Comments on news posted 2011-11-04 09:15:41: Of the 75 million broadband subscribers in the US around 42 million, or 56%, have some form of data cap in place from their internet service provider (ISP) according to data from Leichtman Research Group. ..
There's 2 scenarios under which an ISP can make a lot of money with a cap:
1. Caps and overages give ISPs a huge disincentive against upgrading their networks. Why spend the millions of dollars on upgrades to allow for higher speeds when you can pocket the money spent on overages instead?
Or:
2. Upgrade the networks but leave the caps the same, or lower them. More customers will hit the cap faster.
I am taking a shot in the air here but you are either a shill for the industry,or are rich as hell.You say some of the most outrageous anti consumer comments I have ever read here.ISP are making all the money they need and then some without needing more revenue streams.What happened over the years did isp's forget to upgrade any of there network and just put a giant band aids on there network to get by because all the years I have lived in my city which has been for 30 years the only upgrade I have ever seen was the docsis 3.0 upgrade.Oh and one more upgrade I read about this year,our city council forced Comcast to run coax out to a new nursing home that was a 1/4 mile to far and Comcast said no.
I am taking a shot in the air here but you are either a shill for the industry,or are rich as hell. blah blah blah
With all due respect, STFU and re-read my post. Did I say I personally support these policies? If you had bothered to read, you would see that I never said such a thing.
EDIT: I think people need to remember that it's their network and we all pay for access. If they want to be greedy then don't make deals with them and let them go bankrupt. Until they don't start bleeding customers not a single company will listen because at the end of the day you still pay the bill.
EDIT: I think people need to remember that it's their network and we all pay for access. If they want to be greedy then don't make deals with them and let them go bankrupt. Until they don't start bleeding customers not a single company will listen because at the end of the day you still pay the bill.
And what do you do when you have no other choice for broadband internet? Go back to dialup?
The majority of thing's I do can be done in different ways where I don't require a fast connection or I I don't need one altogether. Is it more convenient to use such services? Of course but I am not going to be paying a arm and a leg for services that just make my life easy.
EDIT: I think people need to remember that it's their network and we all pay for access. If they want to be greedy then don't make deals with them and let them go bankrupt. Until they don't start bleeding customers not a single company will listen because at the end of the day you still pay the bill.
um no, the US taxpayers have paid for the entire cost of developing and installing cable until the mid-90s. much of the additional research and development of the internet and WWW was done as government sponsored research at CERN, NCSA-UIUC and the NSF.
with the government, these companies would have nothing to sell. sure, they have spent a lot of money installing cable for their own network, but the internet is not THEIR network, it is ours.
Can you please state your sources; not saying your a liar or anything but I want to know more about this and the history on cable because I refuse to read wikipedia as a source.
It's not Wikipedia so it's another source if that helps.From what I get after reading the whole page,it seems until that time the government was laying the bulk of cable throughout the country.
"In 1991 the Internet backbone was upgraded to T3 which offers speeds of about 44.74Mbps and the World-Wide Web was released to the public, providing easy access to information from anywhere in the world'.
EDIT: I think people need to remember that it's their network and we all pay for access. If they want to be greedy then don't make deals with them and let them go bankrupt. Until they don't start bleeding customers not a single company will listen because at the end of the day you still pay the bill.
You have it all wrong. Technically it is the customer's network. no customers = no network
The problem is the internet is a necessity for alot of people and we have no alternatives as everyone has capped. I stayed with ATT DSL because they had no caps and recommended them to everyone. Now ATT is a horrible restricted ISP since they have started caps.
In my area I cannot voice my opinion by switching services as everyone is capped.
did isp's forget to upgrade any of there network and just put a giant band aids on there network to get by because all the years I have lived in my city which has been for 30 years the only upgrade I have ever seen was the docsis 3.0 upgrade.
Really? So 30 years ago you had DOCSIS 1.1? That's pretty impressive, I would have killed to have broadband in 1981.
Sorry for my grammar I will try harder next time sir.The 30 year comment was meant to give a idea of how long I have lived in my area so I try to learn everything that goes on in my town,back to comcast and there reinvestment back into there network and caps I feel this is the big issue here.Back I say in 1990-1991 ish there was Continental Cablevision that serviced roughly 50 miles in all directions from my town,they were one of the biggest providers long before comcast was the giant that it is now,anyways right around that time they decided to start buying up the competition in the New England area without laying a damn wire unless they had to and they still bitch about all the regulation so that's why they don't expand out to any remote places,please.
To me they need more regulation because if you see in the pic above that is how I spent last Saturday to Thursday with a industry that has a lot of regulation.
