AT&T, Verizon Don't Want Caps Included in Broadband Definitions ISPs have already been whining quite a bit about the fact that the FCC wants to raise the current minimum definition of broadband from 4 Mbps down, 1 Mbps up -- to something ranging from 10 to 25 Mbps. Now AT&T and Verizon are whining about the possibility that the FCC would like to make sure bandwidth caps are considered when defining the quality of a broadband connection. Jon Brodkin at Ars Technica points to new filings from both companies with the FCC in which AT&T and Verizon offer up a fairly feeble defense of usage caps.

As we've noted time and time again, usage caps on fixed-line networks that technically don't need them are a symptom of uncompetitive markets. Even the cable industry, after years of denials, admitting that usage caps on fixed-line networks have nothing to do with network congestion Usage caps are -- and always have been -- about getting more money out of consumers, and protecting TV revenues from Internet video, something both Netflix and consumer groups like Public Knowledge were quick to illustrate in their own comments to the FCC. Verizon doesn't impose caps on FiOS, but they've always left the door open to the possibility -- and do crack down on some multi-terabyte users. To hear Verizon tell it in their comments to the FCC, caps aren't about ISPs trying to both thwart and profit off of over the top video services, they're about "getting users to make efficient use of available resources": quote: "...Usage caps "encourage all users to make efficient use of finite network resources," Verizon argued. usage caps "encourage all users to make efficient use of finite network resources," Verizon argued. Usage-based pricing "provides a way for consumers who are not heavy users to keep their costs down" and "increases incentives to invest in broadband networks," Verizon further wrote. “Because such pricing helps ensure a superior broadband experience for most consumers, it better enables providers to win and retain subscribers, thereby generating the revenue necessary to make broadband investments in the first place. Of course Verizon was able to spend $24 billion to deploy FiOS without ever once billing for usage, so their network's very existence would seem to undermine their own argument. As for the argument that usage-based pricing helps light users keep their costs down, we've quote: "As an initial matter, AT&T is not aware of tiered data plans that actually limit the amount of data a customer can use. Rather, to the extent providers use tiered data plans, those plans attach different prices to different buckets of data and require that customers who exceed the allowance associated with their chosen plan to pay for their additional usage. In this respect, tiered data plans are no different from any other pricing model that relates charges to usage." While it's nice to see the FCC interested in including caps as part of an honest definition of broadband, the agency over the years has been an absentee landlord on this issue. The agency has Of course Verizon was able to spend $24 billion to deploy FiOS without ever once billing for usage, so their network's very existence would seem to undermine their own argument. As for the argument that usage-based pricing helps light users keep their costs down, we've never seen that to be the case in the sorts of pricing plans proposed over the years. More often than not, these proposals offer no real value to light users, and only act to drive up costs for all broadband consumers.We broke the story of AT&T's usage caps on DSL and U-Verse back in 2011 , but the company's enforcement of those caps has so far been inconsistent. In AT&T's filing, the company chose to push more heavily into semantics, arguinig that there really is no such thing as data limits -- but instead simply pricing differentiation:While it's nice to see the FCC interested in including caps as part of an honest definition of broadband, the agency over the years has been an absentee landlord on this issue. The agency has refused to acknowledge the potential anti-competitive ramifications of caps, or the consistently poor job ISPs have done in terms of metering usage accurately (read: they want to bill like utilities, yet not be regulated like them).







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