It isn't impossible, just too costly to the typical residential customer who expects to pay <<$100/mo.

Except Comcast and the other shitty ISPs (including mobile carriers) which implement data caps, despite there being no technical reason for it*. At least back in the day there was an actual limit to the number of active simultaneous connections an ISP can handle.

* even for mobile, data caps don't make much sense, as they are monthly and per-user while network congestion is temporary and local. Better sell unlimited data plans with different speeds (priced accordingly), and only apply those speed limits if the local cell becomes congested.

I can assure you with certainty that it’s all in the because category. Their approach in my experience is raise prices until the customer complains.

I had to quit spectrum due to moving out of the country (10Gbps symmetric now for €25/mo thank you very much) and they still offered a reduced price “in case any roommates are staying behind”. I was paying ~$100 and the “discount” was significant but I don’t recall the exact number.

I was too lazy to basically fight for a better price, but if you threaten to quit (or better quit it for a while) they’ll 100% lower your bill. I’m sure there are more sophisticated “negotiation” tactics a search away.

No it doesn't. ISPs can still charge you for the bandwidth they provide. If you want gigabit service, that's going to cost more than megabit service.

I don't think this is universally true. I have a gigabit line via a residential ISP ($60/mo) in Europe and it will max out 24/7 without throttling.

What I don't have is access to the same support and service guarantees that would be included in a business plan.

If you don't have a SLA, you're not paying for X/s. The cheap consumer plans only advertise the speed as a potential maximum with no guarantee. Moreover, they explicitly state that overuse will result in slower speeds.

So if you want X/s, then you'll need a stricter contract, and will have to pay a lot more than what you're doing now. Or, the ISP can request that upstream services subsidize the bandwidth for downstream customers and that way you won't have to pay more.

I always imagine it like this:

    Them: "This plan gives you up to 23mb/s."
    Me: "So you're saying you guarantee I will not get more than 23mb/s?"
    Them: "Right."
    Me: "OK. I'll pay you up to $40 a month for that."

That assumes people have a choice for their ISP.

If I want high speed internet I have two choices. Both of them are huge national companies.

If they decide to go the throttle route, where do I go?

>Secondly, why are they throttling this service? Because they can't charge effectively for it.

That's an interesting take considering how they offered a product at a certain bandwidth and I agreed to pay for that bandwidth. If I use it to capacity, the services I receive from third parties are somehow 'exploiting' the model? I don't think so.

If the post office offers to ship anything under 10lbs for a flat rate, is a company taking advantage if they offer, say, a 10 lbs cheese of the month package using that USPS service?

Actually, where I live there is competition.

In fact, there is a second cable ISP in my apartment building.

What's more, in addition to the cable ISP I have (Spectrum), I have a DSL link (Fusion) as well.

I'd dump Spectrum (and tried to do so), but long term construction has blocked access to the access points for my building, so I'm stuck with them for now.

Once the scaffolding blocking access is removed (it's been up for more than three years), Spectrum will be history for me.

Even more, Verizon has been claiming they're trying to get access to implement FIOS in my building, but I think they're lying since they were able to site a cell tower on the roof a couple years ago.

However, I live in the most densely populated city in the US.

In most other places in the US there are, at most, two ISPs which provide service. Usually a cable provider and a DSL or Satellite provider.

That's what I meant be a lack of competition. My apologies if I didn't make that clear.

Have you never seen paid wifi hot-spot access?

>There are a million other reasons from privacy to p2p and beyond.

You still haven't given a real world example. It sounds like you're mad you can't seed on bittorrent effectively from your mobile.

>And lets not forget that all wireless telcos have absurdly low data caps

Sounds like you picked a bad plan. In the US all 4 national carriers offer unlimited (well technically softcap congestion depriority if you go >20-someGB) plans for under $100. I literally never switch my phone to wifi at home since LTE propagates better and I get more consistent speeds. (Carrier gave me a femtocell so I'm still using my cable ISP for backhaul there). I've scratched 20GB a few months and actively had to try to download livecd's in addition to my usual 320kbps spotify streaming to do it.

Ah, so you're on the receiving end of the subsidy, in a big way. Wow! That's what, five or six people streaming a full-length movie apiece, every day?

The structure that ISPs seem to like, of a cap with a fairly stiff charge for exceeding it, doesn't appeal to me either. But I don't see what would be wrong with a baseline connection fee plus a modest charge per GB, such that streaming a whole movie would cost on the order of $2.

(Message heavily edited after I realized you agree that the subsidy is unfair.)

It's immaterial to me whether ISPs had gotten around to creating their a-la-carte packages yet. I want it to be impossible for them to do so. Why leave the option open?

> Basically, by fighting data caps, you're demanding that a grandma who only checks their email once a day has to pay as much as a family of four who streams Netflix in 4K every waking hour of the day.

You do realize that ISPs already tier their offerings in such a way that this is a non-issue? Grandma would buy the 10Mbit/s package, the family would buy the 1Gig/s. I have no issue with that sort of tiered pricing. That's a perfectly fine division to make. But, slapping arbitrary data xfer caps on top of that is dirty double-dipping.

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.

Most of the cost is the actual digging/laying new fiber. The price of that does not really go down over time (instead the cost of labor goes up over time usually). The actual fiber and equipment is a very small part of the cost.

This happened at my parents town. They were looking at setting up their own municipal ISP and after some research/quotes it ended up costing X which was too much. They tried again a decade later and the cost for roughly the same system was 1.5X so even more out of their budget.

The other case is the fiber already existing and the ISP refuses to upgrade to enable higher speeds then that is just pure greed.

I thought you were serious for a sec. You should open an ISP, it would be wildly successful with your background knowledge.

well, truth said, you can pay that and more here if you want a good SLA and bandwidth guarantees. But for residential use it's not needed.

You must understand that they can only sell you a 1gig pipe because they know not everyone will use it at the same time.

EVERY ISP in the world operates by oversubscribing their capacity. EVERY. ONE.

You want 1gig and removed data caps by law? Ok, get ready to be introduced to “boosted” bandwidth. You’ll get 1gig for the first 30 seconds of a connection then they will throttle you back. Already exists in some places including mine.

It really $houldn't be that hard to under$tand.

no it's not subsidizing. Basically I pay X amount to the ISP to ACTUALLY VIEW NETFLIX. Basically the ISP gets more out of the deal by having access to netflix, not the other way.