It's a consumer plan, they're always absurdly oversubscribed. It doesn't make any sense to charge consumers for a leased line because even if they're listening to Pandora and watching Netflix like crazy they won't hit the (currently) high data cap.
If you don't want caps (either explicit or defacto) get a business plan from Comcast; It's quite afordable relative to other options that businesses would pay for. Of course it isn't anything different than what you're paying for right now, but they won't shut it off after you've uploaded the contents of a 1TB hard drive to a backup service.
I had 3 roommates at one point, and all 4 of us were subscribe to Netflix. It was VERY easy for us to hit the cap with everyone watching Netflix alone, let alone playing games or streaming music in the common areas.
After I moved out and got married, my wife and kid routinely have Netflix playing in the background as they sit at home during the day while I'm at work. When I go home, I usually have work to do at home as well, which only adds to the usage.
Using numbers found in the article, if you use Netflix on a daily basis for 3 hours a day watching HD content purely, it would park you at about 210GB of the 250GB cap according to Netflix themselves:
So yes, using Netflix and Pandora can easily put you over the cap.
EDIT (for clarity): This article talks about the quality settings in the account settings area, but if you adjust the settings to allow for highest resolution, it would still apply.
With which point? I think you're trying to say that most consumers WILL hit the cap based on your experience - but how typical is your experience? You're an HN reader with 3 roommates, some of whom are probably HN readers too. And how many other people leave Netflix on all day, instead of just leaving the TV on a cable channel?
There will come a time - really fucking soon, too - when your story is representative of the average broadband user - but we're not there yet.
The problem comes when you read between the lines. ISPs like Comcast aren't giving a massive push to strengthen and expand their networks, instead they are punishing the (according to Comcast and other's) %1 of users that do hit that cap.
I've had a 250 GB softcap on my ISP's account for 7 years. 7 years ago, it wasn't all that possible to actually hit the 250GB cap unless I tried _really_ hard, but right now with 720p or higher quality movies available instantly, and without hours and hours of buffering required, it is easy for a heavy use family to hit those limits, possibly in a single day. I've actually hit 300GB in a single weekend before.
Comcast and others are cutting the consumers off that are the ones that they should be aiming to please, as those are the ones that dictate how everyone else is going to use the service the day after tomorrow, whether they like it or not.
I was disagreeing with the general argument being made about Netflix/Pandora not being able to consume the entire bandwidth allotment for the month. My first scenario (the one with 3 roommates) is not common, I'll agree to that, but the second scenario (wife and a kid) is much more likely to happen. We also do not subscribe to cable because of multiple reasons (advertisements, we consume seasons at a time, etc.).
This is one of the reasons I migrated to a Business Class account. Netflix helped put our bandwidth usage way over the cap.
Something I learned about Comcast is that they don't pursue every case over 250GB. There was a period of about 3-4 months where the roommates and I consistantly used more than 500GB/month. It wasn't until we hit 1.541 TB in one month that they called. This leads me to believe that they only pursue cases where there are a lot of high-consumption users in a small area and the top X% get the call.
Your point is quite valid. If you treat Netflix like cable TV, and you watch TV the way many consumers do you'll likely get close to the current cap Comcast has. However most people that are Netflix customers that use their streaming service don't use Netflix in this way.
Today most people that are going to watch that much TV already have cable or satellite tv service, or are happy with over the air tv. If this changes either Comcast will need to increase the cap, or make a deal with Netflix and other video providers to get part of the subscription fee and not count the data against people's data caps.
The most important thing to recognize here is that most consumers don't want to think about bandwidth, setting up a box, anything particularly geeky (even watching something in a browser is too much). We're likely to have the most hours viewed (and dollars paid) in front of TVs that take care of everything automagically; all you have to do is keep paying your bill every month.
The long tail of content will likely be cheap (around what you pay for Netflix streaming today), but the cost of Netflix is likely to balloon once people start watching mass market content en masse, leaving their "TV"s on all day, etc. These people will pay for service. They already do. They aren't cutting the cord because they can get somewhat obscure documentaries on Netflix while the local cable provider sticks with reality TV and sports.
The end game that I see here is that most consumers are going to pay around $30-$50 a month for "TV" that covers the costs of bandwidth and a lot of popular content, while movies in theaters and sporting events are "on-demand" or something similar. The only question is who controls it.
One of the biggest reasons that we got Netflix over a standard cable service is because the wife and I like to watch seasons at a time (I might burn through a season of House over the course of one weekend, for example). Regular cable/satellite does not allow for this type of usage. And neither one of us particularly enjoy commercials. We don't watch sports, and except for True Blood, neither one of us really cares about the latest shows.
That's nothing. I've been pumping myself full of amphetamines so I can watch all the seasons of Star Trek: TNG within an 8 day period without sleeping, or even blinking.
If you don't want caps (either explicit or defacto) get a business plan from Comcast; It's quite afordable relative to other options that businesses would pay for. Of course it isn't anything different than what you're paying for right now, but they won't shut it off after you've uploaded the contents of a 1TB hard drive to a backup service.