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Rogers Cable Plans Fees to Curb Bandwith Hogs
jeremyd writes: "Major Canadian broadband provider plans to charge heavy users higher monthly access fees as high as $80 per month. Read the article here from the Globe and Mail. If only the world would protest. What's the point of high speed broadband access if you can't use it to full potential without having to start selling organs to pay the bills?"
Shit, as soon as people gotta start worrying about additional fees, they'll dump that service. People want to know how much they're going to pay.
I use Shaw (Roger's main competition), and several times now they've called my house and asked me to tone down my bandwidth usage.
:)
I asked them that very question: What's the point of broadband if I can't use it to its full extent?
The license agreement I signed clearly stated there's no bandwidth restrictions for home users, but you can't run servers. I wasn't running any servers, they knew that, and they called me anyway. They actually tried to get me to switch to a business account (more money, bandwidth restrictions), too.
If the ISP can't handle the bandwidth it makes available, it's their loss if people use it too much. It's not my fault I enjoy streaming content and sending movies to friends and all that.
Geez... Everyone wants to charge more and more for stuff we already have because its getting more popular... It really sux that all our contracts with people such as time warner express such ideas as "rates subject to change without notice" and such... But then, how do you compete in bandwidth with big industry? It isn't a trivial matter to lay one's own cable across the country and say "hey, buy my bandwidth, its cheaper!" ... cause it'd be more expensive prolly than the leading largeass company in the feild... Anyway, I'm done rambling...
Contrary to popular believe, bandwidth DOES cost money, so it's not that strange they do this.
A lot of people just want (their computer) to be online 24/7, and don't use that much bandwidth.
It should be cheaper for them than for those who use kazaa as an external harddisk.
No security through obscurity: my password is goatse. Stop me before I troll again.
Why everybody here seems to be so opposed
to diversification in fees based on used
resources?
The bandwidth is not a unlimited resource.
Has anyone noticed how bandwith cost less to the end-user as to the upstream provider?
Anyone notice a problem here?
Well, there is. The bandwith sold to you is shared. If you use all of it, constantly, then others are deprived of what they paid for. So the upstream provider bills you more to accomodate for your dedicated bandwidth needs.
I'm amazed most broadband operators made it so far selling bandwith so cheap. As a matter of fact most didn't, and bought the farm. Funny how no-one seems to notice.
In my opinion, Scientology is a cult you should avoid.
Personally, I looked into getting a cable modem here, but found the 1-computer-only, no-server policy, and 128k upload cap to be too restrictive.
I was even considering getting the $100/mo. "corporate" option, but found it to be little better.
If I could get an un-capped upload and download line, and the ability to use the bandwidth as I see fit, I'd be willing to pay US$100 for it. I don't think $80 canadian would be a bad price at all.
--The Rizz
"Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything." --G.B. Shaw
what is this about?
/me looks at his 10mbit for 7 bucks á month.
whining about prices? the editors usually tell us non-american that we shouldn't whine about america/slashdot.
well, let me tell you, this is a classic example of your so called 'market forces/intrests/powers'
if someone is PREPARED to pay 80$ for a more advanced server, this is going to work, if nobody pays, well, what a shame.
to bad you dont live in i a country where the goverment subventions things like this.
I always kind of assumed that broadband internet access would start off desirably out of the reach of most people, but gradually slide down the scale of availibility, dropping in cost until it was a mass market technology. But more and more I see providers of the service taking steps backward and either raising prices or limiting availibility, putting restrictions on what you can or can't do with it.
This is especially true here in the UK where free dial up internet access appeared, then promptly disappeared. Now a similar thing seems to be happening to broadband. Rather than becoming more accessible to the average man in the street, companies seem to be raising prices and limiting signups right, left and centre.
Not a lot to do with the article here though, just an observation. What exactly has caused this? Have companies overestimated network capacity? Or are they just incompetent? Will widescale, high bandwidth access ever become the norm, rather than the exception?
http://www.davetansley.com - you proba
I don't know what exactly does the high-speed Internet service mean, but I'd love to pay $80/month for what I consider a high-speed link. I live in Poland where I pay about $450/month for 768kb/s DSL... And it's not even a guaranteed bandwidth.
~shiny
WILL HACK FOR $$$
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It certainly isn't worth it. We are currently paying $80 a month for broadband through charter (69.95 for the service, $9.95 for modem rental) and we're getting a maximum of 65k/s downstream, about 30k/s upstream.
Until these cable providers can start providing truely reliable service, they really can't justify these price hikes. With an economy this slow, it's going to do nothing but discouraging potential broadband users from signing up with the service.
My advice to the cable internet providers, fix your networks first, then worry about charging users more for high usage. Hell, with the type of bandwidth we're getting, I don't think it's even possible to GET those higher realms of transfer.
Yea, but they're gonna lower the cost for "light internet users", or so they say. So you pay for what you use, and if you don't like it, use another ISP. Now lets hear it about monopolies and repressive governments...
rant
you ain't seen nothin' bad till you see the "high spped" resident network at my apartment... they wad extra fibre lengths and stuff them into the most crammed slots... Paint clogs the jacks... latency of 3 seconds. to the router. I seem to recall being able to shoot myself in quake games...
I'd be happy to pay $50 bucks for this dsl, but they have us on a 33k limited pbx, kinda killing dsl. And the cable is some wireless fed crap, most channels don't have audio. Now they claim up north that it costs too much... we can't even pay for better access...
Anyone have any ideas on exactly how much bandwidth a "bandwidth hog" uses? The article doesn't give specifics, so I'm curious what others think the limits will be set at.
I use rogers right now, and this pisses me off to no end. Bell Sympatico can't be installed in my neighbourhood, so I'm stuck with rogers if I want to use broadband (I can't even use Shaw or Cogeco).
maybe there aren't enough people like my but i'd pay $120 a month for 2-3 static ips, unlimited bandwidth 1mb down 512 up. that price would easily cover that cross section of a t3 split amongst other members, i'm not even looking for garunteed bandwith i'd settle for average speeds. (within reason) sooner or later hopefully someone will provide that. (unfortunately at this rate it might well be a cell phone provider)
Really, if you have to sell blood to pay an $80cdn/month internet bill, you need to surf less and get a job. Bandwidth isn't free, and I'd rather pay $80 for an awesome connection than $52(usd) for a shitty one. However, my options in OKC, USA are $52 for a shitty one or $250 for a good one...
Well, sure, strictly speaking I'd rather pay more than less. But I wouldn't mind paying about twice as much as the low end customer. I'm still getting a better bargain from it-- the low end users check their e-mail and that's about it.
Plus, $110 Canadian? Damn, that's not much more than you have to fork over for AT&T cable modem. And if AT&T offered better upload speeds for a few extra bucks, I'd seriously consider it.
Uhhh where in Canada do Shaw and Rogers actually compete for customers? They are in distinctly different areas of the country and are not competing with one another.
We love Monopolies in Canada, and we have the CRTC to regulate them!
...are going to drive bandwidth collectives.
You already share bandwidth with a whole mess of people in your neighborhood... you just don't know them, and that's why the cable co's can screw you all.
All it takes is some knowledgable people to form community ISPs, lease a fat pipe and redistribute the bandwidth via the most convenient method (802.11?) When the need to make a profit is removed from the cost of being an ISP, the price per user can come down quite a bit... hopefully the cable co's will start to feel some of the pricing pressure they thought they escaped when they killed the competition.
Sure, easier said than done, but hatred of getting screwed is a strong motivator...
Marc Siry || interactive media professional, motorcycle enthusiast ||
The provider might ask the same question. At what point does the cost of offering the service cover the price charged to the customer? In other words, the provider doesn't want to lose his shirt just so Joe Consumer can have service.
I have to agree with you though, $80 is getting a bit expensive for the average home user. The company will also have to temper their need to charge more with what people are really willing to pay!
I fully understand Rogers. Of course, there will be lots of whiners, that does not understand that there are lots of users on the same network.
.. for providing 3 OC3 links per month.. pluss service.. pluss other costs.
Of course you can use the cablemodem for the quick speed, for normal things, and with some extreme spikes when you download things occassionally.
The _problem_ starts when someone starts using 100% of the bandwidth available to them, almost ALL the time. The problem is when there are about 50-100 people that does that. I'm not sure what speed Rogers is offering, but say its 512Kbps. If 100 users use all that, they need a T3 just for 100 users! If they've got, say 1000 users that are like that.. well, then they have a big fucking problem, as an OC3 wouldn't be enough to satisfy them.
Now, if someone does some calculations. How much would three OC3 links cost Rogers? Now, tell me, how much is 1000*45 ? Well, $45.000
It seems like a rotten deal for Rogers, to me. I fully understand that they want to punish the bandwidth-pigs.
"Rune Kristian Viken" - http://www.nwo.no - arca
On the other hand, things like "if only the world would protest" sound a bit self-righteous. I don't personally know how much bandwidth costs ISPs, but presumably there is a point beyond which your account is being subsidised by the other customers.
At that point, the ISP can either:
eat the costs (unlikely)
pass the cost on to all users, and possibly lose the very people who they are making their profits off (people who don't download very much) for whom it will no longer be value for money, or
Get rid of the users that don't make them money, or shift them onto more appropriate (read more expensive) plans.
All this is no excuse for companies promoting plans as 'unlimited' and then imposing limits, but it is unreasonable to expect profit-seeking companies to lose money providing you with your ideal broadband access.
Free Java games for your phone: Tontie, Sokoban
I know what it is, and perhaps the ISP can be blamed to some extent for promoting the illusion of what they are selling you.
But the truth has always been that they're selling you a shared pipe. Everybody doesn't have the right to saturate their pipe because its physically impossible for everybody to do this. It's an illusion if you think they sold you that right.
Sharing a pipe is a great win for both customer and supplier. It lets them sell access to the pipe for far, far less than they would have to charge if people saturated. With totally flat pricing, the low users subsidise the heavy users. That's fine, even good to a limited extent. But how far?
When you say "how dare they not give me all the bandwidth all the time for the same price as the grandmother who logs in once a day?" what you're saying is not that you should pay as much as her, but that she should be forced to pay as much as you.
They can price everybody the same, and that makes grandma pay for your heavy usage. Or they can have level of pricing and balance it out. If they can give people lower data flow with the same bandwidth for $25 CDN (just $15 USD, think about that) I think it's a great thing, and those who oppose it are selfish.
Having to pay to buy the whole pipe is the old way. Sharing is the internet way.
Now I know why people are upset. The flat rate deal had some interesting positive consequences. When grandma subsidzed the heavy user, it allowed heavy users to experiment and do things that might never have been done if people had to pay for their own usage. That's why per packet charging is bad, it goes too far the other way. But nor is entirely flat rate the fairest answer.
My example is not made up. My mother (who is a grandmother) won't buy a cable modem. She thinks the dial-up using her existing phone lines is just fine for the 3 times a week she goes to check mail. Why shouldn't she have a chance at high speed for a similar price?
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
I do some part-time computer work with elderly people and a lot of them don't have enough cash to go and spend $50/month on cable. Just as the $5/month limited use dialup accounts are popular with these people, I'm sure that others with little income would stand to gain a lot from this type of pricing structure.
Personally I blame P2P and FTP, I think that there is a real argument for usenet which lessens the bandwidth at the ISP end.
There are alternatives but they are priced out of your average consumers price range
I dont mean to whine, but it tends to peeve me that you yanks and Cukics compain about blocked ports or slight price incresses not knowing the real handicaps that people in other contries have to face, man I wish I was American sometimes
Pianist : Some jerk whos taught themselves how to type in rhythm
I'm a soon to be former Comcast Online (used to be @Home) subscriber and they are charging me $70 a month including the modem rental fee. I said soon to be former because I find this price to be too much per month. Additionally, since they have switch over to the new service, everything is slower and tech support is non-exsistant. The actual monthly fee is supposed to be $39.99, but when you figure in modem rental, taxes, franchise fees, etc, etc, etc, the price ups to $70 a month. It's nice to have bandwidth, but not $70 nice.
Smeghead every day of the week.
It's funny readin all your complaints about how expensice internet access is. Where I live (Slovenia) I have to pay just as much (~$80) for 150 hours of being online - and I'm foreced to use this lame 56k dial-up connection! No, I can't get DSL, since I do not live in a "profitable area".
We used to have Rogers here but due to them using negative billing, hiking fees for poor service and generally being the epitome of a lifeless, bloodless corporation (no, I'm not bitter...) the general public forced them out.
To those affected I say organize a rally, call the papers, submit letters to the editors, hit every public news broadcast you can and let them know how you feel.
It worked on the West Coast, no reason it shouldn't on the East!
The GEEK shall inherit the earth...
Look, all they're doing is changing the bundling of their service to more closely reflect the usage patterns of two groups of customers. To insist that they do otherwise is to demand that the light-usage customers subsidize the heavy users. And this is exactly what happens in the DSL market anyway, where service providers charge different rates for different bandwidths.
Crispin
----
Crispin Cowan, Ph.D.
Chief Scientist, WireX Communications, Inc.
Immunix: Security Hardened Linux Distribution
Available for purchase
When Telus (fully) enters the DSL market in Ontario, we should Ontarians should see some price competitions.
Telus is offering high speed DSL service for $79.95 (including modem)
Downstream speed up to 2.5 Mbps1
Upstream speed up to 640 Kbps
5 e-mail boxes
30 MB Webspace
5 dynamic IP addresses
Domain hosting - Included
6 GB/month Internet connection traffic (5 GB/month down, 1 GB/month up)
Unlimited hours with high-speed connection
10 hours dial access per month for when you're away from your high-speed connection, $1.50 per hour overtime
Expert technical support
Satisfaction guarantee
Now, Rogers is offering
128 Kbps UP/1.5 Mbps DOWN
1 ip
(don't know about email, cause I don't trust their server uptimes)
5 megs webpage
blah blah...
Bell DSl isn't much better, than rogers, other than it's DSL (you know the trade offs)
Personally I think the service stinks everywhere, and CRTC won't do anything about it, because it's not cable, radio, television, or telephone service. It's internet... which they are not monitoring, or governing, yet if ever.
Shaw cable, when there were in Ontario, was great, high speeds both up and down. Things didn't break too often to complain about.
Well... enough ranting... atleast we have choice... well ones that are close enough to a CO for DSL.
Wonder if Look.ca/Look.com (Look communications) still has wireless digital internet?
Horray for Ontarians and their choices:
1.) Bad [Bell]
2.) Bad, if not Worse [Rogers]
3.) Don't know yet, but will be coming soon [Telus]
4.) dead [Look]
5.) dialup [is this the same as 4?]
6.) high cost Small business DSL lines [misc companies, and really expensive for home use]
Money cannot buy happiness, but can buy something soo darn close, that you can't really tell the difference
I can just see them deciding that the top 50% are the "heavy users" and the bottom 10% are the light ones.
Well, for $40 a month, I get 700kb/s guaranted connection. It's nearly T-1 speed.
If you're not a Liberal in your 20's, then you have no heart.If you're still a Liberal in your 30's you have no brain.
$80/mo is still an amazing deal for 3Mbit down and 640K Up, which is what cable speeds run at in Canada typically. Currently it's $39.99/mo for 2 Dynamic IP's and until now there has been no stipulation about the amount of traffic you're allowed run over your connection. (This is Canadian dollars we're talking about here so it's like a nickel for you Americans)
It could go up another $100 and still be a sweet deal compared to any "Highspeed Business" solution out there. It would cost you a lot more than $80 for a T1 or something of that variety.
As a Canadian, I firmly believe we have no right to bitch about Highspeed internet. We've got it made compared to many other countries in the world.
Pfft.. $80.
I pay over 90 bux a month for IDSL, thats ISDN, only 2x the speed of a modem! But its unlimited. ;)
80 bux for high speed access? Sounds damn good to me. The only thing that would concern me, is that they are lowering the monthly rate for low usage customers. This is needed to switch to a usage based system, and when they start doing that, it will really be down hill for us. Slashdot users are not the norm. Not many grannies downloading linux iso's or mp3s all month.
I wonder in 10 years, how many products will migrate from service to usage based fees.
-
Are you into the scene? www.scenemusic.net
A lot of people, like me in New Zealand where cable is non-existent, and apparently Usians too, would consider $80 a month to be pretty damn reasonable for high-speed, high-volume cable access. When did the idea of paying for what you use become so unfair? If you're a 35 year old housewife who just wants to check her email and have a connection for her kid son to play games online and chat to friends, would you want to be paying the same as someone who downloads three gigs of porn a night, every night?
When I'm cruising for pr0n, it gets to me quickly. If all I do is cruise the Web during certain hours, I want my bits coming quickly, and at an affordable price. If however, I decide to set up a server and use up more bandwidth on average, then yes, I'll be willing to pay more. Better this than have rules of use against servers. (And yess, I'll slashdot-proof my box with mod_throttle).
I'm on the fence on this one. What does a company do when users start to eat of major chunks of bandwidth that start to eat into their revenue ? ...
People should definately be given lead way, but realistically, someone has to pay for the 2 gigs of pron your downloading at the end of the day.
I wonder what the people that bitch about this would say if Rogers said that they were about to go out of business because of the bandwidth hogs eating their revenue ?
Could you still be indignant ?
Just a thought
Help pay for my wedding! Go to my kickass website
with $20/month dialup, once people realize that they only use their connection at home for checking email/news occationally.
-Michael Roy Some people are like Slinkies. Not really useful, but you can't help smiling when you see one tumble down
I could not be happier about such a move.
I like my cable modem for the always on factor, and for the occasionnal big download. I have my little router and I just enjoy having my LAN connected to the net with no fuss.
I don't plan on running a gnutella node anytime soon and I'm not a big *insert favorite mean of file transfer here* user.
They could even get a mean bandwidth usage factor in there, so people streaming audio to their machines woudn't be penalisez for the constant trickle.
If I could get a cheaper high speed, low latency, connection for cheap, I could not be happier.
If this isn't a reason for Slashdot to ditch its crufty, table-laden markup for a modern, svelte approach to layout ... well, I don't
know what is.
SlashdotLite isn't the solution. I'll even let Malda et al. keep their tables, just cut down on the cruft.
It's a joke. Laugh.
A quick check of the currenty yeilds
80.00 CAD = 50.1078 USD
doesn't seems to bad as I am paying about $45 monthly for my cable access anyway.
As long as the service is up and you have a choice of other type of ISP services, I don't see a point to argue..
geek page at KY speaks
I can't think of any organs of mine, offhand, that I would let go for $80, much less broadband access. I still use a 56k modem, and I make my living (a good one at that) designing Web-oriented applications. I've never needed broadband for that. In fact, I've found it advantageous to avoid broadband in many cases for my development work.
... Slashdot comes up just find a my normal 50.6k rate. Yahoo and Google both work. Salon comes up. Devshed, DevX, developerWorks, and OnLamp all come up. Even EOnline works fine.
Come to think of it
MP3s are what, 5 to 6 MB on avg.?
Maybe Rogers just figured out what the rest of us already know. There's only one thing for which one really needs broadband in order to satisfy the requirements of very large downloads as well as a sense of very palpable urgency.
Porn.
I used to own a datacenter and bandwidth costs money. A T-3 is humorously known to cost a "Porsche a month". But as of now, I choose where I live depending on whether or not they have high speed internet access. If I can't afford it, I will give up FOOD to get my bandwidth :)
I can't conceive of using a modem. I've been too spoiled by having a T-1 piped to my house and then getting a cable modem. Dialup?? What's that?
If you're not a Liberal in your 20's, then you have no heart.If you're still a Liberal in your 30's you have no brain.
Look guys. Its not a free ride, someone has to pay for all that bandwidth. You have three choices:
1. keep the low cost high bandwidth until the provider goes bankrupt leaving you with nothing.
2. You raise prices across the board, and let the low bandwidth users subsidize the high end user.
3. You let the highend users pay for their heavy usage.
People in N. America have more or less been spoiled by their broad choices up to this point. Now its time to actually pay for the services you use. It is a free market. If they are actually overcharging then the situation should naturally right itself, but I suspect we will findout that this is just market normalization.
--wyn
What's the point of selling high-speed internet access if you can't make enough money to cover the costs of said bandwidth?
Get a clue.
Only on slashdot can a posting be rated "Score -1, Insightful".
I pay $25 per month, and am certain to get at least 3000kbps down and usually no less than 900 up. Usually, it's more like 5000/1000, but who's counting? No bandwidth limiting, either. But that's what happens when Big Government buts in where business can clearly provide more service for less money.
political_news.c: warning: comparison is always true due to limited range of data type
I read the same article. Rogers complained that 70% of the network capacity is being used by 10% of the users.
When you are downloading 10 gig a month, your broadband is effectively becoming a music store, a Blockbuster, and probably a porn theatre.
I have friends on Rogers/Shaw, and it's a constant stream of complains during peak hours, most likely due to bandwidth hogs.
Most commercial Internet providers for business charge by the gigabyte. Why shouldn't your consumer broadband provider?
But to be hypocritical, I download about 10 gig a month with Telus DSL. Fortunately, they have no plans to put this sort of cap it (it's in the rules, but not enforced). Probably to woo customers to their service.
That's $80 Canadian, my friend.
At the current exchange rate, that's about $50 US. Currently, cable/DSL in Canada goes for about half that.
I hope you all realize that the current exchange rate is about $.625 for $1 Canadian. This of course means that $80 Canadian converts to $50.07 US. Not exactly a far cry from the $49.95 a month I fork over to ATTBI. Indeed, as the article states, some people in the U.S. pay as much as $111 Canadian, which is really $69.47 U.S.