Actually, I think pnh102 is one of the few obviously rich exec type that's not a shill posting here. He is merely stating the problem and why this will continue to get worse without intervention. That is, the corporations stand to profit greatly on this and not much competition to stop it, so loss of a few "unprofitable" customers is all they stand to lose, in many monopoly and duopoly(where the other guy's policy mirrors the other) markets. Relax, there are enough shills here to pick on. Take that energy and throw it at our paid off regulators, who made things the way they are with franchises(even for unserved areas) and other bs all for the sake of a buck. They are the ones betraying us.
Take that energy and throw it at our paid off regulators, who made things the way they are with franchises(even for unserved areas) and other bs all for the sake of a buck. They are the ones betraying us.
That's my other big beef against caps. In every state, any product or service that is sold by unit has to have whatever meter or scales used to measure out the quantities regulated, inspected and verified to be accurate.
The classic example I use is a gas station that would get into a lot of trouble if the gas pumps were not certified to actually be pumping what they say they pumped. I see no reason why caps on broadband should not be subject to the same scrutiny.
That's my other big beef against caps. In every state, any product or service that is sold by unit has to have whatever meter or scales used to measure out the quantities regulated, inspected and verified to be accurate.
The classic example I use is a gas station that would get into a lot of trouble if the gas pumps were not certified to actually be pumping what they say they pumped. I see no reason why caps on broadband should not be subject to the same scrutiny.
There is an interesting point. That is most certainly going to lead to metered billing and taxation by the gub'mit.
You should not have given that secret out in public.
2. Upgrade the networks but leave the caps the same, or lower them. More customers will hit the cap faster.
My usage tends to stay the same or go down over time. There are only so many TV shows and movies to watch, and after I'm done with them, what is there left to download?
2. Upgrade the networks but leave the caps the same, or lower them. More customers will hit the cap faster.
My usage tends to stay the same or go down over time. There are only so many TV shows and movies to watch, and after I'm done with them, what is there left to download?
There's 2 scenarios under which an ISP can make a lot of money with a cap:
1. Caps and overages give ISPs a huge disincentive against upgrading their networks. Why spend the millions of dollars on upgrades to allow for higher speeds when you can pocket the money spent on overages instead?
Or:
2. Upgrade the networks but leave the caps the same, or lower them. More customers will hit the cap faster.
Either scenario is a big winner for the ISPs.
Neither of those explain Comcast's cap implementation, which has no overages. If a user exceeds Comcast's 250 GB cap, something that is more and more likely to occur as time goes on, Comcast simply cuts off service.
So Comcast actually loses a customer and the money that customer is paying when the cap is exceeded.
Most customers ration usage and are unable to cancel their expensive cable TV plans. Others pay double for the same service they had before as "business class" customers, as if they are operating Fortune 500 IT departments in their homes.
Most customers ration usage and are unable to cancel their expensive cable TV plans. Others pay double for the same service they had before as "business class" customers, as if they are operating Fortune 500 IT departments in their homes.
don't know how much business class is where you live but the performance tier equivalent on business class where I live costs the same as the residential tier. both are $65/month. yes, if you want more speed it gets very expensive.
My friend in Sacramento, calif had to switch over to business class for comcast. In order to get the same pricing as when he had residential he had to sign for a 5 year contract. I'd rather stick a knife in my gut than be locked in for that long.
My friend in Sacramento, calif had to switch over to business class for comcast. In order to get the same pricing as when he had residential he had to sign for a 5 year contract. I'd rather stick a knife in my gut than be locked in for that long.
That's to waive installation costs. If you're willing to pay the high one time installation you can get business class without a contract. In my area it was $250 to get 'installation' (the cables were already there so basically the guy said, 'Here's a business cable modem') but it was contract free. If you're ok with the lowest tier it isn't that much more than residential. (now if you want higher speeds you really pay for it at 50Mbps/$189 and 100Mbps/$389 a month)
My friend in Sacramento, calif had to switch over to business class for comcast. In order to get the same pricing as when he had residential he had to sign for a 5 year contract. I'd rather stick a knife in my gut than be locked in for that long.
I had no idea that they would do contracts that long. quite a bit can change in 5 years.
Neither of those explain Comcast's cap implementation, which has no overages. If a user exceeds Comcast's 250 GB cap, something that is more and more likely to occur as time goes on, Comcast simply cuts off service.
I thought they would "ask" you to go to the business class service. But either way, as much as I hate caps, I have to say Comcast's is the least worst implementation. They could actually make a genuine argument about it being about network congestion management.
I thought they would "ask" you to go to the business class service. But either way, as much as I hate caps, I have to say Comcast's is the least worst implementation. They could actually make a genuine argument about it being about network congestion management.
