The ability to have unlimited broadband caps is a basic competitive advantage. In order for this country to remain both competitive and innovative, the ability for individuals to grow their usage of the internet without undue fear of compulsory charges or cut-offs allows us to remain competitive in the world-wide marketplace. The fact is that price to provide bandwidth is continuing to shrink at the same rate as bandwidth growth is continuing to increase.

Finally, none of this would even be an issue in a marketplace with real open competition. There is no REAL problem. If there were, you’d see Verizon Fiber capping rates – they have the highest per-household install and improvements percentage in the industry. They also have the vision to see that creating the next information highway is an important competitive advantage, rather than just something that you milk for all it’s worth without making any significant infrastructure improvements for 10 years (like Cable). If you have more open cable, internet and broadband wireless markets available this all turns into a no-brainer discussion.

The electric companies try this approach – though I’d hate to have my air conditioning throttled back during heat waves. However, I’d certainly accept an ISP throttling my downloads during peak network usage times.

The telco’s price naked DSL high enough to negate any cost savings from say Vonage, they want you to use their telephone service. Cable cos are a bit better but suffer the same syndrome.

These industries are not unique in this. When automobiles first came out there were many vestiges of horse-drawn wagons carried over.

I just want the best pipe available. I don’t want any stinking tv packages with dozens of channels I don’t want in order to get the two or three I do want. I don’t need my ISP to have this portal page, or email, or any other chrome nonsense. Just a pipe. I can live with tiered pricing as long as it’s transparent. Tiered by overall usage, or as someone suggested, off hour rates. Then there’s the QOS question. VOIP is more resource intensive than surfing.

In any case both cable operators and ISPs should better be careful to press caps too much because the interest of people on Internet access services depends very much, in my opinion, on having free and unmettered access to any service / web site. Before ADSL, internet access (using POTS) have been mettered and, at the end, that scheme has been demonstrated as non acceptable to consumers and all the ISPs have introduced flat access tariffs. Now we have more bandwidth but the situation is the same: Internet mettered access is something that consumers will not accept.

Perhaps all this is simply an intent of some companies to “kill” or limit the “risky” (for them) growth of Internet.