Congressman Unveils Bill to Fight ISP Caps

[Mark]

If you thought that the debacle over ISP net caps was just starting to boil, then you'll be even more surprised to hear that the issue has now landed on the front doors of Congress.

New York Congressman Eric Massa (D-NY) promised that he would put forth a bill called the "Broadband Internet Fairness Act" that would "prevent job killing broadband internet downloading caps," said Massa.


Time Warner Cabe is at the forefront of this heated issue. Because of a roll-out in New York state, many customers in the area have already canceled their TWC accounts and moved onto other services.

Congressman Unveils Bill to Fight ISP Caps - Tom's Hardware

 

[Adamd]

ISP caps are like one GIANT step back.

It is like when the internet first came out. This is very sad and I hope they don't do this.

The USA will be so far behind in broadband

 

[CougarDan]

Will be?

 

[Simon]

Will be?

Agreed.. It is indeed a step backwards.

 

[Sam]

This is ridiculous, the banner my ISP advertised with was "unlimited internet" when we got broadband. Of course that was before Comcast bought up the regional ISP. Now there is a 250gb cap, and we weren't alerted when this cap was put on. It's mostly my principal that's pissed.

 

[Digger]

could you imagine being capped on cable TV? Say you're watching the big game, but your kid watched cartoons all that morning, and in the middle of your game, times up ..... blackout!

 

[jonatasmz]

could you imagine being capped on cable TV? Say you're watching the big game, but your kid watched cartoons all that morning, and in the middle of your game, times up ..... blackout!

lol.. eAUHEAUHEa...
i liked your example... ;P...

 

[abuttino]

This will not pass. The Telco industry has a tight grip on congress.

 

[mxosder16]

could you imagine being capped on cable TV? Say you're watching the big game, but your kid watched cartoons all that morning, and in the middle of your game, times up ..... blackout!

lol, then having to explain to the kid that cartoons are not allowed

 

[xan K]

Caps suck big time! I get it from my ISP and from 11:00 am to around 11:00 pm all torrents and emule activities are ridiculously slowed down, even slower than a 56k dialup conection. that's not what we pay our services for.

 

[jtoolman]

That's why I jumped to Verizon FIOS big time. Not Caps at all. I Pay $180 for HD TV FULL HD package many movie HD channels ( all the popular ones ) Home phone with unlimited L distance, and 20 megabit dl and 5megabit upload. For a bit more I could have gotten 50megabit down and 10 up.

Torrents often DL at over 2 full Megabytes per second to as slow as 200-500 kbs
When I was with Comcast it was that much for Internet and TV Oh I also have two HD DVRs. My signal was full of macroblocking and digital glitches before and now it is crystal clear on a 52 in HD set. Internet is great.
I actually got CANCELLED by F***ing Comcast for over use of BandWidth. I quickly and Swiftly cancelled them. I was streaming a lot of TV from Hulu and others, often it was in HD so they reported me to their abuse department. They are presently losing customers by the dozens in my neighborhood.

I can now be downloading and uploading at high speeds or streaming TV to my TV or Monitor set and still be able to surf with out any slowdows on any of my three machines including the Lap top using WY-FI.

COULD NOT DO THAT BEFORE!

Really happy with the service.

 

[jimbo45]

That sounds truly bad for folk in your part of the world . Hope they have a change of heart it will slow thing up so much

Don't be too sure as in the UK whatever (BAD) gets done in the US gets done later in the UK -- however if stuff is GOOD then strangely the UK leaves well alone.

Scandanavian countries seem better by far in this regard -- maybe because the worlds largest Mobile phone manufacturer (Nokia) is based in Finland.

I can't see any point either in having a nice fast internet service say 30 - 50 Mbs / sec if you get a stupid 10 GB cap on it -- that's barely enough for 2 or 3 movies at a decent resolution.

Never mind the Banks -- it shows the days of unfettered Corporate Greed are still here and old Joe Public is being taken (again) to the cleaners.

