Mackintire
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Comcast 1TB Internet Cap Is Becoming A Reality
- Thread starter Megalith
- Start date
Massively. We monitor what our customers use vs what they pay for, and its crazy. Even my home connection, with 3+ people watching Netflix, amazon, hulu, and playing games on multiple xboxen, PCs, and PS4s, our 95th percentile rate was like 2mbps. We're starting a new trial program called "Community Broadband", where we charge a flat $9.99 for line access, and all the customers just share the same pipe. There are some limits, since a lot of our customers have radios that only linked up at 25mbps/25mbps due to distance/signal issues, but we don't limit or cap anything artificially. If a customer abuses the network, we offer to move them to the "Professional" plans, which are more traditional speed tiers with guaranteed bandwidth allotments. Its going well so far.
So, you're saying if I use 2TB in a month instead of 1TB, it will cost the ISP more money in equipment, maintanance, monitoring, support, and electricity? Can you quantify that for me? is it like, an extra $4 in electricity per TB or something? How many units of human is one unit of bandwidth?
Mackintire
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Additional bandwidth inside your network, as long as you are not congested, doesn't cost you anything additional. As soon as you peer asymmetrically...that action and data traversing the link costs money. If your data is symmetrical, yeah it shouldn't cost anything....but people consume more data at home than create data. So the usage is asymmetrical.
sfsuphysics
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But here's the 64 dollar question, COULD YOU alter your habits? I think that cat is out of the bag already, and people use these phones for way too many things for you to sudden stop using them. Think of it like the drug dealer who gets you hooked on something, sure it's easy to say "just stop" but the fact is you rely on all these things. Back in the day with per minute pricing, hell forget cell phones, think landlines where any phone call farther than like 15 miles away while not "long distance" did cost to use, you were very cautious about where you're calling, you didn't have long drawn out conversations about absolutely nothing, you did have a habit which didn't cost you a fortune. Now imagine if we jump back to that, wait what? I have to think about where I'm calling now? My friend who has an phone number with an area code 3 states over now costs money per minute to talk to?
I'm not sure what you think I'm arguing here. Let's say I use 100MB of data over 24 hours. Now let's say I use 100GB of data over the next 24 hours. As long as the network doesn't become congested during peak hours, how exactly does that cost the ISP more money? Charging by how much I use makes NO SENSE for fixing the problem, it's only to shake more money out of people. Charging me by BANDWIDTH, especially between peak hours if it's asymmetrical like you're saying would actually keep things in check.Mackintire said:
If I was an ISP and was concerned about this, I'd much rather have the person using 100GB spread evenly over a span of 24 hours, than somebody using 50GB only between 8-10pm.
It depends on the contract and the peers. From a purely technical standpoint, yes, residential connections pull more bandwidth than they push. But, another way to look at it is I have a pool of customers that want to purchase services from the companies that mostly push data. The data flow might be asymmetrical, but so is the cash flow.
And none of that answered any of my questions. Yes, if you oversell your network and someone starts using more bandwidth, you have to pay more to upgrade your infrastructure. So...don't oversell your network. Instead of trying to penny pinch and scam your users out of more money, plan upgrades that keep everything healthy. The problem we have in the US, is our ISPs pissed away the money they were given for upgrades, and then got blindsided by things like VOIP, YouTube, and streaming taking off. For years they were able to put off upgrades by saying only pirates do things like download/stream movies and games. And we had no competition to push them to upgrade, so everything just stagnated.
That's a good point. I suppose data could be free after hours much like the old night and weekend cell plans used to be.
Mackintire
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"As long as the network doesn't become congested during peak hours"
Your ISPs network might be fine....but they have to pay their peer to upgrade their stuff. They have to pay for that somehow.
Your ISPs network might be fine....but they have to pay their peer to upgrade their stuff. They have to pay for that somehow.
True. They could just pass the actual cost of that data the peer charges to the customer.
