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 badtripI heart the East BayPremium
join:2004-03-20
Albany, CA | reply to openbox9
Re: I would be afraid to be a Frontier Customer said by openbox9:Do you look at your electric meter or your water meter daily? The concept of monitoring your bandwidth usage and paying for usage is no different. If customers are concerned about maintaining costs for electricity, water, broadband, cell phones, ATM transactions, etc., they will take appropriate action. Nice try.
No, I do not look at my electric meter daily. However, I know that if I keep my light on it uses a (more of less) fixed amount of electricity per second. Same with most of the items that use electricity in my home. This and other highly predictable factors in electricity use means I can tell you with extreme confidence that my electric bill will be in the $90/mo range during the summer, $80/mo in the winter.
However, when I load up a web page, I have no idea how much bandwidth will be used. I could load up BBR one hour and it will use x amount of bandwidth and then reload it in 30 mins and it will use y amount of bandwidth. Multiply that uncertainty by a couple thousand web page visits for the month and multiply it again by the number of folks (PCs) in your household and soon a household will have no idea how much bandwidth they are consuming.
PLUS, add in a xbox360, Wii, two smart phones with wifi, a PS3, a DVR connected to the router and whatever else and then it really gets ugly.
Bandwidth is more akin to cell phone usage. Like bandwidth, I have no idea how many minutes I will be using per month because of the nature of communication (largely unpredictable). I can predict my water and electricity on the other hand with virtually pinpoint accuracy. It pretty much follows a strict seasonal pattern. The unpredictability of cell phone usage is what prompts me to buy a 1000 min plan even tho my cell usage ranges from nil to close to 1000 min per month.
BTW, Frontier's caps are insulting. I advise folks living in their footprint to raise hell. | | |
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openbox9
join:2004-01-26
Alexandria, VA
kudos:2 | I agree that bandwidth consumption is akin to cell phone usage, hence why I included it in my statement. The fact of the matter remains, if consumers are concerned about consumption, they will determine an effective means to monitor that consumption.
I also agree that Frontier's relatively low cap number being thrown around are questionable. The same can be said for TWC's numbers. The proof is in the pudding and we'll see what happens when these companies make official announcements and roll out their plans. | |
 guypd
join:2008-05-08
Silver Springs, NY | reply to badtrip
...and to make matters worse, there cap is based on your download AND upload usage. | |
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