ISP caps really should be made ILLEGAL -- with you all on that one -- fortunately we don't have this restriction where I am (yet).

Cheers
jimbo

 

[ramoine]

That's why I jumped to Verizon FIOS big time. Not Caps at all. I Pay $180 for HD TV FULL HD package many movie HD channels ( all the popular ones ) Home phone with unlimited L distance, and 20 megabit dl and 5megabit upload. For a bit more I could have gotten 50megabit down and 10 up.

Torrents often DL at over 2 full Megabytes per second to as slow as 200-500 kbs
When I was with Comcast it was that much for Internet and TV Oh I also have two HD DVRs. My signal was full of macroblocking and digital glitches before and now it is crystal clear on a 52 in HD set. Internet is great.
I actually got CANCELLED by F***ing Comcast for over use of BandWidth. I quickly and Swiftly cancelled them. I was streaming a lot of TV from Hulu and others, often it was in HD so they reported me to their abuse department. They are presently losing customers by the dozens in my neighborhood.

I can now be downloading and uploading at high speeds or streaming TV to my TV or Monitor set and still be able to surf with out any slowdows on any of my three machines including the Lap top using WY-FI.

COULD NOT DO THAT BEFORE!

Really happy with the service.

I wish I had the choice for the FIOS over Comcast !
You're lucky !

 

[jtoolman]

I wish I had the choice for the FIOS over Comcast !
You're lucky !

Yea that's the problem. You have to be in a pretty well established or a brand new area that buries all cables underground. My newly wed daughter and husband got their brand new house pre wired for all sorts of possible gadgetry and lo and behold, they has also run Fiber optics under ground to a box to each garage. Once I saw what they were experiencing and after what ComCRAP pulled on me, I switched and have never looked back.

 

[hdjunkie]

I have been considering moving to a fios town to get away from comcast. I wish fios would just come to me.

 

[PotatoMan83]

I have charter cable..its $119.00 Digital Plus (130 channels), 20mbit cable internet and telephone (unlimited LD). With taxes is $132.00/month. But only allowed 100GB/month.

 

[dmex]

Every Australian ISP uses caps, you cant find one that offers unlimited download quotas.

They do it because American ISPs charge European/Australian and other ISPs for a traffic quota and exceeding that quota means that ISP get charged double the price per/MB than they would normally get charged.

Americans will be forced to have quotas because they forced other country's like Australia, Europe and others to introduce them by charging us for our traffic when it entered their network and considering nearly every major website is hosted within the US it was costing ISPs millions while making millions for American ISP's, what changed was other country's turning around and saying they would charge them for their usage when it enters our network just like they charge us for ours.

They will not be stopped from introducing quotas because they simply cant afford to pay the high price they will be charged for their users usage exceeding the ISPs traffic quota to other country's.

If American ISPs hadn't tried to be greedy and charge other country's for their internet traffic over the last two years then we wouldn't start charging them for their usage and Americans wouldn't have this quota situation to begin with.

Either way, every country and every ISP will have download quotas thanks to American ISPs charging other ISPs for that ISPs traffic being transferred over their network.

There is some light at the end of this tunnel...About 15 ISPs in Australia have signed up to the WIAX peering network so we can transfer data without it affecting our quotas plus most ISPs cache website data like Youtube and other sites and that also doesn't affect our Quotas.... Hopefully now some American ISPs will create similar peering networks of their own and join them up so it doesnt affect either users quotas, this also means the Internet will eventually return to its so called "Free-Traffic" designs.

 

[Lebon14]

You guys are whining over a 250GB cap? Here in Quebec (province), the two mainstream ISP (Bell Canada and Videotron) both use caps (you pay what you've gone over though - max 30$ for Bell and depends for Videotron).

Bell blocks P2P all day @ 30KB/s and has a 30GB up/down limit on the regular high speed internet (which is 40$/m) @ 5Mb down, 600Kb up (I know it sucks). They sell (phone) ADSL.

