Comcast Users Must Now Pay $50 Per Month Extra To Avoid Caps (dslreports.com) 218
Karl Bode, reporting for DSLReports: In a letter being sent to Comcast customers in usage capped markets, the company says that with the recent announcement of usage caps being bumped to 1 terabyte, the company is also capping the amount of additional charges capped users can incur -- to $200 in a single month. As it stands, customers that cross the 1 terabyte limit face overage fees of $10 per each additional 50 GB consumed. But under the revised plans, customers have to pay $50 (up from $30 to $35) extra per month to avoid usage caps entirely. "Because you are an unlimited data customer, we will maintain your current rate of $35 until the end of 2016," the letter reads. Comcast's recent decision to bump their caps to 1 terabyte weren't driven by altruism. With the FCC preventing Charter from imposing caps for seven years as a merger condition, the agency has signaled that it may start getting more serious about cracking down on usage caps in the broadband market.
Pay up ! (Score:4, Insightful)
Today it's Comcast, tomorrow it might be AT&T, the next day it might be some long distance company ... the list goes on, and on
All squeezing the American customers
Where is the government when we truly needs them?
Re:Pay up ! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Pay up !... Or not (Score:2)
People should just switch to Google Fiber. They don't have data caps and the bandwidth is fairly high.
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While it sucks to live in an apt. complex...and have to get whatever one else does...
I would advise people renting or owning houses, to consider getting a business internet connection if you need unlimited broa
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Many managers of apartment complexes here were more than eager to get hooked up to fiber. They would then boldly advertise that they have Google Fiber.
Caps are good but there's a yawning danger (Score:3)
I'm totally in favor of metered service. Caps are a form of that that are convenient. Basically one can plan a budget of so much for month that's correct nearly all the time but if you want more than that then you can pay incrementally. It's a fine idea that ties charges to usage.
The problem with this model is if there are certain services that escape the cap. If T-mobile can let me binge-on Hulu or if Facebook will let me watch certain parts of the internet they get payola from for free then this is ju
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So metered service = good but it has this slippery slope to evil.
Metering and price control to limit access to a scarce resource is one thing, but it appears that large ISPs, when working from a semi or complete monopoly position, are merely gouging. $50 extra for unlimited usage?
fair meter is needed as well (Score:2)
fair meter is needed as well.
Most IPS's seem to have ones that error alot and they change you for data sent if your system is off. As well changing for stuff like there own management traffic.
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People should just switch to Google Fiber. They don't have data caps and the bandwidth is fairly high.
True, but their pricing is roughly inline wit cable's prices. AFAICT they no longer offer the $300 lifetime unlimited lower speed class of service, which would have been a good deal for many users.
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Yes. I'm surprised you're not already in KC. It has a little bit of everything without the insanity of the coasts.
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AT&T already announced caps for DSL and U-Verse the other day. So, you are right, except it looks to be already decided. They are just releasing the info every couple of days so we wont notice. Mooooo
It's a natural response to the threat of cost cutting. If they lose subscribers to the TV product they will look to makeup the revenue from broadband users. The Death Star's UVerse service already lifts the cap for no additional charge, beyond the cable fees, if you subscribe to the TV product as well as broadband. They have no desire to become a simple dumb pipe.
Re:Pay up ! (Score:5, Insightful)
Where is the government? The government is busy churning out regulation after regulation that prevents any possible competition that would drive the costs down. Most of these deals are driven by Comcast, etc, lobbying to keep everyone else out.
Re:Pay up ! (Score:5, Funny)
Don't worry. When I'm president we're going to have the best caps. Tremendous, tremendous caps. The smartest caps, not stupid caps.
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Internet accomplished!
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It's Morning On the Internet!
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The Internet will pay for it!
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Mathematically, this swamps lives saved from a government type system as they are equations of a vastly different order.
Quixotically, this government systemically swells type and equates lives as its a new vastly different new world order.
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Much better to have everyone with nothing?
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If you're going to try and make a point, at least be genuine.
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It is genuiine. Like lots of fields the wealthy pay a premium to get things early.
So yes the wealthy get better medical care than the poor, but over time those treatments become available to the poor (while the wealthy have newer and better still ones). The wealthy also got cell phones long before the poor.
There are many things to be tweaked. If patents are too long then it takes too long for the poor to get those treatments, for one obvious one.
Just saying "that's unfair" and making medicine a field in whi
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In the case of medicine, if the product is successful (i.e., more effectively or more safely cures, treats, or diagnoses medical conditions), the "poor" do end up with the advantage - just a bit later. However, without the profit motive, the product might never have been developed and deployed to anyone for a long time after it would already be available to the "poor" under the current system.
