*shrug* I’m not trying to excuse Comcast, they ARE greedy bastards, and I agree with the premise of the video, but I can’t agree with them “almost never” providing the bandwidth they advertise.  Hyperbole isn’t going to help the debate.

Underperfomance certainly does happen at the ISP level but more often is really a user-side issue. For example, Windows (all versions to date) does NOT use the proper TCP/IP settings for broadband; try running TCPOptimizer (free, found at http://www.speedguide.net), and see if that helps.

In November I blew my 60 gig plus.net limit by 15 gig over the course of three consecutive afternoons of work meetings and not having to worry about the excess use charges means joining meetings from home won’t leave me worrying about cost.

the problem is one of limited ACCESS to infrastructure. Data Caps do not address the limited access, in fact, the way they are currently used they exacerbate the actual problem by encouraging people to get faster internet access so they can get the larger data cap.

the problem isn’t how much people are using the internet, it’s how many are trying to use it at the same time. Data Caps do nothing for that.

Imagine you run a nightclub. Some nights it gets really busy and you are full to capacity. Other nights the place is fairly slow. There’s a fairly predictable pattern though – Saturdays are busiest, maybe Tuesdays are slowest. If you graphed the turnout from night to night it would look like a regular repeating weekly wave*.

Your club is getting popular. Saturdays are getting so crowded that people are complaining. You decide to build an addition to make more room. You go to a community meeting to present your expansion proposal, which includes more parking spaces, architectural plans, etc. Some guy named L_Mariachi stands up and proposes that what you actually need to do is determine how many individual customers come into the club during a given week and build out capacity as if they all showed up at the same time. So instead of basing your infrastructure on highly predictive graphs showing that you will have extra room above peak capacity even on Saturday, you are being told to spend more on capacity that will not be used.

* Anyone who’s ever looked at a graph of aggregate internet usage for a large enough service or carrier knows what this wave looks like.

I’m not talking about broadband internet at home, but on mobile. Once the mobile network has enough capacity reserve, speed limits will definitely be the way to go. But as things are right now, without volume limit the connectivity would probably be as worse as in Manhattan at many more places. Imagine people would cancel their home contract and go mobile only for all their internet needs. The network couldn’t handle it. 

For now, I’m just happy they stopped billing me by the minute and there is only one metric I need to keep in mind (only the used data, not the place where I used it or when I used it). Lets hope the marked keeps evolving. 

Oh wait, they’re monopolies so they don’t have to.

Keep bickering, peasants.

Some research suggests that we only fully explore how to use media if we are free to waste it.

By “research suggests” you mean “Venkatesh Rao made this observation on his blog,” right?

No, everyone is already paying too much for their access. If casual users are upset that they’re not using their service as much as the heavy users are, they need to increase their usage or get a different plan or service (if available). Because everyone pays a base amount (at least as far as my internet service provider is concerned) and the costs just go up from there.

If the ISPs are actually concerned about the casual users subsidizing the heavy users, they’d also decrease the costs for the casual users. But why would they do that when they’re already making a shitload of money that they don’t need to spend on infrastructure that’s mostly already paid for (with tax subsidies from the public)?

The heavy user is an outlier and his abuse of the network is a myth – a very profitable myth.

Storing the bits costs money. Shipping the bits costs money. Having a computer that can support a browser costs money. And our time on earth is very limited. Bandwidth costs money. Period.

Pretending that some limited item is “unlimited” is an old marketing game and it’s nice in some ways but it does force the casual users to subsidize the heavy users. That’s not fair in the long run.

And yes, I’m obviously an ISP shill.

Getting a little sick of the “cloud” circlejerk, myself.  ”The Cloud” isn’t some magical land with unlimited storage, bandwidth, and CPU cycles.  It’s a computer or computers, sitting on the Internet, with equipment that has to be powered up, maintained, etc just as it’s always been.  And someone has to pay for that.  Sure, that whole “doing shit costs money” thing stifles innovation.  Duh.

Still, apples and oranges.

Nor, for that matter, is the water thing.

I haven’t looked into it, but I guess at least for normal folks the sewer usage would be similar.