Lawmakers Seek Review of Broadband Data Caps

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I'm not holding my breath but it sure would be nice to see something done about broadband caps, don't you agree?

"When you couple limited broadband competition with a strong desire to protect a legacy video distribution business, you have both the means and motivation to engage in anticompetitive behavior," David Hyman, Netflix's general counsel, told the House Commerce subcommittee on communications and technology on Wednesday.
 
I'm not holding my breath but it sure would be nice to see something done about broadband caps, don't you agree?

Luckily I don't have caps with my provider (Charter)...what I WOULD like to see though is a review into to monopoly ISP's have and the price gouging that is happening. To me being able to choose 3-4 companies while only paying $20 a month for fast internet is a lot more important that being limited to a couple hundred gigabytes a month.

I mean, look at England, internet providers are aplenty there and they pay like $15-20 a month for 150MB internet or there abouts...here you're lucky to get 1MB internet from someone like AT&T for less than $40 a month...
 
Eliminating the monopoly's would resolve the cap issues naturally. Right now ISP's can charge & do what you want & there is no option for a very large amount of consumers. Give options & then they will have to earn what you pay them.
 
As much as I hate data caps, I just don't think the government should be involved in the process either way. Oh well, guess big brother insists . . .
 
Good luck. All the providers have huge numbers of lobbyists in Washington (with At&t having the most). The FCC Chairman recently was stated saying it was a "good way" to handle demand :rolleyes:

Yea right , so much demand that Verizon and At&t are basically *walking* away from DSL entirely? What about all the bundle deals they are all doing with each other? No one considers that price fixing the market?

It seems like Netflix and a few small ISP's around the country (Sonic.net) are the only ones that find data caps completely unrealistic in the long term. On of the biggest money grabs from content providers in recent history. Even if you could justify it , people are still cutting the "cord" and ditching $120+ monthly content bills. Caps are pointless , networks are stronger than they've ever been , consumer usage is never going to stop growing.

I'm sure this "investigation" will end up being ruled as a "fair trade" or some bullshit of the like. Fuck content providers and ISP's that are apart of this data cap game.
 
Yes, because people using 10GB a month should pay the same rate as someone using 200MB a month.
 
Yes, because people using 10GB a month should pay the same rate as someone using 200MB a month.

Yep , they should pay $80-100 a month which is double what most people pay for home broadband with 250GB caps for that 10GB . Yep , nothing absolutely insane about that :rolleyes:
 
As much as I hate data caps, I just don't think the government should be involved in the process either way. Oh well, guess big brother insists . . .

As much as I don't like the government sticking it's nose where it doesn't belong, the problem here is that the monopolies were pretty much created by the government in the first place, allowing these companies to gouge prices and set caps. If the government had stayed out of it to begin with, you might currently have more than 2-3 broadband choices in your area.
 
i would like to know for how long can you download at advertised speed before you hit the data cap.


but i think being able to stream maximum hd (1080p x2 currently) should be the maximum for acceptable usage, beyond that you are likely doing something illegal (but not necessarily)
 
At&t and Comcast are both on a hiatus with their caps right now for DSL/VDSL and Cable. A family could easily hit a 250GB per month using just Netflix and general data use.

Hitting your cap is not hard especially if you share it with others.
 
As much as I hate data caps, I just don't think the government should be involved in the process either way. Oh well, guess big brother insists . . .

As much as I don't like the government sticking it's nose where it doesn't belong, the problem here is that the monopolies were pretty much created by the government in the first place, allowing these companies to gouge prices and set caps. If the government had stayed out of it to begin with, you might currently have more than 2-3 broadband choices in your area.

Exactly. companies are already leaching off the government hands that feed them their local monopolies. Might as well let government tell them to ease up on the price and cap. And if you don't want government telling you what to do, then you can kiss the government issued local monopolies goodbye.

Yes, because people using 10GB a month should pay the same rate as someone using 200MB a month.

Bring on the tiered plans! Just don't do it under the safety of a local monopoly.
 
Luckily I don't have caps with my provider (Charter)...what I WOULD like to see though is a review into to monopoly ISP's have and the price gouging that is happening. To me being able to choose 3-4 companies while only paying $20 a month for fast internet is a lot more important that being limited to a couple hundred gigabytes a month.