Regardless, the bandwidth hogs will be exceed the amount they pay in terms of the cost of bandwidth. Assuming they have 1.5 Mb/s down and the cost of 1 GB is around $4 US, about 16 GB/day can be downloaded and totaling upward of 450 GB/month. That's $1800/month providing access for a customer who pays only $50 a month. Granted, the cable ISP is most likely not paying the full T1 price for bandwidth, but even at 1/4 the utilization and 1/4 the price for bandwidth, the ISP is still losing money on these customers.
The future isn't what it used to be.
Apparently Sympatico are also going to be imposing bandwidth caps, according to this rumour. This hardly surprises me as these two companies seem to operate as a cartel when it comes to pricing. For those who don't know, Sympatico is the other big ISP in Ontario and Quebec, with a few hundred thousand more DSL subscribers than Rogers has cable subscribers.
I am surprised I haven't heard this yet, but let's take a look at the root of ISP costs. If anyone is going to revolt/protest, go direct to the backbone and trickle-down economics tells us that the realized prices by the Consumers will get lower. If they don't, then protest at that level.
Need more competition in the Backbone department.
Out.
And frankly I'm a little surprised when my service provider greeted me early one morning with this message. I run a small website that averages 3 hits day (more code red hits than real visitors.) The mail server takes in about 40-50 messages/day. Pop onto opennap every few days and download a few tunes. And have IRC running all the time.
I dont play quake, I dont run a porn site, I do share oggs on my website with friends but we're talking about 15-20 people that download on an infrequent basis.
So to sum it up, Well I dont know what these cable companies expect their users to do, maybe shut their machines off? I'm miffed and for the amount of money that I have to shell out for this "high speed" connection I'm about ready to go back to dialup.
Contain my voice. Place my user into your foe list.
First, and that $80 is Canadian, which is about $50 US.
...but this potentially could be a big problem.
Second, Videotron doesn't keep track of what type of traffice is incommig...so if you piss off someone, they can floodping you, and get get a bill for hundreds of dollars, and then they cut you off. They tried to say I downloaded 20 gig in a month...I don't think so! I don't know what other providers do
ttyl
Farrell
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
We dont have a DMCA in Canada. so when that /. story (that i couldnt find) about @home cutting news groups that affected us because we were @home. but when @home fell apart Rogers gave us access to ALL the news groups.. i mean have any of you ever heard of alt.binaries.cd.image ?? WOW!!! thank you @home for going under :)
:( oh well..
course... no rogers is going to charge me for that
The More Knowledge you have the Luckier you Get- J.R. Ewing
http://www.gamers.com/game/1060379/media
What, will DooM ]I[ be able to beat that?! It LOOKS impossible, but one can always hope!
$80 a month for fast service and no caps or throttles? I'd gladly pay it! What is even more interesting is this is Canadian money. I do not know anyone in the states that gets fast broadband for anywhere near that cheap.
That's like $45USD. I get digital cable, high speed (350kb/sec down, 150kb/sec up) internet, and telephone all from the cable company (www.eastlink.ca) for $99 a month, canadian funds. That's like $55 USD for all that service!! Plus the downloads are 2.5x T1 and uploads are equal to t1. Canadian broadband rocks!
youre definitely getting screwed, man.
my 3 roomies and I split 768Kbs - 1Mbs DSL, unlimited bandwidth, for 60 a month, or 15 for each of us. Time for you to find a new ISP =]
Rather than doing it this way, why not just set a capacity cap which is enforced by bandwidth which starts out high and degrades slowly. For example, if you have a 128MB/day limit, you deliver the first 64MB at full rate, then next 32MB at half rate, the next 16MB at 1/4 rate, the next 8MB at 1/8 rate, etc.
You can save up unused capacity from one day to the next (up to a maximum limit?), and so on.
In this way, you put a limit on the heavy users and don't penalize those of us who need to get the odd 600MB Linux distro.
Sean Ellis
Follow OfQuack's antics on Twitter.
As a bandwidth hog myself ( I watch all my favorite TV shows on the web ) $80 sounds CHEAP. In the UK I pay about $70 US for 512k down, 256k up. 2MB/256K would cost me the equivilent of about $200 US per month.
I wish they would come over here and Roger me like they are doing the Canadians *grin*
... is only a matter of time. (And it makes sense, too.)
- Tal Cohen
Having said this, I don't think it's necessarily a bad idea to split the broadband consumer packages up into tiers. That's fine. As long as paying more for your connection gets you BOTH higher traffic limits and a increased level of service. This could translate into better support, increased bandwidth (both top end and guaranteed minimum), and more extras (fixed IPs, e-mail addys, etc.). As long as you are getting a better service for paying more, bring it on.
I kinda doubt this is what they will do. And the term "bandwidth hogs" --used liberally in the article-- seems more than a little propagandist to me. What are they saying? That these people shouldn't be using their connections this way? That it is wrong to consume b/w that you paid for? It's pretty rich of Rogers to imply some of its users are greedy, and taking advantage of poor old Teddy R.
I mean, just think of all the lost profits! *sniff* I gotta go... I'm getting all choked up!
I've got a bad attitude and karma to burn. Go ahead. Mod me down.
The headline forgets to mention a couple of things. 1) The $80 CAD is equivelent of $50 USD. Thats what most people pay in the United States already. 2) They also offer a price break of $20 CAD to low users. Thats $12 USD. This is perfect for people like my parents who haven't switched, because all they do is e-mail and their dial-up while slow is worth the price. A few problems: 1) The bill. I don't know about you, but I already have enough surprises with my cell phone bill every month. I don't want to get on a cheap plan for Internet and be surprised to find that I downloaded one too many mp3's. 2) Could this be the new beginning of Internet beige boxing? How are they going to stop me from spoofing my neigbors IP address!!!
I would rather see a pipe width restriction than a cap on data transfers. The pipe of the average high speed connection rarely gets used even during spikes by the average home user so cutting back the size of the pipe would go unnoticed by most. Pipe restriction would also save me from having to monitor my usage, I enjoy web surfing and downloading new apps the way many people enjoy channel surfing, imagine turning on a stop watch every time you turn on the TV just to make sure you stay within budget. I mean come on people!
Does this also mean that I get to refunded for or at least given the ability to bank the bytes I don't use? It's a two way street people!
Well pardon me for showing no sympathy, but I alreafy pay £100/month (about $150) for .5Mbit, so I don't really feel too bad about someone getting it for half that price!
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
As many others have stated, the cost of this is not ACTUALLY $80 per month. It is 80 Canadian Dollars per month, which is 50 US Dollars at the most. Seeing as how most of us in the US are paying $50USD per month for our cable modem services while operating under bandwidth restrictions and a full ban on servers, I don't think that $80CD for even faster service is that bad. You should also note that this isn't just a price hike. They're also offering faster service with less bandwidth at $23CDN, which is only about $15-16USD, and would make a GREAT alternative to dial-up for lighter users.
All in all, this is a brilliant pricing plan, and is still much, much cheaper than most cable modem services in the US. It's far from selling an organ to pay the bills.
I just got a $1,500 bill from the bastards after they changed the "unlimited" pricing plan to
20c per MEG!
Don't you love Telstra Bigpond..
I think this may push me to DSL because with DSL you don't share bandwidth.
No mater what service I use I want to use it too 100% of its capacity. Doing anything else would be like going out for supper and only eating half of whats on your plate.
Remember, the $80 is CANADIAN money, not USD. We all know how worthless Canadian money is
I think, however, it would be worth tinkering around with the details a little. For example, volume charges should probably differ between peak and off-peak hours, and metering should be on a per-month basis, not a multi-tier subscription service. Also, if they have volume-based pricing, they should drop any restrictions on usage ("business", "multiple PCs", etc.) from their contracts. So, the specific volume-based plan that they have may or may not be "fair" or reasonable, but overall, it seems like a step in the right direction.
I think the big question is going to be: do you get what you pay for? Personally, I wouldn't mind paying USD 80 (meant as equivalence in purchase power, not in value) for broadband of the class you apparently get in Canada (here in Silly Con Valley you can't get that at all basically) *IF* they comes with lessened restrictions -- such "premium" customers should be able to get fixed IPs and run servers as they wanted up to the limit of the contract. That's a real service that is worth money.
Getting higher penetration of broadband even among casual users is a good thing. It should increase availability, and make services easier to market. In that way, it's an entirely reasonable thing.
However, what I'd be afraid of is that the ISPs will treat the "premium customers" with the same kind of disdain that they do everyone else... *sigh*
Rogers is basically across most of canada. In a few provinces there are other cable providers. Rogers also has to compete with ADSL in most areas now. I believe there should be something in place so that bandwidth can be fairly distributed for the most part. Where the problem lies in how they do this. For the most part, most of the peak bandwidth times are in the afternoon. This is one of the few times that its actually noticably bad. For the rest of the day and night you can do just fine. Now for someone who downloads huge amounts of data in very off hour times, it seems very unfair since im really not impacting other users. Bandwith charges, if required should be not only based on how much traffic is done over your monthly limit, but should be be a higher rate during peak hours since service degregation is only noticble in this time frame. Many of my friends are on Rogers, mind you I myself am not, I'm using a very nice local cable company called dccnet =)
Well? Doesn't anyone find disturbing the concept that a provider penalises you for the very thing that they have based their entire marketing campain on? From a legal perspective?
I am far from being a lawyer, but all of the commercials for broadband provider sport heavy internet users downloading "real-time" video and audio 24 hrs a day?!?!? Touting how you can now use the internet "as it was meant to be seen"?
Doesn't this fall under the "False Advertising" umbrella or something?
you americans are soo funny, you should all be thankful that you even have 56k! over here we "surf" by attaching TCP/IP packets through pigeons!
My Cable Company is a very small player in the Canadian cable industry. They have also had this type of policy in place since they started offering broadband. There is a very hefty charge on upstream usage above 1 gig per month. I have never gone over my 10 gigs per month download limit, but I've come very close to my upstream quota with just day-to-day work and surfing. I'm happy with the speed and service, but it's a bit of a pain to burn stuff to cd just to bring it to the office.
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# Roughly right for English text, all lowercase but who cares?
chars = %q[aaaaaaaabbcccddddeeeeeeeeeeeeffgghhhhhhiiiiiii
%q[mmnnnnnnnoooooooopprrrrrrsssssstttttttttuuuvww
(%q[ ] * 35) +
%q[...,,;!?]
# Start with this...
text = 'Confusius say: '
# Add some text...
(5000 + (rand 5000)).times {
text chars[(rand chars.length), 1]
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# Print it out
print text
Here's the problem: this is a residential service, marketed at Joe Clueless. If you've ever talked to a broadband provider's residential tech support, you'll know what I mean.
The reason that's a problem is this: how many residential users keep track of the traffic received at their cable modem or ADSL socket?
My ZoneAlarm firewall tracks usage, but only between restarts (and they don't want me online 24/7, right?). OK, duMeter does better, but I have to remember to reset it every month. And that still doesn't tell me the whole story about the billable traffic to the modem that gets stopped before it reaches my firewall. Because I was looking over the engineer's shoulder when he installed it, I know there's a web interface to it on 192.168.100.1, and I remembered to turn off explicit proxying (because my cableco's transparent proxy is broken and has been for over a year) so I could view it, but, lo and behold, it doesn't hold traffic figures.
So the basic answer is: I don't know how much traffic I've used. And I've got a fair idea what I'm doing. Joe Clueless has no chance. What if Joe is on the receiving end of a DOS attack? What if Joe sets up a Win9x install which makes his windows shares accessible by default and gets used as a server by warez kiddiez? Sure, then it's Idiot Rash, but this service is being marketed to idiots. That's not supposition, all residential broadband is explicitely targetted at clueless newbies who the provider hopes won't use it and won't know (or care) about what's actually going on at their access point.
So while it's fair enough to bill on usage, I'd like to see more broadband providers run a two tier service. That doesn't mean just billing differently, it means providing a cheap but safe nanny service for Joe (proactively scanning his machine for vulnerabilities and snail mailing him about them), while at the same time billing me more for providing direct access to 2nd tier tech support, not the front line minimum wage phone drones with half an hour of training and an overdose of attitude.
I've had cheap residential cable modem access for over a year. During that time the service has been erratic, the support dreadful. I'm ready to pay more for a better service, to move up to a business rate, but my provider won't let me. What's wrong with that picture?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
That's not important: maybe we're just getting shafted.
That makes sense, absolutely. If this reasoning is correct, prices will eventually rise as businesses that sell below cost begin to fail. There is nothing we can do to stop it.
But critically, we will observe this fair (to consumers) balancing only if there is ample competition to cut monopolistic price bloat. With megacorporate consolidation (eg AOL/TW) here in the US, we are beginning to run the risk of eliminating competition to point where the balancing force is negligible. However, you can bet that the ISPs will still use economic arguments such as this one to excuse price hikes.
Be understanding of authentic plight, but wary of corporate lies.
If you're not wasted, the day is.
I think Rogers et al should realize that many of these bandwidth hogs are university students. Unlike most of the responders so far, they aren't likely going to see the $80 a month as being reasonable. All this will really do is force people to share connections with their friends to cover the costs, so the cable company won't see any more money out of the deal than they do now. They may actually see many of their students drop them for another ISP (if any keep to the old pricing). At least Telus and Shaw seem to be keeping prices down for now.
I'm a Videotron (Quebec Cable ISP) user and they suckered everyone into their service by not having a transfer limit, but once it had enough users, it slapped a 6Gb/month transfer on us. What happened? A small group of users made a petition, but since the only people that were signing the petition were the affected user, it didn't make much of a difference since they were only a small percentage of all users.
The fact of the matter is this: Mr Joe Somebody is perfectly happy with his 6Gb and I have to admit that Videotron's service is a lot better than Bell Sympatico's service (their competitors).
Fish
I can imagine what gruesome results this can have on the bandwidth of an "alway on" connection-- especially to a cable modem pool. And that's not to speak of the costs to the provider, who has to pay quite a bit for their n T1's or whatever. But if my sis got a call from the cable company syaying that she's exceeding her allocated bandwidth for the month and will be billed extra, she'd have an incentive to actually learn the basic principle of P2P file sharing programs (i.e. listen to me).
--All your stolen base are belong to Rickey Henderson
Well, here in Europe the price is about 40 Euros (or should that be Eurodollars) a month which come sto the same amount. This is the typical price, and is not considered all that expensive. For this, you get 10Mb/s (Cable or ADSL) downstream, 128 kb/s upstream. No caps so far (although they urge you to stay below 20 GB a month).
M.
Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing.
I still don't see how anyone can get away with charging for amount transferred. It doesn't cost any bandwidth provider more to move 100GB than it does to move 50GB, when you come right down to it. Once they put in lines and turn them on, that's about all there is to it. Charge me more for a 5Mbps line than you would for a 2.5Mbps line, sure, I got no problem with that. But charging me for how much actually gets transferred is just plain stupidity, whether I'm a home/end user, or a middle-man isp, or anywhere else in the chain for that matter. Once it's on, it's on. Don't even try telling me that you have to do all sorts of work to keep it on. It ain't a wood-burning connection, you don't have some dude stoking the fire like a madman when I'm downloading/uploading a bunch of stuff at the moment, and then resting when I'm just sitting on irc.
This seems to be another blow to Rogers' cable internet service. I mean, 1Mbit ADSL from Sympatico is ~35CAD a month, with no limits on amount of usage. Why would anyone who uses a lot of bandwidth on Rogers stay with them now? Can Rogers really afford to lose 10% of their cable modem customers?
When this is combined with the recent e-mail switch-over fiasco and the highly-publicized lawsuits, I don't see how Rogers is going to attract too many new customers. (For those who don't know, with the impending demise of excite@home, all Rogers customers had to switch from user@home.com to user@rogers.ca. It's not difficult to imagine the number of problems this created for the average joe user. There was even a channel on Rogers cable devoted exclusively to teaching people how to switch their e-mail software over.)
The e-mail problem soured Rogers for many low-end customers and this new tiered service is not going to endear them to anyone who wants a lot of bandwidth. Does this move make sense? Am I missing something?
In my neck of the woods, a T-1 will run you MINIMUM $450 a month (even accross the street) with NO IP from a provider (most Tier 1 providers are gonna wack you $700+ per T loop and transport).
/. readers have no common sense about this stuff.
Why would expect to get T-1 service from less than 1/10th the cost of what your ISP pays?
It kills me that most
If it is technically feasible, a good way is (when the ISP using too much bandwidth) to give hogging users' (for example, who have had transferred more than 10Mbyte in the last 10 minutes) packets less priority, so that they can be dropped first in case the ISP's bandwidth consumption goes too high. Just like the newest version of the linux scheduler.
If only it is feasible...
There's nothing less accessible at all about whats going on. The "common man" off the street will be happy with just high speed access. They aren't the type that needs to be transferring 10gb/month worth's of files. Only GEEKS need that kind of capacity and since most people aren't geeks, there is no problem here. In fact since there will be lower prices for those who use less bandwidth this is making braodband MORE accessible to the common man.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
Have you ever priced a T1? A T3? An OC3?
Admittedly, a cable connection is none of the above. A cable connection is in many respects one of the lowest classes of connectivity you can have - you can even get your own class C network hooked over a dialup line, but you'll never do it through a cable company! And forget SLA's!
Nonetheless, the bandwidth used does cost the cable company money. Pretending otherwise doesn't change the fact.
I run a small regional WISP and I rate cap my residential customers to 256kbits/sec.
:-)
:-)
We charge $30/mo for the port, no local loop since its wireless, and equipment rental is $15/mo. Those are the numbers you need to hit to get decent market penetration.
What does 256k cost the ISP?
A T1 is about $1100/mo when you're small. If you get big enough to start buying DS3s you'll cut that to about $600/mo. 256k is one sixth of a T1 so the monthly cost for 256k dedicated bandwidth is about $200 to the little guy and $100 for a large player.
I know some of you Generation Next play well in groups but suck at math. $200 cost - $30 revenue is me subsidizing a full time music trader to the tune of $170/mo.
My rate shaping at the moment is a solid 256k symetric cap 24/7. I'm working on some method of providing nasty residential service during the day (128k - 192k cap?) to keep my high margin business customers happy, then starting around 7:00 PM opening it up.
After the business customer base is gone I don't care if the T1s run 100% and individuals are using the full 5.5m/sec their wireless links can provide - just so long as they're sharing and playing well together
I only provide dynamic public IP addresses to residential users. Its done with PPPoE rather than DHCP - makes the rate shaping much easier to implement - but it almost guarantees you never get the same IP address twice. I haven't yet blocked inbound traffic to reserved TCP ports but that will be the next big step.
I am sure a number of "free as in beer" whiners are going to promptly respond that I "don't get it" and that I'm "ruining the soul of the internet" with my facist rate cap.
I'd like to personally invite every one of you whiners to put up $25k of your own money, spend five months working without a paycheck, and then get back to me about facist rate shaping policies - I'll be happy to share technique
I am very easy to get along with, but I don't have time to waste being nice to people who are being stupid. -Theo
Here in New Zealand, Telecom have a monopoly on the DSL market, and there is no cable...
There are various DSL plans available. The cheapest, at $NZ49/month, gives you 400MB/month downloads, with 20c/MB thereafter.
There's also a 600MB plan for $69/month (and 20c/MB thereafter), and a 1500MB plan for $199/month (and 18c/MB thereafter)
If you go for a business rather than home plan, they range up to 10GB for $888/month, and 10.7c/MB thereafter. (there's also 3gig and 5gig plans... with prices that fit the patterns - $310/14.3c and $488/12.5c respectively)
There's always the cheaper rate-limited home plan, 128kb/s for $60/month, and they refuse to give you a static IP on it. (if fact, they drop your connection every few days to make sure you don't keep your IP...)
I think it's safe to say that many New Zealanders would gladly pay $NZ100 or so a month for a decent broadband connection.
someone else do the math here, but even if they double the price on those 10% of the people using the 70% of the bandwidth, they don't get that much. And if they also drop the price on some of those 90% (probably greater than 20% of the whole), they're probably going to end up getting less total revenue than they are right now.
Or maybe they're going after the, say, 30% using 50% of the bandwidth?
Heck were I'm in Italy I'm still waiting to get ADSL for $50 a month. The xfer rate is 30kps d/l and 12.8kps u/l . They don't even know what cable is.
Before you guys complain about getting charged $80 per month for a broadband connection, maybe you should take a look at the plight of Australian broadband users, particularly those stuck with Telstra. A *basic* ADSL service is $60 per month - 300MB per month download cap, limited to 256/64. You'll pay $95 for a half decent connection - 512/128 with a 3GB download cap. (each MB over the cap costs 11 to 15 cents) Add that to a network that loves to imitate a yo-yo (up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down) and you guys over in America have *nothing* to complain about.
When I was in university doing my business degree, I did a work term at an accounting company and was assigned to a water rate study that a small town was doing. Basically they crunched the numbers and came up with a fee structure to match their cost structure. They did this every few years. Electric utilities do the same thing. Really, these guys should do the same. None of this crap where they try this and then try that, and then send people emails or throttle bandwidth or such stupidity. Crunch the numbers and offer a sensible flat-rate plus usage price. People are used to that for electricity and water and long distance and all that. They "get it" that these things are reasonably cheap, but if they waste them gratuitously, it will cost them more.
--WeldonM
Why is it that the price of bandwidth is falling and yet prices for consumers aren't? Is it that consumers are increasing in bandwidth requirments faster than the infrastructure and increase? I know that my local ISP (modem) charges the same amount they did 5-7 years ago for access, but surely their costs must be dropping. Im sure that broadband is employing a similar strategy. More profits, less service. I get so tired of the clones screaming that corps are so beaten up.
I don't have any info on what the laws say about this in Canada, but it's been a subject here in Finland too. Obviously ISP's try to alter the rules - 90% of their customers is good enough for them, as those 90% only access their yahoo/hotmail/etc account and check the weather report once a week.
