Why am I using 600 GB of Internet per Month?!??! HELP

[killerlee]

i do have a job i work around 50 hrs a week and my wife works from home while taking care of our kids

[Hottage]

Got curious and took a look.

Apparently KPN doesn't even bother recording how much bandwidth I use.

[Corroc]

America the greatest country in the world. At ripping off people.

[Thage]

Wait... waaaaait... You pay for data usage? What are you using, mobile internet? Or is the US just this shitty?

I can use as much data as I ever want, it will never effect my monthly bill.

Yep. American ISPs cap data so they can charge you overages if you don't keep a keen eye on how much you use. It's highway robbery and because they bought out enough politicians, they pretty much get away with murder here.

[Katchii]

this kind of old fashioned thinking is so alien to me. and i'm pretty old as in I grew up before internet. online friends are real people. the only difference is that its much easier to connect with them nowadays and actualy be face to face than in the age of writing snail mail and occasional short phone calls (because long distance phone calls used to be expensive). why connect with long distance people vs the ones near by? because of common interests. I don't know about you, but I'm too old and too tired to waste my leisure time on people with whom i don't have much in common. I gave up on that almost a decade ago after sitting in this trendy cafe with a bunch of other couples, drinking overpriced tea with overpriced pastries and bored out of my mind, becasue of all the usual small talk. I looked over to my So who was just as bored, we got out of there early and decided to never, EVER do that again. I'll take people living across the country or even across the world that I can actualy talk to over mindless in person interactions any time EVERY time.

some people are lucky and get common interests in people they live close to. i used to have that back when I was living in NYC. but I don't live in NYC anymore. and hilariously neither do those friends. but there is nothing inherently better about interacting in person just by the virtue of being in one another's vicinity. Meaningful interaction over physical proximity. good for you if you have both, but don't shit on people who find meaningful interaction in whatever way that is available to them.

P.S. to OP, streaming does sound like it could be a culprit, but i would also try to see if unplugging your various streaming devices when not in use would help. it does suck that US companies have been forcing internet caps lately. we used to have unlimited. and then our company decided that they didn't want to do that anymore. and no, our costs didn't go down. they did it because they could, becasue our only other options were satellite and very shitty low end DLC. blah. a trade off for living where there are fewer people.

Never meant to infer that you can't have friends online, they are real people. My point was more that interacting with people physically is a much richer experience, and therefore IMO better. There's nothing inherently wrong with only interacting online, but IMO it's a shallow and incomplete interaction when compared to interactions you can have in person. Having a beer sitting at your desk at home while playing online with a headset on with your friend on the other end, or video calling your buddy is a completely different experience than actually being at a bar/ pub with your friends. Watching a movie by yourself (or simply without your friend) and then telling your online friend about it just isn't the same as going to see the movie together. Telling them and taking pictures about what you ate, again, just isn't the same as actually eating together.

I feel bad for you then if you can't find like minded people/ friends near you to have those richer in person interactions with but it sounds like it's more like you won't take the time to try because of some previous bad/ unenjoyable experiences. That's an understandable viewpoint, and makes sense, but it's still a decision you're making rather than a situation you have to live with. Given the boom of social media and the internet, as you said, it's easier than ever to find a community of people you can have meaningful interactions with and then find out that some of them may be local.

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Yep. American ISPs cap data so they can charge you overages if you don't keep a keen eye on how much you use. It's highway robbery and because they bought out enough politicians, they pretty much get away with murder here.

Not all of them do this, but it is still pretty common in some areas.

The service I have just limits the speed, which is normal, but doesn't have a data cap. Some ISP's still have issues with throttling speeds though, for various reasons.

[Shakadam]

It is far from ideal, but a monthly cap could be an indirect measurement of peak usage participation. I think it is somewhat fair to have a mechanism that charges more from people who participate more in the saturation of the infrastructure at the critical times when more use will affect the quality for everyone else, and ultimately require new investments.

Maybe they could do it like some places do with electricity, and charge for the excessive use during peak hours. Big consumers would be lead to download their stuff on off-times and the overall internet cost for everyone would be reduced.

It could be but only in a best case scenario. Even with a data cap there's nothing stopping every customer from streaming netflix in HD during prime times at the start of their billing period. People with a data cap to worry about might reduce their usage throughout the period, but I doubt much of that reduction happens at peak times because if people wanna watch a show or movie in the evening, they're gonna watch a show or movie in the evening no matter what. They'll possibly reduce usage during off-peak hours to compensate for the cap, but off-peak times are of no concern to the ISP.

Still, I think there is a cost associated with raw data usage, I just don't know how significant it is. But processing more data should require more electricity, should generate more heat, demanding more from air conditioning, and should maybe wear down the equipment faster? I'm just guessing here...

Technically yes but the increase is so minimal per customer that it's not even measurable.

