Netflix has joined the discussion about bandwidth caps and UBB in Canada.
For his part, Mr. Hastings said he believes data caps have little impact on traffic management because the real problem points for ISPs are peak usage times, and monthly data caps do little to alter the times at which customers use the Internet.
“This idea of capped Internet really makes no sense from a network management or policy sense,” he said. “Really, the costs on the Internet are driven by wherever the peaks are … So it’s really inefficient to use caps to manage network bandwidth. All you care about is peak bandwidth.”
While Bell may have revised their proposal to force independent ISP’s to follow thee Bell UBB pricing policy, they still appear to be wedded to charging for total data usage on their networks. However, the cable industry appears to have broken ranks and now admits that usage based pricing is not connected to efforts to manage traffic or deal with peak congestion. Instead, it is about “conditioning the customer.”
“It follows that the price does not necessarily reflect the cost of supplying the network capacity,” the companies wrote.
I wonder if electric shocks will be the next tool they employ?
