-6mbit is by no means the top of the line.
-6mbit is ~2.6GB/hr.
-Your assumption of an institution of a bitrate cap that would lead to a 20GB/month cap is...dialup.  8KB/s.  (Feel free to correct my numbers, as you may have a different cap-that's the only number I recall seeing in this thread.)
-Find me a company that doesn't have a helluva lot more infrastructure than that.
-Find me a user who actually uses that little and does something other than check their email.

Bottom line: The cap is too low, and "unlimited" means nothing.

It seems you don't want a solution, either, and just enjoy being an asshole-but I guess we already knew that.

Please address the question in the final line of my last post.

Wow, it's amazing how socialist the world is these days.  If a company wants to charge more or change their pricing scheme they are more then welcome to in my opinion.  Having the government price fix or force them to use a certain pricing model will just result in one of two things.  Either they will go bankrupt because they are unable to support themselves as a company or they will raise the prices for everyone, so those top 10% can exploitively use 90% of the bandwidth.

Most of the people that frequent a forum like this are in the top 10% so sure, it sounds great.  The other 90% of the people who aren't using far more than what they paid for (in fact, they are using far less) will come out way ahead with pricing plans like this because either their rates will go down, the quality of their service will go up, or competators will enter the market and do one of those two things.

For the 10% that are sucking down most of the bandwidth (I'm definately included in that), start paying your own way instead of expecting the other 90% to support your bandwidth usage.

I don't see a question...

My bad; I'll restate it in the form of a question.

What ISP wouldn't want to charge massive overage charges on a cap that is easily reached?

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I don't mind paying more for more.  What I mind is arbitrary limits and overage charges.

If customers really want no overage a company will eventually do it.  For example, perhaps a better business model is one where instead of charging extra, you just stop service, or shape service until the following month.  Consumers may like that more in which case a company doing that will end up with more customers.

I have this crazy idea that I should get what I pay for.  Maybe I'm not paying enough.  Then maybe someone should try increasing their prices.  If I still think it's a good deal, I'll stay with them.  I just don't want the company playing games with me, and that includes arbitrary limits, overages, packet shaping, and stopping service, among others.  (If you look around a bit you can see my rant when Sprint decided the best way to resolve their dispute with Cogent was to block access to/from Cogent's piece of the Internet, effectively screwing over any Sprint customers who tried to access Cogent-hosted sites-as well as vice versa, but screwing over your customers is never a good business decision.  If I had another option, I'd take it, and as soon as I move, I will.)  I'm sure you can find other practices they indulge in that I wouldn't approve of as well.

Again: I don't have a problem paying more for more.  I just want to get what I pay for.

They are charging you more.  You can choose to pick a package that has a higher bandwidth cap instead of using a lower-end package (cheaper) that has a 5GB limit.  Plus, you can over your cap, you just have to pay more for it.  While I do agree that they need a wider range of options, beyond just 40GB in the biggest package, in almost all cases 40GB / month is plenty (even for someone who watches TV on the internet and digitally downloads their software).

What people in this thread are suggesting is not that they pay for what they use but rather that other people pay for what they use.  By paying per GB, the higher bandwidth users pay more than the lower bandwidth users, which is perfectly reasonable (in fact, it's far more reasonable than the current system).

Some other features like Rollover bandwidth would be nice, so I can burst some months and perhaps some feature additions where I can pre-purchase an extra 10GB for some amount of money.

However, saying that they are doing something morally wrong or illegal just doesnt' make sense.  If you are OK paying for what you use then I suggest you provide them with feedback such as what you would like to see (that makes you pay for what you use) such as more badwidth options (ex: 100GB/month) and perhaps rollover bandwidth options.

OMG NO, you mean Americans finally don't have a bottomless download pit ? Welcome to the rest of the world.

Shaping!? How evil. Welcome to 1999.

This is a regulated industry for a reason. It's not treated the same as some of the less regulated industries. Where I live, there is one cable company and its going into bankruptcy, and so far the only regulations I am aware of on cable companies has been on basic cable, not internet and not digital cable and still Charter manages to offer crapy service at terrible prices and still not make it. My favorite part is how they are telling customers not to worry, business as usual for us... oh great, the usually bad service at outrageous prices.

This is relevant why?

Congratulations, you can do arithmatic.

Would you like dial-up speed instead of a 20 gig cap on a 6mbit connection?

Which one would you like?  Pick a cable company, none of them can do anywhere near the bandwidth they are pretending to sell you.  If everyone actually used it, the entire national grid would collapse from the strain.

Nearly everyone.  I use less than 20 gigs a month quite frequently myself.  I have a 1.5mbit satellite connection with a daily cap of 465MB and a free period between 1am and 6am where the cap is disabled.  I only come anywhere near the 20 gig cap because I hate watching network television, too many really fucking annoying commercials.

