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Why Data Caps Suck

B1zz said:
comcast tried the "don't like it, leave or purchase an unlimited cap" bullshit with me....so i left...for a better service, higher speeds and no caps. and get this...for 20 bucks LESS a month.(fiber to the home too :D ) the reality is, none of the carriers(wireless or otherwise) will learn until enough folks vote with their wallet, because that's all corporations care about anyway - their money.
Click to expand...

You are lucky because most of us only have a very crappy DSL alternative.

TBH I liked alot of the basic way he talked about things. But the fact is caps or no caps it wont matter. We pay for electricity you dont see people turning off their TVs and limiting use because it eats up electricity do you? Why? Because the price of electricity in the USA for the most part is very fair and very cheap.

So I think the fundamental problem is that the ISPs have not given us a fair flexible rate, sort of like sprint used to do with mobile minutes. This also brings up the one major flaw with his arguement, he seems to think that everything on the internet is the result of unlimited internet but he forgets that the speed of the internet has been fairly slow and stagnant in this country. If companies simply charged use per GB of data a fair amount then it would be in the best interest of the companies to make sure that we have the fastest connection possible so we can download lots of data without thinking.

So I personally would rather we move to a pay per GB system. The truth is he completely left out the fact that half the problem is the unrealistic expectations of people who buy internet access and for almost a decade were actually way over paying for it because it was unlimited but they were not using anything close to their share. It is only the recent explosion of netflix that has finally tipped the balance of internet use by getting all the grandpas and soccer moms to start using alot of data. So for the first time since pay per minute 56k, they actually are not over paying.
 
A few things:
- Having unlimited bandwidth sounds nice, but realistically, how much data do you realistically need? How much data are you willing to use before everyone is affected? If everyone was streaming HD Netflix 24/7, the "internet" as a whole slows down as showed in the TCP example due to network congestion. The logic they are promoting is that everyone should slow down, but that's ludicrous/nonsensical/unrealistic. Do you mean that all that HD YouTube videos should be only watched at 480p because "we need to share the internet and not congest it?" Again, ridiculous. Either ask for money to be paid for premium/priority service (LOL NET NEUTRALITY) or everyone gets 1/mbs speeds 5PM-12PM due to unlimited bandwidth.
- Competition will fix most of these problems. It's stated in the video that while data usage has increased, the overall costs have decreased. Data is getting cheaper and cheaper to provide, and once one competitor turns around and provides more economical service (Straight Talk, Metro PCS, T Mobile Prepaid), the money will do the peoples talking.
 
Really neat video, the only problem I had was the end where it tried to point towards a conspiracy to make you watch more TV.

Upside of data caps is when AT&T put one in for DSL (and Uverse) which was fairly high something like 300GB/month which I would never use at my current speed (3Mbps down) it made me look at what other options are out there, and boy did I find a good handful, I finally settled on one such option which is a good sized company (not AT&T sized by a long shot) but large enough I wouldn't have to worry would go bankrupt in a month, get faster DSL speed (up to 20Mbps... reality is 7Mbps is my limit) it leases AT&T's lines, doesn't even have speed tiers just says "you could get 20Mbps, but probably less" it's all one price, and it was cheaper than AT&T's 3Mbps plan AND I get free phone service with it (real phone not VOIP)

Thanks Data caps!
 
I love how monopolies are basically allowed in Internet/tv. I have 2 providers for decent Internet around here, only 1 actually has good speeds. How the fuck is that ok. Such fail.
 
B1zz said:
comcast tried the "don't like it, leave or purchase an unlimited cap" bullshit with me....so i left...for a better service, higher speeds and no caps. and get this...for 20 bucks LESS a month.(fiber to the home too :D ) the reality is, none of the carriers(wireless or otherwise) will learn until enough folks vote with their wallet, because that's all corporations care about anyway - their money.
Click to expand...

You had a choice--many don't.

