Submitted 1 year ago by lousyd@lemmy.sdf.org to nostupidquestions@lemmy.world
Why do cell phones have a data limit but home internet doesn’t? I understand bandwidth limits, but how can home internet get away with giving users all the data they can use, but cell phone providers can’t?
They do have unlimited data plans here and it’s at same price as your average wifi plan.
Where are my Rogers home internet customers at? 🇨🇦
I moved to Telus when Rogers bought Shaw and screwed up my billing plan, and were unwilling to be competitive.
Both Rogers and Telus have capped plans and more expensive “unlimited” plans.
My cell provider Telia gives me unlimited internet and calls in all nordic countries, pretty sweet deal as I need to use my phone in more than one of them.
It’s really mostly a US thing.
You might want to ask Ajit Pai.
Fuck a shit pie.
I mean, wasn’t gonna.
Caps are fake there’s no need for them besides to build golden marble pillars outside CEOs mega mansions.
AT&T asks the same question. They provide the bold option to pay more than the competition and get data limits on your home internet.
In theory at least it’s because you pay for a specific bandwidth for home internet (the size of the pipe) but a specific amount of data for cellular (how much stuff you can get through a fixed sized pipe).
Home internet is a little unique in that way, almost all other utilities are consumption based with no real tiers in terms of how it’s delivered (you pay for the volume of water or gas you use, electricity is the same, just different units).
Networking equipment gets more expensive based on the bandwidth it supports, but it doesn’t much care how many bits you push through it. So ISPs charge based on their capacity to deliver those bits, and provide tiers at different price points. Cellular though is much more bandwidth constrained due to the technologies (and it used to be much more so before LTE and 5G), so it didn’t makes sense to charge you for slow or slower tiers. Instead the limiting factor is the capacity of a tower so by limiting data to small amounts it naturally discourages use. That model carried forward even now that the technologies support broadband speeds in some cases. As such and ISP could provide the biggest pipe (highest speed) to all homes and just charge based on consumption (they used to in the days of dial up, and satellite before starlink always has). Many ISPs instead are now double dipping though and charging for both.
My home Internet charges extra when I use more than 1 TB per month. Not sure but I think it’s metered both up and down.
I remember Comcast suddenly started enforcing a limit of about 1 TB some years ago when I had them. Realized it happened when I renewed my contract to get a lower price again for a promotional period. Apparently I agreed to a new contract or something that included the new limit. >:|
FCC is looking into that, I think it was during Trump’s administration
Yep sounds familiar 😅
Not all home internet is unlimited. In many US rural areas, home internet connections have a monthly cap just like mobile networks do. A higher cap costs more, if it’s available at all.
And not all cell service is limited. I switched from cable to 5G fixed wireless, because I was tired of having a data cap. It’s faster and cheaper too.
In many US rural areas, home internet connections have a monthly cap
And suburban, and urban. I’ve never lived anywhere that didn’t have a cap.
For cell / mobile phones, you’re sharing the capacity of the cell among multiple people.
In this example, a rural cell tower can provide up to 395Mbps.
It would only take 40 people watching Kayo at high definition (or any high definition video service) via their phone or a 4G router to saturate this tower.
For everyone else at this time, it’ll still work but even though they might have a strong radio signal (lots of bars), the internet will become slow.
There aren’t going to be 40 people using that tower if it’s truly a rural tower. If it isn’t a rural tower then they can update it to handle more throughput. The issue isn’t the towers, it’s the companies wanting to keep using old tech to squeeze out as much profit as possible.
Both of you can be correct. The policy is prevalent to squeeze money out or consumers. However, there it’s also easy to imagine more than 40 people in a rural area using their phones for media purposes during PM times. There’s less to do, internet availability might not exist for some or all residents, and people use their phone for everything now. Casting from a phone is a larger percent of viewing TV now.
It depends where you live, Here pay $45usd for unlimited 1Gb/500Mbps Fibre and it is truly unlimited (usually 15-20Tb a month) and $35usd for unlimited 5G tho it’s throttled abit after 60Gb.
Lots of home internet does have a data cap, but you might not realize it. Typically what will happen is that, once you hit your cap, you’ll be rate throttled. That throttle might not affect most video streaming since Netflix is really good at video compression, but you’ll see the hit if you are, for instance, downloading large games from PSN, Steam, etc.
Home internet usually does, it’s just pretty high.
I have the opposite. Unlimited phone data, but it throttles above some high number that I’ve never hit. Capped home internet from crapcast, 1.3 TB, I haven’t hit it but I’ve come within a couple gigabytes.
They offer unlimited data if I use their modem/router for an extra $10/mo. Of course their modem comes with the wonderful feature of a public hotspot for any other Comcast customers in the area. I’ve been thinking about getting their modem, putting it in a metal box and just using pass through with my opnsense box.
My Comcast has a terabyte monthly data cap. They will send you an email if you get close to it, and if memory serves they allow you one time to go over it before they charge you some.
Even with downloading many big games sometimes when I refresh my PC and using streaming video apps all the time, I’ve never hit it but have come close several times. I also work from home.
Home Internet usually doesn’t have unlimited internet. There’s usually caps baked in somewhere. Don’t believe me? Read the fine print. At some point, at some bandwidth usage in the monthly cycle, they will throttle the living crap out of your connection. It’s written into pretty much every contract I’ve ever signed, and I’ve been with over a dozen carriers of landline internet over the years.
The reason being that they don’t want you serving websites or business class functionality with residential level internet. They didn’t build their network with those constraints. They want you paying for and using the business internet package, which has dedicated bandwidth and no caps because you’re paying for a dedicated line to be run.
