This is true of Tucson, AZ where I live. I can get Comcast for 12mb up / 2mb down for an absurd $60 / mo. Or I can get Qwest for 1.5mb up / 768 kb (kilobits!) down, which is basically like not having a choice.
I was actually so annoyed by this (and by Qwest's advertising around town about their high-speed Internet options) that I sent a letter and e-mail to the president of Qwest Arizona, Jim Campbell, asking if Qwest would roll out real broadband to my apartment complex any time soon. To Qwest's credit, his assistant replied (this was back in Jan. 2010) to say no. She's sent an e-mail every six months or so with an update on the situation.
See, the worst part is that, in some places, there is no choice at all. A 1.5Mb connection is enough for email and basic internet usage - in some places, you have Comcast, or you hook up a modem and use dial-up.
Imagine this scenario playing out somewhere where even less options exist, like a rural town in the midwest... you get cut off, you can switch to what? Dial-up?
There's satellite, but bandwidth and limits are worse there.
He was exceeding his limits, and received a couple of warnings. I'm not a fan of Comcast by any means, but it seems to me that in this case he should have upgraded to a plan that would accommodate his needs. Uploading terabytes of AV data to Carbonite isn't going to work very well over standard residential uplink speeds anyway.
But is there a plan that would meet his needs? 15/3 is top tier in a lot of places, and they often won't sell commercial lines to residences. He may have had no choice but to just use less bandwidth.
Or pay for a second line. It sounds like he and all his friends and random guests were all using a single line. That's not how Comcast envisioned its usage, and their usage caps reflect that.
Don't get me wrong. I think they handled this really poorly. But I don't think he paid enough attention to the situation, either.
I was in a similar situation a couple of years ago with Comcast. I upgraded to their business package and haven't heard a word since. As far as I know, business lines are available everywhere residential one are.
While there are plenty of ISPs in Seattle, in many places Comcast is the only option for better than 1.5Mbps DSL.
Qwest owns the lines and although has announced greater speeds planned for the Seattle area, few have received them. [1] Verizon tried to bring fiber-to-the-home, mostly on the outskirts of Seattle, and has since abandoned the market. [2] The city of Seattle studied fiber in 2005 but decided they need a partner. After Qwest and Verizon fell through, the mayor applied for Google's Fiber for Communities in 2010 [3], but didn't get it. Now in 2011, the only company delivering fiber in Seattle is... Comcast. [4] Qwest, now becoming CenturyLink, doesn't have any publicized current plans to improve service.
I'm not arguing that highspeed broadband is a right, but Comcast definitely has a chokehold on the majority of the Seattle broadband market.
I won't claim that Seattle is a terrible place for broadband, but it's also not wine and roses.
On the cable side, Comcast "competes" with Broadstripe. Broadstripe has both terrible customer service and poor internet service. Broadstripe also happens to have a bunch of apartment and condo complexes covered in an exclusivity agreement. Broadstripe makes Comcast look great in almost every regard.
On the DSL side it's true that Speakeasy is available, but if you are willing to ignore customer service, Qwest DSL is almost always dramatically cheaper. It's a good option, but sometimes not available above 1.5mbps, even in extremely central areas like Belltown, which is a neighborhood of condos and apartments directly adjoining downtown.
I'm on Comcast residential now and I'm pretty happy with it compared to my past experiences with all the companies I mentioned above, but next time I move within Seattle I now know one of the top questions to ask is what kind of internet access options the place has.
Since Speakeasy was bought by Best Buy and then shuffled off into MegaPath's maw, their customer service has gotten progressively worse. Qwest's customer service is OK as long as you're willing to learn the right magic phrases that they use. That's the hard part. On the flip side, their field techs have always been uniformly competent when I've dealt with them in spite of having to cope with the massive wad of bureaucracy that goes along with working for a huge telecom company.
DSL in general is slow in Seattle because the city hasn't spent much effort in upgrading its (or encouraging telecoms to upgrade their) old copper telecom infrastructure. When line lengths aren't just really long, they're often running over corroding 40 and 50 year-old copper. In about half the buildings I've lived in, the NID was still the very old nut-and-bolt screw down terminal style interfaces. 66 and 110 blocks? What are those?
Here here. I have had Speakeasy since 1999. I used to love them with a passion. But over the years, they've basically stood still. My bandwidth has never increased, even when they said I could get 15 MB down. That turned out to not be possible (Major packet loss, unreliable connection). So, here I am paying the same amount I paid in 1999 for the same bandwidth I had in 2000. $100 a month for 3.0/768.
I hate it! But there are no other options in my neighborhood, except Comcast. I even live in Oakland. If I was in SF, I could get Astound, which I hear is awesome. But in Oakland, where I live, it's Comcast or something super inferior.
Speakeasy has had about 10X more outages this year than they have had over the past 12 years, BTW.
1. Satellite Broadband
2. Wireless Broadband(most wireless co's slow bandwidth by 15% after bandwidth cap is exceeded and do not cut off) In building use buy a $200 Wilson Wireless amplifier
Both have terrible latency. Furthermore, they both have bandwidth caps. While the provider will not cut you off for going above, they will start charging you absurd prices for it.
The only wireless broadband provider now who doesn't chargis for over usage is Sprint. If he is cut off from that, the situation repeats itself. There is no competition, and that is the main problem.
T-Mobile and Virgin are the only carriers I'm aware of that use a "soft" cap as you describe. AT&T and Verizon don't cut you off, they just keep charging you by the GB when you break the cap.
Tyranny of the last mile still exists, and isn't going away any time soon.