If all the companies providing service X do bad thing Y, but people are too addicted to X to drop it in protest of Y, does that justify Y? No. But it means the companies will likely be able to get away with whatever they are doing for the foreseeable future unless government steps in. Then we have to hope that they don't hit the china collection with a sledge instead of driving the splitter into the wood.
 
TwiceOver said:
Please be sure to check into this further. Most of what this clown says is complete BS from a guy that has no idea how an ISP actually works.
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Please don't say stupid crap without reason. If you think he's wrong then please give reasons for it.

BTW, it's not like he said something we didn't already know. Who here really thought that the data caps were for anything but making money?
 
Ashbringer said:
Please don't say stupid crap without reason. If you think he's wrong then please give reasons for it.

BTW, it's not like he said something we didn't already know. Who here really thought that the data caps were for anything but making money?
Click to expand...


Those of us that actually work for an ISP, and also understand where this guy missed the mark on numerous items.
 
.....and *actually* understand where this guy missed the mark on numerous items, know why it isn't about making money. - had to correct myself, it's too early in the AM.

As I noted earlier in the thread, I work at an ISP with rougly 1.5m residential subscribers.

1.5m residential subscribers, not to mention our close to 500k business subscribers, accumulate 2TB a day just for Facebook traffic.

The guy that did the video is acting as though an ISP is a final endpoint to the internet. This is RARELY the case. Most ISP's require upstream connectivity (internet drains, as we call them).

Those drains cost a f*ck ton of money. Oh, and they have to be redundant, and from multiple providers to ensure any sort of guaranteed uptime.

Want to know how many tier-1 providers there are?
http://www.internetpulse.net/
 
Kr1ll1n said:
.....and *actually* understand where this guy missed the mark on numerous items, know why it isn't about making money. - had to correct myself, it's too early in the AM.

As I noted earlier in the thread, I work at an ISP with rougly 1.5m residential subscribers.

1.5m residential subscribers, not to mention our close to 500k business subscribers, accumulate 2TB a day just for Facebook traffic.

The guy that did the video is acting as though an ISP is a final endpoint to the internet. This is RARELY the case. Most ISP's require upstream connectivity (internet drains, as we call them).

Those drains cost a f*ck ton of money. Oh, and they have to be redundant, and from multiple providers to ensure any sort of guaranteed uptime.

Want to know how many tier-1 providers there are?
http://www.internetpulse.net/
Click to expand...

I for one don't blame everything on the cable companies here in the US. I have Suddenlink 30/2 Connection for about $65/mo with a 350GB/mo cap. I thought I would go over every month, but in all honestly I have not yet and I download a lot of stuff too. At this point 30mbps is plenty fast for anything we need in our home, what is disappointing is the upload speeds of 2mbs. Being able to stream video from home or run multiple VNC sessions would really be much better on a faster say 10mbps connection.

The real issue with the TV side of the equation is not that cable companies, but the content providers that charge cable/co so much damn money for networks like ESPN. The IP holders are the ones really holding a-la-carte video business model back with their insane licensing to Hulu, Cable co's, Amazon, and Netflix.

All that being said, the US really needs to work on improving its 'last mile' data speeds as we keep falling farther and farther behind in the world. While I see the difficulty of being the middleman Cable co with a massive network to maintain, Google is showing how it CAN be done, and is making some of the more 'extreme' markets look like a bunch of greedy asshats.
 
Go away, dude. 2TB is nothing for that number of clients. And it's not FB that is eating the traffic, it's your PAYING CUSTOMERS, If you don't like it, cut access to that domain.

You sound like brainwashed employee or shareholder.
 
Lol at all you people and your "12mps down/3mps up" and "I only get 20mps down / 5mps up". I wish I had your problems! Lol. Where I live the only choice is DSL from verizon. My max speed avalible is 1mps down / 256k up. Yea, I'm not worried about throttling.... I'm as low as you can go!