For mobile phones? Old pricing models still trying to be relevant. There’s no technical reason.
I’ve read the contract of my internet provider. No limit
Then again, I don’t live in th US
Same, no limit. Not American.
Home internet has unlimited internet
It’s not 2002
Well, maybe not in that…one… country
There’s “hard” caps, and there’s “soft” caps. When you hit the soft caps with many of these ISP’s, they start throttling your internet usage by a substantial amount.
Relevant Screenshot of caps as of Sept 2024. Image
greed. some home internet services are also capped too for the exact same reason.
Neither of those statements is universally true. It is a tendency, but not a universal rule.
Mobile internet is newer, less essential to many people, and I think mostly more costly to operate for the ISP per amount of data transferred, so this is why it tends to be the case. But there are unlimited mobile plans and limited home plans too in the world.
In the past it was due to technical constraints.
Now it’s just greed.
If my phone didn’t have a cap, I’d hotspot it all, which is basically the idea of cellular home internet routers I found a home router without a cap, which time will tell to be true, but it’s still more expensive than my phone with a very large but not unlimited cap.
They want to get paid, that’s the reasoning. The amount of data is really irrelevant except for pricing.
Roaming fees used to be the same until EU stepped in. Hopefully EU will eventually step in and order a full stop to ALL CAPS too. We live in the “future” now, right? Bring me ny free unlimited connection so I can download that car they talked about.
What you’re up against:
Home internet providers have high-speed lines that run through population centers and into every neighborhood. The backbones are fiber, so adding more capacity isn’t all that expensive. If they run a 2.5-gigabit line to your neighborhood and it gets stressed, they can upgrade the local aggregate. Wired internet has enough bandwidth to service an incredible number of people.
Wireless internet needs towers and faces challenges like exposure, interference, and balancing power so everyone doesn’t try to reach the wrong tower. Each tower has to have it’s own network backhaul to service everyone in that area. Each tower has limited bandwidth and time to slice up the connections. It’s hard and expensive to expand cellular tech.
Data caps let IPS’s handle capacity planning. Charging more for overages makes money and dissuades users from making them upgrade prematurely.
I went over my home data cap a couple times. The ISP rep was not amused when I called to have them bump my speed down to the lowest tier and add unlimited data. I pay less now and the speed difference is not noticeable for me with daily usage. I told them I was going to download random crap all day, delete, and redownload out of spite lol.
I am lucky to have a local ISP that is amazing. I’m hoping that they never change.
Neither my phone internet nor my home internet has a GB limit. The phone internet costs 25€ a month, and home internet 30€.
Mine Internet at 500gb, but it’s only an extra $10 for unlimited data. My cell data is unlimited but I know they throttle speed after a certain amount. At least I don’t get charged extra.
Playing devil’s advocate here. A possibly legitimate reason ISPs put in data caps is wireless spectrum congestion.
Playing devil’s accountant here. A possibly legitimate reason ISPs put in data caps is shareholder profits.
Charge more
Provide less service
Profit
It’s a self managed QOS. If the customer knows they can only use X data they’re going to be a bit more cautious about using it. Vs if they have unlimited data then they’ll just download that 50 gig file on their phone because “fuck it why not”. The less data each individual customer uses the less infrastructure they have to build, and the faster/more consistent their existing stuff will be.
Cell tower time is a LOT more expensive than time on a fiber optic cable. Your ISP installs a few boxes to serve your neighborhood, a cell carriers tower might go 20 miles.
It's going to be precisely the reason. If you have a dedicated wire, fibre or copper then the entire available bandwidth is available per connection (one caveat with copper is crosstalk but it is minimal and can be mitigated). With fibre the available bandwidth per strand is huge.
It's so fast that even where there's contention, it is rarely a problem that everyone sharing a part of the connection is downloading or uploading at once. So pretty much most of the times you test, you get the full speed.
With mobile data, the entire cell is sharing a small amount (in comparison) of spectrum. Unlike a wire, the entire spectrum cannot be used by a single tower, a pretty small number of channels are carved out for them. Also because the signals are travelling through the air, there is more of a problem of signal loss and interference to contend with, so the channels very rarely reach the maximum possible speed (forward error correction and reducing bits per symbol to reach a suitable signal to noise ratio both will reduce speed for example.
For upload (which isn't usually much of an issue) there's another problem of guard time between timeslots. When downloading, the cell transmitter transmits the whole time and shared the channel between all users (another thing that can slow things down) so there's no problem of needing a guard time. But when it's separate transmitters (phones) sending there's going to be a guard time between different handsets timeslot and the more active transmit stations there are (phones) the more these guard times add up to wasted bandwidth. Luckily most people are downloading far more than uploading, so it's less of an issue.
I think for these reasons caps are used to limit people from ALWAYS consuming data on the cell/mobile networks and instead using wifi wherever they can in order to keep it fast for those that do/need to.
They convinced the FCC cellular is different than landline, and should have different rules.
Some home Internet plans do. I’ve seen AT&T had in their terms that if you hit 99GB, they would throttle your speeds.
This was years ago, so not sure if that changed or not.
Satellite plans often had limits too because they didn’t want to encourage lots of usage on their satellites. I haven’t checked in a few years, but last I checked, these weren’t throttle limits either, sometimes they had hard limits where you just couldn’t connect anymore once you hit the limit.
My previous home line had a hard cap at 1TB per month. That seemed like a lot at the time, but I think as the internet grows and requires more bandwidth these “sky high” caps will feel smaller and smaller.
Nibodhika@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Not all of them do, I’ve seen that in America data limits on home internet is common, and here in Europe unlimited phone data is common.