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

They aren't doing this because of the RIAA...

[Rombuu]

...they are doing this becuase they are losing their asses providing broadband at current prices.

Re:They aren't doing this because of the RIAA...

[DavittJPotter]

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?

Re:They aren't doing this because of the RIAA...

[krugdm]

But this is on top of the $50/mo I'm already paying for having the cable come to my house. They probably make far more off of this, since many more people have just cable compared to cable+internet.

Re:They aren't doing this because of the RIAA...

[Dark Nexus]

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.

Re:They aren't doing this because of the RIAA...

[gmack]

With Videotron I pay $20 a month and pay extra for over use. I actually like it this way because I do all of my downloading from the office anyhow and this way I don't subsidise other people's high b/w use.

Did I mention that's $20 CDN? I'm paying less than 1/3 of what you are when you toss in the exchange rate.

Re:They aren't doing this because of the RIAA...

[ichimunki]

Try reading the article for a change. Sheesh.

RUNNING FOR COVER. The cable companies' adoption of new pricing strategies has less to do with stopping piracy than with economics and business models. At an average monthly cost of $45, broadband is still perceived as too expensive by many consumers, and in recent months, prices have been rising, rather than dropping. That's slowing subscriber growth. According to market-research firm ARS, the rate of new signups for broadband in the first quarter of 2002 slid to 12%, the worst quarter on record.

Disappointing demand has left cable operators scrambling to cover the $60 billion they spent building and upgrading their networks over the past decade. At the same time, they've tired of seeing a small group of heavy users tax their networks while paying the same flat rate as everybody else. AT&T Broadband says on its system, 1% percent of users account for 16% of bandwidth consumption.

Re:They aren't doing this because of the RIAA...

[autocracy]

My cable provider which covers most of the state runs off of a single OC-3... and it's not bad except for when they get stupid and fuck over the router...

Re:They aren't doing this because of the RIAA...

[aspjunkie]

One has to wonder if perhaps all this noise about broadband/cable companies wanting to move to monthly rates or moving to a metered system is discouraging a large segment of dial-up users from moving to a broadband connection. I know I certainly wouldn't be looking at getting cable or ADSL if I knew the providers were increasing rates at some point in the near future after I signed up. I think that unknown future cost would be enough to deter a lot of users.

Re:They aren't doing this because of the RIAA...

[Dun Malg]

AT&T Broadband says on its system, 1% percent of users account for 16% of bandwidth consumption.

What bugs me is the way they throw out this stat as if it's astounding-- it's not. Look at any system used by numerous people and you'll see about the same distribution. Take the US interstate highway system, for example: I'd lay money that 1% of the drivers thereon account for more than 16% of the traffic. How about campgrounds? 1% of the population accounts for a whopping 90% of campground usage. Their complaint is statistically meaningless.

Re:They aren't doing this because of the RIAA...

[Squareball]

Well i'm not sure how raising prices and charging per Gbit a month will help the RIAA. I pay $50 a month for my cable ISP. If I download say 25 albums and they charge me what 20-30 dollars more a month for that usage.. I STILl am ahead! An album costs $17.99 or so on average. If I pay 25 bucks and get 25 albums, WHY would I go BACK to the record store? I am still getting a hell of a deal right?

Re:They aren't doing this because of the RIAA...

[MouseR]

Videotron cable access costs me 29CDN, unlimited. It's a pretty good deal, but they're fighting hard against's Bells' ADSL offering, which is available to a much wider audience right now (Videotron's network doesn't reach the entire island of Montréal yet).

However, they did cut off, about 18 months ago, a lot of the ports that were previously open. I used to run a web server on my machine, and with DynDNS, was able to connect to my home machine and transfer files, or test out new versions of my wife's web site (which I'm managing).

Now, Videotron cable users can only use their access for regular joe-blow net access.

i'm actually considering scaling down to ADSL because of this. Bell doesn't filter out any port, so you still can host a web server for whatever purpose (I wouldn't serve something commercially off an ADSL line, but for testing purposes, it's more than adequate).

Re:They aren't doing this because of the RIAA...

[Master Bait]

Not only that, the bandwidth of their networks are extremely undersaturated.

Their pricing schemes grow out of monopolization of the service. They should be regulated, instead of being 'deregulated' as is the current trend. I'd prefer that our internet pipe was treated like telephone service, with government-set rates. We should be able to just get a pipe and an IP number, just like our telephone service. I'm quite capable of running my own mail server and httpd and have plenty of room for my own webspace. We should the be able to choose the services we NEED at a price offered by competing providers. 'Deregulation' has severely limited our freedom of choice and is holding our personal internet capabilities captive to corporate totalitarianism.

Re:They aren't doing this because of the RIAA...

[sysadmn]

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.

Re:They aren't doing this because of the RIAA...

[letxa2000]

Look at any system used by numerous people and you'll see about the same distribution. Take the US interstate highway system, for example: I'd lay money that 1% of the drivers thereon account for more than 16% of the traffic. How about campgrounds? 1% of the population accounts for a whopping 90% of campground usage. Their complaint is statistically meaningless.

You got that right. Their "complaint" is not important. Virtually no businesses are able to obtain the exact same profit level on every single sale. There will be sales that are more profitable than others, but the idea is that the pricing is such that, as a whole, you make money.

