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Comcast May Raise Prices On "Internet Hogs"
lunartik writes: "According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, Comcast may raise rates on users of their @home service who download a significant amount of audio or video files. Comcast claims that 1 percent of users use 30 percent of capacity. With the flat fee possibly flying out the window for users who utilize the service's speed, one wonders if US broadband is heading the same way as the Aussies." Time Warner has said much the same, and the spiral has probably just begun.
Spammers must use loads of bandwidth - this should cut them down.
that they get away with this.
sulli
RTFJ.
Get a DS1 to your house. If you live in a downtown area, you may be able to cut a zero mile deal and resell to your neighbors.
Then hog the internet all you want.
Pareto's Principle: The 80-20 Rule
"Pareto's rule states that a small number of causes is responsible for a large percentage of the effect, in a ratio of about 20:80. Expressed in a management context, 20% of a person's effort generates 80% of the person's results. The corollary to this is that 20% of one's results absorb 80% of one's resources or efforts."
How to Download YouTube Videos
How dare they? I mean, why the hell should people who cost them more money have to pay more? Don't they realise that these noble, honourable souls constantly downloading gigabytes upon gigabytes of MP3s and porn deserve a free ride?
I'd be all for it if it wasn't just an excuse to raise prices.
"Comcast, however, has no immediate plans to offer a lower-priced, slower service. David N. Watson, Comcast Cable Communications Inc.'s senior vice president of marketing, sales and customer service, said at a recent conference that it would be "pretty premature" for the company to offer a lower-priced broadband service, given that its current offering is selling well."
I know that I hate the fact that I am going to probably end up paying more for my highspeed connection, but I can see the reasons for charging extra for bandwidth users. A lot of current services we use charge base on usage, why shouldn't the internet? It might lead to a better underlying architecture and better speeds eventually for everyone.
The big question to ask is whether this extra money they earn is going to be put into improving the system that they currently have, and thus over time improve service for all of their customers.
(This is all IMHO, meaning no offense to anyone)
~ kjrose
People pay for their access not for the latency, but for the bandwidth. These companies don't have limits on their user contracts, to enforce imaginary clauses is illegal. Someone should sue their asses. Besides, the pipes are already there, using them costs no extra money to the providers, especially for a company like comcast.
If you don't like their prices, change providers. If no provider has prices you like, then what you're asking for probably isn't financially viable. (Yes, we all want BMWs for $17,000, but that isn't going to happen.)
Plus, if they wanted to be a total bastards, they could continue to jack up the rates until those 1% left. If those top 1% left, they could have 30% more capacity at a cost of only 1% of their revenue. Then, they could add 30% more customers with a usage profile like the other 99%. That seems like good business to me. It's also called increasing shareholder value.
Too big to fail? Does that make me to small to succeed?
Uuugh! Please people don't click on the above link! If any of you know what Goatse.cx is, Then not clicking on it might save you the blinding!
(Please don't vote me down! I'm just warning the innocent!)
Flat pricing only works in some situations:
-If there is significant overhead to individually billing. For instance for water some municipalities flat charge because the cost of installing water meters at every house is prohibitive. Alternately there can be a significant overhead administratively for some systems (for instance for gas and electricity a guy has to come around reading meters). None of these apply to internet connections where it's trivial to meter usage, and electronic billing has made exceptional billing very cheap.
-When you convince people that they will use far more than they actually will, when in reality you know by experience that they won't. I got a "flat fee" membership for the year to Canada's Wonderland (only the cost of going twice!), yet in reality I know that I'll probably go maybe twice all year. Tonnes of memberships rely on this. Gym memberships force you into the "flat fee" because they know that most people will come for two weeks, and then never come again, yet they're tied in for a year.
-When you're a heavy user and you know that everyone else is subsidizing you. This is the case with (former) @Home's where the bandwidth requirements are overwhelmingly to support a few people, and everyone is ranting and raving about how slow the connection is because Jimmy has a 24/7 gnutella serving running.
The only ones who'll be frothing about how outrageous this is are the people who are abusing the system (the 1%).
The price is enough to make me look at other options like dsl.ca that is still offering 1Mbit service for a flat rate of $35 although who knows how long it will last.
I don't disagree that flat rate pricing causes the majority to subsidize the few but I think that 5GB is far to little. I can use that in a month easily and I don't even do any P2P.
The US government claims that 1% of citizens control 75% of the American wealth. As a result, the government will be raising taxes for those that abuse the middle- and lower-class masses.
"I'll say it again for the logic-impaired." -- Larry Wall.
Damn it! I'm sooo sick of people WHINING here on slashdot. Oh, wait. Slashdot. If you don't like their policies, DON'T USE THEIR SERVICE. If you live in a metro area, go find some high speed hookup, get 10, 20, or 50 guys together in a close area, and set up your own high-speed network. We did this when I was going through university and it worked great. I live in a rural area, and the only way I'll ever see broadband again is if I take it upon myself to fix the situtation. Let's see here - 30 guys paying in $50/mo gives you $1500/mo to buy a pipe from or maintain leases on equipment. Do you have twenty people in networking range? How much bandwidth would that get? Could you get more than 30? Who would pay more? How important is your suckage in the long term? Would getting a fat pipe to someone's house, remotely dling your pr0n^h^h^heducational videos via a slower connection, and doing SneakerNet runs suffice?
I thought that america was the land of the "can do" attitude, not the bend-over-and-take-it capital of the world. (and whine about it). Look at what the auzzies are doing to combat the horrible internet and communications rates over there - projects like Sydney Wireless and others in europe have gone so far as to start laying their own cable. Get out and talk to your neighbours, take the initiative.
It could very well be that the current model doesn't work, because that 1% of users is exceeding the cable companies cost. It could be that you don't even need that much internet connectivity if you establish a well-stocked neighbourhood peer-to-peer net. I know another solution some of the residence dwellers use here is their own 802.11 network that isn't routed onto the campus network, or campus-owned.
If you don't have time, then accept the services offered at the market rate.
Man, I'm in a bad mood this morning. No coffee. But if I see another one of these whining threads, I'm going to scream! Might as well post a anti-MPAA diatribe, follow it up with a spiderman-II article.
..don't panic
suppose I only download my text-email, and I only pull 2 megs. per month, I should pay a pro-rated amount for what I use. Equally so, if I only drive 100 miles per month, I should pay a pro-rated insurance fee. If you disagree, you must be a Nazi, or a share holder in an insurance company. If this means I have to have metered internet usage, or metered driving, just like I have metered electricity usage, then so be it.
Normally I don't have a problem with companies charging more for high bandwidth users, but with the way Comcast has been going lately, they haven't even been able to provide basic service to people. Whereas @home managed to keep speeds fairly good even at peak times, Comcast service intermittantly slows to a crawl at least 5 times a day, and their dns servers are constantly out. They've already capped upload and download speeds to almost nothing, now they're using their own network problems as an excuse to charge more money for the same crappy service.
Since a large number of Comcast's user rent their modems, Comcast has the ability to throttle them back. Why not identify the "hogs" and simply throttle their modems back. Or is this a way to allow them to raise prices AND throttle back service?
Bandiwdth isn't free... I think many Slashdotters will find that REALLY surprising when they get out of college.
Those who use more should pay more. Bandwidth is finite and getting more to the ISP costs them more, which in turn costs everyone more. I'm not going to pay for other people's downloads and I don't expect others to do it for me.
The obvious solution is to charge the high use costomers more. That will either offset the cost of increased capacity or discourage the additional use, reducing the need for extra capacity.
Of course, IMHO the additional charge for high use costomers should be balanced to not overly discourage them, as they are exactly the users who will drive new, more compelling content, which will bring more users to see the Internet as an important resource (whether for entertainment or other uses), driving up the total user base.
Eventually the threshold for what defines "high use" will be foreced up as the average user requires a consistantly high bandwidth connection. By that time , the current high use customers will have funded (and driven) the development of a system that can supply that bandwidth. There will of course be those who, because of new uses, require more than the current "average" bandwidth, continuing the cycle.
Again, why exactly is this a bad thing?
Is it me or are broadband isp always blaming the heavyusers. and are the mayority of users always acepting it, because they aren't part of the so called heavy users.
I doubt that this trick would work in another branche.can you imagine:"we have to raise the price of cola, because some customers drink the whole bottle empty"
and how do we know that it is really 1%? In reality it could 20% or something. If you don't want offer an umlimited service just say that, but don't blame your customers for using a service for which they paid.
Go buy your own T-1. The ones I have at work cost $1K/month for a full CIR frame T-1 to BellSouth for Internet. Good SLA and great speed. Then, sell it to your neighbors. When your neighbor's teenage son is downloading pr0n like crazy and using 95% of the shared bandwidth be sure and DO NOT complain! Do not raise their rates! Remember, that's why you left your ISP.
I'd rather that I was given the chance to use some upgraded service than have them chopping off my bandwidth with caps. As long as the charges are clearly presented in advance and it's not some unexpected bill at the end of the month this sounds good to me. Wonder if they'll start offering multiple static IP's as an upgrade...
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/05/25/12 9226
Ummm, err, say what, now?
I've used cable modem services for at least 3 years including mediaone, at&t, time warner and hopefully pretty soon charter. I've always recommended it to friends and family over DSL because you get a much higher download rate (200-300KB/s) compared to the normal consumer dsl (75-100KB/s).
In general you paid the same for DSL vs Cable but got more with the cable service. Well, that's changing now. Cable companies have noticed that they are basically giving away a T1 worth of bandwidth for $50/month. They see how the phone company can offer high-end business DSL for $250/month and want to cash in... so they are copying the DSL's price scheme.
Charter Communications is my current cable provider. Their plans are something like this:
256Kb Down / 64Kb Up - $30
768Kb Down / 128Kb Up - $40
1Mb Down / 256Kb Up - $60
1.5Mb Down / 384Kb up - $100
These are very similar to verizon/at&t/etc DSL packages. I figure most of the other cable providers will switch to a similar plan soon. They save bandwidth, make more money and the only people to really complain are the 1% who are causing all the bandwidth problems in the first place. That 1% doesn't have any alternative except for DSL, which has the same pricing plans... and we know they won't go back to dial-up.
