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So How Do You All Feel About This?

T

thehustleman

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Jan 3, 2013
1,123
1
Everyone - from computers to phones to tablets are all seemingly shifting over to cloud storage (some quicker than others). I also notice ISP's (mobile as well as home) are all putting data limits on their services.

Things used to be UNLIMITED and now Comcast has a 250GB cap and mobile data providers have ended their unlimited data plans when cloud storage is taking off.

If ever, cloud storage should have been BIG when everyone offered unlimited, not when they cut it.

How do you feel about that?



Is the customers best interest in mind or merely the stockholders? A combination of both? And why do you feel that way?


My personal feelings are that they are merely looking out for stockholders' best interests and not the customer.

I wouldn't have a problem with the cloud if unlimited was still offered by all the major carriers and I wouldn't have a problem with streaming movies if I could find them in full blu-ray quality, but I have yet to find a service offering that high of a quality of movie.

I feel pushed towards the cloud because all the new flagship phones don't have microSD card slots (I'm hoping samsung continues to do the right thing!) which is bad be cause Verizon charges extra for data usage as does AT&FEE.


Overall I feel that the cloud is great, BUT not when forced into it.
 
Considering that I don't have the desire to be glued to my laptop watching movies all day long, I don't really care. I use my internet to read the news, download my music and apps, research, and post on websites. I even use less than 3GB a month on 4G to do it.

It seems really unfair that this is happening, but the truth is that internet usage is going up, and WAY up. People used to get on the internet to do very little, and then take some time off to go watch TV, etc. Now there are people who are connected to the internet almost 5-10 hours straight watching season after season of TV shows, and leaving their Pandora and Spotify on constantly to stream music. It's gone from leaving our TVs and radios on all day to this, and this is what is hurting us.

The only service I subscribe to is Amazon Prime, and I don't use it that often by choice (except for free shipping). I like keeping my music offline, otherwise it's like I'm downloading the same song thousands of times per day. I listen to the actual radio a lot and from there can make up my mind whether I like a song or not. I use Pandora, but maybe for like 30 minutes every few days. I also keep 99.9% of my files offline. It's faster to access it that way, especially when my external drive fits nicely in my coat pocket.

I mean, I did buy a laptop so I could take my stuff wherever I wanted, didn't I? Why am I carrying around a smartphone with a nice SD card slot if I'm just going to stream everything?

I usually buy like five albums from Amazon with the money I save from not subscribing to Spotify every month. Look at the top songs over there, and it's just what they're playing on the radio anyway. So most of their subscribers are just throwing away data AND money. I know I was when I used to use it.
 
I stream Netflix and pandora, play multiplayer games on Xbox, and download some moderately large files for work. Comcast has yet to tell me I go over the 250gb cap. Until that happens, I can't say I'm upset with it. I can do all the things I want online without compromise at this point. Hopefully that reality never changes as I don't really want to think of how to ration the Internet.
 
Yeah I think it's horrible. Data caps don't sound all that bad until all of a sudden these companies (which are also the media companies) start rolling out their own services, which don't count against your data cap, and everybody starts using them because they have a data cap, and companies like Netflix and Hulu, Apple, and Amazon are in a world of hurt.

Data caps are all around a bad thing. Any such idea that companies are hurting because people are downloading too much is a complete lie and illusion.

Link

Experts believe that this reluctance has less to do with a lack of customer demand and more to do with protecting high margin broadband businesses. Companies like Time Warner Cable make around a 97 percent profit on existing services, Bernstein Research analyst Craig Moffet told the MIT Technology Review this month. But Verizon is more interested in wireless broadband, on which it can make an “absolute killing,” by charging per gigabyte for usage, broadband industry watcher and DSL Reports editor Karl Bode told Wired earlier this year.
Click to expand...

Yeah. Data caps sure do help that. Then again, this is a company that says "you don't want high speed". Per the article.
 
eric/ said:
Yeah I think it's horrible. Data caps don't sound all that bad until all of a sudden these companies
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Vote with your dollars, if you don't like comcast's data caps, find another ISP that has different terms.
 
maflynn said:
Vote with your dollars, if you don't like comcast's data caps, find another ISP that has different terms.
Click to expand...

I hear you loud and clear, I switched from Verizon to Sprint because of this already, and I told them why when I cancelled over the phone. Right now I don't pay for internet service so I can't choose,but I don't think we have data caps in my local area anyway.
 
maflynn said:
Vote with your dollars, if you don't like comcast's data caps, find another ISP that has different terms.
Click to expand...

Kinda hard when both AT&T and comcast both have data caps and they're the ONLY games in town.


Why doesn't the FCC or some other consumer oriented wing of the government step in and make carriers do right?


250gb may seem like a lot, but it really isn't. I've hit that limit before, thankfully comcast has Temporarily decided to not enforce the cap for now, but will again soon.

----------
SteveAbootman said:
I stream Netflix and pandora, play multiplayer games on Xbox, and download some moderately large files for work. Comcast has yet to tell me I go over the 250gb cap. Until that happens, I can't say I'm upset with it. I can do all the things I want online without compromise at this point. Hopefully that reality never changes as I don't really want to think of how to ration the Internet.
Click to expand...


They aren't enforcing it for now, but they will soon.

I've gotten calls before about "abusing nthe service"

My wife and son are always using data watching various streaming services and HD movies
 
Pretty sure Comcast's 250GB cap is a soft cap. They might throttle after that point, but it's not a hard one from anything I've seen.

I think one month I got to about 120 GB by myself. That was probably my highest month.
 
I have CenturyLink as my ISP and haven't run into any problem with data limits. My wife and I watch Netflix pretty much every night for at least a couple of hours.
 
I think the biggest problem is that people fail to consider the Internet as a utility, and consider it more of something like cable, when that is incorrect.
 
I only make very minimal use of cloud services but I like unlimited internet. Luckily in the UK it's easy to get. On my phone I have unlimited everything with tethering for £25 a month and I just use that as my broadband too.

Personally I still like physical storage. I'm grateful that hard drives and flash memory is so dirt cheap :D
 
maxosx said:
Times change & things change.
I just go with the flow and buy what suits me.
Click to expand...

+1
I won't store all my stuff in any cloud anyway, access to everything everywhere everytime isn't all that important is it?
 
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