| It's not negligible. Wired and wireless are both "pipes" of a certain capacity. When you install the initial investment you build out a certain sized pipe. Wired has a much larger pipe for obvious technical reasons. In both cases, there is no real cost delta between a low to medium utilization. In both cases, if the pre-built pipe experiences a high level of utilization, it results in irregularity of service (more latency, dropped packets). With wireless, the impact of high usage is significantly more severe and is more visible at a much lower percent of utilization. The solution to this is to either reduce capacity or improve infrastructure. The latter involves capital expenditure for both pipes, albeit it is exponentially cheaper to increase wired capacity compared to wireless capacity. Cheaper, but it's not cheap. It's not just hardware - technician training, deployment costs, for larger inefficient businesses it's not easy to upgrade an edge node of 1Gbps to 10Gbps because a feeder for 100 families has a handful of hungry users. From just a straight business perspective, usage caps make so much sense. The vast majority of customers get nowhere near them and will never notice. The small subset of "power" users that are eating your capacity you're losing money on anyway, so it's easy to sacrifice this market segment. The sad truth is that the internet video push has turned "power user" expectations fully out of whack with what an executive room was predicting. A business that has had a built network has a hard time justifying large capital pipe expenditures for what it's internally viewing as troublesome "power" users who should switch to business accounts. So they're fighting it with these policies. The simple truth is that the bandwidth demands are going to continue to increase across the board and this will need to be accepted and the capital spent to expand the pipe. However, a lack of competition will make this process long and painful. |