I mean, look at England, internet providers are aplenty there and they pay like $15-20 a month for 150MB internet or there abouts...here you're lucky to get 1MB internet from someone like AT&T for less than $40 a month...

The problem is size. it is much cheaper and easier to service 1000 homes in 10 square miles than it is 10 homes in 1000 square miles.

As much as I hate data caps, I just don't think the government should be involved in the process either way. Oh well, guess big brother insists . . .

Agreed, the market should be left alone we don't need the government steping in to do anything, they have already screwed over telephone companies trying to deploy higher speeds, they need to stop before they make everyone get 20MB caps and speeds have to be rolled back to 128kbps to stay within their rules.


As much as I don't like the government sticking it's nose where it doesn't belong, the problem here is that the monopolies were pretty much created by the government in the first place, allowing these companies to gouge prices and set caps. If the government had stayed out of it to begin with, you might currently have more than 2-3 broadband choices in your area.

Government created monopolies for phone and internet service? When did they do that? Nothing is stoping AT&T, comcast, Century link and 20 other people from servicing the same area other than 1 thing. Cost. Yes most cities are broke up and have friendly agreements that say this is our area, that is yours, you stay there and we will stay here. But there is nothing stopping somebody else from coming in. smaller companies have it easier as they don't have to let anyone into their offices but that doesn't stop somebody from setting up shop right on top of them. Look at your cell phone, do you only have 1 choice? no you have more but it wasn't cost effective for 20 companies to give service, so the market came down to only a few. ISP are the same, back in the days of dialup you had them all over the place. then came DSL and they couldn't afford to keep up, so they started to die off. A town south of me is serviced by Century link, two small ISPs that used to just to dialup and fixed wireless merged or one bought the other (not sure which) and they now sell DSL to Century link customers. Then on top of that you have cable companies serviceing on top of the same area. But it all comes down to cost, if an area is serviced already by AT&T, century link isn't going to want to put new plant out there and try to take over a person here or a person there, they are going to work on keeping their own customers and working on their existing areas. Same goes for cable, nobody is going to drop into the middle of comcast and try doing tv only to get 20 people for the hell of it.
 
If comcast or ATT wants their streaming movie service or IPTV service subject to the same cap as Netflix would then I say bring on the caps. I have a business acct with ATT and don't have a cap. I heard that Comcast does the same
 
Meanwhile the Cable Co. General Counsel: "Why our esteemed peers on the other side have brought up very valid points I would like to point out something else that may not have been considered...Oh look it appears someone has dropped a roll of $1000 bills. I don't suppose this belonged to you ladies and gentlemen? No matter I will just place this right here in front of you...As I was saying. Good points. That concludes my statement"

In all seriousness though I agree to the degree government shouldn't be involved however thanks to the governments involvement we now have legal monopolies for cable companies for reasons I simply cannot fathom. As such since this is what they wanted then the government must in turn make sure they do not abuse the monopolies they have been granted in such a way that consumers are harmed. As for that actually happening....I am not holding my breath anyways.
 
Bandwidth caps are a problem if there is an absurd charge for usage during which a customer isn't notified of the situation while a huge bill is being amassed. Personally, I'd prefer an unlimited plan at a very low speed (say ~256 kbps) since I can't see the point in being able to scale to a level of performance that can devour a monthly allotment of bandwidth in a matter of a few hours. Providers wouldn't go for that since the on paper performance won't sell service.
 
It's guaranteed that caps won't benefit the low bandwidth user. At best their prices stay the same.
 
Free market is not really working down there apparently if you have companies price fixing.

I know in Canada Bell and Rogers got the CRTC by the balls and do whatever they want to kill competition.

In a matter of 2 years we went from a 10mbps unlimited plan for 40$/month to a 7.5mbps, 64GB monthly limit for 42$/month. And I thought technology was progressing :(
 
It's guaranteed that caps won't benefit the low bandwidth user. At best their prices stay the same.

And we have at least one person here who understands exactly what will happen.

