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Comment by Townley | Hacker News Reader

For me it's not a framing issue. I get upset by that sentence the minute the total receipt goes above $80/mo.

Unlimited internet has been a welcome respite from the inconsistent and unfair pricing of mobile data plans. Seeing that change without an explanation feels wrong.

I can imagine ISPs responding with "Here's your explanation: our infrastructure isn't built out to have everyone downloading 1TB/mo and if you want that you need to pay for it"

To whatever extent that's true, it's because of an ISP oligopoly and active lobbying measures that prevent creative solutions that might improve quality/decrease costs.

So I'm personally upset over this because it's a nickel-and-diming false choice between paying even more than our already-overpriced bills, or watching your quality of service decrease because a greedy company decided not to keep up with an eminently reasonable change in standards of quality.

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>For me it's not a framing issue. I get upset by that sentence the minute the total receipt goes above $80/mo.

So are you upset by the fact you can't get unlimited internet for a reasonable price, or that the ISP advertised $80 month and you had to pay $130? If it's the latter than it's purely a framing issue.

>To whatever extent that's true, it's because of an ISP oligopoly and active lobbying measures that prevent creative solutions that might improve quality/decrease costs.

That seems entirely orthogonal to having bandwidth caps. To the company and society as a whole, having crappy service and gouging 90% of the users for $100/month and 10% of your users for $150/month is the same as having crappy service and gouging all of your users for $105/month. If anything the first option is "fairer" because users that use the service less pay less.

Maybe in a market with real competitors. But like others have said, what usually happens is people with existing unlimited plans lose them overnight to ISP's with a monopoly in their area. Then, ISP's charge $50 more per month for them to get the service they already had.

In this case I'm entirely upset by the former, and will leave the discussion of potentially inappropriate marketing tactics for another day.

You're right that bandwidth caps aren't my main complaint about ISPs, but overall displeasure with internet service is relevant to the bandwidth cap discussion because bandwidth caps are a feature that contributes to that displeasure.

Fairly or not, I blame ISPs for taking us from "A world where everyone pays $50/mo" to "A world where everyone pays $80/mo". Now they're trying to turn that world into a world where you have the choice between $100/mo and $150/mo. There's a fairness question to be discussed (I personally think it's not unreasonable to have society-wide, fast, affordable, unlimited internet be the default) but there's also a value decrease there that deserves just as much attention as the fairness question. That decrease (and not the fairness issue) is where my frustration is directed.

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