this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2023
1033 points (98.8% liked)
Technology
59665 readers
3476 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
They aren't rate limiting bandwidth, but monthly utilization and those are uncoupled values. Besides your plan already limits your bandwidth. The data cap is just an added fee.
No, I mean limited bandwidth as in all together, not individually. You can't have unlimited bandwidth because you don't have unlimited resources.
But monthly caps aren't a cap on bandwidth? Bandwidth is a measure of throughput and that's not what monthly caps are. If it were, then when you used up your monthly cap you just couldn't use any more of it because you'd have run out, but that isn't how it works, if you exceed your cap you get charged a fee, that's it. It's just an extra fee for using your internet.
It doesn't make sense in aggregate either, if I used my entire monthly cap in the shortest possible time period and then stopped using internet for the rest of the month, that would be the most stress I could possibly put on the network. And it wouldn't cost me anything extra. But if I use 1.3TB instead of 1.2TB over the entire month there is no appreciable extra stress on the network, but I get charged a fee for it. It's a bullshit fee.
You just said it doesn't make sense as an aggregate, and then went on to describe something that is literally not an aggregate... That's not what an aggregate is
It does make sense as an aggregate. These sorts of limits are used all over the tech industry, it's a form of rate limiting. Doing it on a monthly time scale instead of a daily or hourly one still aggregates very similarly.
Do I agree with it? No, it's bullshit these days, but you are clearly misrepresenting the problem space that's used to justify it.