Caps can't help with that in highly populated areas. The radio spectrum is simply finite. It's physics.
Most people aren't objecting to rationing, per say. (Though, misleading advertising of available bandwidth does lead to disappointed customers.)
What most are objecting to is unequal provisioning of bandwidth. This incentivizes users to use a VPN (doubling aggregate bandwidth consumption) or use steganography to make the traffic look like voice calls (at significant reduction in transfer efficiency).
Everyone would benefit if service providers rolled out provisioning that incentivized application programmers to truthfully mark traffic using QoS / ToS ... unlimited bandwidth at lowest priority, limited bandwidth if low latency is required.
Instead, they're doing the exact opposite... encouraging P2P developers to encrypt the traffic and then use the ciphertext bitstream to drive an Nth order Markov model that makes it look like compressed voice or HTTP traffic... sort of LZMA in reverse. It becomes a cat-and-mouse game where even the cat loses in the end.
So what you're saying is, I can run a few iptables rules on my phone and prioritize all my traffic ahead of everyone else's? Sweet.
QoS in a LAN is fine, QoS using untrusted devices just plain doesn't work.
The only reason we even have real competition at this point is because the FCC blocked AT&T's acquisition of tmo. That NEVER would've been blocked in our current climate.
Japan seems to be doing just fine with high density, high bandwidth mobile usage.
In layman terms, the air around you is limited and there can't be more of it.
Regardless, the first of his two points still applies:
> More cell towers
In layman terms, better allocating the air around you will not create more air.
Let's just take a look at radio spectrum in US [1].
Right now you are trying to say, that everything there is completely saturated 100% of the time? That is simply false.
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/df/United_S...
Yes, the usable frequencies are saturated.
In layman terms, 1 MHz allow for about 1 Mbps. That's all the bandwidth you can get.
Wired connection bandwidth is trivial, any optic fiber will give a dependable gigabit link. A tower is already equipped with 3 to 12 radio stations.
While we are talking about telecommunications, I wrote that last week: https://thehftguy.com/2017/07/19/what-does-it-really-take-to... Would you like me to write a similar technical article to explain why there won't be more bandwidth?
Yeah, I guess article would be better than trying to explain everything in comments.
The number of bits per hertz is bounded by the amount of noise in the signal. There are natural sources of noise, so a noise free channel is impossible. The mathematical basis for this is the Shannon Hartley theorem if you're up for some reading.
Higher frequencies don't provide more bandwidth. It's the width of the channel that matters. A 20mhz channel provides the same bandwidth regardless of whether its centered at 100mhz or 900mhz. The main difference is the 900mhz signal won't travel through solid objects as well.
People sometimes turn to higher frequencies for more bandwifth simply because there's more spectrum available because it's far less useful. For instance, cell towers sometimes communicate with other cell towers using frequencies around 60ghz. The downside is you need direct line of sight on frequencies that high, so it works for tower to tower, but not tower to phone.
Is it really a value add for the economy for Verizon to turn a higher profit which they funnel to their executives? Or do you think that money would be better spent buying infrastructure which requires thousands of jobs to build?
Why?