F American ISP's

[skinsguy]

Originally Posted by Dirtbag59

I don't know who throttles and at what point. I do know though that Comcast will cut off residential customers for a year if they go over the 250 GB cap two or three times (sometimes once is enough to do it). UVerse charges $10 per 50GB and thats after you go over 3 times. Which isn't preferable but not entirely unreasonable either.

From what I've seen Verizon Fios is the best major ISP product available for home use. Fast speeds, competitive pricing (at least here), and no caps. To bad they're not in Atlanta yet.

I have to say though I'm scared as hell that Net Neutrality will fall if a Republican President gets elected. Comcast is exactly the type of company that will abuse the lack of rules as seen in two incidents. First where they blocked access to the Pirate Bay and second when they backdoored Netflix's broadband provider into paying a toll to use "their bandwidth."

The funniest part about caps though is the claim by both AT&T and Comcast saying that it would only affect 2% of their users. If only 2% of their users are going over the cap then why do you need it to begin with?

Exactly! And why punish everybody else if only 2% of your customers are being abusive with the bandwidth?

The thing with the net neutrality is a sticky situation. On one hand, you have a chance at allowing your ISPs to block your access to certain websites, just because those websites might garner some type of competition of sorts. For example, Comcast blocking your access to Hulu or Netflix, because people would rather watch what is on those sites than what's on TV.

On the other hand, if you make it so that it is illegal for the companies to block access to certain information, then these ISPs will counter by forcing you into tiered data plans, much like what they're doing with the cell phone data plans now. The reasoning is that these ISPs can't support the bandwidth to stream Netflix, youtube, and Hulu, so they want to charge you twice as much to have that bandwidth.

So, which do we want? To have our internet access limited to only what Comcast or Time Warner is willing to grant you, and you may not have to worry about bandwidth limitations, or do you want to have full access to everything the information super highway has to give you, but you'll pay for it dearly if you access high bandwidth sites like Netflix?

But, on top of that. Even if free speech supporters forces congress to side with them, they're still going to push for ACTA or something like SOPA - which will still limit your access to websites AND the ISPs will still charge you dearly for their service. Either way it looks to me like a lose/lose situation for the consumers.