7 ms·

56% of Americans have Internet data caps; FCC asked to investigate

149 points by amnigos 15y ago

pseudonym 15y ago
And of course, as long as Canada has 2-15G caps, they can always point across the border and tell us how good we have it. Capitalism!
- MikeCapone 15y ago
  I'm in Canada and with Teksavvy.com -- 300G cap, as long as the CRTC doesn't take it away...
  - noarchy 15y ago
    I'm hoping that a silver lining in the recent Tory victory is that the door could be opened to greater competition. The big telecom companies in Canada have had their way for too long, and the quality of our internet service has suffered mightily for it.
    - TillE 15y ago
      "Competition" is a funny old concept. When we're talking about competition among telecoms, it's usually strongest in countries where the government has mandated that owners of network infrastructure must allow resale. A hands-off approach from the government gives you natural monopolies, because that initial cost of building the infrastructure is so high. Every supermarket chain in Germany has their own branded mobile network reseller with prepaid SIM cards, and prices keep going down.
runningdogx 15y ago
Verizon did something interesting with their wireless network: they track heavy bandwidth users and throttle them during peak traffic periods. [1] That seems like a more reasonable option than hard traffic caps. It's no surprise more wired ISPs aren't using that strategy, though... hard caps generate revenue, while rate limiting heavy users doesn't. That wouldn't be such a problem if there were healthy competition in most metro markets, but there isn't. Verizon FIOS is one of the few good [fast] U.S. wireline ISP options left that doesn't cap traffic. It's too bad many markets are still de-facto duopolies (from the days when there was a meaningful distinction between "telephone" and "cable" companies aside from layers 1-2). FIOS isn't available here, and if it were I'd switch in a heartbeat because of AT&T's incompetence [2]. [1] http://www.tekgoblin.com/2011/02/03/verizon-to-throttle-high-bandwidth-users/ http://www.tekgoblin.com/2011/02/03/verizon-to-throttle-high... [2] http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/mailarchive/users/2011-02/msg00074.html http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/mailarchive/users/2011-02/msg00...
- DrJ 15y ago
  I full heartedly support throttling during peak traffic, but I don't see a reason for bandwidth capping. We should all rise up as one and really ask, if we are now paying $X for $Y GB of data, why doesn't it roll over like Minutes or a persistent commodity. I'd also like to point out Charter Communications doesn't throttle nor cap their bandwidth and yet the service is great!
  - achompas 15y ago
    We should all rise up as one and really ask, if we are now paying $X for $Y GB of data, why doesn't it roll over like Minutes or a persistent commodity. Because user bandwidth is not, by definition, a persistent commodity. ISPs do not accrue bandwidth every month they are under capacity, so why should users?
    - MatthewB 15y ago
      True, but neither do cell phone mintes to a cellular company. They just figured out a way to make the economics work while providing a better service to users.
      - achompas 15y ago
        Right. Unlike wireless minutes, though, ISPs would directly help their competition by offering rollover bandwidth: http://acompa.net/blog/2011/05/why-isps-will-not-offer-rollover-bandwidth/ http://acompa.net/blog/2011/05/why-isps-will-not-offer-rollo...
    - AretNCarlsen 15y ago
      I disagree completely. It's just like real estate: since I only use about 50% of the floor space in my apartment at any given time, I roll over my unused square footage and only pay rent every other month.
      - seanp2k 15y ago
heyrhett 15y ago
"This will be my greatest lawsuit since 'The Never Ending Story'!"
PaulHoule 15y ago
My I.S.P. (Frontier) wanted to cap DSL at 5 GB a month! I'm not against metered billing, in principle, but the rates would have to be reflective of what it costs to provision the marginal bandwidth. The bandwidth cap issue highlights two crises that the industry faces: (i) the nature of fiber optic networks is such that it's several orders of magnitude cheaper to move data between hubs in major cities than it is to move it over the "last mile" to the consumer and (ii) video streaming from Youtube, Netflix and other providers is starting to provide real competition for cable television. (i) leads to pricing schemes that don't reflect the cost of provisioning services; installing the "last mile" might cost a few thousand dollars up front, but this gets amortized over bills that a customer pays over a long time. Upgrading a customer to a higher speed tier is the only way that the ISP can offer "better service for more money" to a customer but the increase almost certainly won't be reflective of the difference in costs. As we've seen in the airline industry, crazy pricing leads to pathology in the long time. As for (ii), ISP's can't be seen as good actors when they are in the competitive cable television business. As customers turn on to streaming video, utilization is outpacing the rate at which ISPs want to invest in infrastructure -- and in the long term, the many ISPs which are cable providers realize that customers who've got access to Netflix and other streaming video services might decide they don't need to blow $80 a month for 500 channels full of crap.