They will create a cheaper plan with unreasonably low data cap. Then everything else will be equal to or higher than you pay today basically. Have fun with your "fair" tiered data.

If anything there should be peak and off-peak usage, with free off-peak. I doubt any ISP network is struggling at 3 AM local time.
 
I mean, look at England, internet providers are aplenty there and they pay like $15-20 a month for 150MB internet or there abouts...here you're lucky to get 1MB internet from someone like AT&T for less than $40 a month...

BS, I paid the equivalent of $50 a month for 8/1 dsl (actual speeds 4/.5) and only didn't have a cap because I had BT business. Any DSL line into your home you have a pay a line fee of $20 a month to BT just to use it, then you can choose your provider and pay them for your actual DSL connection. All of the non-business DSL providers have caps anywhere from 50 to 250 GB depending on your plan. Virgin cable is few and far between unless you live in a city, same for BT fiber.

Here I pay $200 month for Comcast Business 50/10, much better connection and no limit.
 
Eliminating the monopoly's would resolve the cap issues naturally. Right now ISP's can charge & do what you want & there is no option for a very large amount of consumers. Give options & then they will have to earn what you pay them.

How do you eliminate providers as a monopoly when they are a regional utility provider that either dropped their own fiber or cable to tie into tier 1 main pipes owned by the big 2?
 
As much as I don't like the government sticking it's nose where it doesn't belong, the problem here is that the monopolies were pretty much created by the government in the first place, allowing these companies to gouge prices and set caps. If the government had stayed out of it to begin with, you might currently have more than 2-3 broadband choices in your area.

It's a more complicated issue than that. The FCC is largely to blame for it's regulations towards broadband caps and how it defines how these companies regulate getting online to begin with. I've said this before and I'll say it again, if they were classified as dumb pipe providers coupled with net neutrality of all data then we wouldn't be having this discussion at all since the fingers in the data packet pie couldn't discern what data is being used vs. other data.
 
As much as I hate data caps, I just don't think the government should be involved in the process either way. Oh well, guess big brother insists . . .

This sounds nice in theory, but the reality is that this is the governments mess to clean up in the first place.

And even if it was not, these are exactly the situations where the government should start poking around. In many industries, the consumer can flee from businesses that are exploiting them. There is a lot of competition just itching to steal away customers from any business that gets too big for its britches as it were.

But when it comes to Internet access, you're lucky if you have more than 2 choices. Some people only have 1. Given the importance of internet access in day-to-day life in the 21st century, that's not really acceptable, and the consumer has no power or recourse to solve the problem on their own. Hell, even if you were willing, giving up your Internet access pretty much leaves you without a voice in current events. That's where everything is coordinated these days.

I agree that the government shouldn't be meddling where they aren't needed, but as a consumer I don't really know what other option we have in this case. It's extremely important for purposes of free speech that peoples access to the Internet is not ruled by a single iron fist. We don't want the government running the Internet either, but we need them to be keeping the corporations in check at least.
 
Eliminating the monopoly's would resolve the cap issues naturally. Right now ISP's can charge & do what you want & there is no option for a very large amount of consumers. Give options & then they will have to earn what you pay them.

QFT

however i think the limits cellphone companies are offering is also a very important subject
 
At&t and Comcast are both on a hiatus with their caps right now for DSL/VDSL and Cable. A family could easily hit a 250GB per month using just Netflix and general data use.

Hitting your cap is not hard especially if you share it with others.

I and one other have used per my router "June 2012 (Incoming: 160883 MB / Outgoing: 428158 MB)"

Keep in mind that I stream my home media and DVR while I am working overnight. otherwise I would have a very boring night LMAO
 