As you said, the entire population subsidizes the highway system used heavily by a small minority.

Consumers that carry large balances on their credit card give banks the money so that I can charge everything, pay it off, and pay absolutely nothing.

Many people have insurance and they end up paying for my mistake if I crash and cause lots of damage and medical bills. My premiums certainly didn't cover it.

It is also incredible to see companies trying to ration the use of their own product. It's counterproductive. The whole point of broadband is to be able to consume tons of data quickly. When they start limiting that they are reducing the value of their product and also limiting the things that can be done with Internet--and not just P2P. Videoconferencing, VoIP, gaming, streaming radio... These are things that 99% of the people still don't do, and WON'T do if they are limited on their bandwidth.

As has been said, it's a monopoly. They can charge, so they will. They want millions of users using their broadband at dial-up levels, but charging them $50/month instead of $9/month that dial-up costs.

Re:They aren't doing this because of the RIAA...

[CrimsonAvenger]

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...

Re:They aren't doing this because of the RIAA...

[g4dget]

In all those cases, people should pay proportional to the costs (opportunity and otherwise) they impose on others. The fact that some people get a free ride and the public is paying for it in some cases doesn't make it right.

Re:They aren't doing this because of the RIAA...

[LinuxHam]

Excellent point. Mod this up.

It's not that good. Sure, 1% of drivers (truck drivers, mainly) account for well over 16% of highway traffic. But they also way overpay tolls to support the toll roads they use.

And just how much does the Forestry Service have to do differently in the forests when campers are around? Assuming the campers are reasonably clean, costs are not dramatically increased by the few campers who use the campgrounds most often. So neither argument really relates to the situation cable companies are facing.

I subscribe to the theory that they just way under estimated how much the bandwidth was going to cost them. It'll be a while before they figure out how to strike a balance between costs to them and how much to charge.

Having said that, I'm thoroughly disgusted with the pricing practices of Comcast. My cable bill is well over $100/mo for basic, mid-tier, 2 lousy HBO's and my cable modem. They were kind enough to put me in a pre-release test group for the cablemodem because I hounded them for so long. It was off to a rocky start, but I haven't had problems in several months, and I regularly see over 2Mbit/s down.

Now I think about it a little longer each time DirecTV calls offering free installation for 4 TV's. DSL is unavailable to me, so I won't completely escape CC's predatory pricing techniques anytime soon.

Re:They aren't doing this because of the RIAA...

[13Echo]

Most of this bi-directional network was installed to make use of digital cable. The cable companies can make excuses all that they wish. They had a system that hadn't seen an upgrade for more than 30 years. Upgrading it is just a cost that they had to choke up over time. It will eventually pay for itself. The fact is, that they always planned to implement this pricing scheme after they had enough customers. I hope that that everyone cancels their services if they do this, quite frankly. They are making money regardless of what you may think. They just aren't making enough money... And they never will have enough money. Go ahead cable company. Change your pricing plan. I'll just switch back to dial-up. What in the hell did they expect? People would use broadband for email? They blatantly advertise how fast you can download MP3s and video in their promotion. They are just blowing smoke up everyone's asses.

Re:They aren't doing this because of the RIAA...

[gmack]

Bell = Bell Canada

It's either the largest or second largest Telco in Canada(I forget and Telus has been growing)

Re:They aren't doing this because of the RIAA...

[aardvarkjoe]

And just how much does the Forestry Service have to do differently in the forests when campers are around? Assuming the campers are reasonably clean ...

Well, they have to put out all the fires, for a start ;) (In my area, there have recently been two large fires, both human-caused). And I'm sure that the cleanup costs are not negligible, either -- in any campsite with even moderate use, people trash it. That's just how it goes.

However, in most places, you have to pay for parking and campsites. So those who use the forests more do pay extra.

Re:They aren't doing this because of the RIAA...

[pogle]

I'm paying less than 1/3 of what you are

I will now smack you mightily.

Re:They aren't doing this because of the RIAA...

[jazman_777]

The fact is, that they always planned to implement this pricing scheme after they had enough customers.

The rip-off is that the first hit wasn't free. Most dealers will at least give you that first hit for free.

Re:They aren't doing this because of the RIAA...

[rsborg]

If I download say 25 albums and they charge me what 20-30 dollars more a month for that usage.. I STILl am ahead!

You have done your math. The average KaZaA user is probably more affected by sticker shock.
My monthly bill is WHAT?!?!?

Also, what about those "clued in" kids whose parents don't care about the bandwidth use until it hits THEIR bottom line?

Fact is, it's still a big deal

Re:They aren't doing this because of the RIAA...

[shemnon]

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!

Re:They aren't doing this because of the RIAA...

[oyenstikker]

But 80% are not capable of running their own servers and 95% are not willing. And could you imagine if they were? Instead of one ISP running a couple BSD servers, you've got thousands of people running unpatched IIS servers and open relays?

Re:They aren't doing this because of the RIAA...

[ahfoo]

I recently learned about a backbone provider called Cogent right here on Slashdot. Ethernet bandwidth from Cogent free from the "costs savings" of intentionally oversubscribed networks like cable is $1000 a month for 100Mbps up and down no caps no limits whatsoever. They target small ISPs looking to give the cable and Bells a black eye. How are you going to explain away real live competitors in the free market making these cable and telecoms fucks look like the liars and thieves that they are? Read 'em and weep.

