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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."
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.
I'd like to see you back this up; I'm curious as to how they're losing their asses at current prices.
If you figure $50/mo for broadband, and with say 5,000 subscribers, that's $250,000 monthly in revenue. I don't know what a DS3 costs, mind you, but I can't see it being even $100,000 monthly. Equipment costs, employees, I realize, all take part of that pie, but WTF is all this money going?
"If there's hope, it lies in the proles..."
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
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.
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) + (&)
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 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
1) A DS3 isn't that great. I worked for a local ISP that had 2 of them as BACKUP for the OC-12 rings. A cable operation would be looking at an OC line, minimum. Probably an OC-12 at least. Looking at several hundred thousand a month.
2) The backbones (generally) aren't flat-rate. They have to pay so much per Gbit transferred generally. This is why most hosting companies take the approach that DSL and Cable providers are starting to look at, with X GB included in the monthly cost, with every GB (generally) over that costing extra.
Now, having said that, your question still stands for the companies that own their own backbone, like AT&T.
Dark Nexus
"Sanity is calming, but madness is more interesting."
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.
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.
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.
Right, he should have have said "One bad Apple spoils the whole Mac experience."
Are there bandwidth hogs? Yes, obviously. Should they pay higher prices? No. The Cable connection is rated at a certain bandwidth rating. They are merely getting the most out of what they pay for. If someone doesn't want to use their cable modem for more then e-mail or whatever, fine. Don't punish the people who are actually using the system for what it's designed for...
"Roadrunner: High-speed Internet"... that's what they keep advertising it as...
Kierthos
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
I'm sure there a lot of people streaming video legally (pr0n) and gaming...which may be a violation of some AUPs, but is not illegal. I mean, after all, Neverwinter Nights will be out soon so there should be a lot more people setting up game servers and having local groups gaming online.
I am not attacking your post because I think we are in agreement. But I don't even think there is any evidence available at this point proving that those hogs happen to be MP3 users...
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.
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
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.
Companies in the bandwidth business service to homes and business (this includes DSL, cablemodems, and T1s, etc.) have always effectively been bandwidth speculators. If you run an ISP and you have 10 customers with T1s and 100 with 56K modem access, you only need to purchase enough bandwidth to cover your customers' peak usage. It is the difference in price of the bandwidth you buy vs the bandwidth you sell that largely determines the amount of profit that you make.
Depending on the kind of quality of service guarantee that you make to your customers (usually 100% bandwidth for business customers, and often no guarantee at all for residential customers) you may decide to insure against a failure to meet your peak bandwidth by purchasing more wholesale bandwidth.
The key is that when determining your pricing you need to look at the kind of QOS guarantee that you want to make vs. the expected peak and average usage for the typical customer.
As the internet changes and more people begin file sharing, expect the cost of supplying 'unlimited' bandwidth to increase. ISPs can maintain acceptable profit margins either by increasing the flat rate price or by charging by the kilobyte. The nice thing is, having access to filesharing drastically increases the value of the broadband connection, so there is no reason to believe that people wouldn't be perfectly willing to pay more. Successful ISPs will sell the increased value rather than impose a bandwidth penalty on their users. For customers who like the always on nature of broadband but don't really care about high bandwidth, the variable rate pricing will probably present a great alternative to today's flat-rate pricing.
Amazing magic tricks
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!
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."
And maybe it'll provide the impetus for people to start up their own semi-private wide-area networks with data/voice/video over 100mb ethernet. (Remember FIDO-Net from the bbs days?).
If each household chipped in a couple hundred bucks for wiring, conduit, etc., and a few people hosted the bigger files (isos of distros, etc), there'd be no need to exceed the stupid bandwidth cap, and you could kiss your home phone goodbye in the bargain.
Start by wiring all the neighbours on your block.
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.
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
The analogy doesn't hold. Owning a sports car does not entitle you to drive over the speed limit, and it is no guarentee that your reflexes are as good as you say they are.
With a high-speed/large bandwidth connection, however, what is the point of paying the current monthly fee if you are not using it? The cable businesses are in the position of wanting to raise rates because people are actually using the bandwidth that they sold them.
"Omigod Frank, the customers are actually using the bandwidth. What do we do? We had no business plan for our customers actually using our product. Should we raise rates speciously in order to take a supposed hard line against those 'bandwidth hogs' no matter what they're really using it for?"
If we weren't meant to use the bandwidth, they never should have provided it.
Kierthos
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
On the contrary. It's the cost of a broadband connection vis-a-vis dial-up that's slowing adoption. If the average user is paying $9.95 (yeah, right) or $19.95, $40 seems way to much. Throttling the pipe should allow the companies to sell an entry level service for $29.99, then premium services for $39.99, etc.
On the other hand, I am using dial-up. I have been considering broadband for several months. I have postponed such consideration until after the current wave or price changes/usage limits settles down.
So three months ago I was planning on getting broadband this summer. Now I'm thinking probably no earlier than next year. And I won't do it then if I can't get a higher cap than, say, 10GB per month (I can get 6GB with my modem, even with my crappy phone line) for a reasonable fee. And reasonable is NOT $100/month...
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
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.
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
I have AT&T ATTBI cable modem service for one PC, and DSL for the other. Doubleplus bandwidth,with what I earn I should just plonk down for a T1 :)
I, too, am going FULL BURN as we speak, on my cable modem, downloading anime, music, and everything else I want. I've got my afterburners on with Newsguy, Opennap, Buzzard News, etc. And these downloads are stuff I want but wasn't interested in hunting down before.
My traffic counter for this month says I've racked up roughly 80 gigs this month! Easily 20 times what I normally do.
My DVD-RW is going crazy burning stuff I like, to DVD... it's blowing smoke out the back, LOL!
And when ATTBI hits me with this new pricing scheme, and the party is over, I will hurt them one more time. My friends and I will all send ATTBI letters, after we have UNSUBSCRIBED from their service, explaining that we are dumping them for Pac Bell DSL, which has, at 15mpbs downstream and 128kbps upstream, the SAME bandwidth as ATTBI, but without the fucking RESTRICTIONS. The thing is, most of us already double strap with DSL and Cable. I also pay the same for DSL service as I do for cable.
Then, when this is all over, I'm going to a T1, and I'll share my anime' stuff online, and then the RIAA and cable monopolies really, truly can kiss my big fat booty.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
But the difference is that for all of your examples there is pay for use.
Cars? Try state and federal taxes on gasoline. 1% of the drivers also pay for more than 16% of highway taxes
Campgrounds? Try per night rates.
Healtcare? 1% of the users account for 99% of the cost, and we pay for it in insurance. Ok, you got me on that one!
--Shemnon
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.