This is heartening news because connectivity is becoming a commodity. Will anything come of it?
Recently net neutrality ended and now we have 250 GB/Month bandwidth caps as Comcast customers. I'm not worried about ever hitting that cap, but I am worried about the cap tightening over the next couple of years.
Everyone talks about Google and Facebook's control over their information, but I don't hear enough concern about ISPs' collective control over access to information.
Recently net neutrality ended and now we have 250 GB/Month bandwidth caps as Comcast customers.
I don't consider a bandwidth cap applied univerally to be a violation of net neutrality. There may or may not be a legitimate justification for it, but it's still treating all traffic the same. The violation would be if they charged/extorted sites like Netflix or YouTube to collect payments in exchange for traffic to them not counting against the cap.
Bandwidth caps can be seen as discriminating against higher-volume types of traffic, like high definition video (which directly competes with cable TV). If you limit the amount of HD video people can watch online in a given month, they are pushed toward your cable TV product.
For what it's worth, Comcast is already extorting (or at least trying to extort) Netflix for payments.
> Recently net neutrality ended and now we have 250 GB/Month bandwidth caps as Comcast customers. I'm not worried about ever hitting that cap
I'm still under a 100GB softcap right now (hardcap is 160GB, but I have to pay more for everything inbetween), I had to reinstall a machine and wipe out my Steam folder due to corruption.
I have about 300 games in steam, I blew through my cap once last month (in two nights, which are 50% off on the bandwidth counter) and this month I'm already at 96.8GB due to leaving Steam unattended for two nights again. And I'm nowhere near done re-downloading my games.
I don't normally come close to exceeding the cap, but once in a while in freak events it's very easy to blow through a few hundred gigs in a month. I miss uncapped connections.
Have you measured your usage over a month's span? With the amount of video content, streaming music, and "cloud" out there these days, it's a heck of a lot easier to use a big percentage of that as a single user than you might first think. But if you just look at text all day, maybe you can rest easy. "Ever" is a long time though.
This is what Rogers did in Canada. It used to be a 200+ GB cap then it slowly lowered to 60GB, 80GB, 120GB depending on your plan. (not sure if those numbers are 100% correct as I've since moved to TekSavvy)
Here in Aus we have always had caps. They've done nothing but increase over the years. My SOHO plan with a quality ISP is $80 for 150GB, for comparison, but you can get cheap no-frills residential for $40 for the same quota. I doubt the caps where you are will come down much, if at all.
Last year my quota was 60GB, 1-2 years before that it was 25, so on and so forth.
That and these days you can get 200, 500, 1000GB caps, which really are about as good as unlimited as you can get. You'd really have to push to download that much data in a calendar month.
past chance to edit: my timeline is out. I think I was on 60GB for 3 years or so, not 1-2. I can't quite recall, but the increase was slower than the above comment suggests
Recently net neutrality ended and now we have 250 GB/Month bandwidth caps as Comcast customers. I'm not worried about ever hitting that cap, but I am worried about the cap tightening over the next couple of years.
Everyone talks about Google and Facebook's control over their information, but I don't hear enough concern about ISPs' collective control over access to information.