Quote:
Originally Posted by Ichihara Asako
Being Australian, I've lived with metered broadband forever. There's never been unmetered broadband in this country (a handful of small ISPs have attempted it and rapidly gone bankrupt) so on one side of the coin I can relate to people's distress over this trend spreading across the world. On the other side my sadistic side kind of wants to say "ha ha suck it, about time you felt the pain" but that is rather mean. The sad thing is even with the caps US providers (eg Comcast and their 250Gb) are issuing now, you still get far more quota for far less than we pay. So I find it hard to be sympathetic.
Especially when I understand the reasoning behind quotas and limits; it's not a matter of 'costing' them anything, but with more and more highspeed connections, the contention ratios are getting out of whack. When a neighbourhood backbone is only OC3 (150Mbit) and you have a dozen people on 50Mbit (something Comcast offers) then all it takes is three people downloading at full speed to saturate the entire neighbourhood's backhaul. Of course those figures are just examples, I'm sure backhaul would be OC12 or higher in areas where 50Mbit is offered, but it just highlights the issue; there's not enough backhaul to satisfy many people downloading at full steam.
So they put caps in so people have to ration their usage and can't just open the taps 24/7 and saturate the backhaul links which in turn degrades everybody's service. The natural solution would be to upgrade the backhaul, which ISPs obviously do as they are able, but the modern high definition media rich internet is far beyond the scope of what most ISPs prepared for and they can't keep up with the data requirements. Quotas and caps are a stop-gap measure, which as I said, I understand... even if I don't really agree with it since it's very easy to go through small quotas these days.
|
That would be a limitation with the Cable internet since each node is hooked up to 20 houses which share the bandwidth provided by the Cable. Cable uses fiber optics and cable hybrid, but the DOCSIS standard isn't really meant for alot of traffic compared to just plain fiber. This is why fiber is alot faster and can give a high number of bandwidth, but I don't see the reason why anyone would start metered billing with fiber since the bandwidth is unlimited, but for a reason of milking more customers. This is why DOCSIS 3.0 is important so that they can open more bandwidth, but these upgrades cost money, but they wouldn't need caps unless they want to milk more customers. This is the reason why Cablevision's connection is uncapped since they have already upgraded their networks to DOCSIS 3.0 and able to provide 101/mbps down and 30 mbps up speeds.
With Wireless, this is a different story since wireless bandwidth costs more and it's alot more limited compared to Cable. This is why most wireless broadband providers like Sprint, AT&T, and Verizon limits your bandwidth to 5GB a month and if you go over, you get expensive overages. The difference is, there is alot more wireless devices connecting to the connection compared to other mediums which cause the internet to be alot slower, which can lead to dropped calls and other problems. This is a major problem with the iPhone due to it's popularity, which requires AT&T to upgrade it's network to gain more capacity.
Metered internet will only benefit grandparents and people who only use internet for webpage surfing, instant messaging and email and the benefit of the plan being cheaper since they won't use all the cap anyways. The majority of the internet users would only hinder from metered internet because most stream videos, download big files, upload alot of pictures and other intensive activities. Metered internet will only be okay if it's not forced on everyone and it's one plan with a cheap price while maintaining the unlimited access at the same price levels... If they were to implement outrageous prices with outrageous caps like Time Warner originally wanted, then it won't go so well.