[sgrossman]

While I don't argue with the title of the article - bandwidth caps really are just a way to deal with infrastructure costs by passing it on to some consumers - the use of IP transit as a reference for an ISPs cost of service is inaccurate.

IP transit costs are what a carrier or ISP would pay to get traffic from their main datacenter/CO in a given metro area to the Internet. This is an operating expense and is a drop in the bucket compared to CapEx they spend on the last mile.

The cable operators and mobile carriers are freaking out because they are constantly pouring money into nodes splits and QAM carriers(cable) or radios, backhaul, and spectrum(mobile). These are the real money pits of their businesses and their motivation to enforce data transfer caps, throttling, etc.