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Broadband CEOs Admit Usage Caps Are Nothing More Than A Toll On Uncompetitive Markets (techdirt.com)

Though giant ISPs such as AT&T and Comcast continue to impose caps on users with several of their data plans, a crop of local ISPs is no longer hesitating from admitting that there is no justification for these caps as the cost to provide broadband services has only dropped in the past years. From a TechDirt article (condensed): "The cost of increasing [broadband] capacity has declined much faster than the increase in data traffic," says Dane Jasper, CEO of Sonic, an independent ISP based in Santa Rosa, Calif. [...] Frontier Communications CEO Dan McCarthy adds, "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." Suddenlink CEO Jerry Kent said, "I think one of the things people don't realize [relates to] the question of capital intensity and having to keep spending to keep up with capacity. Those days are basically over, and you are seeing significant free cash flow generated from the cable operators as our capital expenditures continue to come down."

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  1. Re:Free Market by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Troll

    Oh bullshit. You know damn good and well the real barrier to entry lies in the physical world. In order to maintain your delusion that the 'free market' is some magical happy land for both the producer and the consumer you bitch at every regulation that is in place, safe in the knowledge that regulation isn't going away so you won't be proven wrong. Meanwhile, you're completely and intentionally unaware of how those regulations came to be in the first place.

    Regulated or not, it's the market position that creates these problems, not regulation.