Fair enough. I have nothing further to add to this discussion then.

I do not care for notifications. It is simply something that I do not want to worry about, and I will pay to not have to worry about it. ISPs are free to take my money or not, but it is there for the taking.

"Excess usage" only makes sense if there is a scarcity. Internet capacity is enormous. I know how to keep my connection free from abuse and I support holding people accountable for allowing harmful traffic.

Wasting water harms other people. That is an entirely different situation.

That is sophistry. There is no way for the packets to get into Comcast. They are dropping the traffic.

Just like Spain is doing to people from Gibraltar trying to enter Spain. Luckily people just get turned back in that case, rather than dropped.

No provider has 1Tbps of bandwidth to other providers. No one puts in upstream capacity of terabit for a few thousand customers. They are lucky to get 10Gbps, and they will never fill that. Yes, those customers can talk uncongested between each other, but Netflix is not served by the other customers.

And 1Pbps? That is 10,000 100Gbps ports. No, you cannot buy a petabit router. You can perhaps optically switch 10,000 colours, but you cannot actually look at the packets inside the colours.

Fibre optic technology will change in 50 years. However, I stand by my prediction that single mode fibre will be useful for the home connections of most people in 50 years. I am very certain of that.

High end connections will probably be better types of fibre or something else entirely, but tens of terabit really ought to be enough for a lot of people -- and the Shannon limit of single mode fibre is somewhere on the order of 1Pbps.

Who runs their own radio network with multiple towers instead of cell phones?

I cannot think of anyone. Even police and emergency services have switched to cell phones, albeit on a dedicated network. A network where 1.5Mbps per tower is woefully insufficient, of course.

Modern cell towers use SyncE.

You expect Cogent to source-route Netflix packets in their backbone? Good luck with that. Besides, where should Cogent send the traffic? They could send it through a paid transit to L3, of course...

...is that variable costs suck. You cannot budget for them, and it means you always have to watch out for whether something inadvertently used up a lot of bandwidth without you noticing. I would happily pay a bit more for unmetered gas and electricity, but usage would likely go up a lot, and I am not willing to pay 10x as much.

I will only go metered for Internet if I can save at least $50 per month, which is exceedingly unlikely. I am basically paying tens of dollars per month in insurance against "excessive bandwidth", and the ISP is able to deliver that insurance practically for free. It would be rather stupid for ISPs to say no to that kind of free money.

Comcast was dropping traffic on the floor. Traffic that their customers had paid to receive. If Comcast is unhappy with the traffic patterns generated by their customers, they should not do business with those customers, or they should raise the price for them. Deliberately dropping paid-for traffic on the floor is exactly what a decent ISP never does.

Often last-mile lines are less than 0.1 percent utilized, measured as aggregate 95% peak. No ISP sets up their network to handle a thousand times more traffic than actually exists. That would be entirely uneconomical.

Proper providers make sure that lines get upgraded when there is a risk of congestion. If traffic patterns change significantly, such as with the advent of Netflix, backbone links must be upgraded. Luckily Netflix also made a number of people upgrade their last mile, so the 0.1 percent figure did not really budge all that much.

There IS an expectation that users do not use 100% of their bandwidth to get to the most expensive transit partner all the time. Hopefully some of that traffic stays local or goes via unpaid peering or at least through one of the dirt cheap transits like Cogent.

You will only get access to smaller providers + some of he.net that way. Akamai or Google will not, AFAIK, talk to the IX route servers. I am not sure about Netflix; they offer a caching box for free anyway if you receive a reasonable amount of traffic from them.

Single mode fibre is for Internet what copper is for phone lines. It works even if it is 50 years old, and it provides enough bandwidth for the foreseeable future. Phone wire increased the useful bandwidth by 3 orders of magnitude through its history without physical changes to the lines. It is reasonable to believe that single mode fibre will do the same (particularly because we can deliver beyond 1Tbps per fibre today, just not economically).

Let the monopoly handle the physical wires. Require that all fibre goes uninterrupted back to somewhere with power, space and cooling enough for equipment from multiple providers -- no passive GPON splitters in inaccessible locations. Anyone with $1000 to spend on a Routerboard CCR can start an ISP.

The price of a T1 has not changed because it is entirely obsolete. No one sane would want one, and specialty items are expensive.

In places with competitive markets, you can get the SLA you want with the technology you want.

In a few HDMI generations, they will move to a unified packet-based format for everything so it all runs on the same wires. No, I have no insider information, but dedicated wires are a waste of bandwidth, and display bandwidth is precious.

CRT picture quality is crap. The colors are good and the black level too, but the geometry is completely off and the resolution is crap. For small displays you can get a half-decent resolution at perhaps 80Hz refresh, but as soon as you want something TV-size you have lost -- and even on the small displays the pixels are fuzzy and never in the right place.

There is more to a good picture than color.