Re:They aren't doing this because of the RIAA...

[Sentry21]

It's the largest, easily. Bell Canada provides telephone services (and thus offers DSL) to Ontario and large parts of Quebec. These are the same provinces that single-handedly decide who gets elected before the polls close in BC. Telus, by comparison, has BC (a few million people) and Alberta (not much over a million).

Then there's their satellite offerings, Bell Mobility, and so on. Oh, and they own CTV. And the Globe and Mail.

So yeah, they're big.

--Dan

Re:They aren't doing this because of the RIAA...

[Sycraft-fu]

Ummmmm, no on just about all counts.

First, you'd be amazed with how little bandwidth most ISPs get away with. Sprint was running all of Tucson off a single OC-12 (voice and data), the university I work at with around 30,000 computers (with eithernet) makes due with two fractional OC-3s, Pair Networks manages to host thousands of webservers with 3 OC-3s and 3 DS-3s. Most of the time when local ISPs drool on about having multiple OC-12, blah, blah, blah, it is an OC-12 connection, but capped for internet usage. For example there are plenty of providers that will sell you a large bandwidth line for traffic to their other, local customers. However your connection to the internet then is more limited.

Also backbone connections generally ARE flat rate. You sign a contact for X numbers of years with a gaurenteed monthly price for whatever level of bandwidth you are buying. If you are buying a fractional line, you can usually renegoate for more bandwidth if you like. You can then use 100% of your capped rate 100% of the time.

Finally, no, OC-12s don't cost several hundred thousand a month. The price would vary wildly based on who you are, who your provider is, how agressively you price things out and so on but I'd be real supprised if you paid more than $150,000-$200,000 per month.

Re:They aren't doing this because of the RIAA...

[Sentry21]

Be nice Gerhard, don't rub it in... Aw, what the heck.

First, I'll point out that most Americans pay between $50-60 USD for cable internet, from what I've read on Slashdot. $50 USD comes out to $76 CDN, which is 4x, and $60 comes out to $92, which is more than I pay for digital cable (with almost all channels, except Deutsche Welle and some other esoteric choices) and cable internet together (with two IPs).

Bandwith in Canada, for some reason, is ludicrously cheap. When we were in BC, we had 5 megabit cable internet through Shaw, which we got with a package deal. When we moved to Saskatchewan, the telco had a package deal that included DSL. Now I have DSL in my bedroom, and Cable internet in the living room, aling with digital cable. Our long distance is unlimited too, but who cares, I never call anyone.

In comparison to the $40/mo CDN I pay for 1.5/640k DSL, a friend of mine in Alaska would have to pay about $120 USD for the same. Elsewhere on the continent it's cheaper, but not that cheap.

--Dan

Re:They aren't doing this because of the RIAA...

[MadAhab]

Funny, my local cable co does colo and they practically shit themselves if you don't run W2K at the colo, even tho you run it yourself. Fucking wankers.

And they *do* shit themselves if you admit that your cable modem will be attached to a BSD machine. I've learned to lie and say I left my laptop at work, just put it right there and I'll hook it up myself later. Meanwhile I get code red probes several times a day from shitlicking goatfuckers on cable modems.

So, no, it's not in the interest of efficiency, it's in the interest of a couple of MSCEs thinking they are hot shit, nothing more.

Re:They aren't doing this because of the RIAA...

[mark_lybarger]

first, i've never really heard of a dial up having GB/mo caps. interesting...

next, i would HIGHLY recommend getting highspeed now if it's available and you're not planning to move anytime soon. unless your budget will be taking a huge hit, you're really missing out. at least for us who love to be constantly connected (you have to wait for the modem to dial out before you can load a web page?, wow those were the days).

Re:They aren't doing this because of the RIAA...

[Dun Malg]

Yes, thank you. This is exactly the point I was trying to make, only you made it much better.

Re:They aren't doing this because of the RIAA...

[Dun Malg]

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.


Yeah, I know. I was mostly making a point about the statistical irrelevancy oftheir "1% use 16%" thing. They say it as if the low-end folks should be outraged by this "abuse", when in reality if these "P2P leeches" all went to DSL the low-enders would still be paying $50 a month, and the top 1% would still account for ~16% of the bandwidth used. It's a thinly-veiled excuse to squeeze a little more money out of the system, either via over-cap surcharges or redused bandwidth use. I just hate it when corps try to spin their greedy plots as Holy Crusades Against Evil.

Re:They aren't doing this because of the RIAA...

[BelDion]

Videotron had a 6gb cap last time I checked.

Are you getting around it somehow, or just not realizing that you don't download that much?

If A, please let us know how. Only have 2 weeks left to jump ship from Sympatico & their 5gb cap. The plan is to jump to unlimited 3mb dsl, but I'd take cheaper unlimited cable..

Re:They aren't doing this because of the RIAA...

[MouseR]

I rarely cap this limit.

There are a ways around it anyhow. The 7-hour free telephone access that comes with cable access (for roaming purposes) is billed separately.

Also, their newer modems (those that have both a USB and Ethernet port on them) are not compatible with their billing system. It's been like thid for nearly 2 years. Those users that have those modems basically have unlimited, unmetered access. They just don't know about it.

Re:They aren't doing this because of the RIAA...

