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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.
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."
it costs money to provide data. ISPs that used to offer flat rate 128k up/down DSL in New Zealand have realised that it costs far too much to support P2P piracy and simply allow people an amount of international data. For example, I get 10GB a month.
The 1% that article quotes are subsidised by the other 99%. I, for one, don't want to subsidise them.
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
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?
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
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?
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
No restricted use?
I'm sure that in every single one of those contracts there is a clause that states they are allowed to revise pricing and other policies without consulting the customer.
Boy, this sure wouldn't be a problem if there were competition, would it? Silly government-allowed telco monopolies.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
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.
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
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.
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
It's too bad for you that your story didn't get picked,etc. I've had a few turned down, as well...
On the other hand, I've got a feeling that oftentimes they get a whole shitload of duplicate submissions, and it is only by getting more than submission of the same article that they realize that people find it important. In this case, it makes sense to take an article that isn't immediately newsworthy (this is not a huge thing) and wait and see how many article submissions "vote" for it.
It's too bad for you, but hey -- maybe the system works after all.
there is no thing
what else could you want?
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 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.
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.
Here in Winnipeg the cable company (Shaw) has been quite good, but I am aware of somebody getting booted off the service. I guess downloading 80 GIGABYTES in a month was overkill.
I know a number of people that have downloaded multiple gigabytes in a month, but until I heard the specifics of this case I didn't realize people were that stupid.
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.
Ah, but the trick here isn't that the said customers aren't profitable; it's that the companies involved see ways to make them *more* profitable. I imagine that the logic is something like "those who use the service most will probably be easier to squeeze for extra money."
The biggest complaint I have with systems like this is that they only look to charge more to the people using the "majority" of their bandwidth. How about "low usage credit" for people who underutilize their bandwidth? Or, for that matter, just bypass all the in-between rigamarole and decide what bandwidth per month is "normal," divvy it into units (kilobytes or megabytes), and charge per unit so that the rate matches the current fee for "normal" use. But this simply reduces their profit, since 99% of their users are checking email and ordering tchotchkes on the web, and would undoubtedly clock in well under a $40 per month flat fee. No, they aren't losing their shorts on these customers, but they sure can see how to drain 'em for a few more bucks.
ummm, no ... take any basic enonomics course and you'll learn that monopolies operate in such a way that any raise in price is detrimental to their profits.
... taxing them just keeps their network from being overloaded.
this is simply a taxing of a small fraction of their users who are using much more than their share of the bandwidth.
again, from an economic stand-point this makes sense - if everyone is paying the same amount, some users will be inclided to take as much as possible
_f
- 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.Equally so, if I only drive 100 miles per month, I should pay a pro-rated insurance fee
Our insurance company asks how far we live from work for exactly that reason. Our rates would be slightly higher if we lived 20 miles from work instead of 2.
As far as the internet usage goes, the same thing. The isp that I use for my email account has a 5 dollar a month e-mail only account, which I've used for years. You get something like 5 hours of dialup service a month with that. Or I could pay 10 for 40 hours and some web space or 20 for unlimited. I believe AOL has a similar 5 hour a month plan as well as a bring-your-own-connnection plan for people with cable modems. Most ISP's have low end, low hour accounts.
Ting!! Your wish has been granted.
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.
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.
Yes, pro-rata internet access is an interesting and logical option. The issue isn't the presence of it, but the rates and limits imposed.
For example, how about $10/m for cable access, etc, and then $10-$20 /m for using it (per 5GB). Low users will pay low cable internet access, high users will pay for what they use. It is fair all around, and a CD ISO download will actually have a cost associated, $1 - $3, that the user can understand. Maybe more people would pay for their software and films then!
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
Buinesses will only change pricing to increase profits, never decrease it!
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?
Absolutely. But don't forget, a T1 doesn't connect to the Internet, it just connects to a telco CO. You then need a T1 from the CO to an ISP, then you need an account with that ISP to provide you internet connectivity. And a sustained 1.5Mbps connection to that ISP's backbone aint cheap!
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
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.
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.
Probably still not very cheap, but paying for the T1 connection and then paying the ISP to have access to it would just be dumb. _You_ should be charging the ISP for access to _your_ T1 line.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Well in that case, they have a vital flaw with their service. If other people's connections are slowing below their share of speed because Joe Schmoe is downloading porn, then they need to redo the system. They have a set amount of bandwidth, and a set number of users (some how I doubt their user numbers are scaling upwards at huge numbers). Each user should have a peak-time maximum bandwidth determined by downloading the total bandwidth by the total users. The resulting number is the ammount of bandwidth which each user should have assuming everyone is using their connection to it's fullest. The bandwidth for a particular user at any other time should vary dynamicaly with the load on the system. If there is extra bandwidth above the peaktime bandwidth availible, and a user can use it, they should be able to use it.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
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
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.
.
- 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?
If all you're using is email and basic web surfing, why do you need to be adding the the costs of these providers? .
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
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.
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 is not "insightful"- loads of ISPs already charge by the MB over a certain limit (in addition to a flat charge for access).
graspee
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".
Until they have cable systems that were designed from the start of internet, and have symmetric upstream/downstream, the are going to restrict servers.
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
Interesitng point. I wonder how much bandwidth most games use per hour. That would be interesting to see.
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.
guess what idiot
companies exist to make $
you aren't getting jack
ha ha ha
BilldaCat
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.
ummm, no ... take any basic enonomics course and you'll learn that monopolies operate in such a way that any raise in price is detrimental to their profits.
actually you won't. so next time don't be so quick to do the patronising "take a basic course in..." shit.
Just to clear this up, a monopolist *in the standard model* would lose out by raising prices if they were operating at the equilibrium price or above. If they were operating below, then it would be an improvement. You cannot assume that a company will be operting at the equilibrium position all the time because the market is pretty dynamic - the demand curve facing the monopolist is affected by external factors. Also bear in mind that the standard model has very little to do with how the real world actually works.
"The new wave is not value-added; it's garbage-subtracted" - Esther Dyson, Dec 1994
Don't burn it. Leave it as gas/oil/coal.
Mark Duell
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.
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"
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."
to them, you do.
it's not war, either. i'm all for charging johnny p2p more money. i'm sure they've done a cost analysis and calculated the amount of revenue they may lose due to disgruntled customers, but i bet the vast majority are just going to deal with it.
peace.
BilldaCat
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.)
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.
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The only good weather is bad weather.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
FWIW Rogers cited the statistic that 30% of users used 70% of capacity.
The newspaper article that quoted Rog
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.
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.
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??
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
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
Qwest DSL is down so often I couldn't violate any bandwidth caps even if I tried.