Government created monopolies for phone and internet service? When did they do that? Nothing is stoping AT&T, comcast, Century link and 20 other people from servicing the same area other than 1 thing. Cost. Yes most cities are broke up and have friendly agreements that say this is our area, that is yours, you stay there and we will stay here. But there is nothing stopping somebody else from coming in. smaller companies have it easier as they don't have to let anyone into their offices but that doesn't stop somebody from setting up shop right on top of them. Look at your cell phone, do you only have 1 choice? no you have more but it wasn't cost effective for 20 companies to give service, so the market came down to only a few. ISP are the same, back in the days of dialup you had them all over the place. then came DSL and they couldn't afford to keep up, so they started to die off. A town south of me is serviced by Century link, two small ISPs that used to just to dialup and fixed wireless merged or one bought the other (not sure which) and they now sell DSL to Century link customers. Then on top of that you have cable companies serviceing on top of the same area. But it all comes down to cost, if an area is serviced already by AT&T, century link isn't going to want to put new plant out there and try to take over a person here or a person there, they are going to work on keeping their own customers and working on their existing areas. Same goes for cable, nobody is going to drop into the middle of comcast and try doing tv only to get 20 people for the hell of it.

Not quite accurate. A lot of cities enter into exclusivity deals, sweetheart deals, with providers. If you are limited to one or two providers in your area pretty good bet that your city's council agreed to a deal for att, verizon, etc to put up the cost for laying the foundation in your area. Now, I don't know about your councils but most council people I have met weren't the sharpest tools in the shed...This type of sweetheart deal is especially prevalent in places that saw big growth during the real estate boom, (Temecula, CA for example)
 
I have no problem with my home internet cap of 250GB/month--never even hit 100GB unless I'm doing something like a massive cloud-backup job for the first time. I don't do massive downloading of "stuff," and we probably stream about an hour or two (max) a night from hulu and/or netflix (some in 'HD,' some not). However, despite that, I've been a fan of TRULY usage based billing. I shouldn't be paying for data that I'm not using, and conversely I shouldn't be assessed exorbitant prices if I surpass some magically-invented data amount. Charge me for what I use, don't charge me for what I don't use. It works quite well for electric and gas utilities.

Separate the ISPs from the media content providers. That should get rid of the conflict of interest. Yeah, as if that's ever going to happen.

I used to think that 2.5GB/mo was more than I could ever use in a month on wireless data, but that's before I began honestly using my phone to watch streaming video from time-to-time. I don't care much, and I have no problem staying below 2.5GB in a month, but I can imagine using more if there wasn't an arbitrarily-chosen relatively-low monthly maximum. Especially when some videos in netflix can use over 1GB/hr of streamed content (though I limit the quality on my phone to conserve data).

And on a slightly-related note, I believe that a data phone subscriber should be able to use their monthly data allowance however they want. I am disgusted that a user is given, say, 2.5GB data per month yet they are prevented from tethering/wifi-hotspot creation unless they pay an added monthly fee. If I have 2.5GB of data to use, what does it matter if I'm using that directly on my phone, or on a different device tethered to my phone? It's simply easier for me to send/receive mail on my tablet than my phone. If the phone company is already assessing overage fees, what loss is it of theirs if I'm using my data? I'm not talking about obvious "abuse" of a phone's data connection/tethering, I'm just talking about using the 'same' amount of data (under a monthly limit), but on a tethered device instead of being on a phone only. It makes no sense. Oh, wait, it's because phone companies also offer wifi hotspot packages, ergo they will charge you for it if they can.
 
Forgot I wanted to mention--currently, there is a dual-pricing scheme in play for most broadband subscribers. You pay for a data connection speed, then you pay (potentially) for data used (beyond some monthly allocation). How have lawmakers allowed this? I don't want a heavy-hand from the government in internet access/usage, but honestly, I don't see why billing shouldn't be akin to electricity. Pay for what you actually use (at a reasonable rate--not some BS exorbitant price), and then have some reasonable "connection fee" on your monthly bill.
 
As much as I hate data caps, I just don't think the government should be involved in the process either way. Oh well, guess big brother insists . . .

Only time I want the government to get involved is when it benefits the people, and this does. People think that if the government stays out of everyone's business, then everything would be better. Corporations are working very hard with government to pass laws and restrictions that benefits them. Why you think FIOS isn't everywhere, and ISPs are isolated in majority of Areas?

Having the government practice abstinence won't solve anything. It's all about control.
 
There isn't really much the federal government can do on this one ... except possibly in the case of DSL or phone based services ... all of the wireless services and hard line services are managed at the local levels ... the individual cities allow a company to install their own infrastructure ... this is what results in the perceived monopolies ... since it would be a logistic nightmare for the governments (state, local, or national) to assume ownership of the infrastructure it will always be up to individual companies to install and maintain their own ... this will limit the market.