The subject on the table here is trying to define a matter very hard to put into proper wording. How do you define "useless" bandwidth usage in fine print? You don't have to leech off warez to get a lot of bandwitdh used. You might just watch news on your registered realplayer or download a lot of game demos and patches.
The other thing is what you can sell and with what text. If you're selling a connection with words such as unlimited usage, constant monthly fee or certain amount of available bandwidth, you can't just suddenly say that the text is only meant for net-lazy people.
The ISP's can blame themselves - they have pushed prices way too down in many places and now they're regretting it. It's not rare to see big price jumps nowadays, the isp here suddenly doubled our monthly bills in a "routine price checking", and a lot of other people are also seeing small effects from this.
ISP's have acted hastily, and quite often they seem to plan only the next week ahead. Key fact: that's not users' fault.
You do b), but only when someone else attempts to get data through the pipe. Then you give them each 50%, 33.3%, 25%... bandwidth depending on how many different IP addresses are using the pipe.
That way Fred and co. can leech to his heart's content - while nobody else uses the pipe. But when Jim gets on, he'll get his fair share of the bandwidth. Meanwhile, Fred and co. are scratching their heads over the sudden dip in their netgraph...
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Cable modems and DSL, they both are pretty much identical when you get to the core technology.. (sorry DSL lovers, you have SHARED BANDWIDTH too, you dont honestly think that they ran a T1 just for you do you?) The problems are DSL cant get to over 75% of the people out there, and cable modems are being ran by the stupidest greed freaks on the planet. I really want them to open access the cable lines. the Cable Co needs to get out of being an ISP as they do not have the ability to be an ISP, they have no clue as to what an ISP does, is, and provides. We kep seeing old tricks brought out of the closet from the 1970's and 1980's (multiple tv charges, trying to charge for watching too much tv!(yes it happened here in michigan.. U.A. cable wanted to charge extra to people that left their tv's on at night)) The funny part is that broadband really isnt profitable. think of it. you are trying to give each user T1 equivilant into their house for the price of a regular telephone line+dial up ISP access. so you have to try and cram many people on one T-1 to make a profit.. well they cant use real ratios that have been proven over the past 20 years, that wont work... too expensive.. so they have to try and cram 100 users per t-1 amount of bandwidth. sorry, this will fail, and it will fail badly. customers will bitch, things will break.. (problem is they try to fit 1000 customers per t1... but that is a different problem)
Cable modems will fail, because of marketing and management. and then we will all be stuck with low speed until the phone companies get off their butts and actually upgrade their infrastructure.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Our ISP Norrnod.se are using an excellent concept:
They allow everyone to connect (for free, except that you have to get the physical fibres yourself - or rent (cheaply) those already present in the city!) to their DMZ and all traffic within it is for FREE, but all traffic leaving the DMZ, out to the leased line (95 Mbps if I recall correctly) that leads to the nearest Internet Exchange Point is what "you" pay for - since that is what renders the cost.
Schematic over the DMZ, where you can see several 10 Gbps links
To keep track of "our" users (we built our own network in our block), the ISP provides us with daily statistics of the usage over the leased line - no statistics over internal traffic is made, thereby is it very simple for us to keep our usage under the amount we bought on the leased line.
Excellent, simply!
ps. Did I mention we have a full 100 Mbps all over town and 2,5-10 Gbps links to other cities via SUNET (within the Free area!)?
I have 1 Gbps Internet access@home
Start a WAN (wireless area network) in your community. It's not hard by any means, and takes a bit of cash to be spent by the members. IF you dont start a community based wireless network then noone will and you have to live with what is dictated to you by the cable company...
You can solve it.. but sadly, most will not lift a finger or spend $10.00 to help a local Wireless network that are technically minded.... the biggest funders we have here are people who think lots of hamsters keep their computer running, and get confused when you say TCP/IP.
circumvent the Cable companies and DSL.. start a Wireless Network today!
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
So many of you are saying, "but my T1 costs a zillion dollars!" The problem with that argument is that band width has been dropping in price fast at the high levels of the inet. But they don't drop the price for suckers that are paying thru the ass for a T1. It's not that cable is underpriced, it's that a T1 is way way way over priced.
Remember, this is prolly Canadian dollars. What would it be in American? $50-60? That's not so bad.
Grand Puubah Skeevis Windows/Internet Newsletter People on Jolt cola write the funniest things. -A-10 Obedience Guide
If only the world would protest. What's the point of high speed broadband access if you can't use it to full potential without having to start selling organs to pay the bills?"
Because much like the majority of people here and all over, they're too lazy. People have gotten way too complacent. No one wants to write an actual letter or stand outside and complain. It's easier to send a three line email or make a phone call from your chair and consider your part done. Let people actually move a muscle and stuff may get done. In the mean time, no use complaining.
They are talking about cheap broadband accounts for $23.95. That's Canadian. $15 in US dollars. Broadband, cheaper than dialup. Wow. This is probably one good thing from the collapse of @home. Rogers et al. gets better control over their costs and can scale service in relation to those costs.
I submitted a story yesterday that got rejected on a Gartner2 survey showing broadband in Europe at little or no growth and narrowband the norm for at least the next 5 years. The same tendency may be starting to show in North America. It may be dark fiber and the implementations of pricing strata reflect a shrinking or stagnant broadband market. Also in Canada a recent cabinet shuffle put a programme to run broadband to every nook and cranny on permanent hold. Normally business will try to increase its return on margins when the overall market stalls.
heuristic algorithm seeks stochastic relationship
The fact of the matter is that the supply side of the bandwidth equation is that bandwidth is increasing and cost is falling rapidly. On the other side of the equation is that companies at the top of the bandwidth food chain are trying to increase profits even though the numbers don't support it. Enron isn't the only corp that is trying to make a mint in bad times thru questionable business practices.
I think it is high time for all ISPs to switch their home customer accounts to usage-based billing. Not for time, of course: Pay for the bytes!! That is what everybody who wants to use backbones/long distance lines has to do, so why shouldn't the end user?
My guess is that all the "total" flat rates will be replaced over time by usage-limited rates (say, 500 MB to 1 GB per month) that are fine for the majority of customers, with extra charges for extra usage. This will eliminate the "ticking meter" effect for the majority, and make the minority of power users think somewhat more about their usage.
On the other hand, if wholesale prices for bandwidth come down still further, there is no reason why this pattern should not be reversed again in the future.
-- H. Wilker
>without having to start selling organs to pay the bills?"
Ever played Neuromancer? (The game)
uhm.. i hate to say this... but i think a lot of problems are also caused by people who come from high-speed campus networks where they have become used to leeching all the time (seen it enough in my time, only 2 years ago)... i would love to continue leeching + sharing, but there is just no affordable solution for an home user... the only way is like in sweden etc... where the gov sponsors inetlinks (or so i've been told)
it also looks a bit unfair to me: why do students deserve so much more free (and mostly unlimited) bandwidth than the rest of the population? because they dont have a normal income? a lot of people i know become really depressed (i mean this, depressed like in D.E.P.R.E.S.S.E.D) when they graduate and find no affordable solution to continue getting what they want from the net. A lot of those go back to the univs either to study or to work as an assistant or coworker on some research project, just to have more bandwidth, not because they like their job or something like that... so i hate to say this, but univs etc create totally distorted people (like me) with totally wrong (and overwhelmingly disappointing) expectations of the outside world... and i DO know what im talking about here... (40 euros for 10Mbit down/128k up but LIMITED to 10G/month so it becomes totally useless,(just surfing sux *ss) id rather have a slower (and less latency so i can at least play a game online) connection without limits, but who am i to say...just a bad evil hellish creature named bandwidth hog...)
I don't get it... A broadband provider goes out of business because they could not make a profit on the ultra-cheap service they were offering, and the whole /. crowd whines.
/. crowd whines.
Another broadband provider is raising its prices to make ends meet (trying avoid both going out of business and leaving customers out in the dark) and the wole
Just in case you have not noticed, bandwidth _costs_money_. Just like food, housing, etc. And if you're using it, you might as well pay for it.
Unless you like getting paid 10 US dollars (new ultra-low unlimited access flat rate!) a month too....
No, seriously, I just come here for the articles.
Only the telekom monopoly can afford running
a real flat rate here (they own all the cables,
anyway), so for most smaller ISP's it's back to
accounting by volume, sometimes as high as 2.5
euro cent per megabyte. Usually you have 1-2 Gigs
inclusive, which is enough for most "average"
users.
Uwe
Ever wondered whats wrong with the world? http://www.ishmael.org/
you guys don't know how good you've got it:
Have a look at the latest broadband offerings in australia. THEN complain about your services.
I would chew off my right leg to get as good a deal as you guys are getting. Have a look at the Australian Broadband community website: Whirlpool then while you're at it look at this Broadband pricing plan which is a 31 percent increase over what it was a month ago!
Don't get me wrong, I'm not ticked off at you guys for complaining, but just remember, no matter how bad you've got it - we've got it worse..
-- Dan "Not happy Jan" Thomas =(
Where if you go over some defined limit, they kick you off or suspend your account.
.iso traders that hog and bog down the network for everyone else. And if it means the cable operator has a better chance of staying in business long term, then good.
I would MUCH MUCH rather feel safe in the knowledge that going over my limit would only mean i'd pay some more for that month (Ca$80 isnt much!) rather than be all worried that the cable-nazis at Optus might suspend or terminate my account without warning, thus devaluing overnight all the money I paid over 18 months that paid for the cable modem I cant use on any other service.
People who have always had unlimited for nothing extra than basic service will whine, but there are WORSE ways they can handle the
Anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random numbers is, of course, in a state of sin.-John von Neumann
We are lucky to have broadband whitout volume pricing, now that's gonna change.. goddamn! Someday I can tell my grandchildren about the happy days of early broadband services
I consider myself quite a heavy user, but I don't think I'll burn more than 2G's of bandwidth a month ever. This includes of course the downloading of various ISO images of linux distros and FreeBSD. If the bandwidth to download the ISO's becomes too expensive for me, I'll just order the CD's from the store. My parents however, average Joe-user types, grab music in an almost maniacal way. 3500 audio CD's over the past year is maniacal to me ;-)
I once tested to see their bandwidth requirements by counting at their NAT gateway, and it appeared they slurped in approx 19GB's during the month I tested! They haven't heard from their ISP yet but I'd say this is excessive. But when I tell them they shouldn't be soaking up bandwidth like that, they just shrug and say 'I paid for it, so I'm gonna use it!'. They just don't see bandwidth as a scarce resource. I think it'll be very hard to convince people like my folks of the fact that bandwidth actually IS scarce. Sadly, there must be millions of people exactly like my parents. Not that I don't like my parents, but they're a far cry from good netizens!
Learn from the mistakes of others. There isn't enough time to make them all yourself.
What are you people complaining about?
I live in American Fork, Utah. In the so-called "metropolis" of Novell's Provo and Salt Lake City.
There is NO, repeat NO, high speed, DSL, anything access. Qwest won't even update the phone lines so I can get better than 28.8 with my modem!!!
I guess that's the price one pays for living in a podunk city in a pdunk state. *sigh*
Talk about living in the dark ages.
The question i have is.. will i be re-embursed for the smb/code red traffic that constantly bombards my connection.
"Be glad you sailed for a better day, But dont forget there will be hell to pay" - Dave King/Flogging Molly
I live in toronto and I am a subscriber to sympatico dsl for over 3 years. I use my bandwidth constantly and they have never complained of my usuage. Can't find it on their site or their user agreement but a few reps have told me that I am allowed to use my bandwidth 24/7. From what I understand, this is due to the nature of dsl not being shared, so I'm not a burden to anyone else in my area. This I thought, was always one of the key advantages to dsl and its a benefit to the customer and to the provider as they do not have to 'police' for bandwidth hogs. I would think dsl would jump on this and have it as a new feather in their cap in the advertising wars as to which one is better. I know about five people on rogers@home in my area and a couple have ok access, but the rest suffer from so much packet loss (especially at peak hours) its pathetic.
Besides the crappy upload cap of 128kbits (wasn't like that prior to pppoe) , my dsl is great. So, because how dsl networks are structured, am I, as a heavy user any more of a burden that there should be a new pricing structure or is it truly as it seems in that my heavy usuage is no further a burden to sympatico versus a light user?
So, an open letter to ISPs: Go ahead an put on a bit cap. Whatever you can give me for $10-15/mo, that's what it would take to get me connected. All I do at home is check e-mail and my wife surfs... I don't need lots of throughput, I just want speed.
Mr. Ska
I'm waiting for the RIAA to demand that governments start charging a royalty to broadband subscribers because they might be using it to deprive labels of their cash money and they should be compensated for their loss.
My cable provider Telenet displays the same kind of behaviour when it comes to their inabillity to calculate bandwith for their networks.
;-)
We get 10Gig a month, and the speed was always very good. There's a usenetserver infrastructure with a local posting policy, so we can trade stuff at reasonable speeds without imposing too much on the network.
But recently the troubles started : They implemented a global cost increase of 13% for the home accounts. The business accounts, which are more expensive and just offer 5 or 10gigs more, did not change. It's very clear that they just expected to sell much more business accounts to the heavy downloaders.
Not only did they increase the cost, they also installed a new traffic accounting system, which doesn't reset the counters every first day of the month, but just calculates 30 days of traffic. This means that every day one days worth of traffic gets dumped from your limit. But offcourse that system wasn't really tested, and now most of the users are on smallband, and do not get automaticaly back onto broadband.
I for one, am on smallband for almost 2 weeks now, and I was supposed to be put on broadband yesterday. But no go.
And the best part of all this bullshit, is the lack of support. No free helpdesk, that one just play little games like testing you cablemodem remotely and telling you all is fine. The paying helpdesk answers vaguely and always will tell you that the problem will be fixed tomorrow. And today , their helpdesk network is down because of the flood of complaints.
How do these companies expect to force users into paying more, if they're just a bunch of amateurs that can't implement their changes efficiently, or can't even offer support for al that money they receive.
Telenet was even on a Consumer Watchdog programme because all those complaints.
I think it's time we laid a T3 in our neighbourhood and took things in our own hand
blaah !
In ireland we dont even have Broadband, so count yourselves lucky. At lease you have the option to take it up.
Hmm.. Poland. OK, I'll put it in perspective. Think of it as paying $80/month to rent a team of very fast horses to ferry you back and forth between Warsaw and Berlin, Germany. Instead of needing to walk with sacks of potatoes on your back you can put them in a cart and pull them with these very fast horses and get to market quicker. Since the horses are much faster than you walking you can make more trips, bring more product to market, and make more money.
:-)
Sorry if this is off.. everything I know about Poland is a little old but last I checked you guys were still riding horses and using swords and flintlock rifles when the Nazis invaded with tanks right?
Class-action lawsuit, anyone?
Look, IANAL (I not Like Being Anal, But I know I Anal...), but if the service was marketed as being without such bandwidth limits, it sounds like there are a few possibilities for legal recourse, such as false advertising (if they marketed it as "unlimited"), and/or the old bait-and-switch (if you can prove that).
Your agreement almost definitely states that they can change the agreement at any time for any reason, but depending upon the circumstances you might find they're on the wrong side of the law on this one.
Just a thought from a graduate of the Slashdot School of Business Law. Hope it helps.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
-The Professor, Futurama
For $80 per month, I'd pay that if I had good usenet service. The old @Home service had an excellent feed locally, and good retention (about 3 or 4 days in binaries). The new Rogers feed has a wider choice of newsgroups, but the retention is short (about a day in binaries) and the completeness of any group is markedly lower. Good thing I have an account with Newscene to help me complete the stuff.
And yes, my bandwidth usage was high enough to get clipped by their cap of about 3 gig per day.
Well after reading many of the comments, I'm starting to feel rather lucky. My ADSL connection, provided by Andrews & Arnold only gives me 512kbit downlink, 256kbit uplink, but with it comes a block of IP addresses (as many as I can justify having), and no restrictions on what I run. On top of that, they're Linux friendly (and own the domain name sod.ms to prove it) and have been happy to help me out with any problems that I've had. They are one of the more expensive providers in the UK (I pay 70UKP/month), but it really is worth the cash.
Rogers cable access... Let's see:
3000 kbps = 375 kB/s downstream
400 kbps = 50 kB/s upstream
I think that's a lot more than most cable providers offer. If you are constantly using all that downstream (which is where the concern is) then you obviously are hammering the service beyond what you should.
And since Rogers is Canadian, I assume this is $80 CDN (I haven't read the article). That's what, about $52 USD?
THERE IS NO DATA. THERE IS O
It boggles my mind that anyone thinks $80/month for a fast connection is too much to pay. First off if you are reading this and know what a decent fat pipe costs (T3, OC-3), and by decent I mean DECENT, you know it's hard to make money reselling bandwidth.
Even with the glut of installed pipes/bandwidth in this continent and the world prices have simply not come down enough to really make bandwidth a commodity. The collapse of the telecom industry over the last couple of years in a shining example of this.
A good comparison here is to all you can eat sushi. Typically the sushi you are allowed to eat is just the "regular" stuff. IE you don't get the neat-o really good tasting stuff. Also service tends to be limited. And last but not least out of all the all you can eat sushi places you can find in NYC perhaps a few of them are truly worth the money. Yet they all stay in business cause when it comes down to it sometimes I want to pig out on sushi and not have a $60 bill for one meal!
I agree that the companies should not raise prices without warning and without disclosure of this possibility at signing. I haven't read the canadian contracts, however I would bet dollars to donuts somewhere in there there's a clause that allows this.
Stop whining and learn that you get what you pay for.
Isn't that like 10$ US?
We had the same discussions on heise.de in Germany many times. It's always like this. There are some whiners who insist on "fair use", saying it should be common sense, that no ISP can provide all its users being heavy users. Then there are others who say they know the fact, that all the heavy users are subsidized by the light users. The ISPs should get their calculations right and if it comes out to what Rogers Cable is planning, so be it. BTW, from what I see posted here, Germany seems to be quite cheap for flat rate DSL - it's just USD25-30/month for 768KB/s down and 128 up, "unlimited" :-)
Drive away the 5-10% that use it for more than burst transmissions and web browsing and the business model gets a lot more profitable.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Broadband is about speed, not quatity of data dowloaded. It makes sense to keep the price of entry low and charge more to those that cost ypou more by downloading huge volumes of data.
I don't want to pay even more for broadband just because some weenies are using the service to download ripped off movies or whatever... Let THEM pay for their own usage.
A 10G/mo limit at current prices would be accepted by most. Potentially, it would improve service for most of us too.
Basically, 10G would be the fair limit as seen by consumers. I expect that Rogers will choose a lower limit, because they think it will provide higher revenue.
On another note, the following support calls should increase in volume.
Some 14 year old I nuked, is ping flooding me 100GB per day using 25 Zombie nodes on your network. Please credit my account $5000.
35 of the 50 spammers I reported last month are still spaming me, despite the fact I've repeatedly sent you their emails! Credit my account 10 cents now, you pigs.
My download was interrupted and now I have to start over... Are you retards friggin incompetent?
Then maybe the supplier shouldn't be selling the product as "unlimited".
I'm missing something here - who, exactly, is crazy enough to be promising "unlimited bandwidth"?
I'm looking at the Rogers EUA right now and it promises "unlimited connect time to the Internet and to other information" (emphasis mine). I don't see any promises about any guaranteed level of bandwidth.
I think the d/l hogs are complaining that they're not getting something they were never promised in the first place. I'd be happy to be proved wrong, however.
instead of treating them like idiots in front of TV sets.
First point, bandwidth is instantaneous, or at least short-term averaged. It isn't something you lump by the whole-day and average. Telephone rates are tiered: 8:00-17:00 is expensive, 17:00-23:00 is cheaper, and 23:00-8:00 is dirt cheap. Plus weekends go on another rate scheme. This is all based on usage, and giving us monetary incentive to shift our usage and even out load on the telepone infrastructure.
Why can't bandwidth caps be the same way? I'd be perfectly happy to set a cron job to fetch ISOs in the wee hours of the morning.
Which brings me to point two: Multicast - I don't know enough about it, basically some rules in the firewall script to prevent its abuse. I believe it may be used in streaming media, but don't know enough.
But why can't "they" (whoever "they" are) figure out that there are more things that would be well-done with multicast, and use it. How about if the ISP could multicast a Usenet feed through the night? If I want a Usenet feed, tune in and catch my groups. How about if "someone" (neighbor of "they" above) would multicast ISO images.
There seems to be this evil desire to turn the Internet into TV. Well, why can't we co-opt some of the good side of TV, and make more efficient use of bandwidth by 'broadcasting' some of those things so dear to us?
Finally, someone else brought this up, and it bears repeating. If they're going to bill me for use of bandwidth, then we need to something about unsolicited use of bandwidth. Script kiddies probing me are now causing financial damage. Spam causes financial damage. Getting DDOSed causes me financial damage, in addition to the service denial, itself.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
...is that they change your service without notifying the customer. One day I discovered that I no longer had Usenet service. I talked with a friend that said he "heard somewhere" Cox was limiting their customer's Usenet bandwidth. I checked their service agreement and it said nothing of the sort so I called them. They confirmed they changed it and it is on the acceptable use policy. When I looked, yes, there it was. One sentence in a several page policy.
My friend and I were/are considering starting a grass-roots effort to call Cox every day and ask what has changed in our service in the past day. I think if enough peolpe participated, they might see some advantage to notifying customers of changes in service.
I've told them over and over that I want to know what I'm paying for. The only way to keep up with it is to read the acceptable use policy every time I want to access the Internet or call them every time. First the upstream bandwidth cap, now the Usenet cap. What's next, only email and web service?
But why is the rum gone?
