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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.
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.
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 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.
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'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.
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
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...
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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's a load of difference between monitoring bandwidth usage and monitoring content.
You're absolutely right, but they're singling out "audio or video files." That information is content.
Some people have a way with words, and some people, um, thingy.
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.
Until they have cable systems that were designed from the start of internet, and have symmetric upstream/downstream, the are going to restrict servers.
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.
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