So in September, Comcast decided to drop all residential internet tiers to 300 GB/month on all their plans, including their highest one to consumers, (150 Mbps down/10 or something Mbps up) which means under full load you could use the service for about 4 hours inside of a month without being graciously charged for extra bandwidth blocks while being charged quite a large amount of money for access to internet in the first place, I'm curious as to what you guys think about this. Do you guys think it's unreasonable to want to use the speeds you pay for for the entire month at that capacity or do I just use too much data and shouldn't be upset about this?
Uhh, it's greed. But you probably know that. The idea is to set the cap just high enough it doesn't affect people much today per se but so people live with the cap. As they start to use more technology though, they'll run upon the cap. At which time the explanation will be 'it has been there for years'
It's a bit like boiling a frog. you don't want the frog to know they're boiled until it's too late.
Bandwidth is not a finite resource. At least not yet -- not until it is many orders of magnitude faster than it is today. Probably somewhere around 500 terabits/sec. Many companies, including Cisco (whose interests align with that of large ISPs because that's who their customers are), have done studies and indicate that high bandwidth users are not rascally pirates and the newest recruits of anonymous, but instead are just early adopters of technologies.
https://gigaom.com/2009/10/20/cisco-data-shows-heavy-broadband-users-are-early-adopters-not-hogs/
And these companies have been caught red-handed commissioning op-ed pieces warning the public of the coming bandwidth crunch. Hint: When you have to pay someone for an opinion, it's called shilling.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20071227/124634.shtml
Unfortunately, the public isn't aware of the issue enough to really become involved. So they may end up being boiled alive before it's to late. It's a pity, too, because just like roads and the electric grid, this sort of infrastructure would have a huge net positive effect on our economy for decades to come.
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