Would be wonderful if the FCC did their fucking job for once and banned data caps. Companies like Mediacom abuse the fuck out of them
Because fuck you, pay me, that’s why.
— Comcast, probably.
It will always make me happy that no matter how hard they try to make Xfinity happen, everyone remembers their real, ugly face before the facelift, and that ugly face is Comcast.[1]
“Stop trying to make
fetchXfinity happen! It’s not going to happen!”
Hey Comcast’s service improved in my area once google Fiber got installed.
Just goes to show you that companies are fine with you complaining as much as you want, just NEVER let there be an alternative.
Oh fuck off FCC, you know exactly why and intentionally don’t address it.
Why is the FCC asking this question instead of already correcting the issue?
In short, the Administrative Procedure Act. It sets out the procedures that have to be followed before policy decisions get made. If the FCC doesn’t follow the APA’s procedures exactly, that gives the industry grounds to sue. Even if the industry eventually looses, it would still mean a stay on the new policies during which they would continue to exploit consumers.
The APA isn’t a bad thing, since it forces federal agencies to be deliberate in making policy decisions that could have far reaching consequences. That said, it does make the government even slower to react to situations that often change quickly. But it has tripped up this administration and previous administrations when they have tried to make hasty decisions, including Trump with his “Muslim ban”.
I wish informative answers like yours would get the upvotes they deserve. You have my upvote.
Question, what the fuck was the “Muslim ban” I’ve never heard of this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_13769
It was never law, which is why it was so easily reversed.
If Ajit Pai were still in charge, he’d say “Woof woof! The telcos can do anything they want!,” and the Verizon CEO who owns him would pat him on the head and give him a Milk-Bone.
It’s ridiculous I have to pay Xfinity $110/mo for my speed and unlimited bandwidth
Over here, I’m getting the Cox… last bill was $99 a month, now my “promo period” expired, and it is the full $170 a month thanks to “unlimited”. It’s pretty gross, but it is the only plan that gives the “amazing” 30 mbps up. :|
God damn. In Austria I’m paying 35€ for 250/250, and am still looking over to the Romanians with longing eyes. Data caps are only on mobile - which is still questionable in my eyes.
Data caps on mobile makes more sense to me, simply because mobile data is so much more expensive.
Is it?
To me it seems it’s cheaper to build an antenna to serve 100-1000s of users than to dig and install cables to all of them.
It depends on what you’re trying to do. If you’re just trying to reach them and don’t care about bandwidth, wireless is the way to go. It’s why more developed countries lagged behind developing countries on the transition to wireless phones. But when you’re trying to deploy shear amounts of bandwidth, nothing beats fiber. It’s incredibly fast, has low latency, and doesn’t get interference.
Because MONEY and lack of choice in some markets… easy.
Because of corporate greed and a ridiculous lack of meaningful regulation.
Lack of healthy competition. It’s plain to see from the other side of the ocean where I live… Is it maybe one of those things you can only see from afar?
Nah, we see it too. Those of us whose eyes are open, anyway.
€20 every 28 days on a PAYG sim for unlimited 5g in Ireland, it’s just boggling to see what folks in the US and Canada pay
OP was about data caps on landlines… yeah, at first glance I too thought it could only be mobile
GREED. That has always been the answer.
Because there is money to be made!
$$$ and because the ISPs don’t get charged for unethical and blantly illegal activities…
The real question should be why is the internet not a public utility yet…? Huh FCC/CRTC…?
What’s going to stop the forms being filled out by industry-controlled bots this time?[1] Last time the FCC took public comment, anti-net-neutrality comments were being made under the names of dead people and people who would later claim they never participated in making comments to the FCC.
Otherwise, it’s going to be the same dumb shitshow as last time.
The same dumb shitshow as last time is probably the goal.
It did a great job of discrediting opening anything for public comment thenceforth. Which I really think was the long-term goal.
The infrastructure over which that data travels isn’t free. If you have a resource and it has any kind of scarcity, you want to tie consumption to the cost of producing more of it.
You can reduce the transaction cost – reduce hassle for users using Internet service – by not having a cap for them to worry about, but then you decouple the costs of consumption.
Soft caps, like throttling, are one way to help reduce transaction costs while still having some connection between consumption and price.
But point is, if one user is using a lot more of the infrastructure than any other is, you probably want to have that reflected in some way, else you’re dumping Heavy User’s costs on Light User.
You pay them for a certain throughput, that is your limit, if they can’t provide that limit then they need to advertise and sell the actual limit they are comfortable providing.
If they’re advertising a guaranteed rate, sure – and there are contracts that exist where one does buy guaranteed rates (usually over some period of time, though). Some businesses may buy that. But if you look at a typical consumer ISP, they usually aren’t selling that. They’ll have something saying that the speed isn’t guaranteed, or “Internet speeds up to” or something along those lines.
Lemme grab Comcast, for an example.
googles
https://www.xfinity.com/learn/deals/internet#Pricing&otherinfo
Internet: Actual speeds vary and are not guaranteed.
The ISP I use (small, most people won’t be using it) says “Up to X speed” next to each price on their pricing page.
Like, consumer ISPs are not going to generally sell guaranteed-rate service, and most customers aren’t going to want to pay for what that would run. That’s not just a function of some users using a lot more than others, but because they’re also overselling the infrastructure. They maintain infrastructure sufficient to handle load if customers are only using a portion of that maximum – that is, if every one of their customers decided to simultaneously saturate their line, even if those customers aren’t particularly heavy users normally, they’d simply overwhelm what infrastructure is there.
Now, that being said, I do think that it might be legitimate to ask ISPs to disclose overselling ratio (or maybe there’s some kind of better metric, like how percent often their internal infrastructure to an average customer is above N% utilization). Or to explicitly disclose soft caps or something. Those might be useful numbers in helping a customer compare ISPs. But they aren’t presently selling and won’t be providing guaranteed sustained rates – that’s just the reality of what kind of Internet service that can be provided at what consumer prices are.
I’d argue that the FCC’s recent Broadband Consumer Label proposal is more important. Part of the problem with broadband as a market is that providers are able to bury the true cost and product under reams of legalese that no one ever reads. Economists refer to this as asymmetric information, where one party to a transaction has vastly more information than the other. Forcing providers to show all costs and restrictions up front would go far in preventing them from fooling customers.
I would also like it to be harder for providers to change their rates. It’s frustrating to constantly have rates jacked up when I’m not seeing much of an increase in service. I finally left Comcast over their rate increases and calls trying to upsell me on services I had no interest in.
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SuperSurf, Smart Unli Data and GOMO Unli only have data caps.