From what I've read you can't actually get the business class service without a business tax ID so unless someone is running a business out of there home, there's no way to switch to business class.
As for congestion management, Comcast already has a separate mechanism for that that's independent of the cap. The cap is simply an anti-competition mechanism to prevent Internet companies from competing with Comcast's TV and VOIP services.
Or did you think that VoIP somehow magically works without sending or receiving data?
An uncompressed voice stream on the PSTN is 64kbit/s. Every VoIP implementation that I've seen uses compression/codecs to reduce this, sometimes to <20kbit/s. At 64kbit/s you could talk for eight hours a day and come out with a monthly total of 6.7GB. The actual usage would be substantially less than that.
third party does impact the cap, However VOIP also does not use that much bandwidth. you can get crystal clear calls on minimal bandwidth usage.
odds are you would have to be on the phone nonstop for the whole month to equal a day of streaming high quality video.
True, but it all adds up. A few hours of Netflix, a few hours talking on the phone, downloading some games of PSN/XBOX, backing up to "the cloud", etc and soon you're past your cap.
My SIP setup streams @11 kbps using the open source Speex speech codec. 11kbpsx2 with maybe 2 overhead=24 kbps=3KB/sec. Unlike Skype(peer to peer), it hardly uses any bandwidth when idle. They can't kill VOIP with caps, even in mobile.
From what I've read you can't actually get the business class service without a business tax ID so unless someone is running a business out of there home, there's no way to switch to business class.
My ISP told me that as well, however...
I've been told that getting a business license is simple and cheap. You don't have to actually run a business, you just need the license and the tax ID number. It's not like they conduct inspections.
because everybody will or already does have caps then its not like you can run from the cap. you will go from one capped provider to the next.
from a moral standpoint they do not make sense in that they market you lots of speed to do lots of broadband things(heck they even pimp the shit out of "you can stream HD video"). but the cap is a Gotcha if you actually use the service as advertised on TV.
from a moral standpoint they do not make sense in that they market you lots of speed to do lots of broadband things(heck they even pimp the shit out of "you can stream HD video"). but the cap is a Gotcha if you actually use the service as advertised on TV.
Basically, it's a scam; They want you to pay for a service without actually having to provide what you pay for.
"which begs the question why would internet providers pursue a policy that is such a PR disaster?"
It's only a PR disaster here at DSLR. If it really was a PR disaster then customers would be upset and the carriers might make some changes. According to the editorial caps effect about 2% of users which means that 98% of people could care less about caps because they don't reach them.
The caps are being implemented to prevent something from coming along that would drastically increase the customer demand for an increase in data usage. Caps are being set at a number that the ISP engineers feel is acceptable to allow for the network to operate efficiently with their current build-out plans.
It is simply a preventative measure that protects the business from being blindsided by some new, must-have service that would otherwise have their customers gobbling up bandwidth at a rate the ISPs promised when sold, but realistically are not prepared to actually provide. With these caps in place, the ISP can update the infrastructure at their own pace, without having to be worried about consumer demand and standard market tactics interfering and forcing competition to take root.
There's always a tail at the high end and the low end. AT&T is really complaining about the central limit theorem. Perhaps we can pass a law banning it.
They do this because they are all monopolies or duopolies seeking monopoly status. PR is actually irrelevant.
Even with this article, it has already become clear
that the ISP's see the data growth and want to cash in on it as much as possible.
This idea of ISP's putting caps in to "free their networks" is a joke. Can the ISP's actually show us proof of this? At all? Has anyone here even seen their speed increase because of this?
Also, who here actually expects the ISP's to raise their caps anytime soon? Anyone? The ISP's will soon release statements claiming that "Consumers dont want caps raised" and that their studies found that "99.9% of customers say caps dont need to be raised"
Also, who here actually expects the ISP's to raise their caps anytime soon? Anyone? The ISP's will soon release statements claiming that "Consumers dont want caps raised" and that their studies found that "99.9% of customers say caps dont need to be raised"
To put it another way, how many Mr. Joe Consumer customers (outside of us here at DSLR) even know there are caps in place or if they do, understand what it means? Not many. None will find out until someone streams or downloads too much and gets bill shock from overusage charges.
So you've got a good point--consumers may not say they want caps raised...because they don't even now they are capped!
So only 2% of customers are affected by caps. Can such a small amount of customers really affect the performance of the other 98%? I really have my doubts. I bet if they raised the caps to something like 500gb, you'd have less than 0.5% affected. These same companies that cap residential service have no problem selling uncapped business services. So are residential and business services run on two different networks?