Mackintire
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Are you a communist or something
It's not even financially possible unless you want to pay $300+ for a 20mb/s connection like AT&T quotes us where I work.
edit: actual quote I received:
rudy
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I can alter my habits, I personally would not, why? Because I am a medium bandwidth user, my whole family uses less than the Comcast cap, games Netflix and everything, we use around 500-700 gb. And I consider it cheap and stimulating entertainment compared to dinner and a movie which would cost in 1 night the whole months cable bill. But on that note I do alter my behavior in that sense that I choose many times to not go out to see a movie to control my costs. In metered charging we are not talking about stopping cold turkey we are talking about changing the motivations of internet users and the ISPs. I have never in my life seen a system where unlimited is actually unlimited it always costs the user more when such a claim is made. The reason such strong opinions rage here on a board like this is because its a board full of users who are probably high volume users whom have enjoyed a decade or so of unlimited internet usage where grandpa and grandma subsidized your use by over paying and under using, this allowed companies to over sell the bandwidth they had. Once every soccer mom started using Netflix things changed. Now those power users are slowing every one down during prime time when soccer mom wants to know why her Netflix is blurry. And as we can see the current system has pitfalls.
If we switched to metered usage we would probably see something similar to what happened with phone companies, long distance or cellular where ISPs would look to motivate people to modify their usage. As mentioned multiple times imagine if they said something like night time usage is free, or very low cost, then consumers start instructing their computers to only download a giant game or torrent overnight. Companies start putting in place features to support this. I think steam already allows users to schedule automatic updates but they would surely add it if they do not. Consumers might also start thinking about reserving high quality video for when they really want it.
Americans love to complain non stop about our ISPs but then they all just seem to want something for nothing. Capitalism is a game and how you set the rules of the game determines how the players choose to compete. We set the rules and asked for unlimited, and the ISPs sought to maximize their profits within those rules. And they did great, they charged grandma $60 / mo to download email 2x a week. But then we come and complain that they didn't upgrade our infrastructure. Hmm, if they could charge a set price for unlimited what motivation do they have to increase bandwidth? Until competition showed up none. And that is how they treated us. here you get your unlimited but its slow, takes 5 years to roll out bandwidth increases and we are going to shove way more people on your node then it can handle to make sure you cant really use unlimited. Does the gas station or the electric company ever tell you hey slow down buddy? No.
These are some of the things that don't improve or do so way slower over the years because of our unlimited internet system.
People running all sorts of servers and services from their homes. Companies don't want you to do this on your cheap unlimited plan so they write the ToS to prohibit it.
Fast support for multiple users. I can remember always being ahead of the curve for computing, and Comcast or other companies would constantly try to put limits in place or over charge for supporting multiple computers or users and I was constantly trying to find ways around it such as providing my own router, cable modem etc....
Comcast wont charge you a rental fee if you are paying for metered usage they will GIVE you anything you want to get more users using more data.
Complete lack of understanding of bandwidth by users. Since they pay for unlimited what would they care what a mb or gb is or how much the average of anything they download is, everyone knows what a gallon of gas is and about how far it gets them.
Excruciatingly slow rollout of bandwidth increases. If Comcast was making money per GB they would gladly roll out fast modems and new infrastructure especially to power users.
Low network performance, band ping, over sold lines. Why improve? If your connection goes down so what, we still get paid. If you get frustrated and quit gaming because your ping is garbage once again so what we still get paid the same amount per month.
These are minuscule costs compared to what's charged. I'm not sure why people on here think Internet providers are hurting. Internet is a very high profit service. Video...not so much.
Mackintire
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I work for a former ISP that no longer sells circuits...there's no profit in it. We now primarily offer co-hosting, Paas and IaaS.
You say "we set the rules", who was that, exactly? It sure as hell wasn't the customers. I mean you talk about capitalism, go to Europe, there you can get the same quality internet for $15 a month in many countries, and scale it up or down. Want super fast internet? Fine, pay American prices for medium broadband. Want cheap broadband? Fine, pay $5 a month, you get something very usable.
As for America, correct me if I'm wrong, but here's how I understand how it went down:
-We used to have a lot of ISP competition back in the 90s and early 00s.
-Those got collectively bought out by bigger companies, since typically the end game of capitalism is for a giant company with deeper pockets to swallow up the others. This left only a few players on the market.
-Realizing it's more profitable to just cooperate rather than compete at the national level, a lot of ISPs collectively agreed not to undercut each other, so that way they all got rich. This also led to a lot of regional monopolies still present today.
