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Frontier Has No Plans For Data Caps As They're Not Necessary, Says CEO (consumerist.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Frontier's CEO Dan McCarthy has said at an investors conference that the company has no plans to institute data caps that squeeze overage fees from data-hungry customers, yet. "The nice part of technology and what has happened is that transport costs continue to decline," he explained. "We have not really started or have any intent about initiatives on usage based pricing," said McCarthy. "We want to make sure our products meet the needs of customers for what they want to do and it does not inhibit them or force them to make decisions on how they want to use the product." He did note that data caps could someday come into play: "There may be a time when usage-based pricing is the right solution for the market, but I really don't see that as a path the market is taking at this point in time." The gist of what McCarthy is saying as noted via Ars Technica is that data caps are a business decision, not a network necessity.
Maybe there are two sides to this argument... On the one side, the progress of technology over the last few years means that companies can squeeze ever more bandwidth out of existing infrastructure, whilst the profits they make would allow for re-investment in more bandwidth if really required. On the other hand, as with any "open access" to a resource, there will always be a greedy and abusive minority that consume considerably more data than average. The challenge for an ISP or telco is to strike that balance between reasonable pricing and protecting the reasonable majority from a handful of excessive users. Part of our challenge as consumers is that our society has become one in which companies are so fixated on profits over service - because "the market" expects it, that this forces companies to make short-sighted investment decisions. So when a telco digs up the road to lay new fiber, they might put in say 50-pair instead of 500 pairs because the latter would have cost 6-7 times more in material cost. But the labor would have been the same, and would have been a huge chunk of the cost. But companies today are no longer prepared to invest for the long term. Any investment for more than 5 years out is considered to be frivolous by the short-terming city traders, who expect a return on their investment tomorrow, not five years out. Sad that we are being technologically crippled by the money men...
I think GP was referring to this
Huh, they are capacity caps, not peak usage caps. How does it matter if you download now vs at night? Peak usage limits on bandwidth make total sense, but that's not what providers are doing.
How the market will react is by not purchasing bandwidth heavy services. And if the carriers start excluding specific services in the usage count, then they should not only lose their common carrier status but also all these right of way mono/duopolies that they are provided by regulations.
I think that Comcast's goal is to make you watch less streaming content from Netflix and the like, and watch more cable TV instead.
So, yeah, I guess that it "influences behavior", but in a completely self serving manner for Comcast.
Frontier doesn't seem to care what you use their broadband for. Hell... they have Netflix built into the IPTV boxes, and offer Amazon Prime subscriptions to new customers.
Frontier just acquired about half of Verizon's FIOS customers, maybe more. They certainly aren't just DSL.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.