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Consumer Complaints About Broadband Caps Are Soaring (dslreports.com)
Karl Bode, reporting for DSL Reports: Consumer complaints to the Federal Communications Commission about broadband data caps rose to 7,904 in the second half of 2015 from 863 in the first half, notes a new report by the Wall Street Journal. The Journal filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the agency to obtain the data on complaints, which have spiked as a growing number of fixed-line broadband providers apply caps and overage fees to already pricey connections. According to the Journal, the FCC has received 10,000 consumer complaints about data caps since 2015.
I pay extra for a "business connection". No caps, static IPs, PTR records, no DCMA torrent monitoring, etc. The only issue I've ran into is a layer-7 SMTP block, which got removed with a phone call. But having to pay $95 a month for it does suck quite a bit. Several years ago I knew this was coming; once we got "conditioned" via cellular data caps, hardline caps were next. Without specific laws to stop them, corps will do everything and anything for extra profit. Good luck with those complaints, your also probably locked into a forced non-court arbitration agreement in your multi-volume "terms of service contract" too.
If I had to pay for my bandwidth, I figure our bill would be at $600-$800 a month. Maybe less now that UVerse was bumped up. I forgot to install bandwidthD, and AT&T's page just says "your unlimited so we don't know" on my current usage lol.
There are better ways of doing it than caps. There are a ton of QOS type tools that work much better than caps. Probably one of the best is where there are different buckets. For instance you get full bandwidth for the first 10G/day, after that it is throttle at halfspeed for the next 10G. You can also give free data after hours just like they used to for cellphones where it's cheaper at night. If instead of trying to gouge customers at the top with overage charges and trying to gouge customers at the bottom by selling them a high speed connection to check their email, companies actually looked at their customer base and came up with plans that were optimized for their customers instead of optimized for profit then you could make virtually everyone happy. Most of the torrent people know that they are heavy users and are smart enough to schedule downloads for overnight hours if the rules are clear. Yes, having posted limits is more complicated than just saying "unlimited" but there is really no such thing as "unlimited". Unlimited phone calls and texting only works because a person has to physically sit there and do it so it sets an artificial limit. It would be easy to have unlimited internet if the person had to be sitting in front of their computer to do it but when computers are on 24/7 then you need some sort of policy to make it fair for both heavy and light users.