-Along the way, many of the ISPs received a ton of tax dollars for the purposes of updating their infrastructure. They mostly didn't and just used the money to buy more competition or line their pockets.
-As they got larger, they invested money in lobbyists at the local, state, and federal level to keep new players out, and keep regulations away so they could gouge people price-wise, just in case their other advantages weren't enough
-Much later, Google farts around in a few cities with fiber.
So how does all that translate to Americans wanting something for nothing?
Darunion
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No one said they are hurting, they said they are a business selling something you want. That costs them money to provide and they charge you more than it costs them so they can make a profit. How much profit they make I am not sure, but repair and upgrades don't come cheap either and they aren't going to take a loss for that.
Those that say the internet is free 1s and 0s, it is not. You people have apparently never had to replace heavy use servers or network switches. Think your PC's run the same in 2 years if they sit at 100% usage 24/7 versus normal use? Heat is what stresses components and causes failure. Do some massive downloads and watch your router temps go up.
Do I think how they charge for service is fair? No I do not, and would love to see a better structure of billing and better choices. I feel there should be low usage tiers that people can opt into for just your email checkers or shoppers etc. and maybe ultra low latency tiers for gaming, and high cap to no cap tiers for streaming video etc.
I do agree though if they are going to measure by 'data usage' this needs to be better defined and listed. As stated, if i just DDoS you for days straight, do you just get a high bill and because I have no caps, does no effect to me? Seems to easy to exploit or get screwed by it. I don't mind the ISPs making money, but it needs to be more transparent.
Susquehannock
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Comcast/Xfinity does these things because they can. No competition in many areas. Go with them or go 56k, if you're lucky.
Back when I first got Comcast internet 15 years ago it was $49 for whatever you got at the time. No caps. At night when nobody else in the local network was on it was usually 100Mps or more. Now I am capped at 25Mps at $29 a month. Only because I am a legacy customer. Anyone signing up now would pay for $69 month for the same 25Mbs speed.
In short ... screw monopolies.
Back when I first got Comcast internet 15 years ago it was $49 for whatever you got at the time. No caps. At night when nobody else in the local network was on it was usually 100Mps or more. Now I am capped at 25Mps at $29 a month. Only because I am a legacy customer. Anyone signing up now would pay for $69 month for the same 25Mbs speed.
In short ... screw monopolies.
MrGuvernment
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You presumably did not work for one of the large monopolies and since the company is offering co-hosting and Paas and Iaas, I would wonder if the company will be around at all in the near future with many other top companies already owning those markets as well and less and less people using co-hosting with AWS /Azure and Google.
I always hear about these magical places in Europe, however all the people in Europe that I gamed with told me to go fuck myself when I upgraded to 30Mbps because most of them in England were lucky to get 5 - 10 Mbps. Same for many other counties. At best they had the same speeds as me but at much higher prices.
As for your list. I will correct you on some of that.
you had many different dialup companies because you needed almost nothing for dialup. You just needed to rent a closet in some small business and put in a few modem banks and get yourself a few t1s. So that was nothing to run a dialup ISP. Then people needed / wanted faster speeds. So suddenly you needed to be able to afford to run a connection to a house that was yours, or you needed to switch to fixed wireless. Some of the companies switched to fixed wireless and stayed in business. Others tried to stay with just dialup and had to close down due to lack of business. As the cost of running a business kept going up and up many of the companies started to merge. In my area I watched the number of fixed wireless companies go from 8 down to 4. Two of those that are left are trying to get one of the other two that are much larger to buy them out before they just close their doors and give up. Mostly because they don't make enough profit to afford to upgrade their equipment as much as needed so they are behind in what they can offer. So at best they could drain every last cent they have to be even close to competitive with the other two, however they still would lack the customer base to bring those numbers up.
