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Time Warner to Charge Extra for Over-Quota Bandwidth
duckygator writes: "I just came across this article on NetworkWorld discussing Time Warner's announcement that they will begin charging users a fee for exceeding a monthly download limit. The actual limits and associated fees aren't discussed. Guess I knew this would be coming sooner or later ... Now I guess I'll just have to guess where the threshold will be. Anything more than email? Active gamer? Graphic artist?"
Honestly... I wouldn't like this either, but remember when DSL companies (and cable) were dropping left and right? Bandwidth costs money, and it makes sense to charge people for usage, not just connection. In theory, it allows lower costs for light users, though I know that they'll only boost rates with this plan. But think about what the equivelent to a standard cable connection (100 - 200 K/sec) would cost if it was bought as a T1 line, and ask how their business plan would look if they provided it for $39.95/month
-- Is "Sig" copyrighted by www.sig.com?
Dang it. I just got my MAMP (MacOSX, Apache, MySQL, PHP) box going in my living room! I should probably shut off Netjuke at the very least, now.
You like your Macintosh better than me, don't you Dave? Dave? Can you hear me Dave?
If it ends up that 5% of users end up paying extra, good. If it ends up that 95% of users end up paying extra, there's a problem.
I think the biggest thing I fear is that the latter case will become the norm. Just like those per-pound salad bars, you never know how much you've used until you check out. I'm sure the cable companies would love to use that model, and want everyone to have $200 bills at the end of the month.
What percentage of users paying "extra" is appropriate?
In my area, a cable modem costs $40 on top of cable, but a very nice DSL feed with 5 static IP's is only $65. This is only a 25 dollar difference monthly. If the differences closes up any, I'll simply switch. 5 static IP addresses are in and of themselves worth quite a bit to me. TW only offers static IP's with their business class service, which, IIRC, is $150 monthly.
C//
As long as the threshold is at a reasonable point, I can't say I'd complain about it. It's only fair that those who use the most should pay the most, rather than having those who use the least subsidize the hogs.
:-) As it is, the guys who use their connections for low-traffic everyday uses like checking e-mail and websurfing are paying the same rate I do, and that just isn't fair to them.
And I say this as one of the hogs who'd have to pay more if I were on that cable system. I regularly transfer about 1.2 GB *a day* so, yes, I should have to pay more than the relatively small sum I pay per month now.
The problem would be setting a reasonable scale of bandwidth and rates, and I somehow doubt the limits are going to be very reasonable...
Chasing Amy
(We all chase Amy...)
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws"-Tacitus
Why not? If I follow the terms of the terms of service, I see it as the providers problem, not mine
I paid for the service - essentially you're telling me if I go to McDonalds and eat all of the food I ordered, I have bad manners. I draw the line at breaking the terms of service - I see it as a contract for the service rendered. "Back in the old days", the internet was an academic resource. Now it's a commercial resource. It costs money. For money, I get a service. If I don't use that service, it's my perogative. If I use the service as much as I possibly can, it's my perogative. It might be their network, but for the time I "rent it" for $40/month, I'll do the hell I want with it.
"But if you consistently go over the limit, you're going to have to pay."
This to me sounds very reasonable. It doesn't sound like you're just automagically going to receive a bill for twice the regular service. They plan to warn you about just how much bandwidth you are using. Sounds reasonable.
My school does this with e-mail. Some people would bang away at the POP3 server every minute or less just so they could get the e-mail almost instantly. If you checked your e-mail over something like 500 times a day, you got a friendly warning that such practices are not good for the community. If you didn't stop, they would block your e-mail until you started to understand.
I guess I don't see a problem with this--at least not at face value. Sounds like TW is just trying to do their best to serve all their customers at some minimum level.
Long, cute, or funny Sigs are just another form of over compensation, used by geeks, nerdz, etc.
Sorry, I couldn't resist.
Kinda goes against the purpose of "broadband" doesn't it. Wonder if Comcast is next.
"I don't think it's selfish, to eat defenseless shellfish." -NOFX
C'mon people. How many of you have unlimited downloads on cable or xDSL - all the time?
Charging for data is the only way an ISP can fairly doll out its data expenses, given that it's the way most ISP's are charged by their wholesale provider.
I'm all for a dead cheap ADSL monthly rent, and bandwith charges for every meg, so long as my ISP keeps it's rates fair to all, and plans it's charges in such a way that it won't go out of business in 18 months.
Dan. -- So what if it's spelt wrong, nobody's perfect
Alot of times, these Cable Modem guys sink thier own boat. They KNOW they can't handle additional users, but then I see adverts all over the freaking place for Road Runner. This is like selling pepsi when you ain't got none. Why in the world would you market it if you know you can't handle it? Although I am not holding my breath on this happening either. It could happen, but my guess is they want to see how pissed people would get. The funny thing is, all of the things they advertise ARE heavy bandwidth uses. Streaming Video and all of that are high users of bandwidth.
Gorkman
people using more bandwidth will have to pay more than people using less? how outrageous!
There's no emoticon for what I'm feeling!
"who regularly upload and download large graphics files, for instance, stand a greater risk of being affected than those who use their cable connection mostly for e-mail."
Who would get $40/month cable internet mostly for email?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
ME: I'm calling to pay my cable bill.
Cable Operator: OK, we charge a $5 fee for paying over the phone, you can pay on-line for free.
ME: I can't pay online.
CO: Is your internet access down. ME: No, if I load the billing page, I'll go over my limit, and get charged an extra $5.
CO: I'm sorry I can't wavie the fee.
ME passes out due to bleeding from ears
You know who I think is crazy? All my ex-girlfriends!
Now THAT was funny.
graspee
drop broadband because of download limits? you're kidding, right? i mean, dial-up has monthly download limits as well... they're just built in... you can't download ten gigs of bs in a month with a modem. the cost for the two is almost the same, so you can't use that argument. (assuming a second phone line) i'd rather be limited and get fast slash.
- Fraud. Several prolific warez kiddies figured out how to
change their MAC address to bill their service to their neighbors or even
to our own router (!). We're still not sure exactly how that
happened. Sure, we cut them off and connected their modems to a high
voltage source as punishment (our contract allowed it), but how many more
are there who we didn't catch?
- Billing issues. People who obviously ran up a very high
bandwidth bill would call us and complain when they got their statements,
asking us to lower their bills. Our position was that it wasn't our
responsibility that they couldn't figure out how to close Napster or stop
downloading porn. When they paid with credit card we would sometimes lose
the dispute, but things were okay when they paid with cash or check.
- Expectation of quality. As you know, a cable modem is a shared
medium and cable companies are not at fault for your neighbors' downloading
habits. However, it was considered a potential legal liability to be
providing a service of varying quality.
For these reasons and many others, metered cable modem service just won't work.Comment removed based on user account deletion
I wonder if it would be possible to setup a few processes to ping a range of IP addresses to cause accounts to run over their quota. Would they distinguish real traffic from garbage such as that?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
> I'll just have to guess where the threshold will be. Anything more than email? Active gamer?
Please spare us the drama. I've done benchmarks and an active gamer who performs regular web surfing and casual file downloads does not approach the quota limits. Quotas are designed to thwart the WaReZ PuPp13z of DC, Kazaa, and WinMX fame who are not only throttling the backbone, they're the reason your cable modem drops carrier every Saturday morning. Cry "wolf!" all you want, I signed up for internet access with a quota and I can't wait until my ISP starts to impose it on me and (more importantly) my k1dd13 neighbours. Spare us the social diatribe...
I'm sick of seeing companies changing the price model for bandwidth. Once you have an OC-192, what the hell does it matter if you fill it, or not. You're already paying for the whole damn thing, whether it is full or not. Some people will use the network like mad, and some won't. That's how it works. Not to mention, that's why we pay for your fucking service.
I may download 18 full 650MB isos one month, and the next month I spend all of my time writing code and checking my email. That's the way it is supposed to work. What one guy doesn't use, the other will.
Besides, if you're tired of your users filling up your OC-192 24 hours a day with peer to peer filesharing apps, why don't you try doing something truly innovative. Start your own server to act as a proxy, and firewall the users from actually passing through your router. Now you've just removed all of the pointless "I'm still here" packets, and only left the data transfer packets. What's better, your network users can share all they want over your internal network, and it won't cost you a dime in additional internet bandwidth. What a fucking idea!
Sorry for being such a prick about this, but I've had my fill of clueless network admins who insist on fighting what their users really want.
If you're not a LEC you pay the LEC for the infrastructure to offer DSL. That's what sunk them. It wasn't the bandwidth costs as that is extremely inexpensive right now due to the glut in the market.
No one saw a problem with Time Warner owning the cable companies in places like my hometown of Charlotte, and now they have no competition, so they can pull this crap despite having already implemented bandwidth caps to supposedly avoid the need for it. Companies like Carolina Cable tried and tried to get their foot in the door, but when TW/AOL can just put off access to the pipes they control, those companies have a better chance of going bankrupt first (CC ran out of money a long time ago). Some free market this is. Uggghhhhh, fuck it all.
The networks in many college dorms are imposing bandwidth limits as well, and that will likely keep increasing, for the same reason Time Warner is doing it (a few big bandwidth hogs can suck up inordinate amounts of resources and make it harder to keep the system usable for everyone else).
Just recently Cornell announced they will raise the price of network access in the dorms to about $40/month, the students are all yelling about it. They definitely don't want to pay real-world prices.
So I don't imagine that they'll be so obliging to give customers a little applet that monitors their bandwidth use on their desktop, will they?
No, I suppose they'll just start charging whenever you run over, yet not offer any easy way of tracking it, right?
That's capitalism. Capitalism is also the fact that they'll still get plenty of stupid customers.
Now we'll see what people see as the real value of mp3s. Is it still a good idea to download it if the download is going to cost you 10c/meg? We'll find out shortly.
I already live in the world of the monthly free traffic quota. Here in New Zealand, I have a 2meg down/256k up cable connection, with 1Gb of (international) traffic free for ~US$40.
Traffic charges are tiered with national traffic (NZ) is at US$.008/meg and international traffic is at US$.08c/meg. So, downloading that image of Serious Sam SE will set you back US$52. All of a sudden, it makes sense to go out and buy the thing for ~US$40.
I can't see this as anything other than a positive development.
Before anyone starts, think about what this will do for the packaged linux software business. It might actually be cheaper to go out and buy the CD than download the ISO from Red Hat. All of a sudden RH turns a sale with a cost to them into a sale with profit! That _has_ to be a good thing.
