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

Shaw's a b*tch too

[Glonk]

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. :)

Re:Shaw's a b*tch too

[Monte]

The license agreement I signed clearly stated there's no bandwidth restrictions for home users, but you can't run servers.

And I'll lay money that somewhere in that agreement is a clause that states they can change the terms any time they feel like it. That's how they'll get you.

You should feel lucky that they called you - they were being nice. If they can get some voluntary compliance from the bandwidth hogs they won't have to take more drastic measures.

But if the rest of the hogs are as unrepentant as you it's a safe bet that they'll be implementing either bandwidth caps or pay-as-you-go as the solution.

I think fixed-rate big bandwidth will be extinct within three years. It doesn't make sense to let 10% of your customers use 50% of your resources.

Re:Shaw's a b*tch too

[Tuzanor]

Actually, the cable companies don't compete at all. As far as cable internet goes, you get it from your local cable company, and each home only has one (generally by area). So you are EITHER on Rogers, Shaw, Cogeco, or whatever. The main Competition for rogers is Sympatico or your ma and pa ISP with DSL...

Re:Shaw's a b*tch too

[Erik Hensema]

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

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

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

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

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

Diversification in fees is GOOD!

[zby]

Why everybody here seems to be so opposed
to diversification in fees based on used
resources?
The bandwidth is not a unlimited resource.

Reality check

[thunderbee]

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

Anyone notice a problem here?

Well, there is. The bandwith sold to you is shared. If you use all of it, constantly, then others are deprived of what they paid for. So the upstream provider bills you more to accomodate for your dedicated bandwidth needs.

I'm amazed most broadband operators made it so far selling bandwith so cheap. As a matter of fact most didn't, and bought the farm. Funny how no-one seems to notice.

Re:Reality check

[MikeFM]

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

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

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

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

Re:Reality check

[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.

Re:Reality check

[sjames]

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

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

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

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

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

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

Re:Reality check

[Fly]

Time Warner cable has a someone better (IMO) strategy. Because network traffic is typically bursty, they didnt'/don't charge for extra megabytes. However, when the local network is saturated, they throttle the connections (to 128Mbps dl) of everyone on that subnet so no one person hogs all the bandwidth. I don't think I've ever seen this happen so I don't know how it would feel.

It seems like my provider is interested in dealing with those who abuse our shared resource (which expands beyond the local subnet, despite what the DLS commercials claim) to keep the overal QoS high for the rest of the users.

I wouldn't be surprised if I download a gigabyte or more per month. I also occasionally work from home, (but please don't tell Time Warner, they'll want to double my fees for a "business" connection). I don't think that I cause a problem for the network; one of my neighbors also works with me, and he provides just as much traffic as I do, but I've not noticed degraded performace locally for years (except when my modem needed to be replaced.)

I much prefer this method of controlling usage. Bandwidth needs have been increasing. Downloads keep getting bigger. As long as we have competition, service should improve. Those who want to consume the more of the service while degrading the QoS for other should expect to pay a bit more.

"[The] law is meant not for a righteous person but for the lawless and unruly[.]" 1 Tim 1:9
If you don't like the above because Paul said it, here's a similar theme: As always, with the power of broadband come responsibility. Are you using yours responsibly?

Re:Reality check

[scoove]

Run their traffic through a router with fair queueing,QOS, and rate limiting. Offer the customer a fair committed rate burstable to 1Mb and make a fair profit.

Ah... you sound like me on a marketing hype day (before my engineers threaten to shoot me). Besides being horribly expensive to implement, I'm not aware that this has ever been proven to scale to the extent of a broadband consumer net has to.

In fact, whenever I've crunched the numbers, it gets rather difficult to absorb the new costs associated with the complexity you've introduced in measuring, mediating, billing, and supporting this type of network.

Billing by measured use and quality/class of service puts you into a billing system typically pushed by folks like Kenan, Saville, etc. You're going to funnel millions of records daily, have significant storage and processing costs, etc. Having purchased a system like this for a smaller international telco, we scraped and got a junior system that ran $12 million including the hardware, not including annual license and support fees (several million annually, which usually tiers with customer base).