As for regional monopolies. Yes and no. You have two different types of ISP or telephone companies. ILECs and CLECs. ILECs are what you would refer to as your local telephone company. they are the ones that put the original copper in the ground and started offering phone service to that area. They are the ones that are regulated and there is normally agreements to a small degree among them out of respect for each other. They each have their boundaries and stay within them. CLECs are competitive local exchange carriers, these are companies that do not have boundaries and can operate wherever they want. So they are your fixed wireless companies, larger tier 1 carriers, cable companies and anyone else that sells service in your are that is not the regulated telephone company. In that regards there are no agreements and they overlap with whoever they feel like. Almost all of your ILECs are going to have a CLEC sister side also. That way they can branch out into areas that are not their areas to get more customers. Larger companies such as AT&T don't normally bother with that and instead will just partner with the local ILEC to service somebody in the middle of their area. Where as the smaller guys will overbuild into a larger ILEC area since to them an extra 100 - 200+ customers matters a lot more than it does to the bigger guys.
As for getting tons of tax dollars. Again not 100% true. First off there was the program that most people think about back around 2000 that gave out money. However most of that went to the really big guys who did waste it as bonuses for their execs. Everyone else got a few hundred thousand. Which I can spend that today trying to give 100 people fiber to the home. So there was one major tax amount that was given out that didn't go as planned due to lack of government oversight. Outside of that the only money that most have received is the money collected when you pay your phone bill. There are all the various fees and taxes that the government takes, then takes their share of the money and redistributes back out to everyone. Which for anyone that isn't one of the few big guys, that is probably 60 - 70% of the money they get per month. As most money they get through their doors leaves them to go into the pool. If you have a land line in your house and pay a phone bill. The only money the telephone company gets to keep is what you pay for calling features, the rest all go into the various pools and they are then given some of that back. Even most of what you pay for internet is given to government pools. So out of every $1 you pay they might get to keep 20 cents and then will get maybe another 50 - 60 cents back from various pools that the money went into. In some cases that actually works by you buying something and then over 5 -10 years (depending on the equipment type) you are given the cost of that back from a pool. Other times it comes in the form of a lump sum every month. Outside of the major handout there have been a few small ones that have been handled much better. Think it was around 2005 or 2006 (around whenever everyone got the stimulus check) they had a program where if you were under a certain size you could apply for something like a $10,000 grant to buy equipment. Now do the larger companies have something to get them money more often, maybe... but not most ISPs are getting handed money all the time. The only other way people would have gotten money is through a program that the USDA and FCC had going on where if you were going to build in an area that was under served (had 1 carrier and speeds under 10Mbps) then you could apply for a loan. The payback was over 10 years and was very strict. So anyone that took that wasn't going to be screwing around with the money as you had to report to the board every month with what the money was being spent on, it was pulled out of an account that they watched and any misuse would result in you having to pay the all the borrowed money back within 30 days otherwise they got your company. So not something that anyone was willing to fuck around with. You also had to show an actual need for the money so it was mostly small companies that couldn't afford to do fiber to the home by any other method.
AT&T and Verizon have invested money in lobbyist. However that really only helps them and nobody else. Some city levels might be harder but not sure how much of that is due to AT&T vs demand for space and cities just being assholes. Nothing a federal level keeps new players out. That is more the price level to get into the game, contrary to popular belief on this site it is extremely expensive to buy the equipment to service customer and to put fiber into the ground. For you to start an ISP and run fiber to every home in a town of a few thousand could run you about $10 million, more if much of that is rural.
Google gave the public the impression they were doing one thing but in reality they were trying to start a fire. Which they did. The number of fiber to the home communities exploded once Google started to play their game. But in all reality they were building as fast as they could, nor where they going into places that could have allowed faster / easier builds. They were going into the areas that they wanted to get the local companies to start offering better speeds. Then once that happen they would take that city off their list and move to the next. There were many more cities than what were publically announced that they started to poke with a stick before they got the local providers to up their speeds then left to go to the next city. In the end they decided it was too expensive to run fiber and gave up on their game. Which if Google can't afford to run fiber, that should go to show that you can't expect some small mom and pop to open up and start offering fiber to every home either.
As he said they are a former ISP so that should have been your first hint it wasn't one of the big guys as they already went out of business as a ISP.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Internet_connection_speeds
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_broadband_Internet_subscriptions
offcause there is no price included in this. But direct price comparison would also be slightly faulty on its own. due to how massively different things are from country to country (higher minimum wages etc etc)
SJConsultant
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This is the point where hardly anybody understands that in the ISP world, bandwidth is not necessarily some infinite resource. Smaller ISPs must peer with larger ISPs and depending on that relationship, yes a smaller ISP needs to pay a larger ISP for accommodating larger amounts of bandwidth to and from the internet. Basically it is called "transit peering", read this 2008 Arstechnica article on it for a more detailed explanation.