This is especially true in the case of medications which are often relatively cheap to produce but very expensive to
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You know Viagra was initially intended to be a drug for hypertension (AKA the circulation problems you're talking about), and they discovered the other effects later on, when men (but not women) who were in the clinical trials wouldn't give their drugs back when they were supposed to? Also, joi
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It's called regulatory capture. Our corrupt political system allows corporations to buy politicians (Democrats, Republicans, it doesn't matter) so you can't vote out the bad guys. (Only Bernie is not corrupted.)
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Where is the government? The government is busy churning out regulation after regulation that prevents any possible competition that would drive the costs down. Most of these deals are driven by Comcast, etc, lobbying to keep everyone else out.
Close! They're too busy fighting about which toilet that Bruce Jenner or Chaz Bono get to use. It's not enough that there was already laws against lewd behavior (e.g. recording a girl in a changing room), now we've got to carry our birth certificates so we can show proof to use the can.
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You have that backwards. The gov doesn't regulate large monopolies...
That's right! Large monopolies regulate the government.
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Too busy spying on its own population...
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Where is the government when we truly needs them?
Right where you want them, in eternal gridlock.
The opportunity awaits. We can clean the house in November, or we can keep on doing the same old thing and reelect 95% of them, and then complain some more for two more years.
If you want your government to fight against the abuse, you have to vote for one that will. All the complainers who say there's no choice are full of shit.
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But ... the choice is between someone who pretty much IS part of the corporations and one that is morally bankrupt and totally corrupt. What kind of fucked up choice is that?
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That has more to do with "Oh if I don't vote $a it's going to be $b and then the sky is falling".
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Given how much both are disliked I am surprised that the Green Party and Libertarian Party aren't getting more attention.
Why are you surprised? The media doesn't care about them. You could put up Adolp Hitler and Osama bin Laden at the top of the two big party's tickets and the media still probably won't pay attention to them.
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You mean your God-given right to consume unlimited amounts of data, forcing regular users to subsidize your usage? Thanks, but I think if you get "squeezed" like that, that's fine with me.
If "no caps" became the law, these companies would simply raise their prices for everybody, making Internet less affordable.
Re:Pay up ! (Score:5, Informative)
The cable companies have already admitted that caps aren't due to network congestion. They are because of two factors:
1) The cable companies want more money.
and
2) Streaming video cuts into their traditional TV profits. Caps and overages help limit how much people can stream. (And give the cable companies more money if you do stream.)
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You mean your God-given right to consume unlimited amounts of data, forcing regular users to subsidize your usage?
Do you understand the phrase "conflict of interest"?
If "no caps" became the law, these companies would simply raise their prices for everybody, making Internet less affordable.
Prices go up, customers leave.
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Correct. After imposing regulations that make the market less efficient, like disallowing caps, prices will go up, the number of users will go down, profits will go down, and everybody will be worse off, except for the tiny minority of very large data users who actually get subsidized by everybody else.
Do you understand the phrase "special interests" and "political corruption"? That's exactly what we have here: politically voc
Re:Pay up ! (Score:5, Informative)
...Where is the government when we truly needs them?...
GOP budget bill would kill net neutrality and FCC’s set-top box plan [arstechnica.com]
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It looks like the Republicans that control Congress are firmly in the grip of the cable and ISP lobbyists.
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The FCC is the same agency that gave us the nipple-protection panic and the Broadcast Flag. There is no problem with the Internet that I want the FCC fixing.
In any event, net neutrality has nothing to do with bandwidth caps. And there is no problem, to date, that their 'net neutrality' rules have fixed or could have prevented.
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...The FCC is the same agency that gave us the nipple-protection panic and the Broadcast Flag....
If you've been following the FCC recently, instead of complaining about it, you would notice that the current FCC chairman is very much on the side of consumers. He's been pushing back on the cable and ISP industries quite hard. Some want him to push even harder. He just might.
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Ok, name a customer that their "net neutrality" rules helped.
Scare quotes because the actual few hundred pages of rules have nothing to do with either throttling or actual Net Neutrality as is technically defined.
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Re:Pay up ! (Score:4, Informative)
So... something this important is better dictated by the likes of Comcast, AT&T and Time Warner. Gotcha.
Hint: Governments at least PRETEND they give a shit about you. Corporations don't even have to do that.
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The free market is not some white knight either.
If white knights are what you're after, lots of luck. But at least you can vote out the government if you can get enough people to side with you. I doubt you or your 5000 closest friends own enough shares in Comcast or AT&T to change their policies via ballot.