[Dun Malg]

You would have sounded like less of a fucking retard had you said:

And they pay for it too, what the hell do you think all those toll booths all over the interstates are for? Art?

First, Most of the interstate highway system doesn't have toll booths, fucknut. Drive outside Jersey (or whatever tiny world you live in) and you'll notice that toll roads aren't all that common in the Interstate Highway System. Only 2,230 miles out of the 42,800 mile Interstate highway system are toll roads (that's about 5%), and the toll money is used strictly for maintaining that one section of road. Basically, you have it ass-backwards: it's not that they decided to charge tolls on the interstate, it's that the DOT allowed toll roads into the interstate system because they were already there and building a parallel (free) road was essentially a waste of resources.

Second, the toll-free 95% of the Interstate highway system is maintained with federal money, so we're all paying for it. Even if the federal fuel tax revenues were enough, it still would be a case of light-users subsidizing heavy-users because fuel tax is paid whether you use the gas to drive on the interstate or not, and MOST vehicular travel is people driving within 5 miles of home, not on the everfucking INTERSTATE.

I sound like a retard? At least I know how to look up shit to verify my claims, jackass.

Re:They aren't doing this because of the RIAA...

[Latent IT]

*yawn*

That really was just the most depressing, boring rant ever. =)

Re:They aren't doing this because of the RIAA...

[bleckywelcky]

Um, "$9.95 (yeah, right)" ... $9.95, yep, right. Thousands of places offer this kind of deal, and people take it because they pretty much know they will always want internet access and will want to save as much money as possible.

average user's reaction

[Zog]

(begins downloading all the ISO's he'll ever use before they start charging extra)

Re:average user's reaction

[wiredog]

Actually, according to the article, the average, or at least majority, user's reaction has been to take the low cost option.

Will This help?

[rblancarte]

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

Re:Will This help?

[no reason to be here]

this will be a tremendous help...to all those struggling telcos trying to sell people on DSL instead of cable. if they do change their pricing, i guess i'll have to move from one evil empire (at&t) to another (verizon).

Re:Will This help?

[kafka93]

Yes; I'd wager that many of the people who have broadband have it precisely because they *use* the bandwidth; if you're only transferring email, web pages, etc., then you might just as well use a dialup connection. The ability to transfer large files quickly and cheaply is the raison d'etre for cable/dsl/etc. -- if it becomes too expensive for the average user to transfer mp3s and pirated software, they're just not going to pay it. It's difficult to gauge what the critical point might be, but I would be doubtful as to my willingness to spend anything more than, say, $100/month -- and I imagine that's more than most.

I believe that the "pay for content" idea is inherently flawed, and that it won't succeed whether applied to bandwidth or to web site access. I'd wager that, from an economic standpoint, introducing such fees would lead to *decreased* revenue for the providers. Only if the cost of broadband for the non-bw-hog were reduced to levels equal to or below those of regular dialup connections might such a change become at all viable..

Having said all of that, I imagine that what we might wind up seeing is a model akin to that of cellular phones, where various pricing levels are available according to projected bandwidth use, with excess being charged at a set rate - but the cable companies will need to be *very* careful in determining the ideal prices and, at any rate, you can bet that the need to compete with DSL etc. will keep any price hikes in check.

Re:Will This help?

[Olinator]

Blockpoth the quoster:

[...]it could go so far as to HURT the sales of Cable broadband connections[...]

I wonder if a case couldn't be made that, by raising rates in a way that's designed to profit from filesharing, the broadband providers are implicitly approving any copyright infringement that takes place... Perhaps the recent FCC decision could be construed as placing broadband outside the umbra of "common carrier" status? It would be a bittersweet thing to see the {MP,RI}AA take Big Broadband to court for profiting from copyright infringement...

Ole

Re:Will This help?

[TWR]

Except that the price of 2nd phone line + dialup is within spitting distance of DSL or Cable. The added convenience of getting vastly better performance (I went from about 5K/s downloads to 160K/s) make the price difference worth it.

Capping DSL/Cable downloads is probably going to be just fine for most people. I am a heavy user, and I would be surprised if I was passing 1GB/month.

-jon

Re:Will This help?

[kafka93]

*grin*

1gb/month isn't heavy use. I get through a few gig a week, and I'm probably a relatively light user compared with many.. :)

Re:Will This help?

[Amazing Quantum Man]

It would be a bittersweet thing to see the {MP,RI}AA take Big Broadband to court for profiting from copyright infringement...

Except that the {MP,RI}AA *IS* Big Broadband. Can you say "AOL/Time-Warner"?

Re:Will This help?

[BradleyUffner]

"Why should I have to pay extra so you can download mp3s, movies and iso files when all I ever use my connection for is web browsing, irc, email and SSH?"

Well then, you probably don't need broadband.

Re:Will This help?

[gmack]

Web browsing on dialup sucks. That's on top of the fact that if I were to use it for too many hours out of the day the isp is likely to complain about it.

The $20 I'm paying for broadband is about what I'd pay for dialup ISP anyhow. On top of that I'd actually have to bother getting a phone line and since since I need to be pageable 24 hours for work I'd *still* need a cell phone.

Re:Will This help?

[Znork]

Even worse, you'd be amazed at how quickly someone elses pingflood can send a user over his monthly limit.

Re:Will This help?