Mackintire
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We have been experiencing explosive growth for the last 24 months, so much so that we opened 2 new datacenters last year. We do not do generic bulk cloud, aka Azure, or Amazon AWS. I can tell you that we are loading our trunked 10Gb circuits fairly hard, which is why we are upgrading all the core equipment to 100Gbps and all pending spine switch purchases have 40Gbps uplinks min.
I love how people think that ISPs just *have* internet to resell to us... like they don't pay for their connections to the internet via L3 and other major providers. Don't be stupid. Nothing comes for free. Comcast and other companies size the "pipes" they pay for based on demand. For simplicity's sake, if they had 1000 customers each with 1gig connections, they are not going to buy 1TB worth of bandwidth, because it would not be fully utilized and would be a waste of money. They purchase their "internet" based on peak usage statistics. When people use more bandwidth, they have to provision more. Depending on where they are located (Comcast is in many states), they may have to enter agreements, leases, etc for the bandwidth they procure. When those backbone companies sell bandwidth to Comcast, that is provisioned bandwidth they cannot sell to someone else. Shit is not free motherfuckers.
It is perfectly reasonable to expect a cap on usage. Just because you have 200A electrical service to your house doesn't mean that you can pull 200A non-stop from the electric company. If you did, they would have to either produce, or purchase more power. It's really no different than with internet bandwidth... we are just lucky enough that internet service is loosely uncapped. The people that abuse their bandwidth usage are ruining it for everyone. Fucking greedy hogs who think that they can just suck down whatever and pay the same amount as those who are thriftier. Sorry, but if you are streaming 4K video all day long, torrenting, and patching giant Xbox One / PS4 game libraries, you ARE using more than everyone else. Internet is a commodity, and you are driving up demand, which drives up cost.
That being said, these caps to curb abuse NEED to change with the times. People are buying games that need giant patches, they are purchasing 4K TVs. These companies need to offer multiple bandwidth packages, just as cell phone providers do.
I don't hear people screaming at T-Mobile for curbing people at 6GB of data per line. Why the fuck is it any different with cable? Is CDMA/GSM internet not "free", whereas cabled internet is?!?
MrGuvernment
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For those who "use" the bandwidth they are using what was advertised and paid for.. is that wrong? Perhaps these providers need to
1. Stop over selling to boost profits
2. Stop false advertising on "unlimited" everything when it is not
3. Clearly state all terms and conditions - which i think they made a law now in the U.S?
1. Stop over selling to boost profits
2. Stop false advertising on "unlimited" everything when it is not
3. Clearly state all terms and conditions - which i think they made a law now in the U.S?
What was advertised and paid for is your rated speed with a 1TB limit. Get over it.
You ALWAYS need to read the fine print. Retailers have been doing that for over 100 years now, but people these days are too lazy.
To a degree I will agree that you can't compare direct pricing apples to apples as there is a difference to what money is actually worth. However that is a problem when the argument is that other counties get faster speeds for $15 USD. At that point only two things need to be looked at, does Europe have a extremely higher average rate compared to the USA? Do people in these counties pay equal to $15 USD for service?
The links that you gave to a degree go along with what I said. Some counties on there have lower average speeds and fewer percent of people in each of the 3 categories. Some are about equal and some are higher. However only a few are higher by a good percentage. I picked Norway at random, then found one of their ISPs. for a package that gives you between 6 - 20 Mbps (so I am guessing whatever ADSL speeds are possible) you pay what would about $41 USD just for internet. Which isn't a terrible price, but that isn't $15 either. Sweden is one the other top county there. 10Mbps service will run you about $27.25 average from values I could find. But that isn't super high speeds and isn't $15. That was what I was trying to point out with my comment. People aren't getting 50Mbps - 1Gbps for $15, which is some of the type of comments I see from time to time.