All joking aside (I was joking above, not about my speed but about the comments about speed) I don't think this situation will get any better any time this decade. There simply is no competitive market and no reason for these companies TO not do what they are doing. The Internet Infrastructure in many of these large countries like the US and Canada are just so horrible that it's a take it or take nothing situation. I wish Google Fiber was in this area. Hell, I'd accept it if Time Warner would simply put cable down the road. But it costs a lot of money to deploy these networks, money that they used to get from cable subscribers. The cost of maintaining these networks may have gone down over time but the cost for deploying into new areas has not and thats why they don't do it anymore. Simply put it isn't profitable for them to.
 
Kr1ll1n said:
The guy that did the video is acting as though an ISP is a final endpoint to the internet. This is RARELY the case. Most ISP's require upstream connectivity (internet drains, as we call them).

Those drains cost a f*ck ton of money. Oh, and they have to be redundant, and from multiple providers to ensure any sort of guaranteed uptime.
Click to expand...

Don't you pay them for bandwidth, not data?
 
xIronCrossx said:
I love how monopolies are basically allowed in Internet/tv. I have 2 providers for decent Internet around here, only 1 actually has good speeds. How the fuck is that ok. Such fail.
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^^^This.

But it happened because your municipality (possibly state) authorized only one set of wires. Probably because they got paid (or paid off) the most for giving someone exclusivity.
 
Although it may cost some money to lay cable, my TV/Internet Bill is over $1000 a year. About 15 or years ago, just TV would get about $300 or less a year and there was still incentive to lay cable.

Cable pays for itself very quickly and then is essentially a pure cash cow after that. The only question is how much goes to the cable companies and how much goes to the content providers. For the internet its essentially nothing that goes to content providers.
 
Australian experience:
Not terrible but would not recommend letting them screw you.
$60 a month gets 200gb of fast reliable Internet. But if you can have the same thing without a cap then fight to keep it.
 
master noran said:
You should check out teksavvy, pretty sure they use the rogers backbone and have unlimited bandwith.
Click to expand...

I switched to teksavvy a few months ago. I have the highest, i think its 48 down, vs the rogers that was 75 down, but I pay $54 vs $140 and I get 300GB, or unlimited for another $10.
I was worried about the slower speed, but considering rogers throttles the fuck out of everything, teksavvy has been 10x faster. A 700mb torrent used to take me 2 days with rogers, teksavvy, 10min.
 
Hooksalot said:
Absolutely wrong. I recently dumped 3 smartphones and went back to a basic phone for text and calls. Left Verizon and went to pay as you go. Put a home phone in. Kids were not happy but the monthly cost for data plans is asinine. Also dropped ATT DSL the minute they came out with data caps and went to the local cable company here and have had no issues with any caps and that's with 5 TVs mostly streaming Netflix from 2 separate accounts. Getting ready to drop Directv as soon as the contract is up and go to Over The Air antenna and Netflix. Companies cannot continue to gouge customers for more and more money while providing less and less services at the same time that the average pay rate in the country pretty much stagnates.

I am currently in the minority in doing these things but I read and hear about more and more people moving towards this trend.
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My wife has a semi-smart phone & I have an android phone. We dumped t-mobile & went to a month-by month. Our mobile phones average $10/month each for shared 750 minutes/texts.

We use data via wifi.

IF we run out of minutes we use voip with my ip based PBX at home -- which also lets my wife talk to her family in Brazil for very cheap or free.

IMHO data plans on mobiles are dead until the pricing gets under control and the bandwidth caps disappear or are significantly raised.

I _do_ have data on my work bb, but I'm sure you guys know how painful using an old bb as a smartphone is :) I also have a myfi from work for remoting in but some months I don't use it at all.
 
I don't believe in getting something for nothing and I surprised people here think its possible too. All this reminds me of web hosting. You got these various providers out there who offer unlimited space and unlimited bandwidth, but anyone who does web hosting knows that these guys have huge terms in their TOS and will cut you off if you do anything wrong. Instead people who know tend to pay MORE like myself for a web host who offers us limited space and limited bandwidth. Why? Because the average service is superior, we get a ton more useful features for free, and the web host typically doesn't care what you do with the site, because at the end of the day you pay for what you use not some magical unlimited amount that cannot really be true. You have to charge customers a reasonable fee, and if you make some ridiculous promise like unlimited bandwidth you will need some way to make sure that never happens, usually it costs us in customer service or other features. In the case of the internet it has directly slowed down progress, anywhere there is no fiber option to force the hand of comcast, they leave people sitting half or less speeds, even though the whole network is ready to double speeds at the flip of a switch.
 
