US Lawmaker Unveils Anti-Metered Billing Law

[moogly]

Prompted by Time Warner Cable's botched attempt to force low caps and metered billing on its customers, Rep. Eric Massa (D-N.Y.) today unveiled the "Broadband Internet Fairness Act" (HR 2902), legislation aimed at protecting consumers from unreasonable broadband overage charges.

Read more: http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/102996

Not sure this law project has some good chances to be voted.

[Switeck]

...paved with good intentions.

So long as ISPs have oversold their real bandwidth about 50 times over, this is unfortunately a bad idea.

Competition that's not litigated to death just for existing is the only solution.

[moogly]

Yeah of course, but I believe in USA, the network is a cable network and now the infrastructure is pretty old and not adapted to new uses of internet like p2p or streaming.

Now that costs million dollars to improve the main network and ISP don't want to spend this money.

So it's more easy to break internet neutrality and filter/reduce applications with high bandwidth cost like streaming or p2p.

It's the same thing in UK, BT has recently decide to limit some services. Of course I'm sure BT will protect and promote its own services to the detriment of the others.

[KingCrunk79]

Well seems lik docsis 3 is coming along but it probably will be metered. That bill is good but its a uphill battle.

[Switeck]

DOCSIS 3 only helps a little versus DOCSIS 2. While multiple channels may be bonded together...if each channel still has 100+ cablemodems connected to them, then the oversubscribed contention ratio doesn't change much. Each download channel is only ~38 megabit/sec usable bandwidth...and each upload channel is only ~27 megabit/sec usable.