Thanks for the venue
George

I agree on service, but the fact is, this is what the way it is now. Rochester NY, where I live, is the 3rd most populous city in NY and the second largest economy in NY. But we have none of the large players except for TWC. Batavia has Verizon FIOS. They are a small town about 20 mins or so away. Alot of the areas that either have data caps or they were trying to be introduced are the in the same boat.

I have paid $50 a month (I don’t have TWC cable) since RR was available in my area. That is about 10 years ago. The only time my bill went up is when they offered a higher speed tier, now it is $60. I know people are sensitive to price, but how can you argue with a price that hasn’t change in 10 years?

That is why you have speed tiered packages. People can save money with the slower service and spend more money with the higher services.

I just don’t get why they have to change the model. If it really is a small percentage of people that use alot of bandwidth, why can’t they manage that bandwidth that they are using just like they do today? If it is P2P, make all P2P traffic slower.

Even though the caps may be big today (at least some of them, alot of them a dubious), we have seen the price get raised, caps get lowered and caps enforced on almost everyone in Canada. ‘

The congestion is pretty straight forward. How much data you download or upload is not a way to bill customers. Someone can be using the network 24 houts a day, 7 days a week and use more network resources over the course of the month then someone doing burst of 5 or even 10Gb per day for a few hours, especially at night when the network is less utilized.

I know you think network management is a better answer than caps. The problem I have that we should be pushing them to network management, and better equipment verses saying OK, caps are OK if that is all your going to implement.

Taking the second best thing is not a good way to go about it. Once data caps are in place on ISPs, do you really think that they will ever look at any other solution to manage their network? Especially when they have to spend money to get those data caps in place?

Especially, with TWCs own data, in a small town – Beamont, TX, 12% of their customers spent an avergage of $20 more a month on their internet bill. While a majority of people may have stayed under their caps, there is still 12% of the people that had their bills raised by an average of 50% if their cable internet bill was $40.

There may be other reasons for bit rate pricing — the idea that low bit users should pay less, so long as the basic service is not too limited (and the companion piece by Ou shows that the US isn’t a laggard in this respect).

There are some places that don’t have great service, and there are a few places in rural America that have no access to anything other than Satellite service. Internet access is not going to be the same everywhere unfortunately, and that holds true for any country. It’s a harsh reality, and it’s a totally different problem altogether than what we are talking about here. The rural and underserved problem deserves a different discussion.

I don’t get your question on congestion. As for Cable TV, it has no resemblance to Internet access. It is a broadcast technology that where the same data of every channel is broadcast to every home whether they have their TV on or not. It’s an efficient way of sending content to a large group of people without having to replicate the bandwidth.

As for raising prices $10 across the board, that would actually allow for a much more generous cap for everyone. The problem is that people are very price sensitive, and the broadband business is very competitive between cable and Telco in nearly 9 out of 10 homes in America, and they’re competing on price. More importantly, if the current 150 GB and 250 GB caps suit more than 95% of the population, why should 95% of the population pay $10 more per month just so that the remaining 5% of the population don’t need to pay more for their own requirements? That might be a good deal for the 5%, but it sucks for 95% of the population.

Some ISPs say they don’t need data caps, but they all have terms and restrictions in their terms of service. So while they don’t disclose their cap, you better believe they will give you a call if you start going over 150 GB or 250 GB per month. But as I said in the article, I prefer transparency and I would rather have the ISP disclose what their limit is if they have a limit.

Can you explain to me, that if it is network congestion that is the problem, why if I use 6Gbs per day in 3 hours, and my neighbor uses 1Gbs per day but has a continuous stream of data 24 hours a day/7 days a week that it is a good way to bill us for network use?

What about those of us that do not use P2P that use data? Why are all these things so focused on P2P? Why don’t they limit only the P2P traffic and explicitly state that they limit it and that it is limited to if that is the argument?

Why don’t we have data limits on cable TV? They have had to build out their networks as well as upgrade their technology to get HD on their backbone.

What is wrong with offering various levels of service based upon speed? Why can’t there by a 1Mb connection at $15 a month to save people money, a 10Mb service at $40 and a 20Mb service at $60 per month for those that want to spend the money?

If you are going to take consumer intrests in consideration, are you not concerned about deals that these ISPs can make where by their own services will not count against the data caps that they have and theirby taking competition essentially out of the picture? Such as netflix? Or having netflix pay some amoutn of money to the ISP to be exempt from the data caps and then Netflix having a serious advantage over Amazon and others? This leads to no competition in the long run if this happens.

Are you not concerned about ISPs coming up with stuff like “The Netflix data package” that you pay directly to your ISP at some amount of money to allow unlimited Gbs of data to the netflix site (or any other company)?

These are companies. Their concerns are how to give value to their shareholders while keeping customers.

If they need more money, why are they shy about raising their prices on Internet Access? I think a $10 price increase across the board with a promise that more services where forthcoming such as DOCSIS 3 would have been recieved far better.

Why are other ISPs saying that they do not need data caps? Are they crazy?

Cable service is not like a gas or electricity, if a person disconnects their cable modem they would still get billed the full rate.

If a person uses Charter,TWC label etc Video on Demand or VOIP they are not charged for the bandwidth of those services. Yet if a person uses Directv or Dishnetwork on Demand they are charged for all of that bandwidth. That is anti-competitive and that is why cable and satellite are fundamentally different technologies.

First of all, thank you for admitting that your initial assertion of monopoly was wrong.

Second, are you suggesting that broadband isn’t priced correctly until all the broadband profits are driven to zero or negative values? That doesn’t seem to make any sense to me. We pay so much more for energy (which is all metered by the way) and so much more money for food. Just going out once to the restaurant costs more than a month of broadband service. Why aren’t you campaigning to make those zero profit centers?