...forgetting any and all traffic spikes, assuming that 100% of capasity is used all the time and evenly consumed by users. 10Mb/month with 128kbps line means that if user utilizes full 100% of bandwith downloading stuff, he's online only approx. 1m18s/month.
Preserve old classics: copy your collection onto all hard drives.
I understand the rationale behind charging extra for high bandwidth use but fear poor policies will turn the general market off to broadband service, leaving us with a 20th Century Internet.
If the company wants to meter people's bandwidth, they have to provide a meter for the end user to read. Residential telephones don't have meters but there's not much need because the amount you're charged for one minute of service does not vary by an order of magnitude and the user tends to know what the per minute charge will be (unless you're like me and call a relative in Taiwan. Oops.) Electrical service provides a meter in the house which is good because the amount used can vary quite a bit. Bandwidth usage can vary even more greatly so a user-readable meter is even more important.
Self-metering might work if you have one computer but is greatly complicated by having even one more computer. The meter could be built into the cable modem but then you're limited to what can be squeezed in the firmware and you still might be metering local traffic for which you shouldn't pay. So, the metering should be done centrally and accessed by the user. This puts the metering where it counts, close to the ISP's uplink.
There are still problems such as the example of paying for someone who pingfloods you.
The mantra of the 90's seemed to be "buy marketshare now, make money later". Because of the global economy, we're in the make-money phase. Broadband use is still low, so perhaps the market hasn't had time to benefit from economies of scale yet.
What the poster fails to mention is that while big downloaders are getting charged this high price, Rogers is also creating an "economy" price plan, where for 20$ Canadian (that's like 13$ US) a month will get you high-speed access with download caps. This is fully in-line with Canada's (policy? suggestion?) plan to get high-speed to everyone.
Personally, I would like to see a dynamic plan, along the lines of a phone bill, that would charge you based on the amount you DOWNloaded.
And I know some people complain about the ping attacks, and various other claims, but putting on customizable hourly and daily caps (not to mention only using DOWNloads) could prevent that most of the time (not to mention not giving out your IP address in the first place)!
...around $600 a month for a T1 line? Because that is essentialy the the download speeds that you are getting. You people just don't get it, do you?
BANDWIDTH ISN'T CHEAP!
The companies don't want you online all of the time because it costs them more money for the extra bandwidth. They don't expect you to be using the service constantly.
Its kind of like the 56k ISPs. You can have unlimited hours of use, but they don't want you connected if you're not using it. They don't want an idle connection wasting a phone line. Don't get me wrong though. I'm not on their side. There needs to be a compromise somewhere.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
I'm in Toronto - and I am a bandwidth hog.
I am not sure what my bandwidth usage in a given month is - but my guess is that its close to 50gigs.
That said, the vast majority of that *was* for NNTP - so that's local bandwidth use on Rogers own network - not off of it.
That difference is critical - as it means the variable cost of providing that bandwidth use is minimal. I repeat - the "hogs" were not (till now) sucking up bandwidth like this via Morpheus. They were doing it with Newsbin.
My biggest problem with this pricing scheme is that it is was announced at the same time - ON THE SAME DAY - as Rogers access to the @Home NNTP newservers went dark.
The suggestions by some posters here that Rogers newservers are now "not as good" as the old @Home groups is a HUGE understatement. The new Rogers NNTP access is simply awful - utterly awful. Binary groups might as well simply not be available at all.
They are now USELESS, utterly useless. And now the NNTP junkies will be forced to turn to Morpheus for the same content. Except Morpheus will be sharing files 24/7 and will do so off network. (This will cost Rogers some serious cash - Morpheus' variable cost to Rogers will be high).
In any event, I find it more than a little convenient how - on the same day that Rogers deliberately cuts off usable access to NNTP binary groups, an article is leaked to Globe And Mail threatening to up the fee charged to bandwidth hogs.
A mere coincidence? I think not.
Last 2 points
1 - In USD the propsed charge is not bad. Except I don't earn an income in USD. I earn it in CDN. And we don't make 40% more than you guys in absolute dollar terms.
It's an expensive hike guys. It will hurt a LOT.
2 - @Home didn't go under becasue of low bandwidth charges. They went under because some IDIOT paid billions for Excite at the height of the dot.com boom. Please fon't re-write history to suit your argument de jour.
.Robert
There is going to be some type of catch. which one would you rather have?
There is nothing so silly as other peoples traditions, and nothing so sacred as our own.
you can't use it [broadband access] to full potential without having to start selling organs to pay the bills. That's why, one by one, companies that tried to sell unrestricted broadband access for low flat fees are going out of business. Go ahead and give it a try - if you can run a profitable business selling unrestricted broadband for $50 a month there will be plenty of customers.
I'm a Rogers customer, and I can assure everyone that they really are an unpleasant company to deal with. But -- at least in my neighbourhood -- the connectivity itself rocks.
However, they're currently charging approx. US$ 30/month for unlimited bandwidth. They're talking about making the highest tier pay around US$ 50/month. That's still stinking cheap!
I'll pay that, as long as the service is there.
I would also love the free ride to continue. I would also like it if they couldn't do dastardly things like changing their TOS on the fly. I would also like a pony.
I am from a small, grease-loving country in the north called Ca-na-da.
Why don't all these cable and DSL companies take a look at their user base, and instead of offering HIGH SPEED 1.5mbit/sec downloads to Granny and Grandpa just give them a dialup account? This will allow them to check their email and see the cute little pictures of their grandchildren. I mean are they really gonna use all the bandwidth that they are given? How many people in this country would actually use 1.5mbit/sec (or whatever is most common) of bandwidth if they had it? I'm sure several slashdot readers could use it, but most Americans only need a dialup, however companies and society has impounded it in their heads that faster is better and "you can download 50 emails in 10 secs with ADSL!!!"
Just my 2 cents
Looking at maybe $20-25 (Canadian!) per month for a decently fast 24/7 connection with limited bandwidth, $45 or so for typical service, and maybe $80 for a fatter pipe and unlimited use -- it sounds reasonable to me.
I'd gladly pay AT&T Broadband US$50-100 per month for a range of static IPs, unlimited bandwidth use, and a fairly fat pipe (at least 256k), and the right to run servers from home.
Probably 90% of the people who don't like this, don't like it because it will make them pay more for their copyright-infringing illegal activities. I'm not saying that's everybody, but I'm sure it's a good portion.
Can't stand paying an extra $40 a month because you're too cheap to buy games/movies/music? Sucks to be you...
I'm all for charging by the byte.
The idea behind home broadband is to allow individual users to surf the web faster. Light use.
Heavy corporate users should pay for a T1 or whatever.
The companies that provide broadband are struggling to break even. Clearly these companies can not provide T1 for $50 a month.
What exactly has caused this?
Probably people downloading full-length movies on P2P networks like Morpheous. (My brother has about 100 some full-length movies at 600 megs a pop)
Have companies overestimated network capacity?
I think they didn't expect P2P and downloading full-length movies would become a normal use for thier service. When they were making estimates some 5 years ago, they probably anticipated streaming audio and video, downloading a game here and there, maybe the occasional warez trader.
I'm pretty sure they didn't expect the average customer to use bandwidth like a warez trader.
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
The capital chased the profits.
If "obscene" bandwidth charges are the order of the day, then companies will climb all over each other to serve the market, and the timing for some latecomer will be disasterous. If the money is good for a bandwidth provider now, then a glut can follow. Who wins then?
If companies get enough hopes built up to get your money on a gigabyte/month basis, well, the velocity of data will increase, making a mild version of Moore's Law. Cisco is drooling at the idea of ISP's feeling hope--any hope.
Don't be so pessimistic.
I live on the other side of the pond (Eurotrash, that's me) we call the Atlantic and I've been wondering about the download caps and what the service providers do when someone reaches the cap.
Do they just shut down your service until the next month or do they just charge X cents per MB/GB after that?
They way things are set up in my country is that I've got a DSL line at home and I've got a cap of a GB now and my provider just charges me a couple of cents per MB after I've reached my cap.
Every month there is a story on /. about how people can no longer run servers on their residential connection, can no longer do VPN, run multiple computers, etc.
I believe these are mostly plays by broadband providers to limit bandwidth. If we're paying for bandwidth, I don't think they would care what you were doing with it, beyond spamming or hacking. And that would be very, very cool.
Jack Valenti and the MPAA are to technology as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone
The reality is that bandwidth costs money, and those who use significantly more will have to pay for it . . . There is nothing abnormal about this pricing model, it is there with any commodity. And don't use the poor example of cable TV, if you watch cable TV 24/7 you don't consume any more of a limited resource . . . to all you bandwidth hogs, PAY UP!
Simple as that. I know lots of people that download stuff more or less 24/7 "just because they can" or even more stupid "because they pay for it anyways".
I use my broadband to:
a. be online all the time, so I don't need to dial up a slow modem pool when I need to check some facts, plus it is nice to get email at once and so forth.
b. download what I do need which really isn't much.
I would really welcome a policy on my provider where you pay for what you use, same as the providers themselves do. That would be fair. Now I probably pay way too much, to finance someone elses compulsive downloading.
You don't need, you probably don't even want 90% of of those "impressive" 120 GB anyways. Do you use it?
I thought so.
T1 in my BFE town cost $600.
As many others have stated, the cost of this is not ACTUALLY $80 per month. It is 80 Canadian Dollars per month, which is 50 US Dollars at the most.
The above point is essentially true, however it might be worthwhile to point out that in the domestic market, the Canadian dollar has >80% purchasing power compared to the US dollar in the US domestic market. Prices are not 40% higher in Canada than they are in the US.
*** Where are we going? And what's with this handbasket?
I'm frankly VERY tired of seeing an ARTICLE on the main page of slashdot at least once a week about someone whining about their broadband prices going up. I still don't get why people think $80 per month is a ripoff for quality reliable bandwidth, or why people think they should get 100x the speed of their dialup modem for only $10-$20 more per month.
/29 with that, complain that they have to buy a bit of hardware, complain that for 5 minutes their mpg ping times went up slightly, and complain about anything possible. Business clients purchase the same package and are happy to have a reliable service and a knowledgeable staff behind it.
I think I said it best last time someone cried about their bandwidth bill, so I'll just quote it here...
"It's simple business. A broadband ISP has to actually MAKE money off of their customers. Upstream bandwidth is extremely expensive, and the residential market has been proven to hog bandwidth with p2p download services. There's no profit to be made when a customer consistently uses their 768k dsl or cable pipe and pays $39/month (US) for it. Broadband ISP's have to rely on the idea that only a part of those resi customers will chug bandwidth, and the less demanding users will "buffer" the effect. But, the fact seems to be that broadband users are bandwidth hungry. Businesses pay more and use less, and are glad that they have a fast and reliable connection. Residential customers, in my "wireless isp operating" experience, complain that we charge $69.95/month for a 512k package, complain that they don't get a
It's no wonder broadband providers are either a) priced more than the competition, b) staying away from residential markets, or c) failing."
With a few exceptions this entire thread has been brought up before.
/. is headed.
However most of you fail to see the potential advantages to being offered a 'tiered' internet service. What other potential services could be added for this additional rate? Broadband has been generalized to the advantage of the so called bandwidth hogs but at the expense to not only those who use very little bandwidth but also to those who would like have other services available without going to corporate rates.
These 'value added features' could include;
- Possibly a removal of port blocks (25, 110, 21, 80 etc etc.) that have become accepted?
- Possibly static ips?
- Reverse DNS mappings?
Possibly other advantages like mail backup or other so called corporate services which until now have not even been available at any rate (for residential clients).
Surely some of you could use a well priced residential solution which allowed you to do more then download from Kazaa - or is this where
Few broadband ISPs currently offer these, but perhaps with the acceptance of a multilevel system these new packages, albeit more expensive will allow those of us who desire a better level of service to receive it.
I suggest anyone looking for such a company check out [plug] http://www.magma.ca a Canadian full service internet provider whom not only offers corporate addons, but also offers static ips, and other features on all its broadband packages (both residential and corporate).
Shouldn't be too complicated, just calculate a 14-days sliding average of bandwidth usage per customer (do that every midnight), and *ONLY WHEN* the pipe is saturated, cap the users who's average is more than, say, 64kbps, at something like 128kbps or so. this way regular (read: non-24/7-hogs) users can get their 2Mbps peaks whenever they feel like it, but if you try to suck Gigabytes every day, you'll get capped pretty soon.
I'm just curious about definitions here. I've never been personally contacted by rogers, but I know I've used anywhere in the range of 5-30 gigs a week without running any kind of server. This is mp3 grabs, online gaming, and surfing high-bandwidth sites (newgrounds, ifilm, etc.). And what about when my gf hops on Morpheus, grabs a few mp3's, and forgets to close it down? I've come home from work after it's been left on accidently and there's been over 15 gigs in transfers from people leeching off me. Considering that it's difficult to close (clicking the X in the upper right corner simply minimizes it to the system tray, you have to right click on the system tray icon and select "Close" to shut the program down), I'm sure this happens to many people who don't know better as well. I'm all for charging people who find it necissary to run 24/7 servers on their box, but is the line going to be drawn between that and legit higher bandwidth uses?
I'm going to pull out my Rogers monthly bill for your edification:
Cable Services:
21.29 - Basic Cable Service
12.96 - Cable Plus Combo
Information Services:
39.95 - Rogers @Home Service
9.95 - Rogers @Home Network Connection
0.00 - Rogers @Home Cable Modem Rental
Digital Cable
10.95 - Digital Terminal
11.95 - The Movie Network
2.00 - Superstation Pack
3.00 - Moviepix
Tax
4.97 - PST
7.84 - GST
Total: $124.86
This is what I fork out on a monthly basis; this is after already having to scale back my TV channels due to their outrageous cost and my bare usage of them (an additional $85.99), I also removed a third extra "IP" (another $9.95) since they switched to DHCP. So if I wanted to get everything that I'd like from this company and add in an additional forty bucks for maximum bandwidth usage, I'm looking at roughly $260.80 a month, paid out to the same company. That hurts.
Now for all the wiseguys that're thinking about sauntering over to yahoo to convert that figure to your oh-so-powerful US dollar: think twice and factor in your wages/cost of living before you even attempt such a comparison. Either way you cut it, having TV and Internet cable is already darned expensive. If they want to raise prices then their customer service, TV and cable service in general needs to improve; I've experienced countless annoying, lengthy and unexplained downtime. I've been blatantly lied to by tech support staff that are either feeding out lines passed down from their manager, or refuse to deal with their cluelessness. I've also had the entire network mysteriously switch to a DHCP setup - of which I was informed by snail mail a full seven days after the fact. My entire building was denied access to free preview channels due to some "technical" issues, and after having the buck passed back and forth between building management and Rogers, Rogers still had the gall to call when the free previews finally ran out (all we saw was a black screen) to try to sell us on them ("We hope you've enjoyed your free preview, now you can buy all of these channels.."). I'm going to feel ripped off no matter what they charge for TV or Internet; this is one heck of a disorganized company, where the left hand has no clue what the right is doing.
DS1(Digital Signal Level 1, T1 is the old nomenclature(As in T carrier)) throughput is 1.544Mbit/s(You have to tack on overhead and all that so in reality it's about 1.1Mbit/s, also depends on if it's dedicated or frame(frame network congestion)). It doesn't compare to cable in maximum throughput(note maximum throughput, because cable is subject to the same bottlenecks and congestion as any transport on a public network, but we're talking about business/hardcore access). And, yes, a DS1 is way more expensive than cable. I wish people would quit saying a(as in one) DS1 is a viable alternative, it's like it's a damn buzz word or something. What was it for Rogers? For every x number subscribers, x number of augmentations to the main access would take place to handle the traffic. 1 cable user on Rogers would take up 2 DS1s with the caps that are in place(I think it's 128K upload and 2Mbit download). So more people are going to use it(cable), even for things against the license agreement.
-------
People are great... When they don't come near me.
In your local markets, how many broadband providers do you have? Odds are, at most, two. Your cable provider, i.e. TimeWarner Cable (a locally sanctioned monopoly) offering cable net access and your telcom provider, i.e Sprint (yet another locally sanctioned monopoly) offering DSL access.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that with multi-billion corporations engaged some friendly pseudo-competition, and with the barriers to entry so high no other competition is forseeably possible, that they have no incentive to lower prices.
Costs going up? No problem, they don't need to innovate, or figure out ways to do things better, they can simply up their prices. TimeWarner and AT&T will trade users back and forth as they ratchet up prices in turn.
I predict broadband prices will continue to go up, until some technology (like wireless broadband) make the barriers to entry signifcantly less. Wireless will allow a competitor to enter the market by setting up a few towers, instead of laying hundreds of miles of wire.
I can hope, anyway.
Software Wars
I don't see anything wrong with usage caps so long as the provider is completely clear about them. The provider has to pay fees for upstream bandwidth and it's only fair for them to want to control these costs.
Now, it is wrong for a provider to claim "unlimited" data transfer and then harass the users. But if the provider is clear about caps, then what's the problem.
Now, for the specific question of Rogers (and the other Canadian cable regional monopolies), the Canadian regulator (CRTC) should force them to provide open access to their "last mile" like they've successfully done with the telephone companies.
http://www.rogers.com/english/customer/e-form-medi a-cable.html
"Always on", "100x faster than dialup" "Brings multimedia and games to a new level"
I'd have a lot more sympathy for these poor little cable conglomerates if they offered more honest advertising.
How about:
"Always on, but prone to going down for days at a time for no apparent reason."
"100x faster than dialup, if your computer is rolling down a steep hill."
"Brings multimedia and games to a new level, but if you use either for an extended period of time, we'll ask you not to, or just cut you off altogether. Or we might just raise your rates through the roof!"
and, my personal favorite:
"We offer expert technical support, if you're willing to sit on hold for 40 minutes to be told to reboot your computer and modem."
They must have called the tech support department!
I dunno... What do you wanna do?
Many comments here are along the lines of, "Do you know what a T-1 costs?" Okay, a copper T-1 is just an older generation of DSL, so that response is about like replying to a complaint about a slow computer with, "Do you know what an Apple II costs?" and answering it with the 1982 retail price.(You can still get a T-1 for about $500 in NYC, but you're paying for a higher support level, not bandwidth.) But I quibble, because some put it in terms of, "Do you know what an OC3 costs?" Still a fair question.
But it's a question that assumes that OC3 pricing is based on a legitimate bandwidth shortage, which is just not the case. Remember all those millions of miles of high-capacity fiber that haven't even been lit? With firms that laid them going into bankruptcy (Global Crossing) that bandwidth should be available at very minimal pricing - any return at all to the creditors of those firms is better than zilch.
Now, lots of folks complain that the "last mile" to the home is the bottleneck. But the discussion here regards pricing for people for whom that is solved. What needs analysis is the distortions in the upstream bandwidth market, where firms appear happy to keep selling you that OC3 at last year's price (like that Apple II), based on a false assumption of bandwidth scarcity.
It's like the electricity scam that hit California. By witholding resources large firms can charge more for delivering less. And your cable providers aren't necessarily the victims here - they could cheaply acquire some of that dark cable.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
you don't use their tactics, and tell them how much they are entitled to. As if there's 100 mb/s and there's 10 people 10 mb/s each, but if other people aren't in then they can, but when someone else comes on yuo give them 100/n, n = how many people on.
If this is combined with an unrestricted service contract, than this is a much saner model for broadband. SOMEONE has to pay for increased bandwidth usage. I'd prefer to have the option of running my own web server/freenet node/ftp site or anything else I want, and have to pay for what I use, than instead never be able to run a web server or a neighborhood WLAN from any ISP (with all the flexible local guys killed off) because of a service contract and blocked network ports.
On the other hand, if this is just a punative measure, and you're still not allowed to do anything with your broadband and in addition they're going to "fine" you with disproportionate fees for not being the customer they want, then it is a bad bad thing.
In particular, I think the worst thing these broadband contracts are starting to do is make it impossible to run a co-op or shared neighborhood WLAN. Pay-per-bandwidth instead of pay-by-residence could make things much better.
-Braddock
...we actually got the service that they claim we do. For example, they say that the downstream is capped at 3mbit, but i've never seen higher than 512kbit from thier own servers.
The mail service is up and down like a hookers pants, some days you can get your email, and others you can't.
The "new news service" is about 80% incomplete for multipart binaries (I make music and get a lot of samples out of the newsgroups, not movies, porn or mp3's) sending anything over thier own network to another user via ICQ for example, you are lucky to get over 10k/second...
routing is a complete disaster. I live in Kitchener Ontario, and attempted to do a tracert to another isp here in town. I would assume that the route would go to Toronto (thier major hub) and then back to kitchener to the other server...Instead, it goes to Buffalo, Cambridge MA, Montreal Qu, etc.
Rogers newest "top priority" is to modify the colors of certain sections of their web page to make it easier to read, instead of trying to figure out why posts on the news server are simply dissappearing.
So, there's my $0.03 worth, and it boils down to what a lot of people who are bitching about it are pissed at....they expect us to pay more for a service that is way less than what they say it is. Fix up the service, and I'd be totally willing to pay the extra cash...but don't try and make me pay more for a service that you don't even know how to get working properly. DSL is becomming more and more feasable for a lot of Rogers Customers and the lack of service that they are providing.
Zro
Are you snail mailing your customers to tell them you intend to cripple their service during the day?
I'm not saying you don't have the right to set whatever caps you like, but I hope you're offering refunds for anyone who signed up for a year and not just degrading the service without warning.
Perhaps your terms and conditions allow you to do this at any time. It doesn't make it right.
256kbits/sec = 32 Kbytes/sec.
Boy am I glad I don't have a connection with you. The local residential road runner service I have will go to 250KBYTES/sec. Not that I use that (except for a few minutes a month if I'm downloading from a fast server) but that's a huge difference, and now you're going to cap even more?