Jason PollockYou know, if there was any REAL competition in broadband, I'd say that this is good, because it'd sink AOLTimeWarner, as all their subscribers flee to alternative providers.
But, since getting broadband internet is a lot like getting cable television, I think that the consumer is going to get screwed big time by this.
Seriously, has deregulation ever benefited consumers? I can't think of a time off the top of my head when it has. It seems to me that it always benefits big business at the consumer's expense, and this is yet another example of the consumer getting screwed by a deregulated conglomerate.
I have read the 60 or so replies so far and no one has stated the fact that bandwidth is ultra cheap right now. There is over capacity in the industry and lines can be had for 50% less than they were two years ago.
... when a cable company adds a new subdivision their costs are in the components that are necessary to connect each house not in the actual bandwidth used by the houses.
What hasn't gone down is the infrastructure costs for DSL and cable companies. The rise in costs is due to the expansion necessary in the infrastructure and not the back end bandwidth. The costs do not rise at the same rate.
Think about it
This is the beauty of the model as anyone who has worked for an ISP knows. You can "oversell" bandwidth capacity without any issues as the lines are very rarely taxed.
Add to this the stranglehold the LECs have placed on independent DSL companies and you really see where the costs are.
I thought that there was a bandwidth surplus? If that's true, then why is it so expensive? Someone should look into this, because I'd bet there are some seriously sleazy deals going on here to keep the price higher than demand justifies. If bandwidth is so expensive, then WTF is Hollings doing trying to encourage broadband adoption? I know, TANSTAAFL, but that doesn't mean that there isn't such a thing as price fixing at unrealistic levels for the market and such. Damn, the future of the internet is turning out to be truly $hitty:
pay to connect
pay for the amount of data you download
pay for the content of the data
pay every time you view the content of the data
and you have to do this from a crippled computer to boot (you think the internet will be immune from the CPTBA? Ha! You won't be "permitted to connect to the internet with a computer without DRM, and there will be stiff penalties if the network detects you trying to connect with a DRMless computer [small prediction of mine]).
Damn, that future sucks. Maybe I should consider moving to Russia, China, or maybe just become some hermit like those gun nuts, though I'll be a computer nut, if crap like this comes to pass. If I'm lucky, they'll be colonizing Mars before I die, and I can go there. I'll need to stockpile some good, old fashioned paper books, though, to keep myself occupied. This all, of course, assumes that Canada, Britain, Switzerland, Norway, Finland, France, and Japan all follow the U.S. lead, since I think I could live in any of those places before I move to Russia or China.
Bah! Yeah, I'm just bitching.
BlackGriffen
Will they just count what you download to your machine? I.e. will stuff downloaded from their Usenet servers count the same as stuff downloaded from outside their own network? I wonder where their bottleneck is. If the bottleneck is getting data from the rest of the world into their network, then downloading stuff from their servers wouldn't hurt too much.
Have any of the other companies that have done things like this made any distinction between the two?
No less attractive, just offline with CDRs or DVD-RAM or online with ad hoc wireless networks that will displace the corporate mavens if this becomes widespread. Just like the death of Napster spawned Gnutella, the death of the flat-rate Internet will spawn loosely confederated wireless networks. If the governments and corporate whores think they have a problem controlling the flow of information now, they ain't see nuthin' yet.
CEE5210S The signal SIGHUP was received.
In the DSL world, you normally have a existing dedicated pair back to the central office, and bandwith from the CO usually isn't the limiting factor. And all the equipment is either at the customer or in the central office.
DSL users share bandwidth too, just in a slightly different fashion.
the point is that the central line has a finite bandwidth, and letting some users disprortionately saturate the line means other people aren't getting the throughput they expect and paid for. The fees discourage abuse.
With virus scanners and other programs set to check for updates automatically, email programs set to check for new mail every X minutes, not to mention the little leaks from programs with the potential like Kazaa, I would think it would be a little like all the electricity that trickles into all the appliances in the modern home when they are "off". How much "wasted" bandwidth would the average user lose in say a year? I guess I will have to start remebering to turn off the light/computer when I leave the room.
From the article:
.tiff files before sending them across the wire.
"But if you consistently go over the limit, you're going to have to pay"
and also this:
"If they doubled the price, it might be a problem, but I doubt they'd do anything that drastic."
Before everyone screams bloody murder, there are a few points to consider here.
First, I'm guessing you're going to have to do some SERIOUS downloading to meet quota. It's the 24-7 Kazaa junkies that will suffer from this. And as my posting history will show, I have exactly zero sympathy for these people. But the graphic artists, etc, should be ok, as long as they actually *compress* their fscking 800MB
Gamers will *never* hit this cap I'm betting, as online gaming isn't really very bandwidth intensive - it's more latency dependant (in which case DSL 0wNs anyhow)
The other point is this: they aren't going to charge you some insane amount. Like the second quote says, it'd be shocking if they even charge double the monthly rate, which given what you're getting, isn't very much.
The Free desktop that Just Works
If they're gonna charge by bandwidth they had better do a VERY good job filtering spam. And how much bandwidth is 5,000 hits from Nimbda?
The masses are the crack whores of religion.
In most suburban areas, the trunk lines are antiquated and are easily saturated by DSL users. This is a fallacy of the DSL vs Cable debate. The twist is that cable has such a much higher bandwidth that even shared, most cable modem users have greater actual bandwidth than DSL users.
What if there is a dispute over the amount of bandwidth used? Will users be given a bandwidth meter? My cablemodem is routed through a Linux box so I guess I can keep track of my usage, but I am sure TWC will not accept that as evidence.
Cablemodem is the only option in my area, and Time Warner is the only cable company. Monopoly? No, no monopoly...
rooooar
would the typical heavy user really need more than 1 gb or so a day?
If it was 30Gb per month, I'd be happy, I don't think I would exceed that in downloading (in uploading, I barely scratch a meg a day, just a couple e-mails and some simple browsing). However, if I was capped at 1Gb per day, It would take more than one day to get the latest Linux distro. I just downloaded the full Redhat Skipjack beta in six hours, 650Mb per disk, two disks for the basic Redhat install, plus three more for powertools, etc = 3,250Mb. That would annoy the crap out of me to have to wait four days to get my isos.
I don't think I'm alone here, either.
The speed of time is one second per second.
Almost certainly it tells you that they reserve the right to reshape your bandwidth without warning you.
I understand the net access limiting in college dorms - most people in college don't give a shit about bandwidth, so they just let kazaa/morpheus run unrestricted all they want - it isn't their money. They just end up fucking the people who really need the bandwidth. These people NEED bandwidth limits.
However, excedding bandwidth limits on a cable modem is not supposed to happen. That's what the 12k/sec cap on uploads is there for, right? If they want to charge me for the extra bandwidth i use, why not allow me to take all my alloted bandwidth in one lump sum? If i upload the latest release of my Linux distro once a month, i'll be using, say, 600 megs of "bandwidth" that month. What difference does it make to them if i spend 10 hours uploading it, or 2 minutes? I still use the same ammount, and still have to pay extra when i go over.
I don't think its fair that they implement upload caps to limit our bandwidth usage, and then say how much we can use what little sending speed we have. Of cours, this is corporate America, and nothing is fair from the consumer's point of view.
"Upon attaching the waterblock to my penis, I began to notice that I know nothing about computers." -- JRockway
A former net admin I know (he consults for 1000 a day now) said that once he was forced to create a policy that charged divisions 10 cents an email. What he noticed after announcing this (it was more of an experiment where he had insiders reporting to him) was that email usage droped to 14% of what it had been. People were just being silly and waistfull. Had they been more vigilant, they would not have had ANY charges... but that is the result of a lack of vigilance I guess.
Some here say that 'soon wireless communications will be free'. How can that be until we come up with a self sufficient system that requires absolutely NO maintenance and works over systems that require NO administration or cost themselves?
The fastest I have ever gotten my upstream to work is 30kB/s.....at best......at three in the morning. During the day, it's more like 15KB/s. This seems to be true for everyone I know in this market. I couldn't run an mp3/warez server if I wanted too. Oh gee, I can DOS a dialup user off the net my connection is so 'leet.
As for downloads, you may have a point but I'm paying enough for this as it is. They cap my uplink, tell me I can't run a secured private server (at least they aren't bitching about ssh.....yet), scan my ports and now they want to put a meter on it as well. What a bunch of @Home CRAP!!
This is bad. I installed Debian on this thing with nothing more than a couple of floppies and my net connection. If I wanted a connection that is good for nothing more than websurfing I would have stayed with dialup.
Can I expect to reamed for the price of a Windows CD the next time I build a box?
Arrrrggggghhhh!
Welp, I'm a long-time Road Runner user, 5 years and going. I've always been happy with them, but now it might be the time to switch over.
;-).
I have no loyalty based on past-performance of RR.
I might still stick with them; it depends on whether I think I'll be affected. I think I'm a pretty heavy downloader, but I'm not sure how they define that. I download lots of MP3's, WMA's, and OGG's, as well as programs and data.
So, I'll e-mail Time Warner and ask them for future specs.
Ultimately, I have no problem with this type of system. It makes sense that if you use excessive amounts of bandwidth's, you should pay more money. This isn't a way by Time Warner to screw over their customers. Rather, it puts customers into appropriate payment classes based on how much bandwidth they use.
Someone who has Road Runner simply because they want fast web-surfing shouldn't pay the same rate as someone who uses Road Runner to download gigabytes of movie, music, and data files each day.
But I'm not Road Runner, and I'm not other customers. I'm ME, the most important thing in the universe (don't you know, the sun revolves around me
Anyways, if I'm one of the users who's using "excessive" bandwidth as defined by TW, I'll look for a better deal. If I'm one of the users who is being charged a higher bill for other users excessive bandwidth, I'll stick with TW.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
Ah, but if the bandwidth costs, then spam may fall under the reversal of charge portion of the TCPA and you can sue for $500/spam
That's it. I'm no longer part of Team Sanity.
This is guaranteed to bite TW back... In what other "utility" service is my bill determined by the behavior of other people?
For example, if some script kiddie wants to seek revenge on a neighbor, what is to stop him from initiating a distributed ping flood against him? Over a month, all of those replies could seriously add up. Or maybe have a couple dozen zombies request the default page for his linksys administration web?
There are dozens of ways for people external to the bill payer to effect the usage of the customer, most without the customer's knowledge.
This also blows a hole in Sen. Hollings "Broadband adoption initiative"... especially if a user is charged $4.95 to rent a movie, then has to pay an additional $10 fee to the cable company to download it.
