

Comcast to begin capping Internet usage in certain markets. - sgloutnikov
http://customer.comcast.com/help-and-support/internet/data-usage-plans-expansion-data-plan

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otterley
I don't have an issue with congestion control and usage-based pricing (after
all, bandwidth is a scarce resource), but I do take issue with the ham-handed
way in which it's being done: monthly usage has no real relationship to the
availability of the resource.

ISPs have traditionally billed at 95th-percentile utilization (sample the
bandwidth-per-second used into bite-sized chunks, throw out the top 5% of
samples, and bill at the highest rate left over). This makes intuitive sense.

But bytes-per-month makes no sense at all. 300GB/month is roughly 1Mb/second.
I suppose that's a reasonable fair allocation in terms of average circuit
utilization, but a customer who used little traffic during peak periods but
25Mb per second during the wee hours would have little impact on overall
availability. In other words, such coarse-grained caps do little to equate
supply with demand.