Although I have a small amount of understanding for mobile 3G and 4G cap-models, I can not for the life of me understand how anyone, anywhere would accept data caps on wired internet, at all...
Would they try that here (Sweden), that would promptly end with no customers. It's just not accepted. Even mobile, 3G usually have data caps, but 4G rarely has caps. Well, there is some super cheap models with that that only gets cheap for very few users in practice. As for wired plans here, only difference is speed, every alternative is cap-less.

Caps is simply totally unacceptable. Is it legal for companies like ISP's to form cartels in the US? Because that is the ONLY explanation I can imagine why every single ISP avoids capless plans completely for non-corporate plans.
 
Meeho said:
Don't you pay them for bandwidth, not data?
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Bear in mind, I am on the customer facing application side of the ISP house, so my knowledge in this area may be somewhat outdated, but ars explains it quite nicely.

http://arstechnica.com/features/2008/09/peering-and-transit/

Traffic that stays on the ISP's network is the cheapest traffic for that ISP. In fact, it's basically free.

Peering costs a bit more, since the ISP will have to pay for a port and the line to connect to the other network, but over an established peering connection there is no additional cost for the traffic.

Transit traffic is the most expensive. The ISP will have to estimate how much traffic it needs, and any extra traffic will cost extra. If the ISP is faced with extra traffic (think large-scale P2P use), its first priority will be to keep the traffic on its own network. If it can't, it will then use peering, and as a last resort it will pay for transit.

Every ISP will need to buy some amount of transit to be able to interconnect with the entire world, and to achieve resilience, an ISP will choose more than one transit provider. Transit costs money, and as the ISP grows, its transit bill will grow, too. In order to reduce its transit bill, the ISP will look for suitable networks to peer with. When two networks determine that the costs of interconnecting directly (peering) are lower than the costs of buying transit from each other, they'll have an economic incentive to peer.
 
Kr1ll1n said:
Bear in mind, I am on the customer facing application side of the ISP house, so my knowledge in this area may be somewhat outdated, but ars explains it quite nicely.

http://arstechnica.com/features/2008/09/peering-and-transit/

Traffic that stays on the ISP's network is the cheapest traffic for that ISP. In fact, it's basically free.

Peering costs a bit more, since the ISP will have to pay for a port and the line to connect to the other network, but over an established peering connection there is no additional cost for the traffic.

Transit traffic is the most expensive. The ISP will have to estimate how much traffic it needs, and any extra traffic will cost extra. If the ISP is faced with extra traffic (think large-scale P2P use), its first priority will be to keep the traffic on its own network. If it can't, it will then use peering, and as a last resort it will pay for transit.

Every ISP will need to buy some amount of transit to be able to interconnect with the entire world, and to achieve resilience, an ISP will choose more than one transit provider. Transit costs money, and as the ISP grows, its transit bill will grow, too. In order to reduce its transit bill, the ISP will look for suitable networks to peer with. When two networks determine that the costs of interconnecting directly (peering) are lower than the costs of buying transit from each other, they'll have an economic incentive to peer.
Click to expand...
Also worth noting, the cost of upgrading infrastructure to accommodate for all of these high bandwidth apps.

Let's say you are an ISP, providing telephone (POTS) and internet (DSL).
All of sudden, a new site pops up, called HDDemand.com. Users can pay them
$10.00/mnth, and stream unlimited 1080p content.

Do you really believe that your backend and regional infrastructure won't need to be upgraded? How about the local lines? Blocking access to the site is a no-go, as that would be violating principles of Net Neutrality.

