Of course, cable companies probably won't impose rate limits as long
as
DSL remains an option, because then they wouldn't be able to claim
(inaccurately) that cable gives you more bandwidth than DSL.
At least publicly ... In Canada, several cable carriers put rate limits
on the upstream at 14 Kbytes/sec and on the downstream at 2 Mbit/sec.
Of course, the service is much slower than that on evenings, but it
cannot be faster than that imposed by the rate limits either.
What is the real problem is that no cable carrier will actually file
their rate limits in their regulated rates before the CRTC. They
clearly benefit from the fact that end-users have no way of actually
knowing that they are being rate limited.
Now that Bell Canada has just filed an economic evaluation demonstrating
profitability of providing residential ADSL at $19 CDN ($12-13US) per
month, cable carriers in Canada will have no other choice to increase
thos rate limits or risk loosing most of their subs to Bell. That being
said, this will only happen if they can survive...
Cable carriers have an infrastructure which cannot be used to play the
bandwidth game. That's why they're so fond of walled content gardens
and free portals. The problem is that in Canada, they wont't be able to
play that game since higher-speed services over cable is regulated as a
telecom service as per CRTC decision 1996-1, something that DN00-185 @
the FCC is taking very long to come up to the same conclusions.
-=Francois=-