Talk:Bandwidth cap

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I've been cleaning this small article up, and I'm wondering if the following from the original version is a bit biased:

"Many broadband Internet Service Providers in the United States and Europe have begun to introduce bandwidth caps. The same practice has been in place in Australia and South Africa since the release of broadband."

It's a conspicuous statement, seeing as a link to an 'Anti-cap' organization directly follows. Also, living in the United States, I never heard of a bandwidth cap before reading this article; the phrase "Many broadband Internet Service Providers in the United States" seems exaggerated.


I can verify that in Australia and New Zealand such caps are the norm - indeed, uncapped plans are expensive and not many ISPs offer them. Although here they are known as 'download limits' or 'download quotas' and the process of implemeting them is known as 'shaping'. I can't comment on the U.S. situation.


Actually, as far as i know, all CableTV Internet highspeed providers are capping their speeds. If i'm not mistaken DOCSIS (the protocol for cableTV internet-highspeed) v1.1 allows up to 27 Mbit downstream speed and up to 7 Mbit upstream speeds. Most Cable-internet users are "restricted" to 3-6 Mbit downstream and 128-512 kbit upstream - whereas the upstream rate is generally 256-368kbits in average. which isnt really that much if you're playing multiplayer onlinegames w. more than one computer in a household. But since backbone bandwith isnt cheap, you get what you pay for. Archangel Michael 16:49, 31 May 2006 (UTC)


Are there any providers or areas where it is common to charge a line fee and then a per MB charge for access, rather than a fixed price per user? That seems like it would allow providers to offer high speed and reduce waste from P2P apps and such. 74.79.174.201 01:50, 23 March 2007 (UTC)


[edit] You need to reference the material in this article

See Wikipedia policies:

[edit] Policies

KarenAnn 13:04, 2 July 2006 (UTC)

In my opinion these people are not very different than common delincuents, thieves.

If a bank, which operates under the same basic principles, refused to give your money back on demand, the fed will shut it down.

If an ISP oversubscribes based on the capping they do on the bandwidth they sell to you, it is not the users fault, is the ISP.

On a time where video, white board, VOIP, P2P and other bandwidth intensive applications are the reason people subscribe to broadband, the capping reflects a very poor business model.

If I pay for a bandwidth allocation based on the tier system an ISP bases its business model, I expect to be able to use it, not to be restricted because the ISP wants to resell my iddle bandwidth and allocate most of if to apps that are not bandwidth intensive. This defeat the very purpose I pay for bandwidth.

This article is biased and basically an apology of the thievering practices of the ISPs who cap and throttle the bandwidth the users pay for.