Maybe it's time for inflation to give a $5 boost to tiers.. but in exchange there should be speed bumps as well.. and primarily the cable companies have been stingy with the upstream bandwidth as much as every other telco NOT on fiber is with the downstream.. There is no good reason why every service provider shouldn't be at 50 megabits down/upstream for $1 per megabit unlimited service. Of course it's a pipedream.. but apathy, corruption and industry gluttony fests abound on why you pay more for less. Afterall the USA is only a bit short of 4 millions sq. miles and a good % of that isn't even where people live.. most of the population are in cities.. »en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States
This cap & overage thing was allowed to go on for far to long in the wireline business. WIRELINE BROADBAND internet is NOT a service that should be metered like wireless data, or other rediculous pricing schemes such as what you pay for OEM printer ink, gasoline, fedex overnight shipping rates, etc..
There is no good reason why every service provider shouldn't be at 50 megabits down/upstream
Unless you're being fed by fibre then there is... DOCSIS cannot handle that kind of upstream performance without splitting the nodes to very small number of users and VDSL2 cannot provide that kind of upstream speed without very short loop lengths, a lot of people are on longer loop lengths that can barely handle 10Mbps up or less. You roll out 50Mbps up with DOCSIS without splitting the nodes very small and the tiny amount of capacity at the node will be congested in no time. These are technical limitations of the access technology. The situation will improve a bit with DOCSIS 3.1 and VDSL2 vectoring but these are a ways off.
based on the amount of profit all telco & cablecos have chewed down on existing networks it could have paid for 3 or 4 generations of new investment when times were very good for them, instead they squandered many opportunities to do right by the customer. the circumstances they are in today are mostly their own doing..
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