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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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.