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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.
the Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material
They're Great!!
Most consumers can deal with a data cap fine... if it is reasonable. It turns out most people are reasonable Internet users: They use it to get what they want, and leave it idle otherwise so that others can share. It is only some people who really abuse it (like torrent heads who download any and everything just to have it) that would complain about any cap, no matter what it is.
However rather than use it as a tool to help network quality, ISPs get greedy and try to use it to milk extra money from consumers. That means they want to set the cop too low on purpose, so people overrun it and have to pay more.
Like I have no issue with my data cap on Cox. For one, it is quite reasonable, 2TB. That's a lot of usage, even with a high speed line. So the chances of me hitting it are very low, even if I have a month where I'm using a ton of data for whatever reason (like restoring from an online backup or something). Also it is a soft cap. If I hit it they don't shut me off, just call me and pester me (or maybe not even that if it isn't much over, I don't know I've never hit it). Only if there are repeated problems would they act.
Now compare that to my boss who's on Comcast and ends up hitting his cap every month. Part of that is because he has a family whereas I'm single but more is because it is a 300GB cap. Our line speeds are the same (or near enough) but Comcast gives 15%ish of the bandwidth and it is a hard cap, you go over you pay a ludicrous amount for more. He's really annoyed, and I would be too in that situation.
It seems when they start charging money for it, they just can't help but get greedy and stupid.
That was a tongue in cheek comment, since at some level *all* data is metered.
But the economics are quite different now than they were a few years ago.
Hosting that used to cost $10,000 a month because of transfers can now be had for less than $100 or $200.
We're talking about residential broadband here, and the incumbent Cable TV firms that are providing that badly want to protect their
expensive traditional Cable TV service which many people don't see as necessary anymore.
We want to stream what we want when we want.
We don't care that something is aired at 8PM on Tuesday, and we want to FF the commercials.
The data caps are to hamstring that. They will not be successful, in a little while.
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Look, the simple fact is us consumers are being abused. The caps are intentionally too low, because they have no purpose other than to squeeze out more revenue. It's rent seeking. The sick part is we built their tenements for them. We gave the ISPs billions in tax subsidies to build out better infrastructure, and they didn't. Rather, they kept the subsidies AND retained ownership of the infrastructure. I don't actually give a shit how we solve it, but less regulation is not the solution in this case. Unlike what seems like everyone sometimes, I don't have an ideological position for more or less regulation. Some regulation helps and some hurts. It's not all bad, and it's not all good. But, it's clear that the broadband industry needs more regulation. Here's my position: as long as low regulation and deregulation is working for all of us, great. But, when an industry is clearly abusing its consumers and obviously has no intention or incentive to change, it's time to bring out the big regulatory hammer. I guess we no longer have a big hammer. The only regulation that seems to pass anymore is regulatory capture benefiting the entrenched players.
We need out legislature to work for us. Look at the democratic race. It basically centers around the fact that even if the Bernie has more popular support, the party will just give the super delegates to Hillary. They're fucking us. They are fucking us harder than the ISPs. And, we still don't vote third party. No, that would be throwing your vote away. It's like high school. If you don't vote for the most popular candidate for student council, it's because you're a loser. If you don't vote for a major party, it's throwing your vote away, because you picked a loser. Jesus, this country is fucking retarded.
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.
Then how about offering different tiers? You want the basic stuff with limited bandwidth, pay less, you want the premium package with unlimited everything, pay more.
But that's not what ISPs want to sell. They want to sell you insane speeds with anemic data amounts, because it's cheaper to put high speed connections to your home than it is to ensure that their backbones can actually handle it if everyone actually used what they pay for.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
For exactly the same reason as these data caps exist: ISPs vastly oversell their resources. And it ain't the first time, remember when dialup was the norm and you could barely ever reach your ISP because he though 100 lines is enough for a million customers, since, well, why would anyone ever want to be online 24/7?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
They (we) don't want unlimited bandwidth. They want to use the bandwidth for as long as they want (and paid for), not some ridiculously short time and then get charged again for the bandwidth that they already paid for. For example, 50Mbps is good for 16TB/month, not 200GB/month. A broadband connection that's capped at 200GB is a burstable 0.6Mbps connection, not a 50Mbps connection.
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.
Data caps exist to make profit for the ISP nothing else.
Data caps do nothing to stop congestion as everybody is free to download at full speed up until their cap during which time congestion reigns.
This could also be completely mitigated by restricting speeds to a manageable level. That's your overselling of resources.
data caps don't do anything to resolve that; they just make money for the ISP.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
When you say "Freeloaders" do you mean the ISPs? They took government money to provide fast service, and then didn't build out, so that seems a charitable term to use for them.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
that Cox (or was it Comcast) reported in their SEC filing that the actual cost of providing broadband is about $7/mo (total cost). Being an SEC filing it wasn't likely to be a lie (you don't lie to investors. Everyone else, ok, but not investors ).
/. but I pay $75/mo. There's really only 1 broadband provider. In theory I could go with DSL but it's slow, very unreliable and when it breaks they don't fix it. They just wait for you to cancel service and go back to cable.
:(. I miss doing things for the public good. And I miss the days (how brief) when we didn't just hand billions of dollars worth of public infrastructure to companies so they could take on a 90% surcharge.
I don't know about the rest of
When we have a service that has so much demonstrated value and that virtually everybody wants and that costs only $7/mo to provide you'd think we'd make it a public utility. Of course, everytime we suggest that it gets shouted down with "Do whatever you want just not with _my_ money!"...
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"There can be no "unlimited" plans period. They don't work. All you can eat may work for Golden Corral, not so much for an ISP."
You mean, they can't work over there in the Corporatist States of America, right? Because it clearly works here in Sweden, with plenty of ISP's competing. Right now, it's saturday prime time, and I still get my full capacity, despite living in a neighbourhood where my ISP alone has over 400 households as customers, and 80 in my house alone.
This is about landline ISPs introducing caps. A 1 GB cap on your home internet would be ridiculous. There is at least a fair argument about available bandwidth in the wireless space as it's a fixed medium that can't be extended. Wired infrastructure just needs more wires added if there's congestion at promised speeds.
"But investment costs money!" yes it does. Now ask yourself why these ISPs are blocking any other providers from moving into their areas? Because they don't want the competition and are buying (and actually writing!) the laws to do this. linky
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
While I realise some customers in the USA may have only one choice of ISP
That assumption is why you don't understand. It's not some, it's most. Here's an excerpt from a report from the US Department of Commerce:
[...] only 37 percent of the population had a choice of two or more providers at speeds of 25 Mbps or greater;only 9 percent had three or more choices.
Source.
Another article says basically the same thing, coming from the FCC.
And even when customers DO have a choice, I wonder how often one of them would offer 'Unlimited' when its competitor doesn't.