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The free market is exactly what created this mess.
Broadband internet is a huge investment. You have to put down some serious dough just to get into the game. That's not only a risk, it's also hard to recover expenses.
Now, all a monopolizing company has to do is ensure that its prices are not SO high that someone could come in, put down that investment (that the monopoly already recovered fully) and get an acceptable revenue from 50% of the market (let's be generous and say that the newcomer would actually m
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The free market is exactly what created this mess.
What free market? Telcos and other ISPs generally enjoy a state-sponsored monopoly.
Got to love one-way agreements. . . . (Score:5, Insightful)
. . . pity we can't say, "Sorry, but when I signed, the terms were unlimited bandwidth for $X/month. I haven't signed any changes to the agreement, so deliver, bitches. . . "
But what can you say about an ISP whose Customer Service Policy is cribbed from "50 Shades of Grey" ???
Seems reasonable (Score:5, Interesting)
... If only because it's documented and clear about pricing (at least at a glance from the summary).
I know this will be an unpopular opinion here but as an Australian that has lived under data caps since forever (the first broadband cap in Aus was 300mb, raised not long after to 3gb where it sat for a while), even considering how much time has elapsed 1TB is a staggering amount of data.
The biggest problem we had in Australia (... Outside of just generally ludicrously high costs for data) was pland being offered as "unlimited *", where the * basically meant go fuck yourself. This was, fortunately, clamped down on quickly and since then we've had crystal clear (if low) data limits.
I've been in the US for the last 2 years on some vaguely defined TWC plan. Despite having netflix running nearly all day every day (I've not been working for the last year so have had lots of spare time) I could barely manage more than 300gb a month, between me and my partner.
But even so I was constantly worried that eventually someone would be all like "you're using too much data!". Knowing there was a real limit would have been awesome, because I was used to thinking like that anyway and I'm tech savvy enough to deal with it.
I have no problems with data plans, as long as "unlimited" fucking well means what it says, even if you have to pay more for it. Having vague, opaque limits is harmful for everyone. Non-tech-savvy end users can just be filtered or rate capped, but for those of us that actually give a shit about service levels, it needs to be clear what we're paying for and what we're actually getting.
In Seattle... (Score:5, Informative)
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In Seattle I get 1 Gbps uncapped. Thanks to the progressive city council we have multiple providers to choose from.
That is a damn lie, and you know it. I've lived here since before the Internet and don't know anyone with a connection fast enough to stream Netflix. Gigabit is available from CenturyLink on a couple of streets and in about fifty expensive condo buildings, but that's it. Here's my house:
http://imgur.com/WgSvnA5
That proves you a liar. CenturyLink only provides 1.5 Mbps max to much of the U District (neighborhood just north of the University of Washington). You're lying by almost a factor of a thousand-f
Re:In Seattle... (Score:4, Interesting)
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WTF? Seattle has multiple 1Gbps providers (3 I know of). Comcast, Wave, CenturyLink. Even if your claim of 1.5Mbps max were true, that is PLENTY to stream Netflix. Troll.
Yes they do. IF you are lucky enough to live in the very, very small areas where they offer it. For example, I'm on the edge of Capital Hill, the Downtown/South Lake Union edge. Can I get 1Gbps (you know bits are 8 less then bytes, right? so your Giga plan isn't actually a really GigaByte.) where I live? Fuck no. Comcast or CentuaryLink regular service only.
So it's nice you live in the 2 square block area where those services is offered, but 99% of Seattle doesn't.
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1 GBps = gigabytes/s
Do YOU know the difference?
Geez..clueless. Even if you can get "regular service" from Comcast or CenturyLink it is PLENTY to stream Netflix. Do you think other US cities have 1Gbps from multiple providers???
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This isn't even that bad (Score:2)
And The FTC Does Nothing (Score:2)
Oh, the FTC could get off their lazy asses and do something, but seeing they are on their knees willing to do anything anyone who stuffs money into politicians' pockets they are going to get away with it.
Cry me a river (Score:2)
I have a 10 GB cap and have to pay 16 dollars for 2 extra GBs with my beloved satellite internet. Its my only choice (unless I want to use dial up).
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I am 6 miles from what was the fastest growing city in the state.
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I am 6 miles from what was the fastest growing city in the state.
In 1812?
No Problem With Caps (Score:2)
I just stay out of Washington DC, and do not watch hockey on television.
Data caps versus the cloud-storage craze (Score:4, Informative)
And this is why the fanatical push towards "cloud" storage of everything is insane nonsense. First it was cell phone data plans, now it's home internet as well.