Not really true. When Comcast introduced caps, they were new and they weren't part of what people signed up for. My guess is that this applies to most people with the 1TB cap too. That said, I think for most plans, 1TB is acceptable. If, OTOH, you pay for some insane speed, 1TB is not enough (see anyone with Gb internet).
Flapjack said:
Wow, let me be extra clear about this since no one seems to get it:SJCsonultant said:
Yes, a company does need to pay for infrastructure, maintenance, etc. Of course that's not free. I wasn't implying it was. I'm saying providing MORE downloading when the company already has the infrastructure in place costs them NOTHING. If somebody WHO IS ALREADY A CUSTOMER downloads MORE data during the day, that DOES NOT COST THE ISP ANY MORE MONEY than if they were to download less. Now if everybody is downloading more during peak hours and saturating the bandwidth, THAT can limit everyone's speed and be a problem, but just the SHEER TOTAL DATA MOVED doesn't cost any more or less. By "infinite" I mean they can move an infinite amount of data and have it cost no EXTRA than moving a small amount. Moving 50MB for 10,000 customers costs THE SAME as moving 500TB for 10,000 customers as long as they're not saturating their bandwidth. And again, to be extra clear, I'm not saying ISPs have infinite bandwidth, that should be obvious.
Natural gas, on the other hand, means you need to move more natural gas reserves, which are limited, and DOES cost additional money to harvest and deliver. It DOES cost more money for the company to deliver 2000 cubic ft. of natural gas than it does to deliver 100, even with the infrastructure in place. It does not cost an ISP any additional money to deliver you MORE data so long as you're not saturating the bandwidth. Again, somebody who downloads 100GB over a 24 hour period causes LESS strain on the total bandwidth than someone who uses 50GB from 8-10PM. This is why charging by total usage is stupid and is just there to shake money out of people.
Norway is going to be a pricier country, compared to someplace like Poland or Czech Republic. I wasn't suggesting you can get 1Gbps for $15 in Europe. I was saying you can get BROADBAND (as in faster than fucking dial-up or satellite) for $15 or LESS in Europe. That's not really possible in the vast majority of the USA. I've never had broadband for less than $45 in any place I've lived.Exavior said:
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i certiannly agree with this. what i believe was "wrong" with the prior statments was that you used a negative ALL and thereby might have beeneasily read like there is None that have it better. which is what i disagree.
But then again you also have to take into something important in this comparison especaill on this topic is that pretty much none is sold with a data cap for a landline... and it havent been done like that for years or even decades
now i haven't looked into it that it just my experience l havent lived and still communication on a daily basic with people living in Scandinavian countries. caps are just unheard of. it was something back in the childhood of DSL birth for 1-2 years
You obviously didn't read my entire post, nor do you understand how provisioning works.
No, I did read your post, christ. One of us is not getting it, but it sounds like it's you since you're not addressing what I brought up. I'm talking about bandwidth ALREADY PROVISIONED. Let's go back to your 1000 customers at 1gig not being provisioned 1TB of bandwidth because that would be a waste of money. I get it, that makes sense. So let's say they look at that 1000 customers and see that during peak hours, (say 8-10PM) the bandwidth needed goes up to about 400GB max, because everybody's using their internet at the same time. We're still well under 1TB. Now they look at the rest of the day and the average plummets down to 50GB. Now say Joe is using his connection around the clock, downloading and uploading every day. But let's say he doesn't have a 1GB connection, he has a 250 meg connection. So he's using bandwidth all the time, but he's not expanding the TOTAL BANDWIDTH as much as Jim with the 1GB connection who only uses between 8-10PM. So Joe is downloading more data, but uses less of the total bandwidth. Do you get it?
But let's say he DOES have a 1GB connection. The ISP sees he's using a lot of data, so they they decide charge Joe on his data use and put a data cap on him, which drastically changes his habits. So he decides to ration it out and only uses it when he really wants it, which is during the prime time, between 8-10pm. As far as provisioning is concerned, there is NO DIFFERENCE because he's still on when everybody else is, so they have to keep provisioning for him anyway.
I understand how more users using bandwidth during peak hours means the ISP has to pay more to provision more. That's obvious. What I DON'T understand is why somebody using their bandwidth at 3am costs the ISP more money, even though their provisioning total is far lower than what it is at 8pm.
