Comments on: Fiber and caps are the future: A view from a small ISP

By: Elmer D. Johnson

Elmer D. Johnson — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 14:45:24 +0000

Maybe a better way would be to offer uncapped 100 Mbps with three or four QoS levels? Sorta like the feeder road, versus the freeway versus the toll roads versus the autobahn.

By: Joe A

Joe A — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 01:40:58 +0000

In Canada, caps are actually starting to go away. Shaw offers 100mbps and 250mbps with both capped and uncapped packages. And we JUST flipped the switch from analog to digital across country. I’m just trying to figure out why the US thinks caps are necessary when the pipe supports speeds of 500mbps and more.

Honestly, it’s just standard business modus operandi to speak this way, just in case their company makes it big and does an IPO and then has to submit itself to the Wall Street model of ineptitude that requires businesses to constantly outdo their record performances or else watch their stock be devalued by people who couldn’t even make a lemonade stand profitable in the desert if it was the only source of hydration around for 100 miles.

Word of wisdom to small businesses…allowing for further growth into your business model and making sure you are profitable is all that matters. Don’t listen to Wall Street Analysts and don’t ever pay your executives on any kind of a pay structure where their motivation is to the stock price and not to the profitability of the company in the long term.

By: Kobe Wild

Kobe Wild — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 21:06:18 +0000

Metering service sucks.
What’s the point of 80mb down if you can’t use it.
currently i’m paying $80 a month for 3mb down(ha it’s more like 1.2 down.) and 480k up with a data cap of 150gig’s. this is f-ing stupid.

AT&T sucks and i’m getting screwed but it’s the only company in my market with adsl.

For 30mb up and 30 mb down.
I would pay $100.00 no questions asked as long as there was no caps..

By: EH

EH — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 18:05:37 +0000

I don’t think that the broadband providers would cut off your service if you exceeded the cap. They would just charge you an extra fee based upon how many Mb of data you used over the cap level. Personally, I see no problem with metering bandwith usage. I think customers should pay for what they use, just like they do with energy, power, and health care.

By: Pagan Bloodrose

Pagan Bloodrose — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 02:09:38 +0000

In regards to this article, no. Alz backup off that Kool-Aid son.

By: Russell

Russell — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 20:15:35 +0000

Caps on food, energy? It’s called rationing – obviously this does happen when resources are scarce. Quite valid and necessary in extreme situations, but certainly doesn’t make for stable society the longer rationing continues.

By: Quentin Dewolf

Quentin Dewolf — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 18:54:07 +0000

wouldn’t scaled service solve the balancing issue? The BroadBand companies should just charge a scaled price (10Mbps, 30Mbps, …) and presume that we will fill that pipe. Nothing would be more anoying than to get a certain level of service and then to all of a sudden have it reduced. It is very hard for even knowledgable consumers to understand when a cap or overage charge will appear. It is much better to offer services that sound like super user, light user, extensive streamer, … Imagine if all of a sudden your cable offered you less channels because you changed the channel too much or watched it too long.

By: Jeffrey McManus

Jeffrey McManus — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 17:30:06 +0000

Caps aren’t the future; they’re a symptom of the way that telecom is organized into chains of duopolies. It means there’s insufficient competition in a market.

Could you imagine if there were caps on other commodities — food, energy, health care? No way, people wouldn’t stand for it. In time consumers will come to understand how bogus caps are and vote with their dollars.

By: KenG

KenG — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 15:48:35 +0000

It will all come down to whether or not there is true competition. Since there is no additional cost to offering uncapped fiber service (and any service provider that claims otherwise is lying), a market with two real competitors would not have any capped service offering. It’s just a mechanism to maximize profits, and would be sacrificed as a no-cost feature of a company that wants to win business.

For an example of a market with very few competitors and real competition, look at the disk drive industry. When the latest round of consolidation is complete, there will be only 3 manufacturers, and yet the price per bit continues to decline, and profit margins frighten investors so much that the two pure play vendors (Seagate and Western Digital) often have P/E ratios of 5 or 6. If those companies colluded like wireless carriers and banks (to name a couple), entry level disk drives would cost $75 and would max out at 500 Gbytes.

By: Alz

Alz — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 15:23:30 +0000

It’s called the effects of “net neutrality”. Metered billing will be required. It will be the only way to keep things “equal”.

As wireless provider MetroPCS (I think) found out, when they tried to come up with lower priced plans that disallowed some high volume traffic, they were sued by the left wing loons who like “net neutrality” – remember, the goal is not related to the quality of the network, but who controls the network.

The regulatory winds are pushing these guys towards having to meter.