I run a rather unpopular website with some pictures of my coral reef tank. Sadly, Time Warner doesn't want me to run a server because of the traffic it could consume.
Now that they have a per for traffic model, can I run my server?
That which does not kill me only makes me whinier
P2P piracy? Someone please just come to my house and shoot me...
I can't imagine how low we've all come since just 2 years ago.
In another 2 years will there even be an internet left? The day I see a 10 10 220 plan for paying for internet time...I'm just gonna pull the trigger.
Everything that's happening is the THE EXACT AND DIAMETRIC OPPOSITE of what was supposed to happen!
We were all expecting BETTER service, FASTER service, MORE applications, MORE companies, MORE global communication. And just look at what's been happening!
Then this asshole posts that P2P is just about 14 year old kids trading warez and pr0n!?!!? Are brainwashed chimps like this guy all we've got left in the geek community?
P2P is a godsend!
BUT WE'LL NEVER GET A CHANCE TO IMPLEMENT IT IF CONNECTING TO THE NET COSTS 10 CENTS A MINUTE!
Call TW. You may not have to pay cable. In areas where MISP is available you don't have to do CATV
This is the same model us here in Australia have been offered. With my cable ISP, Telstra BigPond, you can download a maximum of 3GB a month before you are charged 11 cents per MB (there are different plans available with more or less data, but the 3GB one is the one most users are on, and is the best value).
All Telstra content is exempt from this, and does not count towards your quota. Telstra mirror the major Linux and *BSD distros, service packs, game demos, movie trailers as well as providing video streams (including full replays of every NRL and AFL game).
The other major cable ISP, Optusnet, allows users to download up to 10 times the average of all customers over a 14 day period. Currently, the average user downloads 75MB a day. They have a tool called Netstats that allows users to get this information. Optus does have a fairer system, but they haven very limited availability (only selected parts of Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane; nothing outside those cities), and you cannot run servers at all (Telstra allows this). There are also rumours that since SingTel bought Optus, they are looking at changing this system to a flat download limit.
I'm going to go against popular opinion and say that I don't mind this system at all. I download less than 3GB's a month, I get all the Linux distros for free, and can comfortably download whatever I like. It costs a hell of a lot to send data to and from the US, and I'd rather that my ISP is profitable and won't sink.
I also don't see why I should subsidise 12-year old warez kiddies; if they want their warez, they can damn well pay for it.
P2P is piracy
P2p technology can be used for piracy, and that is frankly the most common use for it, but it's not the only possible use for it. That's why it should be legal, just as VHS tape is legal - there are substantial non-infringing uses.
Lost: Sig, white with black letters. No collar. Reward if found!
...and I don't mind. The cap is 2 GB/mo of uploads (unlimited downloads), but they compensate for this, imho, by explicitly allowing servers in the TOS.
That's the problem with consumer broadband: people running web/ftp servers (specifically, ones that get popular). Too many providers ban this or even firewall port 80. I think it's fair to have an upload cap to collar the warez d00dz who eat my bandwidth while I can run a low-volume server (and I have my router throttle my outbound data...).
Of course, some providers will cap and not change the TOS one iota...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I think that the better way to cap is uploads. My DSL provider, DirecTV (nee Telocity) has a 2GB/month upload limit. That's more than enough for me to run a mail server, ssh, and a little Apache. They also specifically allow servers in the TOS. I think it's a good trade-off.
Lots of comments here about how this makes sense, about time, serves the warez kiddies right, so on and so forth...
I always thought the idea was that bandwidth would get *cheaper*, not more expensive. The pipes are only getting fatter all around, and anyway, prices are supposed to rise when a commodity gets scarcer, not more abundant. I can't believe that the best solution the cable companies have for shared bandwidth hogs is to meter everybody. So much for video over IP, huh?
I remember talking with my friendly local DSL ISP about how much I can reasonably transfer in a month without being a "problem" user. They shrugged and said, hey, download bandwidth is not an issue - you can pull down as much as you like and it's no big deal. It's the outbound bandwidth that costs us real money.
I can understand how that model works, but still, flat rates are a beautiful thing. The best part of the net is the free exchange of information... one person can set up a homepage and reach a practically unlimited audience. The average joe can compete with the big corporations, and all that. Personally, I would just as soon subsidize some MP3 and warez kiddies if it meant that my neighbor could also serve a popular webpage of something useful or beautiful and not have to worry about how he's going to pay for the bandwidth.
The only way I'd be cool with metering bandwidth would be if it prompted the rollout of alternatives. So what if the cable companies have a lousy distribution model -- as long as there's DSL, wireless, satellite and powerline broadband also available, then hey, no big deal. But as long as there are just barely a handful of companies setting themselves up to dominate the broadband market, metering bandwidth is just not cool. What'll you say when downloading from Time-Warner websites is unlimited, but everything else is metered? Where does that lead us?
Streaming video, music, etc is *nothing* compared to the guy who runs a 100 gb 0-day ftp server from his cable modem. Those people send several gigs a day over the pipe, and its hurts everyone.
Wow, I almost feel angry at those theives that are stealing my bandwith, thanks for pointing out the evils lurking on my local cable net. I'll be sure to phone "r-u-shutup" if I notice any unauthorized port 21 traffic.
Now let's get real and pull apart what you said. Let's start with the purpose of the internet: to share information and computing resources. It was made for "servers". ISPs that don't let you run a server are not Internet Service Providers, but something else like a Browser Provider of Adverts. Now let's think about those 100 Gig/day ftp sites. When was the last day you made 100 Gigs of original content? I hate to admit it, but my ftp site does not see anything like that kind of creativity or traffic. People downloading Warez, movies and other comercial garbage deserve to have their line cut and will. It has NOTHING to do with what is happening here which is a pay per the minute fee for downloading adverts.
What you see is the inevitable result of the death of "broadband" competition. The local Bells feel free to crush their DSL competitors and the cable companies have municipal monopolies in most of their areas of domination. With your coices left to two or fewer providers, is it any supprise that you will pay for the minute? People once tollerated this for phone service and seem destined to put up with it again, even if they decide to re regulate the whole mess.
Attitudes like yours make the local Bell, large publishers and the government happy. None of them want you to publish, and all of them want as much of your money as they can grab. "Shut up and give it up, Bitch" is their song. Why would you want to sing it?
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Cheap, high-speed internet is great for web surfing, and ideally suited to it. You get your content loaded right away (fast) and then your connection sits idle while you use it (cheap).
It was always designed for that kind of use. However, it wasn't sold that way. As you say, they push high-quality streaming video and similar nonsense that uses 100% of your bandwidth for extended periods. Worse, they just assumed people wouldn't find any use for the free bandwidth during the supposed "idle" periods.
Sure enough, everybody and his dog is finding some way to suck it up with high-bandwidth games or P2P systems. That "it'll just work out somehow" attitude, basing feasibility on unfounded assumptions, was the main mental illness of the e-business boom and bust.
These bandwidth limits should always have been a part of the system. They should even have been part of the advertising, the way they are for the server market. "20 GB/month, burstable at 1MB/second!"
Of course, they shouldn't bill for bandwidth unexpectedly. They should just throttle the connection down to a harmless speed, and then give the user the option to buy more bandwidth.
I agree, this, on the face of it, is a good thing. If your usage causes increased costs, you should pay more.
Though, the real cost is provisioning for peak usage. Having enough bandwidth to keep users happy at 6-12 pm (time varies in different environments, but this pretty much covers it for residential usage) is what drives the costs up as they need to engineer and provision for that load. The rest of the day it is (for the most part) "free".
What I think they should be doing is only metering during those peak periods and leaving it status quo the rest of the day. They would find users would start those ISO, Warez, etc. downloads before they go to bed, or setting up a cron job for 3am or whatever, turn off their P2P server during the billable time, etc.
I think this would solve the problem they are trying to solve and more accurately pass on costs. The phone company has been doing this forever, it only makes sense.
The only athletic sport I ever mastered was backgammon - Douglas William Jerrold
...Time Warner has on their front page several links to live video, music, etc, but if we use them, and like them enough to use them a lot, they'll charge us EXTRA to use them?
Does anyone see a problem with this?
And, how much is too much? I'm currently streaming NASA-TV to watch the Space Shuttle mission. I watch it a lot. What kind of bandwidth does that take up?
I think their capping compromise is a good one: cap your TX at 2GB/mo.
20 years ago when at&t was the only game in town? A good plan would be a quarter a minute. And that was when a quarter was worth a hell of alot more.
-
I'm confused. I subscribe to Time Warner cable, and I have a cable modem. But the cable modem is provided by one of three ISP's: Road Runner, Earthlink and AOL. When the article says that Time Warner is going to charge extra how will that work? I used to subscribe to Road Runner and now I subscribe to Earthlink. Who owns the bandwidth?
I'm so confused.
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
Going through my Snort logs, I find that I'm hit by CodeRed (I and II) and a number of Nimda variants at least 4 times per day. (This is extreamly better than 4 months ago!) As a good Netizen, I inform the ISPs as soon as I'm notified of an attack (often within an hour).
I've found that university administration is often on top of it before I contact them, while some large ISPs take forever. After getting attacked by one IP at US West Minneapolis several times per day for a week, I blocked their entire network at the firewall. For some reason, the NNNNNNNNNN variation of Code Red seems to be very popular this week, though. I don't know if this is all that bad a thing. Idiots who don't patch their bone head machines "from a certain company" are going to be hurt where it counts.
The entirely experience of Internet would not be the same when they charge per bandwidth. I'd be very careful for every download, since every bit of download means money. That kills mobile Internet buiness in the past - why do they want to kill their own business?
If they really have to do this, I wish they'd allow us to the unused bandwidth to next month. However, I think it's very unlikely that would happen.
Congress and the FCC is now not requiring that local telcos keep their networks open to competitors. This means that your local telco/DSL provider now has no one to compete with...so you get crap DSL...low bandwidth...service restrictions..etc.
Cable companies know this and are starting to turn down the bandwidth valves. As little as two months ago I laughed at the Verizon sales guy that was pitching $50.00/mo 640k DSL...and no servers allowed. I told him that I have a 3-6Mbps cable modem connection for $29.00/mo. Sure, Cablevision doesn't let me operate a server either (they block inbound port 80), but I've got 3 to 4 times the bandwidth of my T1 at work!
