Photographers and videographers push a lot of data around the Internet; that's just the nature of what we do. Unfortunately, that could soon be a problem, as Internet service providers are beginning to impose data caps with overage charges on customers.
Our friends over at SLR Lounge recently posted an article detailing how Pye Jirsa discovered the data cap on his COX Internet service, which charges $10 for every 50 GB a customer uses over 1 TB every month. The company also offers additional 500 GB packages for $29 extra or unlimited services for $50 extra. COX isn't the only company to do this either. They did mention that the cap only affects the top two percent of users, but then again, image and video creators aren't standard customers. While 1 TB seems like a practically infinite barrier, I know I personally push about 200 GB a month simply in backups, and I just upgraded to a camera with twice the resolution. What happens when you switch from 1080p to 4K video? Do you think ISPs will move the bar to match and put that fee toward building better infrastructure to keep up? Call me cynical, but the moral purity of cable companies is not something I believe strongly in.
So, I ask you: do you think such caps are fair or are they simply needless fees to further gouge consumers? Head over to SLR Lounge to read the full story on Jirsa's experience,
[via SLR Lounge]
Lead image from Pixabay user Martinelle, used under Creative Commons.
This is an interesting topic because the climate of caps changes so frequently. One year a company won't have one. The next year there will be 250GB one. Then two years later they get rid of it.
I personally think in the long run caps won't exist (at least practically). In a decade I've had broadband from Bright House/Spectrum, Comcast/Xfinity, and now gigabit fiber via TDS... and I've never been subject to caps.
As far as Pye's situation goes, I sympathize with caps of any kind, but it's hard to be too mad about a 1TB cap. That's 2-4x higher than any cap I've personally ever heard of... and I know people in countries outside the USA with insane caps like 50GB a month.
I have unlimited here in Canada...and with good bandwith. Averaging 200 mbps over AC wifi. I'm sure my provider might try to cap at some point. However you just can't give customers something and then take it away without a fuss.
That said it's easy to go over 1TB....Apple TV's, Android boxes, Console Video Games, browsing etc.
Simply put, society today is engineered to take advantage of people who are too dumb to know what to do with their money, FAR more than it is actually going to force people to pay up for things they REALLY NEED.
In photography, what this means is: If you have tons of TB of photos to back up, do it yourself. Come up with an intelligent, safe workflow that allows you to back up and deliver your photos for a very low cost, using whatever backup solution is the most affordable at the time. Right now, that is simply off-site hard drive storage, NOT cloud-ing every single photo you take using something like Carbonite or CrashPlan.
Same thing with delivery: You don't need to smugmug / zenfolio etc. every last megapixel and every last half-decent photo to your clients. A better business model is to deliver fewer photos, at an acceptable resolution for a mid-sized print, say, 10-20 megapixels.
With all this in mind, 90-95-99% of photographers will not bump into an annual cap of internet data. They'll be fine. Only the most massive commercial operations / studios will need to worry.
The real reason that internet companies are freaking out about internet bandwidth is 4K streaming, and the general population's desire to use the cloud for everything else. iPhones now automatically upload all your high-res photos and only store low-res versions on your phone, for example. Right now I have my Android phone set to only auto-upload photos and videos to DropBox if I'm on my wifi, but eventually unlimited data plans will be so commonplace that we're uploading tons and tons of photos and 4K videos to the intnernet, non-stop, via 4G and at-home wifi ISP's.
And the day Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, etc. all make 4K ubiquitous, (let alone, the TV-over-the-internet services that the likes of Hulu are debuting) ...that is the day we will see by far the biggest spike in sheer data consumption. But, going back to what I originally said- this is designed to take advantage of people who are too dumb to have a handle on their own personal finances, (including those who are broke and those who are rich) ...so they mindlessly pay a higher monthly fee because, well, everybody else is doing it!
Sincerely,
-guy who still owns / watches "regular" DVD's, and also a VHS player.
Pye is running a business and maybe if he needs more data, he should switch over to a business plan and not use a personal plan.
That is not what separates business from personal plans. Business plans traditionally come with much faster bandwidth speeds and static IP addresses that enable the user to establish a server for things like hosting a website. Th amount of data a person uses is technologically irrelevant because the internet is measured in bandwidth, which is the number of bits transferring per second. If a network is able to support X bits/sec at 4:30pm, it will be able to support that same X b/s at 2:30am. The problem is how many people are sending data at one time. It is like traffic on a highway, the highway can only support a maximum amount of cars before traffic starts to slow or stop, but that doesn't mean that the road will always be at maximum capacity.
Rather than charging this customer more for passing an arbitrary and technologically irrelevant number of bits, the company should be creating ways for the customer to prioritize their larger data needs to periods of the day where network wide bandwidth demands are very low, such as overnight.
I generally disagree with data caps, but primarily due to how they are used.
For the most part ISPs with data caps put all usage towards the cap, which doesn’t really solve much of any problems.
If they implemented the data caps similar to how some electric plans are, based on time of use due to load on the system, people would understand it better, and it could possibly cause people to shift usage for certain types of traffic.
The big problems with that however is that the data caps mostly are used on consumers, and most consumers want bandwidth “now”. They are doing things that are interactive (gaming, video streaming, downloading something to use immediately, etc), so it is difficult or impossible to get them to shift that to other times, or even to provide them tools to assist with that.
Businesses frequently do this already. They purchase X amount of bandwidth, use it during business hours for the load their employees generate or that their customers use during business hours, then run batch and schedules jobs after hours so they don’t have to compete with users for the bandwidth. Backups and file uploads are perfect examples here of things that this can frequently be done with.
One of the arguments for data caps and overage charges is that it makes the heavy users pay more, so they are funding the infrastructure upgrades that they drive the needs for. I think the better model though is simply charging based on reserved bandwidth, and allowing higher speeds IF the bandwidth is available. The problem is that they can’t oversubscribe as much, and they have to increase costs to make up for that.
On your comment about the network always having the same bandwidth, that is true in some senses, but there are things that can cause that to fluctuate, expecially when it comes to wireless connections.
Its very un friendly For these companies to get so tyrannical towards their customers in the name of profits! Horrible.
interesting !
I don't have a data cap on my service however I am hopeful that as technology advances, competitors will emerge that offer easily accessible broadband for very aggressive pricing.
Wow you people outside Australia have it good! My very-average-by-local-standards internet connection only uploads at 50kb or so a second making backing up online absolutely impossible and the idea of breaching a 1TB cap at that speed inconceivable. I would kill to have your problems.
You guys are worry about caps being imposed, in South Africa we still try to get the extremely high data prices to come down, here our uncapped is limited to 300-400GB and less before you are throttled to slow download and upload speeds
Here's a secret I found out years ago when Comcast at the time had a 250GB per month cap. Switch to Business Class service. Every ISP in the US that I've seen has it. No limits at all, and the price is usually about the same. Sometimes they may not offer the same speeds, but the bandwidth is guaranteed, and you get a great SLA, so you're better off.
The tricky part that I recently found after moving to an area serviced only by a smaller ISP, is that some have stricter requirements for their Business Class service. My current ISP wants a business registered to my address (LLC, S-Corp, etc.) with a Federal Tax ID before they will give me Business Class service. Me working from home for another company isn't good enough. So right now I'm stuck with a 350GB/month cap on their residential service. :(
Have you checked to see if a DBA with an EIN will meet their requirement? That is an extremely common setup for small business, so I would be surprised if they wouldn’t accept that.
If they would, it costs next to nothing to register a DBA, and there is no cost for the EIN to go with it.
Well thx god we do not have ...yet...caps in france