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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?"
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.
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.
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 $$$
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...
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.
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'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".
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
$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
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 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 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.
What happens when Fred round the corner plus all the people in his house start leeching so much that they use all the bandwidth on your community fat pipe? Do you:
a) change him a higher monthly fee because he is using more bandwidth than Jim?
b) bandwidth limit Fred so that when he starts leeching his transfers get slower and slower to the point where he would be better off using a modem?
c) cut him off?
d) none of the above because, lets face it, he has a right to use all the bandwidth. doesn't he?
--dan
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
See my earlier post. Funny thing... Paul Allen (partorfull owner of Charter), promised to do whatever it takes to defeat AFN. ROTFL. I have seen two or three outages in a year and a half. I have seen people go to Charter, and come back crying. Sincerely wish people had more options, as it would help squash the Charters out there.
political_news.c: warning: comparison is always true due to limited range of data type
$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.
... is only a matter of time. (And it makes sense, too.)
- Tal Cohen
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 have a good idea what a bandwidth pig uses hereabouts .. in British Columbia (just a couple miles north of your American border, BTW) good broadband currently costs about $40/month and that's uncapped - I regularly get about three T1 worth of bandwidth on demand. One member of my household was pulling in a GB per day in just mp3's ..
;O)
Shaw Cable (AKA Rogers Cable in beautiful British Columbia) sent us a friendly little note and several 'urgent' phone messages regarding "Excessive Use," then directed us to a new TOS posted for all to see.
Apparently we are entitled to 8GB download per month AND up to 2 GB upload.
That's a pretty fair distance from our 75+ GB down and 10+ GB upload, eh.
Now they're inspecting us closely, and we can't afford to lose the provider since DSL isn't coming to the area until later this year. Soon enough, though, for us Canucks are a crafty breed
Hope that helps.
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*
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 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
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.
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.
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, 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.
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
THERE IS NO DATA. THERE IS O
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?
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.
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)!
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.
Because the housewife will get AOL for $20/mo.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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
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?
Agreed. I've been trying to get a proper rogers connection since this past May. It goes down give or take every night and has been out the last week and a half straight. They've identified a problem, in fact they did that in June, I've escalated to every level they have, but nothing gets done.
They can't be serious can they? Is this a joke?
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.
Someone with nothing better to do than download megabyte after megabyte of porn, music, warez... Someone who apparently has no life outside their computer and is selfish enough to take bandwidth away from everyone else so they can have a good wank over Britinny Spears videos.
It should be pretty self-obvious what a bandwidth hog is...and its precise definition must be based on how wide a given pipe is. On cable, you are sharing the same pipe with many others. What you take is bandwidth not available to others who are also paying for the service (and perhaps not getting what they expected because a bandwidth hog is taking it from them).
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
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.
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
- 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
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
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!
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.
I am sure that people WILL know how much they are going to pay. The tiers will be based on bandwidth, not data transfer. Those are two different things entirely. The pricing structure will probably be similar to DSL pricing...you pay $x for 512kbps, $y for 1024kbps, etc. Of course, that doesn't mean they won't follow Videotron's lead and also start putting a cap on data transfer, but from the sound of the article, it seems like they are just capping bandwidth for right now.
Many cable companies in the U.S. are moving to tiered pricing structures. Most of them keep prices reasonable, comparable to similar DSL rates, but I have to wonder if they will guarantee those transfer rates like most DSL companies do. I am sure if customers are paying premium prices for 1.5mbps, and only getting 500kbps or so during half the day, they are going to become rather unhappy rather quickly.
DennyK
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.
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.
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?
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)
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.
Not to mention that we can assume that's $80 in Canadian dollars, since the article is bylined Toronto and appears in the online version of a Canadian daily. That $80 would work out to $50 in US dollars. About what I pay for AOL/TW's RoadRunner service right now.
I do not have a signature
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.
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.
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....
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
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.
Gee, thats logical. More bandwidth for you. But if you actually try to USE that bandwidth, it means you'll have to pay double, just like they do. Let's try to keep the pretension to a minumum, eh?
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
Rogers Communications Inc.
333 Bloor Street East
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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?
" ... 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.
