Comcast Introduces 600 GB Caps in Tucson As Carrier Prepares to Offer Higher Caps With Faster Speeds Comcast has introduced caps as high as 600 GB in Tucson as the company moves forward with the idea of offering higher caps for faster services. As we exclusively reported last week, Comcast has decided to offer users on faster tiers higher caps, with the company's basic tier seeing a 300 GB cap, and the service caps increasingly from there incrementally. You can now see an example of what Comcast has planned in Tucson, where the local Comcast website illustrates that users there are now seeing caps as high as 600 GB a month. The tiers and associated caps being introduced: - Economy 300 GB
- Economy Plus 300 GB
- Internet Essentials 300 GB
- Performance Starter 300 GB
- Performance 300 GB
- Blast 350 GB
- Extreme 50 450 GB
- Extreme 105 600 GB
As it stands, Comcast doesn't yet offer their new 305 Mbps service in Tucson, so it remains unclear of the cable giant is considering offering that speed without a cap. Caps generally exist to differentiate Comcast's business and residential services, while protecting future TV revenues from the inevitable tidal wave of Internet video. As per the Comcast FAQ, users will pay $10 per 50GB of additional usage, with somewhat of a "grace period" for cap violators: When you exceed your allotted GB of data usage, you will receive an email, an in-browser notice (see below) and automatically be allocated an additional block of 50GB for $10. In order for customers to get accustomed to the new data usage management plan, we will provide 3 courtesy passes. That means you will not be billed for the first three times you exceed your monthly GB allowance during a 12-month period. Should you exceed the monthly allowance after the courtesy passes are used, you will automatically be provisioned for additional data in incremental blocks of 50GB for $10 each as you need them. As our reliable source noted last week, these higher caps are expected to be everywhere eventually, but the timeline on the changes remains unclear. One refreshing shift from other ISPs: Comcast's lower tier caps are generous, and the website's FAQ doesn't try to hard sell users or insult their intelligence with inane prattle like insisting the new usage limitations somehow "improve the user experience."
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 |  |  BF69Premium
join:2004-07-28
Camden, TN | Re: Don't go cheap on me now said by Nightfall:I don't go over the 250gb level and I am on the Blast tier, so bandwidth isn't the issue for me,
350gb is not enough. Should be at least 400gb or 500gb.   | |
| | |  NightfallMy Goal Is To Deny YoursPremium,MVM
join:2001-08-03
Grand Rapids, MI | Re: Don't go cheap on me now Fixed my statement. Forgot to add "for the excessive users at that tier".
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My domain - Nightfall.net | |
| | | | JoelC707Premium
join:2002-07-09
West Point, GA
kudos:5 | Re: Don't go cheap on me now Actually I think he's picking on the gb vs GB thing. | |
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| | | You know the caps will be designed to gain a bit of revenue at each level. | |
| | | Reviews:
 ·Frontier Communi..
| Re: Don't go cheap on me now Private enterprise wanting a return on their investment? Say it isn't so!
You can combine my usage totals for the last six months and they don't add up to 300GB, let alone 600GB, so I'm hard pressed to feel any sympathy at all for the people who will be impacted by these caps.
600GB / 30 days = 20GB/day = 1.8mbit/s, sustained, 24/7
In actuality, someone who wants to use 600GB/mo will burden the network even more, the 95th percentile for such a user would likely be in the double digits of mbit/s.
A connection capable of supporting that would have cost thousands of dollars a decade ago (a dedicated connection STILL commands that kind of money) and here we have people bellyaching about connections that cost a fraction of that. | |
| | | | | | Re: Don't go cheap on me now SHHHHHH! that kind of talk on here won't be tolerated and you'll be flagged and your comments will be removed. Karl and his fan boys what tolerate it. | |
| | | | | | You've gotta be kidding me.
If that's the case, let's go back to the days of charging multiple dollars per gigabyte on a HDD.
Lets go back to the days of charging .25c per megabyte on mobile data plans.
After all, that was acceptable a decade ago right?
If it's not that much of a problem, then I'll pm you my address, phone number, and send you a round-trip plane ticket so you can come down and have Comcast change my service to the 105 tier at your cost.
After all, it's not that much money right?
If Comcast wants to sell me a 25Mb/s line, then I take that as the ability to use up to 25Mb/s however I see fit as much as I see fit. The onus is not on me to support that bandwidth. I'm paying for it. The onus is on Comcast to support it.
If Comcast can't support ONE user using 25Mb/s a month, then they're overselling their services; and if that's the case, caps are not the answer... a more robust backend and last-mile is.
BTW: I'm having a hard time believing Comcast for anything right now when they state that using the Xbox 360 for Xfinity TV on Demand does not count against you. How that doesn't fly in the face of our non-existent net neutrality rules that aren't enforced by the FCC blows my mind. | |
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·Frontier Communi..
| Re: Don't go cheap on me now You seriously expect a connection with a 1 to 1 contention ratio at residential pricing? Good luck with that. As I said, dedicated connections that provide the type of bandwidth you desire still cost thousands of dollars.
Bellyache all you want, you're squarely in the minority, and nobody outside of that minority takes you seriously. A 250GB cap is a non-issue for the overwhelming majority of internet users, 600GB even less so, so I'm not seeing the problem. Next you'll whine about supposed regulatory capture, but good luck convincing the FCC or anybody else about the unfairness of a policy that impacts a miniscule slice of the internet population.
Usage totals/95th percentile from my last three DSL billing periods:
7/15: 22.93GB down/5.84GB up, 0.22mbit/s
8/15: 26.79GB down/9.54GB up, 0.32mbit/s
9/15: 18.92GB down/3.32GB up, 0.28mbit/s
Yeah, it's totally fair to expect me to pay the same as you, when you intend to use hundreds of gigabytes, while regularly imposing a megabit load measured in the double digits. 8-) | |
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·Frontier Communi..
| Re: Don't go cheap on me now said by Nightfall:Especially those who have done no research on where we have come from and where we are now. Well, I got my start in the ISP business, so I do have that perspective to take into account. On the other side of things, I've on the customer side of business connections ranging from T-1s to gigabit MAE connections, and of course my own experience with residential connectivity.
Speaking personally, and going from memory, my own connectivity to the internet has gone something like this:
1996: 14.4kbit/s - dialup - $20/mo
1998: 36.6kbit/s - dialup - $20/mo
1999: 256kbit/s - WISP - $40/mo
2002: 3mbit/s DS/256kbit/s US - TW cable - $35/mo
2003: 1.5mbit/s DS/384kbit/s US - Verizon DSL - $30/mo
2005: 3.0mbit/s DS/768kbit/s US - Verizon DSL - $40/mo
2009: 10mbit/s DS/1mbit/s US - TW cable - $45/mo
2011: 10mbit/s DS/1mbit/s US - Verizon DSL - $60/mo
2012: 6mbit/s DS/1mbit/s US - Frontier DSL - $60/mo
I've gone backwards at times, depending on what's available when I've moved, but the bottom line is I'm currently getting 24 times the speed of my first broadband connection, for $20/mo more, and if you take inflation into account that's really not a bad deal. $40 in 1999 is worth about $54 today, so I'm paying $6/mo more for 24 times the speed.
That's just my perspective, YMMV, but we've come a long way, and I wish people would consider that when they are inclined to complain about the state of American broadband. | |
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| | | | | | Re: Don't go cheap on me now ALL ISP's oversell. All of them, every single one of them.
If they don't, then they will not stay in business. It's financially impossible.
No ISP can afford 1:1 connections for EVERY customer. They oversell because statistically that is what works. To do otherwise is stupid and business suicide.
Of course they can support "ONE user using 25Mb/sec a month." But they have millions of customers.
And using Xfinity on Demand shouldn't count against a user's cap, even if Net Neutrality is enforced. Their normal on demand doesn't get counted towards any data cap, even though it is data that is only being streamed to you, using finite resources to encode it and get it to you?
So what's the difference? The delivery method? That's trivial. | |
| | | | | | | said by PapaMidnight:If Comcast wants to sell me a 25Mb/s line, then I take that as the ability to use up to 25Mb/s however I see fit as much as I see fit. The onus is not on me to support that bandwidth. I'm paying for it. The onus is on Comcast to support it.
Ah, but Comcast doesn't want to sell you an uncapped 25 Mb/s line. They want to sell you a 25 Mb/s line with a 250 GB monthly cap.
If you want an uncapped 25 Mb/s line, you can feel free to buy Metro Ethernet service from a business-class provider for $1000. If you max it out for every second of every day, they won't care -- because you've actually paid for dedicated bandwidth.
Once you have that dedicated connection, you can feel free to start your own ISP with it. See how long you can stay in business offering uncapped 25 Mb/s service for $50 a month. | |
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 RobIn Deo speramus.Premium
join:2001-08-25
Kendall, FL
kudos:3 | Grace Period Is the grace period just for the first year after the implementation of the new caps? | |
|  IowaCowboyWant to go back to IowaPremium
join:2010-10-16
Springfield, MA
 ·Comcast
 ·Verizon Broadban..
| Caps are not an issue for me I subscribe to cable TV so caps are not an issue for me.
Comcast is a cable company, and their core product is cable television and high speed Internet and phone is a side business for them. Their Internet would be like 4-5 times more expensive without the pay tv revenues as maintaining cable plants and customer service is expensive.
If it was not for customer backlash or regulatory pressure, they would require that you purchase cable tv in order to subscribe to Internet (like Verizon requiring a landline to get DSL).
The could allow competing ISPs access to their network and still be profitable because they could charge those ISPs for access to their network (like CLECs are charged by the ILEC for network access).
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I wish I still lived in Iowa; Everything there from rent and groceries to Cable TV is much cheaper in Iowa (especially with an overbuilder in town). | |
| |  aaronwtPremium
join:2004-11-07
Woodbridge, VA | Re: Caps are not an issue for me Profit margins would still be much higher for internet than for TV | |
| | | | | Re: Caps are not an issue for me Not if the revenue from internet was to be relied upon to maintain and expand the HFC plant. | |
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| | | Cable TV is nobody's core business. The programmers take all the revenue from cable TV. Internet is where it is at. Phoen is a great revenue maker also. | |
| | | NightfallMy Goal Is To Deny YoursPremium,MVM
join:2001-08-03
Grand Rapids, MI Reviews:
·Comcast
 ·Callcentric
 ·Site5.com
| Re: Caps are not an issue for me said by revenue neut :Cable TV is nobody's core business. The programmers take all the revenue from cable TV. Internet is where it is at. Phoen is a great revenue maker also.
Link? Source?
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My domain - Nightfall.net | |
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| | | | DirecTV. Dish. "Cable" is their core business. | |
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| | | | | you do have to buy cable tv in order to subscribe to Internet.
Or it that that limited basic + Internet is about the same price as Internet on it's own.
Now why not just a basic line fee and then cut the price or Internet and cable tv.
But make the line fee be on it's own. | |
| | | IowaCowboyWant to go back to IowaPremium
join:2010-10-16
Springfield, MA Reviews:
·Comcast
·Verizon Broadban..
| Re: Caps are not an issue for me Maybe to protect cable TV revenue, they could base the caps on what tv package the customer subscribes to (such as low caps for Internet only subscribers to no caps for customers subscribing to two or more premium channels).
I still think the only good way to get quality TV programming is to subscribe to cable. Streaming services still don't give you access to live tv such as the Weather Channel, Fox News, local newscasts, etc. I also love reality shows such as Cops.
When you have a node full of people streaming the same content that is offered by the cable provider, they are consuming network resources for those wanting to use other applications such as gaming, web surfing, etc. Shift the streaming users to the content offered by the cableco, that frees up network resources for HSI users that use other applications as the cableco already has network resources allocated to hd programming in the form of their cable offerings. That is why Comcast has every right to manage their networks. Cable TV is a regulated monopoly and streaming services such as Netflix undercut cable TV as they don't have to meet the same standards as cable tv but they consume their resources.
I subscribe to cable tv and always will.
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I wish I still lived in Iowa; Everything there from rent and groceries to Cable TV is much cheaper in Iowa (especially with an overbuilder in town). | |
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3 edits | Re: Caps are not an issue for me " quality TV programming is to subscribe to cable. Streaming services still don't give you access to live tv such as the Weather Channel, Fox News, local newscasts,"
Quality, Weather Channel and Fox News in the same paragraph.
Coming from a cable rip off shill.
I was stuck in bed sick last Saturday watching the Military Channel on Comcast. 5 times in a row the same shit commercial for Star Furniture, some effeminate guys being towed to buy crap furniture, some weight loss crap and hair regeneration garbage over and over again every 10 min for 5 min.
I turned the TV off. Yeah, real quality programming chock full of idiotic adds.
Maybe I should watch the Weather Channel, much better. Paying $130 / month for the cable and $100 for Internet access to be bombarded with the garbage adds is real "value".
As far as "regulated monopoly", IowaCowboy, read up on regulatory capture. | |
| | | | | IowaCowboyWant to go back to IowaPremium
join:2010-10-16
Springfield, MA Reviews:
·Comcast
·Verizon Broadban..
| Re: Caps are not an issue for me Here the commercials are for ambulance chasing lawyers, bad credit approved car loans, and free government funded cell phones for the welfare beneficiaries. These are during local newscasts and it's not like I am watching Jerry Springer (trailer trash cheating on their wives) or Maury Povich (teen moms seeking paternity tests to see who is the baby daddy). The trash on those shows are more entertaining that the lowlife products (such as guaranteed phone service for people who've been shut off for non payment and the same bad credit approved car loans aired during the evening news) advertised during those trash shows.
Recently, they have been playing political ad after political ad and they will play a Scott Brown ad and the next ad is for Elizabeth Warren. I have not seen any Romney-Ryan ads as Democrats always win Massachusetts like Republicans always win Alabama in presidential election. I am sure the ads regarding the ballot questions will be flooding the airwaves as we get closer to election day. As for my political views, we'll save that for the red room.
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I wish I still lived in Iowa; Everything there from rent and groceries to Cable TV is much cheaper in Iowa (especially with an overbuilder in town). | |
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| | covfam
join:2012-03-05
Black River Falls, WI | er no i dont have charter cable tv, just charter internet with thier 30 meg tier, i wasnt tied or required to get anything else, in fact i have direct tv for my video needs (charter tv sux bad) perhaps comcast has different requirements, | |
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| | | Unfortunately, I don't think it's their core product anymore. It's more the side business with phone and Internet being the main draw. Certainly Comcast provides better Internet than cable. | |
| | | IowaCowboyWant to go back to IowaPremium
join:2010-10-16
Springfield, MA Reviews:
·Comcast
·Verizon Broadban..
| Re: Caps are not an issue for me Many times it is cheaper to bundle tv, Internet, and phone. In our area, Comcast has triple play bundles starting at prices not much more than standalone Internet and they give you faster speeds with bundling. I like having a home phone (try telling a 911 dispatcher your exact location when you are in the middle of an armed home invasion or have a child that is not breathing). And in our area, if you dial 911 on a cell phone, it goes to the state police dispatch in Northampton (MA) and you have to tell them the city or town where the emergency is and they transfer you to the local dispatch AND you have to give them the exact location. With a landline, it goes to the local dispatch AND they have your exact location on their screen. When someone is in cardiac arrest, every second counts.
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I wish I still lived in Iowa; Everything there from rent and groceries to Cable TV is much cheaper in Iowa (especially with an overbuilder in town). | |
| | | | Reviews:
·Frontier Communi..
| Re: Caps are not an issue for me said by IowaCowboy:try telling a 911 dispatcher your exact location when you are in the middle of an armed home invasion There's a solution to home invasions that includes the numbers '911', but it has an M and a 1 in front of them.
Joking aside, you make a great case for having a landline. My POTS line is a lousy $27/mo after taxes and fees, or 90 cents a day, why would I give up that peace of mind? I call 911, they have my location instantly. Even in areas with wireless E911 they don't necessarily get an accurate location, and it may take time for the location to resolve. | |
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Reviews:
·ooma
·Optimum Online
 ·Verizon FiOS
| ? Which duopoly company started this first? AT&T, Comcast or Time Warner?
IIRC it was Time Warner floating the idea, then followed by Comcast's "SOFT CAP POLICY" followed by AT&T's HARD CAP policy.. and since that went unchallened, Comcast thinks they can shove down the consumer's throats, or backsides a hard cap policy..
I guess it sucks to live where these companies have free reign to screw over the consumer with usage based billing AND have a franchise lock on the communities they serve. No wonder the population is moving to the eastern half of the country instead of moving west.. wher infrastructure is more developed. | |
| | | | Re: ? said by tmc8080: No wonder the population is moving to the eastern half of the country instead of moving west.. wher infrastructure is more developed.
You are way off on that tid bid of information, just comparing Arizona to NY. Arizona is growing 3x as fast as NY not to mention other NE states. 1.42% vs .45%
»en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.···wth_rate
By the way these companies are pack hunters, it is not a question if VZ will have caps, it is when? | |
| | elray
join:2000-12-16
Santa Monica, CA | said by tmc8080:I guess it sucks to live where these companies have free reign to screw over the consumer with usage based billing AND have a franchise lock on the communities they serve. No wonder the population is moving to the eastern half of the country instead of moving west.. wher infrastructure is more developed.
What abject nonsense.
No one is moving east, or west, based on broadband availability.
Nor is the east "more developed".
Nor is any location "franchise locked".
Where do you get this stuff? | |
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BobAccount deleted
join:2012-07-22
New Jersey | Why not just get rid of the caps? Why not just get rid of the caps entirely? | |
| | | | Re: Why not just get rid of the caps? Because think of the poor Comcast executives who can't bring in a new revenue stream!
And previous posters were correct in stating that cable TV is not that profitable, nowhere near as profitable as broadband. There's basically no regulations on providing broadband, and most of the fees are straight profit. Would this be the case if cable TV died off? Maybe not. But it is the case in the current marketplace. | |
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| | | | Re: good for comcast.. what about everyone else No cable there? Any cable connection is better than AT&T DSL. It's one thing to handle slow speeds when they're not capped, but when they are? Forget it. | |
| | | | their right to keep them low. and your right to change services. if you can get DSL you can generally get cable. Change providers and won't have that. And ATT generally does NOT enforce their caps, especially on U-Verse. | |
| | | | | Re: good for comcast.. what about everyone else And troll, it's also my right to complain about the fact that I have little choice but to pay such fees.
The corporate trolls seem to forget they have us by the horns. | |
| | | | | | Re: good for comcast.. what about everyone else Troll? hardly. You fail to see you have options. That's not my fault you don't change to those options. And its only your right until people get tired of hearing about those "complaints" when they're not valid. Typical Karl Fanboy- have options but fail to even move; you just take the easy way out and just bitch about what you decide to stay with.
Also again, nothing is stopping you from calling DSLX and creating your own DSL company. Nothing is stopping you from calling ATT directly and telling them you want wholesale access to their U-Verse network; which yes they do give.
Maybe instead of Corp trolls, there should be a thing called a customer troll. which is totally you. | |
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 ScreeIn the pipe 5 by 5
join:2001-04-24
Mount Laurel, NJ |  hmm
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| | | Crimecast economics Let's see.
105 mbit/s extreme service is ( 1024 * 105 ) = 107520 megabits per second / 8 = 13.44 megabytes/second
Meanwhile, 1,073,741,824 bytes (1 GB) x 600 gigabytes (cap) = 644,245,094,400 bytes
And 644,245,094,400 bytes / 1024 / 1024 = 614,400 megabytes
So: 614,400 / 13.44 megabytes per second = 45714.28 seconds / 761.904 minutes / 12.698 hours
Only 12.7 hours of downloading to exhaust your entire monthly limit. Just wow. There is nothing generous about this at all. It's as offensive as before!
Oh, and just in case someone wants to bring up the MiB and GiB issue, it's 13.63 hours in that case. | |
| |  espaethDigital PlumberPremium,MVM
join:2001-04-21
Minneapolis, MN
kudos:2 | Re: Crimecast economics This is an entirely new argument never seen before here.
Thank you for sharing it. | |
| | | | | Re: Crimecast economics Please explain your sarcasm. If you were on a jury in a theft case and the prosecutor pointed out the evils of theft, would you blow him off by demeaning the time-tested immortality of his argument? | |
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| | | This isn't really a fair comparison.
For example, my car has a top speed of 202 mph.
At full throttle, I only get 8 mpg. My gas tank holds 16 gallons.
Therefore I have to put gas in my car every 38 minutes.
At face value, this is true. If I drive at full throttle, I will have to refuel every 38 minutes. This is the same example you used to calculate bandwidth, but in the car context you realize how absurd it is.
At the end of the day, most people don't drive at full throttle nor do most people use their bandwidth at full capacity. The selling point is the speed. I didn't buy a GT500 to use up gas in 38 minutes. I bought it because it makes 650 hp, so at the times I "choose" to go fast, I can. | |
| | | | | Re: Crimecast economics But it actually was a fair comparison.
The problem with your analogy is that internet connections aren't cars and don't require re-fueling to begin with. So to use that analogy perhaps more correctly, this is a case of Comcast trying to create an artificial re-fueling requirement, so it can turn internet connections into cars, and itself into an oil company.
And when you boil it all down, the cable and telephone companies are instituting these caps for two reasons:
(1) They're trying to crush the streaming television industry, which represents an inevitable, natural, and long-overdue evolution of television away from channelized networks owned and controlled by large entertainment conglomerates, and supplied by large middleman providers via highly controlled and closed networks (cable systems). There is a tremendous amount of fat and bloat in that old system, manifesting itself in everything from the trend, even on pay television (basic cable), toward low quality reality-based programming stuffed with overbearing amounts of commercials and infomercials, to the high carriage prices and high subscriber bills the public is now being gouged with today. (And there's no end in sight to those increases, either. The cable industry is on track to raise cable rates to $200/month by the year 2020 -- Google cable $200 2020.) Streaming television, on the other hand, promises to trim away all that lard by offering a reboot of the current television distribution paradigm; one providing the public with a completely open-ended, a la carte styled potpourri of entertainment entirely on demand, with no controls over how big you must be to get seen on people's HTPC's and STS'es (set-top streamers). The very concepts of channel availability and of scheduled programming will vanish. As will most of the basic cable industry as we know it, considering that only a few of the existing basic cable networks' business models will be fully compatible with tomorrow's streaming world. The live news networks, for instance, will easily survive in tact, as live streams. Non-specialized broadcasters, with specialized programming, like The History Channel, will in turn probably be forced to switch tracks and make themselves over as "record labels" for original pay programming; stuff that will simply be offered alongside all the other a la carte, on-demand selections in the streaming universe. And the remaining 80% -- the non-specialized channels that serve up little more than commercials, infomercials, and reruns all day, will be gone, replaced with a new and infinite universe of upstarts of all shapes and sizes. Who knows what that will bring. And this whole evolution towards streaming television is already well underway. Mid-sized services like Netflix, while still having very incomplete catalogs, are already to a point where their catalogs cannot be dismissed as anything close to inconsequential anymore. They are actually surprisingly lush. And Netflix Instant alone now has more American subscribers than Comcast does, as of this year. If they continue to succeed, others will join them. So ultimately, what it all means is oceans of change for entrenched interests. And entrenched interests loathe change. They do in fact see all this writing on the wall, and they absolutely do not want the promises of streaming television to blossom and behead all their cash cattle. There's just too much control and money at stake. Hence the bandwidth caps. Which they're implementing primarily in an attempt to derail the upstarts before they can gain mass traction. (Personally, I'd call having more subscribers than Comcast mass traction, but...)
(2) Outside the realm of pay television, and this being the secondary reason for their interest in bandwidth caps, the incumbent telephone and cable companies are also trying to completely reverse the atmosphere of the mid-late 20th century's telecommunications regulatory boom, which saw the public become accustomed to, and grow to expect and even depend on, low and fair prices, and flat rate services, in the communications world. They want to devolve communications back to how it was in the days of Ma Bell, where there was a killing to be made from carefully metered "consumption" of what was in all meaningful ways an infinite resource, which in turn cost essentially nothing to provide, and very little to maintain and upgrade, yielding obscene profit margins. More literally, they want to go back to the days when you built the infrastructure once, and then allowed it collect (1) dust, and (2) cash; while doing only the bare minimum to maintain it. That was the old AT&T. And you know, they love old Ma Bell, and want to carry on in her footsteps.
