Videonet has published the latest blog entry by David Price and myself
Our story so far: After beginning an experiment in cord-cutting, David received a rude awakening from his pay TV provider. This got us thinking about how to get around broadband data caps. Two approaches occurred to us right away.
The first is to make better use of available bandwidth by using improved codecs. The second is to postpone data cap charges with a hybrid broadcast solution. Both have their advantages and challenges…
Click for the rest of this story, on Videonet
Enjoy!
Best regards,
– Steve Hawley
Of course you can also live outside of the US where data caps have largely been rejected for fixed line services (for example for my £22 per month fee, my monthly broadband data transfer varies from 700GB to 4TB), and the degree of deployment of Freemium TV services is very large (e.g. UK has >50 to 200 FTA services on DTT and DSAT respectively)… Seems that once again, along with extremely high cost of video services, the US is a special market that drives the very US only ‘cord cutting’ environment, whereas the the rest of the world has the service stacking/Freemium model that also suits the OTT providers like Netflix and Amazon…
Hi Ian, Data caps and added fees are not universal among US fixed access operators. Those which do impose added fees tend to be larger ones, with the (current) exception of Verizon.
As of this 2018 article in Fierce Telecom, Cable operators Comcast, Mediacom and Cox, and Telcos AT&T and CenturyLink do it. CenturyLink does it for DSL subscribers but not FTTH.
I expected Mobile to be another story – common – but only Verizon was charging overages (which are high), at least in March at the time of that article. Instead, the carriers reduce your speed when you hit the cap, and caps are fairly high.