- nitrogen 15y ago
  (ii) is a real threat to the cable companies. My apartment building pays for basic cable, but I haven't even hooked up a tuner the entire time I've lived here. I pay for Comcast's 50Mbit/s plan and get my video from Hulu/Netflix/YouTube, and yet YouTube still stutters and buffers frequently.
  - PaulHoule 15y ago
    you bet. one underlying problem is the pricing model. you get "take it or leave it" packages that were negotiated by guys in suits between cable companies and content owners (who are often different units of the same business.) as a result, you pay for Fox News when you pay for basic cable in many places, but you can't get Al Jazeera English. The consumer's got no way to say "I don't care for Spongebob Squarepants" or "I don't want my kids watching those stupid live action shows about rich kids that are on the Disney Channel" short of withdrawing from the system alltogether. With no market discipline on the individual channels, they can keep sucking worse and worse until people eventually give up on the whole package.
MatthewB 15y ago
I had no idea data caps were this frequent. I am all about net neutrality and the more selective throttling and data caps our data providers implement, the less innovation we will see.
- keeperofdakeys 15y ago
  Here in Australia, pretty much EVERY broadband provider has caps (there is only one I know of that gives unlimited, although I can't get this because the companies DSLAM isn't in my exchange). Don't even get me started on mobile internet caps.
henrikschroder 15y ago
What are these "data caps" you people are talking about? We don't have them on regular broadband, mobile broadband or mobile internet here? Kind regards, Sweden
- dstein 15y ago
  In the US internet bandwidth is in the same category as health care -- it's a luxury you have to pay extra for.
- tzs 15y ago
  So what happens if you start using your internet connection at full capacity 24/7, and so do all the other customers of your ISP? On the kind of fast connections you have over there, you could easily run up hundreds or even thousands of dollars worth of bandwidth charges for your ISP. Will they just operate at a loss, or will the government step in and pay the bandwidth costs, or will they throttle your speed down?
  - petercooper 15y ago
    Not necessarily. If everyone tried to use the connection at full capacity, they wouldn't succeed since the backbone and international connections are bottlenecks at a far lower capacity than the collective theoretical bandwidth of all local users. So if a million Swedes tried to download from YouTube at 10Mbps each, you can be sure there isn't a 10Tbps pipe to deal with that, and so every user would end up with slow, sluggish service. Just unmetered.
  - henrikschroder 15y ago
    I assume you can be throttled if you use too much, and in that weird scenario, I assume the ISP would throttle everyone to balance costs. Then again, most of our ISPs are tier1 or tier2 networks, so I assume they don't worry too much about peering costs.
    - jbri 15y ago
      There wouldn't even need to be any explicit throttling - when a site gets slashdotted or whatever everyone trying to access it slows to a crawl, but it's not because individual user's ISPs are throttling them. An ISP that was saturating its outbound links might drop packets according to some algorithm to ensure "fairness" rather than at random, but that's still not throttling, that's "our network is too congested to keep up with demand".
rickmode 15y ago
The root problem is a lack of competition. Ideas like government forcing service competition over the physical lines along easements granted by the a government should be explored.
- dstein 15y ago
  It's more than just lack of competition. What's happened is all cable television and phone companies have realized they are completely fucked. The Internet is way more disruptive than they originally thought. With VOIP and Netflix/bittorrent nobody needs a phone or television anymore. So there is a conflict of interest growing among the only companies that are providing broadband internet. These companies don't want to be relegated to simple utilities with low profit margins, and so they are doing everything in their power to keep the cost of data rising even while their cost of the bandwidth drops by half each year. With bandwidth caps and usage-based billing at 5000% profit margin they are simply begging the government to crack down on what ends up being highway robbery.
- PaulHoule 15y ago
  Competition for the sake of competition doesn't necessarily make things cheaper. If you have to make three copies of the physical infrastructure, that's not cheap. I've seen business plans for rural wireless internet projects and typically the economics work out if you can sign up all of the customers in an area but if you've got to split them with the phone company and a cable company you can't pay for the tower and charge an affordable rate. Now, I know a guy who owns the patent for "virtual geosynchronous" satellites that would have about 1/3 the latency of today's satellite internet connections and drastically increase the availability of satellite bandwidth. Despite having a patent portfolio that covers many aspects of the system, he can't get to first base when it comes to finding a few $1B to build the system. Incumbents in this space, however, are happy to keep selling satellite "fraudband" internet and hundreds of crappy TV channels.