[Gannoc]

The article mentions that 1% of the users are using 16% of the bandwidth. If they can eliminate that 1%, they would make money in the end. If they focus on that one percent, it won't hurt them at all. Then after you eliminate the top 1%, there will be a NEW top 1% to eliminate to save even MORE money, and so on until anyone that spends more than an hour a month on the internet is charged an insane amount of money.

Re:Will This help?

[BradleyUffner]

The point I was trying to make is that it was your choice to subsidise the high bandwidth users by choosing to pay for broadband. I'm not saying you shouldn't have it, but you are not using it to it's full potential. You are paying for highspeed, unlimited useage, if you choose not to use it don't expect me to pay more because I use what I paid for.

Re:Will This help?

[issachar]

Why should I have to pay extra so you can download mp3s, movies and iso files when all I ever use my connection for is web browsing, irc, email and SSH? I'm quite happy paying $20 a month instead.

Of course the same logic applies when we're talking about the way North Americans pay for local phone service vs. the way the Brits pay for it. They pay per minute for local calls I believe, and I think the Aussies pay a flat charge per local call like a payphone. (Somebody from those countries please correct me if I'm wrong). So the question I have for North America is "Why should I pay a high flat rate for my local phone service when I only make one 3 minute call per day just so you can talk all night on the phone with your friends?" Seriously. Some people's phone bill's would go down if we went away from flat rate pricing.

That doesn't mean we should do it of course. Flat rate pricing is easier and simpler. And since consumption would tend to go up when something like bandwidth or phone service is priced that way, costs should go down. (Economy of scale).

.

Re:Will This help?

[scowling]

In the last month I've filled 80 CDs full of TV shows. It took some effort, but I got every episode of every season of Farscape, Family Guy and Andromeda. I'm well on my way to polishing off Titus. And so forth.

I used well over 60 gigs of bandwidth last month. It would have been a lot higher if I wasn't archiving the files I was downloading, and even higher if I allowed more than one upload connection on Kazaa(lite).

This is atypical for me, but I regularly burn through 10-15 GB a month when I'm *not* downloading any files.

Luckily, shaw.ca hasn't instituted any bandwidth caps. Yet. If they do, I'm willing to pay a little extra -- but a 6 GB cap is ridiculous, and even $1/gig is likewise laughable.

So if need be, I'll pay that litle extra to share a T1 with some or all of the 40 other units in my building that have broadband.

Re:Will This help?

[Ioldanach]

In most places in the US you can get an unlimited local calls plan. In some places you can't. Living in central, middle-of-nowhere Illinois (LeRoy) a couple years ago I had to pay for every local call I dialed. Of course, I didn't often make local calls because the nearest large town (they thought it was a city) was a whole 12 miles away. If it wasn't in the same local exchange it was not a local call. Real PITA. I'm used to being able to dial a good 15-20 miles away before having to worry about whether it was a local call or not.

To quote Guns 'n Roses

[ObviousGuy]

One bad apple spoils the whole damn bunch.

Re:To quote Guns 'n Roses

[Kierthos]

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

Re:To quote Guns 'n Roses

[ObviousGuy]

I can't remember exactly...

Re:To quote Guns 'n Roses

[jeffehobbs]

"they'll never catch me... 'cuz I'm fucking innocent "

~jeff

Re:To quote Guns 'n Roses

[Kierthos]

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

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

[TheTomcat]

Videotron caps as well, then charges 7 cents per magabyte for excess!

Yep. $71.68 per gig.

Fortunately, the White Samsung modems don't support the necessary DOCSIS features to do bandwidth audits. (-:

S

Re:Sympatico and Rogers

[kypper]

Here in Canada, it is high time that a wireless company took off with investments... OH WAIT, the CRTC, which has been taking cocks in its ass from corporations, won't let you use the airwaves.
The problem is the lines. I think the best solution is just hooking your neighbourhood up on a T1.

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

Cable modem providers business model flawed

[fruey]

Every major company providing broadband got it wrong. Modems peak out at 56kbps. That's usually about 4KB/s, 5 if you're lucky. No single consumer can hurt your bandwidth.

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.

Re:Cable modem providers business model flawed

[Peyna]

Sort of like the free nights and weekends cellphone plans. My sister had one for quite awhile, and then was stupid enough to give it up for a digital phone instead. Arg! Let me see you get one of those offers nowadays for about $20-30/mo

Re:Cable modem providers business model flawed

[theCoder]

I wouldn't be so quick to put your house on it, unless you define what lowcost means. Consumers tend to like flatrate, unlimited things. Not all consumers, but there's a market for it. Why? Because it's (a) easier to deal with, especially in a budget and (b) not going to increase sharply without warning. Other service markets have flatrate options. For example, AT&T is advertising a lot for some program that offers unlimited calling to certain people (that's the catch) for a flat rate. ISPs did flatrate service for years after it had been metered. Memberships to zoos and museums or season passes to theme parks are the same idea.

The cable market is in a crunch right now because they didn't charge enough for their flatrate. Because they're a monopoly, they may be able to get away with charging per use like electricity, but that's only because also like electric companies, there's not much competition. If there was competition in the cable market (not other forms of broadband, actual cable provider competition), there would always be a flatrate option, IMHO. It may not be lowcost (compared to the alternatives), but it would exist.

