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Comment by ck2 | Hacker News Reader

Not sure what people are going to do with 20mbps+ broadband when they will certainly set caps that will be used up within the first few days of your billing cycle?

Sonic apparently has no cap but that's virtually unheard of today. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/07/05/...

Which would you rather have, unlimited speed with a 150gb cap or 6mpbs with no cap?

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My guess is that bandwidth caps are only used when there is virtually no competition. Because in practice, most people will only saturate there connections for very small amounts of time. But it's a nice way of squeezing more money out of your customers.

I have had 20MBit downstream for at least six years and now 120MBit, with no bandwidth caps (The Netherlands). There is a lot of competition in this area, with at least a dozen DSL ISPs, plus cable.

Mobile internet is completely the opposite. We only have three major carriers. My previous phone subscription had no caps for mobile internet, my current subscription has an 1GB cap, and the caps are now being lowered. It's an oligopoly, so they can force caps down everyone's throats.

I'm not sure if you missed it, but this article is actually written by sonic. You know, the people providing 20+mbps without any cap.

Are bandwidth caps really that common? I was under the impression Comcast was the only major ISP in the US that imposed caps.

FWIW I just signed up for Grande's fiber service in central Texas -- 40Mbps/4Mbps (though I have not dropped below 70+mbps down) for $56 a month. They seem to be sticking by their "no caps" policy: https://twitter.com/#!/iansltx/status/94395597351698432

First off, caps are not "virtually unheard of". Secondly Comcasts cap is 250GB/month. Who would use that in a few days? The biggest bandwidth eater I can think of is Netflix and a user would have to watch 108 movies in the best quality to reach that number.

I think your Netflix number must be wrong, because I work at an ISP and there are a lot of subscribers going over 250 GB/mo on Netflix. Anyway, one movie a day (or 3 TV episodes) on 4 computers is 120 movies/month.

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