Then they're not being consistent. I've done WAY over 3GB upload this month already, and probably similar for the past 6 months.
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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!
Ah...Mod this guy up -- When I signed up for broadband it was them telling me I could now stream video, multimedia, audio...etc...It was not them telling me that they would prefer I not use their service to it's capability. Bottom line -- the cable companies are saying "Come use our service it is MUCH better than dial up" and then on the other hand they are saying -- "we will be OK as long as our users patterns are the same they were when they were dialed up. As soon as they start taking advantage of the wider pipe then we are in trouble".
In other words they say if your browsing patterns are to open 3 web pages, download a 2 meg file, and Email and then turn off the computer -- it may take you 15 minutes....Now you can do it all in 3 minutes. What they didnt count on was you would still be sitting down and downloading files, streaming video, and playing online games for the next few hours.
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
> 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.
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.
Personally I tend to believe that it's the tech support that's stupid, and they don't even know enough to tell whether it's the stupid customer or themselves. During the recent Excite -> AT&T fiasco, my connection was a week slower to come back up than the rest of my city, and you should have heard the bullshit that came out of their mouths.
:)
Let's put it this way: I will never ever waste my time with AT&T's "live Internet chat" customer support again. It may be "live", but only so much as you can call somebody hitting C-x, C-v over and over again "live"
At least I got double credits for my downtime, so I guess they learned their lesson in that respect. That was half a month free for me!
when has a corp EVER given money back ? It won't happen that way, some folks bill will get jacked and everyone elses will stay the same. Then next year they'll jack everyone again to pay for infrastructure expansion so they can gear up for video on demand....which of course is the highest bandwidth user I can think of. While there may be some valid point to this, the cable company should have thought of this before advertising unlimited service and always on connections...
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Exactly how will charging the bandwidth hogs extra money for extra use make the bandwidth crappy for everybody?
Speaking of logic, that phrase was or'ed, notg anded (||, ! &&). NOT charging the hogs extra (but capping the shared uplink to control costs) results in crappy bandwidth for all.
The surprise comes in when Joe Blow catches the latest Outlook virus (or Code Red 4) and ends up unwittingly hosting a warez site. Or someone decides to have 'a little fun' and continuously pings his IP 24/7 for a month (with -s 1500 for good measure). Or he grabs a 'few' mp3s one month (just below the threshold), and grabs 'one or two' more the next. Or, the kid comes home from college for a week or two and feeds his gnutella habit while there (naturally figuring it's free bandwidth).
Consider that for Joe blow, the notice about bandwidth surcharges might read "An additional fee up to $40 will be charged to any customer using more than hsjdfjk per month.
It's better that the bandwidth be rate limited to reflect the fee paid.
What I was talking about was burstable rate limiting with fair queueing. That is the key point you are missing. Imagine a simple network with a total upstream of 80k. There are 2 downstream users (A and B), each assigned 40k. As long as B is not using his 40k, A gets 80k (bursts 40 over). The moment B tries to use his 40k, he gets it and A drops back to 40k (but not less than 40k). That's what makes the queueing fair.
In other words, consider that even if everyone in your neighborhood is downloading like mad, you are guaranteed your comitted rate on demand. If you're the only person active online, you get the neighborhood's entire bandwidth allocation.
Without the fair queueing and burstability, you can easily end up not even getting the your fair portion of the upstream (total upstream/ number of users) and without a comitted rate (a true comitted rate is bound by contract), your ISP can oversubscribe the upstream until customers start going back to dialup.
So that they have the ABILITY to enforce it, if it becomes necessary. Most broadband ISPs are like that WRT subscriber agreements -- they have a whole laundry list of no-no's which are rarely enforced. This is because most people who run "illegal" servers keep a pretty low profile and don't screw things up for the other users and the admins. As long as you don't piss off the guy who administers your local loop (by screwing things up and creating extra work for him), he's probably not going to care what you are doing with your connection. OTOH, if he gets paged at 3AM on a Saturday night to clean up the mess you made, he's perfectly justified in LARTing you in to oblivion.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
Alas, I must agree. They're not likely to do that even though it would allow them to stop policing servers or caring how many machines you have behind that firewall, etc.