I understand your general argument, but at what point does the electric company shut off electricity to your house because you've used too many kWh? Seems to me you'll just pay for whatever you use, regardless of the amount.
I hear you HeyP, but if there has ever been a corporation that has earned distrust and resentment; Comcast is that corporation. Every interaction that I've had with them tells me that whatever their plan is, they will find a way to screw their customers with it. I hate it that they're the innovators and the first to move towards this. If you think you've had billing nightmares dealing with Comcast before, wait till you get a load of this...
I love telecommunications monopolies! If it's a board game it's gotta be good for us, like Candyland/chutes and ladders.
I noticed you left off unlimited telephone minutes because that's a closer analogy to unlimited data. And yes, we have many companies offering unlimited minutes. Comcast can do as they please just like Ma Bell use to do as they pleased. The point of usage based billing being unfair is because the pricing we are talking about ($60 for 300GB/uncapped), becomes $55 for 5GB, not $1 for 5GB. I could certainly live in a world where every 5GB is $1 and would find ways to minimize my usage. Even with a flat $10 connect fee or whatever would be fine. The savings from the company by a user essentially not using their service is not passed back to the user. It just allows the company from never having to upgrade their infrastructure. And data caps would also force provider companies into "partnering" with Comcast like the T-mobile deals with streaming music. Imagine how much more money Netflix would need to pay for their service to not count against the cap. I'm very open to a electricity based type of billing usage as soon as Comcast falls under Title II and we can get competing service and regulatory pricing. I'd imagine my internet service would get a lot cheaper then.
They only shut you off when the grid runs out of capacity to supply everyone. Telephone minutes are a better analogy because there is a real and significant variable cost associated with producing the electricity, water, and gas that is consumed. I'm not in telecom but I think the bulk of their costs are fixed costs. Charging by capacity (internet speed) probably makes more sense than by volume, imo. Charging by the GB is rather like the power utility model though that passes through the wholesale electricity cost (they don't make margin on the commodity) but charge for transmission and distribution of that electricity -- the use of their power line infrastructure. They all settled on a model where customers are charged by kwh so big users pay more than small users. But, the cost of hooking a small user to the grid is actually the same as hooking up a large user and the real difference between one house and another for the utility is how much electricity they can use at any one moment. The system was sustainable only because there is generally a correlation between how much capacity a house needs and how much volume they consume. As rooftop solar proliferates though, it exposes a weakness in the system as more and more houses want the benefits of the infrastructure while paying very little for the privilege because they don't consume many kwh. They can have large capacity requirements at any one time when the sun isn't shining, but by month's end haven't consumed much total volume. That problem is surmountable for the generator and the retailer, but it's a big problem for the TDU who is trying to offset fixed costs with variable revenues. Internet service probably doesn't have that particular weakness. But these pricing questions are tricky.
Telephone minutes is not a good analogy at all. The only thing that affects a POTS is an increase of actual users, not the quality or quantity of the call. There are physical limits that you can send through copper and fiber. Not only are we increasing users, we are increasing how much data and how fast we send it. And its increasing at an exponential rate, not a fixed rate.
Let's set redundant caps on size when the technology just keeps growing in scale. 4K streaming demands 44-60 GB per movie. Let's make a cap that's 300! What about lossless audio? What about HD picture files! No, let's act like technology with never get faster! 300GB will be enough. I remember when OLD people never thought we'd use more than 2GB of Internet on our phones. They know what their talking about.
Wouldn't the move to usage based billing just impose artificial throttling anyway or massive congestion issues? Peak times would be a disaster if the upper bounds were reached by everyone's (now unlimited speed dependent on hardware/router bottlenecks) bandwidth requests during peak hours of the day. It'd be like how my university's wifi allocation works. Everyone gets free 500MB of data per week at uncapped speeds on that finite gigabit connection that the university offers. You can pay more for a higher data cap, but everything will slow down to a crawl during peak hours. You are already seeing people in apartment complexes and in dense urban areas on a single node seeing massive slow downs in peak hours because everyone else is running on the same node at the same time. This would be amplified if speed tiers were eliminated. ISPs were given $200 billion by the government to replace copper with fiber anyway. Its not the consumers fault that they failed to accommodate for exponential increases in bandwidth needs. The consumers funded them.
Everyone kind of ignored this post but I think it is pretty relevant. I use AT&T. They don't seem to have a utility that I can find to tell you what your data usage is so I have no idea how many Gb I average month to month, but it doesn't sound to me like Ron's household is that uncommon. HeyP likes to generalize all the complainers as households of college kids streaming HD non-stop or downloading torrents day and night, but I think there is a significant faction of households with families with multiple kids, tablets, ipads, etc along with stream Netflix services. Those households will routinely go over this 300 Gb threshold and Comcast knows it. At that level and with online streaming services going the way they are I think the people that will be negatively effected by this is way more than dorms full of college kids.
More KW hours of electricity takes more coal and natural gas More water takes more storage and treatment Once you have set up the capacity to promote and sell 50MBS per customer, there is very little added cost for high usage (other than the fact they oversell there capacity) High usage might not be a right, but high rates are now a necessity for the expanding commerce of the internet and advancing applications like 4k tv. It all got screwed way back when cities thought cable TV was a civic need and gave cable providers monopoly agreements without much regulation to provide the infrastructure without public investment. That tv infrastructure morphed into internet service without much understanding of the future possibilities; things exist today that we couldn't imagine in our wildest dreams in 1975. It's time for an adjustment in the industry, a separation of access and content.
