Over here in Aus for $90 a month I get 20GB which is one of the larger consumer cable Internet plans you can get. I can understand why US companies imposing a limit when there used to be none would be annoying so many people, including Todd.
Regardless of whether or not the Comcast broadband deal represents good value, to give someone something and then take it away will always get them annoyed. Having offered unlimited broadband for so long, to then restrict that will cause great unrest amongst their customers, even those that use nowhere near 250GB a month.
The telco’s might have been given some slack if they had not been behaving in such an anti-consumer way recently. Trying to create a tiered Internet to improve their revenue. Lobbying against net neutrality. Tracking customers traffic to sell targetted advertising. Redirecting 404’s and even embedded ads to their own services. Bandwidth shaping, and even blocking entire services. Doing nothing to stop spammers or bots on their networks.
Why would anyone give them the benefit of the doubt and trust that customers won’t end up getting hosed by this move. I would expect that once the furore dies down over this Comcast will try and extend it by creating a lower cap at a cheaper price. Once this is accepted they will then likely start upping the price of the higher cap plans. The chance that Comcast will be the last provider to do this is remote.
I still wish I could get 250GB here.
I have ATT DSL. Right now we have no cap, but it is coming. I have the highest-end DSL package available, as I have teens and a husband who are addicted to YouTube (amongst other things). I have no idea how much bandwidth we use on a monthly basis and don’t know how to find out (can anyone recommend a program to use?). I’m going to assume that since we have the highest tier broadband, that our caps would be higher once they are instituted, but I don’t know.
I am one of those that feel the telco and cable companies are gouging, just as the oil companies are. These are public companies and we get to see their profits. They aren’t spending those billions of dollars on infrastructure, which would make caps obsolete. They aren’t using it to expand current infrastructure to reach those in rural areas. No, they are pocketing it, and that probably bugs me worst of all.
You can. You just have to pay a lot more for it.
Bandwidth is an interesting commodity. Had Hawaii not been a US state Todd would be paying more per Gb than you are I would assume.
In the UK we generally have a ‘fair usage’ policy which basically allows providers to advertise “UNLIMITED INTERNET” while at the same time the small print clause of “subject to fair usage” pretty much allows them enough wiggle room to charge extra to those who really flog their network.
Of course, some of these users are running such things as Torrent servers 24/7 which really does rape the (bandwidth shared) ADSL connections in their neighbourhood, which in turn denies their neighbours a decent connection. Is that fair? Clearly not but who it is not fair to is a matter of your perspective.
I don’t know about other countries around the world but it is common in the UK for ADSL connections to be bandwidth shared between up to 50 users, that is how providers can offer the connections so cheaply.
Telecoms companies have always blatantly robbed consumers so none of this is surprising but there really can be consequences for other users.