ACT Fibernet silently cuts FUP from 3300GB to 1500GB

guest_999 said:
Those who use more than 1-2TB per month in India are already a niche category of users. Bandwidth is also not just one time investment because
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you'll be surprised just how large the number of peeps who use up this much data is
guest_999 said:
ISPs need to pay the companies who lay down & maintain those deep sea cables on a regular basis.
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all ISPs around the world oversell their bandwidth by more than a 10000% to make money? the cost for them is trivial compared to the costs they are charging us and the number of users, thats why we have "peak usage hours"
guest_999 said:
Yes but I am only saying that economically it doesn't make sense unless majority of ACT users are niche users using more than 2TB per month.
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the point was, it doesnt really matter whether domestic usage is cheaper or not, its just ACT either being cheap af or driving users to higher data plans for more revenue
 
KNWR said:
Consumers that exceed 1.5-2TB/mo usually are into piracy, file-sharing or some such
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What makes you say that confidently?
We are a 5-person household. 200Mb/s connection.
2 people work from home, 1 student. 2 parents. Only one PC/console gamer among 5.
Monthly data usage (YouTube, Office VPN, Prime, Hotstar, Some game downloads and updates (200GB+ COD updates anyone?), OS and app downloads/updates.
We have hit the Airtel 3.33TB once, with 0 piracy/movie downloads/file sharing.
We consistently hit 2TB per month, barring if we are not at home for a week (let's say on holiday).

The above situation I think is a typical Indian household that has a fiber connection at home (not average household, but average fiber consumer household).
If there are less people or no work from home/content watchers (TV), people just use mobile data (1.5-2GB/day plans per device).

Then there's people like @rsaeon XD
 
I think my mother uses 1TB by herself by streaming youtube every minute she's awake — we're all signed out of google services at home so nothing's cached. I have been trying to get a caching server going to reduce our usage but these days with https there's very little that can be cached without breaking something. The best I can do is an APT caching server for software updates across my debian VM's.

It's frustrating that there's no easy way to keep track of usage on Airtel, I have to use an older version of the android app, 4.50.2 and keep checking daily to see if data's been drained out like this:

photo_2024-08-30 11.38.25.jpeg
 
napstersquest said:
What makes you say that confidently?
We are a 5-person household. 200Mb/s connection.
2 people work from home, 1 student. 2 parents. Only one PC/console gamer among 5.
Monthly data usage (YouTube, Office VPN, Prime, Hotstar, Some game downloads and updates (200GB+ COD updates anyone?), OS and app downloads/updates.
We have hit the Airtel 3.33TB once, with 0 piracy/movie downloads/file sharing.
We consistently hit 2TB per month, barring if we are not at home for a week (let's say on holiday).

The above situation I think is a typical Indian household that has a fiber connection at home (not average household, but average fiber consumer household).
If there are less people or no work from home/content watchers (TV), people just use mobile data (1.5-2GB/day plans per device).

Then there's people like @rsaeon XD
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Same. Between everybody at home, we average close to 2TB/month. This includes 5 smartphones, two laptops, one desktop, and two (Firestick) TVs. Zero Piracy or file-sharing.
 
napstersquest said:
What makes you say that confidently?
We are a 5-person household. 200Mb/s connection.
2 people work from home, 1 student. 2 parents. Only one PC/console gamer among 5.
Monthly data usage (YouTube, Office VPN, Prime, Hotstar, Some game downloads and updates (200GB+ COD updates anyone?), OS and app downloads/updates.
We have hit the Airtel 3.33TB once, with 0 piracy/movie downloads/file sharing.
We consistently hit 2TB per month, barring if we are not at home for a week (let's say on holiday).
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As I said - 'Exceed 1.5-2T', which is more or less an acceptable amount for a consumer grade broadband connection, with average FTTH speeds of around 200MBit/sec in residential areas these days. In a household of 5 with 3 working and 2 retired individuals using a GBit connection, we average about 1.5-2T ourselves, when only 1 works from home, while the retired folk work on streaming the latest 4k content. So yeah, acceptable figures IMO.

As for the data, I briefly worked on a project for a major ISP in the NCR region with NO FUP policy, redoing their self-help dashboard a few years ago, when 4k hadn't really caught on in a big way. A UI related point for consideration involved displaying usage, graphs and limits in GB or TB. That's when they referred to the sample usage data of about 50k customers subscribed to their 'Unlimited' plans. The findings were rather interesting, with average usage being in the neighborhood of 600GB/mo.

Segment wise, majority of users were pushing under 600GB/mo on plans under 100MBit/sec. Over 100Mbit/sec, things got interesting as the usage wasn't proportional to the bump in speeds compared to the lower tier. More power users with an average of a TB/mo, with a very small percentage pushing over 3TB/mo on a100Mbit line. This was around the Covid era, if I am not mistaken - so a lot of WFH definitely happening along with sharing *cough* Linux *cough* ISOs in all probability. The sample data did not include higher tier plans, as the subscribers were significantly lesser in numbers.
 
KNWR said:
As for the data, I briefly worked on a project for a major ISP in the NCR region with NO FUP policy, redoing their self-help dashboard a few years ago, when 4k hadn't really caught on in a big way.
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In 4 years, you think the average demographic hasn't changed?

What were the fiber plans 4 years ago per month vs now? Also, the mobile data pricing has gone up too, so you use more of WiFi than mobile data today vs 4 years ago. As I remember, before jiofiber, I was paying 800/month for 30mb/s capped at 300GB. That was barely enough for 2 students like us (no Linux ISOs, just youtube and other tutorials, some game downloads).
Now I have an option to get 300 or 500mb/s unlimited plan for that price in the same locality.

When something becomes cheaper and readily available, it's usage increases.

1500GB monthly limit, as many will find out, will not be enough and most people will either turn to other ISPs or to compromise on usage / switch to mobile data more often or upgrade plans (which the ISP wants).
 
altair21 said:
90% of the bandwidth you consume is international at a very conservative estimate, so its a moot point
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Most CDNs end users pull from are local. There is hardly any major CDN that does not have local caching servers..
So 90% , probably more of the traffic an average home user uses is domestic only

KNWR said:
Consumers that exceed 1.5-2TB/mo usually are into piracy, file-sharing or some such and would easily fall under the 95+ percentile bracket in terms of data consumption
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Think again..My household usage is largely office work / VoIP calls for 2 users. In addition, there is the normal Netflix/ ATV/ HS usage between 2 adults and 1 child .
Add updates pulled by phones/ computers / games etc and the average usage per month is between 1.2-1.5TB as seen on my router.
Some months its a bit more , but usually 2TB at the upper end. I would guess this usage patter is fairly representative for an urban family in India.
And for families with more members living under the same roof , it will be further higher

Having said that, BB prices are dirt cheap as-is and if ISPs need to raise prices in order to sustainable. so be it.
As long as they add a non exorbitant tiered rate card instead of applying a blanket cap
 
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KNWR said:
Consumers that exceed 1.5-2TB/mo usually are into piracy
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These days, 1.5–2 TB of utilization is typical for a family of four who watch YouTube and other OTT apps. People are in to binging and WFH.

ISPs used to have local peering agreements for the majority of the most popular torrents, but in recent years, they have partnered with OTT providers in order to save data.
 
vishalrao said:
ACT employee spotted.
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Haha. Not at all. Besides, if you read my post(s) you'll see that I have considered 1.5-2T the norm in the first line itself.
It's the segment that pushes multiples of that amount on a typical consumer broadband connection that are more likely to be indulging in File sharing etc.
Oh well, I could clearly have phrased the post differently. Lesson learnt :p
 
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