ck2 15y ago
FCC can't even enforce net-neutrality, they certainly will not be able to do a darn thing about caps (if they even really care). 250 GB cap seems huge to me though, unless maybe you have a multi-user household. I have a 50 GB cap but it doesn't seem to be enforced (yet).
- georgemcbay 15y ago
  250 GB is very roughly* about 12 movies worth of Netflix. Higher than the average user will use but nowhere near "huge" or unreasonable usage. *(depends upon bitrate, sd vs hd, etc, so YMMV).
  - tzs 15y ago
    It's 2.16 GB/hour at the highest bitrate Netflix streams HD. That's 115 hours to hit 250 GB. At two hours per movie that's 57 HD movies a month.
    - sofal 15y ago
      Sigh... I meant to upmod, not downmod.
  - kriardol 15y ago
    I'd argue that it's much more than 12. That would be ~20 GB/movie. I don't think Netflix's HD streaming is anywhere near Blu-ray quality. My roommates stream Netflix all day long and our usage has yet to break 200 GB. Not that I'm defending Comcast...
CrazedGeek 15y ago
How many ISPs actually enforce their caps? Genuine question- my ISP, Cox, technically has about a 100GB limit, but I know I've downloaded close to 1TB in a month with no overages, throttling, or anything.
rick888 15y ago
Comcast has 250GB/month cap. If you go over it, you are put on the lowest plan (no matter what you are paying) until they decide you can handle it. I went over it by about 100GB last month and I got my service turned off. I wasn't even downloading torrents.
- RyanKearney 15y ago
  That is a lie http://i.imgur.com/12nWd.png http://i.imgur.com/12nWd.png Oops that's slightly outdated, here's a new one http://i.imgur.com/p1ku3.png http://i.imgur.com/p1ku3.png
  - rick888 15y ago
    yeah, well, I'm just speaking from my experience.
  - beedogs 15y ago
    Ah, okay, your experience is different than his, so he's lying. Gotcha.
marklabedz 15y ago
One day we'll have a solid wireless option that can compete with physical lines. It will be just as disruptive as cell phones were to land lines. That's the only way you get around the massive barrier to entry that is running physical utility lines. One day.
walkon 15y ago
Why can't people apply non-internet concepts to the internet/ISPs? Do utilities give you unlimited electricity, gas, and water? Of course not. Does everyone who goes to McDonald's pay a flat fee of $5 and get as much as they want? Resources are scarce and the people who voluntarily provide them shouldn't be required by law to provide it infinitely without charging more or capping usage.
- orblivion 15y ago
  People seem to assume that it's out of "greed" that they're doing this. Just look at how much the executives are making, and all that. They don't seem to buy scarcity as a legitimate argument.
  - Klinky 15y ago
    Artificial scarcity is not real scarcity. When you have the ISPs taking federal money and blowing it on themselves, merging with each other to lower competition levels, buying up media assets & suing communities who try to do things on their own terms, you start to see how underhanded a lot of the telecoms practices are.
- Dove 15y ago
  No one is saying caps, in principle, ought to be illegal, the argument you seem to be attacking. The article is arguing that the caps are out of sync with the actual scarcity of the resource. Prices are rising and caps are dropping, even though bandwidth is becoming cheaper and more available. That suggests the caps aren't being used to make people pay for resources they use, but rather to trick people into spending money they didn't realize they'd be on the hook for. That's sneaky and skeezy. It's like the banks that charge a $50 overdraft fee on each of six trivial transactions. No one is saying there shouldn't be a fee, but if it's turning into a significant profit stream, something's not right.
  - walkon 15y ago
    My point is also to counter the outrage over usage-based pricing. What is so unfair about the idea of ISPs charging per/KB similar to how an electric utility charges per/KWh? Prices are rising for services and commodities in almost every industry. For instance, cotton has hit record highs this year, food is more expensive, gas is higher, etc. We're in an inflationary economy right now, so I don't think ISPs should be singled out for raising prices as their costs increase (e.g. they have to pay rising utility costs, salaries/benefits/health coverage, property taxes, etc). Perhaps what should be examined is change in net profit margins for ISPs that cap usage, but even if that rises, it is hard to know with certainty if the "sneaky and skeezy" "tricks" were the factor. One could argue if their tactics are indeed so "sneaky and skeezy" that they would loose business in the long run and negatively impact their profit margin.
barrydahlberg 15y ago
250GB is about my cap for the YEAR.
- beedogs 15y ago
  Well, your ISP is shit.
  - barrydahlberg 15y ago
    Typical plans for our ISPs: http://www.orcon.net.nz/home/plans/ http://www.orcon.net.nz/home/plans/
tyng 15y ago
In Australia, it's more like 95%... unless you pay for the super expensive Unlimited plan