1 out of 5 people wouldn't pay taxes, another 1 in 5 would call every tax period to complain about the quality of government service and get a credit amounting to 1/3 of their bill just to keep them quiet, with the rest paying regularly not knowing that if they just stopped doing so, there's a 50-50 shot anyone would notice.
2002-05-23 12:32:50 Comcast Mulls Heavy-Usage Charges (articles,money) (rejected)
I guess this wasn't newsworthy the day the article actually appeared in the paper, when I submitted it.
I propose a new Slashdot slogan: "Stale News for Nerds, Stuff that mattered a few days ago."
Go ahead and mod me down, I'm at the cap.
~Philly
Comcast has never been reliable. Outages lasting several days or several weeks haven't been uncommon. Maybe their infrastructure really CAN'T support thousounds of people running PtP clients without an upgrade... and that's not cheap.
At least we now have an alternative -- DSL availability is much better in areas served by Comcast. As little as 6 months ago I couldn't get DSL.
Oh yea -- Verizon -- ughh, nevermind!
"Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever." --Napoleon Bonaparte
IMHO, there is nothing wrong with charging people according to how much bandwidth they use.
The problem with cable pricing is that generally, companies have a monopoly on their areas and therefore users don't have any choice beyond paying whatever rate is decreed or accessing the internet by some other (and often inferior) method.
If the market for cable services were opened, I'd see no problem with companies imposing whatever pricing structure they see fit.
They'll charge the same rate per byte all the time. Information is like electricity. It's cheaper at night.
So if I'm given 10GB/month in downstream then why should I bother to do any large transfers at night? a byte is a byte and I'd rather just leave my computer off. If, on the other hand, they said that bandwidth was free off-peak(after 11pm before 9am) then I could agree with their plan. I would have an incentive to queue files and download them over night, rather than during the day.
You don't exist. Go away. --SysVinit Halt
It's important to note that you can't "save" bandwidth for later (unlike water or electricity), and the ISP pays for its pipe whether it's saturated or not, so wouldn't this kind of usage-based throttling of an instant resource simply make more sense? The more you use, the less you get (but only when it's scarce).
Is it really so expensive for an ISP to implement this at the headend versus the small difference it takes to account for the number of Gigs you transfer and charging obscene rates for overages, even during offpeak hours?
--
Power to the Peaceful
Here are some problems with this: /.
1) no more downloading iso of GNU/Linux Distubutions.
2) no more downloading developer's tools from Apple
3) no more keeping an local mirror of ftp.kernel.org, gcc.gnu.org's cvs, ftp.gnu.org, ftp.redhat.org, ftp.openbsd.org, and sources.redhat.org's cvs (src, binutils, gdb).
4) no more being able to be linked from
I just realized I run about 33.7 gigs a month upload... eek!
-Alex
Well, this move kills two birds at the same time. First, they get rid of bandwidth hogs. Second people will stop sharing their bandwidth. It will be especially dangerous to wireless communities like Sputnik and similar. Who is going to share bandwidth with strangers if is going to pay for their usage later ? Of course unless wireless communities will introduce some kind of billing. But then the security and authorization in wireless networks will be a problem. BR, Kubus
Imagine what would happen if, say, instead of 1%, it was 3% using their maximum bandwidth. Now 90% of it is gone. Suppose 20% wanted to use maximum bandwidth. Now you ALL lose. If Comcast doesn't do something to cut back excess use no one will be able to use it at all.
Everyone's always complaining about the imbalance of wealth in this country and demanding that the richest 1% should stop controlling 90% of our finances, but as soon as you're in the 1% that gets 30% of the bandwidth it's you're God-given right to steal as much music as possible. Give me a break.
Comcast has hardly been providing good service these days. The upload has been capped to near nothing and the service slows down greatly at random intervals. Perhaps if it was a good service I would be willing to pay more for my 15-20 gigs a month but if they raise the fee now I'm switching to DSL.
Of course bandwidth costs money, but if I'm going to be charged for the amount of bandwidth I'm using, I darn well better be in charge of how much bandwidth I'm using. And simply speaking, I'm not -- what if someone decides that I should really see a banner ad featuring Regis' voice telling me about the Tribeca film festival? With lights and electricity, I can just leave them off. Same with gas, heat, air conditioning, phone. But if the content I want demands outrageous bandwidth due to "entrepreneurs" of the internet advertising industry, I have no control over it. Don't even make me go into things like Gator, which eats away a chunk of bandwidth that I'm sure would allow for a couple more "heavy" users.
Secondly, streaming audio and video are big business. Charge people for indiscriminately visiting those sites and those sites will soon cease to be. All those kinds of cites cease to be and only commercial ones are left, or none are left and those selling bandwidth don't have anyone to sell it to.
This is a really, really bad idea and there isn't enough competition in the non-urban marketplace to discourage the trend. I suggest we whine and whine loudly!
Yes, really bandwidth costs money. The lowest rates I have seen here in Europe at Internet Exchanges are 150 euros/mbit/month, which is about the same in dollars. This is the rate that telco's charge other telco's/ISP's. This allows you to burn up the full 1 mbit continuously. So that amounts to 150Gbyte a month in data. Anybody that sells you anything cheaper than this, is lying, cheating (or in marketing).
Now I know that the marketing of several of these so called broadband companies has been way off. When they speak of unlimited, they mean that you don't run up a phone bill (in Europe) or that you can always leave it on. Not that you can just burn all that your line can do.
The price that you're paying for current broadband is based on the simple arithmetic, that people won't always use all their bandwidth. If they do, the prices should be higher, other wise the ISP is going out of business. If you think you've got a right to use the full 2mbit your DSL offers, either pay the full amount it costs; 300 euros + extra's or you have been delusional and have bought into the marketing hype too much. If you've bought the marketing hype, you're not a bright nerd and you should consider it tuition for the school of life.
Greetings.. off to sleep.
Use Adsense for Charity
I think I might have to re-read my agreement. I'm pretty sure I'm also paying for the right to use my service... not just to have it at my house.
Speaking of webcasters, I can't help thinking that RIAA would be very happy if metered billing by ISPs went through. A 30Kbytes/sec. feed would be 1.8 Mbyte/min., so a gigabyte in maybe seven hours of listening. You wouldn't even need the insane royalty and record-keeping requirements CARP wanted to impose to kill webcasting, if all the listeners suddenly decide they can't afford to stay tuned in for very long. Then everyone can go back to being force-fed the latest clone band and obediently buying CDs they way they're supposed to...
I use my net connection for email and websurfing. I'll be glad when I'm no longer being billed to help cover the bandwidth of people downloading DVD-rips. Metering bandwidth = good.
-Kasreyn
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
I am very happy with my cable ISP - it's been fast and reliable, and as such it has made me happy. If my provider were to decide that they needed to change the pricing structure in order to maintain the current level of service and make a fair profit, I would consider it a fair deal. I would much rather see that than attempts to degrade the service in order to save money.
This is old news to us in Ontario, Canada. Both Rogers and Sympatico are implementing what they call a Bandwidth and Usage Tax. If you go over a certain amount you will 'fined'.
I understand that some people are using ALL of their bandwidth ALL of the time but why should the casual user have to suffer for their useage habbits?
- - - "Some people hate the English. I don't. They're just wankers. We, on the other hand, are colonized by wankers."
I don't mean to fall into ESR's hole of ending a conversation by calling some one a communist or a facist (he has a sniglet for either the person that does it, or that point in the conversation), but why shouldn't people pay for what they use.
Whatever you bought yesterday by no means indicates what you should be able to get tomorrow. Business models must alter themselves to stay alive. Unlimited may have seemed like a doable marketing scheme yesterday, but to the providers involved, they could either charge a more reasonable pricing structure, or go out of business like so many of their predecessors.
When will people learn that just because you are a paying customer doesn't matter if you aren't a profitable customer. This isn't bad business, or lack of customer service, this is smart business.
RX: 20GB
TX: 1.5GB
Now, that sounds like quite a lot, and sure, it's probably a fair bit above average. Except, I doubt more than a couple of those GB's ever made it outside my provider's network, because most if it is from usenet.
Should I be charged more for using a local news service and my providers internal bandwidth? More importantly, should I be charged the same as some guy who spends those 20G's on Gnutella, 90% of which is jumping off to random nodes around the world and eating the bandwidth they actually pay for?
What's going to happen when residential customers are hit by a DDoS attack? If I were to launch an attack (a la grc.com) on my "friend" and saturate his 1.5MBps downstream, I could easily put him over any sort of monthly cap. Could you then imagine a worm whose single purpose in life is to charge huge bandwidth bills to those infected with it?
Such a worm would be a godsend in the sense that after someone is hit with a $100+ cable modem bill, they're going to make sure they're up to date on bugfixes for their OS/mail client. This could lead to less use of Outlook and other vulnerable platforms which could reduce the worm's effectiveness. However, the immediate result would be a public outcry for being charged for bandwidth that they claim they didn't use.
I saw it suggested earlier in the thread, but in my opinion the most effective way to deal with bandwidth hogs would be to throttle them and the commonly used P2P ports. The content is still available and you still have the speed and "unlimited transfer rate" that makes broadband such a wonderful service.
They may act all indignant about a handful using most of their capacity, but they forget that this is the way its always been: a handful of power users are offset by people who are mostly idle. I doubt any dialup ISP ever had enough revenue to support maximum utilization by all their users. Unfortunately, Comcast's service attracts a far higher number of power users than dialup, and the cost gaps between power users and idlers is so much greater. Finding the right mix of hogs and idlers, pricing and cost cutting is something they're just going to have to keep tweaking. I'd hold out hope for some competitor to emerge with a service that gets this balance right to blow them out of the water, but the anticompetitive climate of broadband doesn't leave much room for that to happen.
If they want to avoid the animosity being thrown at them, then they really need to end the doubletalk, promising all this speed for games, music and video and then calling those who actually use it bandwidth hogs.
They need look no further than the huge jump in subscribers that came when AOL switched to flat rate pricing, and it doesn't take too much imagination to see where it will go. The growth of Internet accsess in Europe and many other places also says a lot about how essential flat rate pricing can be.