Add that to the general nature of customer telecom bill complexity aversion (people like predictable bills = flat rate models) with a highly dynamic and unpredictable product use model and you'll see why we're in trouble.

Really, the reason broadband service came out at around $30/month was due to marketing analysis - that's what people will pay and you'll get decent market penetration. Look at the data showing that as DSL providers move up to $45/mo or above, they start hiking churn up fast and lose customers (not to mention scare off new ones). Consider that your $30/month is a hold over from the dot-com era when it didn't matter if we made money; what did matter is how much of the market we acquired (then at month 31, a miracle happens which we can't explain and we get a hockey stick leap in earnings).

Unfortunately, with consumer aversion to measured billing, I think the only solution is either crippled service or hiked prices. We do both - limit the low cost service and provide the full service at a higher price - very comperable to the airline pricing model. Want first class? $$$ Want the lowest price and no guarantee you're getting on? Fly standby.

*scoove*

Re:Reality check

[MikeFM]

I also know that certain companies that make souch equipment make a nice profit. I have no problem with them making that profit but I'd rather that my ISP spend some of their money to buy into some of their equipment companies enough to exert enough control to lower the equipment costs or better yet pay for research that'd make producing the equipment cheaper. I know some of these companies already do this but I don't know of any that are DSL/cable providers. Anyway my point is there are ways by which such costs can be kept low.

As far as workers go I'd say that right now there is a lot of very talented people that are unemployed. A company could hire these workers cheap right now. That also should help push down the cost. I'm sure you could save some money by reducing overinflated management salaries too.

Sure there are other costs. I'm not suggesting they make the bandwidth free. I'm only suggesting that there is a limit to what customers will pay and raising prices above that is suicide. Better to cut costs where possible first.

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?

Re:Dream slipping away?

[jbrw]

"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. "

I thought broadband prices are coming down in the UK? With the recent introduction of the "wires-only" ADSL service, and the lower wholesale charge for this service, compared to the initial engineer-comes-to-visit deal, there are some good deals coming out.

Indeed, Pipex has just announced a sub-£30 (inc VAT) home service. For a little bit extra, there are better deals out there for the geekier potential broadband customer...

The Daily Telegraph is also reporting that BT will announce, later this week, that the wholesale cost of ADSL will be cut by 50% as ADSL take-up rates in the UK are well below other areas of Europe.

Re:Dream slipping away?

[El Camino SS]

Will widescale, high bandwidth access ever become the norm, rather than the exception?

Wow, that's like people asking the telephone company in 1920s if they will ever have a time that they won't have to share a party line with another family.

OF Course it will. If there is anything that can be said in economics about any technology, it always operates at a 'discounted future.' Meaning that price will drop, and availability will increase. This is a given, unless free markets are not at play.

This is basic economics. I know that many of you believe that there is some major problem with the fact that your cable modem costs might be going up, but the truth of the matter is that the bandwidth is a commodity... and a commodity pricing scheme is different than a service pricing scheme. Commodity is based on cost, delivery, and infrastructure, and little else. Its cheaper because it is almost fully interchangeable. So in other words, you are costing them more... therefore they are forced to charge you more. They have run themselves into the ground because there is a non-commodity pricing scheme with a commodity.

Also, Nimda and Code Red would have been shut down quicker if they realized that a huge bill was coming out of that mess.

Conversely, it should be that if you use less than anyone else, then you should also get the opportunity to save money... that is where this scheme is jacked. We all know that will never happen.

Although it is not a perfect system, think about how much cable modems would cost you in ISDN lines.

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.

Re:Kudos to Rogers.

[fwc]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Re:Kudos to Rogers.

[arcade]

I would like to make an analogy, but it may come out a bit strange, as I'm not sure wheter I know enough english.

