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POLL: What will be America's reposnse to Bandwidth Caps?

Page 2 - Seeking answers? Join the AnandTech community: where nearly half-a-million members share solutions and discuss the latest tech.

What will be America's reponse?

  • Switch Provider if alternative is available.

  • Get Business Account (if they don't cap it).

  • Use 149 or 249GB every month.

  • Downgrade to slower speed (saves money and won't reach the cap as fast)

  • Bend over and take the shaft like always.

Results are only viewable after voting.
OverVolt said:
What prevents people from splitting a cable line with neighbors? Since it is so ridiculously fast, it would be really feasible.

At 100Mb/s what defines a home user line? Apparently, a cap.
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The terms of service set forth by your contract with the company... that's what.
 
The American consumer is a mindless idiot zombie drone asshole. He or she will bend over, take it and then ask to clean the provider off with their own mouth.
 
13Gigatons said:
Bottom Line: American Broadband just went down another notch!:thumbsdown:
Click to expand...

American broadband has always been behind the rest of the world. In the late 1990s, SBC was not even considering parts of southeast texas for dsl. Instead, time warner built the areas and got a 3 or 4 year head start on the customer base.

Even in parts of north houston, in well off neighborhoods, dsl was 6, 7+ years behind cable internet. We are talking neighborhoods where the average home cost 500k, the local dsl providers did no want to tap into the market.

Part of the problem I see, telephone companies want to milk in the profits. They are happy with doing business as usual, and the same way business has been done in the past 100 years.

As times change, the internet service providers do not want to change. Where I live, at&t is only interested in the business district. They could care less about residential services and refuse to upgrade the lines. It was not until just a few months ago that T1 service was offered to downtown.

As long as there is a lack of competition, companies will be free to do whatever they want.
 
I keep seeing this over and over, but is the cap 250GB or 250Gb? I don't see how anyone could complain about the former, but the latter would be too low for a handful of us(ers). Most people would never notice though.
 
I'm gonna write a script to max out my bandwidth by downloading their AT&T logo off their site over and over again. Create multiple instances to ensure that bandwidth is maxed out and to stop exactly at 149GB each months. Problem solved - got my moneys worth. 😀

Forget streaming music and video, i stream JPGs!

FTW

/thread
 
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I will be switching ISP's when AT&T's dsl cap goes into place. I've been with them for 10+ years. Heck, I'll switch my family's mobile phone lines to another provider as well.
 
darkewaffle said:
I keep seeing this over and over, but is the cap 250GB or 250Gb? I don't see how anyone could complain about the former, but the latter would be too low for a handful of us(ers). Most people would never notice though.
Click to expand...

250GB, and people are complaining because with the progression of the Internet we now see much higher throughput then ever before. IE, Netflix, Hulu, anything video on the Internet. If you divide 250GB by the average household of 4 people, you get 62.5GB/month per person. If all four people like to watch video on the Internet, you just surpassed your cap.

People are complaining about the regression of the Internet, instead of a progression. ISP's are rolling in money, and our own governing bodies have made it that way. People are complaining about the potential gouging of consumers who actually know what is going on with their "Interwebs", people who want to be able to use what they pay for, who see the impending doom of progress in trade for corporate greed. If the big ISP's have their way, it will be cheaper to buy ALL their services than use the Internet.
 
250 gb sucks ass.. nearly hit it every month just downloading HD content and streaming and gaming.
a single 1080pHD movie is up to 10gb, most games off steam are 5+gb.. the average HD porn vid is 2 gb..

shit adds up fast..

In this day an age bandwidth caps are ridiculous and unneeded. All they do is stifle technology and progress.
 
Capping at less then 10%:
6mbps = 1500gb / 150 = 10%
12mbps = 3000gb / 250 = 8.3%
24mbps = 6000gb / 250 = 4.2%
 
What is the point of a cap, anyways?

Are they trying to keep maintenance down on infrastructure? Are they trying to avoid having to buy more infrastructure? I have no idea why they would start having caps, because then everyone will switch over to caps, and all of a sudden, you'll have a new market player who offers no caps and now they are getting all of the business.

Ha!
 
i have had comcast for almost 2 years now and have never gone over the cap. closest i have come is 205gb, though i think it sucks they place that limit on me.
i have no choice where i live as comcast is best solution as FIOS has not made it to my neck of the woods yet.
 
BurnItDwn said:
Since I am a netflix user and a movie fanatic, I very easily go over 250GB per month.