So breaking it down;
1. Copper\Fiber last mile upgrade costs
2. Routing\CO upgrade costs
3. Permits with local governments costs
4. labor costs to design and deploy
5. transit costs increase

As I have said earlier in the thread, I don't like the idea of data caps. But, I am also realistic, unlike the OP video. data and bandwidth do not exist in a vacuum.

Last point; Those espousing internet access in other countries should understand that the US has the oldest copper infrastructure of all developed nations. Some of our physical lines are 100+ years old. That is a serious limiting factor in what our infrastructure can do.
 
Having recently finally been able to ditch my data cap due to improved competition and choice in my area, now throttling is a growing problem. So on top of isp fees, there potentially are vpn fees to enable you to use the bandwidth you pay for.
 
SDplus said:
Caps is simply totally unacceptable. Is it legal for companies like ISP's to form cartels in the US? Because that is the ONLY explanation I can imagine why every single ISP avoids capless plans completely for non-corporate plans.
Click to expand...

The way it works here, and I don't know entirely, is that cable owns arenas. Verizon FIOS had a hard time coming to New Jersey, cause cable owned it. So Verizon had to lobby for the law to change, so they could setup shop.

And you rarely get two cable companies in one area. It's more likely to find FIOS competing with cable or DSL competing with cable. Where I live we have Cablevision, but drive to a different area and they have Comcast. Drive even further and you'll find Timewarner. But none of the cable services ever overlap. They own those areas.

But FIOS is unlimited and super fast, so if FIOS is in your area then cable has to also be fast and unlimited. So everyone here who claims to work for an ISP and knows what they're talking about should explain why there's FIOS then there's no data caps? I can assure you that where ever Google Fiber is they don't have competition with data caps. They'd have to be stupid to do so.

So no, the reason is money. There's no magic that prevents cable companies from going unlimited.
 
Yakk said:
Having recently finally been able to ditch my data cap due to improved competition and choice in my area, now throttling is a growing problem. So on top of isp fees, there potentially are vpn fees to enable you to use the bandwidth you pay for.
Click to expand...

This here is the point, people want something for nothing, its not a good deal. There has to be some limit or way to charge people differently. Throttling and odd fees are the way they will attack.

If people grow up and stop expecting something for nothing and are willing to pay for what they use we can get past all this crap.

Companies make money one way or another you gotta learn to be willing to pay the company in a model that works out to enhance you experience not degrade it.
 
I also forgot to mention that your local internet has pretty much always had conditions. Technically you cant run a web site or a game server from your home.

If we would all finally accept that its OK to pay for metered or tiered usage, the ISPs could get rid of these rules. Imagine if you wanted to boot up a 64 player BF3 server and you could do that from your home, and not only could you do that from your home but your ISP would encourage it because they would make more money off of you? Personally I would way rather live in that world then the one we live in now.
 
rudy said:
This here is the point, people want something for nothing, its not a good deal. There has to be some limit or way to charge people differently. Throttling and odd fees are the way they will attack.

If people grow up and stop expecting something for nothing and are willing to pay for what they use we can get past all this crap.

Companies make money one way or another you gotta learn to be willing to pay the company in a model that works out to enhance you experience not degrade it.
Click to expand...

Something for nothing? Hardly.

In my case, Canada has some of the lowest caps and costliest internet access fees in the world because of the large isp oligopoly here which are posting record profits. Yet at the same time they now feature their very own streaming services with unlimited viewing of what they want you to see essentially. Odd isn't it?

Business wise, I don't personally require 99.99% guarantied uptime with instant phone support as I would if I was IT support at a company which could incur colossal costs if the internet goes down. We are talking about two very different scenarios here.
 
Its not odd, its how a business makes money, Canada has a less dense population so it is no surprise they charge more for service since it cost them more to run lines per person. Like I said if you had ISPs that charged for data at a rate per GB then the ISP would have every interest in letting you do ANYTHING you want with your data. We have a small number of competitors here in the USA too, in most places you only have 2.

