What Is Average Data Use And Should You Care?

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jj463rd

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There should be no bandwidth cap at all.One should be able to have unlimited usage 24/7 period regardless of Internet Speeds.
If ISP's advertise faster Internet Service the service should have corresponding increased usage since the plan is more expensive.
 

jalek

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These companies have bought the legislation from the new Congressmen, you don't expect them to not get what they paid for, do you? The FCC talked about making Comcast's surcharge of Netflix traffic illegal and it became a GOP agenda item to stop.

The internet will never be a common carrier and it'll be further stratified because there's money to be made. Americans don't value anything else.
 

mediv42

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I just don't understand why you're so surprised that your family of six combined uses about six times more bandwidth than the average user.
 

AIstudio

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These caps are a JOKE and a secret way of gaining MORE money out of the consumer.
Look at it this way:
A lot of you are saying it won't affect me as I don't use that much etc etc. That is NOW people!!
people are buying and using more gadgets around the home that connect to the internet every day.
If you look at what you had 5yrs ago compared to now, most will find they have a lot more devices that eat up data.
SO, you are under the cap limit now but probably not in the near future. All the big companies want us to go online to buy and download music and films etc etc. Even the ISPs fall over themselves to offer faster and faster broadband.
Then they hit you with a cap!!
Corporate greed in my opinion. They are putting things in place now so that in the future they will reign in more of your cash!!

Hell if M$ have their way and everything you do is downloaded and uploaded to the "CLOUD" by your PC's n laptops then I am sure you will hit your caps VERY quickly!!!!
 

voliveira

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We already have a speed cap!! I does this mean we have a speed and data cap?????
If they are going to subject me to data cap it better not have a speed cap!!!!
This is total BS!! So tired of this companies taking more and more out us and giving less!!
Want to knock Netflix and other services out of the water? build a better one stop building road blocks to all your consumer!!!!!!!
 

gamerk316

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This article is a tad sensational. The idea that heavy bandwidth users may pay a little more, whose payment will in turn assist with the conversion from older copper infrastructure to fiber is completely fair, and I believe the average user claim for "DSL" users is accurate. AT&T is expecting the backlash, and I promise you the "average" user won't be aware of the change.

You make the outright silly assumption that ISP's, who have very limited competition as it is, will actually undergo the costs to upgrade their services every few years to meet demand, rathe then just record the extra revenue as profits to please their shareholders.
 

marraco

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The corporation wants to kill net neutrality, so people stops having access to videos like "The secret of oz" on youtube.
 
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I live in Denmark. I have a 50Mbit line with no cap for around 55$.
 

dgingeri

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I play WoW at about 1.5-3 hours per day, I watch 2-3 streaming movies on Netflix per week, I watch 2-3 hours of TV on Hulu per week, and I download 2-3 Linux or Windows isos per week at home for work. However, I don't do any online music dealings. (I used iTunes at one time, but I found the DRM on the file to be far too restrictive. Now I buy the CDs and rip them to a flash drive, which I then plug into my car stereo. The CDs rarely get used, so they don't get scratched, and I have my whole library on a flash drive in my car with a backup on my computer.)

My usage is about 50GB per month, as far as I can figure. Far below that 150GB cap, and way far below the penalty level for Comcast, my ISP. I'm fine with it.
 

happyballz

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Screw you AT&T...if you have them, vote with your wallet if possible and leave. It is nothing but plain greed at this point; I work at a tier 1 network facility and it costs next to nothing to transfer 1GB of data (fractions of a cent), PERIOD.

I do understand that one would need money to maintain and expand network and it should be based as a flat fee but that does not justify these inflated costs per-byte figures, especially when government gives huge subsidies with our tax money to all big telcos.

ATT made over $3 BILLIONS PROFIT(not revenue!) last quarter in their ISP section alone, they DO NOT hurt for money, just another greedy CEO-bonus, investor-arousal move, while spitting on their customers.

They need to do the right thing and invest into infrastructure and not cry about limited capacity as it will only get worse down the line. Get on with the times ATT. And stop trying to shutdown Netflix with your low caps because your channels are overpriced and nobody wants to purcahse 100 channels on garbage with 10 of the ones you do watch, get real or same fate awaits you and other dinasour telcos that do no know how to progress.