I left U-Verse for an uncapped service and would be considered a heavy user by a capped service. Yet, I only get near 300gb per month very rarely. And most of the time it's under 250gb. But I don't like the very idea of caps, so I switched. I don't torrent or run a server out of my house. My family and I just play a lot of video and games. If my current provider (WOW) instituted caps, I would bit the bullet and get a business service. But I wouldn't get phone service, I would get an inexpensive VOIP instead.
Great article Rich. I think we need more articles like this so more attention is focused on the real motivation behind caps.
I'm not usually one to publicly comment on grammar, but this article is chock full of egregious grammatical errors. Did anyone proof this thing or just paste it directly from first draft to print?
This is a trend I am starting to see more often on the web and it drives me batty.
All the big ISPs offer TV service now. Caps will make sure you keep their television offerings or you will be spending the same if not more in data overages.
Stop complaining and buy the dedicated capacity you expect via a business line.
I plan to do exactly that if Cablevision implements caps. Of course to offset the cost I'll be dropping my TV service, so they'll be getting less money from me in the long run.
I guess it would be a soft cap since Mediacom does not have a specific schedule of overage charges and does not provide a way for the customer to monitor their usage.
I guess it would be a soft cap since Mediacom does not have a specific schedule of overage charges and does not provide a way for the customer to monitor their usage.
..yet
ever since rocco took it private they have increased prices(as usual) added additional fee's, and started implementing contracts. i have no doubt in my mind that with in two years theyl implement a cap and overage system.
and since they dont over provision for speed, i also have no doubt theyl count all of their own network maintnance traffic towards those caps. (ARP, etc)
Remember the day, when ISPs sold "Unlimited" Internet access accounts? The account not on the "Unlimited" plan, were for 30 hours or so of use, per month.
Then a national ISP began selling plans that would only permit 30 hours of "residential" Internet access, as an "Unlimited" Internet access plan. That company is no longer in operation for a reason I think :/
Me personally, I've preferred the business class services for a few years now. I had at&t's U-Verse, when the product first launched. Not bad ... but it wasn't the best thing since sliced bread either.
For the sake of many, many users, I pray this is just a passing fad in the Internet provider circles.
Verizon would love to replace DSL with LTE altogether, yet maintain the same type of caps as for mobile data plans. Suddenly a 100 Gb cap doesn't look so bad
Customers aren't willing to pay the price for unlimited use.
So you have a choice of "network management", throttling, caps and overages. I for one, welcome, a low-priced, entry-level capped service, such as TWC tried to offer last year, and without smaller/cheaper bucket plans for cellphones, we would not see Mom giving the nod to all the "smart" phones y'all covet.
And with the trend towards "wireless broadband", without some form of limits, the technology would be useless, as we saw demonstrated with VMUSA.
quote:If ISPs fail to regularly increase caps as the average data consumption grows then Moffetts argument holds even more weight. Cisco reported in October that the average broadband connection uses 14.5GB of data per month an increase of 31% year on year. With this trend set to continue, more and more of us will be hit by overage charges or bans if data limits are not raised in line with the increase in data consumption. Any ISPs who chose not to increase data caps in line with the growth of data usage will have a growing income from overage charges and banning unwanted customers.
I find this to be an interesting point. All caps I've heard of are absolute numbers, and this argument always comes up. "Sure, it's fine now, but wait until you start doing x (e.g. watching lots of HDTV streams)."
This runs into the same problem as the alternative minimum tax. As people make more money due to inflation, more of them become "rich" under the fixed income threshold of AMT. It really needs to adjust for inflation; shouldn't the ISPs be doing the same?
If caps were relative to the bandwidth, then this argument would go away. As bandwidth went up, the caps would grow along with it. It would no longer be a problem of just "hitting the caps faster" with a network upgrade. If the rule were "we cap usage at X times bandwidth" it would alleviate this problem.
Everyone seems to have forgotten this small piece of critical history. Had they not asked for it and say "Welcome" stop the cap wouldn't exist, and caps might have been a forethought. Instead you gave them an idea and they ran with it! So do I shake your hand, and tell you "good job!"?
Here's a pretty good explanation for caps imposed by a rural Nebraska WISP. This is a company trying to satisfy customers and make a profit, without support from USF.
In general I think most ISPs were blindsided over the last year or so by the rise of Netflix, particularly the smaller ones.
While I'm sure they were in denial at first, I think the only reasonable strategy is to impose some sort of caps to try to maintain a good experience for customers -- then move to upgrade the network.
An unreasonable strategy, at least for the smaller ISPs, is to put a cap on but do nothing to upgrade. When a large percentage starts hitting the cap on a regular basis they will look to alternatives.
This is *all* what caps are about and people are STILL cutting the cord! caps will just wean subs off video making them go back to rabbit ears. I get 49 channels over the air with a dollar store antenna. Why am i paying $113/month for video?