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Will Cable Unplug the File Swappers?
netringer writes "The cable companies are planning to give the RIAA's case a hand and limit P2P file swapping. Yahoo has the Business Week story that cable companies are considering going away from the flat rate pricing model for cable Internet access. They plan to set a lower bandwidth cap for the flat rate and the raise the rates for bandwidth hogs who exceed the cap."
...they are doing this becuase they are losing their asses providing broadband at current prices.
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
(begins downloading all the ISO's he'll ever use before they start charging extra)
Probably - but it won't totally curb it.
Hell, where I see the problem is that it could go so far as to HURT the sales of Cable broadband connections, in which case they will probably have to go back to the flat rate system again.
RonB
It is human nature to take shortcuts in thinking.
One bad apple spoils the whole damn bunch.
I have been pwned because my
Here in Canada, Sympatico's ADSL is already capped at 5GB up and 5GB down per month. Roger's cable will be following suit soon, but still no official word. Any info that's available now can be found in the Residential Broadband User's Assocation forum at http://www.rbua.org/board.
On top of the transfer caps both have increased the price of their service by $5/month, and apparently Rogers will be changing from a 3Mbps service to a 1.5Mbps service.
I thought technology was supposed to move forward.
10 steps back.
Now provide broadband at the same flatrate type scheme. Now, your guy who stays online for hours but just chats on IRC and reads mail costs you way less than some dude who d/ls ISOs and streams 300kbps from real.com once a week.
They all got it wrong. Now they have to backtrack. Lowcost flatrate, unlimited broadband will become a thing of the past. I'd put my house on it.
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
If I gotta pay extra to get the latest distros either way I go, maybe I should buy them direct. At least then I would be supporting the distributors and not the cable company.
Have no bonus for the executives they do, money they need.
How feel you?
I'm working for a phone cie and it all make sense. The companies pay for the bandwidth, but they fail to carry the overcharges to the people causing it, hence, losing money (or not making as much, depending on your side).
It is going to spell the end of the P2P network? I doubt it. There was plenty of people ready to download massive files over their 28.8k modem earlier and there will still be people willing to do it. We cannot keep those rather large download figure while paying 30$. It was nice, but it's really coming to an end.
Now, if only the customer service could improve...
Seems Cable companies are shooting themsevles in the foot..
I see a big movement to using wireless service from isps to replace cable..
Don't Tread on OpenSource
For many people I know, this is a primary use of broadband. If they aren't allowed to use it for this, then they simply won't need it any longer. If they get cutoff from this, they'll just drop the service entirely. And, if they have to consider how much they download vs. some monthly bandwidth quota, many will simply say "screw it" and drop the service, too.
They plan to set a lower bandwidth cap for the flat rate and the raise the rates for bandwidth hogs who exceed the cap The wording is a little off. You can't exceed a bandwidth cap. you CAN exceed a monthy transfer limit unless they implement some hard limit. Some ISPs in Europe do this by giving you 2mbps download speed and a limited amount of transfer (like 1-5GB) and if you transfer more than that in your billing period they throttle the download speed down to 56kbps until the next billing period starts.
They started to raise rates. They started giving lower quality of service, in both uptime, and stability. They wanted to charge $5.95 a month for modem rental. No more servers. No more static ip addresses. Blocking certain ports.
What did I do?
Turned it back in. $39.95 I have no problem paying, but $67.95, for crap?
No thanks
Wasn't there an upcoming law that was supposed to stimulate internet usage? Something like CCDBPTA(?)?
The whole concept behind broadband was that we, the user, would have high bandwidth to do with as we like. But now this idea is completely lost.
Since the broadband provider in a given area is usually an effective monopoly they have figured out that they can jack prices on those who want and need broadband.
It's only incidental that this helps the RIAA. It's really about huge corporations lobbying the government in order to preserve their monopoly and then turning around and putting the screws to the end user.
The dream of cheap broadband for the masses has died on the altar of the holy corporation.
If Attbi starts charging for bandwidth they are loosing my and most people I know's buisness. Im sure most other people feel the same way?
The current trend of bandwidth becoming increasingly more expensive, rather than becoming cheaper (Like most other things..) will only bring us all back to dial-up again. It's pretty sad that right now with all these ads on TV for broadband and how you can download the entire internet in a single night, or watch the latest movies, listen to the latest songs, watch the newest videos, and download massive files in seconds for a flat rate, and then the next day they say we can't do that. We need to pay more to do what they were advertising all along. I know, it's a business, but damnit, someone needs to just invest in their own backbone with all these new Terabit routers that only cost $10 that are always posted on Slashdot. Where are all these advances people keep talking about, and why arent we seeing this get cheaper. I'm already paying $50 a month for my cable, and I couldnt imagine paying any more for it. It just wont be worth it to me.
The fact of the matter is people used Napster and are using these filesharing applications mainly because they get it for free.
Reducing a product to an insanely cheap price won't work, because you just can't beat free.
Hell, back in the old days Amiga games were 15 pounds and people still pirated them - and before that Spectrum games were 3 pounds and you still found people with 90 minute tapes with 3 odd games shoved on there.
I don't have magic solutions to keep everyone (including the RIAA happy) but I'm sure other people do. But I think that we should really admit what we've known all along that these filesharing allow you to get something for free. Yes, there are legitimate uses for it, but the fraction of those people who do use it like that are in the minority.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
Most cable users are leeches anyway because the
upstream is capped to 128kbps, and running a
server of any kind violates TOS. This kind of move
might make the p2p networks better.
What are the odds of xDSL providers going down an analogous path?
It would seem to me that as long as an unmetered option is available, people who want unmetered service (e.g. P2P users) will continue to have their bandwidth.
It's so obvious it's damn near tautological, but it seemed worth pointing out given the conclusions being made in the article, namely that poor Johnny KaZaa will have to go to the Megastore now.
:wq
This was news back in February. I think the article it links to is gone though.
I'm not suprised by this, even if I am disappointed. It's just not financially viable for the bandwidth usage that some of the file swappers are taking up.
Dark Nexus
"Sanity is calming, but madness is more interesting."
If file sharing is what users want, then maybe the cable companies should subsidise the "super sharers" who are absorbing a disproportionate amount of bandwidth, in order to keep the normal users happy and able to download the songs they want. If they succeed in blocking all the music sharing, maybe the ordinary users won't pay the big fees for cable and the cable companies lose.
How much is it to get a direct T1 to my house? Try to cap that!
Assuming broadband competition still works somewhat,
this is good for users.
A bandwidth cap will spur flat rate companies to invent cheaper bandwidht.
Cable companies dropping their customers by raising prices isn't going to hurt P2P that much. The xxAAs are up against a much bigger enemy: college students. Most large universities have dorm-room ethernet connections which are far superior to cable modem access (I've had both, so I know the difference). A big problem with cable is that the upload speed sucks. Universities don't have that problem. And dorm-room ethernet isn't going away or going up in price just because the RIAA says it should. So maybe the cable companies can cause a few people inconvenience, but they can't win the RIAA's war.
I've seen companies limit bandwidth like this before... it's quite silly giving a max or 2 or 5 gigs per month...
On a 56k Modem you can bring down about 9 GB in a month if it's on 24/7. I know it's really not that practical, but I have never heard of limiting usage on a modem. Maybe it's cause all pirates are impatient and use cable.
The media companies that have beeen waiting for broadband to become popular so they can sell streaming entertainment might have a problem. How will people feel about paying to watch a movie online plus have to pay thier cable provider extra for each movie they watch?
http://Lenny.com
This was always inevitable. Small ISPs buy transit from larger upstreams who (usually) bill at the 95th percentile - ie., if only 4% of your users are P2P obsessives sharing 40 gigs of mp3z etc, you may get away lightly. But if 30% of your users are permanently up- and down-loading tons of ffuts, it's going to hurt someone's bottom line.
Incidentally... I imagine P2P usage would severely impact peering arrangements. Suppose ISP A supplies eyeballs to ISP B, who carries lots of content, peering arrangements have to take account of that ratio. If the eyeballs suddenly become servers - well aggregate 250 128Kbps streams and you can bet the little dials on the front of people's routers are going to start spinning very fast. Anyone from a real network care to comment?
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
If the cable companies want to lower their market share, more power to them. Personally I orginally went with cable, cause there was no bandwidth cap, then later switched to DSL cause it was faster and more realiable. Personally I would pay a little more if it was unlimited, and wouldn't choose any service that actively tried to constrain me.
According to this Yahoo! page the CEO of Cox makes $1.5M a year, it does not list what the chairman makes but it's up there too. The sum total of all of the officers listed is $2.92 million dollars a year, and this is only for three officers. That comes out to $243,000 a month. So one way to think of it is that the big wigs want a raise :)
(B) + (D) + (B) + (D) = (K) + (&)
That story is the textbook definition of a hatchet job.
Cable ISPs could care less what you download. Bandwidth hogs are actually a net loss for ISPs, so they intend to charge those more. It is a mere accident that those hogs happen to be MP3 users.
For all the ISP cares, they could be SETI hogs, or pr0n hogs or remote X server/client hogs. So please drop the reference to the RIAA.
The ISP's still have to pay for their bandwith. There just aren't enough people who want high speed connections to justify the capital expenditures necessary to drive the cost of bandwith down.
So we have cable company's going to put caps on their service. Fine. From all the information I have seen it seems to be tentatively set at 2-3 for the lowest class of service. Leaving a sizeable chunk for other stuff as well. Looks like this isn't going to stop p2p to me.
I have ATT Broadband, and at times is is slower than dial-up. In fact if I could pay $100 a month for a fix speed that I could depend up always having, I would do it in a second. I love and need my bandwidth... if that means paying more, as long as I'm assured to get it, I'll quickly fork it over.
But! We also have this kind of a flat-rate cable: you get broadband cable at about 40 euros/month. That gives you the right to download 8GB and upload 2GB per month. When you cross the limit, they throw you on smallband, and basically all you can do is IRC (anything else basically time-outs). If the 10GB/month isn't enough, you can go to a higher account, which will allow you to download and upload more, but at slightly higher prices.
that goes for ADSL too.
"The majority is always sane, Louis." -- Nessus
http://slashdot.jp
I am sick and tired of Cable companies whining about their costs and expenses while the rip new assholes into every single one of their subscribers.
1.) they lie constantly. They lied about my apartment building's contract being expired so that they could then refuse to refund me the money they charged me for installation.
2.) They lied and said that I would have DSL modem speeds. Well, I *would* have DSL speeds if I wasn't sharing my bandwidth with 10,000 other people downloading their pr0n all night long.
3.) they build exclusive deals with complexes preventing you from getting the much cheaper, more reliable and faster DSL service offered by the telco.
I'm sick of this bullshit government sponsered monopolistic rape-the-consumer stuff.
I say let's all move for congress to take all communicaitons hardware and make it an independant co-op agency. Make it illegal to have for-profit communications. It has become a public necessity and it should not be in the hands of greedy or controlling people.
My $0.02 will always be worth more than your â0.02, so
If this was aimed at stopping P2P use, then they would be doing things to individual ports, or even better blocking certain ports only for servers. What they are doing here is just going after anyone who does a lot of down-or-uploading, and so is costing them money. As someone who regularly downloads all 3 legal isos of Redhat or Mandrake, and watches plenty of those MPAA-sponsored high bandwidth trailers from Apple.com I would be being just as hit as someone who downloaded a bunch of mpg files illegally instead.
This is plain and simple charging people for use, rather than a flat rate that they can't stand you exploiting. Personally, I think its much fairer that way, but its got nothing to do with the legality of the information moving around.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
I'm certain I've seen more than one article talking about the fact that the broadband companies aren't getting to everyone out there, but rather have concentrated their efforts on high population densities. Now they say they're getting to most of the 'people' if not most of the 'geography' of the US.
Do these proposed rate hikes, and bandwidth limitations, new pricing structuers, etc.. mean that they're losing money and need to cover costs because their infrastructure is crummy and needs to be upgraded, can't handle the current and projected usage loads? Or are they just trying to figure out what they can make us pay, now that they have a captive market and don't have to share their lines with other providers?
Awk! Pieces of eight. Pieces of eight. Pieces of seven... ERROR: General Protection Fault. [Paroty Error.]
As the article admits, P2P is tied very closely to broadband. Take away P2P, and you'll chop a significant portion of your market out. For companies struggling to keep customers, this could just add to the bleeding. P2P "hogs" will just start looking for different broadband technology -- be it wireless, DSL, or whatever. It's very possible that these P2P hogs could drive the next innovation to profitability, leaving cable as an also-ran.
Will this not kill online gaming? Someone who spends almost all day on say Evercrack will top the upload and download cap. Think that Sony and all the other big names will revolt?
took a while for you folks to catch up to the innovative *cough* companies over here in australia
Here's the scoop for CAD$40/month (US$26/month):
* We have no real bandwidth U/L or D/L limits short of the ridiculous (i.e. if either the Rx or Tx light is on 24/7).
* Our U/L and D/L speeds are uncapped. I've had as high as 400kBytes/s down (that's 3.2Mbits/s!!)and 40kBytes/s up, more than enough for nearly any application.
* Reliability is not bad, but could be better, and it's up about 99% of the time overall.
So, I have few complaints. But, considering that cable companies want to up their 768DOWN/128UP service for US$75/month (CAD$110/month), there's a real disconnect somewhere. Heck, I could get unregulated business-class DSL for that price up here. I think either US cable companies are completely incompetent, or they're overly greedy.
Personally, I think it's both.
Do they honestly believe that they can attract new users with these sort of policies? Yea! Come check out how fast this is, and all that you can do. (fine print) Just don't do too much of it, cause ya, then we'll make you pay more you mooch!
I'm curious about what sort of limits we're talking about...if it's like 1GB per month, or 100MB or what?
- Sighuh?
sympatico DSL is doing this in Canada, as well.
Allan
Finally, a profitable business model for P2P. Let Napster, Scour, etc. all rest in peace.
Again, American Capitalism can do what government regulations could not - cripple "copyright theft". Amazing how the private sector can regulate individual bahvior much more efficiently that the government.
There's another DSL provider here in Ottawa that apparently provides a non-capped service, and have no plans to cap, last I heard.
I can't follow that comment. How does the weight of a game affect how many you can fit on a 90 minute tape? I'm so very confused.
DSL is the solution to cable! For $50/mo I get a descent size pipe, in which I run 4 computers off of. I can VNC into my boxes from anywhere, and also run an FTP server. If I metered how much bandwitdth I use a month, it would be incredible.
I want my rights back. I was actually using them when our government stole them after 9/11.
Sympatico here in Canada is implementing a 5gig upload/download limit. I think they will charge $8 for every extra gig that you download. While I am not opposed to a transfer limit, why don't the broadband providers limit our download rate once we reach our transfer limits.
E.g. If I download 5 gigs by the middle of June, the broadband provider can reduce my speed to 10k/bs a second until the beginning of next month. If I want to download more, then I can just call them up and ask for a higher transfer limit, which I will obviously pay for.
I'm the last person to feel sorry for the cable companies. It's a generally sleazy industry, IMHO. But it's also clear that the companies are losing their shirts given the current pricing schemes, and something's going to have to change.
I'd have no problem at all paying a reasonable market cost for my bandwidth, and then tacking on X dollars each month for my cable hookup charge. In fact, I'd prefer it that way. I don't want something for nothing, and I have no problem paying for what I use. I'd actually prefer to be able to access a webpage and see how many megabytes of data transfer I've done this month.
The one obvious pitfall to this pricing scheme is that it's likely to destroy the current concept of P2P filesharing. After all, few people would have problems paying, say, 3 bucks to download (steal) ten CD's worth of music. But how many people would enable their file sharing, thus paying significant money for sharing their files with other users? And once the number of uploaders online crashes to near zero, P2P as we know it will be dead.
But anyway, this problem will have to be dealt with, and I suppose people will come up with imaginitive solutions. I think paying for the bandwidth you use is both fair and inevitable. So this leads me to my question: does anyone have a clear idea what the cable companies pay for a gigabyte of bandwidth?I'm generally "Interesting," "Insightful," and even "Funny" here. What the hell happens to me at parties?
I think the cable providers are just shooting themselves in the foot. or at least the pinky-toe...
isn't napster what fueled the demand for broadband in the first place? as soon as the market shrinks even a little, economies of scale will take hold and the whole broadband thing will be in the shitter. 'twas good while it lasted i guess.
*Note: This assumes that All You Can Eat Bandwidth goes away, and all Internet traffic becomes "metered" much like electricity, water, etc.
The Good News: Spam cuts down as companies realize they can't afford the bandwidth costs compared to the income.
The Bad News: There's still enough out there that you're charged an extra $5 just to download your mail. Oh, and that time you friend who uses Outlook got that virus? Yup - another $5.
The Good News: With bandwidth metering, idiot people who only only posts trolls stop since their hobby of annoying people for fun is now costing them.
The Bad News: The opinions of many are cut off as they weight their voice against their speech.
The Good News: Sites with way too many graphics, Flash animations, bangs and whistles become less popular, and become nice, clean, quick interfaces. True HTML 4.0 compliance becomes key since you can't just program client side "if browser==this display this".
The Bad News: So much for seeing new screenshots of Star Wars Episode III: Portman Naked and Petrified
The Good News: The Demo Disk industry truly takes off, since to be able to just download 200 - 300 MB demo's of games, software, etc costs too much. Game demos that used to be 400 MB in size are cut down to just 25 MB - just about downloadable.
The Bad News: Now you have to wait at least a week to try out Doom III: Demons in Love.
The Good News: The RIAA and MPAA shut the fuck up about how people are stealing music and videos. The whole CD protection bandwagon is killed off since there's no more fear that people will download music over the Internet, since that would cost as much as the CD anyway.
The Bad News: The whole idea of a legal MP3 music sale system for both established and new artists dies out. We are doomed to forever listen to Britney Spear's latest song, "Knock me around because I did it again".
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
And then, you'd be capped at 10 MB a month and slower service for the same price. Not exactly what I would call a good deal. Wirless (non 802.11b) is MUCH more expensive then Cable Modems. At least the cap is rather high.
Gorkman
This happens all the time, BTW. Classic RIAA. Bring out new tech to make copying unpossible. CDs to kill cassettes, DVDs to kill CDs, and on and on and on. The RIAA relies on sheer size to combat piracy. Count on them to constantly increase the bitrate far beyond what anyone can hear, just to keep wanton copying down! I would not be surprised if this is a reason behind software bloat, as well. (If we can make it require 2 cd's, they'll never be able to share it. haHA!)
My guess is that wireless networks will figure prominently in the p2p 'problem'. These wireless networks will be small, limited to neighborhoods at first, but pick up size and strength with the release of new tech. The internet of the future will be wireless and pervasive. The p2p app will follow.
What about caping the download/upload speed on the TCP/IP ports that P2P software runs on? That's what they do at my university. A couple of T1's and we get 0.5 KB/s on a GOOD day. That would stop just as easily the excessive bandwidth that P2P uses, while allowing all the freed up bandwidth to be used for legal purposes (such as downloading the latest Linux ISO). Since 99.9% of P2P use is for illegal materal anyways (come on, don't tell me you are downloading research papers with all of that bandwidth), it is a win-win situation for everyone involved except for the cheap ass who doesn't take the time to find places to buy CD's cheap (best buy sometimes sells new releases for $12, Amazon.com always has low prices and free shipping if you spend more than $99).
I'd gladly pay twice as much for twice the bandwidth. Unfortunately they'll probably double the price and increase bandwidth by 10%.
Download music, movies and pictures while you sleep.
No use of the word "monopoly" in the /. story? Where is the hysteria of "the man" trying to keep us down?
Ooops! Taco posted this, someone with a clue about the real world of business.
One can only hope that policies like this will cause enough people to be upset by stuff that public opinion will begin to shift they will complain to their congresscritters about restoring competition in the telecom market.
I.E. Lets face it: there is demand for uncapped file transfer. People who get DSL/cable don't do it because they need cnn.com to load in half a second, they do it because they download stuff a lot. When they are told they are going to have to put caps on things, or else go to $80/mo for a "professional" account, they will bail to another provider. When/if they discover that their provider is the only one available because the telco/cable company systematically bled competing services on their hardware dry, they will become angry. Perhaps stuff will happen. In my experience, you can stomp on an american's freedoms and strip away their dignity and get no response, but make them wait 40 minutes in line at an airport terminal or give them a $243 bill for their dsl service one month because they accidentally left Limewire on for two weeks while other people leeched off them, and they will digorge upon you the fury of hell. This is the exact reason why when the internet was first getting big, everyone tech-savvy i know left AOL-- because they accidentally lost track of the time they were spending online, got that one $137 bill, and decided aol just wasn't worth the bother.