This will not last forever. Cable companies will get greedy...who wants to pay for a fraction T3 when you can degrade the services to the point where a couple of cheap T1s will service an entire cable area. With only crap DSL to compete with, they will start degrading their service to cut costs. They know that after taking a hit from the broadband crackpipe, you won't go back to dial-up.
Write to your congressman! Let them know that this is intollerable! If you give monopolies to the cable and telephone companies they'll screw the consumer every time!
-ted
Thats all fine and nice, but you are forgetting about competitions. If AT & T Broadband does something like this to me, I will switch providers.... Yes, despite how much you may hate deregulation, it provides competition, and drives prices down.
A corporation exists for one reason- to make money. If a corporation is losing money because its prices suck and customers can go elsewhere, then it will obviously have to cut prices. Ain't it simple??????
Remember when you were a kid and a long distance phone call was a big deal? It cost a boatload of cash and the quality sucked. Now that there is competitions the phone companies are forced to compete for customers, and I pay 5 cents a minute for long distance--- not bad.
[FromTheMorning]
Time Warener is letting all of that blatant copyright piracy go on? Something is just not adding up here.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I have a choice of ONE cable company, and ONE DSL company. Where can I go when i'm not happy with Cablevision or Verizon?
-ted
So what happens if someone on their network sends out 10 million spam messages and 50,000 of them hit my servers.
Will they pay me for allowing a spammer to send that much crap through my lines?
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
A better plan would be to have no bandwidth cap.
.5x of what it was in case 2, and 0.01x of what it was in case 1). In either case, User A will not notice a thing; he will not call the ISP complaining. However, user B will notice a 2-fold (over case 2) and 100-fold (over case 1) improvement.
But wait, this isn't an invitation for some people to hog all of the bandwidth, leaving other's with none. Read on a bit...
You would pay for levels of priority. Paying $60 would give you twice the priority of $30. At any given time, any user COULD have ALL of the bandwidth on the entire network to himself (if things were right); however, if everyone was using bandwidth for equally intensive tasks, individual's would get an amount of bandwidth proportional to the amount of money they pay to the ISP.
Lets say that road runner has 10 users total (yes, not realistic, but its simple math).
Lets also say that during a particular time, ALL of those 10 users are downloading infinitely large files, so all of the bandwidth of the ISP will be taken up.
Furthermore, lets say USERS 1-5 pay $60 a month, and users 6-10 pay $30 a month. This means that the road runner will be getting 60*5 + 30*5 = 450 dollars total from these users per month. Assuming maximal bandwidth usage, each user would get x/450 fraction of bandwidth of the net total bandwidth, where x the amount of money they pay the ISP. So users 1-5 should each get 6.7% of the net bandwidth, and users 6-10 should each get 13.3% of the bandwidth.
In other words, when there is competition between two users demanding bandwidth, the bandwidth is alotted in proportion to how much they pay.
Such a scheme could be scaled up.
But aside from that, other parameters should be considered. Minimizing the net wait-time should also be a concern. If your directing a shopping line, it would be most efficient to let the guy with 1 item through first, even if the guy with 1000 items got there first. The idea is to do the "fast step" first.
The idea is to minimize the net wait time all of the users experience as a total. As an example, lets say that there are two users on a network, and each has equal priority, and lets say there is 2MB/s of bandwidth available. Lets say user A wants to download a 200MB file, and user B wants to download a 2MB file. Lets take three cases: in the first case, we give user A All the bandwidth; in the second case, we divide the bandwidth between user A and B equally; in the third, we allow user B to download his file, then user A.
1. User A (the "greedy" user) gets all the bandwdith, then user B is allowed to d/l. If user A gets all the bandwidth at first, it takes him 200MB / 2MB/s = 100s to download his file. Then afterwards, it takes user B 1 second to download his file. Thus, user A has to wait 100s, user B 101s. Thus, there is a net wait-time of 201s..
2. Bandwidth is alotted equally between user A (200MB file) and user B (2MB file). This means that, while both users are still downloading, each uses 1MB/s of bandwidth. Thus, it takes user B 2s to download his complete file. Meanwhile, during those 2s, user A downloads 2MB of his file (198MB remaining). After user B no long requires bandwidth, user A will require another 99s to download the remaining 198MB of his file (99s * 2MB/s = 198MB). Thus, user B had to wait 2s for his file. User A had to wait 2s + 99s = 101s for his file. Thus, there is a net wait time of 103s. This clearly better than case 1.
3. Bandwidth is all initially alotted to user B. It will take user B 2Mb / 2MB/s = 1s to download his file. After that 1s, it will then take user A 200MB / 2MB/s = 100s to download his file. Thus, user A has a net wait time of 1s. User B has a net wait time of 100s. Thus, the net wait time is 101s. This is clearly better than case 1, and slightly better than case 2.
So, which of these is best? Obviously, the third case is the best. User A, the greedy user, hardly has to wait any extra time at all (user A's wait time only increases by a factor of 1.01); user B, however, sees enormous reductions in wiat time (user B's wait time is
Hope this was helpful.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
evildude# ping -f
==> $$$$$$$ for them!!!
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
Right and left, I see personal sites dropping like flies or going members-only because they're being hit with multi-thousand dollar bills because they suddenly got popular. Why does it cost so much? What resource is being consumed that justifies these huge amounts of money?
It's an honest question -- I really don't know how it works, and I'm curious to know.
I have adelphia, which they state a normal use of bandwidth is 3.5gigs a month, somewhere around that area..
So downloading the ISO files for a couple Linux distros could easily put you over the limit. That sucks. People get broadband specifically so that they can download larger files and more data more quickly. If you want to sell someone broadband and then mandate that they treat it like dialup, what's the point?
I'd suggest you go check the actually costs versus income of services like this. You'd be surprised at how much you've been ripping your provider off all these years.
perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5, (41*2), sqrt(7056), (unpack(c,H)-2), oct(115), 10)'
I "pay" them for earthlink high speed, my account is supposto be 2 meg/sec down, 1.5 meg/sec up... bull shit ofcorse... upload is capped to 45k, download... i have seen it get up to 189 when pulling from a fully unloaded t1 line.
If they are going to charge more for "overusage" then I want the caps gone, so I can really use what I'm paying for.... ofcorse... if I just made another 500-600 a month, I would get a t1 line and tell rr to fuck themselfs.
After reading this thread I went to my local Roadrunner newsgroup to see what others were saying, and someone had posted, TODAY, a message about TW starting to charge over quota users. The message header was there, but when I tried to access it, it said "message not available on server".
Hmmph.
I also went through my TOS and tried to find anything about what my bandwidth limitations are. I can't find any, nor do I remember agreeing to any in the past.
One simple and well-known algorithm to implement this solution is a token-bucket. (More information from Cisco's web site) The basic idea is that you have a bucket that collects token at some rate. This rate corresponds to the peak rate of transfer. The bucket also has a maximum capacity which corresponds to the size of the 'burst' you'll allow. When a packet arrives and the bucket is non-empty, the packet is forwarded and one token is removed from the bucket. When the bucket is empty the packet is queued or dropped.
Going back to the above example, consider a token-bucket where tokens arrive at 56kb/second, and the bucket can hold (60*60*512) kbits of tokens. This bucket would allow full peak allows full use for a hour or two, at which time the bucket would be close to empty and packets could only be sent the sustained rate.
This kind of setup would not effect most users at all, but would limit the worst offenders to 1/10th or 1/100th the bandwith usage.
I read thru all the post and it amazes me that nobody (Maybe I missed it) has picked up on the fact its Time Warner. This is as much an attempt to protect their Music and Film biz as its a "cost of bandwidth" issue. We are just about now getting to the point where its somewhat practical to download DivX movies in addition to Mp3 music. If they can cap the bandwidth at this point they have bought themselves a few years to try and figure out how to avoid movies going the route of music.
Help fight continental drift.
While I don't know too much about typical pricing plans for leased lines (i'm assuming cable internet providers get an unlimited bandwidth stream through their parent isp). I'm wondering why cable companies haven't looked to colocation/hosting services to help generate revenue by taking advantage of the upstream (being most cable users are capped at 128kbps upload). Could something like this ever work?
That is such bullshit. Im not paying 50 bucks a month for someone to give me trickleband. I want a big phat pipe and thats what i pay for. What i do with it is up to me. Seperating people into "normal" use and "abnormal" use just doesnt cut it. We are supposed to be encouraging the growth of broadband and emergence of new things being done with it... whether that is Video Instant Messaging, Real Time P2P Gaming, Voice Over IP, being able to download/transfer a multi-megabyte file in a short amount of time, or even (as unlikely as you may think it is) *something we havent thought of yet*. The growth of real broadband where all thse that have it actually use it to its fullest is about the only thing that has any chance of hell in re-ignighting the home computer and tech market... along with handhelds and wireless. Whats the point of paying for a new computer with all the bottlenecks finally being worked out if you have to pay through the nose for anything you want to do over the internet. Thankfully the technolgy is sound and that means there are other real alternatives that can make Time Warner regret making stupid business moves that restrict their own consumers... I personally doubt there are many *loyal* time warner subscribers that wouldnt jump at a chance for a better service.... the market is ripe for a company that doesnt have its head stuck up its ass to walk right in.
When I first read this article, I had a fre ideas. After reading some of the better comments, I had suggestions on how the cable company can do this. SO I'll start hitting comments randomly.
First is the bandwidth choice: Limit or no limit. Well, with no limit, you dont. With Limited, how do you do it WITHOUT (keyword) being accused of 'I was hacked'. Mac hacks, redirection, and floods are rampant with the abusive menbers. First, use Port Secure. This essentially makes sure that ONLY that MAC address is on that port. The port doesnt work if it has other addresses too. Second tier is the chew'ers. These guys are the constant linux cd junkies, warez doods, movie pirates, and other poeople who go on to file sharing services with 100 people allowed (and gigs of mp3's). Well, let users download/upload stuff unfrettered, but log people who suck up data (maybe some sort of tag to let local net-admins know). Check up on these people... see where they're going/downloading. If thier warez junkies, either kick them off or put couic on thier account at a random interval ( http://michel.arboi.free.fr/UKUSA/couic.html ). If they seem legit (as in legitly downloading stuff), slap them with a warning. They may chew bandwidth, but they pay. If they dont heed the warnings (even a little), reluctantly kick them off. DO offer readmittance, but then resort to a temporary quota/"pay x after quota" system. I don't like it, but bandwidth isn't cheap.