Re:Cable modem providers business model flawed

[rnd()]

I too think you're wrong about this:

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.

Re:Cable modem providers business model flawed

[truthsearch]

Because they're a monopoly, they may be able to get away with charging per use like electricity

Exactly. In the NY metro area cable in every county is a monopoly. Westchester only has Cablevision, Manhattan only has Time Warner (although RCN's now getting a little slice). But since the government's latest trends have been away from closely controlling utility companies, these guys can basically charge what they want. I hate to say it, but the government needs to step in where cable is a monopoly and treat it like a regular utility, closely controlling its price. IIRC, a utility is defined in NY as a service provided by a monopoly which is deemed almost necessary by most citizens. TV certainly isn't necessary, but it's so common I think it falls under the class of utility, just like the telephone. If they don't control it like a utility they need to allow true opening of the market, which they failed to do correctly with the phone companies.

Re:Cable modem providers business model flawed

[psicE]

She picked a bad plan.

Cingular is not the world's best phone company. Nevertheless, they offer, for $30, a national plan (no roaming within the US, not even in Alaska or Hawaii) that has 250 included minutes and 1000 night/weekend minutes.

For $40, they offer a similar plan with 500 included minutes, and 3500 night/weekend minutes.

Plans with approximately the same price with slightly more minutes are available that are local-only, but which let you buy a plan, for $7/mo, that changes peak hours from 7PM to 7AM instead of the otherwise-standard 9-7.

These two plans are for GSM phones, in my opinion the best you can get right now. In other regions, Cingular offers similar plans for TDMA phones, soon to be upgraded to GSM.

Now, maybe 3500 minutes, or 1000 in your price range, isn't unlimited. But... 1000 minutes is 16 2/3 hours, and 3500 is 58 1/3. If anyone thinks 16 2/3 hours isn't enough, they can get rid of their landline. And if anyone thinks 58 1/3 hours, or about as much time as the average person *sleeps* in a week, isn't enough time... they need help.

Re:Cable modem providers business model flawed

[shokk]

Every major company providing broadband got it wrong. Modems peak out at 56kbps. That's usually about 4KB/s, 5 if you're lucky. No single consumer can hurt your bandwidth.

Riiiiight. Because all ISPs have unlimited bandwidth at *their* disposal. All those 56k people connected, no matter how hard they have that line pegged, are generating no traffic that the ISP has to route upstream. TO make it worse they are oversubscribed and can't handle buying more equipment because they aren't making money. When they do get more customers, they are not going to upgrade/expand the network until things start breaking because they need to watch the pennies. That's a vicious circle they have there.

Re:Cable modem providers business model flawed

[AnotherBlackHat]

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.

I agree that lowcost flatrate, unlimited broadband will become a thing of the past, but not because consumers don't want it.

I think the majority of consumers want a flat fee.
If that's not available, then they go with flat rate.
Only if flat rate is unavailable will they settle for measured rate.
For most consumers, $25 a month for 64Kbps is preferable to
$25 a month for 128Kbps + $5 for each Gig over 10.

But broadband providers aren't interested in less service at a lower price,
so I expect that some new technology will whup their sorry asses.

-- this is not a .sig

Re:Cable modem providers business model flawed

[mindstrm]

So.. you have flatrate, with a cap that requires a manual override.

You go over, your browser auto-redirects to a page explaining you have exceeded your base bandwidth allotment. Set the limit just above what the average user uses, or whever the gap between average and high usage is, so most people don't even hit the limit.

I think you are wrong, by the way.. unlike many things, the bandwidth market IS pay per use, all the way along, and flat rate pricing is not natural. You especially can't have flat rate pricing and total freedom of use.

You think electricity is only pay-per-use because it's a monopoly? What bout long distance companies? Lots of them... all pay-per-use. Those that have flat rate options are just cost averaging.

Gotta watch those ISO's

[WhyDoubt]

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.

Re:Gotta watch those ISO's

[Oculus Habent]

And what about the people crunching SETI@home or folding@home or distributed.net's challenges? Sure, 3 or 4K may not seem like much, but it adds up, and I imagine there will be a small decrease in the participation in these projects if users feel the need to conserve bandwidth.

Of course, we could start a distributed.net-style company, and try to get ISPs in on it... Have always-on connections offer reduced rates for use of your computer's extra time. That way people could get high-speed connections for less without really sacrificing anything.

That same theory might also make ISPs more lenient about multiple computers on a home connection. (don't know about your cable provider, but mine doesn't like that).

exceed the cap?

[GutBomb]

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.

'Vote' with your cable subscription

[qurob]

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

Re:'Vote' with your cable subscription

[salmo]

It's interesting to me that, at least in the US, people talk alot about how important your vote is, but they neglect to point out that we vote every day with the money we spend. If you disagree with the company, go somewhere else with your money. Find another cable or DSL provider, or (dear god!) suffer through having to use dialup. Maybe consider getting together with your neighbors and getting a commercial solution and share it via 802.11.

As long as you support that company they'll remain and they'll continue their business practices. You have to motivate them (you could say provide an evolutionary pressure) for them to change. Sure you're only a few dollars in their pocket, but you can provide an example for other to follow, otherwise you're just part of the problem.

Next time you're having a brewski with your buds or whatever you do where you have moderately intelligent conversation, bring this up. Remind them that capitalism takes effort (I'm not speaking for or against the system, just a statement of fact).