I can see doing a two tiered service where the packets of the people who just read two webcomics a day and check their email get one equal priority for their packets, and people like me who run IRC 24/7 and download big files and play networked games get a priority equal to each other but slightly lower than the first group; i can see offering incentives of some sort to a user to make light use of their service. But it pisses me off when these companies believe they have their customers locked in and start treating their customers like cattle. If you try to impose unreasonable fees on me for trying to get $50 a month worth of service out of a $50 a month connection, i will find another provider.
but if this causes some republican senator's kid to run up a huge bill one month, and that senator then changes their opinion from "the telcos & cable companies are just out to make an honest living, and the invisible hand of capitalism will cancel out any inequities" to "the telcos & cable companies are acting anticompetitively and sitting on network infrastructure that was built with GOVERNMENT iminent domain and (in the telcos case) GOVERNMENT money.. this is preventing the invisible hand of capitalism from doing its sacred work, and we must restore healthy market forces." well, maybe some good will have come out of it then
-- super ugly ultraman don't forget to try in mind
If broadband companies would just block ports of the major P2P programs, it should curb the bandwidth usage greatly. Some of us do some work from home, run X apps remotely, etc., and bandwidth caps would hurt more than having to uninstall Kazaa.
All that can be hoped is that something like this will eat their lunch.
MjM
XKCD:Xeric Knowledge Comically Dispen
And if my bandwidth gets capped, I'll get my cable modem using neighbors to go in on a T1 with me. No big deal.
Piss on the cable companies if they want to cap my downloads. That's why I'm paying twice the dial-up rate. They're within their rights to raise prices, but I'm well within mine when I go out of my way to avoid them.
I can see it now:
"Earthlink 56K, up to twice as fast as your cable modem! Upgrade today!"
*everything* is Orwellian to cats.
This seems like a money scheeme more than anything legal. I thought a good network admin would be able to tell if people are using common p2p networks. Why don't they just track down these people and charge them extra? Oh, because then if they had a list, the RIAA would make them cut them off. So why don't they impose an RIAA tax on these people. I don't mind them disciplining people doing illegal things. I just don't want them coming after me because I download gnu/linux iso's, get (legal (www.etree.org)) music from ftp servers, connect from work with ssh/vnc, and update kde3 from cvs every week. And I know there are a lot of you who do things like I do, and we're going to get hit.
The masses are the crack whores of religion.
What they fail to realize is that probably 16% or more of their customers are connected to those "heavy" users downloading songs from these generous sharers.
While it is true that there are many 56k users that download from cable and t1/t3 users exclusively and who are probably leaching some bandwidth from the cable network, these are the very people who will become fed up with their slow connections and switch to cable so they can download copyrighted songs faster.
I don't see slower service stopping p2p though, but metered bandwith would shut p2p down.
Eat at Joe's.
If cable starts to become less viable, perhaps more people will switch to DSL? DSL seems to be much more widely available than cable is, and the prices have tended to go down, not up. Granted, it's not quite as fast as cable is, but it's still quite fast, and if cable rates go up, then it would even be competitively priced.
In my area, you can get a T1 down/quarter-T1 up DSL line for about $80 a month, and for about $40-$50 a month one half as fast. DSL tends to be available in a lot of the scummy neighborhoods that poor college students tend to live in, wheras cablemodem may not be.
"If at first you don't succeed, lower your standards."
My cable provider's been doing this for a while, but not by raising prices on those of us who transfer a few terabytes a month, by offering a deal for a crippled connection. I pay about $40/month for high-speed access, and I have no bandwidth restrictions. They've been encouraging their customers to switch to their $20/month plan, where it's about 1/4 as fast as regular cable (still fine for web/email types) and there's some arbitrary download limit. This way, they get more customers (cheaper = better, evidently) from the ranks of the dialup users. (an unlimited time dialup connection is about the same price)
I don't agree. My gut instinct tells me these measures aren't going to stop "sharing". Regardless, a pricing scheme based on bandwidth usage is going to have other effects depending on how ridiculous these pricing schemes become:
.ISOs for example.
1. Penalization for legitimate uses, such as downloading RedHat
2. Broadband customers faced with penalization for bandwidth usage may stop using streaming audio and video, thus hurting the already ailing internet radio industry.
3. The price of broadband is unattractive to some. I doubt this type of pricing scheme will help to put broadband in more homes.
When the rates go up, there will be less demand on these companies. I think people will seek alternative ISPs. Maybe this is a good thing for smaller ISPs the truly serve customers interests, because they stand a good chance of undercutting the competition when "big broadband" customers start jumping ship. If demand does indeed decrease, then the supply of bandwidth will effectively increase upsetting the balance. They're going to have a hard time justifying screwy price arrangements with too much supply and not enough demand.
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
At least if they see this as a good thing.
The whole reason that they originally said they needed DRM was because not enough people were adopting broadband, and it still remains one of their key arguments.
Now if the cap is only on uploads, then that's something different. If it's not they're being contradictory by saying they want to stream people movies and that capping broad band is a good thing.
Something that's been bugging the crap out of me-Time Warner's radio commercials in the Milwaukee area center on Video and MP3 downloads and how amazingly fast they are with cable. Meanwhile they are trying to stop their subscribers from doing that and at the same time they're in DC whinning about these same people. What happened to truth in advertising? (rhetorical)
The cable companies are planning to give the RIAA's case a hand and limit P2P file swapping.
This isn't helping the RIAA's case. Their case involves copyright law, fair use, royalty payments, etc. All this is doing is putting more money in the pockets of cable companies when people share files (and any files at that, not just the songs of RIAA artists). There is no angle here, currently, for the RIAA. I'd like the see the fight if the RIAA went to cable companies and said "um, can we take some of that new revenue?"
you mean like AOL/TimeWarner? Oh wait, they already own a cable service.
What's to say that streaming movies from any of AOL/TimeWarner's online properties to someone on their network won't count towards their "cap"? I don't think it would be impossible for them to do, plus, it would actually be a nice synergy (or confluence) of their disparate properties.
Or I can easily see Blockbuster teaming up with any other broadband provider and doing the same thing.
Basically, it's pay-per-view, 'cept streaming digitally. Make it cheaper than going and renting a flick from the store with as best quality as you can put down the pipes... or hell, make it so that one household can "rent" x number of movies a month for free.
But to get there, they need to retire the huge bandwidth hogs on the shared network. I'm not talking about joe-counterstrike-server, but the people that are acting as hubs for filesharing networks 24 hours a day and killing the local loop. Reduce them in size (by having them see their new bill), and broadband becomes a much more interesting phenomenon.
A lot of people have mentioned how these new bandwidth rates will hurt their ISO-downloading habits. Maybe hat won't be so bad after all, though. Think of it this way: how many of us have CD-RW drives that can burn ISOs in less than 10 (and even less than 5) minutes? It's probably much more cost-effective in the long run for one person to download an ISO, then burn copies for a few friends. From there, you start an ISO distribution tree, and everybody who wants a copy could still have it within a day of when it comes out.
Of course, with rpm-based Linux distros, you still have to worry about downloading errata packages, but those don't come anywhere near the size of the original 3 to 5 discs. (And who knows, maybe someday RPM will have a patching mechanism, so that people who are sticking to a distro's official package versions can just download the files that changed instead of a whole package each time.)
Sure, no one wants their heavenly connection to the starry dynamo cut off, but if enough cable and DSL providers move to this kind of pricing plan, it might just be a Good Thing(tm) for the rest of us. Here's why:
/. crowd and other Interner/Broadband power users do not represent the typical cable/dsl broadband customer. We don't do what they think we should with broadband, which amounts to looking at cnn.com, sending hotmail, and participating in other information-consumer activities. Not only are we much higher-end consumers of service, but we're also much more technically savvy. We create the net just as much as they do. We have the technology, and we can do this ourselves if there's enough motivation to get us off our collective asses.
/. community dwarfs that of many corporations (do the math, it's true), but we don't work with eachother. We prefer to bitch when The Man doesn't kowtow to our needs. It's understandable, because up until now The Man has been a pretty good sport about thing, but he's still The Man, and no real friend of a free-thinking geek.
The
There are already numerous instances of tech-savvy citizens lobbying their local municipality (and providing advice) into setting up a community-owned broadband network. These networks are far more effienct and cost-effective than the monsterous nationwise Cable and Phone-Company 0wned systems. They offer better service for less money because they are built to suit a community's needs without the (bloat bloat) overhead of a multinational communications behemoth.
If you're in a metro area where municipal lobbying is ineffective on the individual scale, start your own Community Interest group. Check out distances, lines of sight, etc. If you get 20 geeks together within a square mile, that's enough expertise and purchasing power to buy a fractional T1 and set up your own wifi cloud.
If you're a rural customer, you're in a bit of a bind at the moment, but hang on. Boosted signals and moddedd antenai are gaining in range all the time. You just have to find enough friends between you and town to get the link happening.
The internet will remain Cool(tm) only as long as we continue to work at making it so. The collective purchasing power of just the
I'll say it again, we have the technology to build our own nets. It's already happening. Community-owned infrastructure is the future of a free and exciting internet, and that's why the inefficiency and greed of the big cable and DSL companies just might be a good thing: the kick in the butt we need.
Look, no one said this (the information revolution) was going to be easy. Only by putting in the hours and voting with our dollars can individuals make an impact. But the fantastic thing about this time, as opposed to other massive shifts in the economy (e.g. industrial revolution), is that it's potentially very empowering to individuals and communities. Necessity is the mother of invention, so lets get inventive.
Howard Dean for president
This isn't at all about 'unplugging file swappers'. Nobody is going to get unplugged. People may be paying more now, and it will be roughly proportional to usage. This is a smart crowd, Taco, don't insult us with twisted headlines.
Just one more reason to ditch Comcast all together. Got my DishNetwork installed 2 weeks ago. Waiting for Ameritech to finish some upgrades then switching to DSL. I can think of a half-dozen other people who have done or are doing the same in light of the policies and restrictive agreement that Comcast and other cable companies hit us with. The sooner I can quit giving Comcast a single dollar the better....
I almost never swap music files, not because I have some high moral or ethical nature, but because the quality of the MP3s I typically find are crap. That and I prefer entire albums.
That said, this bandwidth cap really pisses me off. I will be one of the offenders for sure just on my normal day to day activity. I do a lot of work from home as well as working on various web sites both of which require me to move a lot of large files around. I guess we can forget downloading a Linux ISO image and cut back on watching movie trailers...
No, I think this is a terrible idea and the last straw before switching back to DSL.
Ha! I never said it was, and you're calling the wrong person a socialist.
I didn't say it should be free either, just that it should not be in the hands of special-interest groups. It is a necessity for our modern economy and a necessity for the future. It's here to stay and it cannot ever go away if we want to continue success.
Consider roads under your argument. If roads were deregulated and anyone could build roads whever they want and charge for there use, how fast do you think it would become a huge economy-bashing mess?
Communications should be in the same light. We no longer travel on roads to spread information, but that was one of the principle reasons for their construciton! (See history of the U.S. Postal service and read about how many roads were commissioned by and for their use alone).
Agreed that when electronic communications were first invented they didn't have this much impact, but now they are as essential as our highway system.
My $0.02 will always be worth more than your â0.02, so
Does anyone know the details of that AT&T $19.99 flat rate plan? I know they say that it cost $19.99 per month when you call long distance if it is to another AT&T customer but it is unlimited.... so like what if you called like everday and never was off the hook (maybe private modem calls?) Or is there a limit on the amount u can use and simply say 'unlimited' because they don't think anyone would actually call that much... ?
Perhaps Cable/Broadband providers should go with the same route. Unlimited transfers of data within the network but put a cap on traffic is go out of the network? (Would this be possible?)
Now I'll laugh when I note I can download all I want, and nothing bad happens.
:p
In the past month, I've pulled down the equivalent of three discs worth of Linux-related stuff. Another disc was easily filled with Half-Life related stuff - the latest patch, the latest mod versions, etc. Actually, that probably could take over a disc.
And I have plenty of other junk I've downloaded as well. Not a problem.
The only thing that fscking with cable will do is prevent it from being in every home. The allure of cable is gone. (Actually, it's been gone for awhile now - no servers this, no servers that!)
I can download Linux stuff, HL stuff, and damned near everything I'd want on my 56k. Which means, I could download a few discs worth of music (Or a lot of discs worth of music in mp3 form!) if I so chose to.
You know what the death of cable will mean? Pirates will set their computers to download something, and then go outside and walk their dog or hang out with friends for awhile.
In any case, I'll bet this will start people thinking outside of the box and not too far in teh future you're going to start seeing a bunch of small locally owned providers popping up to counteract and undercut these larger corporations.
--Keeping the flame wars alive, one post at a time
Anything other than flat rate pricing will not work simply for the reason that people have become accustomed to unlimited Internet access over the years especially since the reluctant AOL switched to a flat rate a couple of years ago. Any consumer service that has per packet charge will not work. If possible, users will just switch to another high speed service such as DSL, 802.11, etc. If anything, this could encourage more people to set up community networks by getting a couple of access points and hooking them up to a t-1. Nobody will be willing to go back to the old days of staring down the clock while online.
Wrong!
Cable companies will lose customers, what about legimite users sharing files with each other, don't cable connections send data to the server? I know mine does, what if I have a program that sends data to the internet or do work from home, how about if I go to play my favorite high-bandwidth video game? High Speed is what cable is for, if they limit or charge us extra for using X amount of bandwidth I think about 1/2 are going to say forget it and go back to dial-up or even DSL, did they think about that? "Lets send all our subscribers to DSL, we don't wanna make money do we" Ok, end rant, this just really makes me mad.
That's Bait & Switch!
It is also clear that they are going to get greedy and over sell the other 99% in order to increase their profits without adding any hardware or overhead. I would expect the FCC or the DOJ to step in, but they are front men for the corporations these days.
During a single day a couple of weeks ago I downloaded the Mandrake 8.2 ISO. It took 5.4GB. Then I downloaded Debian's and RH's too. But, since then all I've done is a little surfing, one email list and one news group. Except for the occasional download, i.e. for 85%-90% of each day, my connection is idle.
Since they are going to charge more based on download amounts, they should block all ad servers. Why should I pay for the cable service and then pay for an advertiser to download his crap? Fair is fiar. It looks like cookie killers and junkbusters are going to have a field day.
Will ALL data flowing between my PC and the 'net be part of my bandwidth usage? This is an "always on" service so say when code red 2 comes out, will I get charged for all the http requests coming in to my modem? How can this be handled fairly?
For me it's the same as the dial-up rate. It's $40 for cable modem, or $20 for the ISP plus $20 for the phone line for dial-up. Both are $40, but cable is faster.
Best Slashdot Co
Anybody remember paying by the hour? With companies like AOL it used to be the only pricing scheme. But when all of the sudden you can go from paying $20 a month for a limited number of hours, or paying $20 a month for an unlimited number of hours...
The point is practically no consumer ISPs charge that way anymore. It's all flat-rate because people won't stick with a place that has it any other way. Sure, in some places people will be forced to pay it simply because they don't have any other way, but in urban areas people won't stand for it.
They'll try, I'm certain, but they're going to lose so many subscribers they're going to be scrambling to play catch-up with the ISPs that still have a flat rate.
This might make P2P evolve ...but go away? Doubtful.
If I was writing P2P apps and facing this situation, I would simply incorporate a credit method with a cap. In other words, a file sharer gets nnn credits for serving nnn MB of files and I allow the user to specify the cutoff in the client. That way they would need to share to partake in the sharing (which would be great to have in general and will probably increase what's available instead of decrease it, thanks RIAA) and the user can specify a cutoff so they're guaranteed to not exceed the cap.
And if they're a real MP3 fan, they just blow past the cap, pay the extra $9.99 (or whatever) a month and get another 150 records. Oh no.
P2P developers may be "inextricably linked" to bandwidth, but what the cable companies provide, by definition, is bandwidth. So unless you can come up with a way to block certain types of data (don't get me started), this will just make the apps 'smarter' and yet transparent to your average web user.
My
Limekiller
was what changing the pricing structure would do to their subscriber base. When the ecconomy took a nose-dive, many people started to get rid of things that were not essencial, broadband access being one of those things. There were a lot of cable modem users who decided that the extra money was worth not having to dial up and tie up their phone line or even deal with the chance of getting busy signals while attempting to dial in. If all of a sudden, they see that there is a chance that some spy-ware that crept onto their system that runs 24/7 could end up sticking them with a massive cable bill, they may either change to DSL or drop it entirely and go back to dial up. Lower speed would be okay for most, but charging per MB over a certain limit will chase away a lot of customers to other services.
About my suggestion for a government communications branch:
I understand this can be abused, but if done right it could be a good thing. It would require careful design. But not all government agencies are evil and corrupt. Look at the BBB. They are a useful government branch that provides a needed service keeping businesses in line.
I am as wary of government involved in communicaiton as anyone else. Probably more than most people. But I think it could be done right and be a blessing.
It could also be done wrong and be a curse.
But it probably wouldn't be much worse than it is right now.
My $0.02 will always be worth more than your â0.02, so
istop.com
They provide ADSL for Toronto/Montreal/Ottawa. You can get 3.5M/800K, a 20G cap, and a static IP for scarecely more than a Rogers hookup.
-=Chris -- Stop feeding microsoft. DON'T USE HOTMAIL! ---HUSHMAIL---
You forget unification:
Eventually, assuming decent fiber to the curb, You will get your "TELEPHONE", "TELEVISION", and "INTERNET" all through the same pipe- perhaps via ipv6 over mpls or something like that.
Now the flat rate broadband may diminish in the near future, its certainly going to be here in the long haul. (bits become so cheap that streaming video 24/7 like you do tv will be practical, hence to make it appeal to consumers someone will provide a flat-unlimited* offer, which people will like...)
...they'll use this to smear the reputation of cable modems. A lot of them still don't cap downloads, and many don't plan on doing so either. I see this as their competitive edge over cable modem providers, who are about to get their asses handed to them if they go with this new pricing model. Why? How many users are going to accept paying $40/month or more for a a shittier service? Not me.
It is not the last stretch of cable to your home that is the problem (okay with cable, perhaps it is an additional problem since it is a shared link)
Broadband subscribers using bandwith on the copper loop do not incur costs for the ISP (except degraded servcie for the shared cable loop). It is the traffic on the ISP's backbone net, and the traffic to the rest of the Internat, that the ISP has to pay for. Wireless service faces the same costs.
Flat-rate as we know it is coming to an end. The only thing ISP's can do is
a) Spread the costs over all subscribers so that the total traffic costs are covered. With bandwidth usage rising, ISP's are already raising the rates of their services.
b) Implement a limit and charge for the overage, or throttle the bandwidth upon exceeding the limit.
c) Offer different services with varying bandwidths and limits. Some ISP's offer both a cheap limited service and a more expensive flat rate one.
In Europe options b and c are the norm, and I think it is only fair that we pay for the bandwidth we use. Some people want to be always on and have a superfast connection, but just download the occasional file. They should not have to pay the same as those who download MP3's all day.
I don't mind paying for services I use but I want plenty of options in that case, and not pay for things I don't use. My ISP seems to get it, and offer 4 basic ADSL packages. My $100/month gets me 8Mb down, 2Mb up, 100GB per month limit. I can connect as many computers as I like, run a server, and generally do whatever the hell I want with my link. They also offer extra static IP's, extra webspace or mailbox space, and other things, at a modest monthly fee.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
...that certain Broadband(tm) companies are pissing off the majority of their customers. Because of Capitalism, these companies will suffer a major financial backlash and will most likely withdraw from their current customer base. After several months of high Cable subscription prices (while DSL providers steal some customers), some (non-RIAA loving) companies will pop up with the prices we had a couple of months ago and take most of the remaining customers, leaving ATT and such out in the cold.
"We had to destroy the internet in order to save it."
Given that all forms of high-speed internet access are already too expensive, unless their plan is to drop the price for low-bandwitch users very significantly from the current rates, then all such a plan will do is send people searching for cable-modem alternatives and certainly won't recruit new subscribers. Who is going to pay $50+ a month for limited access?
--- What?
What about those that play the online games? That will become too expensive. There go all the independent servers that will become too expensive to operate. In come the pay servers.
I wonder if this wouldn't be a great way to catch (and charge) people using their AT&T broadband connection to get free basic cable TV as well.
The University of Connecticut (at least the Storrs campus) caps residential users to 5GB/any seven-day period, and drops us to 56k for seven days if we violate that. Do it three times in a semester, and we're at 56k for the rest of it.
It sucks terribly---it's made utter bastards of all of us. It costs us to help people out (the 5GB limit is combined up/down), so we don't share. We're a bunch of bastard misers who sit on #imp-iso all day, hoping a server will clear up so we can leech at 200k/s.
My big plan for the fall is to set up an on-campus Gnutella network, probably using Gnucleus. It'll probably involve flyering the campus like mad, and hoping people sign on. I know I'll be sharing about 50GB over Fast Ethernet... mmm, good. Does anyone have any for-dummies instructions for setting up or using this kind of thing? Any experience with the same?
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
That's the sort of article that might have appeared in Entertainment Executive Bonus Entitlement Journal--not in a general business magazine.
What business week forgets to mention is that broadband is supposed to make all kinds of high bandwidth services available, such as streaming audio and video, all kinds of as yet to be invented multi-media entertainment, as well as on-line delivery of software and services. Apparently the business week writer confuses a 5MB MP3 with a 5GB video file. And Jane Black, the author has probably never downloaded a Linux ISO image either. Here go another 100 to 200 song files. Peer to peer will be unaffected, once better algorithms (such as free network project's) are available. Rich content would die--think the next generation of video games, with live audio and video.
If the cable providers want to lower cost, they can start by shutting down their spam portals, which offer a great collection of advertising, bland news, and a box for searching the web. As in who needs it? Too lazy to type cnn or google?