This is how ISPs, credit card companies, banks, etc. can get away with modifying terms. They are giving you a new service every month, so can ask for a new contract. Old service they cannot change.
Contracts where it is important that service continue have fixed expiries and/or evergreen provisions requiring long notice. Did you put any such terms in your ISP contract? No? Then your ISP probably put terms in favorable to it.
1) Lancity modems that are incompatible with their new network (as I painfully found out when they switched fromthe @home network)
2) Misconfigured DHCP servers that give out the same IP to multiple NICs (I have had that happen too)
3) Overloading local loops with more customers then it can handle
4) Oversaturating the networks gateway onto the internet backbone (looking at the traceroutes the pings always take a giant leap on the next router after their network)
5) Incompetant help-desk. Have you ever talked to these guys!!! They give you as many different excuses as different people that you talk to ... all blaming you for the problem of course. When you get a straight answer out of them (local server troubles/maintenance) they go talk to their supervisor and come back with a different reason ... blaming you, of course.
They advertise that they give you *up to* 3Mbit/s but I have rarely gotten that ... maybe 5 transfers in the 3 years that I've had the service.
The big problem is that the only other option is to go with Bell Sympatico and from what I have heard, they are no better and worse in many respects including what you are allowed to do with your internet time.
Could they not just implement some traffic shaping that gives each IP an equal share of the pipe?
Well,
Broadband was underpriced just to get people on the system. Now that they got millions + on the system, they want to charge more to finally see if they can make a profit on it. After watching sevarl hundred ISPs and DLECs (Rhythms, C1, Norigen, etc) go under, they can freewillingly boost their pricing.
I Say good for the cable and DSL industry to show their true face. Be a Monopoly by having the lowest prices, kill off the true competition, then boost your prices to recoup your loses.
I just hope the CRTC is watching and eventually regulates the 2 industries.
I don't see a problem with charging the real bandwidth hogs a bit more.
Bandwidth is not in infinite supply, afterall. As someone who isn't running a cable company or other ISP, it is real easy to say "simply fatten the pipe". Like that can be done with the snap of one's fingers or something.
What REALLY sucks is paying for broadband only to not get it because a few dorks are hogging it disproportionately for foolish, simple-minded reasons. With cable it is especially important since all the users are sharing the same pipe. What one user uses is less available for other users. Pay to play, it's only fair.
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
What's really needed (some of you will hate this), is time of use metering. I had it for electricity when I lived in Maryland, and it worked quite well. There were three levels of fees: low, medium, and high usage. An example for the winter was: during the work day, when business were sucking up a lot of electricity, the rates were medium. Morning and evening, during transition times, a high rate was in effect. At night, when the demand was the lowest, the rates were the lowest. Why? Electricity generation is most efficient when the generators run at a constant rate. In the summer, the cost of electricity during mid-day was almost ten times the night rate. I could heat my hot water with electricity for less than natural gas. I put a timer on it and heated the water at night. It stayed hot all day, and if we used a large amount if it, I could just go flip the manual on switch. I never needed to.
.binaries portion of USENET on your PC from 8-10pm each day, but only $0.10 a gig from 4-6am, when would you do it? Time of use metering helps to smooth out the flow. An OC3 can get 40 TB/mo throughput (excuse me if I've slipped a digit in the math). If 80% of the traffic occurs in a 3 hour "peak" window, you will only realize 6TB of your available bandwidth. That's horribly wasteful. If you could entice your heavy users to do more off-time up/downloading, you could effectively increase throughput without increasing costs. And, honestly, does it really matter if you are physically awake to watch the d/l meter on the latest linux distro? Plan ahead, and have it ready when you get there. Tag your Gnutella files for later.
Since max bandwidth is limited, why not a time-of-use metering for it? The idea is that there are fixed fees for providing you service. Say, $20 a month goes to general network and management operations - billing, help desk, infrastructre support. Then, there's the pipes you've got to lease, and each has a capacity. A fee structure might be $0.50 a gig during the day, $1 a gig in the evening, and $0.10 a gig in the middle of the night/early morning.
If you must surf when everybody and their brother is on the net, you pay extra. If you can schedule those 20 ISOs you want for off-peak times, you should. Here's the financial incentive for it! If you paid a $1 a gig for downloading all of the
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Over the last year or so Canada has had a big media consolidation much like that of the US....so now 3 or 4 companies own most of the media outlets. Rogers happens to open a bunch of radio stations, SportsNet (TV cable channel) and several national magazines. Bell (our main DSL provider) now owns a digital satellite business, CTV (national broadast TV network), The Sports Network (cable TV) and the Globe & Mail (largest national paper).
:) Welcome to the future, the Rogers-Bell duopoly will be more than happy to take all your money and give you less.
So what's the point ? They're both now on the RIAA/MPAA side of the fence, in that they plan to make far more money off content than internet access. So, rather than tell me that I'm a bandwidth hog so they're going to cap me at 384 kbps (or whatever) they tell me I'm a hog and I'll have to pay surcharges ? So what's the point ?
I run Gnutella & Kazaa and I damned well like it. If I had a bandwidth capped connection I could leave it on all day and know it will work, only slower. I can live with that. If I have a surcharged connection I suddenly have to worry about too many file transfers running up my bill and my getting a rude shock at the end of the month. Bandwidth surcharges will frighten non-technical users away from P2P. Period. End of sentence.
Now, given that our internet access comes from media/content behemoths does anyone think it's a coincidence that they're choosing to go to surcharges rather than bandwidth caps ? I don't, and I don't think I'm fucking paranoid either. 'Media Convergence' has been pretty blatant here, as an example:when Rogers moved off @Home to their own e-mail domain users obviously had to switch their accounts around. I'm in my car driving home listening to a Rogers-owned all-news AM station (because they have the best traffic reports) and there's a spot on that day being the deadline for moving your Rogers account over. Not an ad, not a public service announcment, a news article about cable modem e-mail accounts. Strangely enough there were no news articles on any other ISPs that day.
With a name like "Rogers" that you'd get "Rogered" by them.
In the end, I signed up with Bell Sympatico HSE (DSL) - which was a cakewalk to get going. Just for a laugh, I documented my experiences (tongue-in-cheek fashion) and emailed them to Rogers. I got a polite response thanking me for pointing out their process problems, but no mention of how I could actually get their service.
BTW, this behaviour is typical of Rogers in all their divisions. Their cable TV division tried to screw customers a few years back using a technique called 'negative billing'. They gave everyone a bunch of extra (but crappy) channels and then set a deadline by which you'd have to pay. If you didn't let Rogers know you DIDN'T want the channels, they'd assume you wanted 'em and would start charging you. This created a shitstorm in Parliment and Rogers eventually had to back down from this tactic. You can be sure that this latest Rogers@Home fee scam will catch the Feds attention given that one the Liberal government's platforms is (or was) to ensure broadband service is available in all parts of Canada (no matter how remote).
CrazyLegs
"Pork!!" said the Fish, and we all laughed.
I've heard many people say they have no problem with it.. they don't? remeber cable is shared. nothing will change just because they are charging somebody more than you. They'll still give you the same existing shared line, with people paying more hogging it. They won't reduce what you pay now, they'll just cap you and ask somebody to pay more. Besides what good is 1gig a month? download a couple of linux iso cds and it's all gone. I wouldn't mind if they gave the hoggers their own lines to hog from, but what's the point if they are still hoggin from the shared bandwidth? it doesn't help me.. it only helps the greedy cable company
did you forget to take your meds?
Except this doesn't solve the problem that was presented, which was that there is a point where high bandwidth users are being subsidized by everyone else because they are using so much bandwidth that the ISP is losing money. You solution keeps bandwidth for other people during peek times, but it doesn't either limit the bandwidth, or get the bandwidth paid for.
Except that this misrepresents the problem.
The problem is not that the bandwidth isn't getting paid for. It is.
The problem is that the bandwidth being paid for can't support all of the customers needed to cover its expenses, because of the overuse by a small percentage of the users.
The real problem is that the business model assumed passive consumers (web browsing) rather than the participatory exchange the internet was designed for and facilitates (multi-user games, chats, web hosting, etc.)
The solution the poster presented was that, by limiting the hogs when demand goes up, is perfectly viable, unless the providor is deliberately overselling their bandwidth, in which case they deserve chapter 11, or worse.
In other words, that OC3 doesn't cost any less if no one uses it, so why not let everyone use it to its maximum capacity, as long as they are forced to get out of the way (temporary restrictions during peak usage) when others need it, thus insuring that everyone who paid for access gets it, with reasonable performance, while allowing power users access to the otherwise unused bandwidth during off hours?
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
10 Insert rant about poor service;
20 Raise prices to buy more T1s;
30 Insert rant about high prices;
40 Lower prices, sell back T1s;
50 Insert rant about poor service;
60 Modify terms of service to stop people from running servers;
70 Insert rant about how running servers does not necessarily use bandwidth;
80 Actually charge for the bandwidth used;
90 Insert rant about selling organs
100 Drop bandwidth restrictions;
110 GOTO 10;
- You can get more than 50 modems perl T1. Although folks might be dialed up, they're not filling their pipe the whole time. You're looking at 100-200 "56k" modems per T1. [depending on scale and your exact user base]
- 15 users per modem is horrible. 6-8 is a much better range. Again, it's based on your user base, however.
- ISPs have much bigger charges than the T1. First, you have whatever debts you're paying off for your router and modems. Then you have the recurring charges... Either POTS, Channelized-T1 or PRI. Depending on where you are, and the economy of scale, an ISP could be paying anywhere between $30-80 in recurring costs per month, per incoming line.
Now, based on those numbers, if you've got 115 modems (5 PRI), and you're paying $80 per line, ($9200) and $1600 for the T1. ($10,800 total). You're charging $20/mo, and keep a user/modem ratio of 8, for $18,400.So, we've got $7600 profit, right? Well, no. There's still business phone lines, loop charges, location rent, utility bills [ie, electricity], ongoing costs of equipment upgrades, etc. So, say you're not paying that much, and you're pulling in $7000 per month (which would be damned high, mind you).
Well, that's $7k/month, or $84k/year. Sure would be sweet, but unfortunately, you probably need some other folks to help you run the place, or you'd have to do all of the tech support, 24x7 network support, billing, accounting, etc, on your own.
ISPs are profitable, but it's a sliding scale... if you upgrade too fast, you pay our more to keep the customers happy, and cut into profits. If you don't upgrade fast enough, you have constant busy signals, and you lose customers, which cuts into profits. You have to be slightly forward thinking (as it might take 2-3 months to get that PRI in from the order date), but you can't be too over enthusiastic.
However, as with any business, you don't _have_ to serve people. If you have a problem customer, you can get rid of 'em. It's perfectly legal, and well, the AUP/TOS just helps to cover your ass. Yes, they might bitch, but when you're paying $80/month for modem line and hardware charges, you've suddenly stopped losing $60/month on that person.
[There are, however, ways to handle the problem customers, but I'd have to classify that as secret, as I still have a vested interest in the ISP]
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
His point is that ultimately "bandwidth hogs" don't cost the cable company a dime as long as there isn't contention for the same bandwidth by multiple users. If they've got 50Mbit woth of bandwidth and the bandwidth hog is constantly using 512Kbit, it's bad if 100 of those guys are on at the same time. However, if only one of those guys is on, why should anybody care. At that point he is not depleting a scarce resource he's using a barely tapped resource.
There are two solutions here. The first is to provide better tiering of services to allow those who want more bandwidth to get it (and yes, pay a little bit more). Personally I pay roughly double what I might otherwise be paying for bandwidth so I can have decent upstream speeds and static IP addresses. The second is to use dynamic management of bandwidth restrictions based on system capacity. At primetime, it makes sense that Mr. Bandwidth hog shouldn't get his full 512, but no reason for it to be an issue at 3am when he's downloading Linux ISO's. This system makes everybody happier because the bandwidth hogs can still be hogs and not have it hurt the provider, and the non-hogs can still do their routine without noticeble slowdowns.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
I am betting they stay the same or gain customers.
1. Lower prices for light users - may convince some Dial-up users to switch.
2. What other choices do people have? When I was in Denver Area I could only get Cable Internet no DSL where I lived. I would have paid twice as much for the service.
Seems like simple economics to me.
Use more pay more.
Regularly pepole don't have access for a couple of days, and unlike Shaw rogers does not refund you for this, remember this story?, it barely helps you! They have already increased costs by forcing users with more than one computer (and not clever enough to set up NAT) to paay for more than one ip.
One more thing to all those americans who say "That's only $80 CDN, let them increase it":
I don't think we should be punished just because our currency happens to be at an all time low to the US $
Canadians get PAID in CDN $, we don't go around converting to US$
We get PAID less
This is not a good thing, and may I remind people that Shaw/Rogers have been providing cable internet access for half a decade now, and I certainly don't see it hurting either one of them financially.
I would like to reply to all the (American) people out there who claim that $80 CAD is peanuts. First of all, doing a straight conversion of funds is NOT a fair way to compare value. Sure, $80 CAD is like 20 cents U.S., but $80 CAD to a Canadian in Canada has the same purchasing power as $80 USD does to an American in America (well, maybe closer to $70 USD). Also, they fail to see that going from = $80/mo for internet usage is actually a 100% increase in cost of a service. This kind of thing is a big no-no in the business of providing a service. There is NO additional features or functionality, but there is a 100% increase in price. Unfortunately, Canadians are generally so conservative that they will allow themselves to be boiled like frogs without complaining [I am a Canadian, so I can say such things]. Naturally, the cable companies have to make money. That is fine. On average, I am a light internet user, but there are times when I like to download the latest Linux ISOs. I don't want to have to pay $80 to do it, or I might as well just buy Windows (which would at least give me a box to throw up into).
Wasn't there an article on here a week or two ago about how some cable companies are trying to thwart users who set up in house lans and do NAT? The main sentiment I heard in response to that article was that the cable companies should simply charge people according to the bandwidth they use. Now we hear of a cable company doing just that and I hear a bunch of bitching. I'm sorry folks, but you can't have it both ways. These companies are in business to make money. I get annoyed when I see price gouging and greed, but that isn't what this sounds like. If it is then that means that high profit margins will encourage the entry of competitors into the market, at which point competition will drive the prices back down again.
Lee
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
However, that wouldn't be a problem at all if the P2P systems were a little more intelligent - preferring more local connections for more remote (why download a movie from someone in norway when you can get it from the guy down the block?). Someone help me write this program.
funny munging
I'm not sure what speed Rogers is offering, but say its 512Kbps. If 100 users use all that, they need a T3 just for 100 users!
FYI, I've used Rogers in Ottawa, Canada for 4 years and I have a hard time getting over 100KB/s (800Kbps) now. AFAIK, Rogers implemented a cap (also halving the max. upload speed) a few years ago to discourage FTP servers hogging bandwidth.
I'm not complaining about 100KB/s, but if I have to pay $80CAN a month just so I can download at 'high speed' when I need to, I'm gonna snap. I would rather they implemented some sort of 'throughput' math on it (like x gigabytes per month), instead of a speed cap, which is more likely. *sigh*
Regardless, there will always be a cheaper option for geeks that just want to wail on an Internet connection. As soon as it becomes available, the 'early adopters' (ie. those same 4 year-long customers alienated by Rogers that early-adopted waaay back when) will flock to it. Buh-bye Rogers. Nice to know you.
----- rL
No kidding, I love my organs very much. I need them to digest my Mexican food.
-- Game Developers: Stop porting badly-textured games from crappy console systems!
This is what bothers me about the telecom companies in general. They've caught on to the fact (either from discovered from their own research or customer "choices") that people will buy service that they don't use, as long as it looks like a good deal. And its picking our pockets clean.
So all around the industry, you find that companies are now offering "unlimited" services for a set fee per month, while product quality is undefined, or going down the crapper. They seem to have forgotten that there's an option called pay-as-you-go with reasonable rates. (Although many of the debates this thread are about just that)
Just look at cell phone pricing plans. This is why I've never gotten a cell phone, though I would use one if I had reasonable options. Who among us uses up 3000 minutes after 9pm, or only on weekends? Have you ever wondered why you can only purchase plans that basically start around $40/month? I don't want a plan with 3000 useless minutes for $40/month, and charges me $0.35 for each minute over the piddling 200 minutes during the hours when I actually need it. I want to pay a reasonable fee per minute, something like $0.07 and not have upper, or lower boundaries on my use.
The only reason the phone companies keep doing this is because 1. it's obviously making money, charging people for service they won't use (yet making them think it's a good deal) and 2. they think that customers are ok with it, because enough people are buying into it.
We all know the traditional telecoms are struggling right now, you can see it from your phone bill. Why does caller ID cost $8? You can bet it doesn't really cost that much. They're just trying to make up in a losing game (and they'll even resort to padding the bill with dubious "taxes") I guess enough people are willing to drop that money on a service that doesn't satisfy them that the telco wins in the end. Sad.
What's the point of broadband if I can't use it to its full extent?
Go ahead, moderate this as flamebait or troll, but what exactly is it with the whiny 14 year olds who post crap like this?
Listen, for those of you who think that your provider "owes" you or is "obligated" to open the flood gates of bandwidth for you, all for the low, low price of $49.95 (or whatever), here's two words to live by: Screw Off.
You're paying for exactly two things 1) an always "on" connection, and 2) the "ability" to download content at a rate faster than dialup. No guarantees are made, nor is anyone ever obligated to roll out the red capret of resources and let you track mud all over it.
Broadband service is sold and priced as a statistically "multiplexed" service, meaning that on average, a T1 worth of bandwidth should suffice to serve 100 customers, or whatever. There is likely 10's to 100's of thousands of dollars in infrastructure that's being used to deliver that service to you (which has to be maintained, upgraded, and eventually paid for - yes, paid for), as well as monthly fees for bandwidth from various backbone providers and whatnot (yes, believe it or not, providers don't get bandwidth for free).
It gets said all over the place when articles like this are posted, and I'll just join the few that do have a clue and reinforce it. If you want unrestricted access to a T1's worth of bandwidth, both up and down so you can run your "servers", then STFU and pay for it, all $1000 or more a month of it. Period, end of discussion.
If you wish to join the rest of the civilized public, pay your way accordingly, and enjoy a decent, convienient service for a very reasonable fee, then you're welcome to join in.
But I refuse to pay for, or allow "little Johnny" down the street to download pr0n from the Gnutella network at an average rate of 600kbps 18 hours a day, 7 days a week, degrading service for the other 99 or whatever users that bandwidth statistically should be serving, and pay the same rate as I do. That's totally BS, and no reasonable person with a clue can argue against it.
What would happen if telephone service or electricity was sold "buffet style" like broadband is/was? The US would turn into a third world country virtually overnight from a technology standpoint. Certainly no electricity for most of the country (unless you could generate your own), and telephone service would be worthless. Chaos the norm, piss-poor service at it's absolute best. Sound familiar? Welcome to the typical world of broadband.
Grow up, use the service provided responsibly, and pay your way.
Operator's Voice:
"Please enter another quarter if you wish to attack the terrorists again. If you wish to just spectate, please insert another dime for every 30 seconds you wish to spectate for. Thank you and have a nice day."
Then it will be the 56K laggers doing the laughing!
www.slightlycrewed.com - Because aren't we all?
"Major Canadian broadband provider plans to charge heavy users higher monthly access fees as high as $80 per month."
/me calls his lawyer.
This is outrageous! How dare they charge fat people more than thin people!
I have been a Rogers Cable Internet (formerly Rogers@home) subscriber for years. The service is not that great. But compared to the services in the states it's damn cheap.
.and I'm paying almost as much as the new higher rate Rogers.
Anyway... one of the things that I had for over two years with Rogers is the same IP... even though it was assigned dynamically it was the same IP. This was important to me because I want to be able to reliably GET into my computer remotely... not share gigs of MP3s and run my own warez site. That's what was important to me about broadband... accessibility. As of JUST YESTERDAY I am now running on a independent DSL provider, dsl.ca. They're basic 1.2 mbps rate (everything in CDN) is $34.95 + $5 for static IP + $10 for modem rental. That' way more than the 39.95 I paid for Rogers. AND on top of that I have a usage cap on direct IP traffic to 5GB/month with a $10/GB additional charge per month. But you know what...
I DON'T MIND PAYING FOR BANDWIDTH. I know I use it and I have the money. I think what Rogers is doing is fine. It will actually make my GF happy because she'll be paying LESS!... she sends ICQ messages, checks email and gets school info from the web. I'd be surprised if she used 500MB of bandwidth per month. Her rate is expected to drop to unlimited dial up prices.
Me... I needed more than Rogers was willing to offer me. And more than I think they will even if they doubled the price of my service. Tech support that could talk to me on my own level... static ip... consistent service.
I think I'm getting it now..
--- tracer.ca
The trouble is that most of you kiddies still live in fantasy land thinking that BW is free. Real T-1's still cost a $600-$1100 a month. And T-3's still cost about $10k - $15k a month. Also, you dont hook a cable modem up to land one of these babys, more like a cisco 7500 (and yes thats more than $199). It all costs money so you should count your blessings that someone is leting you ride on thier network for $~49. As usual the freeloaders bitch the loudest.
Would you rather that they raised the rates for everyone, so that the light users would subsidize the heavy users?!
Pay-per-bit internet access is a good thing. It is The Ideal. There are practical reasons for why it hasn't caught on widely, but anything that moves us closer to it, gets a thumbs-up.
Flat rates, on the other hand, are fundamentally unfair. People only like flat rates because they think it's a way to get something for nothing, to get someone else to pay. But for every person who successfully exploits the systems and gets more for less, there's a whole bunch of people getting screwed.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
So you want a non-profit government agency to manage the Internet now do you? You realize what that means, government regulation of the users. I suppose you don't mind getting an Internet drivers license to use it then?
