So I am moving into a new apartment and that means a new ISP (probably). DSL around here is total crap (Fair Point) so I’m thinking of going with cable (Comcast) but I think they have data caps.
I watch tons of Netflix while a paint and I am wondering roughly how much data is used by watching, say, an hour of Netflix? YouTube?
Also I’m curious as to how much data playing an hour of an online game uses?
The last thing I want is to sign up for Internet only to discover that I can’t really use it. I figure some of the QT3 smart pants types probably know this stuff.
Data caps are a load of BS designed to punish cord cutters. Hopefully you’re in an area where Comcast has raised the data caps to 1TB/mo. That would give you plenty of breathing room. If it’s 300-350GB, good luck with that. We went over every month watching Netflix/Hulu/HBO. Now we have unlimited data and life is good.
The DSL provider probably has caps too and probably lower. Certainly that’s the case up here. Though to be fair, Comcast did not seem to care about their caps (I routinely exceeded them by double or triple and they didn’t say a thing) and now have suspended them entirely in my region.
I watch a lot of Netflix, pretty much 4-10 hours a week day, double that on weekends, as I game and do stuff. I refuse to lower my video quality to adhere to some ridiculous data cap, though I have a 1TB a month.
Just me myself, I have set Edge to be my Netflix browser - since I don’t use it for anything else, I set Netflix as the home page and pinned it to my task bar. So whenever I want to watch Netflix, I click that link. The benefit is I can watch how much usage my Microsoft Edge application has been using, and since I literally only use it for that one purpose, the usage is pretty spot-on I suspect.
For the last 30 days, Edge has used … 101GB of data. So that’s the entire run of Parks And Rec, the last season and a half of Deep Space 9, a handful of movies, a season of Penny Dreadful, and the entire run of Stranger Things. I’m probably forgetting something in there, it’s been 4 weeks after all, but you get the idea.
If you live alone, and you use Netflix even twice as much as me, 200GB is probably all you’ll burn up a month.
Now, you pull down a 35GB game every week on Steam, that’s going to add up as well.
Here in Cleveland (well technically Lakewood, just west of Cleveland) is where the aptly named Cox Communications decided to trial run their data caps. I’m at 350GB per month with $10 per 50GB overage. I haven’t gone over the limit yet, but I also keep an eye on it. But like, for example, I’d really like to get into the Battlefield 1 beta. But that’s a 50GB download I can’t really afford only 10 days into my billing cycle. I’ve been on the internet since the BBS days and never before have I had to watch every bit I download like a hawk to make sure I’m not screwed by some asshole ISP.
The worst part is that the only other internet option in my apartment building is AT&T DSL. And since Cox have the data caps here, so do they. Fucking assholes.
And all the plans for both are designed just like mobile phone plans. Your choices are either pay $80 a month for something that should be $40 or some shitty plan that’s like $10 less and gives you 1/10th as much speed/data. You can go higher as well but the prices go up way faster than the data cap does, of course. The hilarious part is that the speeds increase quickly as well, but at each stage you’re never gonna download much at top speed or you’ll burn through your data cap in 2 days.
How is it 2016 and this is what we’re dealing with? Why is this country so fucking backwards about some things? The rest of the world has cheap gigabit fiber while we’re paying an assload for data caps and being screwed every month by whoever has the monopoly in whatever town you live in.
I feel you. I live on a ranch, so there is no cable, no DSL. I have to get by on my cell phone data plan, using it as a hotspot for my laptop and Xbox. I have a 30GB a month cap and that costs me $160 a month.
The best hope for any US city is Google Fiber. Just the threat of Google Fiber rolling into Nashville magically gave us $70 unlimited Gigabit internet from Comcast. Atlanta got the same thing.
Of course, now that Alphabet’s pushing them to dramatically reduce the costs of the Google Fiber program, potentially even stopping progress in already-chosen cities…
It’s been extremely crazy here in Nashville, with AT&T, Comcast and Google fighting between themselves as to who gets to move equipment around on the utility poles (you can’t dig underground in Nashville). In a year and a half, Google has so far only completed work on around thirty poles out of thousands and may walk away from Nashville. Only four apartment complexes have access to Google Fiber in the entire city so far. This is why we’re hearing about Google/Alphabet seeking out a wireless solution instead of fiber.
No matter what happens, at least I got a free Google Fiber t-shirt for being on the mailing list.