And for lowering the cost to consumer, the answer lies in competition. But Congress and U.S. regulatory agencies have pretty much outlawed and out ruled competition. Imagine broadband prices, if all the surplus fiber was put to use. Or if there was a real choice when ordering broadband access, instead of AT&T Cable or Qwest/Microsoft DSL. Or if instead of filling the airwaves and cable system with digital spam, the spectrum would be available for bridging the last mile, and the cable system would be available for Gigabit access. But seeing cereal boxes in high definition is obviously more important.
Broadband suffers from poor service and too high prices, not too much bandwidth. It's a chicken and egg problem, waiting for bandwidth and content. Kill the chicken, and the birds will eat the egg. Or something like that.
Buried in the article: "Cable companies have another reason for acting now: Because they can" Its all about the benjamins.
"Give a woman two glasses of wine and some pad thai, and they'll agree to just about anything." the Sports Guy
What, specifically, are your grievances against the 'Anonymous Coward'? Help me understand what the problem with not being logged in is. Thanks.
It seems to me everyone is bitching about the wrong problem. Why is it the cable companies are unable to recoup their costs for their high bandwidth users? They are able to supply their users with big enough pipes at low cost. Their bandwith is cheap. Isn't it?
The problem is the Teco's. Cable providers in many cases, if not almost all, need to purchase their upstream bandwidth infrastructure from a phone company. Where bandwidth costs have gone through the floor for things like cable modems, etc, they have not moved one iota for the old copper T(X) lines. I don't work for a cable company, but we have had to pay a local techo a crapload of money, and wait months for an install to get a 10 foot T1 connection to our ISP. Why don't you just run direct for that 10 feet you ask? Good question! Contracts. Our ISP _MUST_ use the telco for all T1 type connection in our situation, whether it makes sense or not. It's in their contract with the telco. It was one thing they needed to do in order to get favorable terms for the hundreds of "real" T1's our ISP has from the telco.
Cable companies have two ends in their layer 1 supply chain, the consumer end and the phone company end. The consumer end is dirt cheap, thanks to the use of modern technologies and system upgrades. The phone company end still has a guy out in front of the building where I work trying to figure out which of 1000 something wires coming out of a copper bundle is supposed to be connected where. I've got news for you, the guy connecting the copper is not the most cost effective use of modern technology.
Some major changes need to happen in the infrastructure supply side of things. Until this happens, the consumers and cable companies are going to be "stressed."
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
The key quote from the article is:
RUNNING FOR COVER. The cable companies' adoption of new pricing strategies has less to do with stopping piracy than with economics and business models.
So let's toss out the incidental RIAA connection and look at what's really happening...
Recreational net users will no longer be able to dabble for "free" in p2p schemes, and the division of processing power on the Net will once again return to a server-side-heavy setup.
That faux-Trojan in KaZaA might have been sneaky, but with unthrottled consumer bandwidth, it anticipated what the net would look like in a few years -- no longer thin clients randomly attached to powerful/thick servers on the Net but evenly matched peers surfing peers. Personally I think going back to centralized sources of content be a big step backwards for freedom on the Net, even though it's obviously what the market demands. The faux-Trojan might have basically just been a distributed server for one special interest but apps that copied its architecture would open up thousands of these potential virtual servers for whatever use people can imagine. Once distributed serving received its Apache equivalent, the sky would be the limit. Throttle bandwidth for consumers, aka "potential distributed servers", and that possibility goes away.
Hopefully this will at least get the cable company to remove the silly provision against using my connection for business purposes. If I'm not getting flat rate, it would seem I should be able to do whatever I want with my bandwidth.
It's all 0s and 1s. Or it's not.
"Every" company---you mean like one? 'Cause that's all it takes... it's called a monopoly, and that's one of the big problems with 'em.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
The idea that broadband providers, who pay for connectivity by volume, might pass the costs on to the heavy users isn't particularly exotic. Of course, the usual Slashdot weenies are getting their panties in a bunch over it (probably because the bulk of them prefer to ignore the fact that J. Random DSL-User with his twice a week web browsing is subsidizing their constant high-bandwidth leeching).
:-) ), they're not going to want to set rates so high that all the heavy users go away. They'll try to find a price point that allows them to sell whatever bandwidth they have at a profit. Oddly, this may put them in a position of being pro-file-sharing, as they will have a new class of profitable user. File-sharers are an interesting class of user; while they want high-bandwidth, they're not at all choosy about when (relative to a business which _has_ to have high reliability).
The suprising consequence? Presuming that the ISP's can still make money off these heavy users (and while bandwidth is expensive, it's not _that_ expensive; it's not, say, anywhere near the order of $15 for 600MB of uncompressed music
Furthermore, if you're a large enough ISP, you may even wind up in the position of getting to charge file sharers for connecting through your own network to each other (given the preference of file sharing systems to find close servers).
My Experience: As if Charter hasn't screwed with us, it's customers, enough. They already Block common ports (21, 23, 80, etc..), which they don't mention to you till you bluntly ask one of the support tech's that actually had 1/2 a brain. Then there was a little 'mishap' where all the packages they offer got revised and not a lot of people were notified that their 512/128 packaged was switched to a 384/64, and again, you had to call them to find this little bit of information out.
My Feeling: Screw Charter, screw them and thier demented idea of customer service.
Now granted, I have yet to see anything press wise that points out that charter is also thinking of embracing this idea, but then again, I haven't seen anything else from them on paper, that is, except my monthly bill which heaven forbid, I better not be late on.
I appologise for my venting and frustration, but I got onto the wagon of 'broadband', specifically cable, cause I wanted the speed, I wanted the freedom of a 24/7 connection, hell, I wanted to play Quake2 with a 25 ping! And it is unfortunate now that I have to use Charter as my service provider. In all seriousness, what business is it really to them what I am downloading? People can say 'it's totally their business, your using their pipes...', and that's valid enough, but I am paying for use of their pipes. I am paying to be able to download what I want, and any size I care to do, and most of all, I'm paying for a service they offered me and others, and I said 'Ok, here's what you asked for.' (money) and now I get excuses as to why I am unable to do 1/2 the features I was advertised. Which pathetically, they will have excuses for those excuses as well. Makes me wonder if charter hired their Tech support personal from AOL.
Anyways, appologise from the vent, but I am sure I am not the only one out there that has had, or is having difficulties with Charter or another cable service provider.
======
Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish. - Euripides
It just pisses me off that trolling stories like this have to create a Great Demon to justify it. As the story itself goes on to admit, it's not about Jon the Brazen Music Thief, it's simply about economics. If it wasn't P2P that was generating the bandwidth, it would be usenet (still a big hog), porn, streaming Britney Spears Pepsi commercials, good old ftp, you name it. Give people an unmetered resource, and they'll use it.
The big joke is that the cableco's with interests in content provision kidded themselves that they could sell access and content. I'm still stunned that anyone actually pretended to believe that. I mean, if you've got a cable coming into your house and $3.50 to spend, are you going to spend it watching a crappy postage stamp sized movie on your little monitor, or are you going to spend it on sending the movie to your big screen TV? It's a no brainer.
This was always going to happen. The only part that pisses me off is that I've been a good responsible low bandwidth user, but now I'm going to get reamed just as bad as my friend who has been using 50% of his cable capacity every second since he got it (that's terrabytes, multiple. He has an entire wall full of tape archives). I can't decide if he's to blame for the situation, or if I was an idiot to not get my snout in the trough when I had a chance.
The only question now is how low are the caps going to be, how much is the extra bandwidth going to cost us, and will DSL providers follow suit.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
because you just can't beat free.
Of course you can... aside from the difference in quality, they can make it convienient, because getting it free can be a pain in the ass. It took me days to get the last Manson album (lots of fake/bad tracks out there), a week for Soldier of Fortune 2 and longer than that for a decent copy of Spider-Man.
So you've just spent 6 days downloading a screener of AOTC, and Anakin is turning to the dark side when some fatass walks in front of the camera. Or you could just drive to the theater and pop $5 to see it on a big screen.....hmm wonder what most people would choose.
Amen, man!
The cable provider in my area put up billboards---yes, billboards---for cable internet, when they have no cable internet. When will it be around? Dunno. Call back in six bloody months. Real soon now, honest.
What kind of morons run these broadband providers? Is there any other industry that gets away with this kind of customer abuse?
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
It seems to me that this would be a huge risk for the RIAA. Right now, people download their music from Kazaa for no cost. A lot of people then go out and purchase the songs they like on CD, paying for what they downloaded, and thus legitimizing it. I don't have the link to evidence that CD sales skyrocketed along with P2P filesharing, but in this forum I think I can assume it's common knowledge. But if the downloaders have to pay the cable companies for the songs they downloaded, they would then feel that they own the song, without having to go down to the local megastore to buy the CD. In the minds of the users, having to pay for it may legitimize it, and people would stop going out to buy the CDs. I can see this really hurting the RIAA, as people continue to download music with the money they used to spend on buying CDs and can no longer afford to blow their cash on the silverbacks.
On the other hand, it could hurt the cable companies, too. If they raise their prices so that it still costs less to download the music than to buy it, it hurts the RIAA and helps the broadband providers. If they raise the prices so that it actually costs more to download the music than it costs to buy it on CD, it helps the RIAA and hurts the cable companies (and it also hurts the consumer, as broadband innovation will have been squashed). If, however, they raise the prices to the point where it would cost the same to download it as it would to buy it, the results are harder to see. Some people would continue to download, and they definitely would not then go out to buy the CD, in effect paying twice what it's worth (or, some would say, 200x times what it's worth, but you get the picture). Other people would stop downloading and buy the CDs instead, perhaps cancelling their broadband connection. Still others would stop downloading and continue to not buy CDs, but rather return to the good ol' radio. Before Napster, I got all my music off the radio. It started to get old, however, when the commercial-density-ratio began to skyrocket, so I began to download songs off the internet. When I listened on the radio, the RIAA had no chance at my dollars, and when I downloaded it, the RIAA still had no chance at my dollars. If they force me back to the radio, why would I then give them a chance at my dollars?
This isn't even mentioning the fact that this price hike is totally ridiculous, because it cuts into fair, legal use as well. What if I wanted to download the ISO of the newest Debian release? Or upload a home movie to a community website for mass viewing, and then download one of somebody else's? Or download the source code to my favorite OSS program to edit it, and then upload my edited copy? Why is it that people only see the "bad" things that happen, while ignoring the good? Nothing would squash Open Source like forcing us all back to 56k modems to download and upload our huge source files.
I think it's time for a new guy in the broadband arena, one who understands the needs of the consumers, not the needs of the billionaires. Now if only I had like a million bucks so I could start my own service provider...
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
Honestly, if they are going to charge me per byte of traffic, I'm going to need to see itemized lists of what they are charging me for.
Just being on my current cable network invites floods of port scans, let alone the amount of traffic Code Red generated Who's going to be billed for that? Unless they have the infrastructure to track only bandwidth resulting from user requests I can see a lot of mischarging here.
P.S. Any misspellings or faults of grammar you think you detect are mearly transmition errors, and probably your fault a
Q: What do consumers want?
A: Unlimited bandwidth and unlimited (mostly free) content.
This will just accelerate the development of coop ISP's, wifi coops, etc. The cable companies are effectively removing themselves from the ISP business.
When the coops reach critical mass, the backbone providers will only be needed for long-haul data (trans-oceanic).
No big loss.
One bad apple don't spoil the whole bunch.
...girl.
Edith Keeler Must Die
Here's an idea. Kinda obvious to some, not as obvious to megacorps with "whats good for us" goggles on.
First of all, the US is the greatest country in the world. At the very least, especially if we intend on being the most technically advanced society on earth, we should have more than enough bandwidth. We should be bandwidth gluttons, with extra bandwidth out the waazoo.
Here's what I don't understand... the phone company comes to my house and hooks up a wire. The cable company comes to my house and hooks up another wire. Damn it! Why don't they just get together, stop duplicating each other's work, and run a single fiber line right to my doorstep!! Why does bandwidth have to cost so much money? I don't understand. If we all had a single unified fiber line for telephone, cable TV, internet, music, etc, then bandwidth wouldn't be an issue. We'd be the society we should be, with more than enough bandwidth to suit our needs. If we had fiber connected to the back of every computer in the US, then bandwidth would practically be free.
I guess I don't understand why bandwidth costs so much money to begin with. If mega bandwidth didn't cost what it currently does (for no apparent reason), then we wouldn't even be having this discussion.
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
Yeah, it pretty much kills P2P. At UConn, where we're capped at 5GB/week up and down combined, no one shares anymore. It's kinda saddening, 'cause pirates are really good, kind, giving people at heart... but not when the administration steps on their sack for sharing.
It makes people into vicious, miserly bastards. Free the bandwidth!
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
It seems to me that the bigger impact of charging for excess bandwidth is going to be on the gamers and on the people listening to internet radio. Those two probably chew up more bandwidth on the average Slashdotter's connection than anything else.
Between the battle in Congress over royalties and a potentially significant drop in broadband users, internet radio is heading for some tough times.
When I got my cable, the prospects were full 24 hour online connections, blazing speed, and all the B/W I could handle. Now that the cable guys have a huge customer base they suddenly realize they shot their mouths off and can't give us what they promised. It would be like Chevy offereing a new car that they claimed got 80 mpg on the cheapest gas and then after selling a few hundred thousand admitting that the car really gets only 20 mpg and thats on the expensive gas. Hey, I'll admit it, I D/L lots o stuff from new games to new cd's. THAT'S WHY I GOT CABLE. If they decide to penalize me for using my cable for what I got it for then I'll drop it and go back to my $10/month dial up. Why else would someone buy cable? You don't need it to view web pages or get your email. You buy it to D/L shit at lightning speeds. So I drop my cable for dial up again. Does that mean I'll rush down to Best Buy to get all the latest greatest Britney Sucks album or The Sims #47: Nice Coffin. NOPE. I never did it before I had cable and I'm not gonna start. I just can't afford $60 bucks a game or $20 a cd. My only treat IS cable. So I'll do without like I always did and go back to my goal of a hundredth level Sorceress on Diablo 2 and play it till I can't stand it anymore. Either way just because they stopped my piracy doesn't mean thier sales will sudenly skyrocket and I doubt I'm the only one that feels this way. Let the cable company screw up thier business model. They have a good product but as with all things I'll drop it for something better if I'm not satisfied. Or I'll do without. PERIOD.
The cable companies should be charging less, for example, as more people sign on, the connections slows, we as subscribers have to deal with this, amd now they want to put an arbitrairy limits AND have the nerve to give us massive price increases at the same time!!!! It is obviouse that the regulating bodies of government are cow-towing to the cable interests and allowing this joke to continue. we are at the beginning of the 21st century and are witnessing the relentless exponential growth of technology will lower costs to the point that fiber to the home will become cheap (this is only a decade away, a flash in the pan on civillization time scales). What would Picard say if: "I'm sorry captain, we have exeeeded our allotted 5Gbyte cap for this month"?
I realize that you're being funny, but it occurs to me reading this that things are so much worse than your joke implies that that in itself is funny, in a nihilistic sort of way.
The Good News: Spam cuts down as companies realize they can't afford the bandwidth costs compared to the income.
Spam isn't cut down at all; bandwidth-wise it's not nearly as significant as P2P, delivery can be modulated to stay inside a speed/size restriction, and the dirty little secret is that spam is often quite profitable (why else is everyone doing it) - spammers can easily afford the $500-$1000 a month for a "business class" internet connection - or several.
Not to mention that many if not most steal their servers, and their bandwidth, anyway, which brings me to point 2:
The Bad News: There's still enough out there that you're charged an extra $5 just to download your mail. Oh, and that time you friend who uses Outlook got that virus? Yup - another $5.
I would actually call this worse news. Because yes, with metered connectivity spam can really start to cost you big, even as the government will continue to refuse to regulate it. And because that Outlook virus, or the distributed denial of service client you just got hacked to run, or any number of other abuses far beyond your control, will land you with a bill far, far larger than $5. Try $5,000. Don't laugh. It's already happened.
Not to mention that with bandwidth becoming more expensive, DDoS will only become more necessary (to kiddies), and hence more popular. Despite this, Microsoft will continue to do nothing of substance about the security of their products (it's impossible, since it's not economical to really do things right).
The Good News: With bandwidth metering, idiot people who only only posts trolls stop since their hobby of annoying people for fun is now costing them.
Unfortunately not. It's ironic that the most annoying things on the internet generally require the least amount of bandwidth.
The Good News: Sites with way too many graphics, Flash animations, bangs and whistles become less popular, and become nice, clean, quick interfaces. True HTML 4.0 compliance becomes key since you can't just program client side "if browser==this display this".
In a word... no.
The Good News: The RIAA and MPAA shut the fuck up about how people are stealing music and videos. The whole CD protection bandwagon is killed off since there's no more fear that people will download music over the Internet, since that would cost as much as the CD anyway.
Not a chance. CD copy protection is just getting started, with or without P2P.
Nasty, isn't it?
We're on the road to Tycho.
At 181KBps download rate, I could download 469GB per month. If I do nothing else but watch my favorite streaming program, which runs at ~70KBps, for 30 minutes each day, I am using almost 40GB per month.
"I don't know that atheists should be considered citizens, nor should they be considered patriots." George HW Bush
So let me get this straight...not only have they capped my modem at a 128kbit upstream without announcing a change in my service agreement from a previous company, but now I have a $7/month rate hike coming, followed by any additional bandwidth metering fee they choose to charge me?
No, I'm not feeling raped by my ISP right now :P
DSL here I come...
"That's it, it's time to sell the car, Mona, we have to fund that OC3. Oh, and get me the folder for Little Timmy's college fund...it's got to go!"
-----
"Cogito Eggo Sum: I think, therefore, waffle."
The tax on CD's was referring to home burning CD containing music downloaded via P2P.
;o)
Glad to see that the music industry don't get all this tax money anymore
Don't cable providers realize that one of the few "killer-apps" out there for broadband is p2p??? If they take that away half their customers will up and leave. It baffles me how these people can tout the benefits of broadband and then deny their customers the ability to use it.
Write your own client. Keep track of the IP addresses distributing your music. File lawsuits (while simultaneously notifying the FBI).
RIAA and all just want something to whine about. They're not serious about stopping P2P.
So, if the byte caps are to curb file swapping and other forms of not so legal behavior, isn't charging extra making the cable/DSL providers benefit from pirating? So are the cable/DSL companies going to send a share of the profits to the RIAA or software companies? Humm, I smell another lawsuit coming up...
Hallelujah, brother! There were times, when I was paying US$125/month for 348 SDSL, that Code Red made it damned near impossible to get anything done. Thankfully, I was running a Linux box and didn't get infected. And there wasn't anything I could do about it because it was coming from an unused computer in a library in Pig Knees, AK, a library that didn't answer their phone after I finally tracked it down to tell them that their fucking Windoze box was annoying me just because we happen to have similar IP addys! You know, I *STILL* get a few Code Red hits every week! Anyway, if it comes down to a pay-for-use scheme, I may have to hand it back to them and tell them to keep it.
Useless opinions, worthless observations, and more!
It sounds to me like they're opening up the market for new competition.
I'm sure users would love to pay $10/month extra to have full bandwidth all the time. Maybe I will start a bandwidth reselling company.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
Bandwidth isn't free. It isn't expensive, really, but it sure isn't free. So flat rate, while desireable, probably isn't reasonable.
Problem: Monopolies.
You can never trust a monopoly to set a fair price.
Problem: Spam
The cost should be born by the party that initiates the transaction, not the party that receives it. But this can be quite difficult to determine for non-persistent protocols. Mail is easy, bill it back to the sender, and if you can't, you don't forward it. http, ftp, etc. are much more difficult. The user who initiates the transaction is the one who receives most of the data. The sender is essentially reactive. So the sender shouldn't be paying here. Without micropayments, I don't see any reasonable method to handle this.
Problem: privacy
If transactions are billed back to the sender of the communication, then it will be possible to trace who sent what message. This has obvious unpleasant implications for privacy of communication.
But bandwidth isn't free, and I object to paying to receive spam. Perhaps everyone needs two addresses. One where the sender pays for the transmission, and one where the receiver pay. You would use the receiver account for ftp, http, mailing lists, nttp, etc. (oops! that opens you up to spam!) and the sender for normal e-mail.
This needs careful design. Remember the inherent dangers of any single point of failure. (Look at what mailing lists could to the spam prevention of the separated addresses!)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
The 1% myth states that a very small number of users consume a disproportionate amount of bandwidth, and thus cost a disproportionate amount of money to support.
;)
That's probably true. But it is only half the truth, because only 1% of the users are early adopters who have figured out what to do with a relatively fat pipe. Those are the people who can show everybody else the light. Those are the people the broadband companies need, to show everybody else why they should pay $40 to 50 per month. Those are the people the broadband companies should love.
Then again, the suits crunching the numbers with their spreadsheet use the Internet for looking up stock quotes, to wander aimlessly from site to site, and perhaps a little porn. Delivering a product and service is obviously just a costly anomaly. If they could just figure out how to suck money out of the consumer without doing anything... yes, let's go talk to Congress about that. Financial stability in war time sound good?
