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If the caps apply equally to any and all data, I really have no problem with them, and neither should you. We're just asking for a content-agnostic utility. No

If the caps apply equally to any and all data, I really have no problem with them, and neither should you. We're just asking for a content-agnostic utility. Not "as much as you can eat". Consider if electricity was "unlimited". "Unlimited" is part of what got us into this mess in the first place. Delivering lots of data to each of many subscribers is just not that easy and cheap. At least with explicit caps companies can compete by offering higher caps. Instead of mysterious limitations on "unlimited".

staunch 9y ago
There's no "mess" with unlimited bandwidth. Bandwidth is not like electricity itself. It's a fundamentally cheap thing to flash LEDs down glass pipes. There's no technical or financial reason why every major American city shouldn't have unlimited gigabit for $50/mo per household. The only expensive part is running conduit and it's a one-time cost. It's disappointing how many people buy into the talking points of these shitty corporations as they work hard to fleece and permanently damage an entire country.
- rayiner 9y ago
  > There's no "mess" with unlimited bandwidth. Bandwidth is not like electricity itself. It's a fundamentally cheap thing to flash LEDs down glass pipes. Electricity is actually a lot like Internet. Sending electrons down a wire isn't as cheap as sending flashes of light down optical fibers, but in both cases variable costs are vastly lower than the fixed costs.[1] In both cases, there is a total system capacity you can achieve for a given fixed cost. And in both cases, usage is such that what you're really trying to manage is the amount of fixed capacity in relation to usage peaks. It's fundamentally about managing congestion rather than delivering units of a product. > every major American city shouldn't have unlimited gigabit for $50/mo per household Other than the fact that it's not economically possible? Chattanooga charges $60 for 100 megabit and $70 for gigabit, and its just about breaking even. And Chattanooga is a very favorable city for fiber buildout: power lines are overhead, not buried (the same reason Google built in places like Kansas City, not San Francisco), and its a southern city with relatively low cost of labor. New York, D.C., etc., are all going to be more expensive. Nor is $50 for gigabit common in western countries for fiber, at least in places where fiber isn't subsidized. Gigabit fiber in the U.K. is $70-100/month. In Sweden and Denmark it's $120+/month (and typically have multi-thousand up-front install costs). [1] The typical American pays 12 cents per kilowatt hour for electricity. The fuel cost for a fossil fuel plant is about 2.5 cents per kilowatt hour, while for nuclear it's less than 1 cent. Almost all of the cost of electricity, just like with broadband, is operations and maintenance of the infrastructure, and fixed cost recovery.
  - kalleboo 9y ago
    I live in Japan where "1 Gbps" connections are offered at around $50/mo over a nationwide open access fiber network. But to prove your point - the consumer ISPs here are comically oversubscribed, to the point where with few exceptions you're lucky to exceed 100 Mbps during peak hours.

staunch 9y ago

There's no "mess" with unlimited bandwidth. Bandwidth is not like electricity itself. It's a fundamentally cheap thing to flash LEDs down glass pipes. There's no technical or financial reason why every major American city shouldn't have unlimited gigabit for $50/mo per household. The only expensive part is running conduit and it's a one-time cost. It's disappointing how many people buy into the talking points of these shitty corporations as they work hard to fleece and permanently damage an entire country.

rayiner 9y ago
> There's no "mess" with unlimited bandwidth. Bandwidth is not like electricity itself. It's a fundamentally cheap thing to flash LEDs down glass pipes. Electricity is actually a lot like Internet. Sending electrons down a wire isn't as cheap as sending flashes of light down optical fibers, but in both cases variable costs are vastly lower than the fixed costs.[1] In both cases, there is a total system capacity you can achieve for a given fixed cost. And in both cases, usage is such that what you're really trying to manage is the amount of fixed capacity in relation to usage peaks. It's fundamentally about managing congestion rather than delivering units of a product. > every major American city shouldn't have unlimited gigabit for $50/mo per household Other than the fact that it's not economically possible? Chattanooga charges $60 for 100 megabit and $70 for gigabit, and its just about breaking even. And Chattanooga is a very favorable city for fiber buildout: power lines are overhead, not buried (the same reason Google built in places like Kansas City, not San Francisco), and its a southern city with relatively low cost of labor. New York, D.C., etc., are all going to be more expensive. Nor is $50 for gigabit common in western countries for fiber, at least in places where fiber isn't subsidized. Gigabit fiber in the U.K. is $70-100/month. In Sweden and Denmark it's $120+/month (and typically have multi-thousand up-front install costs). [1] The typical American pays 12 cents per kilowatt hour for electricity. The fuel cost for a fossil fuel plant is about 2.5 cents per kilowatt hour, while for nuclear it's less than 1 cent. Almost all of the cost of electricity, just like with broadband, is operations and maintenance of the infrastructure, and fixed cost recovery.
- kalleboo 9y ago
  I live in Japan where "1 Gbps" connections are offered at around $50/mo over a nationwide open access fiber network. But to prove your point - the consumer ISPs here are comically oversubscribed, to the point where with few exceptions you're lucky to exceed 100 Mbps during peak hours.