You could say that, or you could say that the cap is stopping me from actually using the bandwidth I pay for. I pay for 100Mb/sec down, how long would it take me to hit the cap if I used that continuously? So do I really have the 100Mb/sec down that I'm paying for?
And as a side note, I've never hit the cap - I'm not sure it's turned on yet (Comcast customer), but it's coming. But I won't have one soon because I'll be switching to a different ISP as soon as it's available. But if I stayed with Comcast, I would hit it as soon as I get a 4K TV and start watching 4K sources.
You are not paying for CIR 100Mbit. That's the point. (Go find a real commercial ISP with an SLA and a way to call their NOC to quiz them about QoS and peering, and see how much that costs)
The main cost there is the SLA, not the 100Mbit. Nobody is saying that the cheap consumer price should have an aggressive SLA.
And 100mbit of CIR per person isn't the right metric either. We're in a consumer context here, where bandwidth can be massively oversubscribed without capping or running out. That doesn't mean they're not actually selling that much bandwidth.
You can tell me if I'm way off-base on any of the following: Comcast claims that only 8% of their users average more than 1mbps, even in areas without caps. If we assume most of those 8% are using 5mbps and the rest use an entire 100mbps, we might get an average data use of 3mbps per customer. In terms of transit costs, that's nothing. Less than a dollar per mbps in bulk. Almost all the cost is in supplying the pipe that's capable of bursting to 100mbps. So there is no real need to have these caps. Just sell unlimited data.
And as a side note, I've never hit the cap - I'm not sure it's turned on yet (Comcast customer), but it's coming. But I won't have one soon because I'll be switching to a different ISP as soon as it's available. But if I stayed with Comcast, I would hit it as soon as I get a 4K TV and start watching 4K sources.
EDIT: minor change.