I think that if the broadband companies took a closer look, they would discover that the 1% of high end users bring them more business than all the TV, billboard, and radio spam combined. Those 1% of the users are creating the market they so desperately need. Do the broadband suits really think people will pay $40 per month to read their e-mail, or that reading e-mail at 30Kbits/s is a good deal for $20 when you have to be home to use the service?
As for shutting down the people who offer a lot of pirated stuff by raising cost: Ms. Black obviously doesn't have a cable connection, or she would know that upstream speed is already limited--128Kbits/s is pretty typical. So how much slower would it get? Remember, modems can now reach 56Kbits/s--sort of.
All of which makes me wonder if there is a Jane Black writer for Business week. Maybe it's really Jane Doe, aka. RIAA PR drivel...
This is idiotic, the internet IS bandwidth, limiting bandwidth is not "limiting fileswapping" it's limiting everything you do on the net.
and I can determine which broadband provider has reasonable service and will into the future I will give up my 56K modem. Til Then I will be patient.
The hell of it is that this will also apply to iso's I want to download.
Hot Damn! It's the Soggy Bottom Boys!
> They plan to set a lower
> bandwidth cap for the flat
> rate and the raise the
> rates for bandwidth hogs
> who exceed the cap.
I'm trying very hard not to take all this personally...
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
In an effort to be fair, I did say to myself, "Maybe this is good journalism. Maybe it's just a case of following up on a story. The editors might have merely been offering complete coverage and analysis of an important issue."
Then the coffee kicked in and I woke up. This is Slashdot.
What's in a Sig?
It's funny though, does anyone remember the broadband sales pitch a few years ago? "Move to broadband! Download streaming video! Listen to your favourite artists online!". Their whole sales pitch was that not only could you browse faster, but watch lots of video and multimedia online. Another question is what was to happen in the (off-chance) that an online audio service like NetPlay or what have you was actually successful and caught on BIG? You're still going to have a lot of people downloading music, causing just as much traffic as p2p sharing.
This is all theoretical of course, but it begs the question, what was their business plan in the first place? They promised high quality internet video and music, well.. they got it and now don't know what to do with it apparently.
The essence of the internet community is one that is free in speach (take a look at open source). Buy putting caps on bandwidth, the idea's on the internet get curved by a finical factor.
Sounds like a not so good idea to me...
But I can think of an upside... Think about the argument you could make against spyware in a class-action when they start using your not-so-free bandwidth.
Your mammas flamebait.
When I signed up with mediacom - And I signed up with them directly, mind you - they were using @home to provide service. I had 6Mbps down and the usual 128kbps upstream cap. Then they capped me to 1.5Mbps down.
If the bandwidth cap isn't sufficient, then fuck ya. I'll get DSL. The whole point of a bandwidth cap is that you set it to the right point so that you don't have to meter bandwidth usage. I should be able to pull my full cap all day without anyone breathing down my neck.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
There's a great synergy between our big, overconsolidated and overextended broadband ISPs and the media companies. They each want P2P to stop. The media guys want it to preserve their trust- I mean, rights, and the ISPs want it so they can overextend even further.
Of course, in theory this isn't a problem, since if a big ISP raises their rates or imposes onerous restrictions, their customers will all flee to their competitors.
But what if there are no competitors?
You see, both the media companies (who also own cable, BTW), and the telecommunications industry basically own the U.S. government.
That's right - the same government that has been quietly dismantling competition in the ISP field with great alacrity, both for the cable and telco infrastructures. The effect? To leave a few major players (the bells, and the cable companies) owning broadband. The goal?
Control.
They can't stop P2P, so they're going to stop the entire internet.
They'll use a tried and true method: making it expensive.
The only possible out is if the coalition collapses, and rather than play along, the telcos decide to make a grab for the fleeing cable customers rather than fall in line and restrict their own service.
Of course, they may restrict it eventually anyway.
Ordinarily I would say that technology will eventually find a way. Now that the demand for bandwidth exists on the scale it does, people will come along to create a supply. If the traditional infrastructures have been subverted, new ones will be created. Grouping wireless, for instance. But the FCC, which is part of the same prison-bitch federal government already being discussed, is in an excellent position to shut such efforts down.
Ugly. Very ugly. The only light at the end of this tunnel will be the demand for cheaper bandwidth created by "legitimate" content providers. This could eventually force the ISP trusts to compete again, but there's no guarantees, and it could take a long time.
In other words, my friends: it's fucked.
We're on the road to Tycho.
I don't understand this, its common sense. Instead of charging the small fraction of users who use more, they plan on implimenting this to EVERYONE - why? The same damn reason ATT went ahead and raised prices on their service, to make more money! Don't start whining to me about how expensive broadband and bandwidth are - I don't want to hear it. 90% of the infrastructure is in place already. I don't see them laying new cables/fibers, why do the prices need to go up for? The law of supply and demand here seems to be backwards - "since there is a dwindling supply of subscribers, lets charge more!" Sure, they will have services that are priced less than what they offer now, and that will attract SOME additional subscribers - but the ones who are here now, the loyal customers who have been with them for a while, will get screwed. Its a damn shame that the senate will not deregulate the cable industries death grip on their lines.....If only they would we would see prices possibly going DOWN instead of UP!
Intuitivly, it seems like rates should be falling per byte transmitted not rising. We need this to happen to stimulate new data hungry services like video and audio on demand. When pricing falls to some arbitrarily low level, it becomes easier for the consumer to pay for steaming content rather than to pirate it. The 1% of heavy users mentioned above is the future of broadband, not a group to be snuffed out. Where's the log jam? Why is bandwidth so damned expensive? Can someone with a *real* clue help out here?
Now, this is as probably some already has said, quite logical that they do.
But how will I know (when my ISP decides to do this evull thing) how much bandwith I really use so that I can choose which type of service I shall choose. Of course I *want* the broadest one (especially when downloading large files from my friends) but sometimes the price sets the limit.
I'm using Linux so I assume that some kind of measuring program should be available.
Any ideas/hints?
Metered net access will kill Internet Radio also. And, people (well, at least me) will be quite diligent in blocking ads. I don't want to *pay* to download ads that I don't want to see in the first place.
One possible benefit, if there is any silver-lining to be had, is that spamm may well become illegal, since spame incurs cost onto the reciever.
Software Wars
If you remember the lyrics to *that* song.... Geee, you must be really OLD.
Broadband, while sparked by Napster et. al., is about more than just "stealing". It's the way software companies do business nowadays, and the broadband companies may want to take that into account before they do this.
And how come we never hear about these things w/DSL, only with cable modems?
And I'm sick of people who take at face value what the telcos and cable companies tell them about the real costs of providing this service. Don't forget the track record of the people you're dealing with.
Until someone publishes an independent study about the nuts and bolts economics of the broadband ISP, I'll take Occam's razor. When someone sells you $2.50 a month call-waiting or a $3 per month unlisted number, you draw the obvious conclusion when they start whining about the "onerous costs" of meeting their contractual obligations to you.
We're on the road to Tycho.
1. This isn't about the RIAA, it's about the cost of providing services.
/. people complaining that their ISP does allow port xyz traffic. No, let them use the applications they want but make them understand that there are monitary consequences.
Peering and downstream/upstream links cost money. The more the customers use, the more the ISP pays. The ISP will only contract for the average sustained usage on their network. If they exceed this, they are charged higher rates by the other networks. This is simply what they are trying to pass on to the consumer.
2. Downloading ISOs, sampling songs or listening to internet radio shouldn't put you over your usage limit.
Grab a usage meter and see what your monthly usage actually is. You may be surprised. I've only exceeded mine once in 3 years and that was because I did 5-6 ISOs, lots of music transfers and had a temp ftp server up for some 400+mb files.
3. The "average" consumer won't be affected.
95+% of the cable modem users in my area have never gone over their usage. Who does? Jane Doe, single mother of teenage boys who finds this strange program Kazaa on her machine. John Geek who's streaming video of his fish tank, downloading the entire NewsGroup database daily(yes, I have a customer who does this) and running various servers.
4. Virii will not cause people to go over their limits. In the hey-day of CodeRed and Nimba I had less than 5mb of traffic on 2 web servers. This goes for email also.
5. Shutting down ports won't work. How many times have I seen on
6. The "cap" system will work. My ISP(the company I work for) has been using this for 3 years. I don't like the term "cap" because it's not a hard limit but just what you've purchased as part of your package. Sure some customers will do to other services like DSL, but they tend to come back to us because of quality of service.
The ISP's resonsibilities should be:
Providing a way to track usage daily.
Sending a friendly reminder email if someone is getting close to their "cap".
My ISP charges and then credits the first time someone goes over as a warning and courtesy. This saves Jane (above) from being penalized for what her children are doing and gives her a chance to correct it. It's amazing how many don't repeat.
it's really only a problem is you are stupid enough to not take advantage of the system and know how to use it to your benefit.
The more people who sign up for broadband, the more overal bandwidth is used. That means higher costs for the broadband companies. I don't know why you would think costs would come down as more people sign up. Feel free to stop being stupid at any time now.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
Current dialup users will see these restrictions / hassles and decide "why bother".
It seems that these sorts of restrictions could have the effect of killing broadband growth. What do others think?
I understand that broadband providers need to raise cash fast - and that bandwidth hogs do raise their costs.
But there is a danger in this strategy. The value of any network depends on what's on it. The Internet is no different. If broadband providers price out the content providers that the casual (read: profitable) customers want to access, there will be much less demand for broadband.
Of course many of the T-M-T set would prefer to see the Internet become a toll road for access to their proprietary content. RIAA certainly doesn't want to see any competition from some guy distributing his garage band's mp3s from his home PC over his Comcast broadband.
Friend:
"This is such bull, I can't believe it. I was talking to Tony, my friend at a used cd store, and he says the CD sales have never been higher. People all the time are coming in saying, "I downloaded a song from the new ______ album, do you have it in stock?" And they buy it. The RIAA needs to get a clue. "
And no one knows the answer, and there's a very good reason for this...
It would expose the price hikes as the scam that they are.
I don't understand their business model. As a dialup consumer, I would assume that I am the market that cable providers are trying to reach. I see rates continually go up, and quality go down. Why would I ever buy their product?
On odd occasions, I do need a large ISO image right away, but usually if I'm downloading an ISO for Solaris, Oracle, or Red Hat, I can wait up to several days before I really need it.
Cable companies should set up special proxies for downloading large files, and distribute multi-platform download applications that use them. These proxies should automatically throttle bandwidth consumption in periods of high-utilization.
Cable companies with bandwidth problems should provide credits for people who use such mechanisms, and surcharges for people who use straight ftp.
It would also be nice if Kazaa et al provided standard http/ftp interfaces for download, for the pirates among us.
This doesn't make sense, putting a limit on downloaded Bandwidth only hurts potential eCommerce sites.(IMHO, anyway)
Curious, does the amount of Bandwidth you're charged for include all the ads downloaded to your browser too?
How about blown downloads.. do you pay for it when the server on the other side dies? or cuts you off in the middle of that Valhalla upgrade?
Wanna Cut down on Piracy? Scale the cost of your service against UPSTREAM. Joe Mom and Pop will never need that HUGE upstream pipe, but junior will never be able to share his MP3s with a capped upstream.
Personally, I'd have no problem paying a lil' extra for a bigger upstream pipe.
No, this doesn't solve the issue of piracy, it simply narrows down the universe a bit.
It's a win win for the Cable Companies.. It tosses a bone to the [RI/MP]AA and it stuffs cash in their pocket at the same time.
Why isn't this being persued as a solution?
Start Capping on how much people can download, and you lose the reason for people buying broadband in the first place... It's like having digital cable, but only being allowed to watch 20 hrs a week. (and 25% of THAT consists of Commericials!!)
All, of course, IMHO.
I just called my Cable provider - AT&T Broadband - who informs me that yes, we are changing rate plans - but that they are only going to offer a higher tier of service and that my existing service speed and rates are not going to change. I will however be able to purchase a plan which doubles my speed from 1.5mb/down to 3.0/down for an undisclosed amount. If this is the case (which I don't exactly trust is the case) this wont effect me or my downloading habits (heh, heh) in any way. I wonder if this is due to the fact that the ATT broadband network is basically still a cluster-fuck of assimilated cable companies which were gobled up in the nineties - each microinfrastucture significantly different from the other causing different limits/rates etc...
---- "Logoff! That cookie shit makes me nervous!" - A. Soprano
You might want to try DirectConnect, which would allow you to easily restrict the connections to hosts on the local network. We have a couple of DC hubs here at Cambridge University (one 'elite' hub for people sharing a lot, and another hub with no minimum share). Just word of mouth has allowed it to expand so that it has multiple terabytes shared most evenings, so I rarely have any need to download stuff from outside Cambridge any more.
66.30.208.96- [12/Jun/2002:06:11:55 -0400] "GET /scripts/..%%35c../winnt/system32/cmd.exe?/c+ dir HTTP/1.0" 400 294
66.30.208.96- [12/Jun/2002:06:11:55 -0400] "GET /scripts/..%25%35%63../winnt/system32/cmd.exe ?/c+dir HTTP/1.0" 404 311
66.30.208.96- - [12/Jun/2002:06:11:55 -0400] "GET /scripts/..%252f../winnt/system32/cmd.exe?/c+ dir HTTP/1.0" 404 311
195.55.126.121- - [12/Jun/2002:12:13:29 -0400] "GET /default.ida?NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN%u9090%u 6858%ucbd3%u7801%u9090%u6858%ucbd3%u7801%u9090%u68 58%ucbd3%u7801%u9090%u9090%u8190%u00c3%u0003%u8b00 %u531b%u53ff%u0078%u0000%u00=a HTTP/1.0" 400 331
And what are they going to do about this:
"Make money in your $pare time with...."
And how 'bout teh endless barage of packets that keep probing ports 137 and 138.
And those flash animations I didn't ask for, and those pop-under ads, and all ads for that matter. I suppose I'll have to figure a way to add all this noise up, and attach it along with my corrected invoice to the cable company.
I bet they do. I will give them pure hell, if they try to charge me or give me shit for this.
This is just a thought off the top of my head, but... this is just a multi-tiered pricing system. Really not much to write home about.
Also, it seems to me that unless they jack their prices to some totally insane amount, it would still be worth getting your music on-line as opposed to on CD at the store.
Wouldn't it?
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
Posting doesn't like it when the textbox wraps on a dot.
o lin k.co.nz/costs.html
http://web.archive.org/web/19961018082318
/ipr
Still seems to add an unwanted space between the n and k.
Broadband providers already cap such activity by running user connections asymmetrically.
F'rinstance, I get typically 4-6 mbps DL speeds from a well-connected test server at Sprint Broadband Direct. UL speeds are more like 128 kbps.
If they restructure pricing, it won't be to "help" the RIAA out of the goodness of their hearts, it will be to tier my 4-6 mbps DL rate so as to squeeze more money out of me for decent connectivity.
--Blair
It sounds to me like they're opening up the market for new competition.
That would be true, were it not for the fact that these companies own a monopoly on the 'last mile' of cable coming into your house.
Were fibre and copper treated like a public highway, to which all of the various ISP competitors enjoyed equal and unbiased access under the same terms, you would indeed have competition.
Unfortunately, in the case of telecommunications the highway is privately owned, and competition all but impossible (remember all the DSL providers going belly up? You have companies like Ameritech to thank for that. Hell, I had Ameritech cut my wire just to create a trouble ticket that would make their competition look bad and ultimately line their own pockets. Luckilly I had my own toner and butt set and was able to punch down new wire myself, cheating the telco monopoly of the profits they would have otherwise made on their vandalism. Now there is a hidden camera present, one which will hopefully document this behavior sufficiently to allow for legal action if and when it should happen again).
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
This should just about kill MMORPG's (like UO, EQ, AC, AO, DaoC) customer base. Hell, these people are already paying a premium just to logon.
And how many people are still going to host Unreal, Quake, and Doom servers when their bandwidth is on the line?
For that matter, what about VPNs? If tunnelling in to work through my cable modem is going to cut into my gametime, they'd damn well better be prepared to help foot the bill!
- Despite popular opinion, I am not perfect.
Will the cable companies not charge for overuse if:
1. The downloads are made by children? If my son makes tons of 900 calls the phone company will throw out the charges, what about here?
2. If a new, unpatchable secutity flaw comes out and my machine is exploited and used in a DDoS attack or ping flood, do I have to pay for that bandwidth? It is Microsoft's software at fault not me!
Mod this up!
- Despite popular opinion, I am not perfect.
So the cable companies are going to start making a profit off of (according to them) the primarily illegal activities of their subscribers.
I wonder how the RIAA and MPAA will feel about that?
"Oh, you hate your job? There's a support group for that, it's called everyone, they meet at the bar."
lets just hope the cable provider improve the service before they change it, if I have to pay more I'm going to tell them to shove it, connection sux now as it is, & they have a grade 2 class as the tech staff...
I'm tired of the self-righteous indignation of cable modem companies and even some of their subscribers regarding bandwidth usage. The cable companies made offers to everyone for "unlimited usage" and "T1 speeds" and "always on" connectivity.
Now that some small percentage of users are actually using the bandwidth that they were sold, the cable companies are demonizing them. They want to charge them extra, calling them "bandwidth hogs" and other such childish names. I don't see the cable companies scrambling to offer lower prices to people who just check e-mail occasionally and maybe move 750K a week through web surfing. I don't see them being called "bandwidth anorexics."
I'd have a lot more sympathy for the cable companies if they had been honest from the beginning, figured out what kind of bandwidth they could support, and spelled that out in the agreements.
They remind me of the airlines. Now the airlines have squeezed the seats so close together that they don't have adequate room for carry-ons, they portray passengers with "oversized" carry-on bags as self-centered buffoons -- despite the fact that many of these "oversized" bags met the airline's size requirements at the time that they were purchased.
Unless this bandwidth limitation is extremely high, then this will limit the ENTIRE 'broadband expererience' that they've been touting for years, and in general, cause more people to go with a DSL solution, or hell, back to the much less costly dialup..
This is exactly why people usually choose the unlimited local calling option.. LOL..
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
Work productivity will be going down if this happens. People won't want to risk their minutes...eh...capacity on checking email, etc.
Push back on businesses to pay for all or some of the ISP burden will increase, and have to be honored to get employees to work from home if/when they need to.
Sales of Linux distros will go through the roof, becuase people won't want to pay for the bandwidth to download them.
I will be demanding an immediate discount for having to accept the following traffic through my cable modem.
1. SPAM (nuff said on this)
2. Browser Pop-Up advertising
3. Hackers hitting my firewall trying to get into my network
"...the shortest distance between two points may be straight line, but it is by no means the most interesting."
how my cable company (time warner) gives me unfiltered access to usenet (like alt.binaries.warez or whatever), hosts this pirated software, then charges me extra to download it... will the extra money they make to to compensating the other companies they are helping me steal from?
NOFX, NiN, Nirvana, and Eminem are considered OBSCURE? Geez, I'd hate to hear whatever you would call mainstream.
That's fine if they want multitiered pricing plans but shouldn't they have to then make sure that download/upload speeds are kept at a constant. I can see subscribers paying for the higher service suing for more guarantee's on the speeds this could really cause a backlash in the form of a nice class action suit. What happens when a judge orders the cable companies to do just that then they have to spend more money to get more bandwidth to those higher paying subscribers. And what happens when the goverment gets involved. Cable prices are already almost $100.00 for basic cable/high-speed Internet. I guess the goverment will have to start regulating the cable industry since they (the goverment) is stating that they want more people to have the ability to get online. What about all those poor people who can't afford to get online because.
If the DSL and phone companies band together (which will never happen) and start pricing competively and guarantee bandwidth speeds they could go after the higher end users and get more customers on their bandwagon. Then what will the cable companies do when people are leaving them for more guarantees?
Just a thought....Any lawyers interested in a nice big class action suit?
Save Pangaea!! Stop Continental Drift!!
1) Competition. Some company WILL offer uncapped access at a reasonable price. Remember the reason that most existing companies are in this mess was because of paying STUPID amounts of money in order to expand.
2) Technology. When a technology becomes widely available offering uploads/downloads at 10+ mbps ( some 5-10 years away maybe) that 5/10/20GB per month cap suddenly looks STUPID. So the cap moves to oldcap * X...and it becomes trivial again to freely fileshare.
The real game is being played out in the FCC. The cable companies are not looking at short term problems like p2p or declining subscription rates for broadband. The real goal is long-term. There will be a breakthrough application that will make broadband desirable for average users. The cable companies need to position themselves for that day.
Thus watch the FCC decision soon. The FCC has classified cable broadband as an "information service" rather than as a "telecommuncations service." This means that it may not be covered by the Telecommunications act of 1996 (anyone who laughed at Clinton for saying "it all depends upon what "is" means" should realize that politics is 75% about the meaning of words and who gets to define the words.) This means that the cable companies will not be required to provide access to the networks for competitors. This means that cable companies will be granted monopolies (and who thought this sort of stuff only happened under "Banana-Dictatorships." This is politics for the Repubocrats.) Thus "competition" will be suppressed (the destruction of competition justified by appeals to increased competition--the hypocrisy of big business and its ideologues. Or is it he inherent contradiction of "free market" capitalism rearing its ugly head once again?)
This is the opening salvo in the price gouging of the internet monopolies.
