Quote from: Kluge on August 11, 2013, 04:41:17 PM

Quote from: vehementchrome on August 10, 2013, 11:07:59 PM

Out of curiosity, does anywhere else other than america have throttling/bandwidth caps like this?

Yeah. Capping (or "lite" HSI) was a hot topic in Canada when the discussion came up here. Capping was popular in the dial-up era, when you bought "minutes," but when cable and DSL came out, I don't remember any company talking about caps. Faded from memory. Pay-per-use billing seems reasonable when the infrastructure is unable to handle the demand, and ISPs regularly oversell their bandwidth by hundreds or thousands of percents. It's very difficult to determine real Internet speeds vs. what an ISP advertises in the US, and they aren't required to provide any type of data on that. Hughesnet, for example, previously sold me an "up to 15mbps" connection, with the idea being that it must be faster than the "up to 10mbps" connection. In reality, speeds while people were home (including myself) was ~3mbps.

The trouble with pay-per-use (or capping) being sold as any type of efficient consumer-oriented "feature," is that it doesn't actually solve the problem with peak times (~3-10pm), when the vast majority of users are online and experiencing poor service. People using an obscene amount of bandwidth per month are most likely downloading files throughout the day (esp. if torrents), not streaming them, but because people stream when they're home, all that streaming at once leads to congestion due to ISPs' abused ability to oversell their bandwidth. So really, bandwidth caps are just another arbitrary limit imposed to get consumers to pay more, but ISPs are trying to keep the discussion about "over-eaters" rather than their inadequate, oversold service.

I'd think if the US really wants to see change, we'd be asking why ISPs, industry-wide, are allowed to advertise a meaningless maximum speed without giving typical speeds, nor guaranteeing a minimum speed. I'm not saying "there ought to be a law," but if enough people are aware of what ISPs' marketing departments are doing, maybe consumers would be more willing to select a service willing to publish meaningful details about their service instead of their arbitrary speed/volume caps on plans.

what is the point of offering higher speeds if you have a cap of 250gb. that looses its incentive.
ISP's should not be allowed to provide tv services, only internet.

companies like at&t is actually trying to compete with Netflix and providing shit internet so people jump to their shitty tv service.