Re:'Vote' with your cable subscription

[ocbwilg]

and how can you boycott by giving up cable? If you depend on highspeed, it's the only gig in town!

In some cities there are multiple cable companies servicing a given area. We have three cable companies in central Ohio, and most communities have some overlap between two of them. If you don't want either of them then there are the various satellite companies (Dish, DirecTV, etc) that are available just about anywhere in the country. If you want broadband we have several DSL options as well as cable (two of the three cable companies offer broadband service). Not only that, but the cable companies are supposed to have opened up their broadband networks to competition from other ISPs, i.e., if you have Time-Warner you can choose from RoadRunner, AOL, Earthlink or possibly even other ISPs over you cable lines.

Re:'Vote' with your cable subscription

[CynicTheHedgehog]

I would like to agree with you, but when companies start losing business I don't think it is clear to them what it is that causes their customers to leave. I see postage-paid comment cards everywhere, but I can't say I have ever filled one out. Have you?

So they break up their customer base into target audiences and go with the stereotypical whims of the largest percentage. And who is that? Probably not someone who knows or cares what an FTP server is. Granted, these same people can and probably do use peer-to-peer file sharing services (sometimes without knowing it), but when that stops working they will just chalk it up to that bad computer voodoo.

I would say that the best thing you could do (realistically) is call and complain. The squeeky wheel really does get the grease. If you don't get the answers you want or the satisfaction you feel you deserve, ask to speak to a manager. Get the issue escalated until you get what you want or you decide to cancel your service. At least when you cancel they will know why, and several people within the company will have been involved.

As with politics, voting alone is not enough. You have to voice your opinions and be persistent. To most people, it's just not worth their time to do so, and so the minority suffers, if you can truly call it suffering.

Broadband Held Hostage to Corporate Greed

[SirChive]

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.

Re:Broadband Held Hostage to Corporate Greed

[PhxBlue]

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.

No, the concept behind broadband was that they, the corporations, would make money from selling you high-speed internet access. When they no longer make money doing this, they will either stop providing the service altogether or will change their pricing plan so they make money again.

Re:Broadband Held Hostage to Corporate Greed

[Junks Jerzey]

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.

No, the idea was that we, the user, would have much faster access than we had via modem. I don't ever remember cable ISPs talking about much *more* you could download, just how much *faster* your surfing would be. If you start downloading dozens of 50MB movies a day--one of which would have taken all night with a modem--then that changes the picture drastically.

Re:Broadband Held Hostage to Corporate Greed

[rw2]

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

No, the whole concept behind broadband was that the existing media providers could play in a new business line using copper (aka "The Last Mile") that they already had in the ground.

_From day one_ this has been about 'corporate greed'.

Here's a tip for you to remember going forward. There are no companies that are out for *your* good except and only to the extent which your good increases their bottom line.

This isn't to say that we, as consumers, shouldn't fight back. Not only should we, but it's _the_ fundimental check in a free market system so we must fight back. (ignoring for a moment that the government is also a check. It is one, but largely for safety and environmental reasons, not consumer value reasons)

All I'm saying is that you shouldn't be surprised to see that the man behind the curtain is trying to get an extra buck a customer in order to buy himself a new boat. The man behind the curtain is *always* doing that.

Re:Broadband Held Hostage to Corporate Greed

[tomhudson]

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.

Re:Broadband Held Hostage to Corporate Greed

[Catbeller]

No, the idea is to give us, the people, the consumers, the citizenry, the lowest prices possible for unlimited bandwidth.

Bandwidth is not expensive. It has been made expensive by greed up and down the distribution chain. Listen, it's just lasers blinking in a glass tube. The capacity of the those blinkenlights is more than even we can use in the near future. The costs are all those expensive toys that Cisco makes, all those maintenance contracts, network admins, corporate VP's, etc.

The purpose of giving businesses monopoly (and telecoms ARE) is to give the consumers, US, lower costs - NOT TO MAKE INFINITE PROFITS FOR THE MONOPOLY. Business are allowed to incorporate for the the overall welfare, not for their private power! The free market absolutists have lost sight of the contract. Corporations are ALLOWED to exist, for OUR benefit. They are given ficticious personhood. They are given all the rights of a person, and more. But they have increasingly refused, under the guise of an ideologic movement, to accept limits or responsibilities under which a person would normally be subject.

If these corporations want to choke off our ability to use massive bandwidth, then they are useless.

We want enormous bandwidth. It really doesn't cost much more to provide gigabit than megabit. This isn't water or oil, as they are subliminally implying. The resource is almost infinite, even factoring in costs of the adding the switches, at reasonable prices.

The don't want reason, they want profit, more every year. This will inevitably produce eternal inflation. And the normal cure, competition, is being shut off by Powell's FCC. What kind of free market exists when eventually no one can enter the business?

Cue the inevitable ...

[Mr_Silver]

... comments from people saying "My music collection has grown at the same rate, I only use it to sample, I listen to albums that aren't available from new bands" etc. etc.

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.

Re:Cue the inevitable ...

[kableh]

From the article:

"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."

So obviously, this asshole's opinion and yours MUST represent the view of EVERYONE who uses a file-sharing application.

