> most national ISPs

Which nation are you talking about? I suppose I'd guess US but it would help if you said.

I'm still getting uncapped broadband (albeit with vague TOS provisions) in the UK. I think the rest of Europe is probably similar.

For the record - I'd like to move towards metered billing - but with a realistically low price per GB - not a punitive one based on profiting from people that don't have the knowledge to estimate their usage.

Give me 20-40 GB at a good speed for £20/month with prices scaling linearly from there and I'll be fairly happy and no-one will get burnt.

(just checked and most providers are offering uncapped at around 20Mb/s for £20/month)

I'd be curious to know why you would prefer a metered approach when, as you say, for that same price you get uncapped. It seems to me that most people, in the US anyway, would rather not have caps. I can honestly say this is the first time I've heard anybody say they would, for the same price, prefer a cap. For the record, 20Mbps for £20 is roughly similar to what our local cable monopoly offers in NC.

I absolutely prefer capped service far, far more than uncapped services. In Singapore, I can get a LTE SIM for $35, and then pay $25 for 7 days of data @14 Gigabytes, with roll over of the amounts I don't use.

In general, I get 50 megabits down/20 megabits up. And, because this is a capped service, I have a reasonably good chance of actually seeing that performance. If it was, "Uncapped" or "Unlimited" - then people would abuse the crap out of it, and all of a sudden that 50 megabits/sec down would quickly drop, making the system far, far less useful.

I've never been a fan of unlimited/uncapped services, they quickly degrade into poor experiences for everyone in a very short period of time.

> And, because this is a capped service, I have a reasonably good chance of actually seeing that performance. If it was, "Uncapped" or "Unlimited" - then people would abuse the crap out of it, and all of a sudden that 50 megabits/sec down would quickly drop, making the system far, far less useful.

Using the service I have paid for is not abusing it, anymore than watching too much cable TV or making too many local calls is abuse of those services. If it causes degradation for other users, that's the fault of the ISP that has over-overprovisioned us. And the top ISPs all have profits in the billion dollar range, so it's not like they're hurting for money and just can't fix the infrastructure. Caps are just a way to squeeze out higher profits by reducing the necessity of upgrading infrastructure.

That said, not once have I ever seen my speeds drop below what they're rated to be.

So - let's take those one at a time, because they are interesting.

"Watching too much cable TV" - Cable TV is a broadcast Medium, and watching it, like listening to broadcast radio, has no marginal cost or impact. You can leave your TV off for an entire month, or tuned to a channel for 24x7x365 - zero difference in cost to the provider, or impact to other people on the service.

"Making too many local calls" - More than one person has been required to purchase a business line when they overused their local calling privileges. Indeed, on some CO to CO trunks, if enough people (ab)used their local calling privileges, the entire exchange would be blocked and nobody could call in/out. Unlike the case of internet connectivity, there is no graceful fallback - once the trunk reaches capacity, it's dead for anyone else. (Lumby, BC to Vernon, BC - used to happen all the time - 48 people could bring down a town of 1800). That's why those types of deployments require some type of per minute charges to avoid that scenario.

"If it causes degradation for other users, that's the fault of the ISP that has over-overprovisioned us" - We totally agree here. Any ISP selling unlimited service, and not clearly explaining how many gigabytes "Unlimited" equals, is doing everyone a disservice.

"Caps are just a way to squeeze out higher profits by reducing the necessity of upgrading infrastructure." - We disagree here. ISPs should provide Caps to their customers, and clearly communicate what they are - and then compete to provide higher caps while ensuring they maintain the line rate they've committed to their customers.

For example, if I've purchased a 1 Gigabit connection, the ISP darn well better invest in their infrastructure to make sure that none of their ports are blocking. Comcast utterly failed to do that with Netflix recently, and I find that annoying beyond belief. At the same time though, I don't expect Comcast to provision enough capacity to support all of their customers at 1 Gigabit (or whatever a high speed connection is) at the same time - that's cost prohibitive - particularly as it will rarely be happening.

On the Big I internet, this is solved by what's called 95th percentile billing. This is probably too confusing for the average user, so something simpler like, "You get a 1 Gigabit connection for $75/month, with a 10 Terabyte/month Limit during Peak hours, and Unlimited Terabyte limit in Off peak hours, $20/addition Terabyte in Peak, and we make sure that none of our upstream ports our blocked on any of our peering routers" is exactly what I'd be looking for.

