You sir are a LIAR, Bandwidth cost NOTHING, only the infrastructure, and there is enough infrastructure already in place for Comcast to supply ALL of their customers with an UNLIMITED account, at NO COST TO THEM. Only mental midget monkey focks like yourself who work for Comcast would say otherwise, you lying SCUMBAG!

I think in markets with real competition, you’d find unlimited residential service would end up costing about $10/month more than capped service. In these markets, business accounts are already only $80/month (vs. $50 for unbundled residential) for cable modem service and these include static IP and some other amenities. The real problem is not caps per se, but lack of competition and lack of proper regulation, especially in those markets with monopoly providers.

Because internet is already capped in terms of speed. You don’t get less power or water flowing into your house, because you didn’t purchase high volume electric or water plan, but there is a limit on the amount of data that every comcast customer can get at once because of their internet package.

Now Comcast wants to use both business models, where the speed is capped and also the data volume, that’s just not right. They shouldn’t be able to make the cake and eat it too.

If every ISP had a true unlimited tier for say, $300/month would you be satisfied? I suspect not…

(Hint: true unlimited tier = business account)

If you are wealthy enough to get your own fibre to your home, there is still a cap — a large one, but it is still there. So I don’t get why people think there should not be a cap.

All our utilities, water, electricities, waste are all priced by usage. Why should data service be different?

The problem Comcast has with the cap is that since there is no meter – or way of knowing where you are vs. the cap – any cap will encourage customers to switch to DSL. If the telcos are smart, they will skip capped DSL/Internet and start to recoup market share.

You also wonder about Comcast’s plans for faster Internet services like “Blast” and Docsis 3. Both are going to be non-starters for customers who will see them now as just faster ways to hit the cap.

If you ask me, the telco DSL offerings are in for some gains here.

Yeah, I figured the issue about how TV content is delivered over the cable networks vs. IP video would be problematic, but that just doesn’t seem to be insurmountable. I mean, if a subscriber purchases a VoD movie, given some assumptions about how it’s encoded, length of the program, SD vs. HD, etc., that would seem to equate roughly to the number of MBs for the same movie to carry it over IP through a cable modem.

Not trying to oversimplify the issue, and I hear you that these streams are carried over different “logical networks” within the same cable… Just trying a thought experiment to ask whether it would be possible to ignore the engineering aspects long enough to find a way to implement/enforce the principle.

On your other point about the need for changes in how broadband services are regulate, I couldn’t agree more. But, it seems to me that even in cases where providers are forced to disclose accurate service levels, be up-front on terms of service, provide metering tools and so on, the risks of them 1) stifling innovation and/or 2) favoring their on content over their competitors still exists. A difficult set of issues to address in a way that all parties would find acceptable.

It looks like Comcast listened at least to this complaint. A representative of the company chimed in on the subject in the comment section of GigaOM today, (…)…

Furthermore, almost *EVERY* user will be highly impacted by the bandwidth downgrade for >15minutes of high usage. Do you play any MMOs (or other large games) or download HD video? Odds are very high that you will take >15m to download a game/patch/video at some point and get screwed by Comcast lowering your available bandwidth.

If Qwest customer service wasn’t so horrible (they make Comcast customer service look good) or there was another choice besides Comcast or Qwest, I would be leaving Comcast at the end of the month.