Data caps You have to work with theme more and more every day. But do they serve a purpose or are they a scam to get more money out of you?

 

Well I am going with scam, I have been the go to guy for tech advice by family and friends. And have lived in the background keeping up with developments in the technology world.

 

When I got my first computer all those years ago. We hooked into a dial up connection I was hooked from then on. Our phone provider at the time “Qwest” put in a fiber optics line on the main highway five miles from our house and told use that in a few years we would have DSL. That was the dream to get high speed 1.5Mbps.

 

That was ten plus years ago. My mothers house still has no DSL she along with 150 neighbors still have no DSL, now the other roads coming off the highway with between ten and 50 houses have DSL from Century link (used to be Qwest). She and those other 150 houses Can only get satellite or wireless broadband. They where limited to 7.5GB and 5GB (even the unlimited was really 5GB if you read the fine print.). She sits in a hole among hills so the 3G connection was always problematic dropped connection all the time, evens with a Amplifier.

 

So this has caused me to become vary familiar with all the options and their technology’s. And how the internet works down to the most random details. So let me explain data caps to you in simply terms.

 

The ISP's will have you believe that the data cap are there for you. So the network is not congested and their for not slowed. Well you all know that the network can slow down at peak usage times.

Now the ISP has the either fiber or T1 lines coming to the cell tower for your Wireless Broadband, and to the Dslam for your DSL (that big phone company box in you area). For satellite connections, it is the satellite itself that is the bottle neck. These limits are in Gbps or Mbps.

 

Here is an example, So they take there total limit and divide it among the number of users. But they do not take 1Gbps and divide it by 100 user/houses and give theme each 10Mbps connection. The oversell presuming that all the users wont need the connection at the same time. So they divide it by 150 houses/users. Now here is something they could never account for all those users get home from work around 5pm and want to use their connection until the go to bed at 10pm. This causes the congestion. So your ISP buys their connection based on total speed, it cost theme nothing extra to have you use more then their data cap”. No one charges them for data. The lines are there and there limit is in speed Gbps or Mbps. What cost theme more money is a bigger line to have more data go thought at once, in other words more Gbps or Mbps. So if the limit on a line is 3Mbps it cost theme nothing more to run it 24-7 at full speed then for it to sit at half capacity. So in a month at full speed you could download 7,776,000MB or about 7,590GB of data, and it would cost your ISP nothing more then downloading 10MB of information.

 

So their cost is in the speed then why do they have the data caps?

Well the only thing I can think of, is to get more money out of you the consumer.

 

When it comes to Satellite here is what happening:

For the new ViaSat1 (the new satellite used by wildblue/Exede) it's 140Gbps. Now they promised when this new satellite went online. The would increase speed by ten times and data caps by ten times. This would put their new plans around 10Mbps and data cap around 75GB now this is a Ok limit closer to what most cable and DSL providers have of 150GB-250GB data caps (I remind you most of these company’s it's a soft limit so they may slow your connection when you hit the cap) Satellite is a hard limit, when you get to 85% of your data cap they slow you, “so you wont go over your limit”. Then speed it back up when you drop below 70%. So your real limit is 6.375GB per month. And they drop your speed to 128kbps.

 

So the new Satellite planes sound like an option now, Before the new plans where announced. They are all 12Mbps so the speed is as promised. Now the Data caps went down. Before you got 7500MB Download and 2300MB upload, for a total for About 10GB per month total (1000MB is not 1GB). The new plans are 7.5GB Total per month. So you lost about 2.5GB of usage per month. The largest plan is a little bigger at 25GB then the original 22GB of the original plan. Still not the 75GB for the basic plan and 170GB for the largest plan that they promised. If you want to take advantage of there speeds for an hour you would use 43200MB or about 42GB of data , Much more then the biggest plans limit of 25G. So they make it impossible to use the speed they sell you unless you only want to be only for 18 minutes before they slow you to 128kbps.

 

Here is what Cell phone company's are Doing:

They used to all have “Unlimited” Data Planes (they where really limited to 5GB of data a month in the fine print, before the slowed your connection to dial-up speeds or close to. They have mostly gone to tiered pricing now except for sprint they still have unlimited data and good for them, that used to be the way of the future. Until someone decided they could make more money be limiting the amount of data used. Now with cell phones the speed is limited by the technology used. But it still cost theme nothing more for you to use more data. Below you will find a link going into the cell phone plans of Verizon and AT&T.

 

So to summarize they should be charging you for faster and faster connections. But anyone can live with a slower connection to save money if they need to. But they cannot live without more total data, more music, more movie, more streaming TV, more surfing, more e-mail. So it is much easier to get people to upgrade and spend more money when the basic package is so low that you have to watch yourself like hawk to stay under the limit. When you stop and think, do I really need to get the weather or check my e-mail.

 

This is a world I do not want to live in, one that limits what you can learn, or how you connect to your friends. Because that is what data cap are doing!

 

 

This first article explains the 4G data caps that Verizon and AT&T have on there networks. Pointing out that you can use your entire limit in under 60minutes. And then you start paying $10 per 1GB over that so you are paying about $20 plus per hour to use their data network at full speed after that.

http://www.publicknowledge.org/4g-data-caps-magic-beans

 

 

This article goes into how data caps do not work to fix what the ISP's are trying to fix, “Network congestion” As the ISP's Clam.

http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/30/another-study-shows-data-caps-are-likely-ineffective-address-wrong-problem/