This is no where near T1 speeds on cable networks. The upload is capped, the download often becomes very poor during peek hours, latency is often a major issue, and sometimes you can't even get on.
Bandwith caps can easily get very expensive, a weekend (one day) of playing games/surfing web can easily generate 100mb of trafic, and thats without legit downloads like updates and linux dists.
If they fix reliablility, latency, customer service, and the upload cap, perhaps THEN I could see charging extra, but until then cable is nowhere stable enough to justify extra money unless the bandwith cap is VERY high (4-6gb maybe?)(that would still stop the warez leaches etc but allow almost all other legit activity)
If Comcast and other cable modem providers aren't careful about their pricing, they may invite much competition they didn't count on.
As of now, Comcast in my area (southeastern PA) is offering ISP service that virtually no one else is able to compete with...small ISPs can't match their speed/price and DSL isn't available in many areas.
However, if Comcast raises prices excessively, telcos may again see a real incentive to upgrade their switches and lines to allow for greater DSL penetration.
And don't count small ISPs either...as of now, most people needing faster ISP access just call their cable company without even thinking twice about it...but with high prices and limits, more people will shop around first before signing up.
Some will ask how can the mom and pop ISP compete...sure bandwidth is cheap and plenty is available, but how can they bridge the "last mile"...well, that's been solved...many small ISPs offer high speed service via packet radio from their facility to the customer. Works amazingly well and there's no noticable latency unlike satillite service.
I never thought I'd ever use a small mom and pop ISP again, but if Comcast isn't careful, I will...here in the Reading, PA area, there are some local ISPs that offer high speed access via radio and other alternative methods...who says cable has a monopoly...they control the cable path, but who says that's the only way...one has many options on how data gets to and from their computer and more people will explore these if their cable isp bills get insane.
To be fair here, I'm generally happy with Comcast's service and wouldn't mind paying a little more for faster data transfer with a reasonable transfer limit...but if Comcast thinks 5GB/month is enough, they'd better rethink that...even the so-called average user can easily exceed that...something like 30 GB/month would be more reasonable.
I suspect it's more than just the increased cost that's behind this. Many of the high-use people are likely running Gnutella and other file sharing programs. It's possible that Time Warner, for some reason, might want to discourage people from doing that.
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
- Comcast, however, has no immediate plans to offer a lower-priced, slower service.
Damn right they don't. When they took over @home in my area, download speed dropped by 75%, uploads dropped by 96% and prices went up by 25%. Comcast is a monopoly in my area, they know it, and they're taking advantage of it.O.k.
Ahem...
STFU. Oh darn some porn/mp3 freaks, or plain crack d/l er's might have to pay more. SFW. Half of the country is still blessed with 56K! Well 53k thanx to the FCC. And from the buisness side, why not do it? The people that use that much will pay the higher price to keep it. The lower end users will think of it as a noble gesture from the company. Just as long as I have constant access and a good d/l rate for a distro or two is fine. You don't need 500kps to play an online game either!
So, you're going to raise the rates on the 1% of your customers who use 30% of your bandwidth? Fine. Raise the rates for people who go above their "allotment."
Just don't forget to lower the rates on the other 99% who are using only 70% of their "allotment."
The only surefire protection against Microsoft infections is abstinence. - The Onion
This is nothing more than proof that supply side economics is voodoo. Comcast (and most cable companies) spent a boatload to retrofit their infrastructure to support 2-way digital communications. It looked great. Internet, Digital Cable, Pay-per-view, video on demand, home shopping, it was the sort of thing everyone would want, right? Build it and they will come!
Guess what.. Nobody came. All those estimates they had about number of homes passed that will want Cable Internet, how many current customers will upgrade to digital cable, all wrong. We didn't need cable internet where DSL came to market first, people don't really want 12 HBOs and 14 Showtimes, and PPV pricing is a joke.
Now they've got this huge debt and huge over-supply. With the debt, they can't afford to lower prices, so they need to get demand and supply to meet by going in the other direction. They're cutting back supply and raising prices until they meet demand. It's that simple.
The cable companies are looking for ways to get rid of that 1% that use 30% of the bandwidth. What they all want is consumers who will sip from a firehose. Their ideal customer is someone who checks their e-mail a few times per week and maybe web surfs for an hour or two every few days. In other words, they want customers that have no real need for broadband.
I have gone to battle with my cable modem company over and over due to their ever more restricted AUP/TOS. When I signed on, they had no problem with, or prohibition against, me running servers for my own use.
Now they tell me that I must be running a business if I want to do anything other than web surf and use their unreliable mail server. They are trying to pressure me, and other Slashdot-profile users to go to their $250/month business service (price for the same 1.5mbps download pipe and a similar upload speed). Mind you, my usage is not excessive -- much less than the average p2p MP3/Porn/Warez trading kiddie. But I use somewhat more than average. One of their techs told me I was an "active user" but that there were users who moved orders of magnitude more data than I. And I complain loudly when they have their multi-hour (or even multi-day) outages. So they want me gone.
The best way to fight this is to complain to the local government that signs the contract that allows them to serve your area. If your cable modem provider promised you unlimited usage, then don't sit still when they tell you that you have to pay more than your neighbor because you download Linux ISOs every few months. It was their job to determine pricing and bandwidth allocation before offering the service.
Dialup's been out of style, with broadband getting so popular, but now that all the broadband providers are restricting their service to as close to dialup levels as possible (at 3 times the price, often with a year contract), will dialup become popular again?
And if this happens, will dialup providers who don't suck start to appear?
Or will the now dialup-bandwidth broadband go down to prices which fit the bandwidth ($15 would be good), filling that low-cost gap?
Or will, most likely, service continue to get worse, more restrictive, slower, and less reliable, while prices rise? And at the same time, dialup providers continue dying?
I know which possibility I'm betting on.
They are approaching this the wrong way. Why not offer a discount to the cutomers that are not using their connection to it's full potential? Namely the 99% of customers that are only using 70% of capacity.
They can try to pull this crap but in the end they will lose their customers and go bankrupt. No one is going to put up with their bullshit and they can expect lawsuits from FTC and State Attorney General Office as the complaints come in on their illegal greedy behavior. A cable company has signed onto laws that are regulated by the State and Federal Government. If they abuse their power they can be fined and a criminal investigation started on their illegal activity. Comcast is losing money just like AOL and they are now trying to gouge the consumer why should the consumer have to pay for their corruption and greed. Let them go out of business the consumer would be better of without them. No one needs Microsoft or AOL/Timewarner there are plenty of alternatives to step in and provide the service. If you hold shares in Comcast I would be very concerned about their financial health as this is a warning sign and perhaps the beginings of another Enron bankruptcy.
If Comcast establishs a policy where you pay depending on what you download, they are demonstrating that monitoring traffic is not an undue burden. This could open them up to liability for actions of their users.
ISPs have argued that they should not be liable for the actions of their users because, in part, the burden of monitoring users is too great.
Comcast should not open this Pandora's box by targeting specific content for higher fees. If they want to charge more for excessive bandwidth consumption, fine. But they should not even attempt to demonstrate that content can be monitored. If it can be monitored, it can be censored.
Some people have a way with words, and some people, um, thingy.
When I had @Home, I had to agree to a one year contract if I wanted the installation fee to be waived. If I were still with them (which I'm not because they suck), I would remind them of the contract to provide unlimited access and that they can't raise the rate or implement limits until such contact was concluded. The downside is IANAL so I'm sure there wouldn't be much I could do about it if they disconnected me for refusing to pay extra.
BTW, I'm now with Pacbell/SBC DSL, wouldn't this same principle apply? I have an 18 month obligation (free installation and DSL modem). Is it legal for them to increase the montly rate on something I'm locked into for a year an a half?
-- Will program for bandwidth
I've seen some backbone providers offering in the US 100mbps for ~ $3000/month and 1gbps for ~ $18000/month. Of course not all backbone providers are cheap.
Good for you! Here in good old Sweden the education is free (payed with taxes) and I only pay $20 for my 10Mbit connection per year.
I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!
Sure, it's an idea that makes a lot of sense, and sure, it seems fair and just and all that, too, but didn't I sign up for a certain bandwidth when I just ordered cable internet service about a month ago? Shouldn't I get grandfathered out of this because they mentioned NOTHING about this when I signed up? I mean, if they want to change the rules, fine, but if so I don't think I should be held to my year-long contract when they're no longer providing me with the service I signed up for. If they reduce speeds to less than what I'd get with some other service, either broadband or otherwise (didn't some other slashdot article mention something about speeds paralleling a 28.8?), then I want to drop them and get that other service and not have to deal with them harassing me and continuing to charge me like Earthlink did (I HATE those guys!!).
Comcast has capped my upload speed to 1/10th its original capicty, and download to 1/3rd. The only reason i haven't switched to DSL is because these two speeds happen to be the exact same speeds i'd get from any DSL provider. Since I would not be getting better service, I haven't seen a reason to switch.
.
If comcast is gonna start charging more for me to use more, then they damn well better lift the upload/download caps so that I that I can use it when I want to. .
The problem with all this is that it's not going to benefit customers in any possible way. Speeds will not improve for others; the network's capacity is not taxed currently. The upload/download caps make it so that only a faction of the total bandwidth availlable is ever at use at any give time. The caps are there so that comcast can create a new high speed service for buisness that they can charge more for. In other words, they've turned bandwidth into a commodotiy. They are limmitting supply intentionally, so they can drive up the price. Its pathetic and only works because they are a Monopoly. Capitalism strikes again. . .
With bandwidth restrictions like these, ReplayTV's networking feature is pretty much shot for anyone hoping to transfer programs outside the home LAN.
If restrictions are truly unavoidable (and I doubt they are) I agree with those promoting the idea of AVERAGE bandwidth used, not total volume transfered. As long as I have the ability to transfer large files at off-peak hours without restrictions, I won't be *too* unhappy.
On the other hand, could this be considered anti-competitive? Though most of us don't currently watch television via IP (well, not legitimately anway), it's likely that studios will eventually find DRM they're happy with and will sell programs online.
