At&t capping broad-band.

[SamuelRSmith]

Galaki said:

SamuelRSmith said:

Well, in my part of the world, bandwidth IS in short supply. Particularly at peak times. Caps or pay-as-you-use need to be put in place to:

a) make things fairer
b) allow the ISPs to better direct investment resources

You fall for corporate talk quite easily. It's just excuses so that they never have to upgrade their pipeline to support for higher bandwidth capacity.

I live in a rural area, it's currently not profitable to provide us with a better service than a ~5mb connection through ADSL. I don't expect firms to do things that aren't profitable (to do so is a mis-allocation of resources by defintion).

When it hits peak hours, the speed of the internet connection can drop to under a meg, due to everybody having unlimited broadband... if people had to pay more for usage during peak times, the demand will fall, and a better service would be provided to those who are willing to pay for it. I do not see the problem, here.

And, I've never heard a company talking about pay-per-usage, not since the days of dial-up, so I'm not falling for anything. Indeed, I see this as the exact same problem as we have with our roads (congestion at peak hours) - and believe the problem could be fixed using the same solution.

We ration everything else out there through the price mechanism, why should bandwidth be any different?