[wat10000]

I go to their home page, click "get started," and it asks me where I want service. If I put in a place with a congestion surcharge, then it shows me on the next page. In fact, you have to pay it up front to order service. Seems advertised to me. If you don't want to pay it, then you don't have to use their service.

[ButlerianJihad]

> congestion surcharge

I can't wait until our urban cable-modem and DSL providers pick up those "congestion surcharge" ideas! (FCC tariffs prevent this, right?)

[inemesitaffia]

They already do to run you service.

In the case of FWA they just say no.

[wat10000]

They've generally chosen to go with bandwidth caps and throttling instead. Different ways of managing the shared resource.

I'm not really sure what people want here. Capacity is limited. They're adding more as fast as they can, to the point that they've launched more satellites than everyone else has combined in history. But it takes time. Until capacity meets demand, there are going to be limitations, one way or another. At least they are actively adding capacity, unlike some ISPs I've had with old infrastructure that couldn't handle modern demands and just left it that way.

I'm sure people would be complaining just the same if they had no surcharge but throttled everybody, or imposed strict data limits, or stopped accepting new customers entirely in congested areas.

[ButlerianJihad]

Back in the day when analog modems were becoming obsolete, there was a hue and cry from broadband enthusiasts that cable modem technology was inferior infrastructure. These folks all agreed that DOCSIS and cable modems would suffer crippling congestion in neighborhoods. That your cable modem's bandwidth would be shared bandwidth, shared on a medium with all your neighbors up to that head-end, and that this shared medium would inevitably be oversold many times over, and that cable-modem ISPs could never possibly meet bandwidth demands on these local networks.

In contrast, DSL technology was sold as "never congested, never shared": that is, your copper pairs would wire up directly to the wire center, and have a dedicated connection into the ISP's backbone (and that ISP was experienced in telecommunications, rather than the entertainment industry) and therefore, DSL was always superior due to its lack of shared mediums.

It was a weird argument, because inevitably, every provider's core network is shared to some degree, and cable modems really have not suffered congestion beyond the ordinary. Conversely, DSL also had its strategies for aggregation, overselling, and shared media. But a lot of people believed those stories about topology myths.

Personally, I switched from ADSL to cable modem over 18 years ago, and I haven't regretted it. Very stable, always available and reliable, and plenty of bandwidth to spare, for my applications.

[vel0city]

> cable modems really have not suffered congestion beyond the ordinary

I've lived in and had friends live in apartments with absolutely terrible noisy neighbor problems on coax networks. Too much junk plugged in making all kinds of noise on the same run making internet services close to useless. DSL infrastructure lost out to cable at the start in that area so it got practically no upgrades since it was first implemented. While far more reliable it was ancient speeds at even higher prices.

It seems like it largely took 5G home internet actually being a thing in those areas for the cable companies to start fixing those buildings and rooting out the problems.

Cable modem congestion and line quality issues definitely vary greatly on the operator and the actual location installed at. A cheap old apartment building filled with poor residents is likely to have abysmal line quality. A well-off neighborhood of single family homes probably has no problems with line quality at all.

[wat10000]

It's a lot easier to upgrade the capacity at a central office than it is to upgrade an entire neighborhood. Plenty of cable infrastructure was built out when it was just a broadcast (multicast?) medium and the only concern was making sure signal strength was adequate at all receivers. If you repurpose that wiring for emulated point-to-point transmission, there may not be a whole lot for each individual.

Random example, my house has fiber and cable available. The internet plans are similar, except fiber offers 30x higher upload speeds, which is a direct consequence of better topology.