Mine is testing out at 2.0 MBit according to CNet tonight.  $29.99 (USD) on Earthlink.

In the long-run, you'll have plenty of options because you'll have 3G (and soon 4G) options, your cable company of course, and others will come in if there's a market.

Right now, the problem is that the cable companies business model has fallen apart.  For years, they sold $50 cable modem connections knowing that 90% of their users were using trivial amounts of bandwidth per month (some surfing, email).

But not anymore.  Now people have game consoles, streaming netflix or Xbox 360 movies. Lots of people use Bit torrent, use iTunes for movies and music, etc.  

So now a LOT of people are using a LOT of bandwidth.  And the cable companies haven't figured out how to adapt yet.

My personal preference is to have it based on speed.  You want a 1MB connection, it's $X.  You want 5MB? It's $4X, 10MB? and so on.

There's also the fact that in my above estimates of my bandwidth consumption I neglected to consider either the bandwidth my father consumes or the bandwidth his ex-girlfriend (don't ask) consumes.  With all three of us, I'd imagine we're quite close to the throughput cap.  (As mentioned, this is on a 768kbit DSL connection, as it is, quite honestly, the only option in the area.)

I bring this up only because I would assume that most households we're speaking of have at least 2 or 3 people sharing a connection, whereas the bandwidth caps as implemented are on a connection basis rather than a user basis.  So that 20GB/month limit is really closer to a 7GB/month limit, etc.

The other posts mentioning other electronic devices in the household that consume bandwidth (Xbox, etc) would factor into this as well, but perhaps not as much as an additional person.

For what it's worth, I seriously doubt that half the kids at the college you go to use less than 20GB/month.  That's less than 700MB a day, average-that would be about 80 minutes of AVI/WMV, and although FLV is more efficient, even Youtubing/etc is going to take up a significant portion of that.

I really think we need to be clear on something here: How much bandwidth you use is not equal to how much you "download", which will obviously be (in some cases far) less.  Plenty of shit is kept in a temporary directory or RAM and deleted after use, but you sure as hell pay for that bandwidth usage, too.

Assuming $x is a decent value to begin with, such that people can have a connection for cheap, although it won't be a good connection, sounds good to me.

This would also be my preference, I would gladly step down to a 3mbps connection as long as the latency doesn't change (meaning as long as I could still play games with minimal lag).

Right now I get about 300 kB/sec with Verizon 3G on my computer

and with my Comcast I get about 24 mB/sec.

My argument is wrong because you don't think they should be selling you a service you don't like, yet you have no alternatives because I'm right and the regulations killed the profit incentives to build competing networks and improve their capacity so they'd actually be able to handle all the porn you're downloading.

As previously stated, moo.

You asked me to address your question, not answer it.  As I have nothing better to do and enjoy posting walls of text, I'll do it anyway.  Any ISP with competition.

You also didn't answer my pointless question.

Not to nitpick, B in "kB/sec" and "mB/sec" should be lower case since these are bit measurements, not bytes. So the 300 Kbps would translate to 37 KBps and the 24(!) Mbps would translate to 3 MBps.

I have no clue how much I use per month. I have one online game that I am constantly downloading patches and updates for. I play other games with friends online all the time. I have the Wii connected and download info for that. I get music tracks from amazon. Small games I had minor interest in but never got around to I buy on Steam and Impulse (still not a downloader of new releases). If I miss a show, several of the networks have their episodes online so I watch that.

They have a tiered system here but it starts at 128kb and goes up to 10mb and the middle, 5 mb is around 47 with a 15-18 dollar discount I have to beg the company not to raise every six months, at which point they try to shove their phone service on me or threaten to raise my rates. I know I use more than average but I would be suprised if I was all the way at the top, and don't even get me started on the upload limits. They are awful here because there is no competition. A lot of houses around here don't have access to DSL (mine included). If you are one side of the freeway, you don't even have cable, you use Sat internet and TV. Clearwire is starting to move around a bit so competition might finally show up. My city used to have its own cable service but it folded after Charter competed it to the ground and when it did, everyone in the zip code saw their cable bills increase 25% (there are others cities within 11 miles that had rates higher to begin with). These companies will do anything to charge customers more and then punish the people that actually use the service and do everything they can to avoid competition.

Nesrie, you might not use the 20.  It would depend on how much music and how many shows, but you're looking at 350 or so an hour on the television at standard resolution, much higher with the increasing resolutions.  The gaming, patches included, uses very little bandwidth.

Okay. I will take your word for it. I will admit I never really thought about it much before. Charter hasn't mentioned the metered thing yet but these companies tend to think and move alike, and I think the way the these companies are going about the changes are symptomatic of the monopolistic nature they have (yes I know larger cities have competition but believe or not, these is not some small town I live in. It's in the northwest so its hilly and not ideal for a lot of companies to compete in.) Tell a bunch of customers who are consistently unhappy with your service (and cable companies score very low in customer satisfaction) that you they are going to raise your rates (which they do every year anyway) but this time using a meter except they don't actually provide you with information on your usage. At the same time, you've got an industry pushing digital download while the cable companies sit back and get ready to cash in on the future.

Free market principles only work when there is free market competition.  That doesn't apply with monopolies.

What monopoly?  There's only one company you can get CABLE internet from?  So get internet from someone else.  Alltel, Verizon, Sprint, AT&T all offer wireless data plans, which means the cable company does not have any sort of monopoly.

Calling a service a monopoly when other companies offer the same services is ridiculous.

In many places there is only one service available. My cousin was stuck with dial up for years due to him living in a rural area. Big cities certainly have plenty, but smaller areas don't.

And if there is more than one, it is likely that only one, if that, is a decent speed and latency.

YODA IS A SISTER OF BATTLE?????????????????????

I live in England, so Time Warner can't do anythind about it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

What he said. If you actually read what I wrote early, you would know that DSL is not available where I live. There is one cable company and Clearwire is trying to fight for land to place a tower which may or may not reach my house. There are a lot of houses here who don't even have access to cable of any kind and by definition, this area is not rural, it's actually a Metro area but it's a valley with hills and a number of people on well water.  This is not the sticks but there is one service provider and guess what, that makes it a monoply. And even with competition, the cable companies are still considered a bit of a monopolistic industry because of the barrier to entry into the market and because the of the nature of the industry. We don't have ten cable companies fighting for space under the city to put up ten different systems of cable lines, that would be a mess.This industry is not like some bookstore down the street you know. You can't just throw up another one.  There are franchise fees involved witht the cities... and it's not just as easy as you think to add competition.

And when it was taking Charter too long to upgrade it's lines (after all why would they go to the expense when there wasn't anyone else around to change to), offer digital service, one of the cities here did it themselves and then Charter finally got around to it (imagine that) and priced them into the ground. That's the behavior of a monopoly, and I don't know if you know the size of Charter but there was no way one city was going to out due them when they dropped their rates by 25% in the area to drive out the competition. That brief blip of competition is what it took though to get them to actually do something with these lines because as a monopoly, they had little incentive to upgrade anything.