- Joined
- Feb 4, 2008
- Messages
- 1,602
- Reaction score
- 71
- Points
- 48
- Location
- Detroit, Michigan
- Your Mac's Specs
- MacBook Pro M1 Pro - 16 GB RAM - 512 GB SSD - macOS Monterey
250GB isn't too bad but terminating your service for going over it twice in 6 months seems a bit extreme!
Wireless carriers do it, too.
250GB is a lot NOW. It won't be in 3 years. Who's to stop them? No one, but you have options.250GB bandwith is a lot. But say they implement this. Fine. But what if say a year later they say hey this isn't working. We need to downsize the limit to 100GB then even less. Who's to stop them?
For that reason I am against the idea.
But most wireless carriers don''t advertise the service as "unlimited", nor are you locked into service with one particular vendor.
In this country, it's mostly rare that more than one broadband service is available in a given area.
Not sure what you mean by "vendor." Do you mean carrier?
Until recently, most wireless carriers that offered flat-rate, unlimited-use data plans used the word "unlimited" in their marketing, even if it had an asterisk after it. AT&T Mobility is one example, and I know because only recently did they start mentioning a 5 GB cap.
Another example is Sprint. Their Simply Everything says unlimited, although you have to read the fine print to find out that they don't want you running a server.
If you mean the United States, that's incorrect. According to a January 2008 NTIA, report, 91.5 percent of Zip codes are served by at least three competing broadband providers.
Yes, carrier.
But does that make it right?
Sorry, but I won't accept that report as gospel. My company deploys hundreds of work-at-home employees in home offices throughout the country and in the vast majority of cases, only one broadband provider is available (and I'm intentionally excluding Satellite and wireless providers, since those services bring with them a ton of caveats).
Unless you've got an unlocked phone or can get the unlock code, you're stuck with the carrier that subsidized your phone's retail price. In the industry, that's known as "subsidy lock."
I don't have a problem with AT&T's 5 GB limit because they don't enforce it unless you go waaaay over that. I know because I regularly use twice that much per month, and I've never heard anything or been charged extra. Same thing for Sprint: For years I've been using my PPC-6700 as a radio by listening to stations' streams, and Sprint has never complained or charged me extra.
If you exclude wireless and satellite ops, of course it's going to be less than three or less than 91.5 percent. Personally I don't have a problem with cellular broadband in terms of speed or pricing. In fact, in some places, it's faster and a better deal than what you get from, say, CenturyTel.
On the wired side, 32 percent of rural service providers have deployed FTTC or FTTH, nearly triple from 2005. So even in the boondocks, you often can get multi-megabit service.
My point is that this isn't an apt analogy. In the wireless phone world, you might have to pay a penalty to get out of your contract, but at least you have the ability to leave under protest and go to multiple carriers of your choosing. This is not always true of the broadband market. So, in some markets you're locked into one provider and have limited choice.
I'm sure it's not a big deal in that industry
but the many and varied uses for broadband keep on growing, so instead of beefing up their infrastructure, Comcast has chosen to crack down on utilization. To me, that's wrong - especially when one of the primary benefits of broadband has historically been "unlimited" service. I can certainly understand if Comcast wants to offer tiered service for less money. But to take an existing service and subtract value from it, without lowering the cost is a problem for me.
Again, it depends on the types of networks (e.g., DSL, sat) that you're willing to limit yourself to. I'd love to have FiOS, but it's not available in my area. So I content myself with cable, which is about 12 Mbps down.
It's a huge deal. For example, in a suburban or urban area, if the carrier has enough high-bandwidth users, it either has to add radios and more backhaul to each cell site, or it has to start splitting cells to add capacity, at $100K-$250K per base station. That's part of the appeal of WiMAX, which supposedly has a cost structure three to five times lower than 3G: They can cater to heavy data users without charging more than the cellular ops -- or at least that's what WiMAX ops hope.
Or Comcast, et al are adding limitations to an existing service rather than raising prices, which they probably can't do in many markets because of the competitive environment.
How do you know that Comcast hasn't beefed up its infrastructure? You can find out by looking through their SEC filings to see what their capex is. Somebody has gotta pay for that, and I don't think shareholders are going to be willing to foot that bill. Neither are most customers, so caps might be their only option to make the numbers add up.
I could care less how they foot the bill. If it weren't profitable, they wouldn't be in the business. My problem with Comcast is that the product was sold as one thing, but morphed into another and many consumers are left in the lurch as a result.
Clearly Comcast isn't willing to invest in the appropriate infrastructure to maintain the established performance level without limiting consumption. That may be a wise move from a shareholder's perspective, but it's still anti-consumer.
Exactly how many are left in the lurch? I haven't seen any numbers in the press.
Plus, Comcast and the other ISPs can add all of the capacity they want, but unless the big backbone providers do likewise, we'll have the same situation: a minority of bandwidth hogs deteriorating service for everyone else.
Do you work for Comcast or something? I only ask because it seems like you're taking a really hard line on this.
I just think it sucks for all of the reasons I've outlined in previous posts. I'm really not prepared to produce statistics here, just express my opinion, myopic as it may be.
I can agree from that standpoint, but I don't think the limitations of the backbone providers are the cause for this action on Comcast's part, do you? I mean, Verizon has yet to impose similar limitations and they're supplying quite a bit more bandwidth in some of their FIOS tiers.