THIS. Right here. THIS. The problem is exactly as REEKO just described. I carry around IN MY POCKET every day approximately 65 GB of data storage without even thinking about it - phone, data card, and a 16GB USB stick on my KEYCHAIN. It wasn't very long ago that an idea like that would have been preposterous. I can now burn data disks on my own home computer which can hold anywhere from 25 to 50GB of data EACH, and they come in spindles of 100! I can go buy a 2TB portable hard drive for around $70. This is what the consumer sees every day. Data, data, data. Data everywhere, and its use and volume is GROWING, every day. We are sold 'unlimited data' from every corner - by our phone provider, by our internet services. We are told, nay, DEMANDED, to 'STREAM THIS! STREAM THAT! PLAY THIS GAME ONLINE! SHARE YOUR PICTURES AND MUSIC ALL OVER EVERYWHERE!' It's endless and only growing louder. So we understand intuitively why 'unlimited data usage' goes hand-in-hand with this growing data world. ANd then we see these 'caps' being whispered about. And we as consumers know instinctively that we have been set up. Because we see how much it GROWS, and we see that a CAP does NOT grow, and we know that, probably sooner rather than later, if we live in a 'capped' world, we will be coming up against that cap inevitably, and in the end it is all about just trying to take more money out of our pockets. We are being force-fed a data addiction, only then to be shackled with data caps afterward. So we will have to choose: do I want to watch my shows this month? Yeah, but I will have to pay like an extra $30 to do so... Unless you PAY EXTRA!!! Yarr!! It's brilliant scammery of the highest order. Maybe a lot of you don't remember the early days of the internet, especially with something like America Online, which basically charged you by the MINUTE. You were charged for your TIME connected, not your speed or your data usage. People instinctively developed the habit of 'logging-in-checking-email-replying-to-email-read-a-headline-maybe-all-of-it-as-quickly-as-humanly-possible-then-logoff-NOW-NOW-NOW!!!'. That was no way for anyone to have to live, and relatively quickly other ISP's got the message and sold their internet access as 'unlimited access' as it should have been all along. And that was before 'high speed' anything, before streaming, before Netflix, online gaming, Hulu, Pandora, etc etc etc. So people are not going to be blithely accepting of data caps, ever. Even if the cap is so high as to not bother the vast majority of people, it's the PRINCIPLE involved, and an instinctive understanding that a big cap TODAY equals a small cap TOMORROW. And that is not going to work in a growing data world. Besides, why have a cap at ALL if it is allegedly so high as to not interfere with the vast majority of users? We know when people are trying to rip us off, and we know when we are being set up. This is a long-range set-up for a massive rip-off down the road. Hopefully consumers will not ever put up with data caps, and will speak with their feet and their wallets by taking their business elsewhere when these companies try to slide these data caps in under our noses. And before HP blows a gasket, I am a low data user, I stream a bit of Netflix and Amazon Prime, I play some games online, I watch Youtube, and I browse the internet. I am pretty sure I wouldn't come up against that 300GB cap any time soon. But I will eventually, especially as higher-bandwidth streaming becomes more and more ubiquitous. So it's the principle of the thing, mainly. I will not EVER willingly or knowingly give one dime to an ISP who has placed a data cap on my usage. And hopefully there is enough competition out there from companies who understand this basic truth: people do NOT want data caps, even if it will not (immediately) affect them.
Exactly. This is just them trying to recoup their losses from declining TV subscribers, nothing more.
The question then is, should they be able to use their monopoly status to do that? or should utility monopolies return 5% to their investors?
Interesting . . . . . Reminds me of when Texting was becoming popular The places Charged PER TEXT . . until someone did UNLIMITED TEXTING Then it comes out that Texting basically cost the company nothing Per Text was just Free Money If per HeyP - they will open the gates and let the horse run free speed wise Unlimited usage but you gonna pay per GB Is Per GB the next FREE MONEY for these guys. If I use 2 GB versus 1 GB . . .. . am I truly using twice as many of the company's resources? Rocket River
The problem is, AT&T isn't available everywhere. Here in Eugene it's comcast or some ancient DSL company. Charter is also here, but Charter only has services in areas that Comcast doesn't! It was the same way in Tucson with Cox and Comcast. You're stuck. I'm fine with comcast charging whatever they feel is fair, but there is a lack of parity in the market to keep them honest. I'm not saying their rates are not fair, or even overpriced, I'm saying they carve out regions and avoid competition to such perfection I don't even know what a fair price for internet/TV/other junk would be.
And it's silly to think we've hit that physical limit considering earlier this year this happened: http://www.gizmag.com/dtu-world-record-data-transmission-43tbps/33214/ http://www.alcatel-lucent.com/press...ed-10-gbps-transmission-data-over-traditional So it's up to last mile providers and the major interconnects to actually upgrade infrastructure to accommodate increasing demand. Instead what we see is lobbying for legislature and business practices to keep the status quo. With the type of profits they earn, I'm not exactly falling for the woe is me line. These aren't exactly airlines with razor thin margins. http://arstechnica.com/business/201...ofited-1-9-billion-in-first-3-months-of-2014/
Comcast is one of the greatest inventions of all time. I use it daily. It's right up there with the VCR, GPS, Iphone and Walkman.
