The only way this would be beneficial to consumers though would probably be to have the government regulate it so that the pricing isn't ridiculous. 10 cents a GB is reasonable. $1 per GB is not(and I bet the cable companies would be closer to that price point, than the 10 cents, if given the opportunity to choose themselves)
Also, they specifically chose cities that are labeled as up-and-coming or as fastest growing.
If they tried to dramatically increase prices in captive markets, the FCC would hammer them.
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This. Ditto for San Francisco. Remember when Google tried to give free WiFi in SF? Hippies of all sorts opposed it for every reason from fear of radio waves to just plain hatred of a corporation for being a corporation. The self righteous windbags in SF HATE Google and the moron city supervisors listen to them so there won't be Google fiber in SF any time soon.
I've seen people say that Comcast's meter is widely off on data usage. Like the day before they implemented the caps, a person was a at 162gb, the day after, 292gb. I wouldn't be surprised to find out Comcast is purposely misstated data usage in order to generate more profit for themselves.
I hear this all the time (I live in an area with lots of capped satellite connections). The truth of the matter is that 99% of end users have no idea what their computer is actually doing, how to view current connections and throughput on their routers, or what processes consume more data than others.
Yeah but we should certainly trust comcast, who doesn't have a history of fucking over its customers at all. Maybe those people that finally find themselves capped by comcast can pay the extra $30 a month for unlimited data, which comcasts own metering software tells these people that they are close to their cap.
Its very possible that a lot of people don't know how much data they are using but I'll side with the consumer every time over Comcast, a company with a history of screwing over their customers. The fact that comcast will let people buy their way out of the caps for an extra $30 a month, just proves that their caps are in place to generate extra profit for Comcast and to stifle streaming in favor of comcast's own video services.
No, every customer should learn at least the minimal basics of their internet connection (latency, throughput, jitter, packetloss), but that just isnt going to happen in this day and age. A lot of consumer routers even have total usage tracking built in, but most people don't even know how to log into their router let alone set that up. Comcast still totally sucks dick but I'd wager for every 100 claims of "NO WAY NO WAY I USED ALL THAT" there is probably about 1 legit metering error.
I posted early in this thread that cord cutters were in a savings bubble, and that it wouldn't last. I also posted that we would see one of the following in the very near future on basically every internet connection: slower speeds, caps, or much higher prices (think $200/month). You are replacing TV services, which you paid probably $100/month for + had advertisements, for $60/month (internet + hulu). Until Charlie Sheen cant command $1mill an episode, that is the world that we live in.
EDIT: And to reiterate, I run a small rural ISP, and I do not have any caps. I fucking hate caps. However, instead my customers have to deal with what most of you would literally kill yourselves slow speeds (1.5Mbps to 3Mbps download speeds). I have customers who pass 300gb every single month. And, I have 1 customer who streams Netflix to 4 (four)! devices at the same time on their 1.5Mbps connection. Big downloads suck for them, but it is rather impressive what you can accomplish with slower speeds. All of my competitors offer faster speeds and no caps as well, but they bleed customers due to peak time congestion. Mine all have rock solid jitter, low latency, and advertised speeds during peak hours. In 5 years, I have lost a total of 3 customers to my competitors (<1%).
I'd wager it is more because it costs money to move data (infrastructure or oversell). So, the more data you move the more it costs Comcast. The more data the average customer consumes, the more they have to decrease their oversell ratio to account for the increased load, or invest in infrastructure upgrades.
I caught them packet shaping and terminating TCP connections. They simply handwaved and insisted it must be my equipment. Strangely it stopped.
Yea, not actually. I mean they were doing it more viciously - they were actually doing TCP resets by altering the packet headers. I had logs from a server I was testing it on because I couldn't download a P2P patch (I think from the old wow installer) at the time.
Yes that happened in 2007. I thought you were speaking of something that hasn't already been addressed by the FCC.
Do network appliances that meter connections go through a certification and testing process by state regulator boards that deal with weights and measures? Guessing not.
All bit meters must pass the 7 stages of worthiness as foreshadowed by the regional high priestess and thus be certified as lacking to all maleficent or equitable misgivings.
