Editorial: Caps are welcome - They just need to be structured to meet needs - dslreports.com

I see that the mainstream press has picked up the "blogging" condemnation of the Time Warner experiment with tiered pricing, and usage caps. My own view on this probably counts for little but since dslreports.com is a "blog" as well perhaps I should set out "our view" for the record: Caps and tiered prices are overdue. The backlash against them at best misrepresents technical issues, and at worst is self-serving.

Clean fast bandwidth is not an inexhaustible resource. I want my ISP to deliver maximum speed without any perceptible congestion, and with minimal latency. I want them to invest heavily in their infrastructure to ensure they can meet the speed and latency targets morning noon and night. When an ISP engineer says that metering and caps are necessary for quality service, I believe them. Any customer of a data center understands the equation: they understand that BOTH speed and monthly usage are key factors in pricing. US ISPs, due to inheriting dial-up pricing plans (effectively included caps due to very low speeds) have been missing one pricing factor, to the detriment of the majority of users and the benefit to a minority.

[From Editorial: Caps are welcome - They just need to be structured to meet needs - dslreports.com]

This editorial is a great piece of work from a source that has a hell of a lot more clout than what they are willing to acknowledge. And it is right on the money: not only are caps the way to go, but we are going to hear a lot of noise from the same kind of abusers that these caps are designed to discourage.

I am with Comcast right now, and have been for about eight years. For a long time we heard of people getting their service mysteriously cancelled by Comcrap without the company ever disclosing what the cap actually was, except that it was excessive usage. People don't understand that broadband costs money, if a few saturate the service then it makes everyone else see Comcast as slow.

Of course, the whining is going to rage, but hopefully the end result will prove them right. You would have to pull a lot of video in order to hit the proposed 250GB limit with Comcast. If you are the kind of guy that is pulling above that, and Comcast offers you a $10 hit for every extra 10GB above the cap, you should be happy.

What about legal downloads? A full DVD is 4.7GB, so if you had a legal service that let you pull DVD video at full resolution, you would be able to watch 53 full DVDs in a month before hitting the cap. Comcast and others will probably make arrangements with the legitimate sources, like Netflix's instant play and the Apple iTMS so this content is cached within their network so it would not count against the cap.

What about software and other legitimate sources? The Australians have successfully proved that you can cache these at a local level, so you should be able to grab your Linux ISOs without problems.

Who is left? P2P. P2P is going to be left hanging out to dry, especially since the major broadband providers are already moving on with a newer generation, P4P, that will allow them to lock out the undesirables like The Pirate Bay, etc.

What we won't see is a price drop. What is their motivation to lower prices when even with competition present they simply nod to each other and keep the prices artificially high? We have FIOS available now, but the pricing is almost identical to cable. One would think that a new service would have to offer a lower price point to compete, since the feature set is almost identical.

Read the editorial, it is good stuff and you will be hearing a lot of bitching and moaning about it over the next week.