[ale] Xfinity Modem -- lease or buy recoomendations

[DJ-Pfulio]

On 09/29/2015 10:04 AM, James Sumners wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 29, 2015 at 9:33 AM, DJ-Pfulio <DJPfulio at jdpfu.com> wrote:
> 
>> Over subscription is a way of life for all networks.  Highways, POTS,
>> internet. All the same. If everyone gets on the highway at the same
>> time, it is bad.
>>
> 
> What's your point? Data caps do nothing to curb usage at specific times of
> day.

Just like people don't try to avoid rush hour by pushing trips to
different times of day. I can't be the only person who does this - both
for roadway use AND for internet bandwidth use.

>> 90% of internet users use less than 50GB/month.  Fewer than 3% use more
>> than 200GB/month - should all the other customers subsidize huge
>> downloaders?
>>
> 
> I honestly can't figure out your argument here. A customer pays for access
> to the Internet. How much they use it is their prerogative. It's the ISP's
> responsibility to ensure they have the capacity to provide what they sold.

The customer may believe they have purchased access, but the fine print
says differently.  The Comcast residential ToS has a 300 GB limit now
and added fees for using more, in $10 increments. Can't believe I'm
backing Comcast.

Comcast also advertises only their 12-month teaser prices, not the 13th
month prices.  Deceptive, yes. Should be illegal, IMHO.  They should
have to advertise $XXX/month with a $Y rebate for 12 months.

>> On highways, trucks have to pay more for their higher uses. Seems fair.
>>
> 
> Irrelevant.

It is a metaphor.  I was trying to imply that heavy users of access to
the internet SHOULD pay more. Sorry if that wasn't clear.  Basically,
with the bandwidth available to many people in the metro area today,
going over the prior next-to-impossible download limits has become much
easier.

Let's try another metaphor - if you use more natural gas, you expect to
pay more, right?

Or if you use more water, you expect to pay more, but water is bought in
1K gallon buckets, so with Comcast the first bucket, included, happens
to be 300MB/month.  Same thing?

<snip> My poor analogy.

> I didn't make any claims about such things. I merely gave an example of a
> literal legitimate use case that is being crippled for absolutely no
> technical reason what-so-ever. 

Agreed that it is legal. I do not agree that a network provider is
required to provide unlimited upload/downloads for 100% utilization over
the billing cycle.