The industry wants to have it both ways but it's not realistic. These two schools of thoughts are financially incompatible with each other.
Ha, suckers! I'm getting NextLight (Score:2)
I live in Longmont, Colorado. The city government is running fiber to the entire city. A guy just strung a piece of glass into a box on the side of my house the other day. Next Monday they come to install the inside port and give me my fiber modem. I'll be paying $50/month for 1Gbps and I can't wait to give Comcast the boot.
So HA! Suck it all you capped mofos. Looks like your big commercial ISPs have put a cap in your arse, so to speak.
There's a house down the street from me for sale if anyone's interested.
Utility with price controls (Score:2)
FTC did a great thing by declaring ISPs utilities. They were trying to get approval for fast lanes (so they get charge you for Internet access AND then they charge Netflix, Facebook, etc. again to send that data to you expediently while exempting their own services from that charge to give themselves an edge), and the chairman, who was a industry insider, just totally surprised them by letting his conscience guide his actions.
However, he didn't invoke price controls on them, and I think we're either going
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If you look very far upstream from the commodity Internet access service, most of the billing is usage-based. When ISPs sell to each other they use a "95th percentile" standard. The mbps usage rate you're just below 95% of the time is what you get billed for.
Severing the last mile leases from the ISP service would address a number of serious problems, but usage-based billing is not one of them.
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instead they did what they could to make sure maximum profits are to be had.
They are not a non-profit municipal utility, they are a business with stockholders that demand top financial return.
Having said that, I agree that they are blood suckers and I'm looking for a way to cut them from my life...
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Actually, I get the impression that Wheeler at some point might have been backstabbed or financially or personally harmed by one of his colleagues or associates while he was in the cable industry. Now that he's a regulator, he seems to be standing in the way of letting cable companies run amok with plans to further and further monetize their customer base.
I think, if we had no regulation, Comcast would gladly charge $10 per GB just like mobile carriers do. I'm not saying we have an awesome regulator who alw
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I think you're right, without regulation the cable-based ISPs would ramp up data costs so high that video streaming would have been crushed and cable would be the only possible TV option. Netflix would still be only a disc delivery service. It's not clear to me that even the Commerce Department would view it as a monopolistic practice.
I'm not even sure if the existing regulations would have actually stopped it. They wouldn't get away with it now because streaming is too popular and there would be politic
Re:Thank the FCC. (Score:4, Informative)
With the FCC preventing Charter from imposing caps for seven years as a merger condition, the agency has signaled that it may start getting more serious about cracking down on usage caps in the broadband market.
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The future is half "1984" and half "cyberpunk" (corporations become more powerful than governments and run everything)
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You mean something like this [imgur.com].
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When FIOS came into my town my connection with TWC suddenly went from 20mbps to 200 without any additional charges. They were just like "Umm yeah we're gonna up the speed across the board." It's hard to support the idea that they need to meter my internet usage when they can do this big of bump just because fiber MIGHT be coming to town. (BTW... that fiber rollout stalled.)
I am cutting the cord on my next move. TWC could have avoided this by doing the following:
1. Cut down on commercials. Every comm
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I do NOT get the same upload speed as an OC3
I do NOT get the savings passed onto me from Netflix/YouTube/etc paying my ISP for a better experience
I do NOT get anything except a crowded spectrum from my ISP sharing my wifi by default
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All three of the things you mentioned are completely missing the point.
It's irrational to expect a dedicated 100% capacity-reserved line for every customer. It makes no economic sense. It's like expecting a dedicated lane in every highway just for you. That has nothing to do with net neutrality or ISPs sharing your Wifi.
You want to debate about Comcast's advertising, that's a different thing and you can have at it.
Re:One last try (Score:5, Informative)
On the backbone, assuming you buy at big ISP scale, 100Mbps dedicated and symmetric costs less than $50 per month. The last mile costs roughly the same whether you use it for 1Mbps or 100Mbps. Volume caps have no effect on congestion (because they reduce off-peak usage, not peak usage.) This is a shakedown, money-grab, market failure.
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The cost of a megabyte should be in flux, and it should be transparent.
This is way too complicated a product to try to sell to the average household. It's the sort of pricing scheme they might market towards professional customers.
