Say they charge $30/month for the cable modem service. After infrastructure costs (helpdesk, installation, fiber runs, routers, servers, etc) and bandwidth costs, what is left is profit. You cannot change most of the infrastructure costs, but you can affect how much bandwidth people use. Add to this the need to stay competitive and constantly show users that you allow them tons more than their competitors, and at the same time not wanting any user to cost you more than you make.
It is true that most users do not come anywhere near the limits, but the 5% that do cost a lot of money.
Example.Suppose that Internet bandwidth costs $20/megabit. Now suppose that your top 5% bandwidth users mostly are using torrents (or any peer to peer), and averaging 6 megabits of traffic each. That becomes $120/month of cost, whereas they only make $10/month on that customer. Sure, the other 2000 customers on that router blade combined are only averaging 20 megabits (together) and the company overall makes money. Now put pressure on the CEO to make even more profit, and where can it be found? Again, the top 5% of the customers, each of which can be charged more (profit) or restricted to lower bandwidth (lower expenses) or annoyed enough to leave (lower expenses). Even worse is if they have to add another router to handle the traffic on that particular hub, and they will be even more inclined to let the peer to peer users go away.
-Steve Clint Savage wrote:
My friend Christer Edwards posted an article about how he is getting the shaft when it comes to torrent traffic. He's just sharing his torrents for Ubuntu. I disagree with Comcast charging him for his bittorent traffic as if its not appropriate. There are a lot of reasons we need to keep them from doing this, but I think Christer's article says it best.
smime.p7s
Description: S/MIME Cryptographic Signature
/* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
