said by baineschile :

Way off Karl. A 40 Gig cap does not affect ALL households; as most internet users still are way under that threshold.

said by fireflier :

1. Most internet users are still below 40GB huh? Your statistics to support this can be found where? I'm not a a constant video downloader/gamer/traffic user but my router shows I'm hitting 40+/month. If your definition of "most" internet users are grandmothers who check email, then your claim could be correct but the definition is not. Remember, part of that 40GB consists of various OS patches (along with patches for endless numbers of software packages), Game system updates, etc. And if a person has multiple PCs with similar configuration then it's a x2, x3, x4 scenario. Many households do have more than one PC now.

2. 40GB was TWCs HIGHEST tier at one point in their "suggested" new pricing structure unless you wanted the uber supermondoall-you-can-eat tier for a ridiculous $100 or so a month. 5GB per month for the lower tiers WILL affect MANY households which will force them to higher tiers. It will also become a bigger problem to people as additional bandwidth-using apps appear. I didn't see anything from TWCs spin doctors claiming they'd promise to raise those caps as needs required.

said by Anonymous_ :

cable modem Noise Traffic is 5GB to 6GB all ready

said by espaeth :

The noise traffic is broadcast traffic, and shouldn't be counted against the unicast byte counters per associated MAC on the CMTS. I've had some "drive time" on the Cisco uBR CMTS in the lab, and that traffic is definitely excluded from the reported individual modem/MAC byte totals on that platform.

said by fireflier :

1. Most internet users are still below 40GB huh? Your statistics to support this can be found where?

said by fireflier :

If your definition of "most" internet users are grandmothers who check email, then your claim could be correct but the definition is not.

said by TKJunkMail :

And if it was counted, the background noise runs about 10 kbps based on my router WAN statistics. That comes to about 3.24 GB/month »www23.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=···000+bits & not 5 or 6 as claimed.
[att=1]

said by espaeth :

These statistics can be found various places. The MINTS project, for example, cites approximately 5GB per capita on average in the US for Internet traffic.

said by S_engineer :

So then if the best interest of the consumer was in the mind of the cablecos...then why not price ala carte? That would drop those 5gig users to about $8 a month and those vicious bandwidth hogs would be on the hook for what they use!

said by S_engineer :

The more they pay the less they use...then the cablecos would reclaim some of that precious bandwidth they're supposedly losing.

said by BF69 :

And of course it will stay 5 GB forever. Um have you noticed the ads for Hulu on TV a lot? What happens as more and more peole start using that.

said by BF69 :

I have a subscription to MLB.tv where I can watch live games on the internet. They even have them in HD at 3 Mbps stream. Watching my favorite team play their 26 games a month will use 100 GB. I wouldn't consider watching 1 baseball game a day excessive.

said by BF69 :

You link also eldues to a 50% yearly increase. Within 5 years that's 38 GB per month average. Within 8 years it's 128 GB average. Within 12 years it's 649 GB average.

said by BF69 :

By the way how come no cap on TV watching? How much bandwidth am I using when I'm watching that average 151 hours of TV per month?

said by espaeth :

You start having a lot more indicators popping up about how the current model isn't sustainable.

Insurance rates are based on statistical evaluation of past events. What do you suppose the impact would be to home owners insurance rates if instead of a major hurricane every few years to having, say, 2 major high-claim hurricanes a season? Pricing will need to adjust to new reality of the situation.

The argument made here is that your usage should be able to dramatically increase, but your monthly bill should stay the same or be lower. That position has obvious inconsistencies with reality.

Sure, but MLB.tv had around 500,000 subscribers last year, out of 200-some million broadband subscribers in the US. That's practically a rounding error in the grand scheme of Internet statistics.

5 years is a long way away. 5 years ago we were just being introduced to the first DOCSIS 2.0 hardware that was capable of turning the 9mbps shared upstream into 27mbps shared upstream on cable plants. Keep in mind that is average growth; the demand of some folks is significantly greater than that year-to-year.

Because broadcast TV is infinitely more efficient. There are a vast array of one-way delivery technologies (OTA ATSC, QAM, 8PSK/QPSK, etc) that are able to push massive amounts of content to your house economically. 2-way systems are more expensive, and have the detractor of having to manage separate flows per viewer.

Broadcast TV is easy to plan for, the downstream bitrate is constant no matter how many viewers there are, and efficiently only goes up when more people are watching the same thing at the same time.

said by Metatron2008 :

The current business model is unsunstainable?

said by Metatron2008 :

So we should send them more money huh? The same way we sent telcos tariffs for years so they would build out FTTP, and they did nothing but keep the money?

said by Metatron2008 :

Who do you work for?

said by espaeth :

The noise traffic is broadcast traffic, and shouldn't be counted against the unicast byte counters per associated MAC on the CMTS. I've had some "drive time" on the Cisco uBR CMTS in the lab, and that traffic is definitely excluded from the reported individual modem/MAC byte totals on that platform.

said by Anonymous_ :

cable modem Noise Traffic is 5GB to 6GB all ready

said by S_engineer :

The more they pay the less they use...then the cablecos would reclaim some of that precious bandwidth they're supposedly losing.