If you go to a tivoli/amusement park/theme park/whatever you call it in english, and there are lots of different attractions, say, big dippers, merry go rounds, and so forth. There are only a limited amount of seats in each of'em.

You pay for an all-day-card, to be able to use all the attractions as much as you want.

Now, can you use all the attractions as much as you want? Nope. But you've payed for it!!! Yeah, but you see.. lots of others has payed for it too. So, everybody is queuing up. For the greatest attractions, you may have to stay in a queue for as long as 30-45 minutes.

When you've taken one ride, you have to return to the back of the line, in order to take another ride.

Now, what would you do if the ISP that sold you a line with a 'peak connection' of 500kb/s, and you never was able to get it above 50kb/s, due to congestion? You would complain? Right! So would I! Thus, one has to find an alternative solution, as people expect the Internet to be a tiny bit faster than a theme park. :-)

An 'unlimited' internet connection is _not_ the same as an all-day-pass at a theme park. Those that think so has clearly misunderstood something.

Re:Kudos to Rogers.

[someone247356]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

.

Devil's advocate

[tunah]

I am frustrated by these things too. Our ISP just made us change our ADSL setup to help them "track us better" and "cut down on the 20% of the users generating 80% of the traffic". The best bit is that our connection is capped at 128k! (not K).

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.

Re:Devil's advocate

[Jeremi]

At that point, the ISP can either: [several non-optimal remedies presented]

Or, they could do the right thing, and just reprogram their routers to dynamically bandwidth-limit the 'hogs' whenever there is bandwidth contention. Doing this would avoid pissing off their customers, save them lots of time and money that would have otherwise been spent harrassing their clientele, and solve the hogging problem.

... but oh yeah, they're a cable company. They couldn't come up with a technical solution if you wrapped it around a gold brick and beat them with it.

Re:Devil's advocate

[dirk]

At that point, the ISP can either: [several non-optimal remedies presented]

Or, they could do the right thing, and just reprogram their routers to dynamically bandwidth-limit the 'hogs' whenever there is bandwidth contention. Doing this would avoid pissing off their customers, save them lots of time and money that would have otherwise been spent harrassing their clientele, and solve the hogging problem.

... but oh yeah, they're a cable company. They couldn't come up with a technical solution if you wrapped it around a gold brick and beat them with it.

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.

I find it amazing that a few weeks ago there was the article about another ISP raising prices unilaterally and everyone was in arms about it. Now Rogers try to just raise it on the people that use the bandwidth and everyone is up in arms about it. Someone has to pay for the bandwidth used by hogs, and these are the two options. ISPs aren't giving away bandwidths, they are trying to make money.

What's the problem here?

[btempleton]

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?

$80 is a lot for broadband?

[InsaneCreator]

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".

So What's the Problem?

[Crispin Cowan]

So what, excactly, is the problem with heavy users paying their own way?

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?

Hmmm ... perhaps, to get low-latency access to the small(er) blobs of data you want to access?

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

Conversion...

[MiTEG]

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.

Sympatico too, allegedly

[Malc]

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.

A couple of points.

[farrellj]

First, and that $80 is Canadian, which is about $50 US.

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 ...but this potentially could be a big problem.

ttyl
Farrell

Re:Bandwidth Levels?

[Herr_Nightingale]

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 ..
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 ;O)

Hope that helps.

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?

Importance of Competition

[malahoo]

$80 Canadian converts to $50.07 US

That's not important: maybe we're just getting shafted.

even at 1/4 the utilization and 1/4 the price for bandwidth, the ISP is still losing money on these customers

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.

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 :-)

dont like it? do something about it.

[Lumpy]

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!

Actually it's really not their use...

[Greyfox]

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.

Boils down to what limit is

[GodSpiral]

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?

Help customers make better use of the system...

[dpilot]

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.

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.

Stop downloading stuff you don't need.

[Dog and Pony]

Simple as that. I know lots of people that download stuff more or less 24/7 "just because they can" or even more stupid "because they pay for it anyways".

