Plan change no longer resets bandwidth on Airtel Xstream Broadband

@Seeka Excitel.
 
Absolute garbage behavior by company. They write "unlimited" everywhere and then secretly put 3.3TB as a limit. On prepaid sims its understandable but on fiber connections ? And there is no way to increase the fup. Earlier the plan changing technique worked but now even that has stopped working. Will switch my ips cos of it.
 
yeah but i feel FUP's are stupid in general. there are tons of people who use barely 1 TB of data per month, so if someone uses a few extra terabytes a month, it shouldn't be much of an issue for them. Atleast let us top-up or pay extra for more data. also, @Sushubh could you link the thread please, thanks
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This debate never gets old and comes across various markets in the world once in a while.

3.3TB gets you on an average around 10Mbps and since cap is in both direction, assuming 20% upload, so practically 8Mbps on an average will not hit the cap.


Some reasons behind the cap:
  1. Networks are designed for peak capacity similar to road infrastructure. Average doesn't matter much. Averages over month assumes full day as "usable day" but majority of people would not use capacity outside of certain hours. So if you look at average speed if one is using retail connection from say 5pm to 11pm peak times, you can burst at ~ 30Mbps without hitting the cap. So people hitting cap are using more than that and often during peak times. So impact isn't as low as you would imagine.
  2. For ISPs without caps (small to mid sized ones did not had a cap), they were often abused by LCOs/small ISPs would would take a 100-200Mbps retail pipe and resell to a few dozen users. That breaks whole equation at which these plans are sold to retail users.
  3. Enterprise connectivity used to contribute a lot to large players. Once a large player shared that their revenue split between enterprise and IP transit was 60:40. While their traffic volume split was 4:96. So enterprise has massive ARPUs compared to IP transit or retail.
    During covid period there has been decline, years of loss / no revenue from that segment. And with SDWAN & other options slowly replacing premium paid MPLS / layer 2 circuits etc is also causing the damage. So retail connections are not going to be mostly retail but also would carry some of enterprise traffic with SDWAN etc and these caps somewhat tend to control it as well.


So the whole things turns out to be - let a small % of users be unhappy/churn out while saving on investment/upgrades on transport capacity and retaining users across other products etc. Telcos quote for 50Mbps "leased line" with absolute no concept of FUP is ~ 2.2lakh/year these days.
They would not like that segment to be hit and churn out to retail. Caps would likely increase over time unless someone (Jio or Airtel) decides to get away with them and push market in that direction.

Excitel is not large enough in this cap context, plus I stated on earlier posts (when I was testing them) - they would barely give you full speeds outside of speedtest.net. They heavily shape traffic and hence can sell any plan at any price with those sort of policies.
 
Depends on the market. It's not very common to be true specially in large countries where transport costs are high and competition is not much (yet). If the question is in the context is Singapore (or even the UK, Germany etc) then things are not that hard due to small size. Remember that for the majority of users, traffic flow is Google/Facebook/Netflix/Akamai/few more for 95% of their usage. If they are present near to you, it's not that hard.

In theory, Jio/Airtel could have different pricing for Delhi/Mumbai/Chennai (and a few other cities with caching nodes) but then it would create all sorts of confusion, marketing issues etc. Airtel used to have different prices for different cities during DSL days.

Comcast in the US has caps in certain markets of as low as 1.2TB and they would charge extra for actual unlimited data. AT&T has caps (reference). I think on FTTH in certain markets they do not have any for now. Still, American providers at large have fewer/no capping issues because of much better ARPUs. With Indian retail pricing, it's actually tough and hence if cost can be saved, providers will do their best to save. The US has more competition on wholesale, long-haul dark fibre but much lower on retail. We have the opposite!


So some of this has to happen to change this situation:
  1. More competition on transport specially from non-telcos who aren't competing in the same retail space. Some companies have come up but it's still a work in progress. More non-telco dark fibre is needed on the long haul which can be leased by ISPs.
  2. Policy change: Active infra sharing still has issues. So if an ISP has access to dark fibre, they cannot share it / lease its capacity to others. ISP license = lit fibre only to offer "internet service". Selling point-to-point links, DWDM waves, layer 2 transport...just anything non-internet is not legal and requires an extra expensive license with its own set of paperwork and long-term cost of maintaining it.
  3. Cheaper IP transit (specially for small to mid-sized players). IP transit pricing varies wildly specially for lower commitments.
  4. Some sort of shared common last mile infra. (read about how the Stokab network did in Stockholm). In the absence of that, everyone is putting their own last mile, burning cost, there is much lower density on the last mile due to so many parallel rollouts, plus middle mile management to reach Delhi/Mumbai/Chennai for peering, plus IP transit arrangement, plus managing CPE cost ....all with massive competition and very low commitments (3 months or 6 months).
Unless these fundamentals change, issues will keep coming in one or other form.
 

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