In the case of AOL/TW, assume that they will eventually allow downloading of video content, and that they will likely exclude their own packets from the user's quota. How will anyone else compete with that, when downloading a few decent sized programs will easily cost a few dollars each in excess bandwidth charges alone? How does this compare with "must carry" rules cable companies are currently forced to honor?
Remember that law? The reason consumers aren't buying broadband is because they can't get all that music and movies the MPAA/RIAA are desperate to send us due to DSL providers needing to be run out of business.
Thank Billy Tauzin and your other bought-and-paid-for congressmen for the destruction of broadband in America.
You see, the broadband companies want to advertize unlimited access and at the sime time to limit the use.
So only fair way for them do solve this is to sell access with some limit cheaper and charge extra for real unlimited.
Why they do not do this? Because for people limited access is not so attractive. Even if you are casual user (thing your grandma) you will be afraid to exceed the limit and either get penilized with high charges for additional bytes
or to be cut off.
If they would do what articles reffers to (trottle heavy users) I guess only way for consumers to prove them wrong is to go to the court and make them answer why "unlimited" access they advertized is not so unlimited anymore.
Yawn, how many times have we heard this?
:)
Weekends suck, what with not much news being posted (i actually mean everywhere else, therefore nothing to submit here) anywhere.
Fuck all you crybaby broadbanders
-- Note: If you don't agree with me, don't bother replying. I won't read it.
Screw their corporate mentality, and go get your connectivity from a company that has a correct philosophy of what the Internet is, and encourages you to make the most of it.
Your reality is lies and balderdash and I'm delighted to say that I have no grasp of it whatsoever. - Baron Munchausen
I know that University of Texas in Austin is doing something similar -- everyone gets a certain amount of "free" bandwidth per week (I think 2 or 3 GB), and once you've exceeded that amount you remain connected, but get classed with the "excessive users" in a lower priority class (using some sort of Quality of Service routing). Thus when the pipe isn't being used anyway you don't notice any difference, but at peak times you get throttled (while the people who don't exceed the limit get fast speeds all the time).
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Several other "lopsided" situations.
I think we'll find that it is customary for the highest usage customers to recieve discounts, not rate increases.
Telephone: Residential lines run what? $15-$25/month? But purchase several hunded lines, and you can get them for $5/month.
air-travel: the most frequent customers get free upgrades, discounts and special incentives.
Roadways: Most toll roads allow frequent travellers to purchase a dicount pass, or other reduced rate access method. For example, I recall the NJ Parkway used to sell tokens where you got something like 45 tokens for $10, when the tolls were $.25 each.
The list could go on... so many other goods and services in this economy are discounted for the highest consumers. Why should a service like this that is based on fixed cost be any different?
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
Is it just me, or has the general mentality of saving bandwidth almost gone away?
Even putting p2p, audio, and video aside, index pages on websites themselves are now huge and bloated, some sporting full blown uneccessary flash animations.
I remember a few years ago when everyone was very careful about wasting Internet bandwidth. Maybe suffering the speed of a dialup connect kept it in the front of users minds (at least technical ones). I remember Slashdot threads where the mindset was to treat bandwidth as a limited resource.
Just this weekend I put up a Squid proxy so that my machines wouldn't redundantly use bandwidth fetching something that had already came into my network.
I'm OK with capping "unlimited" cable IF it's a reasonable cap that only the VERY biggest (ab)users will surpass. I want to be able to download a few ISOs a month, plus all my normal web browsing, and not have to worry about passing the cap. 10GB/month seems appropriate. If someone is using more than that, they're doing something funky, if not illegal, and deserve to pay more.
I don't even download ISOs much personally -- I just want to BE ABLE TO.
ok, we covered that isp provide "caps" for downloads.. right? I pay $25 a month for 256/128 (charter crapline)... now that $25 is PAYING FOR 256 down 24/7... no where in the TOS DOES IT SAY.... I can only d/load for 3 hrs a day. Following me yet? all services are capped, you pay for 256 down, or 512, or whatever, your still capped. How abt the cable comapnys provision the correct amount of people to the correct amount of total bandwith.
Let's go through a list of facts.
1. Bandwidth costs money.
2. This money must come from the users of an ISP.
2. If you use more bandwidth, you cost more money, and your ISP thus has the right to charge you more.
However:
4. Bandwidth does not cost $0.10 per MB, as many ISPs are planning to charge for overuse. Most of these ISPs get it for between $0.50 and $1.00 per GB.
5. Because most of the infrastructure required by your ISP is already there, extra bandwidth use does not require an ISP to pay for a large amount of additional equipment, or costs other than that charged for the actual bandwidth itself.
From this we can conclude that:
7. A markup on the price of bandwidth of 100 to 200 times is excesive, even with any additional costs an ISP incures.
8. Legislation on ISP bandwidth pricing schemes is quite likely going to become necessary in the future, if the Internet has any hope of living on in the fashion in which it exists today.
I'll gladly pay more money if they'll give me a static IP address, allow me to run servers and a VPN, and improve my upload speed (currently capped at 128kbps).
I'm thinking about dumping my cable modem for a real T1, but $450/month is a lot more than the $45 I'm paying Comcast right now.
This is the reason we have cable in the first place. They advertise high speeds, download movies, etc... Now they want to charge more for doing what they advertised for us to do.
If you can't use it ? I should go back to dial up.
The solution is fairly simple. Throttle down the traffic during the peaks in the porn curve at 10:30 PM, 1:30 AM, and 4:00 AM. Throttle the bandwidth back up during normal business hours. Result, fewer bits in the pipe, lower latency, both sides get what they want.
:)
Of course, we could always unionize, and begin charging Comcast and the @Home mafia for the fact they pass along advertisements into our browsers without prior approval or consent. Doing so might offset such a "metered usage" tax imposed on us.
Then again, you can always just uncap your cable modem, and get the milk thru the fence.
Cheers,
Bowie J. Poag
There is one flat rate ISP in Ireland. They charged a fairly expensive flat-rate for users, and signed up alot of users, becoming the largest in the country.
Then they just kicked off the people that were using it the most. They were allowed to get away with it, but the backlash from the disconnected customers (myself included) was high.
Here is the coverage on Wired from the incident:
Wired coverage of Ireland's flat-rate ISP kicking off its frequent users
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Cast a Cold Eye
On Life, on Death
Horseman, pass by
--W.B. Yeats' gravestone
There are several pumped storage plants in the U.S. where you use electricity to pump water up a hill at night, and then let it run through hydroelectric turbines during the day. This works particularly well with Nuclear power where you can't really shut down the plant at night. The full-cycle efficiency is about 60-70%.
Fine, but if they're gonna be charging me usage, I want my modem uncapped.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
Of these two factors, one rather makes sense as a reason to reduce bandwidth: the cost from backbone providers based directly on volume. The other of these factors does not serve as a good basis: the cost of routers.
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- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
When Slackware 8.1 [slashdot.org] is ready for prime time, I'll probably do it as an ISO. For 15 minutes, I'm going to be the biggest bandwidth user on the entire Eldorado Mountain Sprint Broadband Direct cell.
You can have your ISO within 14 hours if you throttle your download to 13 kilobytes per second (typical ISDN speed). And because your connection is always on, you won't be nearly as likely to get cut off While-U-Sleep.
Will I retire or break 10K?
While they're fiddling with the pricing structure, why can't they offer customers the right to run servers? I have ATTBI, and I'm prohibited from running servers (HTTP, FTP, etc.). This limitation to consumer broadband has great implications for my ability to publish or run a small home business, and I suspect it will impact the future of the net if most large broadband providers also prohibit customer servers.
I'm willing to pay more (even >$100 per month) for the right to run an HTTP and FTP server, even if they cap the bandwidth; but so far my pleas have fallen on deaf corporate ears. I realize they may need to upgrade/enhance hardware to support billing and bandwidth-capping of customer servers, but that's why I'm willing to pay more.
For the record, DSL and business broadband is not available in my neighborhood, and T1 is prohibitively priced.
Are consumer broadband internet systems going to become two-way communications pipes? Or merely one-way delivery vehicles for the latest Hollywood dreck?
It's not abuse if they're following the terms and conditions advertised. The fact that a company was stupid enough to offer unmetered/unlimited access at an unrealistic price point, and that a consumer was smart enough to take them up on it when it was in his/her best interests to do so, is not that consumer's fault. Nor is it their problem if low-bandwidth customers also subscribe to the same unlimitied service on the assumption that no-one else is going to use it more than they do.
It is abuse if, like BT Internet in the UK, you advertise unmetered access 24/7 blah blah, and then impose a 2 hour time limit on modem connections, a quietly spoken cap of 16 (now 12) hours per day on-line, "new numbers" that actually force your most bandwidth-using subscribers to share the same lines, giving them about 1/3 the service everyone else gets (though they are still paying the same access fees) and so on. If it's not 24/7 unmetered and you don't want it to be used as an always-on line, don't market it as if it is. If you do so market it, and you take people's money for it, it is abuse to then change the deal for those people you don't like.
(By the way, I'm pretty sure I'm not in the 1%. For a start, I've never been on the file-sharing networks and I've never downloaded an illegal MP3 or movie from the 'net in my life. I just find it irritating that ISPs -- particularly major players like the aforementioned BT Internet -- get away with ruthless and downright unrealistic marketing to sustain their bank balnace.)
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Wouldn't be so bad if these companies didn't have a monopoly on the isp services already in the area.
After all, the T1 lines we use at work are metered. UUNet sends us a bill based on how much bandwidth we use. But, along with that comes a SLA (Service Level Agreement). I would be happy to pay my ISP for bandwidth usage as long as they were willing to guarantee me a level of service. Of course, they won't do that (I've already asked) because there service sucks ass. They want the best of both possible worlds -- running a large, mediocre network with lots of downtime and differential billing based on bandwidth usage. If they had to adhere to a 99.995% uptime guarantee I would be getting broadband for free. Once they are willing to offer me a guaranteed level of quality I will pay for the bandwidth I use. Right now I'm just happy their network isn't down again.
Of course, is for _everyone_ (from the major telcos on down) to stop the ridiculous practice of charging by data _volume_ and start charging a single, flat rate for data _bandwidth_.