149 points by amnigos 15y ago

And of course, as long as Canada has 2-15G caps, they can always point across the border and tell us how good we have it. Capitalism!

MikeCapone 15y ago
I'm in Canada and with Teksavvy.com -- 300G cap, as long as the CRTC doesn't take it away...
- noarchy 15y ago
  I'm hoping that a silver lining in the recent Tory victory is that the door could be opened to greater competition. The big telecom companies in Canada have had their way for too long, and the quality of our internet service has suffered mightily for it.
  - TillE 15y ago
    "Competition" is a funny old concept. When we're talking about competition among telecoms, it's usually strongest in countries where the government has mandated that owners of network infrastructure must allow resale. A hands-off approach from the government gives you natural monopolies, because that initial cost of building the infrastructure is so high. Every supermarket chain in Germany has their own branded mobile network reseller with prepaid SIM cards, and prices keep going down.

runningdogx 15y ago

Verizon did something interesting with their wireless network: they track heavy bandwidth users and throttle them during peak traffic periods. [1] That seems like a more reasonable option than hard traffic caps. It's no surprise more wired ISPs aren't using that strategy, though... hard caps generate revenue, while rate limiting heavy users doesn't. That wouldn't be such a problem if there were healthy competition in most metro markets, but there isn't. Verizon FIOS is one of the few good [fast] U.S. wireline ISP options left that doesn't cap traffic. It's too bad many markets are still de-facto duopolies (from the days when there was a meaningful distinction between "telephone" and "cable" companies aside from layers 1-2). FIOS isn't available here, and if it were I'd switch in a heartbeat because of AT&T's incompetence [2]. [1] http://www.tekgoblin.com/2011/02/03/verizon-to-throttle-high-bandwidth-users/ http://www.tekgoblin.com/2011/02/03/verizon-to-throttle-high... [2] http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/mailarchive/users/2011-02/msg00074.html http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/mailarchive/users/2011-02/msg00...