> That's why those types of deployments require some type of per minute charges to avoid that scenario.

It sounds like those deployments required infrastructure upgrades, not more creative billing to stop people from utilizing it.

> We disagree here. ISPs should provide Caps to their customers, and clearly communicate what they are - and then compete to provide higher caps while ensuring they maintain the line rate they've committed to their customers.

Even this isn't the reality. It's rare for landline Internet to be advertised with the actual data caps in effect. In my case, the data cap is defined nowhere except the Acceptable Use Policy (a long document that nobody is going to read) and in a My Usage part of your account (which you obviously won't see until you're already hooked up.)

At the same time, who are they going to be competing with? How many people are going to lay down fiber side-by-side with someone else's fiber? What incentive is for them to compete based on the data cap instead of following current practices which ae basically "100 MBPS BLAZING FAST SUPER-SPEED INTERNET!!!"*

(fine print)

* Limited to 200GB/month. Users going over this limit will be automatically upgraded to the next highest tier after three offenses.

I'm not sure why you disagree with the statement "caps are just a way to squeeze out higher profits by reducing the necessity of upgrading the infrastructure." You're basically making the argument that yes, caps do have that effect, but are put in place as a necessary network management strategy, despite the fact that most of these networks worked quite well before data caps and don't work any better with them. While some or most of them are continuing to invest in upgrading infrastructure, most of them are also rolling around in billions of dollars of profit that they aren't investing...because there is no real market incentive to do what you're saying they "should" do.

> "You get a 1 Gigabit connection for $75/month, with a 10 Terabyte/month Limit during Peak hours, and Unlimited Terabyte limit in Off peak hours,

What a world that would be. In reality data caps are usually 300GB in networks that can obviously support much more than this. I could blow through my former data cap in 12 hours. Heck even in your scenario, I would only be able to use my rated 1 gigabits for 2-3 hours at max utilization. It seems misleading to advertise Internet as 1 gbps if you can actually only get 1 gbps for 3/720 (0.4%) hours of the month.

EDIT: I misread that as 1 TB instead of 10TB, but I don't think 4% of the month is much better.

I think to some degree we agree. Caps are put in place to both ensure a profit to the carrier, as well as ensure availability to the users. If the Carrier did not need to make a profit, they could upgrade their infrastructure to be totally non blocking. Alternatively, if the Carrier needed to make a profit, but was okay providing degraded service, they could avoid upgrading infrastructure.

But, if they want to do both - Profit + good service, then caps are needed.

The competition, btw, is definitely fiber (See what happens to Comcast Service when a fiber competitor comes to town - it gets much better) and wireless (I haven't used a wireline carrier in singapore for 2+ months. All LTE, all the time.)

Regarding my limits - the nice things about Tier-1 ISPs (which Comcast is) - is that they don't pay for data use, as they engage in what is called "Settlement Free Peering" - what they do pay for is (roughly) Trenches + Vaults + Data Center Real Estate + Power + cooling + security + Chassis + Fiber + Interconnect Ports + Line-Cards. These are all a function of peak usage, not total usage. So - outside of peak-usage, which has reliable patterns of behavior, there is no costs to the ISP, or fellow users of the same resources, to your usage. Peak Usage may be as few as 4 hours/day, or 120 hours/month * 1 gigabit = 54 Terabytes. In a month, 1 gigabit could theoretically draw 324 Terabytes, so - that's 270 Terabytes off Peak + 10 Terabytes on Peak allowance = 280 Terabytes/month.

By doing just a bit of scheduling, you don't have to pay any extra, the ISPs network isn't overloaded, and you have a reasonable allowance of data to work with.

Of course, if they start selling 1 Gigabit Service, that's a lot of switch ports/chassis/routers/interconnects/etc/etc... they are going to have to upgrade to handle the new peaks.

I think they're talking about home internet connections, as in fibre or ADSL broadband.

I have an uncapped service (Virgin Media) in the UK which I wouldn't trade for anything. So much so that if I were to move house their service availability would be a factor to consider.

