176
submitted 1 month ago by lousyd to c/nostupidquestions@lemmy.world

Why do cell phones have a data limit but home internet doesn't? I understand bandwidth limits, but how can home internet get away with giving users all the data they can use, but cell phone providers can't?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] r00ty@kbin.life 9 points 1 month ago

It's going to be precisely the reason. If you have a dedicated wire, fibre or copper then the entire available bandwidth is available per connection (one caveat with copper is crosstalk but it is minimal and can be mitigated). With fibre the available bandwidth per strand is huge.

It's so fast that even where there's contention, it is rarely a problem that everyone sharing a part of the connection is downloading or uploading at once. So pretty much most of the times you test, you get the full speed.

With mobile data, the entire cell is sharing a small amount (in comparison) of spectrum. Unlike a wire, the entire spectrum cannot be used by a single tower, a pretty small number of channels are carved out for them. Also because the signals are travelling through the air, there is more of a problem of signal loss and interference to contend with, so the channels very rarely reach the maximum possible speed (forward error correction and reducing bits per symbol to reach a suitable signal to noise ratio both will reduce speed for example.

For upload (which isn't usually much of an issue) there's another problem of guard time between timeslots. When downloading, the cell transmitter transmits the whole time and shared the channel between all users (another thing that can slow things down) so there's no problem of needing a guard time. But when it's separate transmitters (phones) sending there's going to be a guard time between different handsets timeslot and the more active transmit stations there are (phones) the more these guard times add up to wasted bandwidth. Luckily most people are downloading far more than uploading, so it's less of an issue.

I think for these reasons caps are used to limit people from ALWAYS consuming data on the cell/mobile networks and instead using wifi wherever they can in order to keep it fast for those that do/need to.

this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2024
176 points (94.0% liked)

No Stupid Questions

35870 readers
1320 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS