More Bandwidth Caps!
Posted on February 6, 2009
Filed Under Seattle, Tech | Comments Off
Now in Charter’s defense there’s a fundamental flaw with cable, the more people that have it the more useless it is, and every cable company that has attempted to fix this problem has failed on every single level. This week we’ve learned Charter is the next ISP in line to cap how much data you can transfer in any given month.
Charter plans on rolling out a tiered set of caps. Those who are on its 15mbps service plan will be capped at 100GB of aggregate use per month, while subscribers to the next tier up will get 250GB. Those who have signed on to the company’s top service, which comes in at 60mpbs, will get unmetered access.
This is even worse than comcrap, they don’t even give you a full day of service, what the fuck can you even do with 100GB? Why the fuck would you want super sonic speeds if you can’t even use it for more than 15 hours before they’ll threaten to cut off your service. Why even offer a higher speed if your network can’t support it? For years cable companies have wanted to pad their coffers and enrich their stock holders while they make up beg for more internet.
What they don’t tell you is the next tier is as bad as the last, assuming this next tier is the 25mbps that 250 GB would be gone in under 23 hours, still not even a day’s worth of service! The only reason there’s no cap on the 60mbps line is because no one’s using it, not because we don’t want it but because some people think internet shouldn’t cost more than 50 times what it costs in other countries. Slow bandwidth is a tax on the American people, I can’t wait for this stimulus package to be passed so we can finally join the rest of the world instead of being stuck with these companies that think we only want less than a day of internet.
There’s a bandwidth myth out there, that somehow someone who downloads 500GB is exponentially more expensive than the person who uses 1GB, it’s simply not true. Sure, you use more electricity but it’s no different than the phone companies, who have operated land line service with flat monthly fees even though some people would be considered ‘abusing’ their monthly plan. We don’t penalize those people for talking more, we shouldn’t put up barriers as to how much information we can consume. Especially if that barrier only allows you to use less than 2% of what you pay for.
There’s hope though, not only does the stimulus bill add more funding for broadband it clearly defines what it is.
It specifies that “advanced broadband services” must meet speeds of 45 Mbps second downlink and 15 Mbps uplink
Now we’re getting somewhere, a federal mandate to increase speed because we’re so far behind the rest of the world it’s pathetic. I could live with 45mbps, that is of course until I buy my 2PB hard drive, in which case I will continue whining about how horrible it is that I live in Seattle and it still takes more than 10 minutes to download a full movie.
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