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.
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.