Comment Re:You don't have Cox, do you? (Score 1) 129
People who exclusively stream don't get full bitrate, but they will soon. In the meantime, people who like to download full quality video, because 4-6Mbps is simply not good enough (or because connection quality can't handle it smoothly despite available throughput), are already over the line of just about every capped provider. I'm not downloading things I never watch just to collect them either.
Even streaming alone... 5Mbps is 2.3GB/hr, or 400GB in 174hours: 3 people streaming Netflix HD for 2 hours a day average, and bam. That's not even considering all other internet activity. Hardly unreasonable, and becoming far more common as more and more people forego cable tv.
And even beyond that, capping total bandwidth has no justification other than to eventually move to metered usage (don't be fooled into thinking that means light users paying less-- the bottom 10% will pay what they're paying now, everyone else will pay more). Throttling connections temporarily if the network is congested is reasonable; but capping overall usage is not, since ISP-level connections are priced by link speed- it doesn't cost the ISP anything else extra. Fortunately my two ISP options are Cablevision (Optimum), and FiOS, and neither of them have usage caps.