What is the additional cost to Comcast of the connection being used at, say 95% of capacity instead of 50%? Is it anything? I could understand if it were a simple supply and demand issue, but with no competition Comcast can simply charge whatever they want. At least if there were other providers they would have to keep prices in line with their costs or fear being undercut.
Usage based cost makes sense for electricity or water. If you use more, they have to send more to your house. It's not the same for bandwidth, unless the total amount is over the available bandwidth.
There is probably no additional cost for 90% of the day, but just like highways they need to design for the congested times. I wish they would just meter the peak hours -- this way more people would set their backups to run overnight or services would offer a way to cache episodes locally during the night so you can watch them after work.
I have a feeling they just have more people in the "peak users" category than the "over 300gb" category, so its easier to piss off the smaller group.
With more people cutting the cords, this is only going to get worse -- people come home and watch TV. I personally don't want to pay for a 10 lane highway with 5% utilization 90% of the day just to avoid 2 hours of traffic, so I definitely don't want to pay for internet that guarantees 50 mbps or whatever even during peak hours (if I wanted that I'd lease a line - I just want a cheap connection to the internet). I don't want to pay the ridiculous cost of over engineering. I'd rather see solutions that embrace the reality of that situation.
With their profits, I'd argue that -- in terms of the bill you're already paying -- you are already paying for that "10 lane highway". Only, Comcast (et al.) are not investing your payments in infrastructure. Instead, they are extracting them as profit (excessive profit, I would argue).
As to metering, that might work if there were competition. But, as has been repeatedly pointed out, there is little or no effective broadband competition in the U.S.
"No capacity" has a similar spectre in the last mile as to that which was recently demonstrating in the Netflix inter-connection choking scandal. Although last mile requires more outlay than "fixing" Netflix, the money is there (currently in outrageous profits).
The major ISP's have had years -- and very significant government subsidies and other favors -- to fix this. They haven't. We need the infrastructure to keep our economy competitive. Time to (re)regulate, and to open the field up to municipal development and competition.
> I wish they would just meter the peak hours -- this way more people would set their backups to run overnight
There are a few problems with this. Firstly, very few users are going to cut down peak usage, because it's during primetime that they have the free time and inclination to use the Internet.
Secondly most people don't even know what a GB is. Thirdly, you assume usage-based fees are meant to curb usage rather than drive profits.
> or services would offer a way to cache episodes locally during the night so you can watch them after work.
Since we are basically talking Netflix here, this is never going to fly with the DRM guys.
This is not a technical problem, as you can see, since the desided outcome can be reached, if you are willing to ignore some legal niceties...
But if Comcast gets its users in the habit of using less bandwidth/data, won't that mean Comcast can delay speeding up their connection and providing more bandwidth? I think from that perspective, there is a long-term cost for them if their customers continue to demand better connections. So, you're right, there isn't a cost for each individual bit that's sent across their network, but instead there's an eventual cost for their users demanding a connection that requires an upgrade to their infrastructure. And that's a cost that could be delayed if they change the behaviors and/or expectations of their customers.
(and fwiw, i have no interest in defending comcast. i bring this up mainly inform myself about the circumstances.)
> What is the additional cost to Comcast of the connection being used at, say 95% of capacity instead of 50%?
The marginal cost to Comcast is close to zero, the question is how to account for upgrades if everybodys usage goes up enough to exceed network design capacity.
Regular folk unexpectedly think that the cost of normal network upgrades are included in this so called "monthly subscription fee", but Comcast has real accountants with actual hard copy degrees on their walls that tell us that we need additional "bandwidth usage fees" and "overage fees" to pay for it in the US.
Usage based cost makes sense for electricity or water. If you use more, they have to send more to your house. It's not the same for bandwidth, unless the total amount is over the available bandwidth.