I full heartedly support throttling during peak traffic, but I don't see a reason for bandwidth capping.
We should all rise up as one and really ask, if we are now paying $X for $Y GB of data, why doesn't it roll over like Minutes or a persistent commodity.
I'd also like to point out Charter Communications doesn't throttle nor cap their bandwidth and yet the service is great!
We should all rise up as one and really ask, if we are now paying $X for $Y GB of data, why doesn't it roll over like Minutes or a persistent commodity.
Because user bandwidth is not, by definition, a persistent commodity. ISPs do not accrue bandwidth every month they are under capacity, so why should users?
True, but neither do cell phone mintes to a cellular company. They just figured out a way to make the economics work while providing a better service to users.
I disagree completely. It's just like real estate: since I only use about 50% of the floor space in my apartment at any given time, I roll over my unused square footage and only pay rent every other month.
The difference is when you don't use your bandwidth, the company benefits, but when you don't use your square footage, a company doesn't gain anything.
The ISP company only benefits if their pipe is saturated 100% at that moment. If they had spare capacity at that point in time, it's of no use to them and they can't carry it over.
As do I. Throttling per user (as in per customer port) rather than per traffic stream (the latter can cause net neutrality issues) is obviously a superior technological solution. Traffic caps and overage charges do nothing to prevent people from saturating links at peak traffic times (evenings, for home ISPs).
How do you know Charter doesn't throttle bandwidth at peak times? Do you track packet loss, and would you notice if it went up by a percent or two?
Even if an ISP doesn't voluntarily throttle traffic, border routers automatically will with WRED or some other more modern queue management strategy if there's too much traffic buffered for the link it's trying to send on. It's more a question of whether packet loss is managed on a per-flow or per-ip basis, on egress, or whether it's managed on a per-port basis on ingress from the customers to their ISP.
I just went through a very long (about two months) trouble shooting session with Charter after moving to a new town. After getting the personal cell phone number for a local plant supervisor and keeping in touch with him during the time it took to fix things I got some information out of them. They try to keep their lines at 80% capacity all the time. They do have traffic shaping in place though he wouldn't be specific or didn't know. They don't throttle customers, they do disable power boost and more tightly restrict bandwidth to the plan the customer uses during peak hours. Which tools they are using to manage these restrictions I don't know.
Since they've finished the DOCSIS 3 rollout here last week I've considered upgrading to 60/5 from my 25/3 plan but it's pretty over priced and would be much more worth it at 60/10 or 60/15. During the period of trouble (not enough bandwidth for their inter city link where they actually do their peering) I was down as low as 1Mbit/s during peak hours on a 25Mbit plan.
if we are now paying $X for $Y GB of data, why doesn't it roll over like Minutes or a persistent commodity.
This will usher in a 'pay what you use' scheme, not unlike long-distance phone bills back in the days of yore. (you transferred $Y GB this month, so you owe us $X dollars.)
If an ISP throttles they should be required to say they are doing so to you the customer and indicate it to you in real-time.
You're paying for a service and if the company you're paying considers your use in violation of the terms agreed to they should indicate to you that you are in violation not some sneaky restriction you never know about. In fact I bet people have called their ISP and played the "it's not me it's you" game when it's actually the ISP throttling their customers.
We should all rise up as one and really ask, if we are now paying $X for $Y GB of data, why doesn't it roll over like Minutes or a persistent commodity.
I'd also like to point out Charter Communications doesn't throttle nor cap their bandwidth and yet the service is great!