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?"

Comments

Reality check

[thunderbee]

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.

Re:Reality check

[MikeFM]

I don't mind if ISP's offer a cheaper service for less so that those that don't need as much bandwidth don't have to pay as much but I really think ~ US$40/month for bandwidth that you aren't allowed to run servers on is about as much as I'd pay. I'd pay $80 if the connection was fast both ways and I was allowed to run small home web sites.

Maybe if these companies are hurting for money so much they could take some of the cash they are wasting on cheesy commercials and put it towards reducing the cost of bandwidth. Sure this stuff costs a lot to install but there is a crap load of fiber already installed and just left unused because the companies don't feel the need to switch it on yet. They sit there and make excuses about how they have limited bandwidth and that is why they have to charge so much while at the same time leaving a lot of their capacity left untouched. Sprint for one has installed tons of fiber all over the place and still isn't using it for much of anything. Maybe if your ISP's bandwidth costs are so high they should try complaining to their provider rather than squeezing their customers.

Another solution is to offer proxy servers and make them part of the default install. Include file sharing software that includes a local cache server. I'd imagine those two steps would greatly reduce the ISP's upstream bandwidth usage because a good number of users use the same websites and look for the same files. I'm greatly surprised more ISP's don't offer something like a regional BBS-like interface that lets users chat and trade files with others locally. The cost of an extra webserver in exchange for the saved bandwidth would seem a good bargain to me.

Either way please get rid of those crappy commercials. I'd pay an extra $5/month just to be able not to see those. :)

Re:Reality check

[sjames]

Has anyone noticed how bandwith cost less to the end-user as to the upstream provider?

That is true, and is a problem for them. They shouldn't offer allways on 1Mbps for $40 if they can't afford it. I don't get to sell you my car for $50 and then complain and bill you the difference when you actually accept my offer (bait and switch anyone?).

What they need to do is grow up (become a REAL bandwidth provider) and make a fair offer. Run their traffic through a router with fair queueing,QOS, and rate limiting. Offer the customer a fair committed rate burstable to 1Mb and make a fair profit.

Basically, they'd be fine if they set up a rate limiter for each customer, and set them to fairly share any uncommitted bandwidth up to their upstream cap (set at a level that meets their commitments + a bit for bursting and allows them a profit). It's fairly easy to arrange for unused customer bandwidth to be 'shared aropund' until demanded to meet the committed rate.

They should then offer a higher committed rate to customers for a higher monthly fee for those who need/want it.

Customers need to have a bill that they can count on, not $40 + god knows how much depending on the alignment of the planets.

Re:Kudos to Rogers.

[fwc]

I agree with arcade's general statement. In our neck of the woods, an OC3 costs roughly $35,000 a month if we dig and dig and don't care the quality we get. More realistically, your looking at $50,000 or so a month for a good solid working OC3.

Let's say you have some bad users which are using 512kb/s continuously. For sake of argument, we'll say we're charging them $50/month. An OC3 is 155mb/s, so we should be able to support 300 of the 1/2mb/s (512kb/s) users. 300x50 is only 15,000. So we're loosing 20,000 a month if we buy the cheap OC3's, just to support those bandwidth hogs. And that is just on the bandwidth.

The only way this is going to work long-term is if you can either deliver very large bandwidth quantities around for a lot less than the backbone providers are charging now, or people are going to have to learn to live with some sort of tiered pricing based on bits.

The problem is that the ratio between average usage for an average user and the peak usage for an average user is all screwed up on the broadband products. A typical home user will likely average under 1-2kb/s over the course of a month. A gigabyte of data is only about 3kb/s when spread out over a month. How many "typical" users download a gigabyte/month? You can support a LOT of users on an OC3 if all they transfer is a GB/month or so. Now, it's bursty, so you might take your GB in 1Mb/s bursts, but you still take the same amount.

The problem is that now you've provided customers with the ability to burst to their 1Mb/s, some people will insist on taking the full pipe 24x7. That is 1000kb/s versus the 3kb/s average, or 333 times as much as the average.

