Reply to Thread

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tanis143" data-source="post: 3369975" data-attributes="member: 43724">I can explain that pretty easily. I will preface with I'm not a fan of the data caps, but they are needed. Each channel in the spectrum has a limited amount of data due to frequency size and current technology. Without getting too technical it stands at around 30 Mbit/sec per channel max on docsis 3.0. Docsis 3.1 allows for more, which is why with just 33 channels it can hit a gigabit. But, each node has a max bandwidth as well, and the network has not grown as fast as the technology has increased the speed. Cox saw this happening several years ago and started plans for a node + 0 approach but completely revamping the network takes time and money. Anyone who thinks cox could deploy the amount of fiber needed to make all areas node + 0 honestly has no clue about how cable infrastructure works. Right now they are mitigating how bandwidth is used with switch digital video channels but they can only do that with certain channels. They are starting to use IP tv, which if they could switch all tv to that would save a lot of bandwidth, but it requires a certain cox rented gateway, which a lot of people (myself included) do not want to use. So, unless they develop a quicker way to deploy more fiber throughout the city, they have to do bandwidth management. Part of that is discouraging bandwidth hogs. Before the caps hit (and even before we had gigabit speeds over coax) there would be at least 5-10 people per node who were downloading over 3 TBytes of data a month. With as much use that we see today just one of those is enough to lower speeds for everyone. It sucks, yes. But bandwidth is a finite resource. It comes down to the law of supply and demand.</blockquote>

Verification