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Originally Posted by Rathji
People torrent because it is:
a) Free
b) Convenient
If you suddenly don't make it free, do you honestly think that the same amount of people will still be putting 10-20GB HD movie rips up on torrent sites for people to leech off? Think of it this way, would you spend $10-$40 in order for someone else to be able to download a movie for free (or spend if they go over their own bandwidth cap)?
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That's not the issue. The issue that ISPs are bringing up is that video streaming is jamming up their network. This is an issue of capacity, that means that at peak times they need more bandwidth to alleviate the congestion. How much you can download has very little to do with this as it's essentially an issue of users at one time not downloading. A download cap does nothing to alleviate capacity constraints at the peak. Downloading data has essentially no marginal cost for an ISP off the peak meaning there is no economic reason to charge any more for it.
Furthermore, reducing capacity goes to reducing the providers costs. Do you think that capacity reduction will be reflected in bills becoming cheaper? I don't.
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All these things mean that either network traffic will go down, or people will start to pay through the nose, which will allow Shaw/Telus etc to upgrade their networks.
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In a competitive market they would need to upgrade their networks anyway. Canadian investment in broadband is significantly behind other developed countries as many studies have demonstrated.
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Bottom line is you should pay for what you use. At work, I need to pay the real cost of my traffic, because I have a level of service that our company demands. If we don't get that level of service, then our business does not function. Home users should not be any different if they require that same service, but realistically they still are, since all home users are billed the rates they are because they are connected to an over subscribed network infrastructure that allows for such a discount. Most residential users would have a fit if they got the bill I get at work for 100Gb of network traffic.
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I have absolutely no problem with this. But if you want to pay for what you use then why would you support paying a flat rate up to a certain GB limit even if you don't use it? That's essentially just giving your money away to ISPs. And what you're talking about is upstream data which is a whole other ballpark and not relevant to this discussion. Because if you're paying exorbitant amounts for 100gb of download then that's your problem.