DrJ 15y ago
I full heartedly support throttling during peak traffic, but I don't see a reason for bandwidth capping. We should all rise up as one and really ask, if we are now paying $X for $Y GB of data, why doesn't it roll over like Minutes or a persistent commodity. I'd also like to point out Charter Communications doesn't throttle nor cap their bandwidth and yet the service is great!
- achompas 15y ago
  We should all rise up as one and really ask, if we are now paying $X for $Y GB of data, why doesn't it roll over like Minutes or a persistent commodity. Because user bandwidth is not, by definition, a persistent commodity. ISPs do not accrue bandwidth every month they are under capacity, so why should users?
  - MatthewB 15y ago
    True, but neither do cell phone mintes to a cellular company. They just figured out a way to make the economics work while providing a better service to users.
    - achompas 15y ago
      Right. Unlike wireless minutes, though, ISPs would directly help their competition by offering rollover bandwidth: http://acompa.net/blog/2011/05/why-isps-will-not-offer-rollover-bandwidth/ http://acompa.net/blog/2011/05/why-isps-will-not-offer-rollo...
  - AretNCarlsen 15y ago
    I disagree completely. It's just like real estate: since I only use about 50% of the floor space in my apartment at any given time, I roll over my unused square footage and only pay rent every other month.
    - seanp2k 15y ago

heyrhett 15y ago

"This will be my greatest lawsuit since 'The Never Ending Story'!"

PaulHoule 15y ago

My I.S.P. (Frontier) wanted to cap DSL at 5 GB a month! I'm not against metered billing, in principle, but the rates would have to be reflective of what it costs to provision the marginal bandwidth. The bandwidth cap issue highlights two crises that the industry faces: (i) the nature of fiber optic networks is such that it's several orders of magnitude cheaper to move data between hubs in major cities than it is to move it over the "last mile" to the consumer and (ii) video streaming from Youtube, Netflix and other providers is starting to provide real competition for cable television. (i) leads to pricing schemes that don't reflect the cost of provisioning services; installing the "last mile" might cost a few thousand dollars up front, but this gets amortized over bills that a customer pays over a long time. Upgrading a customer to a higher speed tier is the only way that the ISP can offer "better service for more money" to a customer but the increase almost certainly won't be reflective of the difference in costs. As we've seen in the airline industry, crazy pricing leads to pathology in the long time. As for (ii), ISP's can't be seen as good actors when they are in the competitive cable television business. As customers turn on to streaming video, utilization is outpacing the rate at which ISPs want to invest in infrastructure -- and in the long term, the many ISPs which are cable providers realize that customers who've got access to Netflix and other streaming video services might decide they don't need to blow $80 a month for 500 channels full of crap.

nitrogen 15y ago
(ii) is a real threat to the cable companies. My apartment building pays for basic cable, but I haven't even hooked up a tuner the entire time I've lived here. I pay for Comcast's 50Mbit/s plan and get my video from Hulu/Netflix/YouTube, and yet YouTube still stutters and buffers frequently.
- PaulHoule 15y ago
  you bet. one underlying problem is the pricing model. you get "take it or leave it" packages that were negotiated by guys in suits between cable companies and content owners (who are often different units of the same business.) as a result, you pay for Fox News when you pay for basic cable in many places, but you can't get Al Jazeera English. The consumer's got no way to say "I don't care for Spongebob Squarepants" or "I don't want my kids watching those stupid live action shows about rich kids that are on the Disney Channel" short of withdrawing from the system alltogether. With no market discipline on the individual channels, they can keep sucking worse and worse until people eventually give up on the whole package.

