Bravo, Verizon: "No Bandwidth Caps. Period!"

Customers hate bandwidth caps, Verizon's market research shows, so "No Bandwidth Caps. Period!" is the highlight of their latest DSL ad campaign. There's no technical or cost reason a cap is needed on any large, wireline network; it's a way to block competitive video and efficiently raise prices. Internet transit is down to $2/megabit at major peering points and costs of deploying broadband continue to drop steadily. Bandwidth growth continues, which Bill Smith of AT&T tells an FCC workshop has slightly raised his cost per customer. That's important information for DSL Prime readers whose job is to manage network costs, but I'd estimate any increase in the last year is less than 1% of the price of the service. The usual industry figure is the total bandwidth cost is about $1/month, 2-4% of the price charged.