Reply #5: A few points. [View All]

[FormerDittoHead]

I've been following this for years, from the Comcast side. I personally think "net neutrality" and PRIVACY to be a MUCH greater issue, however, it's very important.

1) DSL ain't Cable or fiber optic. Not even close.

I had DSL for ONE DAY and it pegged out at less than 1/6th the speed of Comcast. (DSLReports metered me at around 200kb. With Comcast I get streaming 1.5mb and max of 3.0mb.)

If you're downloading 150 gigs on DSL, you're downloading almost all the time. On Comcast, one month I downloaded 300 gigs and they shut me off, but in retrospect, I was grabbing everything I saw.

Back to AT&T. If you're using AT&T's "U-verse" service, the cap is the same as Comcast's well publicized and well noted 250gb. At those speeds you can go through 250 gigs downloading a few hours a day. (about 8 gigs).

Let's talk about bandwidth. A Hi-Def Netflix video eats up a more than a gig of bandwidth, and Netflix allows you 6 simultaneous connections per account. If you're a big family and if you're all watching Netflix / Hulu / Amazon you could go through that 250 gigs pretty quick.

However, I was told that UNLIKE cable, DSL is NOT "shared" (like Comcast) so the idea that heavy users effect the quality of service for light users is false.

Furthermore, and I just have to add this because I've never read this anywhere, if the issue is quality of service, then why count bandwidth at off peak (1AM-7AM)? If general bandwidth is anything like the traffic any of my websites, then the traffic goes down like 90% during those hours. Whose service are you hurting? Cellphones let you call for free on off-peak.

Also, MAYBE there would be ONE MONTH where the user may want to exceed the limit. If I used 100 gigs last month, why can't I "bank" the difference?

I agree with this being a danger, and that the way they're controlling usage is arbitrary, self serving and the excuses they give are false. But I can't help but say that if you're going to pick a battle, net neutrality is the one to go with right now.