There is no reason I can think of that anyone should be charging you based on _how much_ you download. Data is not a limited resource. The wear and tear on the infrastructure is not (appreciably) different if you use them to download 5MB or 5GB. The QoS for other users is not directly influenced by the amount you download. All these things are affected by the amount of bandwidth consumed and charging models should reflect this - you should pay a flat rate for a given amount of bandwidth, not a given amount of data.
This reminds me of something else I heard:
"Did you know that 50% of all Americans are of below average intelligence? Time to open more schools!!!"
You can't fix a percentage problem unless you have a homogenous environment. You'll always have a top 1% of downloaders... The best they can hope is to lower the amount of capacity used by the top 1%.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
In Canada, we only have two main high-speed companies (Bell, Rogers) and it's no coincidence that both of them changed their policies and their rates at the same time. We now have a total download limit of 3GB per month with $8 per GB above that. Naturally this poses no problem for the average user, or for companies that can largely afford to cover bandwidth costs.
However, it limits the amount of content our web-based business can provide. We were developing a web-based multi-user game for promotion for our next series, but now users in Canada (at least, and other countries are following) will be very wary of any downloads or games that eat up bandwidth. While we can shell out the cash to get our own direct net feed, it still doesn't have any affect on our users.
Until more companies are able to get into the market, these prices are going to continue to soar. And with so many new MMORPG's coming out (EQ2, Star Wars, etc) I wonder how many people are going to be able to afford to play, certainly the users just getting email and their weather online won't want to pay for the gamers and warez geeks downloading divX movies.
My question is, when were limits initiated to where it was a BAD thing to actually use something you PAY for?
When did I become the "bad guy" for actually knowing HOW to fully tax my connection to the extent that it still takes me hours to download an ISO? Yes, I have 3 systems hooked up to a 768/128 connection. Because I CAN. Because I want to use that single connection for ALL my Internet usage, as I am told because I am a "home" user I cannot get more than one line in. I pay every month for my access. I don't use their Tech Support, nor the e-mail they say they provided me, nor the functions of any "ISP" system. I don't need it.
All I ever wanted was a way to connect to the Net. I have that. Not as fast as I would like, but I can only afford so much. Now they say I need to pay more for LESS? Not going to happen. EVER.
You keep going until you die..."Me".
They DO advertise the service as being able to browse the ENTIRE internet in a single night, watch live tv, download HUGE movies, listen to all your music online, and download music videos. Wouldn't this be considered false advertisement? I think it would. not very smart. I'd like to see them bump someone off and then get a lawsuit slapped on them about this. Either learn to find more bandwidth to support your "hogs" of get out of the business that you advertised. Period.
It's absolutely true; I find any new pricing scheme that charges heavy users without rewarding light users to be highly suspect.
My question is; would they continue to advertise the connection as unlimited?
-Chris
--an unbreakable toy is useful for breaking other toys--
Well, I've used about 1.5gb over the weekend... Which includes downloading some videos (Invader ZIM!!!), playing some online games, sending the aforementioned ZIM videos to some friends of mine, as well as the usual timewasting on /., fark, and numerous other websites.
I'd figure that I'd use an average of 4gb per week (bidirectional), so around 16-20gb per month would suit me just fine.
Of course, the summer is coming up too, and I plan on doing a lot of BBQing, and a lot of online gaming to wind down after a long year of teaching.
Still, I think I could manage in 20gb/month. 5-10gb? You gotta be kidding. And I want my 20gb bidirectional totals, not 5gb one way and 1gb the other way or something screwball like that.
I'd go up to around $70/month for 20gb/month of bandwidth I suppose. That should easily pay for the service providers cost and allow them some room for profit.
Of course, I have a T3 at work that I run servers and such on, so I always have a fallback if need be, but I hope I won't need it...
"Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence." - Charles de Gaulle
Those 70% shouldn't even be on broadband at all then. They're the ones sucking up the bandwidth.... either that or maybe allow the "hogs" to continue if you agree not to use morpheus, kazza, etc. That would be nice for those of use who need to d/l ever rc of slackware :)
It's the bandwidth that's going to get gauged, i.e., measured. Whoever loses lots of money in the process is the one getting gouged.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Lets see what you mean by "no competition". I'm certain, no matter where you live, there's at least one isp that offers dialup access. ISDN is also probably available. However, these are slow, but they ARE alternatives as soon as your "shitty overpriced cable" becomes too expensive to make sense.
But they're so very slow. Fair enough, call your phone company and check on the prices for T1's. With a T1, you'll get comparable maximum speeds with your cable, you'll get the same 1.54mbps upstream that you do down. You'll get NO bandwidth restrictions, and your line will stay up ALL the time, or there will be hell to pay if it doesn't. I get the impression you won't feel your cable is so horribly overpriced anymore.
But don't give me this crap about there being no alternatives. The only alternative you don't have is an unlimited pipe with unlimited restrictions at a price that doesn't even break even for the company providing it. If that cable service of yours was so horribly overpriced, there would be competitors lined up to offer service in your area. In fact, why don't you do it yourself? Invest several millions of your $$ or find yourself a willing venture capatalist to fund it for you, bury all the lines, market yourself, get those customers, and figure out for yourself how to deal with the bandwidth hogs while at the same time offering service that is better than "shitty" and at a very low price.
Good luck!
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
Ok, apart from the fact that the conversation got completely off topic (the original point was that Comcast was run by a slew of incompetent fools who couldn't find their asses with both hands, a map, flashlight, and team of expert consultants helping them) since you bring it up I'll respond:
There's nothing grossly disproportnate about it. You see, if a person makes 10 millon a year, and pays 38 percent of it in taxes they still wind up with six million dollars. If a person makes 70,000 a year and pays 30 percent on it, he has 49,000. If you compare what people keep after taxes, the rich person still has MUCH MORE MONEY that the middle class person.
If you have LOTS OF FUCKING MONEY, then it's reasonable to expect that you should bear a larger portion of the burden in keeping the society as a whole afloat, seeing as you benefit more from the advantages that the society provides you in garnering wealth.
We all know what great rates and service BellSouth provides. Just go read their EULA for DSL - no servers kidies! BellSouth made the lowest bid for my University's connections once. They really screwed things up, and I'm not sure the place has recovered after eight years. T-1 is 1.5 M bits /second, that's about 10 DSL lines. $1,000/month is a going rape, especially when you consider that a 485 pcimcia serial line will give you the same performance on twisted pairs 1.5 miles long.
Rapes like that are why people thought opening telecomunications up to competition was a good idea. Consolidation of providers (mostly under Clinton but endorsed by Bush), and their mass purchase by entertainment companies shows how screwed up US law is getting. The poster who says the US is getting like Austrailia is correct.
You, Mr. NetJunkie, are a turd. You should expect more from your ISP than this. They are making plenty of money.
ISPs that do this are going to find their sales more depressed than 1% when they do this. When their friends and neighbors ask them about "broadband" they will report, "It's not worth it." Boom, sale goes away despite all advert generated hype. Sales of XP encumbered computers are having similar problems. When you make things suck, people don't buy them.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Please...If you are trying to justify any current/future service moves use data which reflect the service that you are providing, not data that is 6 months out of date from a company which is not in business anymore.
If bandwidth and "bandwidth hogs" are such a problem then why is AT&T raising their upload cap from 128kbps to 256, making sure there are consistent caps across their network? Please explain that one to us Mr. CEO.
-zAmboni
Team Ars Technica Lamb Chop
What market? In case you have not noticed, it's against the law to use the public right of way in most places. Most towns have a sinble cable company and a single phone company providing lines to houses. So you have a market of two choices. Good eh?
Competition was planned but aborted. The local bells got to compete in the long distance telephone market without alowing DSL access as they were supposed to. The cable companies have been told that they don't have to allow "competing services" on their digital networks, despite laws requiring access by TV broadcasters who represent competing services and can be recieved by alternate means.
Can do can be undone by bad laws. One single stinking frequency has been allocated to wireless networks, and it gets to share it with microwave ovens. Now that it's proved viable anyway, the FCC will crush it, just as they did TV over HAM. Then there you will be, all nice and shut down.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
I've read some creative and very valid solutions to this "problem" in the posts today. But the real reason they want to charge more doesn't have anything to do with bandwidth and usage (otherwise they would just implement one of these better ideas). Comcast and other ISPs like them are simply greedy bastards looking for an excuse to siphon more money from their users.
Everytime I read of some ISP wanting to do this somewhere, I think of DirecPC. They had (may still have) a great satellite service for people who live where broadband doesn't exist yet. The problem was (at least back when I used them) they had a cap on how many megabytes you could download each month (or maybe it was based on hours of use, I don't remember). Many people I told about the service weren't interested because of this limitation. They'd rather use their modems. Also, when an unlimited service became available in my area, I bailed on DirecPC in favor of the unlimited service.
The funny thing in all of this is that to reach the maximum usage on a DirecPC system, you'd have to be logged on for 3 or 4 hours every day (now that I think about it, it was time based; not bandwidth based). Nobody I mentioned DirecPC's service to even comes close to that kind of usage, but the idea of a cap was very distasteful and not one person that I know of ever used their service (I even gave my hardware to one guy, but he still wouldn't use it). I imagine it will be the same for Comcast. People will just go elsewhere.
When the whole pipe is not being utilized, leave it as-is. When the whole pipe is being utilized, start capping. "Bandwidth hogs" get a smaller fraction of the pipe than non-"hogs".
Since it's apparently possible to determine how much bandwidth each customer has used (given that Comcast's proposal is basically metered fees), just assign each customer's traffic a priority based on the amount of bandwidth (possibly adjusted to discount bandwidth used during unsaturated periods) used over an appropriate sliding window. When the pipe is unsaturated, everybody gets their traffic through as normal so you don't piss off your customers for no reason. When the pipe is saturated, the low-priority traffic from the "bandwidth hogs" gets dropped in favor of higher priority packets.
I'm sure this has some flaws (e.g. a new "bandwidth hog" will take some time to rise above the mean), but it still sounds like a better option than either of the two you presented. It doesn't uselessly limit bandwidth when there's plenty to spare, and it prioritizes so-called "normal users" over "bandwidth hogs" when there is a scarcity. Bonus points if you expose some of this data to the customers (/.ers, etc.) who'd want to see their current status.
