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Comcast Users Must Now Pay $50 Per Month Extra To Avoid Caps (dslreports.com)
Karl Bode, reporting for DSLReports: In a letter being sent to Comcast customers in usage capped markets, the company says that with the recent announcement of usage caps being bumped to 1 terabyte, the company is also capping the amount of additional charges capped users can incur -- to $200 in a single month. As it stands, customers that cross the 1 terabyte limit face overage fees of $10 per each additional 50 GB consumed. But under the revised plans, customers have to pay $50 (up from $30 to $35) extra per month to avoid usage caps entirely. "Because you are an unlimited data customer, we will maintain your current rate of $35 until the end of 2016," the letter reads. Comcast's recent decision to bump their caps to 1 terabyte weren't driven by altruism. With the FCC preventing Charter from imposing caps for seven years as a merger condition, the agency has signaled that it may start getting more serious about cracking down on usage caps in the broadband market.
. . . pity we can't say, "Sorry, but when I signed, the terms were unlimited bandwidth for $X/month. I haven't signed any changes to the agreement, so deliver, bitches. . . "
But what can you say about an ISP whose Customer Service Policy is cribbed from "50 Shades of Grey" ???
Don't worry. When I'm president we're going to have the best caps. Tremendous, tremendous caps. The smartest caps, not stupid caps.
You are welcome on my lawn.
On the backbone, assuming you buy at big ISP scale, 100Mbps dedicated and symmetric costs less than $50 per month. The last mile costs roughly the same whether you use it for 1Mbps or 100Mbps. Volume caps have no effect on congestion (because they reduce off-peak usage, not peak usage.) This is a shakedown, money-grab, market failure.
The cable companies have already admitted that caps aren't due to network congestion. They are because of two factors:
1) The cable companies want more money.
and
2) Streaming video cuts into their traditional TV profits. Caps and overages help limit how much people can stream. (And give the cable companies more money if you do stream.)
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Really, this is voted as +5 Informative here on *Slashdot*?! Comcast are not going to be laying OC3 lines all over the place. OC3 costs so much because it is strung directly to your office building or whereever. When you are talking about the cost of bandwidth to Comcast, it is the cost of IP transit. Right now you can get a 1Gbps (with a full cabinet for your equipment) for $400/month: https://he.net/special.pdf (I have nothing to do with them other than that I used to be happy customer for a long while). If you need just IP transit (no cabinet), it goes down to $0.32/Mbps per month. To transfer 1 Tb of data per month (i.e. their current cap), you need about 4 Mbps of bandwidth. So the data cost to Comcast is roughly $1.28 for each 1Tb. So please, let's stop with the bullshit indeed.