I get 152Mbps down/15Mbps up and I have never dropped below that level but more than a few Mbps for a short time.

Because at the moment s/he is bearing the cost of abusive users.

I suppose my preference would be that providers simply build the capacity required to support the advertised bandwidth at 100% utilization. This is similar to what Google Fiber does. They don't care if you use 20GB or 20TB in a month from what I've heard. That sounds optimal in my mind. Underestimating usage and failure to anticipate demand are real issues that major ISPs have to deal with over the long run (off the top of my head AT&T's network problems after the first iPhone was released). I've always viewed these caps as short-term fixes until they figure how to increase their network capacity to support increased use.

> Because at the moment s/he is bearing the cost of abusive users.

There is nothing abusive about using that which you paid for. If you sell me a 100mpbs pipe, I should be able to use that pipe 24/7.

Of course, the reality is that it would be expensive to make sure everyone could use their 100mbps pipe 24/7, so ISPs sensibly over-provision to save money.

But ISPs miscalculating their provisioning requirements (or as it appears in most cases, simply grubbing for money), is not the end-users fault and not the end-users problem and it does not mean that they are doing anything abusive.

Metered service at reasonable prices would probably actually be better for a lot of consumers, but most people aren't _comfortable_ with metered services.

Move to Romania. We have uncapped 1Gbps for 15$/month

Man, I'm in the UK and there would be no way I would like this arrangement. Im on Virgin Media fibre (152Mbps for £34 per month) right now and I would never go back to an Open-Reach infrastructure service.

Here in Australia, where data caps have been the norm for, oh, forever, it's pretty sustainable (for now). Music streaming is notionally the same cost as reading an image-heavy website: negligible, in the scheme of things. Video streaming is again not that bad, because I can only watch so many videos... they take real time to consume. YMMV depending on your chosen resolution.

Games are the main problem. When one of those 60GB bastards comes out, that's nearly one third of my monthly bandwidth, so I have to think carefully about scheduling it. But I regularly re-install 4-8GB from the cloud because it's a marginal impact compared to the entertainment it will bring.

Yeah, when GTA V came out, I waiting until 'off-peak' to use the 100G of data there, rather than waste my daytime allocation. Rarely would we hit our max usage though... thanks to appalling internet speeds. :)

> Video streaming is again not that bad, because I can only watch so many videos... they take real time to consume. YMMV depending on your chosen resolution.

I use Netflix as a replacement for OTA and cable TV. So my girlfriend, who likes to watch a lot of TV, has used 221GB 7 days into the billing cycle.

Are they moving towards bandwidth caps? Comcast in the SF Bay Area has claimed a "suspended" 250GB cap for years and years. I get the impression that we're moving away from bandwidth caps.

Data caps on Comcast service are coming back. They started with Nashville and Tucson in 2012. The program's now expanded to Huntsville and Mobile, AL; Augusta and Savannah, Georgia; Central Kentucky; Maine; Jackson, Mississippi; Knoxville and Memphis, Tennessee and Charleston, South Carolina; and Fresno, California. They're testing two different plans: a 300GB cap with overage charges ($10 per 50GB) and flex-data plans ($5 discount for a 5GB monthly cap, and $1 per GB over the 5GB).

Add Atlanta, GA metro area to your list. They've had me on a 300GB cap for the past year. I've only gone over it once (burning one of three overage allowances) because we stream most of the TV and movies we watch, and I do a lot of OS testing, downloading ISOs and packages on a daily basis.

I really don't get a data cap of 300GB for today's culture of "stream everything". I can see something like a 1TB cap to knock out the heavy torrenters, but 300GB/month is 10GB/day. A decent sized family will bust through that easily (Dad watching a 3GB movie, Mom streaming 1GB of Pandora throughout the day, Daughter downloading 7GB of new Xbox/PS4 game content, Son binging half a season of a Netflix show at 5GB).

I could imagine, at some point if ISPs became militant about caps and municipal broadband and Google Fiber weren't making inroads fast enough, Netflix creating appliances similar to their OpenConnect appliance [+] for users, but with the content encrypted with a key tied to your user account. Netflix would then cache the majority of the content you consume locally.

[+] https://openconnect.netflix.com/hardware/