The only problem is, the segment of the public that's aware of all this is absolutely against them. And the louder that segment screams, the larger it grows. Meanwhile, none of the industry's justifications for its bandwidth caps are working. Remember when they invoked red herrings and canards like "bandwidth hogs" and "MP3 pirates" to back up claims that their networks were in danger of being clogged and brought to a standstill? That was back when they wanted to charge web sites tolls for high-speed access to their networks. Now, with online video, they're trying to tell everybody their networks again can't handle the latest thing. And they've decided to see whether their own subscribers will be easier to push over than all the online businesses were, by shifting the toll road burden from companies like Netflix and Youtube to people like John Q. Public. That's all the bandwidth caps really are, after all: Toll Road Internet version 2.0, with the previously proposed fees shifted to their own subscribers. Yet their claims about capacity versus online video are equally transparent. The public has a long memory, and knows that the internet has always been this way. That its growth has always been "relentlessly explosive." And that while its growth when measured in gigabytes may allow providers to wave around scary looking numbers, its growth as expressed in ratios turns out to be no different than its growth ten years ago. "Continuous upgrades," in the end, is just a fact of doing business in the world of internet service provision, and if anything, today's upgrades are even cheaper than yesterday's. There's a great article toward that end here: »www.theglobeandmail.com/technolo···e622177/
Anyway. With wholesale internet bandwidth now costing just 3 cents per gigabyte, and still falling toward zero, those familiar with the realities of the industry's technical underpinnings know that these recent bandwidth caps are only the latest cons of an industry that has bought up all the infrastructure through mergers and acquisitions, and that now wants to play ball like it's 1972 instead of 2012. It's not going to happen, though. And on that note, I'll leave you with this excellent comment, posted in another DSLR thread earlier this month:
"I think [AT&T] would prefer to hook you into LTE and charge you up the yingyang for data overages. Their $$$ margin is in wireless these days, and I know they don't give a hoot about wireline service. Even business-to-business, their margins are disappearing as companies like Level3, XO, etc., are lowering their pricing on new circuits week by week. They are practically giving away T1's and DSE3's these days. The general assumption in the industry is that bandwidth prices will continue to fall to zero, and that the money is in the services (network security, cloud, etc). Take a look at the sale price of PacNet last week. They practically gave the company away. The company is flush with fiber and underwater cables, and nobody saw any value to it. They lacked the vertical services. It is a shame this hasn't translated into residential service, but there isn't any competition there. Consumers are seeing prices go up, while businesses are seeing record low pricing for bandwidth."
IMHO, if the home broadband industry wants to go on being profitable while not running afoul of the public and ultimately regulators, it needs to invest in vertical services, as the above-quoted commenter says. Verizon is opening up a Red Box branded streaming service, for example, which is a good move. But at the same time, it absolutely must also lower access rates to prices which actually reflect the realities of the bandwidth market, while simultaneously not punishing subscribers who choose to take their business elsewhere with scams like bandwidth caps (and especially fraudulent scams like bandwidth caps which exempt in-house vertical services). If they only did all that, everything would be fine. Alas, all the short-term investors with dollar signs in their eyes will need to be booted to the curb before any of this can happen. | |
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| | caps Really, if comcast was to go by the FCC definition of broadband these caps need to be 1500 gigabytes per 30 day period. | |
| | | sigh... I kinda feel bad for the people who don't push for higher limits even if they don't reach them now. I think most of them are likely single, living in a household mostly comprised of a generation that didn't grow up with the Internet, or are a bit short-sighted.
Once you have a family comprised fully of people raised in the "Internet Era" coupled with the rapidly increasing bit-rich media and increasing on demand platforms...you're gonna kinda wish you argued for less restrictions and/or better compromises. You've got the ISPs demonizing the super-minority "bandwidth hogs" to the average user and then they get away with pushing these blanket restrictions and hefty overage fees with people cheering them on.
They're just establishing a billing infrastructure that bodes well for them in the future. But hey, maybe they'll scale their pricing back once a large portion of their consumer base and technology start to catch up....riiiiiight. It probably depends on how competition evolves, so cross your fingers. | |
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