Here in Brazil companies are forbidden by law to cut your service because you hit some kind of quota. Basically I can download 1TB everyday if I want to or any limit at all.
But I heard that’s not the case with other countries, is it true? Is that why digital-only products that require you to download instead of just putting a disc a disadvantage?
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I so frequently hear people use “bandwidth” to describe their mental energy that I momentarily forgot what the word actually means 😅
(My thoughts before clicking to read your post was literally “Yes?? We’re humans”)
I assume I do, but to be honest I have no idea because even using as much bandwidth as I do….its never been an issue.
They don’t cut the service either, but it may get throttled.
Most ISPs also are allowed to prioritize traffic from vital services like hospitals, banks, etc….
Most people purchasing digital products are fine with them being downloaded. Physical media in all forms is dying pretty quickly. Stuff like PC gaming has been nearly all digital for decades. Music is almost entirely digital as are movies and TV. Console video games are getting there.
They don’t cut you off in the US, but they throttle you to a lower speed
My ISP has no data limits but they do ban some activities that can consume a lot of data (e.g. hosting public servers or torrents)
At a high limit mine gets throttled. However we’ve never actually hit that limit even with multiple people streaming and gaming.
The provider I use for data on my phone and the one I use for fiber at my house don’t have any restrictions. Some do, some don’t.
Our biggest, much beloathed ISP just eliminated data caps. Because they’re bleeding subscribers.
But yes, there are still plenty of smaller ISPs with (usually soft) caps. Cellular data in particular gets throttled pretty hard on most “unlimited” plans after a certain monthly usage. There are solid theoretical network management reasons for cell data usage to be limited and it can be done well/fairly or poorly/for profit driven reasons.
Wired ISPs without data caps will need some sort of QOS technique that is likely to effectively throttle Tb daily usage on a residential account, even in Brazil, unless your guys network is crazy overbuilt.
It depends on the internet provider, but usage caps are more of a cellphone data plan thing than a home internet thing.
Where there are restrictions, it’s to the amount of data transferred (a data cap might be 2 gigabytes for a cell plan), and is usually enforced by a bandwidth restriction rather than totally cutting service. Basically, if you pour too much water they make your pipe smaller until the next billing cycle.
I am unaware of a cap on my bandwidth. I’ve heard this exists in some places, but it’s not common.
I’m talking about my residential home internet – which is a cable modem. There is a cap on most mobile data plans.
Bandwidth is the amount of data that can be transferred over the network at one time, so everyone has limited bandwidth since all networks have max speeds.
Most ISPs have plans that cap the bandwidth, usually measured in Megabits (Not megabytes) They are also often set up to allow the first few MB of data to download extremely fast then slow down as the transfer contiunues.
I think what you’re asking about, though, is metered data plans. Which is the total amount of data that can be used by a customer during a time period (like a month) In this regard, I don’t think many plans have hard limits where you’re shut off or charged more, but do have tiers where bandwidth is throttled after reaching the data quota.
A.ount of data is not bandwidth. Amount of data at over a period of time is bandwidth.
But the answer is, “It depends what you paid for “
It mostly applies to mobile data (many people in the US also have a separate broadband ISP at home). And almost always with unlimited plans — you can pay for a plan with a cap, so you have to pay for extra data and it’s full speed, but with unlimited plans, there’s usually a very small print addendum that if you use to much in any one month, they will throttle everyone on that account until the beginning of the next billing period. Which is why most people pay for separate non-mobile wifi at home, which does not throttle if you pay for unlimited (There’s been a move by some cellular companies to encourage people to use their mobile data for their home wifi, and that does work for some people, but it’s not super popular because cellular service can be spotty, not work in some houses, and the throttling). I only pay for limited data on my phone, I mostly use my unlimited home wifi which is a separate account with a separate company (and much faster).
That’s not what bandwidth is
I have proper symmetrical gig fiber, 1000mbps up and down, with a static IP.
Even with the services I run on my homelab, I’ve somehow kept it to ~10-20TiB/month. I must be doing something wrong.
Famously Comcast and Cox have caps, 1.2 terabyte after which point they charge you more, but I don’t think it’s common for home internet. Those companies get a lot of hate for it. None of the services offered in my area (Spectrum and Astound for cable, AT&T and Metronet for fiber) have any sort of data caps.
I pay extra for unlimited. Otherwise, it was capped at a level that was too small for a house of four people when I’m working remotely and on Teams all day every day, my partner uses YouTube and CNN as background noise all day and both my kids love online games and streaming music.
Where I live in the US, we have the fastest internet available outside of Korea. We can have 25gig/sec speeds if we want to pay for it. I don’t know of any data cap. Our slowest speed available is 750meg/sec for like $20/month. I know people that have downloaded every season of multiple shows within one day
On home internet I have no data caps, and speed is not throttled by the ISP. Phone plans can vary a LOT.
