Then don't sell me one. If you need caps then add caps but don't sell me it uncapped and then complain when I use my connection that you sold me more than you intended.
So what's the problem? If you violate the ToS and become an unprofitable customer they refuse to keep selling you a connection by disconnecting you.
I guess I don't understand all the complaints along this vein. It's not like providers come back and try to sue you for excess bandwidth usage. They just say 'no thanks we don't want you as a customer'. If you walked into a mcdonalds and ordered 1 small fry and asked for 1000 ketchup packets they would probably do the same. Despite condiments being unlimited.
I completely agree. However, ISPs should not be allowed to advertise "unlimited" if that's not what they provide. On the other side of things, the tech community should stop getting angry every time an ISP attempts to actually charge for heavy usage.
Of course, but in other instances, the tech community gets upset at usage-based billing.
We want ISPs to stop advertising non-unlimited service as "unlimited". But the tech community seems to only accept the solution wherein unlimited service is provided, ignoring the other (IMO much better) solution wherein non-unlimited service is advertised as non-unlimited, and the non-unlimitedness is provided in a sane manner with usage-based billing rather than vague rules.
It's like the all-you-can-eat buffet that changes the rules when a football team shows up, but also everybody gets upset any time the buffet thinks about changing to an a la carte model.
The problem is that people are completely, almost willfully ignorant of what a gigabyte is.
Add to that programs and OS's that automatically update, family members / unsecured wifi that results in uploads/downloads without the subscriber's knowledge, and the fact that (especially at fiber speeds) most downloads are in the "fast" to "instantaneous" range. (In the 56k days, you knew to be cautious about downloading big files, because tying up the phone line for a couple hours could be a major inconvenience.)
So I guess people are more willing to pay for a product that's a fixed cost instead of variable cost -- even if variable cost would be lower -- because the conceptual workload of understanding what a gigabyte is, and monitoring their usage in gigabytes, represents a cost higher than the price differential between fixed and variable.
I agree, but it's not really a 'problem'. Knowing enough about how the internet works to save, say, $10/mo on your bill due to pro-rated charges probably just isn't worth it for most people.
I'm sure we'd all save on car repair if everyone in the country knew the basics of it, but it's really just not in everyones interest to know a little bit of everything.
> Home users don't really want unmetered connections
Implying that the commenter was in favor of giving home users metered connections (with a gigabyte cap).
I was saying that the problem with a plan to give customers capped connections is that many of them don't understand the concept of a monthly transfer cap and don't know how to effectively monitor or control their usage to stay within the cap.
I didn't mean to say that the problem with the customers is that they don't understand the concept of a monthly transfer cap.
But I might've come across that way, because trying to get non-technical people to understand technical topics is usually an exercise in frustration and futility (as most HN readers probably already know). And I guess some of that mindset colored the tone of my comment.
And it would be interesting to try to fix it as if the customers were the problem -- i.e., an ISP that tries to educate its users about what a gigabyte is and provide bandwidth monitoring tools. Maybe it'll improve technological literacy if people realize that knowledge can save them money. But I fear it'd be an uphill battle.
As soon as you get infected or bring a kid back from college and let them torrent like crazy, the bandwidth overage costs get high, fast. I tried this for years with our customers, we're going unlimited because we're tired of arguing with people who can't comprehend this model.
Technical reasons? There are none. This is customer/sales driven, normal (non-technical and the majority) customers don't want to bother with technical bandwidth/transfer non-sense.
"Real" bandwidth that you're allowed to saturate costs an ISP about $1/Mbps/month, and that's not counting the cost of building the ISP's network itself which is probably much higher. Today's $50 broadband service is maybe backed by 1 Mbps of real bandwidth if you're lucky, but changing the advertising from "up to 15 Mbps" to "1 Mbps guaranteed" is commercial suicide.
I would bet that almost all of the cost of Google Fiber is in the last mile; OTOH Google can probably buy bandwidth very cheap. It's probably still oversubscribed 100:1 or more.