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perl -e'$_=shift;die eval' '"$^X $0\047\$_=shift;die eval\047 \047$_\047"' at -e line 1.
I'm currently working on setting up a local community wireless network (in Western Australia, where we have been paying for bandwidth for years). Each node is going to have a BSD/Linux box running squid proxies (of at least a few gig each) in sibling configuration, allowing hit-only access to each other.
If your cache contains something your peers want, they get it from you, at no cost (you downloaded it already). If not, they fetch it directly out of their own bandwidth, and it is stored in their proxy for other wireless users.
This sort of setup will be attractive even for dialup users in our area - if stuff is in someone's wireless cache, they get it at wireless speeds.
The other use is of course online gaming ;)
Given that a node can be set up for the cost of an old Pentium PC and a few hundred dollars in wireless gear, I think it should be fairly cost-effective.
smash (squid is funky)
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Normally I wouldn't raise an eyebrow at this development but since I am a comcast customer I have direct experience with their shenanigans. The quality of serivce is poor, they require windows or mac, they don't even want to hear linux. They dropped usenet for a while, have hinted at blocking VPN unless you pay more, they have also made noise about people using NAT in their own homes. And to top it all off they advertise being able to download your "internet music and video faster".
As soon as I have a broadband alternative I'm giving comcast the boot. They only reason I deal with them now is the fact that they are a monopoly in my area.
Cat
The reasons I signed up for high bandwith internet access are as follows:
... at the same rate
- always on
- flat rate
- I can use however much I want to
Hell, with restrictions such as these, it might even be cheaper to rent a movie than download it...
(no troll intended)
PayPal $$ if you sign up for free offers (eBay, cred cards, e
The problem with this setup is that Sprint has an incentive to NOT give accurate usage information! A friend of mine uses this, and several times she's gone over the limit because the website and the '*4' information deal (which costs minutes, IIRC) aren't up to date even though they claim "Current as of $CURRENT_TIME" (once we even saw "Current as of $CURRENT_TIME+5 hours" online (and no, it wasn't a timezone thing)). And then they turn off her phone because of the extra charges, and don't bother to tell her they prorated her minutes for the next month once she got the money to pay them off; of course, they can't be bothered to write the usage apps to take this prorating into account, only the billing apps...
The advantage of flat rates in general is that they're easier to budget for. With electricity it's not so bad, because whatever electricity you use is basically what electricity you want to use, so it's not that likely to change from month to month (but then you get a cold spell when you have electric heat, owch). With Internet access you use bandwidth receiving flashing banner ads, spam, virus probes, etc, etc, etc. all taking bandwidth you'd rather not use.
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perl -e'$_=shift;die eval' '"$^X $0\047\$_=shift;die eval\047 \047$_\047"' at -e line 1.
Don't burn it. Leave it as gas/oil/coal.
Mark Duell
Another problem with this model when applied to home use is online ads.
Ads/popups/whatever eat up bandwidth. Maybe not a lot, but not stuff I asked for. And maybe enough to put me over the cap. I have to look at the ads, and now potentially pay for the priveledge of doing so.
What's that you say? Software to kill all the popups? Sure...but if everyone killed their ads, the advertisers wouldn't pay anymore, and so those websites would either go under, or be forced to charge for access.
Is TW/RR going to give me a rebate on bandwidth associated with advertisements? Not a chance.
Please...just some vaseline first.
But bandwidth isn't the same as other things at all.
For instance, it makes sense to pay more for power if you use more. The reason is that the power you use ultimately translates to fuel expended. Fuel costs money, so the more fuel you use, the more you have to pay to offset the costs.
But bandwidth? It's not the same at all. Let's look at the costs:
I don't think I missed anything important, but if I did, please let me know.
So what's the point? Simple: bandwidth itself isn't what costs money. What costs money is the labor and equipment used to provide that bandwidth.
And that is why it doesn't, in general, make sense to charge more for people who use more bandwidth: those people aren't costing the provider any more money at all or, if they are, it's only because the provider was stupid enough to sign peering agreements in which they pay for the bandwidth they use instead of a flat fee. Instead, if the ISP is undercharging for their services (i.e., can't pay the bills based on the money they get from their subscribers), they should either cut their costs or raise their prices. But before doing either one, they'd better have a good handle on where they're spending their money first.
It's only if a few select subscribers are causing quality of service issues that are, in turn, substantially raising the amount of labor required to keep the operation going that charging those subscribers more may make sense. But I would argue that, in that case, those subscribers are either abusing the service (true only if they're using a substantial amount of bandwidth to initiate DOS attacks against others) and therefore should have their service terminated, or (more likely) that the service itself is oversubscribed. The latter isn't the customers' problem, it's the provider's problem, and charging based on bandwidth used is an entirely inappropriate response, in my opinion.
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
Cable modems use shared bandwidth.
What they are doing makes perfectly good business sense. They could also throttle the bandwidth to 256k for basic service, and make the hard core users pay more for the full 1.5mbs.
It's hard to justify raising prices on people who are just using the ISP's service how they want to use it. The difference in bandwidth is probably you have some ones grand mother who checks her e-mail and surfs recipe sites. Then you have the high school kid downloading large media files and playing online games for most of the day or night. I've had cable service since 1997 and most of the people who I have known who also have the service use it casually. They may look at news sites, chat with people on their buddy list and download the occasional shareware program all their friends use. The way I think is, if I'm paying for a fast connection I'm going to be trying to constantly putting it to use. Sharing files, downloading game demo's, downloading linux iso's and waiting for me to remote connect from work to sync my home and office PC. My wonder is what the cap is going to be on amount of data allowed to be downloaded every month by these ISP's before I'm considered a high usage customer.
You seem to think it would be extremely cheap to meter broadband internet usage. It is not. All the routers would have to be replaced, or at least some very powerful snooping loggers attached. These would have to be fairly detailed records in case someone disputed their bill. This is certainly 'way more cost than the amount the large peered broadband ISPs pay to their GSP.
The irony is that the market driven capitalistic system has driven true marginal costs down so low that the cost of capital and other fixed costs predominate. As a result, there is cutthroat competition or conversely collusion and monopoly building. The system is it's own undoing.
I had an 8 month "unlimited" download contract with $BIGISP and they could change anything they liked whenever they liked. The only thing that was unlimited was their rights to change the "contract".
OK, no-one forced me to sign, but as they own the only delivery mechanism available, I am over a barrel. No-one forces you to buy oil from OPEC you know, but try buying a soar powered car.
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
I for one would like to point out the obvious reason why one percent of Comcast's network users are utilizing thirty percent of their network capacity.
Their network sucks.
That being said, a 1% - 30% ratio isn't that bad. In the last network I managed, small, 50 users, I found that the top user dominated the network's bandwidth by 50% on average. The thing is, that the last 50% was plenty for use by everyone else.
Now Comcast isn't admitting that it's signed up more people, and promised more than I could deliver.
This would be, quite clearly, one of those cases.
I would also like to point out that I am a Comcast Cable Internet and Television Subscriber. I'm currently using 56k. In the eight months I've been a good paying subscriber, I've only been able to be online through my coax for six of those months.
All technical support calls have lead to nothing. I've had to fix every single problem and connectivity issue myself, or at least get the technician on the other end of the phone to do what I think should be done.
So when they say that 1% of their users are utilizing 30% of their network resources, they must mean that only 10% of their users can actually get online.
Well, Comcast, try, try, try again. If all else fails, blame the users and charge the scapegoats more money.
My Comcast Rep (for the place I work at) was in about 3 days ago and said nothing of this. He DID however, reveal plans to allow people with home offices and power users to SELECT a higher speed internet service with a 6 month IP lease and 5 ips for $95/mo. The higher speeds are 3.5Mbps downstream and 384k upstream. There was never any mention by him or by any materials of anyone being forced into this, and by our discussion, this is the only other tier Comcast is currently using. By the way, modem rental fee is included in your $95/mo, and installation is now $149, which won't matter for existing customers. Rollout in NJ should be done by June 1, 2002, and a phone call is all that's required to upgrade the service. Someone hears 95/mo for net service with higher caps and after it gets passed around 10 people, it suddenly makes it into a news story as being forced upgrades. Sleep well Comcast abusers, your service might suck, you'll still be overpaying, and your uploads will remain slow, but at least you shouldn't be subjected to any new pricing tiers against your will.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
A typical pumped storage site has a reservoir many hundreds of feet above a water source. A powerplant at the bottom has turbines that can act as both pumps and generators. At night, when power is relatively cheap, water is pumped into the reservoir from a river or lake. Later, when power is more expensive, this water can flow back, providing "free" power. When there is high load on the power grid, pumped storage can be used instead of bringing another (dirty) generating station online.
Overall, this is about 75% efficient -- not too bad. And these sites can generate several megawatts for 10-20 hours at a time!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It will forever be the case that some small fraction of the users will be using the majority of the bandwidth.
Get rid of the current top one percent, the then new top 1 percent will be the new abusers.
Because they don't want to limit 99% of the users. To trully bring the UNLIMITED experience to 99% of their users they need to limit 1% of the (ab)users.
I think that while you may be really angry with what i am saying, the reality is that limiting everyone's experience because some people have 500.000 mb of crap in their download getright download queue just isn't fair.
After all, they are paying the same as the hardcore downloaders. While the downloaders do get to use the idle time of everyone's share, they never allow a second for others to compensate. So, bottom line, limiting everyone is not fair.
unfinished: (adj.)
Now, that sounds like quite a lot, and sure, it's probably a fair bit above average. Except, I doubt more than a couple of those GB's ever made it outside my provider's network, because most if it is from usenet.
You might probably be more of an expense to the provider than the guy that just downloads the same amount of data from outside the ISP's network.
A "full" newsfeed clogs some hundred GB's each day. If the provider would like to have a newsfeed for the last month it could require about 10TB of storage (of course, not every newsgroup would have posts stored for that long, though). And currently the newsflow is accelerating faster than the development on storage.
Furthermore, news is a service that only a small percentage of the ISP's customers make use of. It is surely not a simple solution to run a useful newsserver; you would surely need people to maintain it.