I find that a good portion of the websites I visit can't send me data faster than 1Mbps anyway, so the 2Mbps down I get is only used when more than one person is browsing in my house. It's nice when I find a good server that has an ISO or file I want with a fast connection - I can download Mozilla 1.0 (10MB) in two or three minutes, but the majority of people don't need or use it.
If they raise my price, then I'll shop around and likely find that it's still the best deal. However DSL and regular dial up will get a shot in the arm, at least for a little while. I may even be motivated to get a T1 (or more) to share with my condo neighbors.
Either way, they're still raking in a cash. AT&T says 1% of their users use 16% of their bandwidth - well that means that 50% of their users are paying $50/mo for the equivilant of dial up bandwidth. Cash in the bank.
What they're selling now is bandwidth, not transfer. If they cap my transfer to 5GB per month I'll expect them to leave the bandwidth where it is or higher - it'll only make them more money since I have more oportunity to go over - and those who transfer very little will feel that they are paying less for faster service. Happiness all around.
At any rate, there'll be options.
-Adam
The factors that my cable company (Adelphia) forget about are:
1. Their service sucks. They can't keep a name server up and running.
2. No redunancy in their network.
3. They shutdown their network almost every week day until 5:00PM.
4. Their left nut (local cable office) and right nut (adelphia.net) are f'ng clueless as to what the other might be doing. It takes multiple phone calls before you give up totally as they are the dumbest shits in the world.
5. The price of this crap is overpriced.
Hell, life would be back to a simplier time if I just dropped my cable modem. Since the digital TV is unreliable, I might as well drop the whole ball of spittle.
Hey, leave him alone. Maybe he's just gay...or a chick...
192 or VBR encoded with maximum quality with the latest Lame encoder
that is, LAME 3.92, lame --preset r3mix
rivals the professional hardware based mpeg2 layer 3 encoder we have here at work.
No schmidt. "MPEG-2 layer 3" often means MP3 at 22 kHz, which would cut out all frequencies above 10.5 kHz (Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem plus the transition band of a real filter).
(Background for mods: Some people claim to use P2P to discover music not approved by Clear Channel, the Microsoft of radio broadcasting. Many have suggested independent FM radio as an alternative.)
as anyone can get a LPFM license
Not anymore. The FCC has effectively closed the low-power FM license program to new applicants: "Applications for construction permits for new LPFM stations or major changes to LPFM permittees or licensees cannot be filed until the next application filing window period. We cannot advise as to when the next application filing window might be." No filing windows have been opened in the past year.
Will I retire or break 10K?
What will be the
DL Quota (better be 30 GB +)
Charge per GB (better be in line)
Business is Business and Business must grow, Regardless of crummies in tummies you know... -Onceler
I'm a Unix/TCP/IP network admin by trade. If the
cable company does this I will get a fractional T1
feed and sell off access to my neighbors via 802.11b. I believe I have enough people interested to pay for the line.
NOFX, NiN, Nirvana, and Eminem are considered OBSCURE? Geez, I'd hate to hear whatever you would call mainstream.
Some Eminem releases are obscure. Some NIN releases (everything but PHM, Broken, Fixed, TDS, FDTS, and The Fragile) are obscure. They're much easier to find on WinMX than on CDNow.
Will I retire or break 10K?
GEEZ! As if it's not bad enough to have to pay through the nose for say, listening to Radio Paradise - now they want to charge for BOTH Bits AND Bytes!!!
db
Cig:
ôô
I'd be willing to pay a few bucks more if they'd open up "the good ports" such as 80 and let me serve my photo album to my family without having to explain to them how to tack the port number on to the end of the domain name.
I heard a Verizon ad on the radio today that kept talking about the speed at which you can download MP3s. The ad must have said "download music" a half-dozen times. I've also seen billboards in the area for other high-speed internet vendors touting "music downloads" as a key feature of their service.
You're not going to get much music if they start throwing caps on the bandwidth.
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
But it shouldn't have to be that way. Cable networks are designed like most local area networks that have a connection to the internet. The internal network has typically has an order of magnitude more bandwidth available than the uplink to the internet. Internally, they could handle almost the maximum capacity of all of thier users at once, but when that bandwidth demand hits their internet uplinks, the supply falls short. The same problem is encountered with University networks.
The P2P software, to remain on the network admin's good side, needs to go out of its way to search for files only on hosts that are close (network wise) to the client. Your typical cable network has thousands of cusotmers, and if even only a small fraction of them are using similar software, and by the looks of it, its more than just a small fraction, the chances are relatively good that the file you're looking for already exists somewhere on the local cable network.
This results in the same amount of traffic on the local network, but a signficant reduction in traffic to and from the internet. Only if a file is unavailable locally will it venture out to the internet at large, but chances are good, this will apply to 5% of the searches or less.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
If MY connection gets capped, I will complain every time I get an unwanted email. If I spend 20kiB of my download limit downloading an unwanted email, I better get that 20kiB back, or the sender better PAY me for the bandwidth they used by sending me a message. If each email I get costs me money, it should be illegal for people to send me unsolicited emails. (Hey, unsolicited faxes are illegal IIRC)
/usr/games/fortune
They're doing that - you're obviously getting your news only from /., which hasn't mentioned it yet. Big sharers on the Gnutella and Kazaa networks are getting RIAA and MPAA DMCA notices..
Cheers,
Backov
In the law there is no overlap between theft and copyright infringement whatsoever.
-Milo
Where ever the broadband hogs go, tiered pricing will follow them. Do you think wireless and DSL providers are going to allow people to get away with the broadband abuse that the Cable companies would not tolerate? What makes you think DSL and wireless companies are going to want to eat the costs of all that broadband usage and basically lose money for you?
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
Speeds Up to 3.5Mbps/384Kpbs/ Ad ditionalProducts/serviceupgrades.asp
IP Addresses 5 Persistent IP Addresses
with 6 month lease life*
Additional Benefits 7 email addresses 25 MB of Web storage space
- My File Locker - transfer files from different locations
- My Web Page - build your own Web page to display work
Newsgroups
VPN Capability
Price $95/month
Modem Includes Modem Rental
Installation $29.95 Self Installation Kit
or $149 Professional Installation
http://comcast.comcastonline.com/memberservices
It's not that bad of a deal though. But it shows that cable companies are NOW starting to offer diffrent service tiers just like DSL.
They'd better change all their commercials. Every single broadband commercial I says something to the tune of "Download music all the time, it only takes a second!".
Now they'll say "Download music during off peak hours and during your alotment of P2P hours. Please check when your p2p service hours run, because we are not responsible for severed files."
In the last couple of months there has been a surge in the number of people who play games on-line. There are a few companies that are charging anywhere from $5-$15/month just to play (ie, Everquest, Infantry, Ultima Online, etc). Capping Bandwith usage could seriously imapct this industry as now not only would you have to pay for the on-line game, but also the additional costs incurred from the bandwith used playing it. Playing quake a couple of hours a week will easily put you over 30GB in a very short period of time.
This isn't as much "normalization" as it is "don't take so many drugs when you're designing tables."
I can remember getting madden 98 over a 33.6 and it made me enjoy it more. Now with high speed I download stuff and never even get around to look at it. This will only help AOL and other dial-up's.
... is a big price drop in all of those "broadband" routers from folks at Linksys and such. The more you have to pay for a broadband connection, the less money you have left over to share that connection.
:)
Of course, then there's those of us out there with enough foresight to buy a router with modem support.
If I actually get to pay less for capped speeds, or if I could pay more for higher speeds, I would be fine with it. I really like the way WOW Cable Internet has set up their pricing structure.
WOW! Internet Value: $29.95 (Download Speeds Up To 112Kps)
WOW! Internet Basic: $39.95 (Download Speeds Up To 500Kps)
WOW! Internet Advanced: $44.95 (Download Speeds Up To 1.5MB)
I have Comcast Internet right now and the speed is horrible because I live in an apartment complex, and the lines get spliced about 80 times before it reaches my apartment. At least I would be able to pay less for my slower speeds.
Also, if all i wanted was a fast browsing experience then I would pay say $30 a month. If I am a bandwidth hogging gamer, I can opt to pay more for that type of service.
Unfortunately because of the abuse from certain users, I think cable/dsl may be forced to raise prices. If prices go any higher, then I am dropping my service, and I would think that others would too.
Really though, it is time to start banding together and creating wireless networks for our neighborhoods, and divide up the costs of the hardlines between everyone. =)
By doing this they would kill all the people who are sharing but not downloading from other things or browsing
Jesus people, cut the knee-jerking and think for a second. Having additional charges for those who exceed a certain bandwidth point CAN be a very good thing for most of us. Setting it in the context of "shutting down file swappers" though is a red herring. It comes down to paying for what you use, nothing more or less.
Look at the data. In the linked article, it cites AT&T's data that 1% of users use 16% of the service's bandwidth. Elsewhere, I've seen numbers like 5% of users consuming 30% of available bandwidth. Part of my monthly DSL/cable bill, and yours, goes to supporting these bandwidth hogs. If implemented correctly and regulated as a public utility like the phone / gas / electricity, having the mega-users pay for excess bandwidth can make it less expensive for casual users to access the internet with a fat pipe. At least in CA, electricity consumers like wasteful home owners or power-intensive companies that use more electricity than others pay more for it because, like broadband, it's a limited resource that they're using more of than others. Why should broadband be exempt from similar controls, if implemented and regulated reasonably?
What sort of guidelines should be in place? Primarily, there should be a mandated minimum amount of bandwidth one gets for the flat rate so that broadband ISPs can't turn it into something analogous to basic cable service -- I would expect regulation such that the per-capita amount of bandwidth used by around 95% of a service's users would set the minimum flat rate. Also, I'd advocate against speed limitations wherever possible - the purpose of broadband is the fat pipe, so why have it if you can't use it?
I believe such a pricing scheme can be implemented fairly and work as a benefit to both us and the continued implementation of broadband service. There just needs to be adequate rules to prevent the broadband carriers from using it to screw us over. But the people who see everything AT&T or SBC says as part of a sinister plot to double everyone's rates and halve their download speed are just a part of the bloviating tinfoil hat crowd, not really deserving to be listened to.
The only tool you've got against psychosis is experience.
Indeed, accountability is going to be the order of the day if providers start charging on a per usage basis.
I don't pay for phone calls I didn't make. I'm not paying for bandwidth I didn't willfully use.
I remember this same issue happening with dial up when the first started offering flat rate unlimited service. Many people that the ISPs were losing money and that they were going to have to go back to charging per hour again. I have a feeling that competition will force this issue with Cable Companies, and maybe even DSL (in areas that have access to both). Joe
Here in Silicon Valley (well Peninsula really, San Mateo - zip 94401) I have RCN fiber and I have
- phone
- cable tv
- broadband
for about $80/month (no contracts).
There is no caps of anysort on downstream/upstream. I hope it stays that way!
let me clarify......my ISP does not carry *all* the groups. The customer is downloading 1-2gb+ daily.
First of all, I feel that it's necessary to be very clear with terminology and the underlying concepts. When it comes to talk about capping, or charging for, transfers, there are two separate issues: bandwidth and traffic. The units of the first are: bits/sec. The units of the second are: bits. The time integral of the bandwith I pay for is, or should be, the upper bound on the traffic I can transfer. Obviously most cable ISPs already "cap" bandwidth -- you can't use the whole, say, 48Mb/s pipe if your neighbors happen all to be asleep at any given time. What they are talking about now is capping traffic. And I don't think it's the right solution -- I'll say why later in this post --, nor that it will prevail in the long term. But, given this news, I am preparing for the worst -- severe traffic caps -- in the short term -- and hoping fervently that it won't be as bad as it sounds.
I currently use AT&T (formerly MediaOne). I'd consider myself a heavy user -- probably at least two gigs down a day, on average, and perhaps a hundred megs up. (I don't use the P2P networks at all, by the way. A fair amount of my bandwidth is transfer back and forth to machines in my lab; a lot of it is nntp traffic; some of it is VoIP - I have a Vonage phone, and use it about an hour a day - and of course I actively using the web, streaming media, etc. a lot.)
Now, I'm not saying that AT&T shouldn't charge me more for this. The approx. 1.5 Mb/s downstream, 256Kb/s upstream non-guaranteed bandwidth that they provide me is very valuable to me; more valuable than the $45/month or so I currently pay for it, so in that sense I've been getting a kind of "free ride." I would probably pay at least twice that, perhaps even more, for the same service level (i.e. no traffic cap, unchanged bandwidth). I'm not saying I wouldn't grumble to myself if my bill suddenly went up to $100/month, but I'd pay it, and I wouldn't really be that pissed. On the other hand, if AT&T do institute any kind of traffic cap that is significantly less than the 60GB/month or so downstream that I use now, anything that would keep me from utilizing that much traffic or make it really unaffordable, then I'm going to have to drop them. I've already ordered a DSL line, which I hope and pray is installed without glitches (I'm a little far from the CO, but Verizon assured me that they'd be able to provide service -- I'm crossing my fingers). That means that I'll be paying approx. $110/month for connectivity in the next few months at least. If AT&T does what it's threatening to do, then I'll drop it and keep DSL; if they continue to offer flat-rate access at a higher but still affordable price, I can always drop the DSL.
I have not noticed any slowdown in the four years that I've had the cable connection, so MediaOne and then AT&T definitely have enough installed bandwidth to deal with current usage levels. Last time this subject came up on Slashdot, someone -- I forget who -- made an extremely perspicacious observation, roughly as follows:
Suppose I, the heavy user, am doing my thing, downloading away at a steady 100KB/s or whatever my shared bandwidth permits. Now, at any given moment, there are only two possibilities -- either I am using installed bandwidth that otherwise would be free right then -- or, if the entire installed bandwidth is in use at the moment, then I am sharing it equally with everyone else, light and heavy users alike. Neither case justifies my being charged extra for being a heavy user.
The crux of the issue is that provider costs are tied mostly to installed bandwidth, not to traffic. Once the pipe is installed, it costs the same whether it's fully or partially utilized. And when I purchase broadband service, I too am paying for installed bandwidth -- a non-guaranteed, but equally proportioned, share of that pipe, in the case of cable. My individual degree of utilization should be of no concern to my ISP. What they need to worry about is the aggregate usage over all customers, light and heavy users alike. That determines how much bandwidth they need to install.
Sure, the cable companies "oversell" bandwidth based on usage estimates. If those usage estimates turn out to be wrong, they may need to install more bandwidth to cover. And if they incur costs for installing bandwidth, then -- I have no problem with this -- they may need to charge more for it. But the extra charge should be distributed equally over all users. As counterintuitive as it sounds (shouldn't "heavy users" bear a greater part of the burden?) there's no other way to do it without violating the principle that one sells bandwidth, not traffic. And broadband providers (and all ISPs) should be selling bandwidth, not traffic -- as they have been, by and large, since the Internet began -- because their own "raw material" costs are tied to installed bandwidth, not traffic.
If it still seems counterintuitive, think about what would happen if the cable companies charged heavy users extra -- and those users actually paid the extra. The cable companies would, presumably, use the extra cash to install more bandwidth. That would improve service for everyone, light and heavy users alike. Heavy users wouldn't get a greater share of the improvements than light users. So why would it be fair for them to pay more for the new bandwidth?
That is why I believe, unlike -- apparently -- many people posting here -- that flat-rate broadband is the right business model and does have a future. The thing is, broadband providers may need to raise rates as aggregate utilization keeps going up. And, not surprisingly, they are loath to do this right now, when it's hard enough to sell to hesitant new customers. So, they are thinking of violating the "bandwidth, not traffic" principle by capping, charging heavy users more, etc. This can only have three effects: either heavy users will cut down usage, or they will pay more (perhaps much more) to maintain their current levels of usage, or they will say "forget it" and take their custom elsewhere (if possible) or give up on broadband entirely. The first outcome might forestall the broadband providers' having to install more capacity for a while, and the second might help to pay for installing more capacity (the benefits of which would of course be shared by everyone). The third would just suck for everyone; the providers would lose customers and still be paying the same for their installed bandwidth, and the heavy users would lose their access.
Right now it seems almost inevitable that AT&T will do something. I'm hoping that they will see the light and continue to offer at least the option of uncapped traffic, at the same service level we have today, raising the price if necessary. I would prefer to see the price hike distributed equally over all users, which I still maintain is the fairest solution, but I recognize that they'll have a tough time selling a higher-priced service to light users. So I wouldn't kick too much if they offered an unlimited-traffic tier at a higher (but still affordable) price. But if they cap across the board, then I'm going to be really bummed.
Kiscica
For these changes to happen, DSL, Cable, and all other internet providers will have to do this metering system
Or just have DSL not available at all because you don't live within 3 km of the switch, and it costs $200,000 to move. Satellite? 1000 millisecond ping? Give me a break!
Will I retire or break 10K?
Actually, the cable companies are shooting themselves in the foot if they are trying to stop P2P. I know a lot of people that have broadband for that reason alone. Regardless of whether or not it is wrong or legal, it is pretty much the only "Killer App" for broadband right now.
"Da ist ein Technölüst in mein Unterpanten!"
A usage distribution like that may not be unique, but it is worth taking into account in the pricing structure.
Your examples actually disprove the point your sympathetic too. Take the highways: what's the appropriate and common solution to a small number of drivers using a high proportion of road resources? Tolls in the more congested areas. That way the people that use it more, pay more. Traffic snarls in Western cities can in part be blamed on the failure to charge "per byte", as it were; only now are they coming around to the idea, given solid theory and evidence that it helps.
Same on those campgrounds. You pay each time you stay in a campground, under the theory that the people who use a resource, should pay for that resource. Again, the National Park system has been implementing this idea in recent years.
Personally, I'd like to see a dissociation of bandwidth from monthly usage. Some people might want relatively slow speeds, but constant usage, adding up to a bulky total. I'd want this option, because I listen to Net radio all the time. Others might want blistering high speeds, but not all that much total usage for the month; say, someone who wants to download a few large game demos. And that 1% wants high-speed, high-usage. Fine. Let them pay for it. I'm sure the prices could be changed to reflect these different usage patterns.
four nine eighteen twenty-7 thirty-nine forty-7 fiftyeight sixty-nine seventy-9 eighty-8 one-hundred-and-nine one-twenty
Bandwidth is free (to the ISP).
It costs money to pay people to manufacture and lay the fiber. It costs money to pay people to make the routers. It costs money to pay people to give users technical support. And the cost of people isn't going down.
Will I retire or break 10K?
In reading the discussion there seems a lot of confusion about how companies will limit access. They have two options open to them (assuming they're going to do _something_):
1. Charge a set of flat rates, depending on either bandwidth or total traffic (like some US local phone service)
2. Include some element of pay-per-byte, perhaps after an initial included element is used up (like cell-phones)
What seems to be suggested in the article is option 1 - I pay $X to get 256kbps connection, and $2X to get 512kbps. Or depending on the model, I get 5GB per month for $X, 10GB for $2X.
This method shouldnt't significantly discourage the average user from using cable. The marginal cost of doing something is zero, as I've already paid my $X for the month. If the limits imposed inconvenience me I can always pay $2X, and once again the marginal cost of a byte becomes zero.
It's only option 2 that causes issues - do I really want to see the Matrix trailer now that my free bytes are used up?
Either option works in limiting usage, but option 1 is easier to implement, easier for the customer to understand, and ultimately probably squeezes more money out of us. Personally I'd love it if I could get 128kbps for $25 per month. Plenty fast enough for my use, and not much more than dial-up!
Cheers, Paul
----
.sig created manually - automation scares me
Universities have to pay for that internet too, and you bet they're starting to cap student use. They just don't get as much press over it and do so in a slower, more beauracratic manner.
I am one of those people that shares gigabytes per day, primarily through the anime fansub scene. For those of you who may not follow it, two years ago, a 25 minute anime episode was about 50mb in size, and was in 320x240 realplayer format. Then broadband and DivX came along, and suddenly everything is DVD quality and over 200mb in size at 640x480. The catch was, despite more broadband actually getting it has become much harder. Downloading takes forever. Connections are quickly saturated. ISPs are capping like crazy. All the fansubbers and primary distributors are so obsessed with high quality that they failed to appreciate the tradeoffs.
The point it, the internet is neither unlimited nor free. There are costs, but we weren't directly paying for them, so we pretend they don't exist. The P2P networks were a manifestation like this. They don't even make a distinction between the guy next door and someone halfway across the world.
We're all going to have to get used to working with a lot less bandwidth, and paying for our fair share. Unlimited flat-rate broadband was untenable. It should have been this way from the beginning.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
Hate to break it to you my friend, but your average Flash navigation is small potatoes.
Grandparent was probably talking about the 500 KB site splash screens, not to mention Newgrounds.com (the home of Flash entertainment on the Web).
Will I retire or break 10K?
Now they are will try milk they customer base for all its worth. If my cost goes over 60$/mo, I will be starting a wireless service myself. Because most people will not tolerate over here
... and other alike convinience services.
bill of over 60$ for something they use so little.
Screwing people in IT is hard too, because as it happens, IT has some of the brightest and least tolerant people(towards abuse of them and others by large entities) so there will be a revolt. Many small broadband companies will start. 802.11a is around the corner and it is almost as good as cable, has good distance and scalability.