[Witchblade77]

Never meant to infer that you can't have friends online, they are real people. My point was more that interacting with people physically is a much richer experience, and therefore IMO better. There's nothing inherently wrong with only interacting online, but IMO it's a shallow and incomplete interaction when compared to interactions you can have in person. Having a beer sitting at your desk at home while playing online with a headset on with your friend on the other end, or video calling your buddy is a completely different experience than actually being at a bar/ pub with your friends. Watching a movie by yourself (or simply without your friend) and then telling your online friend about it just isn't the same as going to see the movie together. Telling them and taking pictures about what you ate, again, just isn't the same as actually eating together.

I feel bad for you then if you can't find like minded people/ friends near you to have those richer in person interactions with but it sounds like it's more like you won't take the time to try because of some previous bad/ unenjoyable experiences. That's an understandable viewpoint, and makes sense, but it's still a decision you're making rather than a situation you have to live with. Given the boom of social media and the internet, as you said, it's easier than ever to find a community of people you can have meaningful interactions with and then find out that some of them may be local.

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Not all of them do this, but it is still pretty common in some areas.

The service I have just limits the speed, which is normal, but doesn't have a data cap. Some ISP's still have issues with throttling speeds though, for various reasons.

first of all, you are making a lot of assumptions. its not that i haven't tried. its that I'm no longer willing to waste my time on people I do not connect with and would rather spend it on people that I do - even if they are not next to me. I don't reject local possibilities (like I said I did have local friends back in NYC, from which we moved years after deciding not to waste time on people we could only have pointless small talk with, sadly closest people to me are hours away, so they ae pretty much long distance by definition) . and I don't do bars. or pointless beers. this is EXACTLY the kind of crap that bores me and I don't want to deal with anymore. I had more meaningful interaction with people that I just met in a random painting class.

there is nothing, and I repeat NOTHING that is inherently better about being next to each other. and if you say "helping you move" ugg. no. would rather hire people for that rather then abuse friends that way.

this is why long distance life long friendships existed for as long as we were able to communicate across distances. this is not something that started during internet age. all internet did was made connecting easier and faster.

[Katchii]

first of all, you are making a lot of assumptions. its not that i haven't tried. its that I'm no longer willing to waste my time on people I do not connect with and would rather spend it on people that I do - even if they are not next to me. I don't reject local possibilities (like I said I did have local friends back in NYC, from which we moved years after deciding not to waste time on people we could only have pointless small talk with, sadly closest people to me are hours away, so they ae pretty much long distance by definition) . and I don't do bars. or pointless beers. this is EXACTLY the kind of crap that bores me and I don't want to deal with anymore. I had more meaningful interaction with people that I just met in a random painting class.

there is nothing, and I repeat NOTHING that is inherently better about being next to each other. and if you say "helping you move" ugg. no. would rather hire people for that rather then abuse friends that way.

this is why long distance life long friendships existed for as long as we were able to communicate across distances. this is not something that started during internet age. all internet did was made connecting easier and faster.

I disagree, but there's nothing wrong with having different opinions.

I've always found shared experiences when physically together to be more meaningful, enjoyable, rich and fulfilling than any online interaction. I've also never said that online interactions can't be fun, fulfilling, or enjoyable just that (in my opinion) they pale in comparison to physical interactions. That said, I've found online interactions to be greatly enhanced when experienced with friends you hang out with regularly outside of the internet.

My point about beers and bars and stuff was just an example. If you don't like those things, feel free to substitute those for whatever you want. Everyone has activities they dislike or don't find entertaining/ worthwhile for various reasons.

I'm also basing my responses on what you posted so far, so I apologize if I'm projecting or assuming too much, I don't know your whole story.

[LMuhlen]

Technically yes but the increase is so minimal per customer that it's not even measurable.

This conversation got me curious. The first link in google directed me to an article from 2012:

https://aceee.org/files/proceedings/...193-000409.pdf

The Megawatts behind Your Megabytes: Going from Data-Center to Desktop

Our major finding is that the Internet uses an average of about 5 kWh to support the utilization of every GB of data, which equates to about $0.51 of energy costs. Only 38% of those costs are borne by the end-user, while the remaining costs are thinly spread over the global Internet through which the data travels; in switches, routers, signal repeaters, servers, and data centers (See Figure 1 below). This creates a societal “tragedy of the commons,” where end users have little incentive to consider the other 62% of costs and associated resources.

Now, I don't have the background to criticize its veracity, but it states that 1 GB of data requires $0.51 worth of energy, off of which "the internet" pays 62%, or $0.32. So a TB of data would consume $320,00 on electricity alone. Seems stupidly excessive... Probably flawed somehow. From what I gathered, it is the cost of "all energy used by the internet" divided by "all the data transferred in the same period", so it includes storage and whatever else the internet needs.

Another article from 2015 says:

https://www.cse.buffalo.edu/faculty/...rs/sc_2015.pdf

Global Internet traffic will reach 1.1 Zettabytes (one billion Terabytes) per year by 2016 [43]. The annual electricity consumed by these data transfers worldwide is estimated to be 450 Terawatt hours, which translates to around 90 billion U.S. Dollars per year [24, 34, 36, 43].

So that is 0.41 kWh per GB (if my quick math is right), 10 times less, much more reasonable... Still, ~$30,00 per TB.