MatthewB 15y ago

I had no idea data caps were this frequent. I am all about net neutrality and the more selective throttling and data caps our data providers implement, the less innovation we will see.

keeperofdakeys 15y ago
Here in Australia, pretty much EVERY broadband provider has caps (there is only one I know of that gives unlimited, although I can't get this because the companies DSLAM isn't in my exchange). Don't even get me started on mobile internet caps.

henrikschroder 15y ago

What are these "data caps" you people are talking about? We don't have them on regular broadband, mobile broadband or mobile internet here? Kind regards, Sweden

dstein 15y ago
In the US internet bandwidth is in the same category as health care -- it's a luxury you have to pay extra for.
tzs 15y ago
So what happens if you start using your internet connection at full capacity 24/7, and so do all the other customers of your ISP? On the kind of fast connections you have over there, you could easily run up hundreds or even thousands of dollars worth of bandwidth charges for your ISP. Will they just operate at a loss, or will the government step in and pay the bandwidth costs, or will they throttle your speed down?
- petercooper 15y ago
  Not necessarily. If everyone tried to use the connection at full capacity, they wouldn't succeed since the backbone and international connections are bottlenecks at a far lower capacity than the collective theoretical bandwidth of all local users. So if a million Swedes tried to download from YouTube at 10Mbps each, you can be sure there isn't a 10Tbps pipe to deal with that, and so every user would end up with slow, sluggish service. Just unmetered.
- henrikschroder 15y ago
  I assume you can be throttled if you use too much, and in that weird scenario, I assume the ISP would throttle everyone to balance costs. Then again, most of our ISPs are tier1 or tier2 networks, so I assume they don't worry too much about peering costs.
  - jbri 15y ago
    There wouldn't even need to be any explicit throttling - when a site gets slashdotted or whatever everyone trying to access it slows to a crawl, but it's not because individual user's ISPs are throttling them. An ISP that was saturating its outbound links might drop packets according to some algorithm to ensure "fairness" rather than at random, but that's still not throttling, that's "our network is too congested to keep up with demand".

rickmode 15y ago

The root problem is a lack of competition. Ideas like government forcing service competition over the physical lines along easements granted by the a government should be explored.

dstein 15y ago
It's more than just lack of competition. What's happened is all cable television and phone companies have realized they are completely fucked. The Internet is way more disruptive than they originally thought. With VOIP and Netflix/bittorrent nobody needs a phone or television anymore. So there is a conflict of interest growing among the only companies that are providing broadband internet. These companies don't want to be relegated to simple utilities with low profit margins, and so they are doing everything in their power to keep the cost of data rising even while their cost of the bandwidth drops by half each year. With bandwidth caps and usage-based billing at 5000% profit margin they are simply begging the government to crack down on what ends up being highway robbery.
PaulHoule 15y ago
Competition for the sake of competition doesn't necessarily make things cheaper. If you have to make three copies of the physical infrastructure, that's not cheap. I've seen business plans for rural wireless internet projects and typically the economics work out if you can sign up all of the customers in an area but if you've got to split them with the phone company and a cable company you can't pay for the tower and charge an affordable rate. Now, I know a guy who owns the patent for "virtual geosynchronous" satellites that would have about 1/3 the latency of today's satellite internet connections and drastically increase the availability of satellite bandwidth. Despite having a patent portfolio that covers many aspects of the system, he can't get to first base when it comes to finding a few $1B to build the system. Incumbents in this space, however, are happy to keep selling satellite "fraudband" internet and hundreds of crappy TV channels.

ck2 15y ago

FCC can't even enforce net-neutrality, they certainly will not be able to do a darn thing about caps (if they even really care). 250 GB cap seems huge to me though, unless maybe you have a multi-user household. I have a 50 GB cap but it doesn't seem to be enforced (yet).

georgemcbay 15y ago
250 GB is very roughly* about 12 movies worth of Netflix. Higher than the average user will use but nowhere near "huge" or unreasonable usage. *(depends upon bitrate, sd vs hd, etc, so YMMV).
- tzs 15y ago
  It's 2.16 GB/hour at the highest bitrate Netflix streams HD. That's 115 hours to hit 250 GB. At two hours per movie that's 57 HD movies a month.
  - sofal 15y ago
    Sigh... I meant to upmod, not downmod.
- kriardol 15y ago
  I'd argue that it's much more than 12. That would be ~20 GB/movie. I don't think Netflix's HD streaming is anywhere near Blu-ray quality. My roommates stream Netflix all day long and our usage has yet to break 200 GB. Not that I'm defending Comcast...