If price of service goes up I would be damned stupid not to start my own ISP on top of the hill I live on and serve customers below, many customers. Since I can band up with few friends, costs will be low. Internet boom has come and gone and now there is loads of competition to sell uplinks, hence prices are going lower.
Plus there may be some perks. Like mail2pager
Bandwidth is not unlimited, so you can do per-tcp bandwidth limiting -> doable on small scale, so if someone uploads ISOs, give them 10-20K, per-tcp. Internal connections would be bandwidth unlimited. Like ones in between customers, so they can share all they want. -> that what cable companies should've done, make bandwidth unlimited for traffic within their network. Think proportions of @home network that was dead!
Now GO and start your cheching around your area, to start a wirless service.
Publically traded cable companies do not want to make a profit. Seems a bit strange, but the cable industry does not have many similar industries out there. As long as they do not turn a profit, they do not have to pay taxes. IMHO this puts them at a disadvantage whenever discussions about profitability come up. I don't deny the fact that they are probably losing money in the broadband arena. But if your business model revolves around debt, you will not be yelling too loudly when you're turning a profit. I have trust issues with a strategy like this and I would rather check out the companies' annual reports than taking the word of some of their PR drones.
The definition of "bandwith hog" is a bit unclear these days...do I become a bandwith hog just because I want to download the eight-disk unofficial Woody ISOs from debianplanet, or try out a few linux distros vai download, and still do my normal /., email, webcomic, and other web browsing? The problem with these things is they hit more than just p2p. They hit clearly legitimate uses just as hard, just for a less publicly recognized group. Caveat: if you're going to provide high-speed bandwith, don't be surprised when your users are able to use more bandwith than a modem user. That's the whole reason they chose your service over Jimmy ISP in their locale.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
I guess I'll just have to go back to downloading all my music from work!
The tracking didn't do much to restrain P2P usage though, as the network would constantly hit the peak of 40 Mbps, and everything would slow to a crawl. Most of the time, web pages downloaded at about the speed of a 56K modem. The only time I could get decent speeds was early in the morning, or around winter/spring break when many people left for home early.
Connections within the campus and to other campuses were still fast, though. And, the network connection for the rest of the non-residential buildings on campus is always fast with a much higher cap.
A thought, if more and more people start getting capped for so much bandwidth a month, this could harm Microsoft's .NET plan, which they admit is dependant on broadband connections.
One hundred years ago, Mayor Tom Johnson of Cleveland set the stage for the establishment of a municipally owned electric company. His credo: "I believe in the municipal ownership of all public service monopolies, for the same reason that I believe in the municipal ownership of waterworks, of parks, of schools, I believe in the municipal ownership of these monopolies because if you do not own them they will in time own you. They will rule your politics, corrupt
your institutions and finally destroy your liberties."
Expropriate the network. Make it truly public, like our streets. Even though the FCC is a bunch of corporate hacks, the internet is a telecommunciation systems (look the word up you FCC hacks!). Free wireless is the way to go! P2P the wholly fricking internet! To hell with the cable companies.
Maybe the Internet will actually run faster if people have to pay extra to get their daily gigabyte dose of pirated media.
... then I damned well better get discounts for making uploads/downloads at off-peak times. I don't want to be paying for hogging all the bandwidth when there is actually plenty of bandwidth to spare at 3AM.
I realize this probably won't get read too much, since I'm around the 500th person to post, but here goes.
Cable companies don't compete with each other except at the national level. Anyone who wants to argue with this need only look at any place in the country, even the Northeast, and ask how many cable providers there really are for a given area--a handful at best.
When companies don't compete, they stagnate; there is less incentive to be efficient, to give good service, and as a whole the companies begin to do stupid things. Right now, these cable companies have caught their nuts in a vice grip because they overestimated how much they could spend on their networks without going in the hole; now they want to backtrack on flat-rate because they're not making money.
I think the most probable outcome is that in the move from flat-rate to pay-as-you-go, the cable companies screw up. They don't price competitively enough (because they want to recoup their losses) and they alienate a significant portion of their membership, who will turn to other things (like DSL) for connectivity, or just scrap the whole thing and move back to modems. This would happen in a relatively short period of time, and after a short while these companies will start having to either charge MORE for their service (and lose more customers) or sell off their assets. If that happens, you can expect to see a range of smaller cable companies pop up who are better prepared to handle their own service areas.
These companies have no real incentive to work well, and they're starting to pay for their own ineptitude. Providing they don't get hit first by legislation or by antitrust suits or by new technology, it's only a matter of time before they crumble, and when they do, it won't be long before market forces enable someone else to take the reins.
But when slashdot trolls for comments, like I think is the case here (how many times have we heard this one?), you know its a slow news day :)
-- Note: If you don't agree with me, don't bother replying. I won't read it.
See how everyone likes it...paying more depending on how much cable TV they watch etc.
This is NOT because they're "losing money", they've already invested in the infrastructure. It will just take a little longer to get full return on their investment. What they ARE doing is being greedy, like usual.
I don't buy the argument that they're losing money. Especially on cable, bandwidth is shared. Give me a break!
This is all about the fact that the calbe companies entire infrastructure is geared at pushing content at you. It's why everything is assymmetric in the first place: "DRINK FROM THE FIREHOSE!"
I rather expect that they are also seeing much less of the camel-nose-tent effect than they hoped for, with cable modem users NOT also subscribing to cable television.
If they are *truly* concerned about their bandwidth, then they can stop sending "Barney" and home shopping channels and commercials down the wire to my house. That ought to free up an incredible number of bits right there. Then, if that's not enough for them, they can charge less for digital than analog so we all get digital, and not send the bits that no one is looking at on any given segment at any given time.
But, in fact, this is really about uploads: they don't want you sending *anything*. The really annoying thing for them is that you are sending TCP ACK's at all, and they *have* to permit it for their service to work. That's why, despite the fact that they give you a practically infinite DHCP lease, they are unwilling to assign you a static IP address, unless you pay the "business rates" for the service. And why many providers terms of service prohibit running servers, and do port filtering, scanning, and so on to verify that you aren't running anything.
This is all totally obnoxious on their part, and they are stupid if they think that consumers don't see what they are really doing.
-- No camels in my tent!
RIAA or no RIAA, Time Warner and AT&T, which surely could afford more routers, should not place some sort of "Ye-ha! It's bandwidth cap time!" crap on us. We pay for the service, and if the company we pay money to cannot provide the service we need, then those damn CEOs better get off of their fancy lawn chairs and give us some respect.
For example, as a lowly college student, I am a wage slave at a grocery store, and we run this government sponsored program known as "Ohio Women, Infants, and Children" (WIC), whereas struggling mothers get vouchers that allow them to redeem them for certain, product certified foods (kind of like food stamps, only they can only get what's listed on the voucher), and the government reimburses us. In order to keep our WIC liscense, we are required to keep enough cans of baby powder (and yes, Similac charges $10 for a can that costs probably fifty cents to make, showing they don't give a damn about the health of little kids). Anyway, if we run out, we have to drive to another store and buy more off that store's shelves, or risk losing our WIC liscense. The companies we subscribe to should also bear that sort of responsibility.
I don't know how good of an analogy that was, but I'm sure if the ISPs looked at it, they might get a tiny hint.
"I only do it because it's free," he says matter-of-factly. "I don't do it to sample new music before I buy, like Napster always used to say."
Jon may be heading back to his local Virgin Megastore soon. Not because of the music-industry's lawyers, but because he won't be able to elude the Cable Guy.
This Jon guy isn't going to go to Virgin Meagastore, he'll go to the flea market and get CDs for 2 or 3 bucks! http://www.dontbuycds.uncoveror.com/piracy.htm
How ya like dat?
I found it interesting that AOL/Time-Warner wasn't mentioned in this article, yet they are one of the biggest cable companies and broadband ISPs in the country. I also find it interesting that when advertising for their high speed RoadRunner or AOL Broadband service that they tout the virtue of being able to download streaming audio and video along with other bandwidth consuming entertainment option.
Is it just me, or are they caught in a bit of a "rock and a hard place" situation in that they are trying to develop business models that provide the bandwidth consuming content while still trying to make broadband profitable? Are consumers really willing to let AOL/TW ding them for exceeding transfer limits all the while having AOL/TW trying to charge them for the privilege of access to broadband content? I mean, it looks good in that they can charge for content AND the method of access to the content, but will people really pay them twice for it?
I bet a full billing system will cost more money than they recover from the 'hogs'
A full billing system, with full data collection for usage will set you back tens of millions.
Interesting that 'they' never mention the cost benefits of flat rate, isn't it?
Anyway, here in Canada (southern Ontario at least) we've had a couple of companies try to offer flat rate long distance ('long distance' restricted to within the 'corridor', Windsor to Montreal/Ottawa. All of them went tits up. They saved a lot on not having to have a billing system, but 'the hogs' supposedly ripped out their margins.
That was the standard story, but I knew a couple of people working at those companies, and they felt the cause was government mis-regulation and bad management.
Draw your own conclusions.
system,
No-one is considering what the effect of wireless networks could be. Add to them a peer-sharing protocol like Bittorrent, and instead of dl'ing from Timbuktu you're dl'ing from Uncle Buck across the street.
In fact, the neighborhood onramp doesn't even know what the heck you're doing.
So while I think it's OK for cable companies to charge more based on more usage, I also think it long-term won't lead to the devastation of the stereotypical bandwidth hog lifestyle.
Now I officially pay extra to be able to see all the pop up ads and garbage that all the spyware and everything throws at me! Alright!
All I have to say is that if I get to pay more than I already pay (which feels like too much already) for less, I'm going to die of happiness!
I'm going back to tin cans and ham radios.
m.
http://www.pataphysics-lab.com
Interesting logic: everything else has restraints, so this new technology should too, because everything does. I'm also troubled that Cohen is pleased that consumers will have to pay for bandwidth, even though he doesn't benefit from it. He sees it as a punishment. It's not that important if the content providers make money, as long as consumers lose money. They shouldn't care what the consumer is paying for outside their own scope. A punishment's only goal is to hurt somebody. The RIAA seems more focused on punishing customers than getting business from them.
also worth quoting:Hundreds of mp3s comprise several megabytes? What bitrate is Jon using, 2?? Or maybe the songs are just very short.
I really hate signatures, but go to my website.
And when they cap down this sinister 1% that's using 16% of their bandwidth, charging exorbitant rates, how long will it be before they decide to clamp down on the next 5% that's using 30% of their bandwidth? And the next 10%? And the next x%?
Lovely divide and conquer trying to get us to buy the concept, but it's purely political. They know what they want to do (start building in unilateral price hikes to "meet a need") and they just had to find a laughable reason to do it.
Cable modems/DSL aren't gas or electricity, but thanks for the inept analogy anyway.
If the per-capita bandwidth was set at what the mean that 95% of the service's users use and speed caps were removed, I'd be the first to jump on that puppy. But since we're talking greedy monopolies here I've no such rosy vision of sensibility here.
Easy does it!
This comment has been submitted already, 276865 hours , 59 minutes ago. No need to try again.
Ya down with DSL? I'm down like hell
Ya down with DSL? I'm down like hell
Ya down with DSL? I'm down like hell
Who's down with DSL? Ya know damn well!!
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
98% of the fiber infrastructure has never seen the light of a laser. Therefore, all the cost arguments are BULLSHIT!
The ONLY solution to this, is P2P content cacheing on the providers side. This will allow everyone to get everything they expect (want), while still keeping the providers uplink light.
History teaches us that this problem was solved 10 years ago, only it was 6GB usenet feeds back then.
If i dont have to get off my local cable to get everything i need, then the cable company can make mucho profits and everyone is happy.
If I cant use P2P then I would not need high speed cable too. I would rather get a 10$ dialup if I just use internet to check mails etc.
Here's a thought: most of the people using the service do so from 6-10pm. Why not make some sort of access available only during the middle of the night, when no-one else uses it? I think it would be a win-win proposition if I tell my computer "download all this, be done by 6am" and walk off. The heavy use doesn't affect any of their normal customers, the bandwidth guys get their bandwidth, happy happy joy joy. Granted, I'd have to find some way to automate what I want to grab, but I could cope.
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
Seriously!
Try some Coil, Converter, Synapscape, Winterkalte, Needle Sharing, etc.. and that's just modern stuff!
(I'm a big experimental fan, if you couldn't tell)
1.) The current pricing structure ($50/month) most likely has very little to do with what it costs the cable company to provide it. Pricing decisions like that are made based on what the market will bear...They figure that customers are willing to pay a certain price, and then they figure out if they can make money in the long run at that price. They must figure they can make money or they wouldn't offer the service. 2.) A tiered pricing structure won't affect file sharing. The article mentions file suppliers on cable, but what about all the suppliers not on cable? I know a certain large university with thousands of people sharing files. Also, even at slower speeds, downloading is still going to happen. It happens now at 56k on dialup! 3.) My cable co. has already capped upload speeds. I've yet to notice (granted I'm not running a large access FTP site either). ~Vlade
A flat rate is much simpler to administer for the cable/dsl companies as well as much more attractive to the consumer.
Billing based on usage brings a lot of baggage with it. They will have to collect detailed bandwidth usage data for billing. They will need more customer service reps to answer the "I was in Florida that week" calls from the customers. Seems like a lot of work to me.
The 1% of users use 16% of bandwidth?
Anyone try telling these greedy Cable people that 1% of the US population controls 90% of its wealth? Think about that before you complain about bandwidth.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
Your point about tolls is interesting, and so metered rates would make sense if the cable lines were congested. But they're not. As someone pointed out, the cable lines are very undersaturated. So a move like this is just a reflection of their monopoly.
Basic Assumptions
-------------------
Web Page - 50K
Streaming Video - 1MB
MP3 Size - 3MB
Game - 30MB
Full Length Video - 600MB
1 GB Capped
Web Pages - 20972
Videos - 1024
MP3's - 341
Games - 34
Full Length Movies - 2
5 GB Capped
Web Pages - 104858
Videos - 5120
MP3's - 1707
Games - 171
Full Length Movies - 9
56K Dialup
Web Pages - 338688
Videos - 16538
MP3's - 5513
Games - 551
Full Length Movies - 28
Unlimited 384Kbps DSL
Web Pages - 2322432
Videos - 113400
MP3's - 37800
Games - 3780
Full Length Movies - 189
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
I bought my cable modem 2 years ago to get a cheaper rate. remember the boradband ads?
download streaming video! etc...
Well If they charge by the bit we sue them.. and
no damn dumb ass lawyer who gets a large cut of a class action suit. we find someone who gets a fair cut... and nail these bastards.
I'm putting together an alternate solution. I might go frame relay, or T1. First I need to sell
bandwidth to my neighbors and see if I can get the
line to pay for itself.
Argh!
If they put rate caps or charge by the bit this will kill broadband.
It sure as hell ain't so I can browse, irc and do email...
Random thoughts...
1. Now I'll be paying for spam email, banner ads - including those damn flash ads, any idiot who decides to DoS me, etc.? This is where the electric/gas analogy falls apart.
2. Streamed content - one of the major things that the companies pushed - suddenly, who wants to use it?
3. Online gaming, both of the Quake/CS type and the massively multiplayer type.. that too is in trouble
4. Why is it every plan I've seen like this so far charges huge excesses for every megabyte over the cap? I wouldn't object to a *reasonable* charge and a number of "usage plans". So far, though, all I've seen is 3-5GB/month and many-cents per *MEG* for "over-usage". To the "Hogs should pay more!" brigade -- I would gladly pay for a "high usage" plan if it were priced reasonably.
5. What's the point of an ultra-fast link if I can't use it for more than a few hours every *month*? Seriously, why would I want that?
6. Why is no-one offering slower flat-rate connections if it's just bandwidth that is the problem?
7. The companies complain about the "bandwidth hogs", where the top 1% uses so-much bandwidth... what about the users that have broadband and use relatively little?
8. If I just use half my quota for a given month, will I get a rebate?
9. Why is it not a single apologist for this sort of policy - including many who at least claim to work for ISPs/cable co.s, whatever - has stated the *actual* bandwidth costs ISPs pay? (I have a fair idea of costs 3 years ago. Given they should have dropped significantly now....)
10. Why is no-one upgrading their networks to handle this?
11. The "If you want a T1
12. This will have interesting knock-ons with stuff like
13. There is no 13.
Yes, pure rambling... I should probably drink my coffee and edit it... naaaah... this IS slashdot...
Good point, but I doubt that any of us can afford a better lawyer than their billionaire owners...anyways we will always find a way around their anarchy BS, it just sucks to have to make the effort
Once the cable companies and DSL companies start doing this to consumers and consumers get all bent out of shape and finally realize that bandwidth is very, very expensive still, maybe things will start getting done in Congress.
The problem is that AT&T and the like are sitting on huge piles of bandwidth and are only letting it trickle out so they can keep charging their exhorbitant(sp?) rates.
The worst part is, Congress just rolls over and lets them do whatever they want and even helps them get rid of competition.
We need to commoditize the bandwidth market and prevent 3-4 big, colluding companies from controlling it all and extorting the consumers for rediculous sums of money.
Warning, the parent post is made by a fake. No mention of "9/11" or "post-Columbine" anywhere.
I'm on Comcast cable. I am not worried about this. Why? Simple; I switched to the Comcast professional service. I get lovely things like the right to run VPN's (which I take as a cancellation of the ToS section on running servers), more than 3 times the upload speed (around 400kbps instead of 125 - 130kbps), more than twice the download speed (went from 1.3 - 1.5mbps to around 3.3mbps -- actual speeds, advertised speeds are 1.5/128k and 3.5/384k respectively), and an even more stable connection (my ping times used to vary wildly and my connection died at least once a week or so). What do I have to pay for these privilages? $95/month, which includes all fees including the modem rental. Before, I was paying about $50/month. I consider this a perfectly fair price, and I pay it without bitching or complaining. What do I do with all this bandwidth? Well, I haven't used morpheus since it went south (horrid gnutella network), and I use kazaa for maybe an hour per week, if that. I do a limited amount of file sharing, limited primarily by my upload speed. As one who shares files, I will say only that the .edu's are the most useful folks, even though the firewalls now being set up to stop file sharing can be a mild pain.
As one who knows at least a little about how the ISP market works, I would say that the tier'd model is the best way for the broadband folks to go. Cap the speed and limit monthly bandwidth usage on the low end, with slow services starting at around $25/mo (for like 384k/64k) and at the higher end (around $100/month) don't bother with limiting the monthly transfers, just cap the upload at a reasonable rate so your network isn't getting hammered non-stop. Most people have limited storage, so downloads have some limit, but one person with a 1GB hard drive could send out 50GB of data per month with a fast connection simply by sending the same file or files hundreds of times. Think about it.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
Now, DSL is not as good as cable by far. The cable companies have the advantage of unlimited bandwidth (they use a cable TV channel to give you the cable modem), so to up the 6mbps it is usually rated at, they just have to add a channel. DSL cannot get faster because it is limited by the physical lines running to your house. DSL uses the line that runs to your phone. By adding hardware on the other end, they can allow you to use all of that bandwidth, except for a small section dedicated to phone (voice over IP?). It is sad to hear that the cable providers are charging more. It is not really a matter of making money, but trying to leverage more money out of their current customers. This is the exact same thing they did with Cable television. I remember when basic cable was only $20, now it is like $45 in my area and for only a handful more channels.... poor planning on the cable companies end. Of course, they are all the same company any way, so price is greatly influenced by what the companies want to charge rather than the usual supply meets demand equlibrium model of a true free market. This all makes me glad that I have a T1 line at home.... but yeah, it's expensive and if my roomates dad didn't run some of his servers out of our house, I wouldn't have it.
If film88.com can stream 300MB movies, charge $0.88 and still make a profit, why the hell should bandwidth here cost $7 a GB?
Per-byte bandwidth prices are complete bullshit. It didnt work for Enron and it wont work for comcast.
I think I have a pretty good grasp of broadband econimics, I own and run a small ISP (and I make a little money at it too)
I can tell you that I am no cheer leader for the local monopolies (mine is Verizon). But I will say that the cost of keeping up a T1 is not cheap. They have replaced 4 smart jacks at my place in the last year, due to lightning strikes. They test the lines each time I call with a problem. Each incident requires that there be a call ticket opened and tracked. A tester typicaly has to get on the line and test it, and some one has to be dispactchd to my place. And due to regulations this all has to happen in a certain amount of time.
They have to maintian a support infrastucture that is better them what the DSL and cable companies have to do. The DSL and cable companies are not regulated the same way.
As a result of this lack of regulation you get chaper service that can be less reliable. Sometimes is it blazingly fast, other times is sucks wind.
As for the 2.50/mo for call waiting, complain to your local PUC. They are the ones that approve most of what is passed on to the public as a service. The Bells have to make money for the shareholders, the problem is that the Gov't let them get into to many services that they can levereage with thier monopoly on the last mile.
If we could turn back the clock we should have told the bells that they can maintain the last mile, and let any company run services over it. That way there would have been a level playing field. But that will never happen now...
Hey if they start charging for bandwidth, picture this...
I hate Joe, I know Joe uses comcast cable and has a limit of somewhere in the viscinity of 5 GB per month up/down plan and pays through the nose for anything extra. I have an unlimited plan. So to screw Joe over I just ping him all day. Not enough to DoS him or anything, just enough so that at the end of the month I've used about 50+ GB of his bandwidth and he never even knows!
