The Comcast Banhammer. Welcome to insanity.

[NightrainSrt4]

The only way you hit those huge limits if torrenting plain and simple. No way you watch that much in streaming movies.

Like I said, just installing steam games onto a few computers in the house is enough to breach the 250GB limit, and that wasn't even close to all the games that we have.

There are plenty of other legitimate reasons as well. Take online off-site backups for example. People who need to do an online backups of their photo's all the time. Photographers for example. Shoot, teens who feel they need to upload every picture they've ever taken to Myspace AND Facebook.

Or take my brother, who is uploading very large HD game demo movies just about every day, on top of the ones that he downloads to compare his work to.

And the biggest thing it seems you are overlooking is that it isn't 250GB per person. Some people have large families all within the same household. Now have all these people all doing their own independent thing, and it is easy to see how it is legitimately possible to break the limits. AND, all it takes is once if your phone number isn't up to date.

[crenn]

I would be willing to pay $10 a month service fee and then $0.10 per gb if it meant I could have all the speed that the wire could give me. People downloading 250gb would have a bill of $35. People downloading 1Tb a month would have a $112.4 bill. It would be like electricity, water, and gasoline. If you use more you pay more.

Everyone would love that.... except for the telecommunication companies. Their profit margins would drop down too low and they'd also be sued by the MIAA and RIAA for encouraging illegal downloading.

[xRyokenx]

I don't see how that would encourage illegal downloading. Would you mind elaborating on that a bit?

[crenn]

I don't see how that would encourage illegal downloading. Would you mind elaborating on that a bit?

A recent case in Australia happened between AFACT (Australian version of RIAA pretty much) and an ISP iiNet where AFACT accused iiNet of encouraging illegal downloads by having larger cap values. I'm linking it by saying that with data so cheap, it's like increasing the cap values.

[d_stilgar]

The cheap rates are a result of supply and demand. In the cases I listed, 250gb and 1Tb, the price for a months worth of internet was about the same as what people are used to paying now. People who use significantly less are still paying at least $10 a month, and the people who use the most are going to be the ones that pay the most, so in the end they would be the people who pay for new infrastructure.

The speed of your internet would also be a supply and demand case. If everyone gets home from work at six and tries to watch hulu, then speeds go down, but if people decide to schedule their big steam update for 2 or 3 AM, then odds are you will have 100mb+ down speeds because everyone will be asleep.

I don't see how letting people watch as much hulu, netflix and youtube they want is considered encouraging illegal activity. Nor do I see how letting someone install all their steam games in one month is encouraging illegal activity.

A real benefit to this is that people could legitimately host their own server at home without a breach of EULA, and ISPs would want to encourage this because the more internet we use the more money they would make. The other real benefit would be that people like my grandma wouldn't be stuck paying $40/month for something she barely ever uses. Her bill might be $12.

Also, a single song is what, 4-6000kb? I think that should be our cap so we don't confuse anyone to believe we are encouraging illegal song downloading.

[x88x]

I'm linking it by saying that with data so cheap, it's like increasing the cap values.

I don't see them sueing Verizon (no caps). Seriously though, that sucks.. who won that case? No offense, but I'm not entirely surprised that something like that would pop up in Australia first...your government has some pretty jacked up internet policies.

The speed of your internet would also be a supply and demand case. If everyone gets home from work at six and tries to watch hulu, then speeds go down, but if people decide to schedule their big steam update for 2 or 3 AM, then odds are you will have 100mb+ down speeds because everyone will be asleep.

Ah yes, prime time slowdown...that is something I will not miss in the least when I eventually get off cable internet.

The other real benefit would be that people like my grandma wouldn't be stuck paying $40/month for something she barely ever uses. Her bill might be $12.

Great for her, bad for the ISP.

[artoodeeto]

...bad for the ISP.

That's really it in a nutshell. As long as any alternative to the status quo isn't better for the ISP, they're not going to change a thing. In fact, imposing an artificial limit actually makes them more money, as it gives them a completely contrived way of charging 'violators' more. Sucks, but that's life - they won't change until they have an alternative that'll make them more money, or until they're forced to by outside influences.

I personally like the thought of paying per meg - make it more like other utilities. Course, my water/sewer/trash bill in my apartment has ballooned from $40-ish a couple years ago to over $100 now, and there's absolutely nothing I can do about it. It's a flat fee based on the size of the apartment. I could leave the taps on all day, or never ever use a drop, and the bill would still be the same. Way to encourage conservation!

[x88x]

I found this on Ars today; interesting example of an ISP off the deep end.

Frontier DSL is running a new policy on a trial period in Mound, MN...5GB monthly cap, and if you go over it repeatedly they up your bill from $50/mo to $100/mo...oh, and did I mention this is for 3Mbps DSL?

http://arstechnica.com/telecom/news/...data-tiers.ars

[diluzio91]

all it will take is one company to undercut these nut jobs and offer a good price, people will flock to them, then these idiots lose $$, and they all scramble to figure out what they need to do, service their customers, not themselves. Who wants to take the first jump? lol

[x88x]

The problem with that is that in so many parts of the country, the ISP owns the last-mile infrastructure, so any new ISP that wants to start up has to either build their own infrastructure or lease it from their competitor (unlikely if the competitor is already offering service in those areas). That's where public open-access infrastructures, like are popping up in some smaller cities in the US and some cities in Europe, are awesome, because a new ISP just has to hook in at one of the connection points, and they're in.