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Comment by jsz0 | Hacker News Reader

> The big difference is that each player is already paying for bandwidth at their end

We are really only paying for bandwidth to/from our providers. Everything in-between is best effort, nebulous peering arrangements, etc.

> But, ISPs charge their customers for 'unlimited' bandwidth

I doubt you can find a single residential Internet provider who advertises unlimited bandwidth at this point. The marketing for 'unlimited' started to counter dial-up services like AOL who billed usage by connection duration not bandwidth usage.

> having all the major content providers on-board with calling them out on throttling will keep them from doing it

Way more likely ISPs will do a little deep packet inspection and re-write the page to have a message along the lines of "Netflix & Google are the reason your rates keep going up. Your video is buffering because Netflix & Google want YOU to pay more for Internet service"

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I doubt you can find a single residential Internet provider who advertises unlimited bandwidth at this point.

Nation-wide? Maybe. But there are plenty of ISPs that offer unlimited bandwidth as a differentiating feature. See sonic.net, which covers most of CA[1].

1: http://www.sonic.net/sales/maps/

> Way more likely ISPs will do a little deep packet inspection and re-write the page to have a message along the lines of "Netflix & Google are the reason your rates keep going up. Your video is buffering because Netflix & Google want YOU to pay more for Internet service"

Haha, good luck with that on increasingly HTTPS-only services.

"You need to configure your browser to trust our SSL certificate authority as part of your account creation and router setup process....oh by the way we are also going to use it to inspect your SSL connections."

>We are really only paying for bandwidth to/from our providers. Everything in-between is best effort, nebulous peering arrangements, etc.

I don't know about you, but I'm certainly not. I fully intend to be provided connectivity to the wider Internet at the speed advertised. The money I'm giving to them pays for the peering arrangements that let that happen. Let me put it another way, I wouldn't pay anything for a connection that's just to/from Comcast with no wider connectivity.

>Way more likely ISPs will do a little deep packet inspection and re-write the page to have a message along the lines of "Netflix & Google are the reason your rates keep going up.

Netflix and Google can just use HTTPS if that happens. I believe Google already does.

Manipulating websites that way is likely illegal in a lot of countries.

Interestingly, in Australia we have had Data Caps for a significant amount of time (2002 I believe was when Telstra introduced the 3gb Cable Cap).

I know it's not US based, but looking at ISP's and their offerings elsewhere, there are options available. For example I have an Unlimited ADSL2+ connection from TPG (www.tpg.com.au). The trend locally seems to be ISP's offering more data and more value for money (Unlimited in some cases, but 500GB / 1TB plans for marginal fees per month)

I'm also with TPG and can't fathom having a cap, much less the typically tiny ones offered. Recently I noticed that Optus is now offering an unlimited account for a reasonable price. I've heard anecdotally from people working there that it would be cheaper for Optus to do away with the caps because of the internal overhead that tracking and accounting requires.

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