I think companies will find alternatives to caps in the hard line business (where they aren't as capacity constrained) through the addition of other services to replace the ones people drop as they move online. The wireless services where there actually are capacity constraints due to the availability of cell towers and such will likely always use some form of tiered or off hours discounts. I think the feds should just let this go and concentrate on things they might actually have some control over ... like maybe grants to encourage development of new internet delivery technologies that will allow less bandwidth constrained access for more people (power line delivery technologies perhaps).
 
I think companies will find alternatives to caps in the hard line business (where they aren't as capacity constrained) through the addition of other services to replace the ones people drop as they move online. The wireless services where there actually are capacity constraints due to the availability of cell towers and such will likely always use some form of tiered or off hours discounts. I think the feds should just let this go and concentrate on things they might actually have some control over ... like maybe grants to encourage development of new internet delivery technologies that will allow less bandwidth constrained access for more people (power line delivery technologies perhaps).

The problem is nobody wants to try and compete. In my area FIOS and cable are fighting hard for market control. Especially Cablevision which makes advertisements that are just marketing FUD. Verizon had to change some laws to be able to setup shop here in NJ. During this process, Cablevision was spamming commercials with propaganda to stop the changes.

God knows what Verizon had to pay just to even be allowed to compete with local cable companies. The only real way to compete with cable is to get around laying lines.

#1 DSL

Yea I know everyone hates it but if done right it could be a decent competitor.

#2 Internet through a power line

Saw this like 5-6 years ago and never saw any fruit from it.

#3 Wireless

Sounds great for tablets and smartphones but anyone who wants a reliable connection wants wired. Not to forget the constraints on data caps. So far it looks like Wireless is what a lot of companies are trying to go after.
 
Eliminating the monopoly's would resolve the cap issues naturally. Right now ISP's can charge & do what you want & there is no option for a very large amount of consumers. Give options & then they will have to earn what you pay them.

That is a completely baseless statement. It is near impossible to have competition beyond 2 maybe 3 companies in the ISP market. You forget how much infrastructure is needed to support an ISP. Even if companies were to fund the roll out, do you want your street to be under construction and torn up consistently as 5-10 new companies lay out lines to compete?

The solution is to regulate ISPs as a utility much like electric, sewer, telephone, etc. I am even find with metered billing.. pay for what you use. But the reason ISPs are out of control is because they have all the benefits of a utility (monopolistic grip on market) with none of the regulation your local telco or power company sees.
 
Luckily I don't have caps with my provider (Charter)...what I WOULD like to see though is a review into to monopoly ISP's have and the price gouging that is happening. To me being able to choose 3-4 companies while only paying $20 a month for fast internet is a lot more important that being limited to a couple hundred gigabytes a month.

I mean, look at England, internet providers are aplenty there and they pay like $15-20 a month for 150MB internet or there abouts...here you're lucky to get 1MB internet from someone like AT&T for less than $40 a month...

Charter does have caps on residential connections, but they're generous and not strictly enforced.
 
The caps exist only to protect the content delivery aspect of the cable company.

Suddenlink (which is one of the worst ISPs) did their whole "This is to help the consumer" thing when they added the caps and they did it in a particularly obnoxious way.

When you hit your cap, your web pages redirect to their "walled garden" page - the page you normally get if you don't pay your bill, but in this case, you just have to enter your customer number and account number to "continue".

Originally, once you hit your 250GB cap, you have to call them and ask them for 50GB more (for $10)

I called them and said look - just charge me $20 extra and give me 350GB and call it good. No way.

I was finally able to change it so that now I just get an email saying I will be charged and my service no longer gets interrupted, but I still harbor a burning hatred for the people who run Suddenlink and I can honestly say that it's because they run the business like a bunch of amateurs:

A few months ago they were trying to get their subscribers to contact AMC and tell them not to raise their prices on what are some of the best shows on TV. It was a juvenile move and it pissed me off. The AMC price increase deadline was going to make Suddenlink subscribers miss the Walking Dead finale which would have sucked, but I thought AMC was justified in getting paid for the value they add to cable (which is so rare) and I really hated the way Suddenlink just assumed that we were stupid. Raise my damn cable bill by $0.75 if you have to, but suck it up.
 
