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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...
Comcast, are you listening?
You don't -have- to be dicks, you choose to.
I think GP was referring to this
In most of Frontier's service areas "broadband" counts as shitty adsl where you are lucky if you get 3mb/s down. They don't need caps, because you can't download anything anyways.
Seriously, if you've got the choice between Frontier and 4G connection, go with whatever 4G provider there is. Praise FSM if you've got Comcast in a Frontier service area. Seriously, Frontier is that bad, you will be BEGGING for Comcast. They're that bad.
Frontier pretty much has taken over the unprofitable areas of Verizon's wireline business. They have no desire for infrastructure upgrades, or really anything other than getting you to keep paying.
If it is mostly DSL, might the quote be translated to:
"We deliver service over an inherently bandwidth limited transport technology. We don't need caps because our delivery technology is too slow for anyone to reach them anyway."
The users hear "caps are unnecessary". The investors hear "there will be caps when the market is ready to pay more". Everybody's happy. Good CEO.
I remember them singing a much different tune a few years ago - back about the same time Time Warner started playing with the idea, they were only too happy to institute caps, and when in Rochester, NY you had Frontier with caps, and TWC threatening them, people got so pissed off we nearly had them pushing for a law against data caps in Congress.
What you hear in the ear, preach from the rooftop Matthew 10.27b
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.
I think GP was referring to this
The summary should have mentioned that the company is Frontier Communications. It should have also mentioned that nearly all of their customers are on DSL. It is easy to offer no data caps when your customers are sucking data through a narrow straw and aren't going to get much anyway.
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.