Says the voluntary customer that is willingly paying for a service.

The solution presents itself!  Don't buy it.  Or, you could just make life easier for the rest of us and kill yourself now since you'd rather the government control your life than actually have to decide not to use a product you don't think is a fair deal.  If you actually accomplish your goals, we'll all be better off dead.  Yes, I do enjoy being me.

Moo.  Now that I've addressed your question, I'll ask an equally irrelevant question of you.  Would you like to wish in your left hand or your right?  Your answer will determine whether you're in your right mind or not.

Edit:

No one wants to rent a shitty grid, makes perfect sense to me.  This shows your problem.  Until 2005, there was no incentive for Charter to improve their grid, all it would lead to was someone else renting it from them and stealing their profits.  There was also no incentive for anyone else to bother putting up a grid, as the same thing would happen to them.  If a competitor came in and killed them off with a superior service, they could probably have made more money renting the opposing grid than they were using and maintaining their own.  When there is no profit to be made, there is no investment made.  You're out of luck until someone notices they can make a killing off your area.

This only works as long as there is competition. Having only one option for high speed internet isn't entirely "voluntary" and "willingly". It's voluntary in the sense that nobody is requiring you to have high speed internet, but the alternative is not really fit for a gamer.

So those who just check email have their option that doesn't affect them much, but those who like watching movies online, or prefer digital downloads for games/software are more or less choiceless.

It's not really that TW is using this pricing scheme, which on its own does make sense in many ways. At least my issue with it is that in a lot of areas, they're basically a monopoly. Where everything else works on competition, there is none here so anyone who wants high speed internet has to adopt whatever they come up with. And that's the main problem.

I'm curious... How much are you (Anyone) paying them and what speed are you getting now?

Also, competition doesn't always improve things much. Where I am, there's three choices. One is fairly new. Before, it was between Qwest and Charter. Charter... even after 'fixing' the line averaged about 20 hours of downtime per week. During the days, randomly.

I average 60-80GB a month, and that's on a 768kbit connection.  On a connection that wasn't so easy to max out the rate of, I'd probably average 2-3 times that, but that'd be about my limit, regardless of connection speed.

If you can find me an ISP that would prefer to do things for the good of the consumer rather than make scads of money, I'm interested.  I'm perfectly fine with paying for what I use, but overage charges are, have always been, and will always be ludicrous, especially in comparison to the charge rate for the plan itself.  We're talking about TWC here, which has a history of doing some not very kind things to its customers with regards to their bandwidth, and I'm talking about Sprint, which I'm horribly unimpressed with.

The cap and overage method isn't designed to have people pay for what they use; that's just a side effect.  It's designed to generate massive revenue because no one reads the fine print on their ridiculously low caps, and incidentally will result in a huge loss of customer base.

It's yet another instance of businesses choosing short term profits and long term losses over short term losses and long term gains.

Rollover bandwidth is a good idea, particularly as usage isn't going to be constant across months, but I'm not getting my hopes up.

I'm not saying what they're doing is illegal.  I'm not even necessarily saying what they're doing is immoral.  All I'm saying is I personally refuse to give a company my business, assuming I have a choice (and right now not having internet is not an option), if they do these kinds of things.

I really don't believe Sprint would listen to a plea for more options, but I'll give it a shot.

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psychoak: I didn't say they could do the bandwidth they promised me.  I said they can do a lot more than dialup.  There's a difference.

Also, you haven't addressed my question.  Again: What ISP wouldn't want to charge massive overage charges on a ridiculously low cap?  Not because it's a good idea (it's not), but because they think it's a good idea.  Actually, think may be too strong of a word...

Until, of course, you hit the cap.

Talk to your neighbors much?

My mother, my grandmother, my father, half the kids at the college I go to, several of my aunts, uncles, and cousins, the list goes on . . .

Anyways, I personally think I'd rather see a rate cap when I hit some point rather than totally dropping it or giving me a bigger bill.

Currently I have Time Warner cable internet and am paying around $35 a month for (optimally) 8mpbs connection though it rarely goes over around 7mbps.  I don't really know how much bandwidth I use but if I had to guess I would say it's well over a hundred gigs per month.  I have 3 computers (2 of them power users) and 1 Xbox 360 streaming hd tv shows from netflix fairly regularly in my house, so we burn through bandwidth quite fast.  Also, Annatar11 is correct, in my area this is basically my only option for high speed internet (not even DSL is available here).  That's why I said earlier that while I don't want to go back to dial-up, I will do so if this capping is implemented in my area where there is no competition to choose from.