That's nice that they don't throttle any more, but how about those data caps? A data cap is like a baggage fee on an airline: Once it's there, it's never going away.
Now that doesn't mean data caps themselves are the right solution to the "problem" (conceptually!), I'm just speaking to change the frame of mind of this.
Imo, what we should be demanding is an SLA for normal customers. Cap speed or data, I don't care, but give me what I'm paying for at all times.
As I see it right now you're getting capped on bandwidth, total data, and absolutely no guarantee about any of it working. It's the worst of all aspects.. for customers, great for Comcast I'm sure.
Because from a networking point of view, data caps is an artificial thing.
> Nothing is unlimited, so why pretend you can get an unlimited amount of data?
Your connection is not unlimited anyway; the max you can get out of it is MAX BW * seconds/month.
Since the providers don't have guarantees about the max bandwidth, it can vary depending on the demand from the other users, I don't see why you need an artificial data cap.
How so? If I limit you to 1MB a month, good luck clogging my pipes. I said it's not an effective method of approaching the problem, so I'm not defending them at all.
> Your connection is not unlimited anyway; the max you can get out of it is MAX BW * seconds/month.
Not true, if you have a data cap. Hence why data caps theoretically could serve a purpose. Again though, I'm not defending them.
> Since the providers don't have guarantees about the max bandwidth, it can vary depending on the demand from the other users, I don't see why you need an artificial data cap.
I agree. My point however is that complaining about data caps is besides the point entirely. We're lacking an SLA, we're lacking any way to ensure that we are getting what we're paying for.
Data caps provide no real benefit to the idea that they sell of reducing network congestion. The only way they could is to have a very aggressive data cap, resulting in a large X% of your users not even having internet access due to being capped. This of course, is basically impossible, as people would flip out.
By focusing on data caps we are, in my opinion, focusing on the red herring. Rather than getting what we're paying for on bandwidth, we're focusing on how much total data we can download.
> How so? If I limit you to 1MB a month, good luck clogging my pipes. I said it's not an effective method of approaching the problem, so I'm not defending them at all.
Is your argument that "data caps" are not an artificial thing because you can have.. "data caps"?
In that context yes I agree, they are artificial.
The point of a data cap is to get users to self-manage their usage, not to block a large percentage of users.
Rather than getting what we're paying for on bandwidth...
I think by and large we get exactly what we pay for. Have you noticed that business class service, which has SLAs & generally better-delivers agreed speeds & bandwidth at all times, costs a lot more?
Residential users are paying for sparsely provisioned links, and that is what they are getting. But most do not realize that.
Users feel like, "Hey I paid for a 1Gbps link, I should be able to saturate 1Gbps 24/7".
Providers know that 99% of users don't need 1Gbps 24/7, so to reduce the cost of the service, they sparsely provision.
Caps of some form, either on speed or on bandwidth (or N Mbps speed cap after Y GBs of bandwidth) are the way they keep users within the limits of the network.
Ie, if you're overselling by a large margin than you'll need to be capping a lot of people. Not the same amount as the "large margin", but a significant portion of your users need to not be accessing the pipe at 5pm.
This is why I think they should just get rid of caps, and instead give us a meaningful SLA. They won't however, because they have massively oversold their network[2].
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17306906
[2]: I don't know if they've actually oversold their network, it's just clear that there is data troubles based on user traffic. Personally I think Comcast is purposefully limiting traffic based on marketing strategies. Ie, when Google rolled fiber into Portland, suddenly Comcast's "available speeds" massively spiked to stay competitive with Google. Which indicates that they had a lot more than they were selling.
You're also paying a fraction of what it would cost to get a line with an SLA, even in a commercial building with several competing providers.
If you're selling XMbps for $Y then I should be able to use XMbps, regardless of total usage. That's the unit that they have chosen to market, "speed of connection".
The problem is that I have to pay for this this two ways. As it stands, they're going to charge me for a 125Mbps connection, then they also get to charge me more if I use that 125Mbps for more than 18 hours in a month. To reverse your statement: Why pretend that I have XMbps of data if I can't use it?
The rest of your statement makes a lot of sense, and the SLA is what's really missing. If that was addressed in addition to / in lieu of neutrality it would be a net positive.