- Peter Brodersen; professional nerd
Well, when the FTC forced open the long distance hardware to competitiors, people like Sprint and MCI jumped at the chance. Now the market is very nice for consumers. The same thing applies to wireless. On the other hand, the vast majority of people are stuck with maybe one, occasionally two options: cable and DSL. But most municipalities are in exclusive utility mode. And the Bells certainly don't want DSL cutting into their T1 line margins do they? Basically, two providers may not be a monopoly, but it certainly provides a ripe oppertunity for coincidental collusion.
There is, of course, multiple answers. Long distance is a competitive market. On the other hand, I2 has zero competition, and was funded by tax dollars to build for research. I'm still not exactly what kind of research this might be; they'be been pimping teleconferenceing with it for the last five or so years.
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
The broadband providers are looking at tiering as a way of increasing revenue. They may have all sorts of different ways of representing it, but basically they want to sort their customer base into a few tiers based on amount of usage, support requirements, etc. Then they will charge different amounts for different tiers.
Compare this to cable TV packages. There you typically have a base rate, and then all sorts of higher tiers. It doesn't cost them more to send you the additional programs (except in some aggregate way) but they charge more.
Another example: toothpaste. It costs nothing and is basically all the same stuff. The only difference between brands is the marketing, the package, and maybe the color or flavor.
This is standard marketing. Take a product, then differentiate it into several products, give them different images, and charge differently for them. I expect some will tier by bandwidth, some by support for NAT's ("small business rate"), some by uplink CCIR, etc.
It isn't a matter of fairness. Unless you want to socialize bandwidth, don't expect it to be "fair."
Of course we could socialize it. You can then wait 14 months to get it installed, have a 3 week wait to get an outage fixed, and be insulted by all service personnel. But hey, it would be fair! We would all get the same lousy treatment.
.
The only good weather is bad weather.
"European Internet provider PlusNet, for instance, announced last week that it would offer broadband service over telephone lines for $31 a month, but it would block users from using popular file-sharing services such as Kazaa and Morpheus."
Web don't call it pusnet for nothing!, it has a history of similar shabby deals, and ripping off consumers. Quoting this as an example means nothing, as NO-ONE in the UK will use them.
Which providers, and from where to where? I'll bet that 100mbps probably doesn't include the fiber it takes to get it from the backbone to the ISP's gateway, which will cost almost as much as the bandwidth itself, depending on your telco. Still, $3000 a month is an excellent price for 100mbps of bandwidth. I'd love to hear from who, if you don't mind.
Trying is the First Step to Failing --Homer Simpson
Connection speed and data tranfer aren't necessarily the same thing. They won't be limiting how fast you download, only the amount of data that you would transfer.
Since I'm absolutely sure I fall into the 1% catagory (25.05GB transferred in last 9 days) I wonder what my pricing will be.
;)
There goes my software budget
And laid their only backup NOC off. Now all their operations are handled in New Jersey.
As a former employee I cant even get out of my verizon wireless phone until november and where I moved I have no service but analog.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I'm pretty sure there's a law about this. IANAL but I'm sure that if a company missrepresents their product/service in an advertisement you have grounds for a lawsuit. I know I would try at least a small claims suit... if enough customers would do that simultaneously it would be a major pain for them. Imagine 10000 simultaneous lawsuits in 500 different jurisdictions... they would bleed serious money on lawyers. I guess this would be similar to a DDOS attack.
:)
But hey, it's 7:30am after about 4 hours of sleep... maybe I'm still dreaming
If con is the opposite of pro, is Congress the opposite of progress?
It's very like the telephone system. A small exchange might have 250 telephones connected, but only 25 lines connecting it to the next exchange. The phone company expects that its customers won't be trying to phone out all at the same time. If they do try to (for example, Christmas, when everyone wants to phone relatives) the system gets loaded down and people start getting "exchange busy" signals. The customer gets unhappy because they can't phone out, but they're not prepared to pay for a dedicated line through the exchange.
If you bought a Volvo for £250, would you complain if it was slower than a £50,000 Jaguar?
FWIW Rogers cited the statistic that 30% of users used 70% of capacity.
The newspaper article that quoted Rog
OK -- I thought that the /Gb excess charge was a little high.
I download backups from my web server to a backup server in my home and will definitely cross the 5Gb limit.
Then, I read the rest of the Sympatico e-mail and found that, for _C_$69.95, I'll get 10Gb AND get faster speeds (3Mb down, 640k up) ... this is not an unreasonable price for this service ...
Cheers,
JAKD
If bandwidth were such a pricey commodity for these big ISPs then companies such as GX and MFNX would not be CH11.
To me, this is misleading at least, if not an outright lie. This seems to have slipped between the cracks as far as any substantial outcry or objection goes.
give me a
I believe they really dont care about the bandwidth hogs. Its the bean counters saying "Hay if we can drop these hogs we can drop those T3 lines down to T1's and increase our PROFIT". They dont really care about the others being able to surf a bit faster when they get on for their half hour.
2. Bell is already doing this in Canada, and other ISP/Telcos such as Telus, Shaw, Rogers, etc are considering taking similar steps to deal with the bandwidth hogs
It should be noted that the hogs are a small minority and that most of them are engaging in illegal activity. Given the current legal trend in Canada (placing of liability on ISPs, forcing them to report potentially illegal activity of a serious nature to the authorities, etc) I wouldn't be surprised if Canadian ISPs will be taking a more active role in stamping out piracy.
perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5, (41*2), sqrt(7056), (unpack(c,H)-2), oct(115), 10)'
Rogers High Speed Interet in Canada seems to going down that road as evidenced by this article and it's main competition Bell Sympatico has already "been there and done that." Face it, the days of unlimited Internet access are over. We can either throw in the towel, or switch to providers that support unlimited Internet access on mass.
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
Bell sympatico has started it here. As of July (i think July), they're going to cap their 1 meg to 5 gig up and 5 gig down, with each additional gig costing 7.95. I haven't heard anything about Roger's @home service doing that yet, anyone know?
I don't agree that this is fair. If I pay for a cable connection I'm not paying for 1/10th the bandwith only part time. I'm paying for 100% of the available bandwith of my line, 24/7. If I were to be continuously downloading, non-stop I would be well within my rights, after all that's why I'm paying them. If they are having trouble keeping up, that's their problem, I should not be punished simply for using what I'm paying for.
They should not sell bandwith on the assumption that I'll only use part of the available bandwith, they should not sell bandwith they cannot afford to lose either, but once they've made the agreement they should stick to it, as long as I'm paying my bill.
This is like "express" dry cleaning. You can ask for your stuff to be ready by the next day, and they will do it. But you must ask, because they can't do it for everybody.
This is also like Craftsman hand tools. If one ever breaks or ever voids it warranty, forever, you can bring it back for a free replacement. Of course, few people actually do it. Imagine how much the things would cost if everyone did!
The broadband providers might need to readjust their numbers pricing, but they should definitely keep their fixed pricing model, and NOT return to the Bad Old Days.
"Get out and talk to your neighbours, take the initiative."
Unfortunately that would not work very well. When I bring up conversation about accessing the Internet the typical response is "I use AOL - I'm happy using AOL." Any thoughts of starting a co-op ends right there.
Sanity.html - Error 404 not found
This is the part that makes me assume this is all a tempest in a teapot. There's no way the US is going to get behind Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Guangzho and Shanghai for long. If it does happen I'll be very surprised, but somehwat amused as I reside in Taiwan and will probably be moving to Shanghai.
Here in Taiwan, we got excellent DSL service a few years back that has been nice and cheap --US$30 a month-- for the 64K up and 512down service and not a sign of data restrictions anywhere. But then the news came that the residential data networking market was being opened wide in the second half of this year meaning anybody with a GbE ethernet switch, a fiber uplink to the net and a bunch of cable will be able start an ISP in these dense urban markets that are total gravy as they're just solid 5 to 30 story buildings as far as the eye can see.
I didn't believe it at first, but then the government monopoly telecoms came up with 512up and 1.5meg down for US$40 bucks a month and I knew the rumors were no longer just bullshit, this is happening now. And data caps --ha ha ha. Yeah, you have to be able to write CDs fast enough to clean your hard drive. How's that for a cap? Good thing the 40Xs are coming out soon. Asia needs those and some fat new harddrives too bad.
So, knowing this situation to be a matter of geopolitical fact gives me a certain perspective on all these idiots from the States on Slashdot talking about how bandwidth HAS to cost a lot of money because it always did in the past and uncle Bubba will lost his job if it aint.
Hmm. Funny, it seems bandwidth only has to cost a lot of money in the US and Australia but is magically cheap in Asia. I can't imagine that's going to last and if you think this coalition of Asian nations is going to reverse course, uhm well I suppose. I doubt it though.
Under your system tho, I'm sure these 'ohhh we should be allowed all the bandwidth we want' people would be alot quieter when their mate down the hall was hogging their shared connection.
To any ISP, throughput is not the big issue... bottlenecking is. When I was adminning for an ISP, there are several peak times for usage. We would see a big jump in connections around noon, and also between 8-10 at night; but the biggest peak would happen around 4pm. (All times EST.)
One marketing idea for ISPs, then, is to watch when the peaks happen. If peaking during the day, market to home users more. If peaking during the night, market to businesses.
Take that a step further... if the problem is P2P-using downloading freaks, stop marketing the speed issue and start marketing other benefits. I notice that right now Comcast is marketing the "always-on" nature of their service. Hey, good idea.
it's odd that they're actually going to make them pay more for using their pre-determined capacities... you already are leasing the bandwidth to them, and now you want them to pay more just because they're using what they paid for??
So what will then happen when Grandma's computer is taken over by a warez pirate? Will she then be charged for her bandwidth? Just a thought.
It has been said many times, but I'll reiterate it because it is my opinion; I think it stinks! Why are corporations allowed to promise one thing and turn their back on you once you're signed up? That's crap.
The fact of the matter is that I am paying $50 + extra IPs for cable access. I have an agreement that I am supposed to get 1.5mbps downstream and 128kbps upstream. I am supposed to get n e-mail addresses and whatever. Why can't I use that which I am supposed to get?
