The FCC “knows” what’s going on. The greater question might be “why don’t they care?” There is no reason, need or excuse for metered broadband. When you compare the throughput rates of other countries to ours, it would appear that our country’s providers are either just pathetically clueless in addition to being technically behind the rest of the world, or as I think it really is; incredibly greedy. They can provide more. They ’should’ provide more. But they won’t, and don’t have to, because they pay politicians to listen to them, and protect them from us, the people, instead of the other way around. We can’t make the providers, like Comcast, or Cox or any of the others do anything, nor can we make “our” politicians do anything, because they’re in bed with each other, and laughing at us, the poor pigeons who pay the bills making the politicians and the corporations rich. They’ll listen to us complain, and refuse to do anything about it, as long as we keep paying. Only when/if we affect their bottom line will they have any reason to listen to us, *if* then.

If cities had contracted with companies to install the infrastructure in the beginning, in order that *they* own it, instead of any one cable company, we wouldn’t be held hostage now. But, instead, the ’shoe is on the other foot’ whereby, whichever company came to your town first “owns” the infrastructure and holds the city ‘for ransom’ and can raise rates whenever they darn well feel like it. You can’t shut ‘em off because they own the wiring. Pass bond elections to buy (or replace) the infrastructure, then let the Comcasts, the Coxs, the Sprints *competitive bid* to come to your town and provide services and programming, and contract to maintain *the city’s* infrastructure. When *they* own everything, you’re not only hostage, but you’re paying for the privilege!

I’m surprised that the companies that sell on-line backup services aren’t lobbying like crazy over this. This will *kill* their businesses. Suddenly, what was cheap, or could be done without a second thought, becomes as present in your mind as how many gallons of gas you bought this week. Streaming providers should be up in arms. Hopefully, those entities whose livelihood depends on an un-metered pipe will crush the idea like a bug.

I think that it is crap and that it should be stopped.

I had found these articles a couple months ago about it:

http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Time-Warner-Caps-Behind-The-Numbers-95035?nocomment=1

http://gigaom.com/2008/06/04/why-tiered-broadband-is-the-enemy-of-innovation/

I use Data Deposit Box and SugarSync and if I have to pay more to cover the internet cost for using it, I am going to throw a fit!

I already suffer through metered broadband and throttled speeds. I’m living in one of those rural areas the local telco and cable companies refuse to service. Although available,I can’t get EVDO at my house so I get internet through Wildblue satellite access.

Don’t ever call it broadband! The latency and the throttled speeds are more like fast dial up rather than broadband. I pay $85 (with tax) a month for 1.5 mps speed. I am allowed only 17 gigs down and 5 gigs up on a rolling 30 day FAP for that top tier price. HTTPS sites frequently time out because of the throttled speeds. It can take up to twenty minutes to pay a bill at your banking site and up to five minutes to log into your Gmail account. Many people who have Wildblue maintain a cheap dial up account so they can do their banking! If you go over your download/upload limits they cut you back to 14.400 speeds and you get to keep paying.

The only thing I can say is truly reliable about Wildblue is the monthly invoice. I AM already living everyone’s future in U.S. broadband and it is hideous!

maybe it’s time we start nationalizing anything that could jeopardize national security. in a national emergency the best was to reach the most people to inform them what is going on is by cable television. in regards to the internet a lot of our national security depends on it. why are we as a nation and a people allowing any company to be a gatekeeper of something that is vital to our national security. this is just like the oil, energy, and phone service(including cell phones). none of these should have ever been allowed to be owned by private corporations. if i am doing the math right in regards to what my daily download cap should be with comcast versus the 250 gig limit per month starting october 1st at 6mbps times 86,400 seconds in a day equals 518,400 mb a day or 518.4 gigs a day. that comes to 15,552 gigs a month based on a 30 day month. i started service with comcast in seattle in july of 2004 and the contract was and is for 6mbps and nothing short of that. comacts can rewrite their terms of service as many times as they want, but they have a contract with me and they are going to stick to it.

I just dropped my local provider due to metered broadband. The primary reason: my bill jumped from $49/mo to $149/mo. This occurred after years of never having exceeded the 20GB bandwidth bubble. Now, come to find out my provider, GCI, inaccurately reports my bandwidth. Their online meter, which you have to log in to check (imagine doing THAT every couple of days) showed I was 9044MBs over limit, yet they billed me for 20,144MBs!!!

Until providers can provide an easy way for users to monitor their bandwidth, it is impossible for most neophytes to know where they are at any given point in time. Add to that the confusion over billing cycles, multiple computers on the same router, download issues that require multiple attempts to download when latency causes timeouts, and the lack of a convenient way for the average user to monitor bandwidth with software to “verify” that the providers measurements are accurate, adds up to nothing more than a ripoff.

If you are being metered, switch to another provider and let your metering provider know why you are dropping them. And, if you can’t, for whatever reason…complain about inaccuracies every chance you can. Call their tech support to request your meter report frequently - don’t login to their reporting system to check it yourself - make them do it for you…play “dumb” if you have to. Eventually, they may realize what a poor decision they have made.

Anchorage, Alaska

David,
that was a good point in regards to calling company and asking for your spending status. You just have to justify it accordingly.
The procedure should be as follows: customer calls to check in because they want to preserve the bandwidth from checking their balance every time AND in case there are inaccuracies the customer wants someone to talk to. Tell the rep that certain pages/files/movies/music didn’t load the first time so you had to restart the download AND you demand the credit for that.

Given the overload of manual labor associated with that there’s a big chance the company will give up.