Not to mention that the federal government can't get its own act together for Internet access. Every government agency does their own thing, and many can't even talk to each other (they use conflicting IP spaces internally). Until they can figure out how to do it themselves, I don't think I want them doing it for me too....
Think before you just jump on the (lets let the government fix it for us) bandwagon.
Casca
It's interesting ... all the television commericials for Rogers and Bell (DSL service) talk about downloading the music you want, the videos you want, playing the network games with friends, etc., etc..
Exactly the bandwidth-hogging uses they are now trying to clamp down on.
I wonder if they will change their advertisments too.
Tuus crepidae innexilis sunt.
Rogers owns Shaw. They are partners, not competition.
This would only be fair if they actually provided reliable service. Which they certainly do not.
Just check out the rbua.org forums..
If they could provide descent service then I'd have much less oif a problem paying.
People, were talking $80 Canadian. That's like, what, $5 US?
Is your company running tools written by ma
There's no such thing as bandwidth hogs. In terms of cable, each neighborhood shares a connection. Depending on how many people and how much they use it, they may up or lower the connection speed shared between people. Here is the main point. Unless you're uncapping your cable modem, which is considered to be theft of service in many places, the docsis standard for cable modems automatically will cut your bandwidth off if someone else on the same circuit requests some bandwidth to be used. So therefore you can only use as much bandwidth is available at the time. That's why cable modems only state a max speed which you can reach but does not guarantee that speed. They usually only guarantee a min speed of 28.8 modems (3k a sec) as their lowest (if everyone in your neighborhood is using the max bandwidth at the same time).
By putting that into perspective, how can someone be a bandwidth hog? Because he/she is using the service that the companies advertised? If they're competing with other companies and they advertise too low of a price, that's their own fault and they'll go out of buisness in no time. To target the users that actually use the service they're advertising and tell them they have to pay more or move out (which in many cases it's their only choice for a decent i-net connection) is extortion.
I am sick and tired of hearing the excuse "Well, they expect the average user to only use ammount X while the hog uses the connection 24/7 and uses an average of 5x that ammount" is crap. The service isn't like a cell phone plan where you pay a premium to use it during the day and less durring the night, it's a service which is like water.. 24/7 usage if you want to. Unlike water, it's a flat fee, so use it as much as you want to and you can. That's what's advertised (unless they explicitly say so).
DSL is even worse if they try to target you because unlike cable, you're guaranteed (usually) a min and max bandwidth (depending on your distance to the central office).
In case you've never visited Canada (likely), $1 Canadian buys you almost precisely (in Canada) what $1 US buys you in the US. About the only areas where there's a significant difference is in books, textiles, and (some) electronics.
So, $80 for cable access is $80 for cable access, no matter which way you slice it, because you aren't taking the currency across the border so the exchange rate isn't relevant, forsooth duh! (Americocentric dolts!)
Personally, and somewhat off-topic, I'd be more than pleased to see the negative-billing, shitty-channel package-bundling, meagrely regulated monopolisic Rogers cable go out of business...but I'm almost afraid that anything that would ooze out of the primordial slime to replace it would be worse.
My $0.02 Canadian, but I'm at home, so that's still two cents!
The Real ?!, posting as AC cause she lost her passwd, ooops.
simple economics.
in an oligopolistic market, firms cannot compete on price.
in a monopolostic market, *cough*.
i live in a country far far away, so i haven't a clue really what rogers cable is... but either rogers' competitors drive up their prices too, to take advantage of the situation (or cartel?), or reduce their prices to steal rogers' market share.
in a region where rogers is the only broadband choice, tough luck.
any firm needs to cover their average variable costs in the short run. if a firm is selling at less than what they're paying, on average, there is a problem--and i doubt this is the case, otherwise rogers would be out of business (again i apologize if i am misinformed, i know nothing of the situation).
Hey, on the good side at least they tell you they're gonna charge 80 bucks a month. Better than QWest in the Minneapolis area, who advertises $29.99 a month, but on the bill including "taxes and other charges", it somehows gets calculated up to about $80.00. And don't even get me started on how they signed me up twice, and billed me, before they turned the DSL on in the first place two months after I received two modems. Cable internet is working a little nicer.
He said you could get 540 modems per T1. His words: "at any given point, 10% of your user base would be online. So you'd figure you could fit 53.6 (Ah let's call it 54) 28.8k/s modem users into a 1.544mbps T1, so you could sell 540 accounts". Notice what he says. the 54 modems accounts for 100% of the bandwidth, but he says you also assume that these 54 users are only 10% of your subscriber base.
He also takes into account the extra expenses you mention. "Don't forget that you have to pay your employees, the telco for all the lines going into the modem bank, etc." and "A router costs a lot of money (On the order of several hundred thousand dollars for the ones we were using) which is one of the reasons we'd charge you so much to plug you into it".
And he says that the 15 users per modem *is* overscubscribed and that companies did/do this *because* of their opther expenses: "But you know, if you subscribe 15 people for every modem you have, the math starts looking better... (Hence terrible oversubscribtion such as AOL was accused of at one point.)"
If you're going to criticise the comments, then at least bother to understand them first.
Would this extra revenue be put toward improving their customer service so that if we call, we're not held in queue for hours?
I have a brother who is too busy to get online much and uses dialup to read mail twice a day. I have parents that love the internet and use it moderately throughout a week. I use the internet daily and occasionally need to move up to a Gig or so. Why is there only one or two prices for cablemodems but the are 12 different packages of cable service?
It's the same thing with cars. Why is the explorer so popular? It's because there is a feature range for just about anyone buying a new vehicle. from 24k to 38k there's a price to fit anyone. Why can't they do this with cable service? My brother pays $15/mo and would like a cable modem but doesn't want to pay $30. The cable company would still be able to make money off him so why not? It's because the cable company doesn't want to provide value. They want to make a large margin off of the internet grandmas that get online and scare off the few power users they label the 'abusers' to hide the fact their service is not well thought out.
running servers is expressly prohibited by Rogers Lic. agr. for many rogers cable users, the "fat pipe" is 256kbps (as in bits, not Bytes). there are many performance issues and the tech support has its own problems. you might also consider the fact that canadians are paid canadian salaries, which is why everything from rent to entertainment costs much less than in the US. incidentally, this is why economists talk about purchase parity as opposed to straight currency exchanges when comparing the standard of living.
In Indonesia ADSL price IS MORE EXPENSIVE
.... US$ 3900 .... US$ 1950 .... US$ 1100
check this out:
CBN (largest in Jakarta)
http://www.cbn.net.id
http://www.cbn.net.id/adsl.html
http://www.cbn.net.id/cable.html
ADSL is as high as US$ 500
for small speed... read the http://www.cbn.net.id/cable.html THEN SCREAM
Cable
512kbps
256kbps
128kbps
PS:
To all american company.
please come to indonesia, you can easily be rich here. And Indonesian will worship you becaue you give them cheap internet
Get them to pull their collective heads out of their asses as well. This may be the hardest thing to do, since Cableco's just don't seem to have a clue.
.
In all honesty, I'd gladly pay more money for more bandwidth. A couple of issues, though:
No fscking port limitations If I'm being metered, then I should be able to run any service I desire (Yes, this means running what has been viewed as a "server" application previously, like SSHD.). I'm just paying for packet A to get to destination B.
Guaranteed QOS Yes, bill me per packet if you so damn well want to, but I want contractual terms that state 128 kbs/256 kbs/n^2 kbs guaranteed or they are in violation, with fee scheduling to match. After all, I'm willing to pay for my usage.
Redress If you don't have the technical know-how as an ISP (or refuse to hire the people with it, more to the point) to recognize that I'm being ping flooded off the net, which is something beyond the scope and control of anyone, I don't have to face a $infinity bill at the end of the billing period. As it is, it's bend over and grab the ankles time. Something is inherently wrong with the current scenario, and there is no motivation to change it. Implement binding arbitration, or alternate means of redress to deal with the interent equivalent of force majeur
Acceptable means of determining usage My cable modem has a default HTTPD config. You could packet storm that thing off the the internet, but the local loop router would register only packets going through to my node. Bzzt! Not acceptable.
That's all I can think of off the top of my head. I'm sure others can think of plenty more.
In Indonesia ADSL price IS MORE EXPENSIVE
.... US$ 3900
.... US$ 1950
.... US$ 1100
check this out:
CBN (largest in Jakarta)
http://www.cbn.net.id
http://www.cbn.net.id/adsl.html
http://www.cbn.net.id/cable.html
US$1 = Rp 10000
ADSL is as high as US$ 500
for small speed... read the http://www.cbn.net.id/cable.html THEN SCREAM
Cable
512kbps
256kbps
128kbps
PS:
To all american company.
please come to indonesia, you can easily be rich here. And Indonesian will worship you becaue you give them cheap internet
I took a tour of the RR facility in Hawaii a few years ago. They had bandwidth usage charts that clearly showed a large reduction in bandwidth used between 12am and 3pm with a few spikes around 7am and lunch time. I assume peoples online times are about the same now so why not limit bandwidth during the peak hours and let the rest be free.
Another small point. Do you pay attantion to the broadband commercials? Do not advertise the advantages of always on, "multimedia" ready bandwidth with nice charts comparing speed to a 28k modem if you are not willing to support it. They sign you up under one assumption and then bill you for something else. If I planned on browsing the web all day I'd stick to my $12/month 56k dialup.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
This sort of pricing has the potential to kill, or at least change the face of P2P. If people have to pay for their bandwidth, they will be much less willing to let people upload files.
There've been a lot of posts talking about bandwidth hogs and how they should be made to pay more money for their usage, since they're robbing bandwidth from non-hogs. You've forgotten something: These bandwidth hogs are about the only market broadband has left.
Let's face it: broadband providers who do this are shooting themselves in the foot. The only real reason to get their service is for gobs of uploading and downloading for Napster or Morpheus or Kazaa or whatever the P2P rage of the day is. It's silly to protect the casual browsers from these people because, to put it simply, casual browsers don't use broadband. They have no need for it.
The killer app for broadband is supposed to be content. So why are they penalizing those who want more content?
Shaw and Rogers used to have cable (TV and Internet) customers in inter-mixed locations, for instance, Rogers serviced Toronto, while Shaw services a few suburbs surrounding Toronto (Pickering, Scarborough, Richmond Hill, etc..). Shaw also provided service to homes/business in B.C, and I possibly Alberta. Rogers also had facilities in some of these other areas that Shaw was servicing.Rogers and Shaw engaged in something of an assets swap to make their services areas more whole, giving Rogers control of Central Ontario, and Shaw control of the western provinces' cable. They are two separate companies.
It's the lousy script kiddie and pirates that are wrecking it. They caused Shaw to downgrade my upstream from 100KB/s to 60KB/s (kilobytes). Now I can't even run X11 programs over SSH w/o killing my network.
Kids are using maximum bandwidth to download and upload all the warez they possibly can. Trust me I know some of them.
There needs to be some way that I can have my cake and eat it too!
$89CDN, the highest proposed rate, is only $50US... less than I'm paying now for intermittent "flat rate" service from AT&T
and the lowest rate, $23/mo is just $15US.
I was annoyed by this at first, but with the new low rate, Rogers seems to be one of the first companies that's recognized that the ISP business is a numbers game where having more customers is nearly always better than having fewer customers..
I actually do this now to a degree. I have DSL through PacBell and got the business package instead of residential. I pay $80 a month, but I get 4 static IP's and since I'm a "business" PacBell never gives me shit for web serving, or playing enough games to max out my d/l.
Unfortunately I hear they are a bit more uptight about who gets business DSL these days, which will almost definately move my business to SpeakEasy once I move. (once again, pay a little more for better service)
Where are these high prices coming from?
Let's see, first, there is Bell. They have near limitless amounts of bandwidth on their network. They charge hundreds if not thousands of dollars a month for the trunk line from ISP to ISP. Then the local ISP has to pay the bigger ISP for their service. Now the service charges are incredibly high because the bigger ISP has to pay the phone company for the trunk line to their neighboors.
Yes there are third party FO providers but somewhere down the line, they enter Bell's domain.
I think that rather than complaining about the problem, people need to figure out other methods of getting limitless amounts of bandwidth themselves. Imagine if cities were to lay the cables within themselves. Then the state could drop the interstate cables under the interstate freeways. Texas would be wired from tip to tip in under three years. Then run the service like the post office. It can't lose any money but can't make a profit either. Any profit made would go to adding more technology to increase the bandwidth.
Then, inside the cities, have wireless networks to the people and high bandwidth services to everyone else.
I know, I know, this is ALL crazy talk but I can dream can't I?
A lot of people are talking about how much it's costing Rogers or Shaw for their bandwidth. Touting numbers about T1/T3/whatever rentals. They have their own fibre that runs through the cities they offer the service in, and intercity as well. It's *their* fibre. The only thing that costs them money is their connection to the backbone, which is backed by the entire customer base. Each node (ie: each section where bandwidth is 'shared') is connected to a fibre network which leads back to the CO. In my area (a smaller one), this then hits more fibre, picks up a few more small cities on the way to Toronto, and is then routed off Shaw's network to the rest of the internet.
You might think "well it also costs them to wire the fibre." Well they had to bloody do that anyway. That's an assumed cost.
I suppose in my area, I've got it pretty well off. It's a small city, and when I worked for the Cable co. I heard we had smaller nodes than larger centers. Basically, we have the same infrastructure as a huge city, but we're not a huge city.
I don't think any of this price hiking has anything to do with what it costs the cable co. for bandwidth. Rogers is just using this as a way (ie: excuse) to make more money. It's also a good way to gain new customers, those who don't use the net much and find ~$40/month a little pricey.
They should offer lower price points for those who don't use the net much, but anything higher than $50/month for residential service is too much. It's about $40/month for our TV, and $40/month for internet, add tax, $90/month. I'd say the cable co. is getting thier money's worth from us. They're just hikin the price because they can. What're they trying to do, turn this into ISDN?
I admit, if someone on my node were hogging bandwidth all the time, I'd want them to pay more for it. If the bandwidth is shared, though, doesn't that mean as soon as someone else starts using it, the person who's hogging just has less to hog?
-kidlinux.
You're ruining the soul of the internet with your facist rate cap!!
I think the broadband carriers are terrified about widespread deployment of wireless NAT-based connection sharing. In general, they seem to be really paranoid about anything that obscures their ability to understand how their customers are using the bandwidth (VPN for example). This latest ploy seems to revolve around extracting extra revenue from the people who are (A) unlikely to walk away and (B) potentially sharing their connections with friends & neighbors.
It could be worse. Given the freedom to do so, the ISPs will take each individual thing you can do on the Internet and establish some kind of monthly fee for doing it. I can imagine them charging for each open port, or for any protocol that you might want unblocked. It's part of their cable-TV mentality where they view the data on the Internet as theirs to sell, not merely as a distribution service. In the future, we will pay the ISP for basic connectivity, and then pay them again for the privilege of actually using it.
I guess I should have stressed flawed logic more than flawed math.
If you're dealing with a true Poisson Distribution, (ie, queuing theory), you have to assume what wait you're willing to deal with. You also assume that things are rarely at capacity, which in our case, was a correct assumption.
In this case, it's odd, as you would never assume that your users are taking up 100% of the bandwidth of their modem at the same time that every other customer is taking up 100% of their bandwidth. [Which is why there's a concept of CIR in frame relay, etc].
You also can't assume that the line to some other ISP is the main cost of business, as it's almost an order of magnitude lower than the cost of PRIs to fill it. [8 PRI per T1 was a good ratio for our users, for which we were paying over $1600/PRI, and $1400 for a T1]. If you assume that you're paying someone $10/hr, 4 work weeks would be $1600. You might be able to get by with that sort of pay for tech support, but not for system and network administrators. [Again, we have economy of scale, as you just can't get 'partial' folks, and you can add to a good system admin with a medicore one, but you don't want to just have the mediocre one, even if they are cheaper]
The larger problem is that we have someone who doesn't fully understanding the problem who thinks they know the whole story, but they don't. Quite simply, an ISP can pull in a hell of a lot more than what the poster assumed, however, they also have to pay out a hell of a lot. To make things worse, it's was a very competitive business, as you had folks who were trying to grow as fast as they could, so they could IPO, or sell out, and make a fast million. Yes, there were CLECs who had tarrifed PRIs for under $500/month, as they were making money from reciprocal charges to the ILEC. Unfortunately, the baby bells fought that, which is why ISP traffic is now exempt from those charges.
Just because you're in a tech field doesn't give you the right to make assumptions about other technical fields, no matter how similar they are. You don't see some pediatrician making claims about how easy it would be to clone people. You don't see cabbies talking about how easy it would be drive in the NASCAR circuit. Just because you work with some version posix OS doesn't mean that you're qualified to install and administer a Sun E10k, but it seems that computer folks overstep their boundries all the time. Don't even get me started about the consultants.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
I pay $20 US/month for cable modem. I get a maximum download speed of about 370 Kbytes/sec. With that you get a maximum bandwidth of 6 Gig downstream and 1 Gig upstream. Every extra 1 Gig costs an extra CDN $10.00. I say that this is a fair policy. I do use the net a lot but I rarely reach the 6 Gig limit. When I did reach it, I simply paid the difference.
instead of having three one price fits all categories why not just graduate the billing and state that you pay x dollars per gigabyte downloaded. Work it similar to a gas bill or water bill you pay a nomnal fee for the service and then a usage charge on top of that. That way the more you use the more you pay. Also with this kind of billing I certainly hope that they'll allow for servers to be run off of this service.
...most people on Slashdot would fall into the "high usage" area of ISPs' TOS agreements. What you're seeing here isn't a good representation of the general populace, but of the geeks, netaholics, and people hosting 32-player Half-Life games, etc.
It amazes me how many people are under the assumption that bandwidth is somehow free or even cheap -- it isn't!
Colocating your servers at a hosting facility, one expects to pay for bandwidth based on usage. Why should consumers be exempt from this?
mje0w!!!1!
Because these companies bray loud and long about how *fast* their services are in their advertising. Continuously.
And yet, when they get you onto their service THAT YOU'RE PAYING AT LEAST 3X DIALUP COST FOR (I can get unlimited 56k dialup for $10/month), and discover that you're actually USING IT MORE THAN A DIALUP CONNECTION (big shock there!), they then try to screw you off their service by either cutting you off, throttling your bandwidth, or threatening you with the above or legal action or both. They'll prattle endlessly about how fast their service is in their advertising...but then try to get customers that actually *use* their service for more than AOLIM and 5 emails a week (i.e. ludicrously high profit customers) off their network.
The issue here (for me, anyways) is companies lying in their advertising. If they say, loudly, UP FRONT, that there are overall usage limitations on a monthly basis for their basic service, then fine - I, the customer, know what I'm getting into.
And, btw, all you folks out there who are babbling about "the high-usage customers being supported by the low usage customers" - uh, no. You're all supporting the profit line of a company that is lying in their advertising to build up a group of users who'll *PAY* (at least!) 4X more for internet access, but won't actually *USE* 4X more.
And that, my friends, is wrong.
Given enough hydrogen, just about anything is possible.
When people install solar system on their rooftops, they usually have the option to use time-of-use metering. With this, they get paid (on sunny days) or pay back to the utility (cloudy days or when too many systems powered up :-) at a higher rate during peak use hours than off-peak hours. I'd like to see a system that works this way; if I want to download those three Mandrake ISOs at 8pm local time, I do so knowing it will cost me more or uses up my bandwidth allotment at a faster rate.
:-)
I know, that's not a perfect plan since bandwidth is not at all limited to our local area, but it ought to help a lot with the load balancing on the broadband infrastructure.
There could also be a cellular phone style plan, where you pay for your anytime/night & weekend minutes according to your expected usage, then pay per megabyte above that amount. Pay different rates for peak vs. off-peak as an added incentive to balance the load.
I prefer the first plan, as it would tend to better utilize the available bandwidth as we set up our ISO downloads for 3am.
- Leo
You don't use science to show that you're right, you use science to become right.
>Let's say you have some bad users which are using
>512kb/s continuously.
Let's say you do. 512Kb/s is 64 kilobytes per second. 86400 seconds in a day, 30 days in a month.... these users are downloading 165 gigabytes per month! Whoa!
>and one user using a total of 1000Kb/s
Wow, 324GB per month! Most cable providers I hear whining about heavy users complain that they're downloading 10 or 20 GB per month.
The reality is, virtually no heavy users are also sustained users. People don't just sit there watching multiple streaming videos and you can't blame the baby Napsters either because 324GB is like the entire recorded output of all RIAA artists put together in MP3 form.
>I don't think it is fair for people to expect everyone else
>to pay for their bandwidth.
I know what you're saying. Health insurance and food labeling should also be illegal, and rural telephone users should pay for every last inch of cable needed to connect them. It's only fair. Every road needs to be a toll road because subsidizing access through taxes isn't fair to the people without driver's licenses, and people who feel they need to be defended should buy guns, hire bodyguards and live in the basement. Heard it all before. Next....
It makes PERFECT financial sense to offer a plan that's a little more expensive, but guarantees you'll never pay for "overage" or usage fees. I never, ever use up my cell minutes each month, yet I would gladly pay twice what I do now for the knowledge that I could *never* run out of minutes if such a thing were offered. I pay 25 bucks a month for a "premium" Usenet account with a 10GB cap, so right there you have my minimum expectation of bandwidth -- even though I seldom use it. I also pay for unlimited local phone service, even though I probably place about 5 calls a month. And I would happily pay 80 bucks Canadian (actually not much more than the 50 US I'm paying now) to never be hassled again about how much data I send or receive. "All you can eat" is the American way of life, and every time it's implemented in a truly mass-market way, someone makes a mint.
