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> Caps are only a thing because Comcast oversells every connection

The caps are a thing because Comcast pays for ingress traffic into their network (they pay other providers from which the data comes from). At a point, you cost them more than you pay for. Which is where they charge you an overage.

Seems more than fair to me - I pay currently $49.99 a month for 150Mbps connection with a 3TB cap (I'm aware they offer different rates, speeds, and caps in different areas).

I do not want to pay more than $49.99 just because someone else in my area constantly uses 10TB each month - that person should pay more, not me.




> Comcast pays for ingress traffic into their network

Actually, in some cases, Comcast gets paid FOR it.

https://qz.com/256586/the-inside-story-of-how-netflix-came-t...


That's not the complete story.

They started charging Netflix (or threatened to deprioritize or drop Netflix traffic) because Netflix traffic to Comcast customers starting making Comcast customers unprofitable.

Comcast does pay for ingress traffic. They are not a Tier 1 provider and do not peer with other Tier 1 providers - bits flowing in cost money. They either had to charge Comcast customers more per month, or get Netflix to subsidize the ingress traffic costs from their service.

This ultimately led to Netflix making the Open Connect boxes and offering them for free to ISP's as a way to mitigate the ingress costs. (this is why ISP provided video services don't have this problem - their traffic originates in-network and doesn't cost them anything additional to provide, fair or not)

Unless we're going to change how the 3 Tier provider system works and who gets to charge who for ingress traffic - I don't see this changing anytime soon. Unless you want to regulate our way into doubling your monthly Comcast bill... I sure don't.


Wikipedia may not be up to date, but it says that Comcast has full peering except for Tata/AS6453. For US-based stuff, and I'm not an expert here so please feel free to correct me, isn't that "close enough" for this discussion?




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