Do not give them an inch as they will take a mile.
 

happyballz

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Oops, rated my comment a negative, though that was in reference to the ATT article not my post.. who would rate their posts down willingly anyways? weird. Oh well heh .
 

MoonMe2

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QUESTION: How does this effect online PC gaming? I am a MMO user, and another person in the household plays Team Fortress 2. Does this type of gaming use lots of bandwith/data? And are there tools for me to use to find out?
 

dark_lord69

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Companies will do anything for money. It is the jobs of people that work at this company to come up with new ideas that will generate more money. Jobs like these ensure that ALL MODERN COMPANIES ARE GREEDY and truely do not care about the customer. They only do just enough so the customer doesn't complain excessively. The only thing protecting us from these greed stricken companies is the government and unfortunately too many misguided people and wealthy have band togeather under the republican party. I'll cut myslef off there because this somehow turned into a political rant and I'll spare you all from that.
 

Niva

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I'm a Uverse customer and I'm rather upset about this, the only reason I didn't use Comcast is because of their bandwidth cap. No idea what monthly usage is like though, I imagine I'm on the very low end but it's not something I want to think about or be concerned about. Very frustrating.
 

f-14

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if you can take the time to write comments on here about how much you hate this then write to the FCC and or your local congressman, they are trying to push thru a vote to take away net nuetrality, this bandwidth cap is part of that in the next step your ISP's will take.
i for one discussed removing tax payer subsidies to telecoms for upgrades and expansions to al franken if the telecoms are going to keep this up! my arguement was they obviously can afford it with these surcharges and i'd be damned if they were going to install any lines for their business thru my yard using my own money against me! i told him i'd institute a land use tax for every megabyte or call sent thru that line. he chuckled about that and understood what i was getting at, but he stopped laughing when i showed him my neighbors agreed with a petition 15 of my 25 neighbors agreed, i told him that was just 1 street, not even my entire neighborhood.
http://www.majorityleader.gov/YouCut/YourIdea.htm
use that to express your pleasure by cutting the tax payer subsidies to telecoms. make your bite felt as large as your bark bite them where it hurts most: their wallets
 

icemunk

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It's nothing more then a money grab. A way to squeeze more money out of the consumer, and siphon it away to their shareholders and board. Rogers did this in Canada in 2005, and hasn't upped their download cap since (they've just added higher/more expensive packages). This is an innovation killer.
 

syriquez

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[citation][nom]matt87_50[/nom]should just be pay by the byte...now THAT is fair!most people who cringe at the idea do so because they assume that means "expensive" but it doesn't have to be. the important thing is that its fair.[/citation]

The problem with such a system is three-fold.
1) The major ISPs seem to have royally incompetent metering systems. As someone that had to use Verizon's wireless Internet (5 GB cap) for two years because of where I was living (older house with a myriad of conditions that didn't support even rudimentary dial-up service), it was astounding to watch their online meter utility. It updated approximately once every three days and was a total crapshoot on whether it accurately measured usage. The measured accumulated usage regularly went down by not insignificant values (worst example: 675 MBs--more than 10% of the monthly usage--was suddenly available again, and it stayed that way the rest of the month). Anyway.
So, let's assume that isn't going to be a problem and they have an undisputed method to accurately and precisely measure total usage capable of providing an instantaneous "snapshot" of the accumulated usage at any given moment. Okay: Does that separate incoming and outgoing data? (My cable connection uploads at 1/10th the rate it can download--is outgoing data suddenly going to cost 10x more than incoming data, per-byte?) Can it "sniff" the packets to know what each is being used for? (Beyond the privacy issues, are gamers going to suffer "premium content" pricing? How about Hulu users? Or YouTube users? How about if I use Google rather than Yahoo to search?)
2) "Per-[unit]" pricing always has an "access" fee. Typically, such fees are often described as being for "Service Availability and Maintenance" or other such nonsense (also known as: subsidizing the costs of infrastructure). Problem: What would be the minimum scheduled payment for "access"? I can just about guarantee you it wouldn't accurately reflect the actual cost of maintaining the connection.
3) "Per-[unit]" pricing rarely results in a "fair" system. All that nonsense about the "high-demand" users you hear now? Now instead of artificially increasing the cost of access, you're going to see the per-byte cost increase to "meet the demand" of said users (who may as well be equated to mythical lore at this point, akin to bigfoot, a sane follower of Palin, or the Loch Ness monster)--it's the same shit, just a different pile. But getting beyond that... How do you define a "fair" per-unit price? If we use the per-MB overage cost of that Verizon Wireless Internet I mentioned above, you could possibly expect $0.05 for each MB (at the time I used it, the overage was $0.25--before that, it was $0.49). What happens when Windows 7 suffers a particularly nasty series of attacks and you suddenly have to download an unexpected 500+ MB of patches for three PCs and a laptop? Do you really want to pay another $100 that month (2000 MB @ $0.05 each) just because of some viruses and Windows?

