Comcast: Usage-Based Billing for All Customers Within 5 Years; 'We're Also Allowed to Do Fast Lanes'

[phazed]

28. I must disagree.

With all due respect, I have to disagree somewhat with your water analogy. Why do we have water meters? Really?

No, bandwidth is not infinite, but it is virtually infinitely expandable. Simply because a company doesn't want to expand their infrastructure is not an excuse. Perhaps we should all revisit the infrastructure of the 90's and get back on phone modems and T1 trunks at the home office.. ridiculous. It's not the consumers fault that Comcast uses a "shared" over-copper antiquated technology that inherently causes bandwidth issues. Verizon FiOS fiber gives you a direct "pipe" to the internet so my usage really doesn't affect my neighbors. It may affect FiOS's main tap to the web if everyone is downloading, which again, would indicate that Verizon is due for an upgrade to handle their added customers and bandwidth. It certainly shouldn't lead to increased fees and caps on the users other than to pay for those upgrades and services in aggregate (Which would be very, very small when spread among all of their users).

Back to the water analogy. If a hypothetical town of 10,000 people had a water pump house and in 10 years the population grows to 30,000, I would certainly not expect the town to continue to use the same singular pump house to supply the now 30,000 users. Should the town now ration water and charge higher prices or upgrade their pumps? Hmm.

Let us also not conflate a finite resource (Water) with the phenomenon of electrons and photons of which are readily abundant and easily created. New technology is many times more electrically efficient now, too, than it was even 3-4 years ago. We are able to send/receive vastly more (1000's of times) information per Watt-Hour of electricity than in the early 2000's. The cost of ISP's doing business is going down, yet our prices are going up. Comcast had a 13.7% profit increase this last quarter alone and a 26% profit increase 4th quarter 2013. That's almost a 40% in 2 quarters - but hey! $1.91 Billion dollars in increased profit isn't enough, let's charge double that and rape our consumers even more. Bloomberg Comcast Earnings

I have no bleeding heart for these guys. We should be striving to be better than South Korea, respectfully.