That is a completely baseless statement. It is near impossible to have competition beyond 2 maybe 3 companies in the ISP market. You forget how much infrastructure is needed to support an ISP. Even if companies were to fund the roll out, do you want your street to be under construction and torn up consistently as 5-10 new companies lay out lines to compete?

The solution is to regulate ISPs as a utility much like electric, sewer, telephone, etc. I am even find with metered billing.. pay for what you use. But the reason ISPs are out of control is because they have all the benefits of a utility (monopolistic grip on market) with none of the regulation your local telco or power company sees.

That's a really good point. The reason those monopolies exist is so that the municipality doesn't have to pay so much for the rollout costs of broadband service by making deals with the ISPs. If these deals didn't exist, taxes would have increased so a neutral set of broadband date infrastructure could be installed, or ISPs would be charging even more as they wouldn't be receiving funding or tax breaks from the municipality for the installation (In theory, anyways).

At this point, all that's left is fair regulation that protects both the consumer and provider(s). Despite what many people will say, well thought out regulation can be a very good thing. You can't even have something like Net Neutrality without regulations to enforce it. Regulations hurt when they are worded poorly or if they have bad intentions.
 
The only reason why I hate data caps is because to often companies will still claim "unlimitted" in their advertising and then go do something like throttle your bandwidth after you exceed a certain limit. You should be held to what you advertise in the big print, not the small print.
 
Bring on the tiered plans! Just don't do it under the safety of a local monopoly.

I agree with this. The monopolies most companies have is insane. I'm lucky enough to have both Time Warner and U-verse so at least I have some choice. Makes negotiating rates easy.
 
Luckily I don't have caps with my provider (Charter)...what I WOULD like to see though is a review into to monopoly ISP's have and the price gouging that is happening. To me being able to choose 3-4 companies while only paying $20 a month for fast internet is a lot more important that being limited to a couple hundred gigabytes a month.

I mean, look at England, internet providers are aplenty there and they pay like $15-20 a month for 150MB internet or there abouts...here you're lucky to get 1MB internet from someone like AT&T for less than $40 a month...

Yea, and they usually have < 50GB caps.
 
Yes, because people using 10GB a month should pay the same rate as someone using 200MB a month.

That argument likens data usage to electric usage which I find just flat out incorrect. The difference is each "bit" of electricity you use in home has to be produced by the electric company. There is a inherent cost in that production.

Each "bit" sent over your ISP doesn't really cost them anything. The equipment must be in place and turned on to provide the service regardless if you are using it or not. So in simplistic terms they have a flat cost in providing that bandwidth to you regardless of how much you use.

Now they like to pop up with oh but we have upgrade costs and expansion expenses so we can provide you better service! While certainly that is true to an extent - I don't see fiber being rolled out in mass quantities. Didn't the FIOS expansions stop recently as well?
 
That argument likens data usage to electric usage which I find just flat out incorrect. The difference is each "bit" of electricity you use in home has to be produced by the electric company. There is a inherent cost in that production.

Each "bit" sent over your ISP doesn't really cost them anything. The equipment must be in place and turned on to provide the service regardless if you are using it or not. So in simplistic terms they have a flat cost in providing that bandwidth to you regardless of how much you use.

Now they like to pop up with oh but we have upgrade costs and expansion expenses so we can provide you better service! While certainly that is true to an extent - I don't see fiber being rolled out in mass quantities. Didn't the FIOS expansions stop recently as well?

Bandwidth isn't unlimited, so yes, each "bit" does cost money.
 
Bandwidth isn't unlimited, so yes, each "bit" does cost money.

Each bit *that contributes to peak demand* costs money. Every other bit is 100% free, the only thing the ISP pays for is service and support costs(you call tech support, or billing to ask about changing your service/explain the charges on your bill etc). If you download 10GB a month but do it every day during peak demand times and I download 100GB a month but do it only between 1am and 4am, you're actually costing the ISP more than I am.
 
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