How would the cable company prevent this type of abuse?
The current proposals do not allow for a whole lot of video. How is this supposed to work? This could be the beginning of the preferred content model. Download from our network or pay more?
Sounds like a loser for Video on Demand, which I have little interest in anyway. Renting media is not difficult, and has the added bonus for the ability to share with friends during the rental period. Purchasing media has the same advantage plus unlimited viewing.
I am not opposed to transfer rate caps for heavy users provided that the scheme is workable. Maybe offer a few pricing tiers. Those that don't want to worry about their bill can use all they want, but as they exceed their limit, the speed scales back. (Not slammed back to modem rates in one shot.) Offer another tier that allows whatever the customer wants, but they pay extra instead of losing their transfer rates.
What about weekly transfer limits? Or transfer limits that only apply during peak usage? At 4am you should be able to move bits even if you are over the limit.
Blogging because I can...
I must be missing something here. With the bandwidth prices dropping sharply in the past couple of years, how come cable companies still lose money? You can get 100 Mbps link from Cogent for $3k per month. That's 100 customers using 1 Mbps all day long for $30 per month.
I keep saying this, we are heading back to the old days..
Sure it was slow.. but at least we will be left alone again.
And of course it will be multipoint PPP, SSH encrypted/compressd, etc, insetad of simple text screens, but conceptually the same..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
If ISP's cannot provide copious amounts of bandwidth for low cost, then many technologies will be hurt. For example, streaming video for at-home learning. Internet radio. Open Source operating systems.
Historically, tolls were implemented to finance the construction of the highway and had nothing to do with congestion.
Side Note: Even where there's no tolls, most gas tax money goes into highway construction, so heavy users do certainly pay more for their usage.
I don't get why Cable/DSL providers don't start advertising the !@#$% out of 2+ computers per connection. If you push 1 computer only, you get people who are HEAVY users. It only makes sense to pay $50+ a month if you need LOTS of bandwidth. If you want two computers online at the same time, then broadband is the only way to go. Even if you just have 2 people doing light browsing. Sure buying a router is simple and so is setting it up, but the companies WON'T HELP YOU WITH IT. My parents would never go broadband if I wasn't seeting up their router. And don't try to convince me that knowing how to set up a router is too complicated to support. It's just silly to me that the broadband folks are so worried about multiple computers per connection. I know--they think they deserve more money per computer and don't want their Joe Schmoe customers to get used to getting it free. It's crap though. It costs them Megs Bandwidth + Cost to get the wires to your door. That's what they should charge you for.
So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
...is how much does it REALLY cost for bandwidth?
Not from my ISP, not from my ISP's provider but from the absolute source. In other words, is there price gouging going on at the source?
If it really costs too much for my cable modem company to provide me with service for $45.00 per month is the reason because someone up the line is raping all of us?
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
Points:
- The current cable companies are merging.
- Broadband under the FCC chair Powell is being deregged, which means further concentration of power into fewer multimedia companies.
- Years ago, I said that the broadband companies would be assimilated by the entertainment conglmerates so that the could meter and monitor video/audio trading. Guess what? They are.
- "Recouping investment" is a red herring. This is simply a move by consolidating corporations to boost prices to become richer. The OC lines cost more now? Well, why is that? Because at all points in the business, there is inflationary pressure caused by greed. The costs of building the structure would be made up over ten years anyway - well, only if greed at all levels weren't a factor.
- Greed is good, if it drives down prices at the barrelhead. This however is a textbook (my textbook, thanks) illustration of how a "free" market fails at providing necessary infrastructure. After 18 years, you'd think fiber to the home would be here, and the costs of the system would be maintenance only. But it isn't. It will never be, because the present profit is never, ever enough. This is why utilities were regulated monopolies, and why Enron and the other "providers" raped a state.
- The broadband net SHOULD HAVE BEEN A GOVERNMENT PROJECT. The private interest rollout of the broadband network has cost us googles of dollars, far more than a simple guv project of fiber-to-the-living room. And it will cost googleplexes more. And we are now facing the fact that companies hostile to over-the-net private transmission of audio and video have taken control (or soon will complete it) of the networks themselves.
- The only solution to all of this is either the election of a Congress and President more attuned to consumer rights than Randian free enterprise (fat chance with election financing through donors) OR we use the IP protocol to create an alternate Internet on 802.11 derived equipment. The last depends, of course, on the broadband corporations willingness to let such a thing exist - and they won't. Karnak predicts that medium-to-long distance transmission over 802.11 connections of unauthorized traffic will become criminalized in some fashion.
-Nope, I have no other happy news. Sigh.
Oh yea, they already pay by the drink!
Chris
why is there no pressure by isps on their upstream providers to reduce the cost of bandwidth? all we hear is that users are downloading too much, napster etc.
Is there a monopoly on international bandwidth?
Here in NZ our largest isp has capped international traffic but national traffic is free, why have other isps overseas not introduced a similar plan especially given the size of somewhere like the US, UK and Canada?
Not just bitch about the problem. Maybe the big issue should be, why is the broadband market designed after the flawed and dying telco market. Think about this. Telco's have enough lines so that approximately 10% of their customer base can use 100% of the available lines at any given time. That means, that is everyone wanted to make a phone call at the same time, only 10% of them would get the other end of the line to ring. Everyone else would get either a prerecorded message saying all the lines are in use (a la Sept. 11th when everyone called New York, and New York couldn't call for help), or you'd get nothing. A dead line. So cable companies have used this same model for their business and have suddenly realized that they made a big boo-boo. If you say "always on", that means for every user that subscribes to your system, that's bandwidth that you have to have available. Well, when you only have 1 line and 10 people want to get through, you are stuck apologizing, and you lose money, time, and future customers. So they need to get off their collective asses, build more bandwidth, and get this internet thing up off the ground and profitable for them. They should never have more users than available bandwidth. It's just asking to fail. It's a poor business model. It's way too short sighted, and above all else, it's the only thing out there. I really wish these people would wake up and get with it. Make the customer happy, and the customer will keep coming back. As long as you can deliver. When you can't deliver, kiss the customer and their money good-bye.
DAQ42
I just heard this amazingly sick story and puked on my keyboard. Does anyone have a squeegie?
Don't Ask Questions. I don't know the answers and even if I did I wouldn't tell you.
Something has been puzzling me. My cable company provides me with a broadband connection, 100 channels of TV and a telephone line. All the information comes down the same cable that enters my house. I leave the TV all day and I don't see anyone complaining about the about of data my set-top box is receiving. What is the difference between this and downloading DivX movies all day? They both cost me about the same each month - where is the problem?
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
At first I suffered a purely emotional reaction: how dare they! the nerve! Then reason prevailed. Here is my conclusion: economics will out. If people want to share files, they will find ingenious ways of doing so. This is not going to stop piracy; at most, it may put a short-term dent in it. As wireless nets become ubiquitous, old-school wired pipes run by ossified telco/media companies will be end-run. Plus, consider this: is it really that bad if you can't download pr0n and warez 24/7? Do something else for a while! Make love to your spouse, or go jogging, tend to your rock collection, &c.
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
Yea, in addition to being put on hold for 3 hours when call technical support, you now have to pay more each month for less bandwidth. Great...
My rate just went up $5/month not that long ago...will it go up more in the near future?
Chris
I know this isn't an option for everyone...
But Time Warner cable in my area offers a "commercial" version of their cable package for only $10 more a month (a bit more if you want a static IP). The bandwidth is locked (approximately at what you get at the 'capped' residential version) and they don't care what you do with the bandwidth.
I'm using mine to do my own email, host a few websites for myself and friends, etc.
When I signed up, I made it perfectly clear what my intentions were...as it stated in the contract, I "own" the bandwidth and all "liability" is then passed off to me (which is good)...
It's an option.
-brain
For those who have taken lots of economics courses, rememeber that in a free market price is not arbitrarily set. Price is set by the intersection of the supply curve (what companies want to charge for a given quantity of a good) and the demand curve (what you are willing to pay for a given quantity of a good). This is called the equillibrium price.
In this case, the problem lies with a monopoly. In a monopoly no one else offers that good or a competititve good. Now, there is something called "monopolistic competition" which is where several companies sell indistinguishable goods (long distance), but much to the same effect. In such a system, the supply curve is constantly shifted because the company can set price where ever it wants to for supply, you cannot go anywhere else for the same service. In fact, the supply curve may even be completely vertical!!!
I say that cable is a monopoly even when other companies are included, because only one provider exists in your area.
This also has alot to do with the most basic rule of business: there is no altruism! Company A will not do something for no money, otherwise they wouldn't be in business. What gives you things like good hardware infrastructure, competitive product features and pricing is competition! Because things like DSL and wireless are not effective alternatives, Cable has no competition.
Before you go knocking the free market remeber that all companies exist for profit only (this excludes churches, charities, etc). This is true in any economy! The failings of something like communism is that their is no profit to be had, so why try? That is why all of their GNP was invested in the military and that is also the only place tech ever improved. You wouldn't do anything extra for free, honestly!
The cable companies are doing this for money, plain and simple. DSL does this already, offering higher bandwidth packages at higher monthly costs. There are several possible reactions to this: .1kbps transfers on kaaza.
a) YAY! By limiting bandwidth, that means that they ought to be able to provide a reasonable guarantee of bandwidth per user, none of this "Shared resource" bullshit. AND, I doubt very seriously that any bandwidth cap that they can come up with will put a dent in my
b) current customers take a hike. As I saw mentioned elsewhere (sorry I lifted your comment), consumers prefer flat-rate, unlimited use items. Look at AOL, $19.95 for 2000minutes a month=2million users; $19.95 a month for unlimited minutes = 40million users....do the math.
c) Cable companies become monumentally stupid and limit downloads based upon megabytes downloaded, rather than upon bandwidth. And then watch as their customers run, screaming, to the more expensive DSL provider.
Overall, stepped bandwidth pricing is probably inevitable, and it might even be a positive thing, unless you are one of the fortunates who gets 100-200kbps download speeds.
Sandvine, Incorporated has a p2p optimizer for ISPs - could prove to be interesting...
I stick to walls...
I am hopeing this article is just a feelier article something that they go hey it was just an idea screw it. I mean seriously they lost 12% in new subscribers the lowest ever last quarter. If they are stupid enough to go with this new pricing model you will see new subscribers drop off the face of the earth along with losing a lot of existing subscribers...... I how they gonna recover the costs of there infastructure then...... I would'nt be buying any broadband stock if I were you......
That was the Osmond Brothers, wasn't it?
if you're not outraged, you're not paying attention.
What you say is really interesting, and I want to thank you for sharing your ideas.
:) I don't think there's an exceptional level of hardware attrition but correct me if I'm wrong.
I want to ask you a blunt question - I have several friends in the small-to-medium-sized ISP business, and everything I'm seeing tells me that their days are basically numbered, because you can't compete with the phone company you're buying services from - especially when there's complicity among the regulators.
So my question is, what do you see in the future for your business? It seems as though the efforts to keep independents out of broadband are going to be successful, and modem customers will continue to shrink, so... that leaves business services, I suppose. But that's pretty thin ice these days. What's the answer, long term, for someone in your position?
I'm saddled with Verizon too; complaining to the PUC... that's a good joke, my friend. Very funny. I know some people who may have more luck trying to sue them (along with the phone company), actually, but that's another story, and one I can't really talk about here.
I know that $1000 a month for a T1 is too much money. (I know, sometimes you can get it for a bit less, often it's more, but 1,000 seems to be about the rule where I am.) I've dealt with the staff a lot over the years and I know how the CO works. I wouldn't say their _margin_ on it is great, because they're a massive, idiotic bloated monopoly, but I would say that it's costing hundreds of dollars more than it needs to.
The question is, for residential service (which as you point out doesn't need the reliability - hah - and quality of a Verizoned T1), what is the real cost? Is it really over $50 per person per month? Over $100? Remember, there are big economies of scale at work here - you're providing service to a significant percentage of an area.
I figure a big piece is paying loans on capital expenditures. This is to be expected. Then you have ongoing maintenance of your equipment and customer support, and then you have the cost to your upline provider. Finally you have utility costs of your own (power, etc) which are basically negligable and administrative overhead.
I couldn't guess what the loans work out to a month. You'd be better prepared than me to talk about maintenance and support costs for broadband equipment and customers; for my part, I haven't talked to my provider in over a year, in no small part because I can't get them on the phone.
That leaves the uplines. What they charge, or pay, is constant voodoo as far as I'm concerned. But I welcome any insights into what it costs to bring any significant portion of traffic from a DSL block to the backbone.
I'd love to get to the bottom of this.
We're on the road to Tycho.
What I'm wondering is, when will broadband start getting cheaper? Maybe it's many years down the road, but consider:
1. Infrastructure - now that broadband service is established, the costs shift from rolling out service to merely maintaining it, which should be cheaper.
2. Technology - higher speed network technologies continue to be developed and to become cheaper. At some point, the consumers should start benefitting from this.
Downloading, say, 600MB per day right now may seem like a ton, but in 10-15 years that might just be what you need to check your email. Our desktop machines are being aggressively improved in every area, so that a $4000 machine today is equivalent to a $700 machine in three years. Shouldn't a similar thing be happening in the broadband world?
"I am a cipher, a cipher, wrapped in an enigma, smothered in secret sauce" -Jimmy James
You really ARE clueless if you think he was talking about TOTAL costs, rather than cost per customer, especially when fixed costs like building, admin, marketing, equipment, are shared across all customers. (Thus reducing cost per customer)
Everybody else made that assumption, only a true moron would assume he was talking about total costs, and then have the nerve to call him a moron.
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
This is the dumbest scheme I've ever heard of, because the ISP' are limiting the bandwidth available to users.
The best thing for ISP' is if people pay a certain amount for a PRIORITY. I.e., you pay $100 for top level priority, $75 for high priority, $50 for average priority, $25 for low priority, and so on. What this would mean is that people pay an extra rate for the extra priority they want. Avid file-sharers need top level priority, so they can override other requests for bandwidth and get quick downloads. People who just surf the net need low priority, because its more than enough to quickly display most web sites.
This way, people pay for exactly what they get. You want to be gaurenteed to download files as fast as possible, given the conditions (i.e., having priority over everyone else), fine. You pay the higher priority rate.
Priorities would work like this. The percent of the time that your request for bandwidth over-rides your neighbor depends on how many more times you're paying than he is. You neighbor pays $50 and you pay $100? Then in that case, your requests are granted 2x as often as his; that is, if both of you request bandwidth, 66% of the time it goes to you first, 33% of the time to him first. And so on and so forth.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
Let me start off with this my thoughts on P2P. While I think that P2P is a great and wonderful means of getting music and other types of files (illegal or not) I don't think that it's the primary source of free copyrighted material.
I for one don't like to pay upwards of 16.00$USD for every new CD that comes to the market. I trade quite often with my friends and aquire entire cd cases full of CD's just from ripping music onto my hard drive. It's very rare that I use P2P programs for anything other than extremely hard to find music and singles which are freely played on the radio.
Most of the people I know are the same way. I don't feel that putting a dent in P2P by taking away unlimited broadband access is going to do much for the anti-priracy movement.
NOTE: I do pay for CD's just not every new cd I get is an original copy, I don't have the cash to support habits like that.
In addition to that even if SOME broadband companies try tiered pricing then you are still going to have quite a few that aren't doing it. Also you have to throw in all those thousands of privatly owned pipes which will continue to pump and provide thousands of gigabytes worth of music and files.
Another thing to think about is the public reaction raised/tiered prices. Okay, so they cap my bandwidth, I may find that it's cheaper and more cost effective to just go back to dial up. A lot of users get broadband for P2P and surfing the internet. I do a lot of web development and development/IT surfing. I don't necessarily need broadband and I know there are a lot of other people out there like that. With tiered pricing and capped transfers it's going to become more viable to go out and get one or two dial up connections without any limitations (remember shotgun modems?) and just put up with slower access and less pressure on the pocket book.
How much money will broadband companies lose then? How many customers will mutiny and go back to their older but unrestricted dial ups?
I feel the only option left to broadband companies is to find a way to make their current model work. Find government or other outside support, find ways to sell their product more effectively, and fix prices so that profits can be made without insane limitations being put on the users. If they can't accomplish any of this I forsee a sharp downward slide that won't be stopped.
If loss of profit means cutting users off even more, then the users will leave, the more users leave the more your profit continues to drop.
It's a viscious spin that's going to get out of control. I'm sure you all know economics well enough to see the trend that could start forming.
I apologize for any mispellings, typos, or isses concerning grammar. I strive to get my point across, not to nit-pick through my posts and weed out mistakes.
--MuXdeMuX
The ultimate purpose of putting technology out there is for the user to find the limits, if there are any. Putting road blocks up only frustrates this effort.
Inquiring minds want to know how much of that slice is taken up by a very small segment of subscribers.
Help stamp out Help-Desk Hogs today!
This will fall into the catagory like unwanted FAXES. Gives me grounds to SUE SPAMMERS and pay for my broadband connection with the cash.
P2P may die somewhat, but I don't care. I use the P2P products nominally at best. THe only area I might complain is software downloads. I mean legal legit demo's etc. Thats where I see trouble. However my guess is they will have a "unlimited" package for all the p2p people at a higher rate.
End of the day if I can stop the spam I will sacrifice.
Razzious Domini
I could be a GREAT KARMA WHORE if I could just shed the few morals I have left.
Compare it to a library. Lots of people have a library card but use it seldom. A few are hooked and try to read every book in the library. The "Book Producing Association of America" (lets call them BPAA) now starts complaining that these people are ripping them off and should buy the books instead. The consumers believe the lie that they are paying for the habits of this small group. The libraries then respond with the rule that you can lend 10.000 pages (books) a year but should pay $1 for every 1000 additional pages. Wouldn't that be bizarre?
They will cut services and offer a higer grade of service for MORE money but never gonna refund for existing service, that would go against the corporate ethic..squeeze until there is no more, discard and repeat as possible.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
But this brings up an interesting point, how does 802.11b and its complete lack of security affect bandwith sensitive pricing? I could very easily set all of my computers to point at a local web proxy that forwards all the traffic out the neighbour's and then he'd pay for my access.
I use 2002:: addresses for IPv6, and I could easily forward all of my outgoing traffic out my neighbour's place, which would cut down on the upstream usage substantially. Etc, etc.
Or on a slightly different topic, what about the initiatives to provide 802.11b for free around Manhattan and San Francisco. Those would fall victim to pay-as-you-go pricing.
I run a server that serves out q3 and wolf3d. It's busy all the time, and it's connected to multiple DS3's so it appears towards the top of people's server list consistently because it typically has a very low latency. It averages 1Mbit/sec 24 hours a day. That's 324GB a month.
I'd hate to see that on a cable modem bill. Ouch.
It has been a well known fact in this buisness for quite a while, if you are not growing you are going to have to sell, or go out of buisness. The margins are so thin between the cusomer to ISP end that it is very hard to make money unless you are a massive company.
That being said, my ISP is not my main income source, it is more of a hobby, lead in for consulting work. I just love to run this buisness, and I have a lot of fun doing it. It keeps me on my toes and makes me stay current with Linux.
The future for small mom and pop ISPs is really bleak if you ask me. Medium sized ISPs will have a hard time. The costs are too great, the revenus too small. What really worris me is that you end up with a bunch of giant providers that dictate to you how you can use the net. That is scarry.
I'm saddled with Verizon too; complaining to the PUC... that's a good joke, my friend. Very funny. I know some people who may have more luck trying to sue them (along with the phone company), actually, but that's another story, and one I can't really talk about here.
Well, my original responce was somewhat sort of toung in cheek. I think the regulators are pretty much controled by verizon (insert favorite baby bell here). We are becoming a corperate state. There is no easy way around this. But you are supposed to be able to complain to your PUC, the general public stopped doing that a while ago, and now the PUCs only pay attention to lawyers.
I know that $1000 a month for a T1 is too much money.
It is too much, I don't pay that much... Again, check out bandwidth.com for prices, get a few people together and split the cost. They are more affordable then you might think. Find a local provider like myself and see if you can strike a deal.
The question is, for residential service (which as you point out doesn't need the reliability - hah - and quality of a Verizoned T1), what is the real cost? Is it really over $50 per person per month?
What is the real cost? Well I'm sure that Rhythms and thier bretheren found out the hard way when they filed for chapter 11. It was more costly then they expected. I cannot say if it is $50 or $100, but there are so many things that you have to deal with just to get the cable/DSL turned on to begin with that it would be hard to measure the real cost. Most of the bankrupt DSL providers probably never realized just how bad Verizon could screw them. They had to spend more time and effort just to get verizon to do the DSL job right the second or third time. (We have all heard the horror stories) This is most likley the leading cause for failure for the big DSL providers.
The cable providers oversold capacity. To get 2 and 3 MBits of speed, you have to have some Phat Pipes, nice equipment and tier 1 connections. These all cost big $$$. Once they rolled out service the 3 Mbits tricked back down to dialup speed during peak times.