In fact, I think the response to this article is much ado about nothing. Bravo Rogers.
re: price-per-bit, plus time-of-day charges
Exactly. I'd also like to see a distinction between local and long-distance. Bandwidth that stays local to the ISP doesn't cost them nearly as much.
If so-called community wireless nets are going to be successful, application protocols and usage patterns must be developed that can understand that access gets much more expensive with every additional hop.
My SMC wireless network manages to allow a 20' distance before it craps out. I'd like to see my neighbors sneaking up to stand outside the window of my living room to get a signal.
"Honest, officer; I was just trying to leach some bandwidth!"
- Leo
You don't use science to show that you're right, you use science to become right.
I don't buy Rogers cable either. I get 8 channels with Rabbit Ears and am not too interested in anything else. (not enough to warrant spending $45 a month for cable!) As far as I'm concerned Rogers is a poor ISP (from past performance (yeah they blame thier supplier, but they're the sellers)).
In my experience it's better to stick with local ISP's who can provide the web space and emails at no extra charge, then to go with the BELL's and Rogers of the world.
I spend so much time at work that sometimes I question paying for internet access at home at all but do so only because it is so cheap. If their plan is to drive any power users from using their network then the idea is perfect. Most of those who are in IT related jobs not only have other sources of high speed internet connectivity but are more likely to demand high bandwidth at home.
Not to say I am happy about it or anything..
Novus...downtown Vancouver...fiber optic service...CA$29/month, 10mbps both ways, unlimited bandwidth. 10 base T into your place, most of them are already wires. Almost all of the residential towers downtown and in false creek offer it.
BTW: Cable is 3-4mbps and 1mbps up. Right now you pay CA$39.95/month for Shaw Cable if you also have cable TV.
How many of your users cost you essentially nothing in bandwidth but keep sending you that 30 bucks a month?
My bet is, more than 10 for every one of those nasty music traders. If not, what are you still doing in business?
Finally, this article was about a Canadian ISP providing a new more expensive level of access with basically no caps; most American broadband ISP's have had bandwidth caps in place for a year or two now, and don't even offer a "premium option." So your defensive posture is kinda unwarranted here, but still curious.
When I start to get paid in USD, then bring on the conversion rate, ooo this is only $25 USD. Forget it! I get paid in Canadian $, so 40 bucks is still 40 bucks!
Look, I'm all about charging MORE for people who use it more, it only makes good business sense.
;D
However, charging on a "per-bandwidth used" basis is just plain impossible, and it leads to all kinds of problems and conflicts. It also leads to more Big Brother-type monitoring of one's connection, and I for one certainly want none of that.
It's simple: bandwidth caps, and various levels of service. If you want 200k down/200k up on demand, you should pay more than the end-user who just futzes around on Ebay and gets a few emails.
I'll gladly pay more for more bandwidth - I'm not rich by any stretch, but I know what the important things in life are!
Bell Canada's Commercial DSL (2.2Mb down, 768 Kb up) is around $400/mo. It's only guaranteed to be *operable* Mon-Fri 9-5, and even then, you're not guaranteed your whole pipe.
The only way to get guaranteed high-speed internet is to get your own T3. (Become an ISP, lay your own fibre to a few peers, etc.)
I'm glad that I'm moving out of the area and don't have to deal with them again. If I was still here, I'd switch to DSL.
The real problem is that the cost of backbone connections isn't proportional to the cost of installing, running, and developing the backbones in the first place.
Plus add in the fact that major players like AT&T don't pay backbone fees since they have enough traffic to peer with anyone.
Part of the reason the broadband market has collapsed is that real, hard bandwidth is just far too expensive. There is no good reason that an OC3 should run $50,000 a month; the telcos and providers could charge $10,000 a month for THE SAME THING and still churn a profit.
Why don't they do it? Because they'd like to see all the ISPs shut down. Then internet service becomes like phone service and you really only have one provider to choose from.
Most of the fibre in the ground across the United States (more than 50%) is dark. I.e. it isn't being used.
I believe this is one of the few cases where the government needs to step in. All fibre ought to be owned by the government, and run at cost, available to anyone. Only then would we see the TRUE promise of the internet and real, fast broadband in every home.
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
If you live in an underground concrete bunker (or set up the access point in your basement), I can see how coverage would be limited. Once you have walls and floors getting in the way, 802.11b is limited by those -- distance becomes irrelevant.
If you put an access point in a window, you should get 100 yards towards anything you can see from that window. With 4 strategically-located access points, you should be able to cover 100 yards North, South, East, and West. If you really want to hit a specific target, get a directional outdoor antenna. None of this is particularly difficult or expensive.
It just so happens that my nearest neighbors are probably beyond 802.11b range, but that's because I live in a forest. The average person in a single family suburban house can probably share with at least a few neighbors. In a high-rise apartment, hotel, or dorm, the coverage possibilities are vastly improved. The best way to provide coverage to a large building is from the outside, where you can get a direct shot to as many windows as possible.
I more-or-less pioneered 802.11b deployment at my company. Inside, we have somewhat limited coverage because of interior walls. Just as a joke, I took my laptop outside and started to continuously ping a server as I wandered through parking lots and other buildings on our campus. I was amazed to find just how much RF was leaking through the windows and how far I could go before I lost connectivity.
I believe that Roger's attempt with this is to get students and young people to curb their sharing of files via Morpheus/Kazaa.
I currently reside in a townhouse complex that houses over 300 units, most of which are shared by 2 or 3 university students. (267 of the units have cable internet). I currently am able to reach the blazing speed of 25 k/s downloads from sites that reside on my ISP... clearly I am not experiencing the internet as the high-speed vendors intend.
So what is the problem? I am sure it is students using morpheus/kazaa to transfer files. I'm sure no one will disagree with me when I say that students are most prone to file sharing habits. I'm sure some of them, as I did when I was that age, download files just for the sake of having them. When napster first started up, I downloaded some MP3's that I don't think I ever listen to, just because they were available for download.
Now this isn't an arguement against file-sharing. That's a completely different arguement. But I'm sure that any of us who are experiencing this think that these people are being poor cable-ISP-neighbours. I think a rate hike such as this would cause many of these students to re-think their file sharing habits, and to limit their use.
I for one am a big advocate of high-speed interent, but I also believe that these people are hindering the growth of the high-speed internet by making the experience less enjoyable for those around them. I think it is a good move by Rogers (and hopefully others will follow suit) to do this, because I think it will make cable internet more viable in high-use areas. I also think the biggest detractors of this move will be the ones who are being poor ISP-neighbours, and will have to limit their file sharing habits. They should take one for the team and think about someone else for a change.
max inglis
Having just discovered that a roomate had the sub7 trojan on his box "Uh, Geoff? Why have you been hammering the cablemodem for four hours? I can't play with the lag you're making..." I have a new perspective on this.
I must have shoveled out a huge amount of data. The schmucks with compromised IIS servers must be shoveling out even more. They're going to get a wakeup, when their bills come in....
LIE!
...) that rent circuits to big backbones provider are selling an OC-3, as an example, to 21 customers by saying that they are offering an OC-3 to each customer, price is lower for each one since they sell the backbone 21 times, but theses providers needs to put a kind of download/upload ratio (transfer), since they want to put the more customer they can on the same OC-3, so that the OC-3 won't be used full time by a customer.
I worked in a Telecom company, and we were offering multi-home internet service.
we were using connexion with major backbone supplier (WorldComm, AT&T and Teleglobe), and they weren't charging for bandwith. We rented a Full OC-3 and full DS-3, if we downloaded 1 Terabyte a month, or 1 gig a month, it wasn't important for them, what they wanted, it's 12 000$/months for their circuit.
And for our customer, we were selling a link, a circuit caped to 5 mbps as an example. If they were using only 2 mbps as average used bandwith on it, we were charging them the price for a 2 mbps but if they downloaded 150 gigs or 15000 gigs, the price wasn't changing, it was the same since it was caped to 5 mbps.
Others companies (like Videotron, Group Telecom, Primelink,
So it's the same for cable provider, customer are something like 128 to 256 on the same circuit, so they want to put more customer on the same circuit without having to pay for a new circuit to the backbone provider.
a byte cost nothing to transfer.. a gig is the same!
More like Broadband Retailer GLUT-tons !!!! And they wonder why broadband "isn't taking off"??? So off they go to soak the ones they think least likely to leave, i.e. those that apparently *really* use it.
If there were more competition among the carriers/providers instead of the current batch of fee hawgs, (AOL/TW/RR, DSL providers, LECS, Bells, et al.), maybe there would be more uptake.
You're in for a surprise if you think Telus will help the situation.
Telus DSL sucks. Period.
They regularly disconnect you at random times, they have a history of network problems that last weeks (yes WEEKS - for two weeks in October, their DHCP servers were down - leaving EVERYBODY with a dynamic IP address screwed) and they never admit there is a problem.
And they simply don't care about customers. When they have problems, it can take a couple of hours to reach a help desk monkey, who will blame your equipment.
Telus has no idea how to compete.
dialtone is a shared resource just like DSL and Cable. If everyone in my neighborhood picked up the phone at once, they wouldn't get dialtone.
But your local phone company allows you to make just as many local phone calls as you like and never says another word about it. Why? Phone service is a lot more mature that internet service. They are able to build up their infrastructure with a good level of confidence of what the actually use will be. Not true of internet service, may never be true.
Because it sure seems that way.
All customers are not created equal. I would probably fall in that 10% of users who eat 70% of Rogers capacity, if I was one their customers. I got my Bell Sympatico high speed connection in the first week of their ADSL offering (five years ago?): 2Mbps in, 1 Mbps out, static IP address for $68.95/month. My effective throughput varies, but is typically in the range of 1.1-1.6 Mbps in and 700-900 Kbps out, with the occasional drop out, which is WAY faster than anyone I know whose using Rogers.
You can't buy this anymore - Sympatico reduced the speed of the service and cut their price to compete with Rogers cable modem service.
I've never been tempted to move to Rogers lower (effective) speed cable modem service or to Bells 'One Meg Modem' high speed offering, even though these are lower cost. Also, I like Sympatico's enlightened attitude to connection sharing. Far from discouraging it, their web site will sell you a 4-port D-Link DSL Broadband Router for $130 (US$82)
I proposed this to my UK isp (Blueyonder) and whilst the tech guys agreed they said it'd probably never happen. But how about this:
Enforce bandwidth caps at boundary router level.
It's a simple concept, give your users a few megabits of symetric bandwidth within your isps network, and give them 1024/128 outwith it.
That way the internet will take on a far more peer-to-peer form, internal-only gnutellanets will spring up. After all who's going to download mp3s from gnutella at 2kbyte/sec or ISOs from redhat at 30kbyte/sec when they can get them dozens of times faster from an internal network!
Surely you can apply the principal of locality and assume that the majority of the data that your users want is already SOMEWHERE on your network. Why pay for dozens of OC3's when all you need is a few routers?
Personally i'd jump to an ISP that had the foresight to do something like. I guess the main counterargument would be that "average users wont set up private gnutella networks and the like" - of course they wont! But 'average' users dont cost the ISP hundreds of dollars each every month.
In principle, I agree with tiered billing, however there are some issue that need to be resolved first:
1)the article presumes the low end base cost will be 22.95. How much bandwidth Would I get for that?
2 gig a month aught to be enough for the base home user that need email, some surfing, a couple of kids doing school research, and OS and driver patches.
2)how will they meter it? the user should NOT pay for spam, DOS attacks, and the like.
thats in principle, in practice I think SPAM should be counted as part of there bandwidth allotment, once consumer begin paying for SPAM directly out of there pocket, spam will go the way of fax spam.
3)how will the tiering work? would I be cut off after I hit my limit? will I get a warning?If I exceed it will I be charged 0.02c a meg(20.00 per gig)?
Hell maybe they should just charge 5 bucks connectoin fee, the 0.02 cents a meg. The scaries thing about that is it begins to look like an electric/gas/water bill, and we know how those get taxed.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Ha! The cable companies are discovering the real value of the @Home network. Whatever you may think about @Home, the original network guys that put it together clearly knew their math. That's why they invested to install local proxies in all cities. Usenet binary downloads (a great BW hog) and high demand Web content would get serviced by the local proxy and would not require backbone BW. You could access remote news proxies in other cities but there was a download cap (256 Kb/s, if I remember correctly). Since ATT took over, my news server is located in NY. Since I am located, in the West Coast, you can imagine the effect on backbone traffic. ATT is just about the only one that can handle the load but they even had to put download caps in place (1.5 Mb/s). I can only imagine the effect on cable companies without their own private backbone. You can also figure out what will happen when Comcast completes the purchace of ATT's cable unit.
80 bucks, 110 bucks? Who cares it's only worth a coupla bucks US. And worth less and less every day!
If I sign a contract and it SAYS NO LIMIT, it's publicly STATED NO LIMIT, the commericals say the same thing.
I expect NO Limits, no download, no upload, and such. And I'll see you in court if you try to change it.
Om, nomnomnom...
I've read most of the posts on this article and one thing definitely jumps out at me: Why is everyone moving towards LIMITING users bandwidth? I thought the whole point of broadband was for people to use it. From the sound of some of these posts, I have to wonder whether some of you really *want* users to have broadband. Perhaps the root cause of the poor economics have more to do with poorly run companies than it does with the price of bandwidth. Keep in mind - by ANY (and I mean ANY) measure, the price of bandwidth has plummetted over the last 3-5 years. Trends indicate it will continue to do so... So, why do you need more money from me? If you could offer this service before (when bandwidth was higher) why can't you offer it now?
I'll simply point out a few things for people...
If a commerical says, no bandwidth cap that is what I expect. If I call them up and they say no bandwidth cap, that is what I expect. If I sign on contract and it says no bandwidth cap, that is what I expect.
If you call me up one morning and say your killing me because "I" am being a bandwidth hog, well tough shit for you. I'll see you in court and I'll sue your ass into the ground for breach of contract.
I am paying for as it says, Unlimited bandwidth, and if you can't provide it that's not my problem...you shouldn't have said you could when you started making claims like it 4 years ago.
Breach of contract is the same thing no matter where you live, wether it is in advertisement, written, or verbal it's all legal.
It's about time.
You see... it's been hypocricy from day one.
They sell you unlimited high-speed access, then start bitching when you use far more than the average amount of bandwidth. They make YOU out to be the badguy.
Now they want to jack up prices.. cool.
In reality, they should simply be charging for bandwidth used, period. You want flat rate? Use some kind of proxied service.
I pay twice that for an always on, 1/4 of the speed satellite connection.
:) Heck, you chould be paying $100/GB for expressvu high speed satellite internet (their price before they realised this is so expensive people linked to it as a joke and took it offline), so seriously, don't complain!
I'd gladly offer over $100 a month to the first high speed land based provider to offer me service in the over 128kbps range. But they won't because I live smack dab in a tri-city area of over 300,000 people (I guess having 1% of the country's population just doesn't cut it) and they don't think they can make the dough from the service.
I don't feel sorry for the cable users at all. I pay way more than you for an 8 Gb cap, service that goes out whenever it snows, and a slow as modem upload speed (since the uplink is via modem). And guess what? From what I've seen, I'm getting a great deal.
Suck it down high speed bandwidth leeches. Its about time Roger's charged you for what you're getting. You really should be paying $10 a GB like me
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Actually, has anyone noticed that bandwidth has gotten cheaper over the last 3-5 years? Go ask Level 3 if they can get the same prices for bandwidth that they did last year. They can't. If fact - they are DYING to sell bandwidth - at ANY price (almost). I just don't buy the "its too expensive" arguments. Technology gets CHEAPER as time goes on - not more expensive. While this is not a proven theory yet, I dont think I would encounter much difficulty in finding more technological examples of where that is true. Sooo...perhaps in the long run, psuedo-unlimited bandwidth CAN be a reality. By the sound of some of these posts, many of you fear that. I don't know why since 6months ago, all I saw were posts saying "GIVE ME MORE BANDWIDTH". Now /. goes the other direction. Go figure
Sympatico is doing the same thing. We've actually started a poll to vote and at least get the limits to an amount respectible. 5Gig for Sympatico with 10 bucks a gig over that is terrible. Vote here if you want: http://www.carricksolutions.com/cgi-bin/ikonboard/ ikonboard.cgi?s=3c5fe2d94d286285;act=ST;f=8;t=104
Bob
http://www.carricksolutions.com - The largest PPPoE Help Website, including EnterNet, WinPoet, MacPoet, Access Manager, RASPPPoE, & Networking
They imply that their going to measure usage but whne this actually rolls out, you'll see that it's merely flat rate pricing across several bandwidth caps. Lots of cable modem providers already do this as do DSL providers. Nice ploy to get press attention, though.
Unfortunatly Sympatico is introducing download caps for all it's connections starting at the end of this month. 5Gig a month and 10 bucks for each gig after that.
Bob
http://www.carricksolutions.com - The largest PPPoE Help Website, including EnterNet, WinPoet, MacPoet, Access Manager, RASPPPoE, & Networking
Most cable providers charge you an extra $10 per month if you don't subscribe to atleast basic cable TV. So the question to Mr Rogers is: If I pay $80 for all the bandwidth I want will you drop the $10 surcharge if I don't want your cable TV.
This is the last straw... rogers is out of my house forever. In the area I live, I sometimes wish I had dial-up because the broadband service is so slow. At least I will be guaranteed to not have to pay any extra... it wouldn't be possible with my connection speeds.
og
Rogers Communications Inc.
333 Bloor Street East
Toronto, ON M4W 1G9
(416) 935-7777
I have called John Tory in the past to complain about my cable modem service (basically, 4 months without service). I will not hesitate to call him again to let him know why I've switched providers (Sympatico DSL is still $40, and their support is *much* better). For readers outside of Canada, Rogers and Shaw are the two dominant cable companies. Recently, they swapped service areas to create 2 giant monopolies (Rogers in Ontario, Shaw in Western Canada). So they can do whatever they want, without competition to stop them.
I use Macs to up my productivity, so up yours Microsoft!
It was only a few months ago that Rogers had an ad campaign across Canada (if you're in Toronto, it's cheaper to bombard nationally than advertise locally, even if you're customers are mostly in Ontario) which generated a bit of criticism.
They implied you could d/l live, full screen, full motion MPEG-2 Video from your cablemodem connection, and followed that with a "get connected" blurb.
When confronted, they said that it was a "forward-looking" or "future enhancement" or [insert weasel words here] some other hypothetical situation they were depicting.
The ads were pulled fairly quickly (but not immediatly) and have been replaced by the "$23/mo for 5 months" promotion they now have.
Any bets that $23/mo will be the new bottom-rung cost for hispeed?
A focused group of disgruntled users can get together and hook up with cheap microwave 6megabit (Full Duplex/$800monthCAD) and 802.11b their enemy ISP into the grave. Punish the Evil Doers ;)
AC23
" ... as high as $80 a month ..."
CAD $80 = USD $52
I can see a lot of US cable/DSL subscribers wondering what the fuss is about.
Is the Bells. Yes. The previous Monopoly, that was split up. They charge maybe $800-$1600 a month for a single T1. That is crazy. They charge thousands for bandwidth.
Now. AOL/TW/Carter/Rogers ALL provider's backbones are bought from the Bells right? Would it not be the Bells' fought for charging such high rates to the companys that use them? Plus Cable/DSL companys have to make money on the side!!!
Im not defending the Cable/DSL companys, and I highly disagree with what they are doing since I know they can afford it, and just want more money from us.
I fear my ISP will do this since I transfer maybe a gig in 4 days from my server (Telocity). I think $50 is enough. I wouln't pay anymore since I have more DSL choices that provide a static IP.
Not only that but my contract doesn't say anything about bandwidth usage, and for them to try to stick that on me would be a breach of contract and they would be subject to appear in court for a settlement.
This all needs to come to an end. The Bells need to wise up, and so do the Cable/DSL companys.
--------------------------
Is this a sig?
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Rogers should concentrate on improving their infastructure and provide quality service, instead of their current policy, which seems to be: Cram as many users on the system as possible with the least amount of infrastructure, support, and service. As a Shaw highspeed customer (the other Canadian cable company), I have noticed that the differance in quality (speed, uptime, support) between my connection and friends who have Rogers is considerable.
I use Rogers@Home, and as such pay for a service in much the same way my taxes pay for the roads.
It's something that is shared.
I don't care what the service agreement says-- if you want to download 30 MP3's and a couple movies all at the same time, and don't like it when Rogers calls you up because someone else on your block has been complaining that their service is , then you should get some profesional help.
I don't know about you, but my local telephone service IS buffet-style. The US turning into a 3rd-world country? They have sold you unlimited, always-on internet for the purpose of "Downloading music" and "Playing Games" "Up to 50x faster than dialup". If they want to skimp on the bandwidth, and instead of 50x its more like 8x, thats fine by me, but rationing out something that has already been payed for is described by one word: fraud.
People in Soviet Russia, however, appear to be afflicted with amusing juxtapositions of the aforementioned situation
You whiners have sat here and watched DSL providers compete themselves into bankruptcy because no one can afford to give you the bandwidth you think you deserve for $30/month, and now you bitch because someone has capped bandwidth. Well, duh. Apparently none of you can add. No ISP can afford to buy bandwidth and then sell it at a loss. It's simple economics. The only way we'll see unlimited bandwidth is within city-wide (or county-wide) networks where the infrastructure is paid for by the taxpayer and the media content (television, music, radio, etc) comes from a head-end located on the LAN.
Expect (and deserve) bandwidth caps on anything going out onto the WAN. Or expect to pay through the nose for your Morpheus habit.
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
But when I buy 4 liters of milk, the dairy industry can't tell me how fast I'm allowed to drink it. If I pay for "unlimited internet"...
And you hit the exact problem of why the way broadband as it is marketed now is a joke - bang-on.