Secondly is the issue with bandwidth. Since it seems that many users are trading inside and between cable/dsl providers, why not have some sort of fiber going to/from major providers? Going through the whole internet costs a lot more than having router tables going from comcast to att@home through a big fiber pipe. Of course, you could have each provider spider each connection to each other high bandwidth ISP. With this spiderweb of connections from cable/dsl ISP's , it could only be inbound or outbound traffic. Even with warezing, this plan should be cheaper.
My big beef is of the limited, and quota'ed bandwidth. How exactly are they going to take into account of unauthorized use? What if one of your 'friends' decides he doesn't liek you anymore and sends you a few dozen copies of a core dump... do you think Time/Warner will care? They're still getting payed, and you're just asking them to accept less. Or how about that spyware that was unwillingly and unknowingly installed on your machine? It turns out it has contacted the master server and tattled that you have enough bandwidth to be a tier-2 server. You'll now share the server responsibilities of a class b network. Too many things could go wrong with that high speed with monitoring and charging extra bandwidth.
I do like my tehcnicial reasons, but the last is more of an opinion. Take it as you will.
...that fierce competition, if applied to a bunch of morons, can produce monopolies that jack up the price immediately after gaining control, and still provide a shitty product. Flat rate was the standard since the time of dialup, but when DSL and cable companies started the price war they ended up:
As the result, anyone who attempted to provide decent quality was losing money on supporting low-priced service to run at some tolerable level, and the only people who survived were ones that provided only or mostly high-priced services (Covad -- and it barely survived), or ones that simply had a shitload of money to burn (SBC, USWest/Qwest, TW). Now the survivors are trying to bring the prices to the level where they can actually make money, but since the public got accustomed to low prices in the advertisements, former low-priced services are becoming high-priced through more sneaky tactics, and customers overall lose compared to the hypothetical situation when prices and service were reasonable to begin with. As some fictional character said, "dodge this", free market worshipers/propaganda workers with degrees.
Necessary bit of disclosure: this is written over a Covad line that costs me $114/mo and works.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
This will help encourage people to install adsubtract and other bandwidth savers.
Of course, increased adsubtract usage will decrease ad revenue at commercial web sites.
As if you work for a company instead of working to get their money. It is same however you turn it. The pursuit of self-interest by all players makes the game work better.
After all, each of your cells cares only that it gets nutrients from other cells around it and that its metabolic waste gets removed. It just happens that the side-effects of its pursuit of personal happines benefit other cells and you as a meta-entity/god of their society.
You'd be surprised at how much you've been ripping your provider off all these years.
I have to disagree. I haven't worked in the NOC of an ISP in years, but this is much is still true. If you own the network, you don't have to pay to use it. Also true, if you own a big enough network, other peer networks allow you to connect to them at what amounts to a reciprocal cost. (I connect to UUNet, and they connect to me. In that way we usually use the same amount of each others network, and thus we charge each other the same price for connection < the charge is a formality >)
All ISP's have to build staff, support, maintenance, and growth cost into their billing. And so while those are huge expenses, if the company is loosing money on those services it's because they made a choice to do so.
There is no additional cost to the provider if i download 1Meg/Month vs. 100Meg/Month, because they own the network. Now someone who downloads 1Mbps vs. 100Mbps is a real issue. While the company owns the network, the network is still a finite resource. There are only so many Mbps at any given second. And if you are using 80% of the company's bandwidth, then you cost them more, because all of the other customers share only 20% and then leave the service because they are unsatisfied with the speed. So in that you drive away customers by hogging the bandwidth, you cost the company more money.
That being said, let's say "47&7" company owns a network big enough to let each of their customers have 50kbps simultaneously. If I keep my 50kbps open at 100% 24/7/52, then I cost the company nothing. I am only allowed to use what I am allotted and I am not using someone else's bandwidth. There is an algorithm out there that says that between X o'clock and Y o'clock z number of people is using the network. So then if they calculate the number of people that use the network, and the average amount of time that they spend, you can lock in a bandwidth number that doesn't infringe on you bandwidth limit.
Now, The problem with what they are doing is they are going to charge you guys for using what they have already allotted me. I keep my bandwidth open as much as mechanically possible, but people like me are part of the fore mentioned algorithm. I'm way ahead of the yahoo games playing mom, or the porn-browsing dad. But I'm not new to the game. ISP have been dealing with the likes of me for years. I don't have a problem paying more than the average Joe. I would gladly pay $10/Mth more to keep my bandwidth open, but It's not fair to those who have "excessive" downloads 1 or 2 times a month.
Corporate greed it still nothing more than greed. And when you say that I have no idea how I'm stealing from my ISP, you're wrong... I do have an idea, no I have the answer. And the answer is, under the user agreement that I signed, and under the limits that they set on my connection, I'm not stealing at all, but rather, I'm taking full advantage of the service that I pay for.
</soapbox>
You're wrong. I've read it, so that makes 1 more than nobody :-)
Anyways, about that person who downloaded 26 GB and th eperson who downloaded 81 GB... were they using the cable legitimately? EG: pirate movies/games ?
If they wern't, I'd call them twice, then slap COUIC on thier accounts. They pay for crappy service. Let them experience a randomly cutting connection. If they were, still give them a call, but I'd be nicer about it.
WHAT?! (while looking at packet firewall) Where are all of these TCP RST's coming from?
When pissed off, I'm not a nice person. And I have my own golden rule: Do unto others as they do to you. My idea is that you give them a taste of thier own medicine. If they dont like it, they can leave.
Reality says that my mom would love to see her ancestry tree come boiling down her cable at 1000mbps. She doesn't know what a megabit is. She's used to the Telephone Company charging her per minute. If "47&7" allowed her to have as much bandwidth as she could stomach, she would use up her month in only a few days. By keeping her speed relatively low, she is less inclined to "splurge" on the bandwidth she uses. It's takes 30mins to down load some of her files. If it only took 10 seconds, she might be more inclined to up/download the file 6 or 7 time a day as she edits it. I agree that maybe they should install an "advanced users" option, but to open the general public to unlimited bandwidth that they would have to pay for would be irresponsible.
But you knew that already, right?
Cables = Roads, and we're moving more towards a future wherein the roads are metered. Ever lived in a country where roads are badly designed and toll heavy? Living gets mighty expensive. The best example here is Japan. The cost of living is so high because two very important things are expensive.
Real estate and transportation.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
That's ok, it's just an indication of what HE does with P2P. If the only thing you do with apple pie is you-know-what, you might indeed find it hard to believe that some people actually just eat it.
Since software producers more and more are skipping the middle tier (stores, distributors) and sell software directly over the internet (requiring you to download the whole CD).
And the music and video industry, though slow and backwards, also begins experimenting in this direction.
Those plans would be seriously hurt when metered access is introduced (depending on the cost per gigabyte of course), which would be a pity.
Anyway, contrary to your statement, there are legitimate uses for large downloads and according to current plans this shall only increase (download a DVD instead of renting one). The bandwidth cost should be lower than sending the CD/DVD by mail, otherwise a lot of future appeal of the Internet is lost.
just to add to my most excellent first post, in New Zealand I am signed up to a DSL plan. We get 10GB international traffic per month for $35, and then pay between 2c and 6c per MB after that. This is a 128kbps up/down service.
Compare Australian prices before crying hardship. I blame Telstra.
deus does not exist but if he does
I recently ran out of room on my server machine, a G4 with a tiny 9GB hard drive in it. I knew it had alot of stuff and was getting full, but completely out of space? COme to find out the Apache logs had swollen to over 150MB EACH with goddamn Code-Red scans, many of which originated from other Road Runner addresses. To this very day I have to keep a cron running to watch the logs and wipe them if they get over 50MB.
My house here has 2 computers sharing the connection, so we get a little more than average traffic between surfing/downloads and AIM being on all the time.
If they try to charge me extra because of this scanning activity, I'm going to not pay my bill until they unplug me and even after that never pay them. Screw my credit report, if they can't even scan for and warn users about viral activity I'm certainly not going to pay them to gauge me on how often I get scanned by viruses!
Of course, the people who are still infected and scanning 24/7 will be hit the worst, but the money in my pocket is what I'm trying to protect, because there isn't much of it anymore...
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
Upstream bandwidth is usually around 128k, 256k if you are really lucky. A decent video or music link will saturate that just as much as busy FTP site. Now, that wasn't so hard to figure out, was it?
I have no problem with companies charging by volume, as long as the volume charges are reasonable (at most a couple of bucks per Gbyte during peak, much cheaper or free free during off-peak). But stop judging what kind of traffic is valuable. FTP is no more or less valuable than video gaming or video conferencing with your grandma. Who knows? Maybe someone is distributing the great American novel from their personal web site.
So be annoyed. You and Redhat using a horribly inefficient way of transferring software updates, and then you get annoyed at having to face the consequences of inefficiency? Awwww, you poor thing.
If metered traffic becomes common, then Redhat will either switch to a saner way of sending diffs, or they'll be replaced by someone else.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Give me a Cisco router and we'll be rich a lot sooner.
There is a fiber glut...that's for sure. Most of it is still unlit since the gear to light up the fiber costs mega-bucks.
So what about the fiber that is lit? It's in all the wrong places! What good is a gigabit ring if it doesn't pass by your house? The bandwidth glut merely refers to all the unlit fiber stringing between major cities. Until someone figures out an economical way to get the data down the "last mile", there will be a bandwidth shortage where it is needed.
-ted
I thiiiiink I'm gonna have to sort of disagree with you on that one.
The day that Mr and Ms. Joe Internet User run over their RoadRunner quota and form an ad-hoc wireless network with their neighbor Frank, will be the day that Rush Limbaugh joins the Democratic Party.
It's way too improbable. Unless Linksys starts selling wireless routers with roof-mount antennas and BGP routing software (complete with easy-to-use "routing wizard"!!) for under $100 at CompUSA, it just won't happen. Maybe they'll prove me wrong. But I won't bet on it.
Only the people who have watched socialism fail miserably think its bad. There are some poor, ignorant, idealistic and naive souls who haven't figured it out yet.
It doesn't need but ONE access point done up right to handle a neighborhood. Access points can be done without LinkSys (or other vendors, for that matter) access point to do it either- a PrismII card with the right drivers or the Sputnik software package will produce an access point. And many of the PrismII cards seem to have an external antenna jack.