Instead we have the opposite ISPs charge set price for a certain speed and so the financial incentive is to get you to use as little as possible because they will not get any more money out of you every month no matter what. Think of unlimited ISPs exactly like their resturant counterpart, the all you can eat buffet. Are buffets known for their fine dining? Are they known for anything? No, why because they only get 1 price from you so they dont want you to stay around and they dont want you to use their service.

That is the core thing people are glossing over because we are in a tech oriented site and many people here probably have been in the great position for many years of benefiting from the fact that most of their neighbors didnt use hardly any bandwidth, so cable cos could afford to allow that 1 kid on the block to torrent to his hearts content so long as grandma and the soccer mom never did anything but check email once a day.

Now that everyone is watching netflix and eating up tons of bandwidth the cable cos are seeing the unlimited system fall apart. So naturally they will not take losses or lower profit, they will alter the business model. And what we see here in this very thread is exactly why they do what they do, because they know ignorant fear mongering and resistance to change will not allow them to move to an appropriate business model.

The whole argument that the cable cos want to push you to cable TV is fine but it has one serious flaw, they have always wanted to push to cable TV, that conflict of interest has never been absent. So clearly it cannot be the only motivation behind data caps, there must be some truth to the network congestion and over use. And on top of that it cannot explain caps by phone providers who often have no presence in a particular market so pushing people to cable / TV makes no sense for them.

You set up a set of rules, you call it a business model. The business model determines how you as the customer will be treated and what features and services you will receive. I personally would rather pay per GB of data because I believe it will push companies to give me faster internet, allow me to do anything I want with my internet including running web server and game servers from home, and they will provide me with more services for free. It is highly likely that netflix would become a free part of your cable package, or maybe rebranded if we paid for metered or tiered data plans.

On top of that it would be in the cable companies best interest to keep uptime at the highest level it could be, simply because down time = less money.

I would also imagine that cable cos would completely eliminate speed caps. Everyone would get the max bandwidth.

To me for the average of all Americans this would be a much more enjoyable internet.
 
That was pretty well done, something Brian spent quite a bit of time creating.
 
If the real concern that ISPs have is network congestion, it seems like opening up the local monopolies they have to competition would allow another provider to share in the network load.
 
I didn't bother reading through all of the pages of comments, but how many of you have worked with fiber before? Fiber, at least for the moment, has virtually unlimited bandwidth capability limited only by our lack of technology to separate light frequencies. I understand the buildout of fiber costs money, but this is where the government should be subsidizing infrastructure builds.

That being said there is no way an ISP can convince me right now that there needs to be data caps in place. It's simply a ploy to make more money. I personally feel large companies expect too much profit from their business. Especially right now, for instance. Inflation is out of control as utilities raise prices and wages stagnate or even get worse. Even my company expects 8% more profit this year and they continue to dole out negligible raises to their employee's. It's not a model that makes sense. Just because I have a pipe the same size as my neighbor doesn't necessarily mean I should pay more because I get more use out of it. I would argue to my neighbor they need to make better use of their pipe in fact.
 
Well technically everyone has a hard data cap.

(insert your speed) * 60sec * 60min * 24hr * 365days = hard data cap.
 
ravx25 said:
I didn't bother reading through all of the pages of comments, but how many of you have worked with fiber before? Fiber, at least for the moment, has virtually unlimited bandwidth capability limited only by our lack of technology to separate light frequencies. I understand the buildout of fiber costs money, but this is where the government should be subsidizing infrastructure builds.

That being said there is no way an ISP can convince me right now that there needs to be data caps in place. It's simply a ploy to make more money. I personally feel large companies expect too much profit from their business. Especially right now, for instance. Inflation is out of control as utilities raise prices and wages stagnate or even get worse. Even my company expects 8% more profit this year and they continue to dole out negligible raises to their employee's. It's not a model that makes sense. Just because I have a pipe the same size as my neighbor doesn't necessarily mean I should pay more because I get more use out of it. I would argue to my neighbor they need to make better use of their pipe in fact.
Click to expand...

Local municipalities are often in the shadow of Comcast, Verizon, or Time Warner. Typically they hang jobs and corporate growth for taxes over the heads of elected officials.

