IMO, this whole thing makes a lot more sense if the throttling and bandwidth caps have more to do with keeping people from canceling their television subscriptions than anything to do with network congestion. Consider:
- ISP's started implementing caps when available bandwidth is higher than ever before. Why haven't such caps been in place for years?
- ISP's try to charge television competitors like Hulu and Netflix, but not other high-bandwidth things like Apple/Microsoft software updates or backup software, the latter of which hits the customer's upstream where there is even LESS available bandwidth.
- In the case of my ISP, at least, there is no option to pay more if you go over the cap or to upgrade to a cap-less plan (short of going to a MUCH more expensive business plan). You just get a notification letter, but I've never heard of anyone who was actually disconnected. If you're really serious about network congestion, you would throttle these people or charge them more to cover the costs of upgrading the network. But if you're trying to keep them as television customers, you just want to make them think they couldn't cut the cable without losing their internet, too. But you don't want to ACTUALLY cancel them, because when they switch internet providers, you would likely lose the TV revenue as well.
One question I have is whether non-content-provider ISPs are also implementing caps and trying to charge Netflix et al. I haven't heard of any that are doing that, but just about every ISP of any size these days grew out of a content provider, so I don't know.