No, Joe Internet couldn't do an access point- but he DOESN'T need to. All it takes is one tech-geek in a neighborhood to start up the wan access. And, since it's easy enough and cheap enough for most of that crowd to do it, it's going to happen.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Sorry, but they advertised the service as faster than DSL and about the same price. Toss in quick installation and you've got yourself a customer base. Now you've got people *gasp* using the bandwidth they're paying for. It doesn't matter if you never turn your PC on or if you never shut Grokster down, you have the right to what you paid for. If their business model wasn't profitable to begin with, then they are being the disingenuous jerks that conned you into connecting into their cable network when you could be on a DSL connection instead.
This is another example of short-sighted business plans, a desperate grass at building a customer base, and then selling-short until most of the competition in the area gets finacially hurt.
Why people feel that the grokster 24/7 kid should be punished is beyond me. They sold him the service now they must deal with it. Conversely, if heavy users are going to be punished then give breaks to lightweight users. Of course that means the same pricing plan as DSL, which is who they're fighting and distancing themselves from. Sorry, but this is more corporate bullying than anything else.
Another fun idea would be to round up a significant number of your local provider's customers and, en masse, tell them the deal's not acceptable and you're either keeping the old terms or dumping them until they see the light. Consumers *do* have power. Its just that they rarely wake up and use it. Arthur Anderson is on the verge of getting the corporate death penalty, something the government would never dream of (witness Microsoft), from their customers.
... something like this if you're not careful!
I dunno... What do you wanna do?
FWIW, TW does, at least where I get it. If there's an outage, you don't pay for the day(s) in which it occurred.
Now, catching Code Red could potentially cost someone lots of bandwith money. Those stupid pop-under downloads might install a P2P program without your knowledge or consent. Online media files are often much larger than you expect.
This makes me think that the cost of administring these quotas (paying phone operators and tech support staff who will have to put up with hours of my constant bitching and excuses about my bill) will be higher than the cost of adding fatter pipes to the network and keeping everything uncapped.
I would honestly prefer that my download bandwith be cut (expecially during peak hours) than to have to constantly fret and worry that I'm close to my bandwidth cap, so I'd better turn off Shoutcast.
I hope they do a test run of this program in some small district, to see how users respond. I suspect that once people see their bill and the cryptic charges, many will try to dispute them. I promise I'll be on the phone the day my first metered RR bill arives. Will they "itemize" the usage fees like any other utility? Will they do it by port number? By time? By source? Will they charge the same for Usenet downloads, even if it puts no pressure on their connection to the internet? Will there be a warning when I've reached 75% of my monthly quota? Without these things, customers will bitch endlessly, and the workforce necessary to accomodate all the bitching will be more expensive than the overdue RR network improvements. Everybody who thinks this is a bad idea should put the RR customer service number in their speed dial and call them all the time to ask a bunch of really obscure questions, like "Oh God, I don't know what my daughter did on my computer just now. Can you please check how close I am to my cap? Oh, really, well, can you check how much I downloaded today? What? That's not what my meter says..." and so on.
On the other hand, most broadband users wouldn't know a megabit of downstream traffic if it bit them in the ass
Just because a user doesn't know that they can monitor their bandwidth doesn't give them an excuse.
In Win2k or better, you can just look at the properties for your network interface and see how much traffic has been passed. I am also 90% sure that there are countless freeware tools that do the same. In fact, the provider probably has a web page where a user can track their usage.
The bigger issue here is trying to get users into the habit of watching their usage. If you leave a room, you turn off the light. Do you know what a "kilowatt-hour" feels like?
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
As a CMTS technician and head end operator who was around for the first rollout and one of the few who actually read the DOCSIS spec, I can testify what Time Warner is proposing is going to be difficult. Given the current state of the network, it's a wonder it even works. When I was there, we were doing things for the most part ad hoc and flying by the seat of our pants. The user database, cable modem SMS database, and interactive user content were completely separate on isolated systems, running on a variety of architectures and different places.
For example, the typical account server that manages BOOTP requests and allows modems on the network is operated by the national Road Runner, while we operate our own DHCP servers. The TFTP server that transfers configuration information to customer modems to adjust settings is hosted and operated by a 3rd party service. In the first case, the BOOTP server runs on an AIX system, the DHCP server is Win NT, and the TFTP server is run directly off of the Cisco UBR.
Currently, we have no way of knowing what users are even on the system (e.g. IP's or MAC's to names). Why? Because our user database isn't connected to the CMTS. When we have to turn off a modem for non-payment, we have to go in and add a line in the UBR's file to map specific MAC addresses to a disabled DOCSIS configuration file. So yes, it is controlled by your MAC addresses but still the config file can be forged to give you access anyway. Cable modems have voluntary network access, that is, they must restrict themselves from going on the network if the head end tells them. That doesn't mean they can't somehow still go on the network, albeit not 'authorized'. Quite literally, there are no network locks other than the customer's modem.
Things were more of a mess just a few weeks ago. The configuration files weren't even using shared secret or message integrity checks to ensure customers didn't tamper with the files to gain unauthorized service. We only found this out after our OC-192 was getting heavily saturated connected to the Road Runner backbone. Doing a dump of connected modems (which displays frequency info, signal info, etc. and is generally used for debugging), yielded over 65 modems operating in excess of 10 Mb/s up and down. Talk about getting a deal for $39 a month. I had no idea how long these users had been exploiting the system, but I suspected at least a few had done so for around 11 months based on old logs from one of our router, which keeps bandwidth info for specific IP's (we could determine it was these users because they were also using static IP's).
Currently, there are around 80 modems on the system that technically shouldn't be. The reasons for this are varied, from mistyped MAC addresses to fraud, we don't have time to investigate and the current DOCSIS version we are using doesn't offer fixes for these types of problems.
Clearly, Time Warner needs to do a lot of work if they want to do anything like bandwidth limits. This may be a franchise-only problem, but the way I see it is the combination of the very much flawed DOCSIS spec to cable operators who ARE NOT internet service providers leads to these kinds of network abuses. Just look at TR's national web site that ends in errors every turn for proof they are running are glued together operation. This leads me to wonder if that article was to scare users into using less bandwidth, thus solving the problem for them? Otherwise they need a serious investment in infrastructure in order to make it happen in real life. Personally, I haven't heard anything to the affect of bandwidth limiting. We don't even have the capability to monitor it now, as I've said all along...
"I'll just chip in a bit for RedHat: I actually have that installed on my university machine." - Linus, '95
Well, here the bandwith for the bradband has been limited since it came out. As a matter of fact, you have 3-4 choices, these prices are average:
....
500MB/Month at like 25/Month
10GB/Month at 40/Month
20GB/Month at 65/Month
Unlimited at 90/Month
Each additional MB is invoiced at 0,05
Maybe this is what will happen in the states too??
Good luck!
So, when media companies finally get around to streaming movies over the internet, Road Runner users will be charged up the butt for downloading stuff from competing movie houses, but access to the AOL service will be unmetered (though there will be usage fees, of course). There will be AOL-approved (and hosted) streaming radio stations, AOL-approved news sites with streaming content (Time, CNN, etc.) and this will be the only stuff users will be allowed to look at without the fear that their RR bills will sink them.
This is a brilliant vertical-monopolistic strategy. This way, AOL will leverage their cable monopoly to feed us exactly the media content they want us to see (i.e. theirs), and we'll be greatful, because it's "free." Any opponents ("competitors") will be ignored because downloading stuff from them will cost you heavy usage charges. AOL will say "why would you want to go anywhere else when we have so much great AOL content for free?" This way, the internet to an AOL user will basically look like an AOL sandbox.
We are entering some scary times...
What it comes down to is this. Don't sell me a Cadillac and tell me I can only drive it to the end of the parking lot.
Pretty simple stuff really.
ok, it's been established that it's time-warner, who distributes/creates/produces movies & music. they're trying to protecte this. who hosts 85% of all movies/music? cable/dsl users. why not just put a 200 MB a month cap on data uploads, excluding file transfer download requests, html requests, ect? the real warez kiddies would find a way around this, but like shitting down napster, it would kill approximatly 90% of the casual user from sharing at best more than a couple of songs or sending a Q3 mod to a friend so they can both play b/c filepnaet sucks ass. there's plenty of downstream bandwidth avalible.
moox. for a new generation.
the real cost is provisioning for peak usage. ... What I think they should be doing is only metering during those peak periods and leaving it status quo the rest of the day.
Charging for bandwidth usage is garbage, based on models of consumable resources rather than shared instintaneous resources. Bandwidth disappears when not used. You can't save it up during low usage periods to provide extra during high usage periods.
- If they charge you when you're NOT competing with other users, they pulled money from you when the difference between you having used the bandwidth and having NOT used the bandwidth made no difference to their costs and to their other customers' experiences.
- If they charge you when you ARE competing, they're charging you when you're no more of a problem then any one of the other customers you're allegedly causing a problem for. If they charge you more then those other customers because you used bandwidth when nobody else wanted it, they're just ripping you off.
The proper thing for them to do is:
- Divide the bandwidth evenly between everybody who wants to use it on an instintaneous basis.
- Add more bandwidth if things are too slow during the peaks.
- Charge all the users for their share of the cost of the provisioned bandwidth (times a profit multiplier).
No matter how hard you suck on the pipe, you can't consume any more bandwidth than they chose to give you at any instant. No matter how many packets you blow into the pipe, it won't pass any more packets on than they chose to let it pass. If you blow in more than that it will drop them - and TCP will automatically drop rate and retransmit until you're using the available bandwidth and still getting through. If you can take an "unfair share", it's THEIR fault for using routers that can't divide the bandwidth fairly, not your fault for trying to use what's available.
And if their business model assumed broadband users wouldn't actually use the bandwidth, that's also THEIR fault, not yours.
Bandwidth usage pricing is not a way to be fair. It's a way to gouge the customers with an unpredictable price hike.
Can you imagine the consternation when an email virus, moustrap animated advertisement package, or distributed DOS client gets loaded on a bunch of their customers and runs their bills up to astronomical levels? Or when users bills skyrocket because the ISP didn't filter out spam?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
> Aren't they always being shot at on Star Trek?
:-P
I think he meant that on Star Trek, they regularly have sex with attractive aliens, whereas geeks on this planet usually do not have sex with any living being.
"There are already a million monkeys on a million typewriters, and Usenet is NOTHING like Shakespeare." - Blair Houghton
Capped bandwidth reduces the cost of the service to ordinary users by not making the rest of us pay for what is probably P2P piracy.
Which could possibly be the big reason behind this.
It's also going to kill net radio services like shoutcast.
Another thought: It's going to make people (well, me at least) even more resentful of advertising.