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Re:One last try (Score:5, Informative)
Really, this is voted as +5 Informative here on *Slashdot*?! Comcast are not going to be laying OC3 lines all over the place. OC3 costs so much because it is strung directly to your office building or whereever. When you are talking about the cost of bandwidth to Comcast, it is the cost of IP transit. Right now you can get a 1Gbps (with a full cabinet for your equipment) for $400/month: https://he.net/special.pdf [he.net] (I have nothing to do with them other than that I used to be happy customer for a long while). If you need just IP transit (no cabinet), it goes down to $0.32/Mbps per month. To transfer 1 Tb of data per month (i.e. their current cap), you need about 4 Mbps of bandwidth. So the data cost to Comcast is roughly $1.28 for each 1Tb. So please, let's stop with the bullshit indeed.
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at educating people on this topic, before giving up and letting people wallow in their own ignorance.
A dedicated OC3 costs about $7500/mo [t1shopper.com]. 155 Mbps, 149 Mbps after you subtract overhead. That's what you need if you want 149 Mbps without any data caps. (Yes an OC3 is symmetric. Cable can be too, they just dedicate more bandwidth to downloads since people mostly download stuff. It is not an inherent limitation of the technology which makes it "different" from an OC3.)
How then are Comcast, AT&T, etc. able to offer you 50 Mbps for just $50/mo? By doing the equivalent of putting 150 customers on an OC3. $7500/mo / 150 customers = $50/mo per customer.
But this only works if none of those 150 people hogs up all the bandwidth. If one person has torrents running at 149 Mbps for the entire month, everyone else's Internet bandwidth is going to be seriously degraded. So how do you prevent someone from hogging up that much bandwidth? You implement a monthly data cap. 149 Mbps * 1 month = 49 TB. And 49 TB / 150 customers = 326 GB per customer. So if each of those 150 people used the same amount of bandwidth, you'd expect them each to use 326 GB per month.
Not everyone uses that much though, so you can make the cap a bit higher without everything falling apart. That right there is why most ISPs are setting their caps around 300-700 GB/mo. 1 TB/mo is actually pretty generous. And being able to remove the cap for an extra $50/mo ($30/mo for AT&T) is an incredibly good deal. $100/mo is a helluva lot better than the $2500/mo you'd have to pay for a partial OC3 giving you 50 Mbps.
Yet profit reports show that it's almost 99% profit on internet usage for the various Internet providers. So let me guess, you work for CentuaryLink or Comcast?
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"[One last try] at educating people on this topic...."
You seem to be under the impression that your posting is any any way, shape, or form relevant to the discussion. It isn't.
1) ISP's advertise unlimited data at X rate for Y dollars.
2) Customers make use of X rate for Y dollars, and ISP's punish customers. This should be illegal, and is definitely bad business. But there is nowhere for customers to go, as ISP's have local monopolies or cartels.
3) Taxpayers have funded ISP's infrastructure expansion for decades so ISP's could handle customers making use of
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My understanding is that it's more like 25 to 5000 customers (I think Cable Labs suggests 250 for DOCSIS 3.0) sharing a certain amount of channels/bandwidth (probably around 300Mbps down for DOCSIS 3.0 and over 1Gbps down for DOCSIS 3.1) on their node to CMTS.
The target over-subscription ratio for gigabit seems to be no more than 50:1 from the few papers I've read.
300 Mbps * 1 month = 98.6 TB; / 250 subscribers = 400 GB but that's saying if everyone used an equal amount / all of their share.
With the realist
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Well, your point 1 is misleading, and the rest of the points are a different topic entirely.
As for other industries that operate on this model, here's some off the top of my head:
Telephone
Banks
Public roads
Private roads
Restaurant buffet
Insurance
Lottery
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A lot of times, there aren't many people who make unusually high demands on a system, but the few who do, do so with a vengeance. Caps are a way to keep them in line, or at least help pay for the excessive resource usage.
Unfortunately, caps are also something that are easily tightened at the whim of a bean-counter.
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There isn't a cap because "no one" hits it. There is a cap because "most people" don't hit it. I realize my perspective isn't enough of a sample size to determine average internet usage, but I'd consider myself a fairly heavy user. 3 teens on youtube/netflix daily, me downloading "stuff" (yeah, let's just leave it there), and the usual basic internet browsing/e-mail/etc. I average around 300-350 GB/month pretty normally. To me, a 1TB/month cap seems 100% reasonable. I realize there are use cases where
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I was thinking the same thing. 1TB seems like an awfully high cap to be worried about. Windows Updates are now peering on the LAN, so five computers will end up downloading their updates once. Business accounts (i.e. the ones actually running servers) aren't subject to the caps. If you're hitting a terabyte a month with torrenting, a rented seedbox will give you better stats and cost less than what Comcast wants for the overage cap. If you're hitting a terabyte a month in video streaming...that's a LOT of v
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