Home ISP throttled my speed after going over data cap

[Cabletek]

I applaud the effort to educate the OP [80 different ways, i kid, i kid]but it really does not matter what analogy he or you or anyone else likes or dislikes, the simple fact is this is the way it works: they charge you, throttle you, or cut you off, if you cannot control your bandwidth consumption to the way you agreed, even if you did not know you agreed. And that's the bottom line. finite, or infinite, its controlled by them, and your accessing their network, they limit you as they see fit, deal with it. Most of the isp's that have no caps are that way becasue the service is so slow you would not reach any feasible cap they set. EQ sprint 3g [at least until they finish that horrid LTE upgrade] no cap, 415ms ping times and 0.28/.027 Mb/s speeds, but no cap. Have at it for $60/month or whatever they charge.

Your only hope is to move into a FIOS or google fiber area soon, last I knew neither of them have a cap for the moment though I think FIOS is considering it strongly. They are on a big no upgrade and no build out kick right now to save investment capitol, for quarterly reports and all. Still the last thing officially said is
http://www.fiosfaq.com/content.php?contentid=27
Read the TOS to be sure though.

With that, can the nerd rage go away? This is one of the few places you can find an intelligible conversation about things, don't start useneting it up with terms like "captain obvious" directed at people. Agree to disagree, but this is not 9th grade anymore.

[JoeMcJoe]

Originally Posted by JackMDS

Yeah, the other day I gave the Gas satiation attendant $20 and he let me pump only 5.5 Gallon. Wtf is going on they are crazy or what, why can't I pump as much as I need for my $20? - - - - .

Did the gas station advertise unlimited gasoline for $20?

[dawks]

Originally Posted by Cabletek

With that, can the nerd rage go away? This is one of the few places you can find an intelligible conversation about things, don't start useneting it up with terms like "captain obvious" directed at people. Agree to disagree, but this is not 9th grade anymore.

Thanks for the forum etiquette advice rookie. My reply was actually very polite, especially compared to the rude OP's reply.

Its hard to believe someone could so distantly miss the point of my simple example. Of course an ISP doesn't use a $50 switch. FFS. It was a simple example. I even stated it was. The point still holds. Its just ridiculous to think that I was implying that an enterprise grade network only uses $50 switches when it was just a simple analogy. That kind of ignorance is more rude and disrespectful than any name calling.

[Fardringle]

Originally Posted by dawks

The frustrating part is that it costs the ISP's the same to send 1kb or 1,000kb's. The same for telcos... it costs the same for 1min of voice calling vs 100min.

What you said is wrong, dawks. If you take someone correcting you as being "rude and disrespectful" then that's your choice (and your problem). It DOES cost them more to send more data as has already been explained. It's certainly not the only cost of running an ISP or TelCo, but it is a cost that they have to consider when providing service to extremely high bandwidth users.

And of course the big companies aren't going to use $50 routers, but when you consider that the routers they use often cost tens (and hundreds) of thousands of dollars and they need to be replaced and upgraded on a regular basis to keep up with demand, that also adds significantly to the cost of their business. If some people are creating a very large demand on the network by using far more bandwidth than they agreed to when they signed up for the service, then the ISP is well within their rights to restrict those users in order to maintain service to other users without dramatically increasing the cost of the service.