Data caps aren’t really a thing in my area. I only learned about them on Reddit TBH.
Comcast and ATT both limited their connections to 1.2TB per month unless you buy into their business class internet. Beyond that limit costs an extra $10 per 100Gb, and that could get real expensive, real fast. I share files on a private tracker, so this is a real possibility. I just recently learned that Comcast uncapped their internet, but you have to change plans to get uncapped.
Fortunately, my son qualifies for low cost, govt. subsidized internet, so the house has 2 high speed internet connections (DSL, and cable). That’s a 2Tb/month limit that we have never reached.
But uncapped in the US is not what you expect. It is perfectly legal for companies to slow your download speed if they think you are using too much. There’s been cases where people’s internet speed slowed down to less than dialup speed. It takes forever for web pages to load, maps become useless. Eventually, everything just times out. Unlimited usage, but they can throttle your speed down to nothing if you actually try to use it.
They throttle but don’t typically cut you off.
I’m not an expert in the field so anyone who knows better can correct me. But having lived in Sweden and comparing the two… basically my understanding is in the US, least in a lot of places ISPs pay to develop the infrastructure in an area. That also means they have a monopoly in that area for those services. Meaning they can get away with being draconian and having sh*ty customer support.
In Sweden the government or maybe it’s each state pays for or heavily subsidizes the infrastructure and allows any ISP to offer their services. Meaning most places over there will have a lot of competition. Which in turn lowers prices and gives you better offers and support because a Swedish customer unhappy with their ISP will have many others to choose from.
They also typically have no data caps and doesn’t throttle.
I got a lot faster and better service in Sweden for less money.
Getting cut off is only an issue with services like Hughes net style satellite internet. Those such services will have hard data caps you have to pay extra to go over. Often pretty low even.
But most general ISPs only have soft caps that just throttle your internet to a lower speed after a point. Usually a TB is the cutoff. Although some are lower. But that sort of internet usage is not the norm for the vast majority of people. So very few will actively ever see such slow downs unless they are actively deleting and redownloading the latest call of duty half a dozen times in a single month.
Yes but I’ve never even come close to using whatever mine is. 50GB/month I think.
No, no one really thinks about that. Not a common thing.
They can throttle you after a certain point. You definitely see it on cheaper cell phone plans. Home internet (cable, fiber, etc) can too but it’s usually at a point that 99.9% of customers will never see.
Everyone everywhere has their bandwidth limited. If I only pay for 500 Mbps, I only get 500 Mbps. If I want gigabit service, I need to pay for it.
At home, it’s rare that it’s limited. Comcast either did or does have monthly caps of around 1 TB, but only in certain areas.
On cellular, it’s often the speed that’s limited: you get a certain amount of 5G to use each month (usually in the area of 20 GB), and then they throttle you back down to 128K if you exceed that. But your total data for the month is unlimited. I pay a little more for unlimited 5G.
Only on cellular data. I’ve never had a data cap on home internet.
I assume you’re talking about home internet and not mobile. It depends entirely on your ISP. I’m not aware of any cap with my ISP, and my family consumes a huge amount of data. I’ve also never noticed any throttling. That said, I’ve never looked into it.
One month I got a warning from Comcast saying i went over my limit. Weird. A couple months later it happened again. Hmm. It turns out the limit was 1Tb per month. I threatened my children with great bodily harm and things were better for a few months. Finally I just paid the extra $15/month for unlimited so I wouldn’t have to keep having this conversation.
It depends on the plan you have.
My home WiFi plan has unlimited and no throttling.
My cell plan has unlimited, and they say you can be throttled, but I have no idea what that point is, and have never had an issue.
In the US they’ll stop your Internet access when you don’t pay your bill.
I’ve only heard about download/upload quotas in foreign countries.
However they have different tiers for speed. The annoying thing is that a lot of places will advertise “broadband speeds” but that phrase has been adjusted through lobbying and coax cables are so common that it lost useful
meaningdifferentiation.I haven’t seen any mention of pay-as-you-go plans with MVNO providers yet. I have been getting my cellphone service from this type of provider all along (at least two decades; and around 12 years with smartphone service).
Does anyone know if data-throttling is also an issue with PAYG plans from MVNOs the US? I am in the continental US, but in a sparsely populated rural area with no cities. I have never noticed any transmission slowdowns in my region that weren’t readily attributable to system-wide issues affecting the entire service area. These have almost always caused a temporary loss of service rather than a restriction in bandwidth or a slowing of transmission speed.
Outside of a custom build or a peripheral who still has an optical drive in their computer?
Mine charges a surcharge over 1T/month. I can only get an unlimited plan if I use their equipment, and I prefer to use my own.