Videotron, what I have, doesn't block any P2P (yay!). It's not available everywhere though because they offer cable. On regular High speed, they a have a 30GB up/down cap (6Mb down, 850Kb up). I have Extreme High Speed Internet with them. It costs 75$ by month for a 10Mb down, 950Kb up line with a 100GB cap. Oh and cheap cable (between 56K and High speed) only has a 2GB cap. For the medium and normal high, you can pay a max of 50$ (7.50$ the GB). On Extreme High Speed, 1.50$ GB extra with no max amount you can pay for exceeding it.

For the small beside, for those that offer ADSL, most offers no download limit but they uses Bell's line so... P2P speed cap. For the cable little companies, they use Videotron's line but actually none of them uses the no download limit plan. Actually, companies habitually offers both ADSL and Cable.

You lucky b**t**s at 250GB monthly download cap...

 

[jimbo45]

Hi all
100GB Cap *might* sound reasonable (although I really don't like the idea of capping at ALL)

But does the "Average Joe" have ANY understanding whatsoever how little this really is once you start wanting to watch HD movies online with your nice 40 - 60 inch LCD monitor / plasma /lcd screen.

I still see stuff in Europe being sold as packets of 10GB -albeit for a very cheap price like 5 EUR ("That's enough for 5 hours surfing every day for a month" the sales spiel says). Might be OK for "Mobile Broadband" services but totally not fit for purpose if you do anything more than just email and casual browsing.

It reminds me of how digital cameras used to be sold purely on the base of the number of MP ("Mega Pixels") the sensor could handle -- these guys were even saying that a small P&S ("Point and shoot") pocket 10 MP digital camera would give better pictures than a fully Pro 8 MP Canon 1DM2 DSLR. Any Pro photographer would just die laughing at this point.

Whilst sheer Corporate Greed is still out there people often make things worse by signing up for stuff they have actually no idea about.

I do hope however with the advent of more and more high quality HD video streaming that the "Cap" idea totally goes away.

I'm sure it will eventually -.

OT but an interesting point raised in one post in this thread about P2P.
The B/S Lawyers and Music moguls are\ trying to fight against the inevitable (Peer to peer networks) and in a desperate case of Horses and stable doors they are trying to trace every possible torrent download - a new and more efficient P2P system is being developed which will replace "Bit torrent". The new system is faster, more efficient and even better its users are almost untraceable.

Here's a possible taste of things to come.

Will There Be A New Bittorrent? | Techdirt

Cheers
jimbo

 

[Smashy]

You guys are whining over a 250GB cap? Here in Quebec (province), the two mainstream ISP (Bell Canada and Videotron) both use caps (you pay what you've gone over though - max 30$ for Bell and depends for Videotron).

Bell blocks P2P all day @ 30KB/s and has a 30GB up/down limit on the regular high speed internet (which is 40$/m) @ 5Mb down, 600Kb up (I know it sucks). They sell (phone) ADSL.

Videotron, what I have, doesn't block any P2P (yay!). It's not available everywhere though because they offer cable. On regular High speed, they a have a 30GB up/down cap (6Mb down, 850Kb up). I have Extreme High Speed Internet with them. It costs 75$ by month for a 10Mb down, 950Kb up line with a 100GB cap. Oh and cheap cable (between 56K and High speed) only has a 2GB cap. For the medium and normal high, you can pay a max of 50$ (7.50$ the GB). On Extreme High Speed, 1.50$ GB extra with no max amount you can pay for exceeding it.

For the small beside, for those that offer ADSL, most offers no download limit but they uses Bell's line so... P2P speed cap. For the cable little companies, they use Videotron's line but actually none of them uses the no download limit plan. Actually, companies habitually offers both ADSL and Cable.

You lucky b**t**s at 250GB monthly download cap...

I know, got some friends with the same problems and I completely agree with the last statement.

My connection :
15Mbps down
512kbps up (capped...sigh)
25GB traffic per 30 days
€42 / month

Seriously, people, stop complaining.