Also, I think the cable comapnies and DSL providers skimped on customer service and call centers, tracking, etc, because they could. It lowered thier costs. Thats why you get crappy service most of the time. This furthur frustrates customers, and it only takes a few people to broadcast how bad the service is to scare away future customers. Verizon, for all thier problems is regulated into haveing to try to have some customer service...
However, in general, Verizon is still evil from my perspective. Verizon is making (no stike that) printing money despite thier massive, bloated, buricratic size. I am lucky enough to be able to work with a few people there that actually think that taking care of the customer is what they are there to do.
Verizon will try to crush you like a bug if they think that they can get more money from your customers. I run a very small ISP so I an not a threat.
Getting quality service from a mainstream provider is somewhat competative because there are generaly plenty to choose from. Quest, UUnet/Worldcom, Sprint, Verizon, and a plethora of local shops like mine.
The simple truth is that bandwidth costs money, and really good quality bandwidth costs more money. If you are getting 3 Mbits from a $50/mo DSL line, more power to you, you are getting a good deal. But if you ask me $50/mo is dirt cheap, and I do not know how anyone can be making money on that if all the subscribers are vigiously using it. The ISP buisness is a giant pryamid scheme. You buy X amount and resell X x 10 bandwidth expecting that for the most part your users will not use all of that bandwidth. If you have 1 or 2 users that use the bandwidth all the time, your service degrades to the rest of your customers, and your business model is shot.
I think what we are seeing is that 1 or 2 users complaining that they can't get that ultra cheap super fast bandwidth anymore, subsidised by all the other users any more.
well enough rambling...
Something that might work is that you get charged if you are max'ing out your line for too many minutes in a row, or perhaps to sell bandwidth differentiating between burst and continuous usage, i.e. sell 2Mb/s burst, 256Kbs continuous. How would this work in practise? Well, you could enforce that the moving average of bandwidth usage is 256Kb/s calculated by examining the prior 5 minutes. So, when the customer is browsing normally, they have a full speed line. But once they start a large download, the bandwidth slowly decays to 256Kb/s.
This would allow them to stay with a flat pricing model, but sell ``less'' overall bandwith while still preserving the snappiness that people have come to expect of broadband.
On the other hand, don't forget that when it comes to these pricing models, it is in the ISP's best interest to cause as much customer confusion as they can without losing customers. Take, e.g., cell phone providers and their calling plans. The goal is to provide you with a plan where you are either paying too much for your low usage, or a plan where you go over your limit and pay exhorbitant per minute charges. The ISP's may take a leaf from that book. They'd probably make a bit more money that way, since you can make much more for penalising customers for exceeding their plan than on the plan itself. (I had an $800 cell bill one month last year, which was, . . ., fun.)
I mean, after all, bandwidth is really the limited resources they are selling. So rather than offering 'Unlimited' access that's not really unlimited, then trying to badmouth those who actually use it, it makese darn good sense to simply charge for the bandwidth you use.
It's not about "Bandwidth hogs" . it's simply about charging appropriate money for a resource used.
Competition. We should get away from the one phone company/one cable company per community mentality. I don't CARE if there are 3 dozen lines on the utility pole, I DO CARE about my monthly rates. If AT&T were competing for the same area, I think that the pricing would be much better. Government regulation is never going to help the consumer.
Murphy was an optimist.
I called Charter and they have heard nothing about this new price structure. The Rep. was so shocked that she got a supervisior. Currently they have no future plans for such a deal and if they do change it, we will be alerted ahead of time.
The article states this
So all you people downloading .ISO's on AT&T have nothing to worry about.
--dan
Color me silly, but don't people paying for broadband do so with the understanding that they can handle massive amounts of data in less time? This may be streaming video or audio, or even P2P. Ergo, aren't they (Cable monopolies, er, I mean, 'companies') cutting themselves off at the knees by setting caps? Also, P2P doesn't necessarily equate to stealing. What about people working cooperatively on multimedia (musicians, animators, etc) via broadband?
;-)
It is my hope that the cable companies doing this go out of business. After all, why would ANYONE pay for broadband if they were going to be limited to the capacity of narrowband??? This is why I love my DSL. As far as cable companies are concerned, I say SCREW THEM ALL!
Mmmmmm... Bold, yet refreshing!
I have seen this subject crop up time and again, seems that flat rate is becoming too expensive to support. Why cant they offer a time based criteria rather than a volume based one.. Seems more fair as the consumer has no control of how much gets upped/downed when viewing web-sites. So something like $x for x hours use.
There were many comments about motives and costs, but I
didn't see anyone make the obvious comment about bandwidth.
That is, the bandwidth on a cable segment is shared on the channel. The cable companies are not in position to make more segments or open up more channels. I view bandwidth caps as a disguised way of dealing with system capacity issues without fixing the system. Someone I know once called this
kind of situation a "success disaster". More customers for cable means the service gets worse, etc.
Web Page: 30-400K
Streaming Video: 500K-25MB
MP3: 2-7MB
Game: any demo: 80-150MB
Full Length Video: AKA pirate movie: 640MB/a half
First of all, I want to thank you again - I really appreciate your comments.
:)
That being said, my ISP is not my main income source, it is more of a hobby, lead in for consulting work.
Maybe that's the ISP business model now.
They are more affordable then you might think.
I've tried a lot of crazy options for connectivity, believe me. Sometimes I find a way to save money, often not.
Most of the bankrupt DSL providers probably never realized just how bad Verizon could screw them
I would put it even more explicitly; Verizon et al were strong-armed into supporting 3rd parties by the regulators, but rapidly brought all their (considerable) wealth to bear on buying their way out of that arrangement. They got their way; first tacit approval that the feds would look the other way while they murdered their competition, and now the coming stamp of official approval on the new monopoly.
The ISP buisness is a giant pryamid scheme.
:) Yes; it's true, or more accurrately it's based on usage patterns totally different than from what's now being seen with P2P applications (which, instead of discrete "transactions," basically use all the bandwidth all the time).
What makes me suspicious (in addition to long experience with the parties involved) is that the system is operating quite well. The major infrastructure investments have long since stopped. They're not frantically building to keep up with demand. The broadband networks, especially cable, have plenty of capacity today, despite the current level of P2P adoption, so it's not clear to me where the crisis is.
Someday there may really be a chronic bandwidth shortage. But there's no reason not to simply shape traffic as an alternative to hiking prices. If the caps are wrong, change the caps, or make them smarter by specializing the limits for different kinds of traffic. At universities, which sometimes really do have such shortages, this is what they do, and it works fine.
In principle you're right, but in practice, I think this is a phantom shortage, engineered to allow monopolies to hike prices (now that they've disposed of the competition) and if there's some synergy with the media companies (often the same as the ISP), so much the better.
$50 x millions of users is a lot of money. I'm having trouble believing that the majors can't break even on it. And as for the bandwidth shortages on the big broadband ISPs, I'll believe it when I see them.
We're on the road to Tycho.
I think they will find out fast that the file-swappers are the majority in a crowd that demands high speed internet. Once all these customers go to xDSL I am sure they will try to compete for their business again. I hate cable anyway... I have a DSS Satellite and aDSL ... I am happy and the customer service is good.
Your free to do as I say
Anyone who uses the Internet for anything more than email and looking at ads.
"Do I dare disturb the universe?"
Back when I was on 56k, and really into fan translated anime, with an automatic redialer and and agressive ftp program, I'd do about 2-3 gigs a week.
Which is about 12 gigs a month.
Hmmmmmmmm.
Congradulations. It is about time that the USA caught up with the advanced broadband policies of Australia. It took you a little while but we are glad to see we layed out a good foundation for you. We will send the baseball caps as needed.
Same thing happened in Australia. Now Broadband is dead down here. =(
So, if you exceed the cap you pay. Uh, huh.
Fine. So if I use less than the cap, I get a discount, right?
Nope? I thought as much. Nothing more than
a money grab.
I agree with this. The bells paid lip service to the regulators/public and screwed the over the 3rd party users.
The major infrastructure investments have long since stopped.
There is no doubt about this. There is no incentive to invest at all in new technology. The bells want to lock up the market before they put in capital into the infrastructure.
I think this is a phantom shortage
I think you are partly right here, there are plenty of pahntom shortages to keep prices up, but there are parts of the Cable and DSL networks that are congested. This is cuased by some of the users that try to use up all avaiable bandwidth that they can for sustained periods of time. And there is the rub. There are only a couple people that do that that are causing the majority of the problems.
Crap on both counts. The cable companies are in a crunch because people are not signing up in droves for their new service. The reasons for this have more to do with M$ degraded computer perfomrance, hence low sales, and RIAA backed destruction of new media outlets that made the internet something desirable to average people. Between those two and other large publishers, the average PC can do little more than a Win3.1 PC could TEN years ago. Name one thing a M$ encumbered machine can do today that it could not then. Innovation not legislation, thanks M$. The new price hikes will have even more people running from the great internet andvert push scam. Sorry, the Greed heads have wrecked this party, do you think people are going to continue comming?
Now for your silly compairison of the publically regulated electricty market to the far more encumbered "broadband" market. Where I live, I have one choice of provider. The local Bell is killing off all other DSL providers. When it's done I'll be able to chose between them and COX. Right now I can chose COX or dial up. My $65/month buys me a fixed IP that I can't serve anything from. I run ssh and ftp, and I can only imagine that somehow violates the unpublished unilaterally changeable EULA of the moment. For about the same amount a month, I get electricty that runs everything in my house. It runs my tools, washes my clothes and dishes, lights my nights, turns my computer fans, air conditions my air and does countless of other automated real physical things that make my wife and my life much easier than the life our parents even enjoyed. The price is strictly regulated by public boards who base the cost on a reasonable rate of return for the providers. I just happen to work in a nuclear power plant, so I can tell you that one five billion dollar facility is a bigger investment than any two bit cable gypsies could ever put together in their little hubs. It is one of many that keep the lights on. How can you even begin to compare the investments, costs and services?
Pththth-tit -fffffff!
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
what if it's 12AM where you are but the site that your downloading from is in a different time zone and it's 9PM. i know i rarely ever download any thing from over seas but i do connect to the west coast an awful lot and im in boston. so who would pay under this mod?
Sure, and that green revolution thingy that's got us all well fed? Forget it. We are all going to have to learn to live with less food. Electricity? You must be insane, did you think you could escape drudgery forever? Get your back back into your chores and wax smog in your lungs. Internal combustion? What are you some kind of future radicalist? Horses are more than enogh for those who really need to move around. We could never expect technology to raise our standard of living or provide new things we never thought of, could we?
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Not only would this squash P2P, but it would allow media companies to enter into partnerships with your ISP to provide "unmetered" downloads of paid-for content from edge servers within your ISP's network. I have to believe that there's enough business there, long-term, that the media companies would be happy to subsidize usage in the form of commissions.
There's more about this concept in a recent article from Cringely.
What if we just kill every one who is causing us problems?
We all know the old sayings "violence never solves anything" & "tern the other cheek" and we all know that's bullshit. Violence can solve any problem. Violence stopped Hitler. Violence built great civilizations. It puts food on your table. It makes 1st person shooters fun to play.
yes im saying the above in jest, but certainly an asswhoppen is in order here.
Why not lobby your cable companies and government representatives for an equitable solution to the problem? And yes, there is one. Here in Australia, a company called Optus had a bandwidth system called Netstats.
The way it works is that they take the average user daily download over a 14 day rolling period, chop out the lowest and highest 5% of users, then give everyone a limit of 10x that. It worked out to about 19GB per month. It's a dynamic system that they touted as growing with the usage patterns of their customers, which I thought was very sensible.
Unfortunately they have buckled to duopoly pressures, and have now opted to follow the lead of Australia's dominant ISP/Teleco by adopting a restrictive 3GB a month cap. Maybe Australia is a testbed for corporate greed, and since users here just took the new plans up the arse, companies overseas believe you will all do the same too. My advice - unlimited internet access IS unreasonable and unrealistic, but a Netstats system is fair for both users and the ISPs. Lobby for the middle ground or you're going to lose everything.
Provide evidence that everyone else made that assumption.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
Would it be fair to say that cable companies getting together and agreeing to fix prices is a serious valuations of the law? What constitutes a cartel?
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One is born into aristocracy, but mediocrity can only be achieved through hard work.
Most of you probably know that download limits are finally being placed on cable internet in Australia. What you probably don't know is that the ONLY internet backbone in Australia (AARNET) is owned by one Telstra corporation, who until a few years ago were a department of the Australian government and basically own all telecommunications equipment in Australia. The Australian government currently owns 51% of Telstram and have been quote on various occassions as trying to get the highest share price out of Telstra before they sell it. Now it's no surprise that every ISP in Australia has to go through Telstra for their internet access. There's no other choice. And Telstra DO make billions of dollars a year profit, so it's clear to me that the reason other ISPs in Australia (broadband or otherwise) are forced to impose bandwidth limitations is due to the costs being imposed on them by Telstra, so all the extra money we pay for internet access doesn't go to our ISPs, but instead to Telstra. Now I won't pretend I'm highly knowledgable about the situation in the USA, but I'll bet there are but a few backbones in the USA, and they probably aren't competing for customers as they have all their customers by the balls. Say hello to bandwidth usage restrictions!
Hey I got an idea, why dont I decide what I want to pay for. Instead of 600 channels of crap they push down my throat for $60 a month, why dont I pay $20 a month for 10 channels i actually watch. Then with all that freed up bandwidth I can download all the shit I want. You know whats a damn bandwidth hog, fucking Oprah Winfrey and Rosie O'Donnel. Yeah and all that other crap they show in the morning. And the fucking O'Reilly factor on fucking Fox News. Why dont they start capping that shit and charge the idiots who watch that crap. Yeah and fucking Shaq, his huge ass sucks up prolly all the bandwidth I need. Why dont the damn refs call some goddamn fouls. Its not like he has talent or anything he's a goddamn freak of nature. Ahh sorry i got a little sidetracked there.
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
(For those not in the know: Phynd searches and indexes public SMB shares.)
Phynd? Please. Let me enumerate the flaws.
Windws filesharing is wonky on Linux. Whoever's fault this is, it's enough to make it a pain in the ass for me to use, certainly to share. Gnutella is cross-platform.
It puts strain on the servers. If someone has a popular file, fifteen leeching bastards will line up to watch it directly off their machine. Net result: the person running the server wants to actually use their machine, so they stop running it. With gnutella, connections can be limited to a certain number.
There's no real benefit to running a server. With gnutella, running a client (usually) means running a server.
Phynd was certainly useful in its day, but that day is past. Technically, it's a lovely solution. Socially, it doesn't float.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I tend to use oth.net (for ratio FTP sites), and gnucleus in a pinch. Both seem to get pretty decent speeds pretty much all of the time... the problem with gnucleus tends to be that no one is sharing with decent speed; I've gotten 200k/s on a weekday if fortune smiles and someone on a fat pipe is sharing what I want.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
No, no, the cap is for off-campus traffic. Sorry, I should have made that clearer. Monitoring on-campus traffic would be both futile and extraordinarily difficult...
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
decide to do any sporting activity that results in a injury and you go to use your medical insurance, remember this: YOU are NOT paying for what it ACTUALLY costs. The rest of us are paying premiums that covers most of it for you. Next time you are enjoying that burger and fries: remember WE are paying for the FDA, transportation channels,etc... that allow you to get it cheap.
No one pays what it ACTUALLY costs for anything in most countries. It is spread among ALL users. Things such as spoilage, fixed costs, R&D,etc... are spread out to ALL buyers/users to reduce the cost to reasonable(well that is how it is supposed to work) so stop whining that you only use it for a small amount of bandwidth. You are using the INFRASTRUCTURE and THAT is what you/we are paying for overall. Go back a couple decades and try living in the MidWestern US. See how you like not being able to have a phone because it is not profitable for them to run a line to you. Now imagine it is your family living there. Might like for them to be able to have one would you not? Just means you pay a bit more and they pay a bit less than if they had to pay for it all.
We are living in a society and if you wish to be anti-social, go live under a rock. There are some basic needs and high speed access is being pushed by all sides as a necessity(I do not agree but if it is then we are going to ALL pay for it). To do so will require everyone to pay part. Some more, some less than what it would be if the providers are allowed to charge and install only in REALLY profitable areas.
When you add somekinda "fucking-lots-of-money-for-ISP" part to your idea, it'll take off immediately!
And it doesn't really change the ISP's overall bandwith needs at all to put a cap on people's download speed. Let's say 10 people each want to download a 10 Meg patch file for a computer game, and their requests come in spanning a 10 minute period. On one extreme end, we have the case where each of them has the ability to download 10 Meg per minute, and their requests come in exactly spaced 1 minute apart from each other. In that case their usage ends up occupying 10 Mb/Minute worth of bandwith for the 10 minute period. In the opposite extreme case, each one can only download 1 meg per minute, and all their requests come in at the same time. In that case you still end up needing a total of 10 Mb/minute for 10 minutes to service them all, only it is coming in the form of 1 Mb / minute each, times 10 users. If you make up a measure of "bandwith-minutes", as a measure of how much bandwith it takes, for how many minutes it takes, to service the requests, then you get roughly the same load (by that measure) no matter how you throttle user's bandwith. Throttle the bandwith and they'll be using less bandwith per minute, but be doing it for many more minutes. When I consider a system with thousands of simultaneous users all doing this, I don't see any overall improvement.
(In fact, due to the overhead assocaited with multiplexing, it's actually a bit worse to overlap usage instead of letting users burst their data and get it over with.)
Paying more for more bandwith will NOT solve the problem, while paying more for total overall bytes could. If I download a total of 30 Mb of stuff in a 30-day month, it matters not whether I did it 30 Mb all in one day with 29 other days of total silence, or if I did 1 Mb per day for 30 days. It would matter only if the number of simultaneous users of the ISP were very small. Once you talk about multiplexing hundreds of users at once with reasonably close to random usage times, it stops mattering whether it's in bursts or slow trickles per user. The overall average bandwith is the same if the users download the same sum total bytes over a long period of time.
Now, behaviourally there may be a difference - if I know a 10 meg download will take many hours I might just avoid doing it altogether, and *that* would reduce their load, but only by pissing off a customer - not a good tradeoff.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Your examples actually disprove the point your sympathetic too. Take the highways: what's the appropriate and common solution to a small number of drivers using a high proportion of road resources? Tolls in the more congested areas. That way the people that use it more, pay more.
Please note my specific example was the Interstate Highway System, which (for the most part) is built/maintained with federal money, according to federal rules, and doled out regardless of how much fuel tax money each state sends to the capitol (fuel taxes wouldn't cover the bill anyway). When you come right down to it, we're all paying for highway system. My point is, the 1% using 16% of the bandwidth are just part of the classic Bell Curve. I suspect that the bottom 1% of users consume 1/16% of the bandwidth, and likely 50% of the users account for (wow!) half the bandwidth used! The number is statistically meaningless. Flat-rate service always ALWAYS ALWAYS result in one end "subsidizing" the other.
Traffic snarls in Western cities can in part be blamed on the failure to charge "per byte", as it were; only now are they coming around to the idea, given solid theory and evidence that it helps.
As a life-long resident of one such city (Los Angeles) I can tell you it's not lack of toll roads that caused the traffic here. It's the lack of any sort of alternative to driving to work. People aren't "leeching road bandwidth" because it's free and they want all they can get, so charging them money only results in them not having as much money. The real solution is MORE BANDWIDTH, but there's no place to PUT more roads without invoking emminent domain and the local politics make that nearly impossible.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Perhaps something's been overlooked here. Often any corporation's largest cost is found in wages and salaries. It's a good bet that for an ISP it's the help desk.
Inquiring minds want to know how much of that slice is taken up by a very small segment of subscribers...
...and how much do you want to bet it's not those 1%-using-16% people who're calling up to ask the help desk why their AOL isn't working...
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction. Some months back Pat Schroeder, on behalf of the AAP, went on the warpath against libraries for "giving away" copyrighted works. If the AAP has their way, libraries might very well end up paying for those additional pages.
That's close to what I estimated for 100% utilization which was 16 gigs.
Just multiply 56K Videos (16538 * 1 Meg)
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
They need to find a way to not charge for incoming spam of course, butg what about all
the banners, popups, redirects, etc that has invaded the web?
Its bad enough i have to deal with them, but via
pay-per-use ill have to pay to view them?
And dont tell me i can filter stuff, it still comes across the wire.. thus i get charged..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
@home is dead and buried.. bankrupt and the remains sold off
at auction this past week.
one contributor was the billions dumped into unprofitable web portals
and hoping to cash in on click-through revenue.
the other big contributor was bandwidth costs.
think bandwidth is cheap? price out a single line DS-3, then price out
OC-3, OC-48 and OC-192's, then price out nationwide backhaul service.
running a high speed nationwide backbone is _NOT_ cheap by any means,
then go and give every customer twice as much bandwidth advertised..
figure what the bandwidth cost to support over 4 million users
nationwide at over 3Mbps constant, then enter into bad contracts with
MSO's (hoping to make up the money on the click-thrus) and set the
price structure on users having only half the bandwidth.
@HOME had a poor business model.. make lots of money so the execs can
have big expensive homes, fancy expensive toys, and plan to cash in on
the dot-com craze.
comcast's business model is to make money so they can stay in business
while employing tens of thousands of employees.
IOW,, the free ride is over, get over it and stop whining about the
past.