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."

Comments

Sympatico and Rogers

[fatwreckfan]

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.

Re:Sympatico and Rogers

[Electrum]

BTW, if any sympatico users with debian boxes running ipmasq are worried about keeping Sympatico honest about their usage, apt-get install ipac.

Better yet, install MRTG. The mrtg-ip-acct program will read the IP accounting statistics directly from your iptables firewall. There is no need for the depracated ipchains compatibility module. Simply create a config file for it, such as /etc/mrtg.cfg:

WorkDir: /var/www/mrtg/
WriteExpires: Yes

Title[eth0]: Traffic Analysis for tourian
PageTop[eth0]: Traffic Analysis for tourian
Target[eth0]: `/usr/bin/mrtg-ip-acct eth0`
MaxBytes[eth0]: 12000000

You will need to have it run every five minutes, using cron, so add an entry to your crontab:

*/5 * * * * root /usr/bin/mrtg /etc/mrtg.cfg

Because the default page generated is named .html, for some reason, certain browsers (Internet Explorer) want to cache it no matter what you do. So the easiest thing to do is to wrap it in a PHP script, such as index.php:

My cable modem provider limits us to one gigabyte per day. After numerous arguments with my roommate, including how exactly to read and interpret these graphs, and because they do not cover a day exactly (we are supposedly counted from midnight to midnight), I wrote a simple PHP script to modify the MRTG output with nice, easily readable usage statistics:

http://david.maridia.com/mrtg/

The numbers at the top of the page are always live, since MRTG graphs are not. Note that the page has a latency of at least one second, because it takes two counter readings, one second apart, to generate the current usage rate. This is not always totally accurate, but should be close enough. Reloading the page a couple of times may give better results. The source to the script is available here:

http://david.maridia.com/mrtg/index.phps

Re:T1?

[warpSpeed]

Depends on where you live, what you want, and the length of the contract. I would guess that you can get a "deal" on a T1 for about $600/mo and the price can go up to $2000/mo. It all depends on length of the contract and your provider. (check out bandwidth.com for pricing)

I have a hard time listening to the broadband whiners saysng that they are getting ripped off by the cable providers, etc. It costs money to support infrastructure, and to get connected to the top level providers. You want dedicated bandwidth that is always avaiable? Your gonna have to pay for it. If you are getting service from your cable /DSL provider and it works most of the time, you probably are getting your monies worth.

In the US T1s are a "tarrifed service" from the phone company. It is my understanding that they have to deliver the line/service if it is requested just about anywhere it is requested. Thats why they charge an arm and a leg for the local loop. They have to support the lines whereever it is installed.

It's a matter of time before these guys crumble.

[mesozoic]

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.