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

Dream slipping away?

[Little Dave]

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?

Kudos to Rogers.

[arcade]

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.

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 .. for providing 3 OC3 links per month.. pluss service.. pluss other costs.

It seems like a rotten deal for Rogers, to me. I fully understand that they want to punish the bandwidth-pigs.

Seems sensible, but for one problem

[Rogerborg]

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?

I run an ISP and I rate cap. DEAL WITH IT.

[puzzled]

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 :-)

Re:Reality check

[Greyfox]

Back when I was working at MCI, they'd charge $1600 a month for a T1, unlimited usage and $23,000 a month for a T3, unlimited usage. Plus local loop charge for your local telco which in some cases could end up costing more than what we were charging to plug you in to the internet. (Local loop charges being what the telco was charging you for the wire from your business to our router.) That pricing plan has probably changed; it's been a few years and the internet was just starting to catch on when I was working there.

It was pretty easy math back then -- you figured 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 at $20 a month, which will net you 10,800 a month. Subtract T1 and loop charges (Probably in the neighborhood of 2 grand a month for most places) and you'd clear 8.8 grand a month from that T1. Don't forget that you have to pay your employees, the telco for all the lines going into the modem bank, etc. 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.)

Back then there were always these assholes who just got back from college and whine about how slow dialup is. They'd set up the modem to dial up and stay on line all day. That means that the other 9 people (Assuming you use my original numbers) couldn't get on that modem. These people were rare but very bad for business. Once ISPs started realizing people were doing that, they started adding AUPs saying you couldn't do that. Or disconnecting people using a variety of strategies.

Fat pipe math didn't work the same way -- our biggest resource was slots on the routers (We had a Niiiice backbone) and we were always scrambling for them. 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. Bandwidth on the backbone wasn't typically a problem, though occasionally the fact would arise that we were tranmitting several gigabytes of netnews a week and that was causing some people some concern.

Add DSL/Cable modems into the mix and it gets a lot more interesting. It's no longer a matter of a line hog just hogging one modem. You alone can easily consume your provider's entire allocation, and some people will. Most user's usage patterns is for web browsing and maybe online gaming. A small number are going to be downloading gigabytes of data a month. This later group is going to be the thorn in your side and ISPs could care less if they went away -- they're costing the ISP more than the ISP is making off them. Eliminating your negative profit users increases your profits substantially without requiring you to pay for expensive upgrades to your pipes. Most ISPs are doing this with upload/download caps and per-megabyte charges after a certain point. I haven't looked into TOS but I bet it'd be easy enough to drop your heavy users into second-class citizen status after a few hundred megabytes every month.

Why??? P2P???

[JohnDenver]

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.