AND WHY do people take it up the wazoo? Why do people all of the sudden "realize" that the corporations "have" to do this. Why are people trying to compromise with a party that will dominate you and bully you? The outcry SHOULD BE that these corporations have to maintain their service as is. Not how we "consumers" can please our corporate masters. I'm personally sick of this crap.
They wouldn't have been doing cable internet in the first place unless it was profitable. It is profitable, because they have a leverage DSL providers don't have; one bill one company (Cable TV, Internet, soon VoIP...). Just different services. This smells like another FCIPS (Fuck the Consumer to Increase Profits to Shareholders) and nothing else. There are people that complain a lot about how bad things are getting and how our civil liberties are eroding away. Well, a lot of these people bend over to seemingly "little" things like these... Go figure.
Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think. -Ayn Rand
Then they need to get rid of the blasted 1.5mbit download cap, and 128kbit upload cap. They can't have both. If they charge for using "extra", than wtf did they institute the cap for? The cap was supposed to limit bandwidth useage. Now they are saying that they don't have enough bandwidth to use your service WITH the cap in place? Then wtf are they doing? Charging us for service we are not supposed to use? Imagine if the rest of the world was like this.
You walk into a buffet restaurant, and pay $8.00 for the buffet, but then on the receipt it says the $8.00 was for the first two plates. Each additional plate is $3.25
Man. Those MS worms take up a lot of bandwidth. Charging extra for running windows as an advance penalty for future bandwidth hogging seems much fairer.
Stop the brainwash
I had a broadband seller hit me on the phone the other day. Their service has a 5G/month cap. This was expressed to me the layman as 50,000 jpegs. Am I supposed to go "Wow, thats a lot of porn".
I was not quick enough at the time to reply that it is only 7 CD's or 1 surface of a DVD. For the price of the cable service for 1 month you could easily sneaker net the same amount of data from your local CD warehouse.
Granted this is not the high price end of the CD/DVDs. And I am totally ignoring MP3 MP4 compression schemes, still:
The broadband dream is fading fast for the general consumer if sneaker net is a better cost option for data transfer.
On the other hand...
I subscribe to high Comcast solely on its promise to deliver unlimited high speed access. It seems to me, that the other 99% of the people who are not using their share of the bandwidth could do fine on dialup. I pay more for high speed because of what I have already been promised. Sure I download lots of stuff, but that's the precise reason I signed up for it in the first place. Would it be too far out of the realm of possibility for these giant corporations to take a step back and look at the figures, and see that A.)Bandwidth, as it has been expressed in earlier posts is only able to cost so much due to the fact that it is for the most part a reincarnation of Ma Bell, and that, sooner or later, if they abuse the people that seek them expressly for what they advertise, and then penalize them for using what they are enitled by contract to, they will be run out by smaller, more maneuverable upstarts, and
B)If they puched on lobyists and technologists as hard as they push on us for a healthy bottom line, that the proverbial Big Brother of the information age will eventually have to listen and bring down bandwidth prices.
On that note, I know it seems easier to just push on the little guy, because we're smaller, but maybe just passing the buck this time around is not in the best interests of the people that pine for cheap, fast, and dependable internet. And now I shall step off my soapbox so to make myself a better target for the Great Balls Of Fire which will inevitably follow.
Raging in an online forum won't do anything for the world around you. To see change, you must take action.
What really sucks, is that fact that popups and banners, etc take up alot of bandwidth. In fact I bet that it takes up about 50% of the average users web surfing bandwidth, (websurfing doesn't count Kazaa usage).
Since this is probably true, doesn't it suck that not only are the companies with popups exploiting you, but you are paying for their banners, with your bandwidth.
I wouldn't be suprized if people don't (I think they should) start demanding that the ISPs in some way give you an option to block popup, give you software to do so, or give you the option to block traffic from those sources, turning your cable modem into a router that can block things. People demand that companies take you off their mailing lists, or phone lists. If the companies persist they can contact the postal service or telco (their service providers) that people are harassing them.
--
Insert your thoughts here--
Tibbon
tibbon.com
Hmm, clever. I don't think you can even presume to know my position on the drug war from the previous post, but before you shoot your self-righteous little mouth off, I would remind you that just about the only mainstream voices for an adjustment of drug policy are coming from within the Conservative movement.
You can read your lefty rags and your High Times, and feel very clever about yourself, but publications like National Review and The Wall Street Journal are carrying a nuanced position in favor of normalization that is actually influencing the debate instead of covering for classified ads for bong parts.
So sorry, you lose.
And by the way, just where do you get the idea that the government is going to `share with you?' Do you really think that that much money going to Washington is helping out anyone?
In contrast, even a rudimentary study of economics would tell you that when that money is left in private hands, and investment is not punished, that money actually works to improve everyone's position.
Here's a fact for you: in 1990, the bottom-most 20% of American society -- that's the `everyone else' of your post, if anyone is -- had, earned, and consumed as much as the middle 20% of society did in 1950. That's growth, and that's the only thing that actually makes any long-term improvement in people's economic situation. And government does not create growth, individuals do. But only if all their money isn't already en route to Washington.
So thanks for playing, try again some time.
Qwest DSL is down so often I couldn't violate any bandwidth caps even if I tried.
I'd first like to note something about this post which is characteristic of the modern left -- an inability to have a rational discussion of a position they disagree with without resorting to insults and accusations. I tend to think of this as a sign of the bankrupcy of the left's intellectual position in the wake of the massive failure of Socialism, but I'm open to other interpretations.
As for the statistics cited, I did not say `the same dollar amounts' as the middle 20% did in 1950, I said `the same amounts'. These numbers are, of course, adjusted for inflation. That these types of improvements in living standard have occured is obvious to anyone who looks at the percentage of the population who own cars, who own televisions, who own refrigerators, who own homes -- even at the very bottom of society.
And that is the truth of our economic system -- that while the left talks about all the wonderful things which big government could do, if they could only get permission to take away that next dollar of your salary or that next civil liberty, or to create that next sweeping social experiment, American capitalism is actually out there improving people's lives.
As for the drug war and star wars (your pet money wasters), we're close to agreement on the first, but when it comes to the second, I'd suggest you actually look at the programs involved. I'd be the first to admit that wasting federal money to keep adults from doing things which they probably shouldn't do but are none of the government's business is a bad precedent. Fine. We probably both agree, therefore, on the need for a drastic change in Marijuana laws (and I repeat that the only rational level-headed calls for such changes today are coming from the right).
But then we come to missile defense, which you claim is a wasteful expense. The only answer I can give is `gee, it sure costs less than filling in the smoking hole where Los Angeles used to be.' -- which is the real issue. What do you propose we do about nuclear nations which have already threatened us with such weapons, or states such as North Korea, which are on the verge of being able to reach us with them? If we do not build defense, we will have to build deterrence -- and there's a lot worse bang/buck ratio in that course of action.
And another note about missile defense: unlike any other program we've discussed here, it has a key characteristic: it actually falls within the responsibilities of the federal government as defined in the Constitution -- and that's no small distinction.
So, again, if you have a clear argument to make why the government should be involved in funding tattoo removal, or tea tasting, or performance art, or any of a hundred other things which are completely outside its constitutional purview, go ahead. But otherwise, I'm not sure where you're coming from...
Leaving aside, for the moment, the standard liberal arrogance (`I am RIGHT. Any who would disagree with ME cannot possibly have a reasoned difference of opinon, they must be STUPID -- or else in BAD WILL') used throughout your post, let's look at your claims:
- The US military has chosen the most difficult method of intercepting an incoming weapon - post boost phase -- Leaving aside amusement at your assumption that only you and other armchair pundits have considered how this system should be constructing it, and that those actually building it have not, you give the game away when you add `It would make more sense to hit the weapon in the boost phase, say from a ship based system ', for that is exactly the problem. Are you really suggesting that we will always know who might attack us in time to have ships off their coast, will always know when they will launch in time to coordinate a strike on the missile's boost phase, and will not cause a diplomatic firestorm by having heavily armed missile defense ships standing constantly off the coasts of other nations -- even if the nations involved do not have the wherewithal to strike these ships before launching their missiles?
- Except in very heavily jiggered tests, they can't hit anything -- so when you are coding, you never unit test any of your components? And if you do, is this not `heavily jiggering' your tests by working on one component of the system at a time, just as the NMD developers are? More generally, you seem very impressed with the technical difficulties of detecting decoys and such problems, but what of it? Once the problem is reduced to a mere technological problem, we're on our home turf -- we got to the moon, didn't we? We won the cold war didn't we? Why the sudden defeatism now?
- The current starwars program assumes ICBM attacks -- there's a very good reason for this, namely that several hostile powers have or will soon have ICBMs. China already has missiles capable of reaching our shores, and has made noises about using them to do so if push comes to shove over Taiwan. North Korea will have these weapons soon, and is ruled by an unstable madman. Any number of other powers or even non-state actors may have these weapons by the middle of the next century. You assert that deterrence will always hold, but why take that chance? And why is threatening to kill millions or billions of civilians preferable to building a strong defense?
- As I said above, the attack will not be a missle. It will be a suitcase, or a shipping container, or something else / submarines / biological and chemical weapons -- certainly these are threats worth defending against, and worth developing technologies to confront. But why should we defend ourselves against only one potential attack? Our enemies have missiles, and may use them, either to attack us or to blackmail us. You would have us reduced to nuclear retaliation in a scenario that could be prevented by an adequate defense.
So now we have a program which is a miniscule part of the military budget, would pay for itself by the force reduction in nuclear deterrents which it would make possible, and is within our grasp. Forgive me if I think your objection to it has much more to do with the next part of your post:We have to stop acting like cowboys and masters of the earth.
And there we have it -- what seemed like a principaled stand on your part at first turns out to be nothing but anti-Americanism. In truth, we are hardly acting like `cowboys' or `masters of the earth'. We have suffered the worst terrorist attack any nation has seen, and met it with a calm and measured effort to prevent it's recurrence. Doesn't make as good a story as your rant, but hey, life rarely does.
... and, of course, you revert to typical liberal arrogance at the end of your post -- never reasoning when you can insult, never entering civil discourse when you can start a pissing match, and always, always sure of yourself to the point of laughability. Disgraceful.
The one I can remember right now is Cogent although I think there are others.