50Mbps, 20/20Mbps FiOS Tiers Hit All Markets → Re: Comcast reaction?!

what's the point?

comcast is talking about caps and throttling; other than being able to advertise faster speeds, the only benefit to customers silly enough to pay more money will be the ability to hit the cap faster. And when they throttle, you wouldn't get the faster speeds anyway. if you are in no danger of hitting the cap, you probably don't need faster speeds anyway.

Faster Speeds =! Reaching Caps Faster

Exactly. I don't do much downloading and uploading.
16mbps down is way more than enough because most of the places I download from don't even support that much speed.
But 2mbps is a bit slow if uploading several 100MB's. If I have faster upload speed I'll still upload as much, only I'll be done faster.

Of course if you're a P2P user and you have your client on 24/7 then higher bandwidth will automatically translate to reaching the caps faster.

My total usage (up + down) doesn't exceed 40-60GB/month with 16/2 connection, and I don't see why it would change even if I had double the bandwidth.

You could conceivably end up being attracted to other services like video downloads if you were able to get those movies faster.

But why does it matter how long it takes to upload several hundred MBs? The only application I can think about that speed would be a problem for is HD video or teleconferencing, but those are such high-bandwidth that Comcast will tell you you're "abusing" their network anyway.

If you're just uploading files to a website, then you could buy the lower tier, set it to upload overnight, and wake up with all your files online.

The industry is reaching a point where customers are going to choose services on caps (whether invisible or visible) just as much as on speeds. Hopefully that will translate into increases on the caps instead of speed increases, since I'd prefer higher caps.