..and the whole "bandwidth hog" thing is crap anyway. So, you have an OC3 connection feeding hundreds of customers that have purchased a 5mbps connection. Then a "bandwidth hog" comes in and uses a bit of it. Hey, he's paying for the 5mbps connection that you advertised. Then everyone's connection slows down because you failed to account for people actually using their connection speeds.

The problem is that you can never tell when a bandwidth hog will move in and wreck the calculations. Well, unless you put in caps, to keep the bandwidth hogs out.

And you're opposed to caps.

Did you read any of my post? I did not say I'm expecting 18Mbps all the time. I'm saying it should be at least in the same ballpark instead of half or less.

But you're not paying for 18 Mbps of sustained bandwidth. You're paying for 18 Mbps burst, and "whatever they feel like" average speed.

Go to a Metro Ethernet company and see how much it costs to get 18 Mbps of dedicated bandwidth.

Um.. If I'm paying for a 18mbps connection and I'm only getting 4, it becomes an issue. I should be getting at least between 12-18mbps constant, not whatever they feel like.

Because residential services are priced on the assumption that you will only burst to the max speed.

..and if they can't handle multiple customers having super/ultra-fast tiers, why did they offer it in the first place?

Yes, it's unfair that grandma doesn't get to pay $5 for cable Internet, while the bandwidth hog pays $1000. But surely it's fairer to charge grandma $50 and the bandwidth hog $100, rather than charging everyone $60.

Most incumbent ISPs have pretty close to an effective monopoly over their respective service areas so going out of business due to not upgrading is unlikely.

As for ISPs wanting to extract revenue from their transit providers, Comcast has tried it with Peer1 and Free is trying it on Google so there certainly are some who are tempted to test those waters. While the scheme may be upsetting for CDNs and transit providers, it actually has a handful of advantages if the ISPs' savings from it are passed down to their end-users, one of them being that it takes most capacity-related costs out of end-users' monthly fees... pay directly for physical access, pay indirectly for your actual usage.

Then those ISPs can expect to go out of business. and extract money from their transit providers? Please stop making me laugh.

Compare DSL and Cable, Where the DSL connection provided frequently has issues and throttles even youtube, yet the cable connection doesn't and provides a predictable consistent connection & speed regardless of content or time of day. The cost to provide the cable network will drop as there will be more rate payers to subsidize the costs for the installed network, while the DSL connection will degrade worse as there are less and less users to foot the costs. Now swap roles, and the argument remains.

Not every ISP can afford (or is willing) to use the latest and biggest gear available so don't be surprised if there are more stories about smaller ISPs hitting their equipment's practical brick walls in the future or attempting to extract money from their transit providers to cover some upgrade costs.

Verizon could care less what its users send/receive as being a tier one provider, it costs the same for one bit or one trillion GB, they have no peering charges

Technology refresh cycles are 3-5 years, which is about the rate you're seeing access speed increases and bandwidth cap increases.

Really? how do both cablevision and Verizon FiOS manage uncapped users, while also being two of the Fastest ISP's based on real life speed tests.

it's a huge accomplishment that the opposition had so much proof the network congestion was a farce that they finally had to come clean and admit it.

I can dispute your use of the word "greater" as a person that has an average bitrate of 5mbit/s has a very marginal cost over someone that uses 100kbits/s per second and that is a fact.

The problem is that the caps are mostly arbitrary and used in an anti-competitive way to limit competition from streaming content.

I'm glad you admit that this is strictly about milking the subset of customers that consume above average resources for no other reason that "we can" and a mistaken understanding of costs associated with the above average use.

but the point here isn't to save 95% of their customers money. It's to monetize the 95%+ percentile of customers that use the lion's share of the available network capacity.

I might agree, but hasn't Comcast kept the same cap for years? I mean if that is the case, then the D3 upgrade didn't make any bit of difference?

If metered pricing were about "fairness," carriers would offer the nation's grandmothers a $5 a month tier that accurately reflected her twice weekly, several megabyte browsing of the Weather Channel website.