From Furo's Fingers

Well, it doesn't take a math major to figure out that even a few warez
users can suck up a full T-1 quickly. 1.55Mbps divided by 256Kbps upload
speed = 6 users and a full T-1 is exhausted. Now, Waterloo alone has
some 3000+ subscribers on the cable modem system, and I can guarantee
that at any given time there are at least a dozen (likely many more)
people running some sort of file sharing software, which doesn't simply
include the “serious” ones. It's the 14 year olds that are running this
software by the dozen. I personally know 3 people that leave WinMX
running constantly. The cap here is 128Kbps, so there's a minimum of
384Kbps of total bandwidth gone, every second of the day. Nobody else
can ever use it. Doesn't sound like much, but when you start adding all
of this up, you start getting into large numbers fairly quickly.

@Home completely mis-managed their network. They spent money where they
didn't need to and didn't spend it where they did need to. Their
bandwidth management was atrocious. They didn't implement caps here for
the first 18 months, but found that they needed to double their
bandwidth before they doubled their customer base early on. Something
just ain't right there. So, how much money were they wasting per month
because they DIDN'T have caps? Couple this with the fact that they
entered into contracts with cable companies that they couldn't sustain
or make any decent profit from, and it was just a matter of time until
they went under. They had no ability to plan for capacity, and it came
back to bite them in the end. Flooded networks results in overloaded
routers, crappy download speeds, users getting knocked off the nodes at
random, etc. Things we've all heard about when speaking of cable modem
providers, and exactly what I've been experiencing lately. I get booted
off of the node about a half dozen times every day, and my download
speeds have suddenly been cut in half on average, but they haven't
changed the caps, nor has my IP address changed, so I know we're still
operating on @Home resources. More users have been added recently with
the marketing push from Mediacom, but they haven't added bandwidth to
handle the expansion lately. If they shut off all of the file swappers
out there, I'd be willing to bet that the situation would be far
different.

AT&T is doing it right, in my opinion. They're restricting users to a
reasonable rate of data transfer, both upload and download. This makes
it much easier to predict requirements, and keeping the warez/file
sharing users squeezed into nearly unmanageable situations. Anyone that
complains about a full T-1 worth of download speed for $30-40/month
truly doesn't understand the costs that go into those high-speed lines.
You shouldn't need any more than 128Kbps in upload speed because most of
the things that need that type of speed are flatly against the terms of
service anyway. Be thankful that AT&T is planning to expand their
offerings and let you pay for more bandwidth. It's long overdue. I've
had small LAN parties at my house with a half dozen people playing
various games on the network, and 128Kbps was plenty. Video conferencing
works perfectly, and I've even run voice servers for several people to
chat together, and had no problems with the 128Kbps upload restriction.
Want to argue email attachments? Most servers accept a max of 2-5MB
attachments? 128Kbps is roughly 1MB upload per minute, so even a fairly
sized attachment only takes a few minutes to transfer.

I consider myself a power user (duh), and there aren't many situations
where I actually find a NEED for higher upload speeds. The times that I
have wished I had more were when I was pushing large files up to an FTP
server as part of a work-related task, or trying to stream video to
several users. Again, it's something that this service wasn't designed
for, so I have no room to complain at all, do I? I'm trying to use the
service for something it wasn't intended for. Work.

Compare the price/speed ratios for DSL or ISDN, and cable is still the
winner on average, even with the caps.

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