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I disagree with his assessment. He only has to "invest capital" for each megabyte you download insofar as he merely has to maintain his current network. An indi

I disagree with his assessment. He only has to "invest capital" for each megabyte you download insofar as he merely has to maintain his current network. An individual user has a hardware limit on the amount of bandwidth they can consume, be it imposed by the network or the consuming device. "Each additional megabyte" consumes no more or less bandwidth than the megabyte before it nor the megabyte after it. He has the same maintenance cost whether this individual user is paying per megabyte or per day of access. What causes him to have to invest capital is each additional simultaneous connection which uses his network. These analogize to subscribers to his service, not bits of data sent over his network. I mean, does he really believe that he can change people's collective usage patterns during peak hours merely by limiting their consumed bandwidth for the whole month? Surely not. If anything, it will persuade people to eliminate their extraneous data usage and only use it when the data connection is "most important". I'm not one for blind guessing, but I have hunch that these "most important" times of data access probably correlate to his current peak hours. The power companies face this same problem with throughput, and what do they do? Do they cap the amount of power you can receive per month in order to alleviate load? No! They invest in throughput, and when things get sketchy during peak times, they enforce throughput caps like rolling brownouts. I have a hunch AT&T also does this with their forced data throttling on those who are consuming the most bandwidth, as if they were the problem! But they are also convincing people to pay more for less with monthly data caps. How they can get away with this is very surprising to me, personally.

farmdawgnation 14y ago
I suspect their ability to get away with it has an inverse correlation to their customer's ability to understand what's going on. There's probably a little bit of the execs having no idea what's going on as well. (They don't strike me as the types who would easily understand the difference you pointed out.) As customers become more knowledgable about what's going on, and why it makes no sense - AT&T et al will either be required to change their business model or someone will eat their lunch. I keep hoping the same thing will happen with the major cable companies as well. Die, Comcast, die.

farmdawgnation 14y ago

I suspect their ability to get away with it has an inverse correlation to their customer's ability to understand what's going on. There's probably a little bit of the execs having no idea what's going on as well. (They don't strike me as the types who would easily understand the difference you pointed out.) As customers become more knowledgable about what's going on, and why it makes no sense - AT&T et al will either be required to change their business model or someone will eat their lunch. I keep hoping the same thing will happen with the major cable companies as well. Die, Comcast, die.