Nobody's Complaining About Comcast's New Throttling > Anti CC fans ?

said by Gbcue:

You don't see "caps" on the highway systems.... Speed limits, that's good. A cap on how far you can drive in a month? Bad.

said by openbox9:

Be careful. Highways are metered in the sense that you purchase gas, which is taxed to sustain the roads. Do you want metered usage instead of caps?

said by Gbcue:

Since when was broadband free? I considered paying my monthly rate part of the tax to sustain the network

said by Gbcue:

but we all know most of that money goes straight into the investors' pockets and none actually go towards infrastructure upgrades.

said by openbox9:

Actually, that's not true. Look at various ISPs' financial statements.

said by openbox9:

No, I mean your claim that, "none actually go towards infrastructure upgrades."

said by Gbcue:

The real question is, why is growth outpacing infrastructure upgrades?

Not enough $
or
Not enough manpower
or
Lazy upper management wanting to milk what they have

said by openbox9:

I'm sure your question was rhetorical, but I'll answer it anyway.

There's two main philosophies that I believe most relevant. One, growth is outpacing infrastructure upgrades and the capacity to perform the upgrades. The other, most of the main ISPs are also in the business of reselling content, so the caps serve to keep in check other potential competing content distribution means. I believe the truth is somewhere in the middle.

said by openbox9:

Do you actually read posts before responding? I did not, nor have I ever, suggested that the "exaflood" theory is real. You call me a liar, but yet you agree with me that bandwidth consumption is still growing. It may not be rampant, but the growth is still there. Furthermore, you highlight the shortcoming in the last mile and suggest that's an issue with the lack of ISPs sufficiently reinvesting in their infrastructure. If you read my post that you responded to, you'd see that I stated that ISPs aren't keeping up with infrastructure upgrades. So, before you pop off again, please read. This is a recurring theme with your responses.

said by Gbcue:

You mean the $$$$$ profits?

said by funchords:

C'mon, you're being rather silly here and openbox9 is being very patient.

Fact is, that Comcast has an operational profit somewhere just under 20% of revenue and that figure drops to somewhere under 8% after paying long-term debts. That's not "all" or even "half" of the money you pay.

You should also know that Comcast is one of a handful of successful cable companies -- the others operate at a loss or barely break even.

We could play a long blame game in this paragraph, but no matter how I paint it, we end up here at today.

Cable Internet, particularly as part of a double-play or triple-play package, is an extremely lucrative venture. It would be ridiculously profitable if they could just run today's system and bill for it. But they can't quit paying off old debts, can't quit repairing, can't quit answering customer service or technical support calls, and they can't quit upgrading/splitting. It's still very profitable, but it's no cakewalk.

said by sonicmerlin:

Keep in mind they're spending a significant one-time upgrade fee to move their entire user base to DOCSIS 3.0. Once that is finished with their profits will increase significantly.

said by sonicmerlin:

Um, no? R&D is usually done by other companies that hope to sell the DOCSIS technology to the cable co's. The big investment is up-front, converting everything to be compatible with DOCSIS 3.

said by sonicmerlin :

Caps are meaningless when it comes to preventing usage, and that's why Comcast's cap has been a "soft" one. They know it does nothing for them, and they're still forced to split their nodes according to peak usage statistics.

What they want is to throttle people's speeds, and according to the article this is exactly what they're accomplishing.

But the problem with throttling is that it simply allows you to *put off* 1 cycle of upgrades. Unfortunately from then on you're stuck with throttling and you *still* have to upgrade with the same frequency as before.

said by sonicmerlin:

Obviously they have to spend money on new capex and upgrades, but they did that even before DOCSIS 3.