This is part of the race to the bottom and why the "states" system isn't used so much in more modern countries than the US. As started in NJ and DE, the dismantling of state and local regulation and control coincided with the relaxation of interstate commerce rules so companies were allowed to freely move, headquarter and do business in other states. State corporate taxes plummeted to attract job growth.

So after that what happens, or at least has happened here, is that Comcast swooped in and bought every potential competitor. They then set up a number of large employment centers which helped spur residential growth. Any time anyone in local government brings up a municipal ISP or running internet infrastructure for competitors to share like a utility, Comcast threatens to pull out a ton of jobs and raise prices. Court cases had to be brought against them for colluding with residential management companies as well where they were making deals to be the sole provider of internet to apartment buildings and newly built neighborhoods. They get gag orders on all of these settlements when possible.

It's weird. I live in Southern NJ and there are parts of this area that used to have heavy mob influence, but Comcast certainly found a legal and far more effective way to strong-arm local government than the mob ever did.


If you're looking for local government to subsidize internet infrastructure, I'd say you're going to be waiting a while if you've got one of the big ISPs set up shop in town.
 
Yakk said:
Well technically everyone has a hard data cap.

(insert your speed) * 60sec * 60min * 24hr * 365days = hard data cap.
Click to expand...

this is capped by time, not an arbitrary limit of data used within an specific timeset.
 
ravx25 said:
I didn't bother reading through all of the pages of comments, but how many of you have worked with fiber before? Fiber, at least for the moment, has virtually unlimited bandwidth capability limited only by our lack of technology to separate light frequencies. I understand the buildout of fiber costs money, but this is where the government should be subsidizing infrastructure builds.

That being said there is no way an ISP can convince me right now that there needs to be data caps in place. It's simply a ploy to make more money. I personally feel large companies expect too much profit from their business. Especially right now, for instance. Inflation is out of control as utilities raise prices and wages stagnate or even get worse. Even my company expects 8% more profit this year and they continue to dole out negligible raises to their employee's. It's not a model that makes sense. Just because I have a pipe the same size as my neighbor doesn't necessarily mean I should pay more because I get more use out of it. I would argue to my neighbor they need to make better use of their pipe in fact.
Click to expand...



with DWDM (Dense Wave Division Multiplexing) >1Tbps across links is certainly doable. bandwidth is only limited by the engineers and R&D money spent.
 
Well it all goes hand in hand with rampant capitalism. I have no problem with capitalism in a vacuum. It's the pinnacle of economies I would argue. However, in our political atmosphere, capitalism has morphed into almost a government type as businesses line the pockets of politicians for votes, etc. And then you have the people who always say they can be voted out. In my opinion, for as corrupt as Washington is, that corruption can not be voted out. Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I believe it will take a revolution of some type (if we even collectively care enough) to hit the reset button. I'm not even sure that's possible now though.

At any rate, about the topic in hand, I hear you. Cable companies have long had a death grip on municipalities. It's bad for business and chokes progression.
 
Kr1ll1n said:
<snip>
Last point; Those espousing internet access in other countries should understand that the US has the oldest copper infrastructure of all developed nations. Some of our physical lines are 100+ years old. That is a serious limiting factor in what our infrastructure can do.
Click to expand...

Then this video seems pretty damn well spot on, part of the video addresses this fact explicitly. If there are issues with local bandwidth but they keep pushing MOAR SPEED and piling more customers, and then more speed and more customers and more speed, then goes crying like a bitch that they can't handle it? If this were the case once again they'd stop upgrading their speed promises.

That said, this is true only for DSL, cable is in no way 100+ years old.
 
Its called a government sanctioned monopoly. The main problem is the government is not up with the times and needs to update things to treat all information providers the same, does not matter if they used to be a phone, tv, or internet provider, they now provide it all.

I have seen local places like wyandotte MI run their own cable service. Not sure if anyone is there and can chime in on if the competition is better, I noticed they had more options for service levels though.
 
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