I use my broadband to:

a. be online all the time, so I don't need to dial up a slow modem pool when I need to check some facts, plus it is nice to get email at once and so forth.

b. download what I do need which really isn't much.

I would really welcome a policy on my provider where you pay for what you use, same as the providers themselves do. That would be fair. Now I probably pay way too much, to finance someone elses compulsive downloading.

You don't need, you probably don't even want 90% of of those "impressive" 120 GB anyways. Do you use it?

I thought so.

Re:Stop downloading stuff you don't need.

[Deagol]

sI'd counter that it's the corps that cause the world to suck. If I could get decent up- *and* down-stream speeds, I'd behave in a heartbeat.

If I weren't moving soo, I'd switch *back* to Qwest (ugh!) and get slower DSL so I could get *faster* upstream.

Right now I get 1.5mbps down and 128kbps up. If I had the option of paying the same rate, but getting, say 512k/512k, I'd do it in a heartbeat. You how shitty the latency is on a SSH session when it's sharing a 128k upstream pipe with a data upload? It's close to unusable!

I know that switches and routers *can* custom-fit each connection, so if I want 512/512 and Foo wants 128/3.0mb, it can happen. The problem is that they don't offer it and thereby cripple us otherwise non abusive subscribers.

I stand by my protest.

Re:Stop downloading stuff you don't need.

[cburley]

I'd counter that it's the corps that cause the world to suck.

No, he's right, it's people like you. Corporations are, fundamentally, groups of people, and the more they are like you, the worse they behave.

If I could get decent up- *and* down-stream speeds, I'd behave in a heartbeat.

Or, if you were a decent, good, or moral person, you'd behave.

Instead, you willfully and intentionally choose to directly disrupt your neighbor's Broadband access by sucking up all the shared resources they, as well as you, pay for under an arrangement that assumes (without being able to easily enforce it) that such abuse will be rare.

Further, you willfully and intentionally choose to indirectly increase the costs borne by all your fellow users of the service -- even those not directly impacted by your bandwidth-burning escapades -- in a quixotic attempt to change the practices of a corporation.

You could just terminate your service. Or just use what you need, not abuse it and your neighbors, and find another approach to changing the global corporate ethic.

The problem is that they don't offer it and thereby cripple us otherwise non abusive subscribers.

But you're an abusive subscriber.

As a fellow Broadband user, be assured that you are acting as my enemy.

I stand by my protest.

It's not a protest. It's a petulant, childish, act of vandalism.

It's nothing more ethical nor moral than expressing your frustration at a lack of proper environmental oversight by the US Government by burning large tracts of old-growth forests.

Of course, I can understand how you came to believe you were acting appropriately. Techno-nerds seem prone to believe their ability to do something technically "elite" trumps any straightforward moral code that would rebuke their behavior. That's why, for example, people can't make moral distinctions between a DDOS attack and a "slashdotting" -- they look only at the effects, ignoring the motives of those contacting the server.

So you probably think you're some kind of technically elite uberhacker and therefore privileged to attack your neighbors in ways they cannot possibly defend themselves against, short of disconnecting themselves from Broadband in favor of some other less-featureful and/or more-expensive solution (something you yourself plainly refuse to do, so you decide to punish others for your own decisions, and blame "The Man").

Now, if one or two of your neighbors decided to suck up all your fresh air by setting fires all around your house, maybe then you'd begin to rise above your own moral idiocy and see such behavior as generally immoral -- because you won't be quite so impressed with the technology at that point?

In short: when you were taught to share with your neighbors in kindergarten, that wasn't meant to include sharing your misery. Grow up and start behaving like a responsible adult. I'm sure you have it in you somewhere.

There is no problem

[FreeUser]

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?

Some flawed math.

[oneiros27]

As someone who's worked at a mid-sized ISP, I can tell you that your math is flawed in many ways:

• 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]

Yes, but that's not his point...

[sterno]

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.

Let them, BUT.....

[Wintermancer]

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.

Reality Check

[Guppy06]

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?

Re:They'll lose customers

[arkanes]

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?