alt Hacker NewsI hope you’re still joking.
Data caps are to an extent “fake”, in that telcos’ costs aren’t measured in how many bytes their customers download/upload. Telcos’ costs come from renting bandwidth from tier 1 and tier 2 ISPs. This bandwidth is constant.
And for popular websites, they will cache lots of content on their own network or peer directly with data centers so they don’t have to pay for the bandwidth there. The routers will continue routing and the switches will continue switching whether you download 5GBs or 5TBs.
One more way to understand how much of a scam mobile data caps are, is that the same ISP will sell you unlimited fiber plans even though essentially your traffic goes through the same backbone.
Data caps may help lessen congestion on their cell towers, but they don’t need to be as low as they are today.
Replies
> Data caps may help lessen congestion on their cell towers
Data caps make congestion worse, because you are more likely to restrict where you use data and people are predictable. You'll no longer use bits everywhere because you care less, you'll use it where everyone else does.
Didn't https everywhere ruin caching? Unless you MITM everyone like CloudFlare.
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