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Comment by j2kun | Hacker News Reader

> It is worth noting, by the way, that BitTorrent users were free-loaders, using massively more bandwidth than the vast majority of Comcast’s customers.

I don't think that's how a service agreement works. If I'm paying for a certain bandwidth and latency, I should get that (to within reasonably improbable outages) if I use it 100% of the time or 1% of the time. If the ISP can't keep up, they should be penalized for it or change the labels on the thing they're selling. You don't see a cloud storage provider saying "you get 100 Gb of storage, but only if you don't use 99 Gb of it."

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There's also the reality that the problem is peak bandwidth, not total bytes moved. It turns out... BitTorrent users use less bandwidth during peak and bandwidth caps discourage people from pulling down data they might not use in advance and instead grabbing it just in time during peak bandwidth periods.

There's also the reality that there's miles and miles of taxpayer funded black fiber that they choose not to light up so that they can claim a bandwidth shortage.

Can you expand on this?

It's part of this whole thing which is a rabbit hole unto itself:

https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6c5e97/e...

tldr version: There were very large subsidies paid to expand broadband as well as the Universal Service Fund. The companies actually built out broadband lines to a lot of areas with minimal coverage and then didn't build the last mile because it was expensive and provided "separate but equal" services such as WiMax, UVerse, or other less equitable services.

Paying customers are "free-loaders"? That's so nonsensical.

There's no free lunch. If you want to start metered home internet connections with overages akin to cellular data plans, keep pushing this argument.

The old bandwidth-based pricing model has been inadequate for a long time. Net non-neutrality may be the only way to save it, which doesn't mean it's necessarily a worthwhile tradeoff. I think I'd rather have non-discriminatory metered billing than unlimited access to NBC News and RT but $0.10/GB to ABC News and NPR.

Well, yeah, of course neutral metered billing would be better than non-neutral "flat" billing, precisely because there is no free lunch. On average, the price should be the same anyway. And you can implement protection of customers against surprising bills without actual flat rates (allow them to go over the limit, but the next month they have to chose to either get a hard cap, or buy a larger package, for example).

It would be more like a buffet... "all you can eat" and when you eat a lot they shout that it is unfair...

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