CrazedGeek 15y ago

How many ISPs actually enforce their caps? Genuine question- my ISP, Cox, technically has about a 100GB limit, but I know I've downloaded close to 1TB in a month with no overages, throttling, or anything.

rick888 15y ago

Comcast has 250GB/month cap. If you go over it, you are put on the lowest plan (no matter what you are paying) until they decide you can handle it. I went over it by about 100GB last month and I got my service turned off. I wasn't even downloading torrents.

RyanKearney 15y ago
That is a lie http://i.imgur.com/12nWd.png http://i.imgur.com/12nWd.png Oops that's slightly outdated, here's a new one http://i.imgur.com/p1ku3.png http://i.imgur.com/p1ku3.png
- rick888 15y ago
  yeah, well, I'm just speaking from my experience.
- beedogs 15y ago
  Ah, okay, your experience is different than his, so he's lying. Gotcha.

marklabedz 15y ago

One day we'll have a solid wireless option that can compete with physical lines. It will be just as disruptive as cell phones were to land lines. That's the only way you get around the massive barrier to entry that is running physical utility lines. One day.

walkon 15y ago

Why can't people apply non-internet concepts to the internet/ISPs? Do utilities give you unlimited electricity, gas, and water? Of course not. Does everyone who goes to McDonald's pay a flat fee of $5 and get as much as they want? Resources are scarce and the people who voluntarily provide them shouldn't be required by law to provide it infinitely without charging more or capping usage.

orblivion 15y ago
People seem to assume that it's out of "greed" that they're doing this. Just look at how much the executives are making, and all that. They don't seem to buy scarcity as a legitimate argument.
- Klinky 15y ago
  Artificial scarcity is not real scarcity. When you have the ISPs taking federal money and blowing it on themselves, merging with each other to lower competition levels, buying up media assets & suing communities who try to do things on their own terms, you start to see how underhanded a lot of the telecoms practices are.
Dove 15y ago
No one is saying caps, in principle, ought to be illegal, the argument you seem to be attacking. The article is arguing that the caps are out of sync with the actual scarcity of the resource. Prices are rising and caps are dropping, even though bandwidth is becoming cheaper and more available. That suggests the caps aren't being used to make people pay for resources they use, but rather to trick people into spending money they didn't realize they'd be on the hook for. That's sneaky and skeezy. It's like the banks that charge a $50 overdraft fee on each of six trivial transactions. No one is saying there shouldn't be a fee, but if it's turning into a significant profit stream, something's not right.
- walkon 15y ago
  My point is also to counter the outrage over usage-based pricing. What is so unfair about the idea of ISPs charging per/KB similar to how an electric utility charges per/KWh? Prices are rising for services and commodities in almost every industry. For instance, cotton has hit record highs this year, food is more expensive, gas is higher, etc. We're in an inflationary economy right now, so I don't think ISPs should be singled out for raising prices as their costs increase (e.g. they have to pay rising utility costs, salaries/benefits/health coverage, property taxes, etc). Perhaps what should be examined is change in net profit margins for ISPs that cap usage, but even if that rises, it is hard to know with certainty if the "sneaky and skeezy" "tricks" were the factor. One could argue if their tactics are indeed so "sneaky and skeezy" that they would loose business in the long run and negatively impact their profit margin.

barrydahlberg 15y ago

250GB is about my cap for the YEAR.

beedogs 15y ago
Well, your ISP is shit.
- barrydahlberg 15y ago
  Typical plans for our ISPs: http://www.orcon.net.nz/home/plans/ http://www.orcon.net.nz/home/plans/

tyng 15y ago

In Australia, it's more like 95%... unless you pay for the super expensive Unlimited plan