said by mhoke6381 :I could state facts all day here, but many of you already convinced yourselves that this is a conspiracy against customers.
Caps are intended to protect the TV revenues by discouraging the use of Internet video streaming services. I find it telling that caps are implemented by ISPs that also provide pay TV services, be they IPTV (Prism, U-verse), or cable.
Network congestion is rarely an issue. It comes up at times when people are on the old ATM DSLAMs. Since those are either DS1 or DS3 fed, too many customers on them can cause congestion, but even that is rare with ATM loops.
ATM has nothing to do with congestion, or DSL version. I saw ATM with a CentutyLink VDSL Internet connection; measured throughput at 85% of sync is a pretty solid clue.
... there are regulations that require ISPs to prevent people from sharing copyrighted material. They aren't written statutes.
Copyright is very much statutory, and set forth in the U.S. legal code. Presented to the U.S. President by the U.S. Congress, signed into law, and enforceable by the U.S. DoJ. Or civil sanctions can be sought in the courts by the injured parties.
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act further grants the FCC, state PUCs, etc to dictate what ISPs must do.
DMCA grants no such powers of enforcement. It provides "safe harbor" status to ISPs, so long as ISPs respond to DMCA takedown notices by removing infringing content.
All I see here is that most of you overreacted to bandwidth caps. But again, nothing anyone could say would convince you otherwise. They could come out tomorrow, proclaim there are no more caps, and you would then complain how terrible of a company they are because network congestion is then going to be off the charts. (again, even though that is almost never a problem even before the caps)
Most of what I see here are people butthurt about something that isn't an issue.
The 250 GB data cap of CenturyLink is certainly less of an issue for DSL subscribers than the 150 GB cap imposed by AT&T on their legacy ADSL (non-U-verse) users. But I am a single user averaging 75 GB to 95 GB per month. With a household of users, such as my sister had with a work-from-home husband, and four teenagers, that average would approach 450 GB in no time; Sis went to a Comcast business account because of the Comcast data caps. I fired AT&T and hired Sonic.net, LLC because of the AT&T data caps.