I'm on Comcast.  I just found out that I'm capped from this article.  That sucks.  I don't even know how much I use.  The biggest part of it is probably Netflix.

My only other option where I live?  AT&T U-Verse.  Fuck me.

And that makes a difference ...   how?

The corporations:  "We'll do what we do, FUCK YOU!"

The sheeple: "OK, fuck me harder, I'll pay more!"

Gotta love the "free" market

It makes a difference in... companies provide what people want.

Look at Cell Phones.  "Pay as you go" phones are far less popular then Phone plans... usually only coming about when you have defaulted on a plan or two.

People perfer the certainty of paying upfront... even if it costs them more.  So they know exactly how much it's going to cost them.

They already throttle heavy speed users.

What I find funny is my internet connection.  It varies wildly... with nothing to do with peak times.  Unless 3AM is a peak time.

Well, the original should be the confusing thing if anything does at all. There's a reason BONES sought to remake their own adaptation once the manga was coming to a close.

I've read pretty much every post in this thread and all I have to say is: "Fuck AT&T." Bandwidth isn't a natural resource. We create it and we should have unlimited of it. It's not hard to get a bigger server. My brother plays a shit ton of WoW and I'm always on YouTube or battle.net and Steam chewing up bandwidth because that's what you do on the internet. It's a bunch of shit that they think they can get away with this. We shouldn't be getting capped by a "resource" that we can have unlimited of.

The problem is that subscription services are generally unsustainable, and lead to demand problems. Of course the market doesn't WANT to be charged for usage, everybody would prefer to have unlimited usage, hell, everybody would prefer it if it was completely free.

Problem is, it just can't work like that. Simple theory dictates that without price for rationing, demand is unlimited... unless you have unlimited supply, you're going to run into problems. It's the same reason why in the UK thered is a shit tonne of congestion (you pay for your roads once a year in a one-off road tax fee - and then you get unlimited usage), and in places like Florida there is very little congestion because of toll roads controlling congestion.

Not only does it control congestion, but toll roads are often in far better condition than roads in countries on road tax - because the funding can be better invested (if you know a road is very important, because millions are prepared to pay a toll to use it, then you know that improving and maintaining that road is more effective than a road with half the demand).

Despite this, I bet if you were to ask 99% of people out there, they would prefer the road tax unlimited usage situation over the toll system. As evidenced by the fact that our Government tried to introduce a pay-as-you-use system for our motorways a few years back, and eventually gave up due to the massive public opposition.

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There was this bar in a town near by me, and they used to offer unlimited drinks: you pay £10 to get in, and then you can drink as much as you want... trouble is, they were losing money, because it was essentially a subscription service with limited supply. So, they decided to increase the ticket price... except that model still didn't work, because fewer people came in, and those who did, still outdrank the ticket price. In the end, the bar had to go back to the conventional pay-per-drink model, and now it's functioning fine. Probably gets lets custom, but the custom it gets is more profitable.

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You can tell the market for unlimited broadband is pretty bad... there is no incentive for better routed investment, so, no matter how much you're willing to pay, you cannot get decent speeds in certain areas (short of renting a direct line to the exchange for thousands of dollars a month), and, not only that, the fact that companies are having to put caps in place show that they are no longer willing to subsidize the free lunch.

If you live in a fairly dense populated area, you'd be surprised... although fewer users are online, the ones who are, are far more likely to be the "heavy users" and will be the ones hitting the torrent networks, etc.

I don't think I use more than 50G per month but that doesn't mean capping is a good thing. I don't like surprises on my bill even if it may not happen. That's the reason why I avoid Bell/Rogers here and get a nocap with another (reseller?) company.

150GB may be more than enough now but with the advances of tech and so on, we'll just use more and more bandwidth.

I imagine that you are probably capped off the same as me which is 250Gb

Now I watch a lot of netlix and other people download a lot, play internet games, and watch tons of Hulu and the closest we have ever come to reaching the cap is 210 GB.