Since Uverse is getting capped, I'm considering switching down from 18mbit to their 12mbit or possibly slower line. Also considering completely dropping my TV service and signing up for cable internet too, and then using a load balancing router.... that way I'd have 500GB limit...
Click to expand...

This god yes this.

I used 200+GB (but not 250GB) 3x off comcast in 2010. Its almost all Netflix, other video, backups (work and otherwise), and cloud services. My wife is a heavy photo transferer.

I specifically moved from comcast to avoid worrying about the cap as I "cut the cord" and moved to rabbit ears on the tivo and almost exclusively online video content. This puts a damper on my plans.

No I'm not going to use your TV service Uverse. Maybe if you let TiVO in... No I'm not going to use your on-demand comcast. It sucks. BAD. It looks like shit, not enough is available and your interface is complete and utter garbage. Only idiots use a comcast DVR because they are tools.

Looks like I might be investigating uverse business 0- but I don't think that quite exists... Might just be SOL.
 
JimmiG said:
The point about Internet speeds is pretty important. There's really no point in having e.g. 100Mb/s Internet if it's capped. If you were to actually use the bandwidth you paid for, you'd run into the cap in a few hours.

With a 10Mb line, you can burn through about 4.4GB/hour. With a 150GB cap, this allows you to use the bandwidth you paid for, for about 34 hours out of 720 hours in a month. A 95% reduction of the service you used to get for the same price.
Click to expand...

It blows my mind that people don't understand why a person would want high speed even if they don't utilize it 100% of the time (or even 5% of the time).

Suppose I only use 10 GB per month. I only need a 33.6 kbps modem, right? That would allow me to download 10 GB per month:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&...3.6+kbps+in+GB+per+month&aq=f&aqi=h1&aql=&oq=

But then I'd be complaining that my Internet is too slow.

Do you see now why total usage and speed have nothing to do with each other? People want fast Internet, even if they don't use it a lot.

Residential Internet service has always been priced with the assumption that you will not use it 100% of the time, because they know from experience that the average user will not use it 100% of the time - or even 10% of the time.

If you want a service that is priced with the expectation that you will use it 100% of the time, look at business services. They're a lot more expensive.
 
The ISPs need to start selling tiered service...and charging if you go over the allocated amount.

50 Gb/mo service

100 Gb/mo service

250 Gb/mo service

500 Gb/mo service

or WTF ever limits actually make sense.

that way, someone who doesn't want/need huge bandwidth doesn't subsidize someone who does.

Why should I, who doesn't torrent, rarely watches television shows on the PC, and doesn't do much downloading, pay the same monthly rate as the guy who torrents everything he can, watches every show on Hulu, and downloads 16,000,000 Gb of pron every month.

Pay for what you use.
 
BoomerD said:
The ISPs need to start selling tiered service...and charging if you go over the allocated amount.

50 Gb/mo service

100 Gb/mo service

250 Gb/mo service

500 Gb/mo service

or WTF ever limits actually make sense.

that way, someone who doesn't want/need huge bandwidth doesn't subsidize someone who does.

Why should I, who doesn't torrent, rarely watches television shows on the PC, and doesn't do much downloading, pay the same monthly rate as the guy who torrents everything he can, watches every show on Hulu, and downloads 16,000,000 Gb of pron every month.

Pay for what you use.
Click to expand...

They are now doing that:

pay $10 for every 50GB over.....you got your wish. :thumbsdown:
 
wheresmybacon said:
This^.

I don't do warez anymore, I download media sparingly, and I'm still not even close to these caps. I don't really care.
Click to expand...

You would if you started streaming Netflix or Blockbuster in HD.

How is streaming ever supposed to replace bluray with this kind of garbage going on?
 
OverVolt said:
Hrm 250Gb with Comcast doesn't really have me reeling.
Click to expand...

250 GB is way too low, I'm at 261 GB this month and its half way through the month 😀

Luckily Comcast doesn't enforce their cap. I guess some people hear from them, but nobody I know and everyone I know is consistently over the cap
 
250GB is NOT too low. This comes from someone who uses newsgroups also. You're obviously spending way too much time at home. If you download 20x1080p rips, thats 40 hours of your life watching movies at home. Plus some bandwidth for you to surf.

But even at 1gb/hour for TV shows you're easily allowed 200 hours. Netflix streaming doesn't eat that much bandwidth
 
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