but..but...but...free market knows best!!

yet another example of how private interests and influence need to be excised from government.

people need to get mad.

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The duration of this video has been updated from unknown to 25:35 - length declared by blutruth.

This is news to nobody.

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I'm mad as hell and I'm ... probably just going to complain about my slow connection for a bit, and then have a sandwich.

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I signed the petition to make Susan Crawford FCC chairman. It needs a lot of help:
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/appoint-susan-crawford-fcc-chairman/73mtqt0q

u has bad link boss. try https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/appoint-susan-crawford-fcc-chairman/73mtqt0q

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Ooops, thanks - fixed it.

If only the "competition" hadn't perverted the term flat rate over the years. The only place I can get no-questions-asked broadband access over here is the previously state-owned monopolist. And a proper LTE flat rate is out of the question entirely.

I know, first world problems...

Meh, cry me a frickin' river.

According to Comcast, you can get a 20 Mb/s connection for US$30 a month. I can't find any mention of a data cap, so I'm going to assume it's pretty much unlimited.

In NZ, a 15 Mb/s connection with a whooping 30GB data cap will cost "only" US$60 a month.

And they promote this like it's a good thing!

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Does NZ have something like the NBN being developed over there? http://www.nbnco.com.au/

I'm with Telstra BigPond and I'm getting ADSL2 with 200GB for about $60 per month. Still, I hope Fiber will give me an exponential increase of everything except price.

I pay $15/mo for my phone internet and I've gotten speeds upwards of 50Mb down on it. If I could hotspot more than 2GB a month I'd get rid of my home internet

Yeah, the government is rolling out it's "ultra fast broadband" over the next few years, with speeds of up 100mbps, but in reality they've acknowledged it'll be more like 25 for most people.

I'm lucky enough to be on telstras cable network, and have been given 100mbps for free for the next year. Score!

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Nice. Yes, Telstra's BigPond Extreme cable is still the fastest consumer level you can get here - unless you're lucky enough to already have FTTP from the NBN - but that's not many.

Comcast has a 250gb limit. Theoretically....I can't say I've ever hit it.

You do know that data limits are entirely made-up limitations? It doesn't cost them any more or less if you download 1mb per day or 1tb (well, it takes more electricity but that's nitpicking).

Those who swear in Capitalism are totally clueless how much of the infrastructure just wouldn't be there if private corporations would've handled them? Simply put, there no incentive to invest a penny to poor people because they won't be investing that money back to you. None whatsoever to cure illnesses of the less fortunate, no need to feed then, house them, nothing.

This is by no means universally true, and I doubt it's even universally true in the U.S.

Even in a world with no peering charges, if everyone starts downloading all the time then additional kit is required to cope with the increased peak bandwidth requirements. No ISP's have enough capacity for everyone to use all their bandwidth at once, the better ones are just closer.

Where did you get the idea that data transmission is free?

*promote more optical fiber

Promoting this video back to the front page; last published Saturday, February 9th, 2013 6:24am PST - promote requested by chingalera.

Data transmission in modern worlds follows rules of contention.
ISP's typically provision their networks with 1:50 or higher contention ratios, because they know that 50 people on any normal day wont use up 1 torrent-user's typical bandwidth consumption under full saturation.

The ratios are calculated from the average access edge speeds....say avg speed is 3mbps, they could provision 50 customers to share 3mbps in the core network before they consider upgrading.

Contention....noone uses the entire networks bandwidth the entire time its available. Otherwise networking equipment and access costs would be 50 times greater!!

Its just not efficient to plan for everyone to saturate everyones links at the same time and not have a bottleneck....because 99% of the rest of the time, noones using shit on average. What a waste of power, space, equipment, service fees, support contracts, engineers to maintain the equipment / network etc..etc...etc...

That is true. But. Peak transfer speeds are not in any way linked to total amount of data downloaded over time. This is what i meant that data caps are artificial, designed for two purposes: to coax users to download less in hopes that it will help peak transfer rates (it will) but the main reason is just more profit.

Correct me if i'm wrong but ISPs do NOT have data caps in their contracts, it's flat rate as no one can predict the total amount of data transferred in n amount of time. Data caps belong to the 90s.when infrastructure couldn't cope with many users.

Oh, I just love it when people blame the "free market" when they're staring at a market stifled and distorted by government intervention.

It's like laughing at drunk people being clumsy.

Even if it were a free market, that's like blaming free speech for millions of people believing in god.

It would be correct to say that it's more complicated than that...

With the exception of the Tier 1 ISPs, who were able to use their market position to force everybody else to pay to peer with them, ISPs will generally pay for all traffic that leaves their network. There are no data caps for ISPs, they pay for usage and then take the average data costs and use that as part of their pricing determination for their customers.

Even aside from that though, due to contention (see @charliem's comment above) there simply isn't enough kit installed to cope with all users downloading as much as they can all at once. You could look at a single fixed cost gigabit line (lets say it costs $1024 pcm) as actually having a cost of 0.31c/gigabyte transferred, whether or not you actually use it. Extra data transfers over that line don't actually cost any more until you exceed the link capacity, then you have increased costs.

What your ISP is selling you is actually a share of a link. They don't have to charge for usage, but they have to pay for it regardless... all that changes is how they bill their customers. Since 1% of residential customers generate approx 90% of the traffic, it is a bit fairer to charge for usage, otherwise 99% of the customers are subsidising the 1% who generate most of the costs for the ISP.

Yeah lady, just get government involved. Everything they stick their noses into becomes faster, cheaper and more efficient.