[Orlong]

The US doesn't have a free market. A free market would mean that other companies are allowed to enter the market, that's not the case in most states. Most places in the US can only choose between one ISP, mostly comcast from what I've seen, or no internet at all and it won't change because no one is allowed to offer you an alternative.

Other companies ARE allowed to enter the market, its just cost prohibitive because of all the money they would have to spend to pay for permits, licenses, and infrastructure (poles or underground conduit, wire/fiber, construction cost etc...). It would take well over 10 years to recoup all that money until they make a profit, plus they would have to undercut the existing providers, lowering margin. Also it wouldnt be right to let them leech off the infrastructure that other companies such as Comcast spend hundreds of millions of dollars installing

[adamzz]

Other companies ARE allowed to enter the market, its just cost prohibitive because of all the money they would have to spend to pay for permits, licenses, and infrastructure (poles or underground conduit, wire/fiber, construction cost etc...). It would take well over 10 years to recoup all that money until they make a profit, plus they would have to undercut the existing providers, lowering margin. Also it wouldnt be right to let them leech off the infrastructure that other companies such as Comcast spend hundreds of millions of dollars installing

No, look it up. They literally aren't even allowed to enter the market in most locations.

[The Casualty]

I stopped reading at the bolded part. How on earth do you have 6 hours a day to play video games when you even have a 5 year old. Do you work? And you should stop allowing your child to play games for 7 hours a day. That's just unhealthy. Does you wife actually work?

I am also confused at some of these numbers.

Assuming a 5 year old is in Kindergarten from ~8am-4pm (counting busing and all that) and even if you let them play an hour before school, that means at 7 hours of screen time a day they have a bed time of no less than 10pm and do absolutely nothing other than play games.

[Mormolyce]

First of all Australia, while a large landmass, has a very large part that is uninhabitable outback. I really doubt they are running fiber through the middle of the country. Its easy when 99% of the population lives around the coast. Also the US does have widespread contactess payment available (credit cards with RFID, Apple Pay, Android Pay) but people havent caught on to using it much, or dont know about it. Almost every time I use it, people (including the cashier) look at me like I hacked the credit card reader

We're running a mix of technologies - the high density areas will be served by a variety of fibre techs. More remote areas get fixed wireless towers. Bob's shack in the outback will be covered by satellite.

The more people you have in an area the more cost effective something like fibre is, so you'd probably be better off there since the US has a lot more large cities and towns than Australia does. But yeah obviously I'm not saying you should run fibre to every outhouse in the US.

So contactless functionality has been rolled out but cashiers have low awareness? That's funny. About how often do you find that the machine doesn't take it at all? Is it just bigger retailers that accept it, or smaller places like cafes too?

[The Casualty]

Depends on what month their 5th birthday falls. If it was after the school year started (usually September), they won’t attend Kindergarten till the following year.

True. However, if they did half days of preschool that's still essentially having a child do absolutely nothing but play video games all day long outside of time spent in school.

Even if the child isn't in any type of school at 5 years old, that is still several times the recommended daily screen time and likely over half (or very near it) their waking hours spent playing video games.

I mean, people are going to raise their kids often times very differently than how I raise mine, but that those numbers still seem pretty shocking/bizarre to me.

[Orlong]

We're running a mix of technologies - the high density areas will be served by a variety of fibre techs. More remote areas get fixed wireless towers. Bob's shack in the outback will be covered by satellite.

The more people you have in an area the more cost effective something like fibre is, so you'd probably be better off there since the US has a lot more large cities and towns than Australia does. But yeah obviously I'm not saying you should run fibre to every outhouse in the US.

So contactless functionality has been rolled out but cashiers have low awareness? That's funny. About how often do you find that the machine doesn't take it at all? Is it just bigger retailers that accept it, or smaller places like cafes too?

Most large retailers accept Apple Pay, Android Pay, and credit cards with RFID chips in them. A lot of smaller stores and mom and pop shops have the technology to accept it but its often not enabled

[Shinra1]

Depends on what month their 5th birthday falls. If it was after the school year started (usually September), they won’t attend Kindergarten till the following year.

You think this is okay parenting?

[LMuhlen]

I am also confused at some of these numbers.

Assuming a 5 year old is in Kindergarten from ~8am-4pm (counting busing and all that) and even if you let them play an hour before school, that means at 7 hours of screen time a day they have a bed time of no less than 10pm and do absolutely nothing other than play games.

You may have missed his follow up post.

he doesnt game for 7 hours a day he is home-schooled and goes to class online for much of the day but during downtime he likes to play and watch videos since we dont have cable

[Shinra1]

Not my business.

We are all responsible for each other so yes, the well-being of his 5-year old is my business as well as yours.

[Shinra1]

Read the above comment then.

*insert abandon thread meme here*

[lokithor]

Damn. I’m paying $135 a month for 105 mpbs, with a 1TB data cap. When I go over, I have to pay $10 for every 10 GB.

Im paying 90 for 125 down, with 300 gig cap. With 10 bucks extra for the first 50 over and then 10 per 10 after that.

Oddly enough I watch the shit out of netflix and game and Ive only gone over twice. Once when I had to redo my PC, and once when I had to get a new Xbone.