If you buy 4 liters of milk, you have 4 liters of milk. In terms of bandwidth, if you had to pay for what you use, you are fully entitled to what you've paid for, regardless of how fast you consume it.
But what people want or think they deserve is the whole damned cow, which is where the problem lies. Sorry, I'm here to tell you that you don't get the whole cow for $49.95.
If it were marketed such that you 1) paid a "media access" fee for the maximum data transfer capability of your connection, and then 2) paid for the data you actually transferred, then broadband sales would be level and fair.
I'll draw the parallel to electricity again. You have a 200 amp service in your house, you pay a minimum "facilities" fee for the ability of the power company to supply you with power up to that rated power consumption rate. Billing note - you haven't purchased a single kilowatt of power yet. Then, you're billed for the power you consume. The more you consume, the more your bill is.
For those who whine about "not knowing how much their bill will be" I say "deal with it". You manage for phone, electricity, food, everything that's metered. There are easy, simple utilities that can account for every byte you transmit or receive. In fact, it's easier to self-account for bandwidth useage than it is to self-account for telephone useage.
There's a distinguishment people totally miss between "unlimited internet" and "unrestricted internet". Everything has a bounds, whether you like it or not. The bitch is really with the fact that the bounds are being drawn in black and white now, rather than the nebulous weazel-words that were in old AUP's.
It always comes down to this - you want fast, unrestricted, unlimited, high quality internet 24x7, you should pay for it accordingly.
For those who want transfer costs at $0.25/GB, you're dreaming. Speaking for the last Sprint dedicated T1 pricing I had, the T1 "port fee" alone was $400/month. So, to do some math:
T1 = 1544000bps
(60 seconds per minute * 60 minutes per hour * 24 hours per day * 30 days per month * 1544000 bits per second) / 8 bits per Byte / 1024 Bytes per kB / 1024 kB per MB / 1024 MB per GB = 465.9GB of transfer per month, 100% utilization 24 x 7
$400 per month port charge / 465.9GB data transfer = $0.86 per GB.
That's the cost of just banging bits into and out of the serial port at Sprint's nearest POP - already at three times what I saw spewed in another comment.
Add local loop cost (>$100 per month usually), then add transport fees (depends on mileage, but likely >>$100 per month), your internal infrastructure costs (equipment, office space, power, maintainance, etc).
Now, figure that you will likely never, ever achieve 100% utilization on the T1 raw bit rate continually, for a typical business, perhaps figure that the most you'd utilize the span at is 50% of that on average. Take whatever cost you arrived at after adding infrastructure cost, and then double it.
Now you're getting much closer to what it really costs.
For >$900 a month, you can probably have the whole cow.
> you have to charge more for the people that
> abuse the system.
Ah...But how do you define abuse? If I am listening to a 128K radio stream from shoutcast, while playing online checkers and downloading a few 30 meg service packs and such, sharing a few mp3's both directions on a napster type service (all on a fairly regular basis) -- am I an abuser -- or just a user taking advantage of the ability to do the types of things that can be done?
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
Exactly how will charging the bandwidth hogs extra money for extra use make the bandwidth crappy for everybody? Besides, these aren't going to be "surprise bills." If you're running Morpheus 24/7 and downloading huge divx movies, then you can reasonably expect to get slapped with a fee. It should hardly be a surprise. If you're Joe Blow and you like to browse the internet a lot, it still won't affect you, since it still only takes a fraction of the bandwidth of a continuous, high-speed file download.
Is your company running tools written by ma
So when do these backbone idiots start upgrading their 100Mbps lines to GigE? Woo hoo, they just created a potential 10x user base. Costs get lower!
I used to be a heavy bandwidth user, using aprox 30-40GB/mth over a period of a couple years. I always considered that for $40/mth CDN this was a great deal for me both with the 1Mb DSL ( sympatico) and 3Mb (Rogers) i used at various times.
...I like it !
Now a days i am busy almost full-time and i just don't have the time or inclination to play on the Net as much. I had considered going to dialup; but frankly at any price, (i was offered a free unlimited dial-up from a pal in the biz) it is just to limited for most anything except sending/receiving text. (Try dialup if it's been a while, you should quickly see what i mean)
So over the past few months i have contemplated dumping my Rogers Cable because its hard to justify the expense, but i kept it up anyway because when i do want to d/l something i want it today and if i want to browse some Flash/etc laden sites i still want reasonable performance.
Up to present nothing existed in the middle ground..by that i mean with reasonable bandwidth (broadband) Say 1/2 to 1/3 of my Rogers Cable and at 1/2 to 1/3 the price. Well now it looks like it has !!
This is good news for me and i am sure will spur the other broadband providers in the area to compete with this offering
I'm one of the reasons that Rogers is going to start charging more, but I won't be using it in the summer and in the fall (when they start charging more I'll just use Bell Sympatico [assuming they haven't done the same thing]). I still agree with what Rogers is doing though.
Time and time again on this topic, people complain that 80 Canadian dollars is little more then 50 US dollars and how their high-speed access is costing them about that much. In some of those threads, there are usually a few comments about what I am about to say, but since many readers don't go too deep into the threads, I feel it's important to bring it out for all to see. If I have to be modded down as redundant, so be it, but it has to be said.
80 Canadian dollars in Canada is NOT equal to 50$ in America!
Though 80$ down south is worth about fifty bucks, we're not spending it down south. We're spending it here at home. And in Canada, prices are not 40% higher to match US prices. The purchasing power of the Canadian dollar on Canadian soil is actually about 80% that of the US dollar on it's home soil.
Also, not many Canadians that I know of are being paid in American dollars (professional athletes and entertainers aside). We take in Canadian money, and we spend Canadian money.
Finally, the cost of living is not the same in Canada and the US. Although it may be close, there is still a difference. Canada has a slightly lower cost of living, therefore wages in Canada are slightly lower. This ties back in to buying power. Many people working in Canada could be earning a significant amount more if they were working in the US, and getting paid in US dollars (after those US dollars are converted back to Canadian of course) for the same work. However, since the cost of living is higher, it makes up for that increase.
So that's it. Canadian dollars ARE worthless, but only when spent in the US.
I've been using them less than a month, and I've had enough problems that I was already considering dumping them and going with DSL. It's already costing me more than local DSL providers charge.
A price increase would be the straw that broke the camel's back.
Dark Nexus
"Sanity is calming, but madness is more interesting."
I'd feel sorry for those of you suffering this fate, but Telstra have just done a very similar thing.
Twice.
First of all there was the 3000MB "limit" (free data; you can keep going beyond 3000MB but you pay AU$0.18 per MB beyond that). Now, just over a month or so on, they've kept that in place, uncapped the speed (now making it easier for you to exceed the 3000MB limit without realising it), and increased the cost by about 20%.
Reason given? It's somehow "better value" for some customers (someone, please, tell me how charging me 20% more for the same service is better value...), running the HFC network apparently is "very expensive", and Telstra's AU$4B profit apparently wasn't big enough already.
Personally, I'd rather have kept the 512k cap - I'm mainly after always-on connectivity anyway.
To make things worse, the usage server provided to allow us to monitor and track our own usage goes down when we most need it - when we're nearing the end of the month, and are most likely to exceed our "free" allocation of data.
What do you expect from them, I mean the opinion of most leftist governments is if you can afford to pay more you should..
Where do you want to be, What are you doing to get there.
My university had a similar problem. So they just limited all the users to X MB per Y days. This solution seems to have solved the university's problem, but it affects many more than just the "10% of users who use all the bandwidth."
While at school I had to constantly keep track of how much I transfered. Even though I only browsed the web and downloaded some source every now and then I was almost always over their "reasonable" limit. So I was forced into a restrained bandwidth queue comparable to a 14.4 modem! I'm glad I'm paying for a "high-speed" connection!
Now if you start playing some only games, downloading the latest iso of insert linux distribution here or anything like that, you quickly use up your aloted transfer amount and in the case of Rogers, start paying more money.
So although I realized Rogers must cover their costs and limit the true bandwidth-hogs somehow. I hope they do a better job at it than my university. (although the ability to check your transfers such as my university does, is an absolute must if you are going to charge based on it)
The funny thing is that Bell Sympatico High Speed Edition annoying TV commerical shows people streaming video & music in real time - a whole bunch of people from different part of the world jamming togther.
I am still having a hard time figuring how to do that when my Sympatico have a cap of about 128Kbps on the upstream which would be saturated by the audio MP3 alone. Is that classified as misleading ?
Most of these TV commerical talks about downloading music & movies. If internet==web browsing, then DON'T advertise streaming real time video & audio.
One of the saving grace about Sympatico is that they are actually showing ads on their pot-hole (pun intended) for NAT box that allows you to connect multiple computers.
Er, Wah some more. No, seriously, cry me a river. $80 canadian... that's what, two burgers and a biggie fry?
Canuck jokes aside, $80/month is quite reasonable for high speed bandwidth. Consumers are asking content providers (and ISPS) to bend over and take it without any lube. My personal bandwidth costs are probably in the $500/month range. Who am I paying for? You. Why are your costs going up? Because every dammed broadband provider went under, thats why. It costs money to give every warez kiddy/napster-weenie those 150k/sec downloads they love to brag about. Where'd that money come from? Hint: It didn't. 'casual' users never bothered switching over to broadband, POTS works fine for checking your email once per week. So, the usage-ratio goes right out the window.
At current prices, DSL providers need to oversell their bandwidth about 1000:1, since the telco takes most of your bill. Cable is a little better, since they own their own lines... they can probably get away with 250:1.
If you want real broadband, go flip on your TV. It's free!... and is starting to have less ads then the internet.
--Dan
I hope Rogers do something, someday, about the amount of probes and attacks I get from zombies and script kiddies on their network. Somedays I've thought about IP-denying Rogers or all all cable modems,just on principle.
Da Blog
I love guys like this. "Yeah, I use $1000 a month worth of bandwidth, but I should be able to because I can."
And your car will probably do at least 120mph. Most cars will this day. Try to cross the country at that speed. I dare ya.
...Steve
Thanks for the heads up. I didn't notice this on their web-site. Do you have a URL?
It seemed the very lifestyle they promoted, and marketed heavily, is now costing them. The TV commercials showed people with "download rigamortis" trying to download mp3s through a phone line. Their Excite portal advertised broadband content (games , movie trailers, etc).
I am on the rogers network as a casual user (I hope) there seems to be no way to check your usage.
If bandwidth hogs are almost all P2P movie traders/downloaders and a cable company has a reasonably large network in a given city, why not encourage P2P among local users, thus diverting gigs that would have to be purchased from a backbone to a little central office router load increase?
The $80 quoted in the article, it should be noted is in Canadian dollars (it is a Canadian newspaper). $80 CAD is equivalent to $48 U.S.
Spam is the essence of evil.
....because the very first thing I'll do is sue them in court if they add even one user onto my local loop that then deprives me of bandwidth. It's none of their business how much I download or use the internet. I signed a contract for bandwidth. They either provide it or risk the consequences.
pi=sigma{n:0-infinity}[(1/16)^n][(4/(8n+1))-(2/(8n +4))-(1/ (8n+5))-(1/(8n+6))]
times like these i want Shaw back,. stupid Rogers. Well, if i'm gonna end up paying 80 bucks for being a 'bandwidth hog' i am gonna really abuse it, maybe i should mirror fileplanet or something.
I'm a hog, I admit it. I've pulled in upwards and beyond 60GB in a month before, and I'll do it again.
However, I DO agree with tiered pricing. I know a lot of people who faster access, but don't want to pay $45+/month for it, why? because they won't use it anywhere near as much as I do. They'll use it to replace their dialup, and use it... about as often to check email and maybe use it's speed to do a few other things, but no leeching like me!
I would happily pay more per month to not be hassled by Cogeco (whom sucks ass, btw) However, again, I would also want a guarentee that my service will be more reliable. As it stands right now they're not really helping me out with my connectivity problems...
Here's how I'd like to see it (since they speak of a dialup equiv. price...)
they could even ad more up, but that's what I'd like to see... PLUS a service guarentee on their part. _all_ companies fail to do that right now...
It's just Crap.
What are they defining heavy use as?
"Amazing that people would buy stuff from a company that tells them they're idiots."
All those "For Dummmies..." books out there.
Average monthly salary in Poland is about the same as fees for 768kbps, so you can imagine how hard it is for young people here to afford the Internet connection, when they need it to learn.
I'd be in heaven if I needed to pay $25 for 3Mbps, it's 10,000% performance:cost ratio increase of what I have now.
And the Internet is the main source of my knowledge, so it's also the main cost of my education.
Anyway, it's very sad how much different start people have, depanding on where they live, but I'm glad that at least some people don't have to take bank loans just to get a good Internet connection, with hope that they'll be able to pay them off later. It's a 21st century, for God's sake.
~shiny
WILL HACK FOR $$$
What the hell is so funny about it?!
~shiny
WILL HACK FOR $$$
~shiny
WILL HACK FOR $$$
Thank you for putting things into perspective. I have never been to Poland, so can hardly picture what life is like there. Was in USSR in the eighties, and if that was any indication...
If you are ever on the West Coast of the US, drop me a line. Email is the last bit of my URL at the domain name in front of it. I'd be happy to show you one way of providing bandwidth to a community.
political_news.c: warning: comparison is always true due to limited range of data type
So who is going to get stuck with paying for the bandwidth of viruses. Ummmmm..... Somehow I think that someone machines will probe my machine and well, my machine will respond. Yes it's not really any bandwidth. But why should I have to pay for someone else mistakes.
Also, what's next? Charging for e-mail bandwidth. Yes paying for spam!!!! Or how about paying for Roger fucked up network change. How many times did I get directed to their website for settings that never worked.
I am not paying for Roger to manage their company. That it...!!!!!!!
No the information was leaked to myself from two Sympatico employees. We are to be notified on February 28th by mass e-mail and postal mail.
Hence we are trying to get votes to at least get a decent limit on not 5gig a month.
Bob
http://www.carricksolutions.com - The largest PPPoE Help Website, including EnterNet, WinPoet, MacPoet, Access Manager, RASPPPoE, & Networking
not really, since the avg bandwith is definied as:
the maximum bandwith you use on your circuit without peaks.. or kinda.. I wasn't working on the marketing side, I was only a tech there =)
when we most need it - when we're nearing the end of the month,
Probably has something to do with the possibility that they realized that if they impose a limit, people will tend to try to come as close as possible to it without exceeding it. Caps can do that :). Thus, the server "goes down" so you can't edge up to the limit right at the end of the month. How convenient.
CEE5210S The signal SIGHUP was received.
I don't object to the concept of hogs paying extra. I run a small server on my Telus ADSL connected computer, but I don't generate anywhere near the traffic that the MP3 and video file hogs do. It is mostly used so I can get into my home files when I'm on the road or working.
The one beef I do have with paying by the megabit is the quantity of cracking, spam, Melissa virus and other garbage traffic coming back up my DSL line. Should I pay for some gerk in Hong Kong to attack my FTP server with 150 connection attempts in 5 seconds? Or should I be able to dictate to my ISP to block all traffic from the former Crown colony?
-AD
Can you imagine the mess if different companies were to build and were able to charge for the highway system?
Actually, I can. Roads owned by private companies would be more efficient! After all, they can't have you using the competitor's side road because Interstate Foo is jammed with traffic, so it would be in their best interests to redesign the roads more efficiently.
Toll booths may sound like a bummer, but the Road Co.'s would realize this, developing new technology to speed things up. Inventions and such would be considered in most circles to be "Progress". Go figure.
And maybe you don't like tolls. Lots of people don't. So maybe they'd start using mass transportation (also privately owned), which leads to less pollution. It all balances out in a truely free trade economy.
This'll probrobly be labeled as off-topic, but I just can't stand people thinking the government can fix problems.
Like eagles on pogo-sticks! -- Glottis
Just a heads-up to everyone...
Converting between $US and $CDN or any other currency is irrelevant. If you are in Canada, you make Canadian dollars. If you are in the US, you make US dollars.
The only people who might be using currency swaps are people who live and work on different sides of an international boarder community, or who are consultants like myself who live in Canada, but bill in $US dollars.
If a sub at Subway costs $6 in Canada, it costs $6 in the US. A sub only costs $9CDN in the US if you are on holidays and are not using your "native" currency for transactions.
My point? The comparison of service costs needs to be done more carefully. The costs of doing business are not level in all markets (employees, rent, competition, etc) and will be reflected in the price the consumer pays. So stop wasting your time arguing $25US vs $40CDN. It's irrelevant.
The Master Plan Always Fails
If you want high-speed, you should expect to pay for high speed. If you want high-volume, you should expect to pay for that volume of traffic. I pay for having convenience and choice -- that's why I've got Shaw cable Internet and Telus ADSL access at home.
... wah wah wah. (Actually, this is my situation, but I'm still not complaining.)
What's the alternative?
Fall back onto (optimally) 56Kbps dial-up? NFW! I'll never go back. I gave my 56K modem away. In the event of an utter catastrophe, I'll dig up the 14.4 from the closet.
What happens if people don't curtail their bandwidth-hogging, or there's a public outcry that stops Shaw from going through with a usage-based rate change? Simple: Shaw installs artificial throttles on bandwidth-hogs. This kind of traffic shaping adds overhead to the network, and in the end, impacts all users.
So quit your whining! @#$%^&*! I'm unemployed, ineligible for EI, taking a couple of classes at night, living off savings,
If you disagree with these caps you can see the petition here: http://www.petitiononline.com/carrick/petition.htm l and sign if you like.
Bob
- Fixed wireless folks all/mostly died recently. And high-speed 3G services are now off in the future (for non-Canadians, both Rogers and Bell are also major Canadian mobile providers). So these two ought to know just how soon they can expect competition from either front. And btw, Bell also operates ExpressVu, which competes with Rogers Cable as a satellite service. Think there's going to be any competition there either?
- Teleco's did a "race to the bottom" to get into this business, but now need to figure out how to make money at this. Figures that this would involve some price increases, especially since the equipment is now on line, and they are all under pressure to raise profits from what they have today.
- US folks that think $80/month Cdn (or $50-60US, depending on the exchange) is OK are *not thinking*; Canada has been cheaper for the last 3-4 years. What's to prevent US providers from following the lead and raising prices in the States? Can you say $90US/month? Don't think so? This is going to be just like 4-corner gas stations; when one raises the price, all will (at least until the next price war).
- I use Bell ADSL, and am quite happy with the service. BUT I live in Toronto, near a switch, so I am in optimal range for service. Still, I am very *bursty*, and wonder what will constitute "high usage"? Given that I regularly download patches (XP, RedHat, whatever), and occasionally listen to web radio, will I count as a "High User"??
- I also use VPN services from my laptop to the office; can I charge the VPN usage back to the company (if there were some way to split out this traffic)? No is the current answer, but the company partially depends now on my having VPN access over a high-speed line. If I switch back to VPN over dialup, where they have to pay the connect charges, are they going to be happy?
- Liked the "Toll Road" analogy. Really fits in here in Toronto, where a very modern Toll Road (Highway 407) was outsourced to a private company to complete (electronic transponders replace manned tollgates or even automated coin-op configurations). The original pricing was tiered by time-of-day: cheapest outside of work hours, more expensive during the core period, and most expensive during rush hour. Goal of this strategy was to encourage time-shifting for less important traffic, so that rush-hour congestion would be minimized (beginning to see the connection?). The operating company has recently announced an increase in the toll, and all but the highest rate will be *eliminated*. Ignoring all the folks that bought houses based on the previous arrangement (we're talking *lots* per normal commute here folks, not the typical $.50-1.00/booth type tolls you might be more used to seeing), think about the reverse analogy for us high-speed users. Two years from now, with a much larger user base, the High-Speed providers can simply eliminate the low and medium monthly Cable or DSL rates, and just charge the high rate to everybody! Why not - doesn't the logic just work here? :^)
So - all in all, very interesting. Yes, I will keep my service, but if I have to cut costs, it will be the Cable that goes (I am a Rogers analog user - digital cable seems to be the same wasteland with yet more variants on the same lack of content). Unless, of course, someone offers me a better bundle (e.g., Bell ADSL + VoIP for Phone + Digital TV over ADSL; or the same/equivalent from Rogers).
--AC--
Most of the 20th century meant wars or occupation for Poland (I personally know people who were prisoners of the extermination camps in Oswiecim (Auschwitz), so I've heard a lot of really terrible stories), but there were times, where we had an empire that reached from the Baltic to the Black Sea, being a very important power in Europe, not only as a military power, but also in the terms of culture and science. Those were times of the great Aztecs civilisation in America.
Living in the exact centre of Europe is nice, but being exactly between the Germany and USSR used to be very unfortunate.
Now we're part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and soon we'll join the European Union. I do hope that things will change for better, and that the 21st century will mean, unlike the 20th century, first of all peace and freedom, but also a fast economical and technological growth for Poland.
A good introduction to Polish history is the History of Poland on Encyclopedia.com and the History of Poland on Wikipedia.
You can find more general info on Encyclopedia.com, on Wikipedia and on Britannica.com. If you're interested, there are lots of links to information about Poland on Polska.pl (Polska means Poland in Polish).
Thanks, maybe when I win the Google contest I'll be around...~shiny
WILL HACK FOR $$$
As soon as technology to track and bill usage becomes more capable and less costly, users will (explicitly or implicitly) pay for:
* one-time setup fee
* monthly connection/account admin fee
* committed (guaranteed minimum) data rate fee
* burst (maximum possible) data rate fee
* monthly pre-paid gigabits fee
* additional gigabit usage fee
* tech support fee
So, people who pay more will get a higher guaranteed data rate, a higher burst rate, more gigabits, and better tech support. Likewise, people who use more bandwidth, transfer more data, or use more tech support will pay more.