I have to pay for (1) simple access, then I have to pay for (2) metered usage, then I have to be bombarded with (3) advertisements to see anything of value -- which I am paying to (4) download, and I have to (5) register with the content provider to get the content and advertisements.
I've got an internal network for testing and development. But I've been spoiled by the net. Maybe I'll just switch back dial up, and use lynx to read slashdot, google groups, search.cpan.org and java.sun.com. And pine (though Evolution is pretty nice) to read email. Maybe I'll resubscribe to a print newspaper and a weekly news magazine for news again.
I'll miss having so much technical information immediately at my disposal, but I've paid for all these technical reference books on my bookshelf. And many of them come with a digital version of themselves. Maybe it's time to use them as a first resource instead of google groups.
Yet another thought: I've been lazy wasting all this "precious" bandwidth by continually accessing content that doesn't change regularly. I'll start using local copies.
I'll have to look inito creating a caching server.
I'll certainly get some junkbuster software running now.
If they want us to *really* pay attention to bandwidth, it will kill a lot of the internet. Animation Express will die. That stuff is interesting, but I'm not going to pay to see it. Even stuff like Yahoo! Games (which I haven't played in while) won't last.
Think about it. A lot of the Internet is entertainment. What sorts of entertainment are people willing to *pay* for? Movies, Music, Pr0n... what else? This is all high-bandwidth, and outside of mp3, the online quality sucks.
Dancing Hamsters? 3 minutes Flash cartoons? Are you kidding?
Quickly changing information is useful to have. Weather, stocks, news. Which can all be distilled down to text and tranferred efficiently.
Technical documation, I can have a local copy of.
This is why I cancelled cable. If they started making you pay for each tv show you watched, how much of it is really worth watching? Not a whole hell of a lot, that's for sure.
So, for me, the internet boils down to two things: one-to-one communication (email and instant messaging) and e-commerce. I shop online to save trips to the store.
Here's a good question. If you had to pay for metered access, can you name any reason at that you ever, ever go to these web sites:
Burger King
7-Eleven
insert usless site here.
Lastly, one of the beautiful things about the Net was the smaller niche and fringe communities that conform without being bound by geographical boundaries. With metered access, those communities will have one more barrier. If you have to pay for acesss, people will more likely stick with the "tried and true" sites, rather that sifting through the mountains of crap to find the gems. This will undoubtedly result result in more concentration of users, content and money around the Big 10 Media Corporations. Which will incredibly boring.
Maybe this internet thing was a fad after all.
Don't mind me. I'm just bitter.
Software Wars
I connect to UUNet, and they connect to me. In that way we usually use the same amount of each others network, and thus we charge each other the same price for connection )
Sure, that's called bilateral peering, however to do so, it requires that there be roughly the same amt of traffic going in each direction... This is not the case w/ @home/othercableproviders, as they have much more 'download' traffic than they have 'upload', ie they need uunet more than uunet needs them. Although honestly i dont know for sure, i heavily doubt that CableServiceProviderX doesnt pay some fee w/ their peering arrangements.
Sure, it was marketed as flat rate. Then they decided that wasn't a good business model, and they're switching away from flat rate to metered past a threshhold. Nobody guaranteed you perpetual flat rate.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
For home users your solution isn't that good. Home users on average do not need a constant bandwidth 24/7 like servers do, so it's a better deal for them to get higher burst service in return for having a limit on total data transfer.
As even for servers, you'll note almost no major colo facilities offer flat rates -- you pay by the gigabyte past a certain threshhold. Otherwise Slashdot would be paying the same flat bandwidth rate as Joe's Knitting Site.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Then this asshole posts that P2P is just about 14 year old kids trading warez and pr0n!?!!? Are brainwashed chimps like this guy all we've got left in the geek community?
Well, before jumping to calling names, the local ISP here did the same thing, and most of the people who switched services here were "warez leecher". 10GB per month is pretty nice, here I have 6, it's a bit tight especially if one month you feel like trying a lot of linux/bsd distros, etc... if I go over 6 gigs, it's 2$/100megs.. this is where I find it a bit expensive.. The other complain is that they should put a 6 gig low usage, 20 gig average usage and 20+ leech, you use, you pay more, you don't, it's cheap.
Right now the problem is out of 100 home connection to the internet, probably 5 of them are over-abusing leaving their 100 gigs of MP3 on a P2P system trading like hell (which is a good thing some will say). Well ISP has to pay for the bandwidth, and they do their pricing to be profitable and expect a certain bandwidth per month, if 5% of your user hrab as much bandwidth that the 95% others, you need to implement something either to get revenues from this or cut them off because they destroy your buisness plan.
Basically it's like a health system or insurances, you can be lucky, healthy... you'll have to pay for those who "needs" it. In this respect I find disgusting that the ISP are not actually profiting from this by charging a decent fee (cmon, 2$/100 megs is kind of expensive a bit, I'd take a "package" instead) for those who use it more, and LOWER THE FEE for the others. That would balance things out, but I guess lowering the fee of 95% of the people isn't profitable or you'd have to overcharge the 5% by a big factor.
You make a good point though. Internet becomes bigger, technology makes it faster, and it's like if it's not moving or degrading sometimes... but that's capitalism and greed doing their job.
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
If bandwidth hogging was a problem the companies should take care to implement priorityschemes so their commercial interests can get through.
I agree with the first in this thread that bandwidth capping is counterproductive if there's even a chance that it can't be delivered, it would be better to have the choice of paying for guaranteed bandwith by size or getting a slower service flatrate.
The fact that the hardware today can't handle priorities is the same thing as shooting themselves in the foot for the ISP's since they cannot sell their network for video-on-demand.
Hence, commercial losses is just fiction since they can't deliver those profits anyhow.
Id imagine that line is in there when they catch someone doing something a bit overboard when it comes to how much traffic is going to them, and they have complaints around the area that its slower, they can point to that and say you are a bad person and cut off yer services..
And that's the way that it should be, really. Most of the "bandwidth hogs" are people hosting servers of some sort on their cable connection which is clearly against the TOS/AUP. Punish the people who abuse the network by booting them, it's only a small portion of the users and therefore revenue. Otherwise offer them tiered service or switch them to commercial service.
By pulling this "excessive bandwidth charge" out, it makes it sound like they want to be able to apply it to a much larger portion of their userbase.
I like what Iglou.com (my DSL ISP for Cincinnati Bell's Zoomtown) does. For my payment, I get a certain amount of "guaranteed" bandwidth per month. If I go over that then I'm at the mercy of however congested their network is at the time. So no extra bills but the router will drop my traffic over the people who paid more if I go over my limit.
Miami University does sort of the same thing. They carved out a chunk of bandwidth from their T-3 with router rules for their library. There it was because of a grant to give it Internet access so they wanted to make sure the dorms weren't slamming so much traffic it stalled the library.
Less administration, less hassle. And I'm happy.
Things just don't magically appear at the other end of your local pipe. Millions upon millions of cables, switches and routers around the world build up the backbone. I can run a 100mbit cable over to my friend's house, no problem. But I see the price tag of running it to {insert very remote area here}. There are very good reasons for ISPs to build large and local mirrors. They don't like big internet bills from their providers any more than you do.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Let's spend a ton of time and effort and money developing and deploying DSL to the masses. It's "More than they'll ever need" is what they kept saying.
:-) ).
Just like 256KB of Sipp memory was more than I'd ever use in 93, and that 1GB HD (Gasp) would be impossible for me to filll up.
It's pointless to keep asking "Why the hell don't they learn." They aren't dumb. They want to be able to bitch and whine to the government so that their pocket polititians can convince everyone else to look at their woes instead of what they are doing. They are raping the consumer with "local market monopolies" perpetuated by county and city regulations which keep out competitors.
I'm speaking mostly about Bell South, I don't know about most of the rest, other than the company I used to work for.
Do the math: In the greater metropolitan area of Atlanta, GA there are about 3,142,857 people, of which I estimate about 1/3 have phones (students, families, etc...). At an extreemly conservative estimate of $40/phone bill per month (and none of that is DSL) Bell South groses about $125,714,280/month from Atlanta alone.
Based on the fact that I have worked for a large telecomm company I can (probably over-)estimate their total number of employees at about 25,000 with perhaps 8,000 service techs(probably BS, because they take forever to respond to a call) in Atlanta which is their base of operations. At an average rate of $12/hr for a 40 hour week they can pay these 8,000 full-time employees $15,360,000/month.
I know my estimates are probably grossly inaccurate on the conservative side, but they aren't even touching this monopoly's corporate revenues! All of the telecomm companies are making money hand-over-fist as fast as they can pump their friggin arms (all 24,000 of them
I'm glad more people don't understand the problem because their would probably be riot if they did.
My $0.02 will always be worth more than your â0.02, so
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Having lived in a few places that lacks competition, I'm happy every day I'm on a 24/7 connection. Time-metered modem, ISDN sucks so completely donkey balls as possible. I've *never* lived a place where even local calls are flat rate either, in case you're interested.
I don't mind getting metered pr. mb or gb or for different time periods, I just hope some fairly skilled MBA out there will know how to distribute the fixed costs, including repairs, support, expanding to more ports, more IP addresses and other things that is fairly equal with every customer, bandwidth hog or not, evenly. Personally I think bandwidth would be overpriced, hopefully I'm wrong...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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So, let's turn the question around - if the threshhold were set fairly high (only affects, say, the upper third of users), but if they also guaranteed no spam and that any traffic you paid for, you requested, would it be more reasonable?
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Comment removed based on user account deletion
I have.
I'm not just referring to bandwidth costs, but costs in paying engineers and operations staff, costs for upkeep and service contracts for hardware, the list goes on and on. Have you looked in detail at finanicial reports for your broadband provider?
Its not a rosey picture, and the world of the ISP has changed significantly from "back in the day". Even when I worked at a local dialup provider before the advent of broadband the costs were astromomical because they had nothing to offer in a peering arrangement. They were a small fish in a big pond. Now, working for a big fish, the costs are entirely different. Sure, peering may be a different world, and owning your own fat fibre network changes costs of traffic... but there are still costs for the network, greater costs for the servers, huge costs for software and service contracts to take care of the servers, manage the network and gather information for trend analysis (Open Source is nice but doesn't cut it in the real world of the huge corporation, hence companies like HP and Micromuse make a killing), and the amount of money you have to dish out for salaries... hoooo boy.