Sure, maybe Grandma&Grandpa are now only paying $20 for access and $1.25 to check their e-mail once a week...but the user who actually, well, uses their connection is still rocking the standard $50-100 currently paid, at best. At worst and the most likely scenario? That user is still going to pay more than they should have to. All that's changed is now the "high-demand" user (however that's defined) has to pay more for their service. That's it. Your bill wouldn't be any more transparent under per-byte pricing than it is now.
 
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The description of your internet usage, while absent any potentially scandalous activity like P2P sharing, is hardly descriptive of the average American family. In fact, I would wager you are exactly the kind of 4%'ers that AT&T is expecting to charge extra to. You get all your services from the cloud, you spend 13 hours a month in video chat, you spend 50+ hours a month watching movies, and even though your music comes from the cloud, you feel compelled to buy copies anyway. All this while suffering from a service that's disrupted at least once a week?

If I have a car, and I have a chance to ride the bus into work every day, but it's broken 20% of the time ... why on earth would I embrace the bus when I can just take my car?

In other words, why would you embrace the marvels of the modern Internet age when your connection is so crappy?

This article is rife with behavioral inconsistencies. I think you tried to paint a picture of the ideal scenario of a large family full of heavy internet users with no illegitimacy going on, and you expect us to believe this is more typical than AT&T thinks it is?

Mind you, I'm no fan of caps either, and I know AT&T's just going to keep that cap in place while speeds go up and up, and content quantity goes up and up, so that 4% gradually turns into 40 and they laugh all the way to the bank, with no laws to protect us 40%ers from gouging. But using such a slanted scenario to counter AT&T's notion of a "typical American family" is weak.
 

synphul

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These data caps are really annoying whatever the reason. On one hand it makes those of us who use 'excessive' amounts of data bandwidth look like pigs, then they turn right around and expect us to evolve into a more technologically advanced culture embracing new technologies like the cloud and streaming media etc. Where's the incentive? Looks like the end result is greed of these providers holding technology back. I have my own usage habits regarding internet and at present, these don't include gaming consoles which are connected nor cloud services. With everyone jumping on these bandwagons to limit our data usage I'm surely not inclined to move to such features if it's at the expense of my wallet. Why bother paying premiums for access to an internet filled with rich multimedia content if I'm restricted to posting on twitter and reading a few emails? No need for Internet Explorer 9, instead everyone will have to download Lynx and resort to text only web browsing. No joy. As for Canada's internet, I surely don't want that either. It was recently explained by one gentleman that with the current costs of data transfer in Canada, it was cheaper to fill a ssd drive and send it via mail, postage included - than it is to download the same amount. http://www.thepaltrysapien.com/2011/02/cheaper-than-the-internet-in-canada/
 

Pherule

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These kind of articles make me die a little inside. If you're streaming movies off the Internet then you don't deserve to have Internet access, and you certainly deserve to be capped if you do. It's called going to your local DVD rent shop, renting some movies for a few days. No need to completely clog the Internet's pipelines by watching them straight off the net.

Someone mentioned paying about 21 cents per GB. I pay the equivalent of 21 US dollars per GB, so go figure. Bandwidth is not something that should be wasted.
 
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