Rogers Cable Plans Fees to Curb Bandwith Hogs

jeremyd writes: "Major Canadian broadband provider plans to charge heavy users higher monthly access fees as high as $80 per month. Read the article here from the Globe and Mail. If only the world would protest. What's the point of high speed broadband access if you can't use it to full potential without having to start selling organs to pay the bills?"

Comments

Reality check

[thunderbee]

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

Anyone notice a problem here?

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

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

Re:Reality check

[MikeFM]

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

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

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

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

Re:Reality check

[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.

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.

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.

[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.

.

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: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?

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

[puzzled]

I run a small regional WISP and I rate cap my residential customers to 256kbits/sec.

We charge $30/mo for the port, no local loop since its wireless, and equipment rental is $15/mo. Those are the numbers you need to hit to get decent market penetration.

What does 256k cost the ISP?

A T1 is about $1100/mo when you're small. If you get big enough to start buying DS3s you'll cut that to about $600/mo. 256k is one sixth of a T1 so the monthly cost for 256k dedicated bandwidth is about $200 to the little guy and $100 for a large player.

I know some of you Generation Next play well in groups but suck at math. $200 cost - $30 revenue is me subsidizing a full time music trader to the tune of $170/mo.

My rate shaping at the moment is a solid 256k symetric cap 24/7. I'm working on some method of providing nasty residential service during the day (128k - 192k cap?) to keep my high margin business customers happy, then starting around 7:00 PM opening it up.

After the business customer base is gone I don't care if the T1s run 100% and individuals are using the full 5.5m/sec their wireless links can provide - just so long as they're sharing and playing well together :-)

I only provide dynamic public IP addresses to residential users. Its done with PPPoE rather than DHCP - makes the rate shaping much easier to implement - but it almost guarantees you never get the same IP address twice. I haven't yet blocked inbound traffic to reserved TCP ports but that will be the next big step.

I am sure a number of "free as in beer" whiners are going to promptly respond that I "don't get it" and that I'm "ruining the soul of the internet" with my facist rate cap.

I'd like to personally invite every one of you whiners to put up $25k of your own money, spend five months working without a paycheck, and then get back to me about facist rate shaping policies - I'll be happy to share technique :-)

Re:Shaw's a b*tch too

[Erik Hensema]

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

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

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

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

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

Stop downloading stuff you don't need.

[Dog and Pony]

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

I use my broadband to:

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

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

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

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

I thought so.

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]