Invoking "corporate greed" is a cop out for refusing to understand the realities. In most cases (I will concede "not all") we're getting our broadband REALLY REALLY CHEAP. The tide is swinging the other way in many areas (ATTBI: tastes flat, less filling, same price), but where I live and work, its not.
perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5, (41*2), sqrt(7056), (unpack(c,H)-2), oct(115), 10)'
I agree with the principals of capitalism. (Not mercantilism, which is something very different.) So I think Time Warner should have the right to change their fee structure. Their service agreement says they can change their service if they want, and we all agreed to it.
Capitalism also means the consumer is part of the market, though, so I hope Time Warner understands that if they overdo their rate hike, I'd have to cancel my Roadrunner service, and I'd also drop my cable account and switch to satellite. They'd lose three times as much revenue they're receiving from me for Roadrunner.
This brings up significant privacy concerns. Today, electric companies are required by law to report "inordinate amounts" of electricity being used in residences. This is because people growing marijuana in their closets use UV lamps, which require gobs of power per day. The electric companies contact the cops, the cops get a search warrant, and the drug dealers are taken to jail.
In the scheme described in the NetworkWorld article, Time Warner will keep track of how much you will upload/download. Download too much, and the police may suspect that you're getting illegal software or music. See the logical progression? I don't relish the idea of the cops snooping in on my business because I u/d too many packets while deathmatching...
What I've always wondered is why are all lines, network speed, and general capability defined in speed (mb/s), but charged via the integral of that (mb).
I mean there's something inherently shady about selling (or even leasing) John Q a 768kps line, advertising the speed of the line, and then only giving him 200mb/month (.08kps)
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Okay,
I'll see your , but costs in paying engineers and operations staff, costs for upkeep and service contracts for hardware, the list goes on and on
and raise you a
All ISP's have to build staff, support, maintenance, and growth cost into their billing. And so while those are huge expenses, if the company is loosing money on those services it's because they made a choice to do so.
you see? The second part of this post, was also the second part of my first reply to you. So please come up with a better argument then that.
You Karma Whore
For all those people who thought I was crazy for waiting for DSL to be available, and for setting the dogs after any cable salesman who stepped on the property....
THIS is exactly why I won't do business with cable companies. They've got the monopoly, because once you're signed up it's hard to switch to someone else. Face it, when you've got some serious TV to watch and some web surfing to do, who has time to call up Dish Network to order a satellite dish? Who has time to get a DSL line?
My DSL line will be installed this month. I'll have the contractual ability to run my own mail server, and my own web server. My TV is through Dish Network. No cable companies get my dollars.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
And just where are you going to plug in that wireless network?
THIS SPACE FOR RENT
Did anyone else catch the tid-bit at the bottom of the article that said for Cox Communications: To introduce 128K bit/sec symmetrical services later this year. ?!!?!?!
What the hell is their sales department going to do now ??? "Yes, we're over 2 times faster than dialup !"
Screw that !! I'll get DSL !
I think this is getting blown way out of proportion. Their not talking about charging you for every byte that goes over the wire. Most people can go to burgerking.com 10 times a day before exceeding any reasonable quota. As long as the quota is sensible, I really see this as a good thing.
THIS SPACE FOR RENT
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
what mirrors did you use?
Honestly, I have no idea. I think most of them were from universities, I remember specifically seeing Duke fly by.
I use a wonderful program called Getright by Headlight Software. It does automatic FTP and filemirror searches, gets up the list of all places it can be downloaded from, and breaks the isos up into eight pieces, and downloads each iso from eight places at once. I never get less than 200KB/s combined.
I've heard that the program contains spyware, but I really don't care since I run it in Wine, and just kill it when the downloads are done. I don't have to worry about it sneaking up in a background process (or service if you're using NT-based windows).
You should try it.
The speed of time is one second per second.
Helsinki Television (HTV) has two plans: Welho Pro and Welho 525.
The Pro is their former only plan, with unlimited rate (technical limit is I think 34Mbps downstream limited to 10Mbps by the 10BaseT ethernet on modem), while the 525 is rate limited to (guessed it) 525kbps. Now that they have the new 525 plan, Pro plan has "limited availability".
Cost is about the same (I think that the 525 was some even number of euros, as it was introduced only this year, where the Pro plan was even number of Finnish marks) - roughly 40/month, or 54.66 with static IP which I have.
At least the Welho Pro is pretty fast - in Finland. But any traffic elsewhere is slow. And I mean slow as in dial-up. That's why I didn't dump my ADSL when I got the cable.. Had planned to keep them both for a while to see which worked better. Turned out both are of unacceptable quality, but keeping two consumer grade connections was still cheaper than one business grade, and they didn't have outages at the same time.. Unacceptable quality means that I did get refunds and free months in the beginning, but at least now they work more than six days a week, so no more refunds.
You seemed to have missed the point that Napster was fast and efficient (in the technical sense, I hate music piracy) and Gnutella is by comparison extremely slow and unreliable. Decentralised internet connections? Doesn't sound too hot to me, and you still have to pay for the connection.
That's funny: my cable company promised me 1.5M/128k service, 24/7. They never indicated there would be any other kind of cap, nor that using the system 24/7 - *as I contracted for it* - was a problem. If this *is* a problem, does the fault lie with me and the contract I signed, or with the cable company for refusing to live up to their end of the bargain?
Really, now, who has the rocks to say that *I'm* the problem when I'm using the service that I paid for? The problem isn't me, it's the cable company for promising something they couldn't deliver. *If they couldn't fucking deliver they shouldn't have offered*. In the real world we piss on these lying sons-of-bitches and move on to a competitor.
But wait! In the cable world there *are* no competitors? Silly me, I forgot that capitalism has no place in this market, and Congress - as it's done with so many other things - has guaranteed this with legislation.
(sigh) One tired citizen looking for a country with a bill of rights and a (mostly) capitalist economic system. Mine no longer makes the grade.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
Any bets on how long it will be before we have to pay a per-minute levy to record companies and movie studios for all our Internet usage?
Of course, they'll make it "fair" by computing the fraction of total Internet traffic in the world that is piracy, and multiply that fraction by the amount they claim to be losing, so the fact that you're not using the Internet for trading music and movies will be "taken into account" in some average sense (like the Canadian CD-R levy).
Think that's absurd? That's what people thought of the blank media levies and the DMCA. But they're the law of the land now. Just wait...
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
The business-level accounts (~$150/month) are unlimited.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
For me, it will amount to more surfing at work, and being a bit choosier when I download stuff at home. But I won't go to Ameritech just because I might have to pay a few dollars more.
I'd have a personalized plate on my car, but "toxic bachelor" won't fit into 7 letters.
Apparently history repeats itself. That article is very reminiscent of some ideas proposed a few centuries earlier by a Mr. Karl Marx. I believe his society fell because of government management of resources. Or one by Aristotle...I believe the principals that where applied to Roman society from his work on government also led to Rome's fall (equal distribution of resources led to an almost non-existant working class).
"Basic economics" do indeed apply - but I think we should only worry about applying economics that have been shown correct in practice. Its strange that so many argue against laisse faire, and so many for forcable direction of resources, though the latter has been shown to work, and the former has been shown to fail miserably in almost every case.
I read that article, and I think I'd have to say that 802.11 networking would be capable of succeeding for the same reason that free market systems work (despite the comments in this article claiming that they don't) - resources could be reallocated as efficiently as possible according to the will of the consumers of those resources.
Compared to ALL other systems, resources in a free market system flow to their users the fastest. There are no hour-long lines at the supermarkets, or shortages, or anything else of that nature. Supply is very close to equaling demand.
I think you assume too much when you assume that the nets have to be "maintainted" in some way - maintenance is only a result of a high enough population of users and a better routing mechanism (on top of 802.11b) than we currently have - one that is ad-hoc. You think the computers are going to be getting tired of doing the routing?
I'd like to end with a well known saying:
democracy is a pretty bad system of government, but its a lot better than the alternatives.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
I know of people who routinely transfer 8-10 Gb per DAY (yes, per day - they max out at around 1000 kilobits second, 60 seconds a minute, 60 minutes an hour, 24 hours a day = 88473600000 bits/per day = ~10.2 gigabytes per day!) of mp3s, warez, movies, spam, etc.
You're full of shit. Care to tell me just where these people are putting their 10GB per day of MP3s, warez, movies, etc? Hard drives top out at about 160GB and cost a few hundred bucks. You'd have to buy a new drive every 16 days.
Plain and simple, your claim is bullshit. Unless you have a server farm full of large drive clusters, you'll never get away with transferring that much information. Number one, you have to store it: No family can go through 10GB per day and actually use all the content. That's 166 hours of MP3s or 10 DivX movies. Nobody sits in front of their computer and takes in that much content every day, so they've got to store it in one way or another for later use. That storage doesn't come cheap, and within just a few days, most people's hard drives will be filled to the brim. So the 10GB per day, assuming it's a realistic number, won't last very damn long.
As for uploads, you can't upload 10GB per day when your upload cap is 128k.
Better rethink your numbers, because they make zero sense whatsoever.
-Ryan, with the unoriginal sig
This is the same company that charges $300 a month for a static IP.
That's right, JUST for the static IP.
Sucks go be them, then--they shouldn't have made the claims, otherwise they're obligated to deliver what they advertised. Was that news to you or something?
CEE5210S The signal SIGHUP was received.
Umm, what's inherently inferior about "residential quality" lines? Oh yeah, I forgot the corporate owners of those lines won't let anyone else lay wires on the PUBLIC right of way. Sorry, I just don't have much respect for the quality of service the slave masters so generously restrict me to. Wireless is going to leave those loosers holding a bunch of worthless wires they can strangle till the cows come home. The smart thing to do would be to try to make some money off their assest now.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Now they have you.
Oh, by the way, we're going to charge you for bandwidth exceeding some yet undetermined quota.
Isn't that special?
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
Little fine print that contradicts the big bold type tends to attract class action lawsuits and the attention of Attorneys General and the FTC. Was that news to you or something?
CEE5210S The signal SIGHUP was received.
They could also decide to only meter outgoing traffic.
That would help reduce competition...
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
Mike,
(I assume that's what your name is)
Please give me your e-mail address so I can contact you directly, so we can see if your network lacks the security to unlock your modem (very simple process from Windows or Linux).
I looked all over your web site and even on your resume, however I could not find any e-mail address of contact information.
If you're interested, let me know. But remember it may be for a limited time, as your cable company wises up, but as I mentioned users had been using 10 Mb/s symmetrical for at least 11 months that we could tell.
"I'll just chip in a bit for RedHat: I actually have that installed on my university machine." - Linus, '95