[Discuss] data caps

[vsharris at gmail.com (Steve Harris)]

Just the other day Comcast showed up in my neighborhood in West
Cambridge stringing new fiber cable up and down the street.  It makes
sense for Comcast to move towards a non-shared-bandwidth model to
compete with FIOS.

> Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2013 11:50:09 -0500
> From: Rich Pieri <richard.pieri at gmail.com>
> To: discuss at blu.org
> Subject: Re: [Discuss] data caps
> Message-ID: <20130122115009.00003f41 at unknown>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
>
> On Tue, 22 Jan 2013 15:46:46 +0000
> "Edward Ned Harvey (blu)" <blu at nedharvey.com> wrote:
>
>> If your objection to cable is the business/marketing model, Fios is
>> no better.  They *are* the cable company.  Just like comcast, rcn,
>> etc.  Which we used before fios.
>
> This is accurate from the business and marketing perspective. But at
> least it's competition where both cable and fibre are available. At
> least on paper. I noted that in the year before my condo complex
> brought in FiOS the quality of service and customer service from
> Comcast diminished considerably. There's a degree of apathy at Comcast.
> They don't seem to care if, for example, their wiring infrastructure is
> exposed to the weather. Verizon is more convincing about pretending to
> care about reliability and customer service.
>
> The technical differences are like night and day. Cable bandwidth is
> shared. That is, every subscriber in a "neighborhood" shares a single
> pipe. Which is fine sometimes and terrible sometimes. FiOS, like DSL,
> is a private link out to the CO. If I do saturate my 25 Mbit link
> downloading a major Guild Wars 2 update then it doesn't affect my
> neighbors' service.
>
> --
> Rich P.