5 day old account and a statement like that? Sounds a bit like a CableCo shill to me.
Comcast offers service at speed tiers. When you pay for a speed tier you would expect to be able to use that speed a reasonable amount of time without having to spend extra. Nobody is expecting to max out their 150 Mbps connection 24/7 but that same connection starts hitting additional fees after 14 hours of maxing that connection in a month.
Data caps are a clear money grab because they need new revenue for their dying TV business. A business dying because of their failure to innovate and constant gouging of customers due to monopolistic practices.
I expect to be able to max out my advertised connection bandwidth 24/7. I don't see why I shouldn't have that expectation despite being physically impossible for everyone to do so. They shouldn't advertise those speeds alongside unlimited data perhaps.
Metered service would be fine, if the marginal cost per byte were fixed or decreasing. When using an additional 25% of traffic causes one's bill to go up by 75% (especially when most of the price is fixed infrastructure costs), it's clear that the goal is just to gouge a captive userbase.
The article doesn't provide any argument to support the ridiculous headline.
Before Comcast had a punitive financial threshold they used to throttle the heaviest users. Now they simply charge those users, while presumably the majority of people are cognizant that they should use some discretion to avoid the fees.
Another user opines "it’s still limited by your maximum throughput and the number of days in a month" and this is an argument that seriously rubs me the wrong way because it's effectively a tragedy of the commons type argument -- I love having blistering fast internet when I need to download something, etc. But I realize I don't have a committed 500Mbps across the internet, and not far from me it's a shared resource.
As a thought experiment, what if the caps went away tomorrow? Is it possible that the network would become saturated? If so, that is to say the caps might be reasonable. If not, how do you know that's the case?
I'm not any happier with Comcast than anyone else; I recently moved from 1Gbps service to 250Mbps service with them, and I was always bumping up against the 'cap' on my 1Gbps service. I want a better provider. But nothing in the article proves that the caps are useless nor a money grab.
bronco21016|7 years ago
Comcast offers service at speed tiers. When you pay for a speed tier you would expect to be able to use that speed a reasonable amount of time without having to spend extra. Nobody is expecting to max out their 150 Mbps connection 24/7 but that same connection starts hitting additional fees after 14 hours of maxing that connection in a month.
Data caps are a clear money grab because they need new revenue for their dying TV business. A business dying because of their failure to innovate and constant gouging of customers due to monopolistic practices.
izzydata|7 years ago
mindslight|7 years ago
mikeash|7 years ago
pwinnski|7 years ago
endorphone|7 years ago
Before Comcast had a punitive financial threshold they used to throttle the heaviest users. Now they simply charge those users, while presumably the majority of people are cognizant that they should use some discretion to avoid the fees.
Another user opines "it’s still limited by your maximum throughput and the number of days in a month" and this is an argument that seriously rubs me the wrong way because it's effectively a tragedy of the commons type argument -- I love having blistering fast internet when I need to download something, etc. But I realize I don't have a committed 500Mbps across the internet, and not far from me it's a shared resource.
rconti|7 years ago
As a thought experiment, what if the caps went away tomorrow? Is it possible that the network would become saturated? If so, that is to say the caps might be reasonable. If not, how do you know that's the case?
I'm not any happier with Comcast than anyone else; I recently moved from 1Gbps service to 250Mbps service with them, and I was always bumping up against the 'cap' on my 1Gbps service. I want a better provider. But nothing in the article proves that the caps are useless nor a money grab.