Again, one of us does not get it. If it's me, you need to point exactly where I'm making my mistake, otherwise, it's you.
topcat989
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i'm sorry. it's all my fault.
Jabeezus you really need all that tranny midget scat porn?
Ok, let's put it this way. You have said that it's "infinite" as long as the users are downloading under the total the company has provisioned during peak hours, and that it shouldn't matter if people exceed their cap, so long as they're downloading during off-peak hours (and not contributing to hitting the cap). It's still not "infinite", not matter how much you look at it. It really is not all that different than energy providers. I've had electric companies bill in much this same way. If you run your high amp appliances during the day (washer, dryer, etc) the rate is lower than if you run it after 8pm. Are you trying to say companies like Comcast should implement something like that? Because otherwise, there is nothing to keep people downloading more during off-peak hours than they do during peak hours. You need something to incentivize that behavior... like how the electric companies do. The major hurdle there is that you are not paying per MB of service. You are paying a flat rate... unlike just about anywhere else in our country. Bandwidth is NOT an infinite resource. There are many, many costs involved with what you are sold. Costs such as maintaining that equipment, provisioning enough bandwidth for the peak usage of all users, electricity costs to actually move the data (take an actual look at the electricity enterprise equipment costs to run... it's insane. Especially at 100% load), etc.
You can shake it down any way you like... it, is, not, infinite. Period. Americans are lucky that cable companies bill a flat rate and just ask you not to go over a certain amount. Cell phone companies are not like that with their data. Why would it be ok for cable companies to do that? If you are in the top 1% of high usage customers, you should either move to a business class account, or shut up and color.
I live out in the country, and had a burn a lot of hours on the phone to come up with the DSL setup I have today. I am running four DSL lines aggregated (two are bonded at a modem, with two 2-line modems going into a load balancer). When going through a multi-IP aware protocol (eg: torrent), I can download a steady 4.5 MB/s. If you did the math over 30 days, that would mean the most I could download would be 11TB or so per month. I don't do that, nor would anyone else in my neighborhood. For a 1GB connection at 100% utilization, that would be 277TB a month. Again, no one does that, and if they did, would that be ok? If your answer is "no", then what is ok? It doesn't matter what you come up with... a cap is a cap. At least there's is likely calculated on what the totality of their system can support, without having to hire more people, pay more electricity, provision more bandwidth, etc, etc. Because if they have to do ANY of those things, your rates are going to rise. If you have 1% of people doing that, is it really fair that the 99% of people who stay under the caps they have determined "balance" their business would have to pay more... when they had nothing to do with the rates increasing? I will tell you this. If I found out my rates went up because of 1% of the userbase, I would be PISSED. I would be asking my cable company (if I had the luxury of cable in the first place) "Why aren't you doing something to control these people?".
Seeing somebody post a throughput in MB instead of Mb is different. I was about to ask how fucking horrible is your service if 4 bounded pairs only gets you to 4Mbps. But 40-45 I assume (36+overhead from bounding) makes more sense.
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My bad if I put Mb or mb. I get about 4.5 MB/s total. Each DSL line is 10 mb/s. Two each are "pair bonded" at the modem, of which I have two. The two modems then feed into a load-balancer.
No, you typed it out correctly. I was just saying that is different to see somebody reference it like that. Most people only talk about megabits per second and not Megabytes. Although a lot of people can't figure out why when downloading a file they never see anything close to what they are paying for (not realizing the difference in bits and bytes). I understand what you mean by bonded. I work for a telco / isp and am responsible for all the equipment that feeds service to the customers. Most of our newer modems support bonding, which the techs hate but I have to tell them to deal with as that is just how technology is moving forward. We can't get everyone fiber fast enough so it comes down to having to be willing to bond two pairs if possible to get the customer better speeds for now till we can get fiber to them. Haven't tried doing what you are doing there. I think I would go for the 8 pair bonded modem to make it easier for our techs before dealing with something like that. Although from a price point your method would be cheaper if the customer knows how to setup the load balancer themselves. As the 8 pair bonded modem is about $2300 if I recall so definitely not cheap. Priced it out for a customer that really wanted 200+ Mbps over VDSL. Once we gave him pricing he decided that 50Mbps was fine.