Let's go a little further. Lets say that only 1 in 100 use it 24x7 and the rest are pretty much average at 3kb/s typ. Now you've got a hundred users using a total of 300Kb/s (please ignore the off-by-one bug), and one user using a total of 1000Kb/s. Do you take the 1300 total and divide it out by 100 users and charge everyone for 13kb/s of bandwidth on average or do you charge most people for 3kb/s of bandwidth and the abuser for 1000kb/s of bandwidth? Look at the figure difference. If you average it, it costs the 100 people over four times as much as if they charged the bandwidth hog separately.

In my opinion, the only viable option is to figure out how to separate out those users who are using more than their share of bandwidth and make sure they pay for it. I know people will flame me for this, but I don't think it is fair for people to expect everyone else to pay for their bandwidth. How would you feel if you paid a fixed monthly fee for gasoline no matter how much you used, and the price was calculated by taking the total fuel used and dividing it by the number of customers. The poor elderly couple who drives their car to the store a couple of miles round trip once a week would pay exactly the same as the semi truck driver who drives thousands of miles in a month. Does this sound fair? I have a severe problem with people who think it's their right to take as much as they can for as little as they can. And, I think that a lot of the people who are griping about this fall squarely into that category.

Re:Shaw's a b*tch too

[Erik Hensema]

I don't know about your provider's AUP (acceptable use policy), but mine says I cannot use all of my bandwidth all the time.

Why not? Simple. While I've got a 3.4 mbit cableconnection at my house for about EUR 45,- a month, my ISP (Essent@Home) has allocated about 100 kbit/user for external bandwidth.

Therefore, we're only permitted to have bursty traffic. Downloading an ISO or two a week is no problem, just don't do it all the time.

When you want a line without these restrictions, get a peering contract at a major ISP. Surely it'll cost you EUR 5000,- a month, but that's quite reasonable for an unlimited (apart from the technical limit of, say, 1 mbit) line.

Fining heavy users seems quite reasonable to me. They take away bandwidth from their neighbours, so they pay more.

Stop downloading stuff you don't need.

[Dog and Pony]

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.

Re:Kudos to Rogers.

[someone247356]

I think, like many other posters here, that the problem isn't heavy users paying more, it's Cable Co.'s and other broadband ISP's creative use of the English language.

Calling people who actually use the bandwidth that the ISP sold them "bandwidth-hogs" is just as bad as calling people who watch DVD's on their linux box "pirates".

If ISP's can't afford to sell "unlimited" usage then don't advertise it. If someone sells me an unlimited, always-on connection, that's what I expect. In my state I pay for unlimited local calls, the PUC would have ma bell by the short hairs if she threatened to turn off my phone because my daughter spends all day talking to her girl-friends, and my son dials up to the university all night (I use DSL myself).

Eventually it'll have to get settled in the courts. (Sigh, more work for the lawyers) Companies shouldn't be allowed to change terms without notice, heck they shouldn't even be able to change terms with out at least 30 days notice.

They shouldn't be able to advertise unlimited access when what they mean is "very-fast downloads, once in a while, of very small files, assuming you don't want to do it when your neighbor does" connection.

In the end I think this silliness will continue until network access gets regulated like the Public Utility that it is. Internet dialtone, the moving around of raw bits, the assignment of IP addresses, landlines and wireless should be controlled by a non-profit gov. entity.

Can you imagine the mess if different companies were to build and were able to charge for the highway system? We'll charge you a flat rate with unlimited access to the road network whenever you want, except of course if you happen to drive anything bigger than a VW Beetle more than once a day. I mean the nerve of those roadway hogs, people actually using the road networks, building roads cost money, if you want to use the roads more often then you should have to pay more.

Of course using the highway to say go from your town to visit your aunt in another state, don't even get me started, there is the company that owns your local roads, then they have to lease access for you through the company(ies) that own the highways between your state and your aunts state, then of course there's the other company that owns the local roads in your aunts town. Access to the highway costs big money, since most people leave the state only a couple of times I year, why should they subsidise your visits to your girlfriend in the next state every weekend? I mean the nerve of these "road-hogs"! ;)

Sounds kinda silly? Well it's where we are at with internet networks. Until network access get to be more like roadway access we can probably expect this silliness to continue.

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