I don't know about anyone else, but I rarely use any P2P apps. Most of my bandwidth use is for A) VPNing to work, to admin servers and such, or B) Downloading ISOs for the latest distros, updating my boxen, etc., or C) pr0n.

Sure, I used to download tons of music from Napster and OpenNap. But most of it was either music I already owned, but was lost or scratched, or live bootleg sets. I might still be buying CDs to this day, if the RIAA hadn't made it clear that we're all a bunch of cheap commie pinko pir8s. Fuck the RIAA, and fuck you. I'll continue buying my records from the artists and labels that don't brand me a theif.

Reducing a product to an insanely cheap price won't work, because you just can't beat free.

They havent tried, have they? Thanks for clearing things up for me.

Re:Cue the inevitable ...

[SirSlud]

> mainly because they get it for free

How about mainly because you can get it from home, you can burn it across all your mediums (CD/MP3player/computer), you can easily share it with a friend (keeping in mind that it is not uncommon for people's friends to live in entirely seperate geographies much more so today than 20 years ago, so there is a significant advantage over snail mailing a CD to lend to a friend. Oh wait, I'll bet lending a CD is illegal too now.)

There are a plethora of reasons why Napster beats your local music store. Price is certainly one factor, but technology adoption does not soley rely on price.

I still can't figure out why Sony cand mp3-ize their collection, stick it online with some php scripts to count your purchases, and be done with it. That'd kill the Naspter-closes pretty quickly, given the numerous problems file sharing networks have (reliability, data authenticity, etc.)

Sony would say people would just share what they downloaded, but then they'd miss my point above. Price doth not adoption make. There are many many reasons why technology is successfully adopted (or not adopted), and if I were a giant like Sony, I'd have the money to cover way more of those reasons than any file sharing network could. The problem is, it seems like these companies are frozen in the headlights of change, and the RIAA hasn't clued into any solution other than bullying, which surely wont help their case in the long run.

Re:Cue the inevitable ...

[Lumpy]

well you know what... I must be that oddball wierdo.

I fire up gnutella to start trolling for something diferent. I find it, listen to it and a few other cuts off of the album(s) and then within a week order it (in fact Some of them I order 3 of their albums.)

Why? not because I want the CD, but because I want the Mp3 in a quality that is acceptable and that is ripped with a decent encoder.. 99% of all the p2p mp3's out there suck, and they suck bad. 192 or VBR encoded with maximum quality with the latest Lame encoder rivals the professional hardware based mpeg2 layer 3 encoder we have here at work. I also have my id3 tags correct, and I dont have it labelled wrong. Unlike again with 90% of the crap out there.

Yes, there is a huge amount of us legitimate users. I have purchased over 40 CD's this year alone based on what I have ILLEGALLY listened to from Gnutella and Open Nap servers.

Funny... If I didnt get the ability to sample this music (they sure as hell dont play it on the radio!) I would have never bought it.

I do know what the magic solution is... pretty much leave it alone or allow internet and non-profit radio stations to play everything they want for free.. those that will buy things will get frustrated with the crap-quality out there and buy it. and the ankle-biter kiddies? no matter what you try to do to stop them... you wont... you cant... it is 100% impossible to stop them. and if you allow non-profit to broadcast you are allowing alternative venues and format to exist creating diversity (although you arent squeezing every drop of blood out of the people... which is all they care about)

yes, the losers of the world will still get their jollies on stealing... the rest of us are looking for a music avenue that doesnt suck...

Oh, and if you make it legal for non-profit to broadcast music, it would almost remove the pirate-radio problem... as anyone can get a LPFM license.... Pirate radio exists because of greed, the greed of BMI and ASCAP to extort thousands out of a group or person that makes nothing..

Re:Cue the inevitable ...

[Reality Master 101]

Reducing a product to an insanely cheap price won't work, because you just can't beat free.

I agree with you that the vast majority of music trading is NOT for sampling, but to get music for free, but I disagree with this statement to some extent. P2P networks are not that reliable, and the quality of the MP3s is often pretty bad (often cut off). It's better if all you want are popular music, but if you want something even semi-obscure, or less popular like classical recordings, you are out of luck.

If the price was right, I think a LOT of people who use the service just because it was a) complete, b) good quality, and c) much less hassle. I know I would.

Re:Cue the inevitable ...

[shepd]

>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.

Back when the Spectrum was popular you could buy a car for $3000 - $5000.

Multiplying to today's $15,000 price, this means the 3 pound ($6) game at a price of $30. Which is still on the pricey side if 1 game = 1 album.

The magic solution is more flatrate costs. When/if the RIAA/other music companies open up a flatrate, open, unemcumbered music server for just $20 a month, expect piracy to decrease because at that price it isn't worth the effort involved.

And yes, they can do it at that price. I have a plan that lets me download 5-10 Gb per _day_ from a usenet server, and I only pay $20 a month, so the cost of bandwidth is not an issue (unless that company is losing money, which I doubt).

Re:Cue the inevitable ...

[Aceticon]

... comments from people saying "My music collection has grown at the same rate, I only use it to sample, I listen to albums that aren't available from new bands" etc. etc.

The fact of the matter is people used Napster and are using these filesharing applications mainly because they get it for free.

One word: commodity.

I freely admit i use Kazaa to download music. Even more, i rarelly buy CDs nowadays (after my Nth experience of buying a CD full of crap plus 1 good song i decided i had been screwed once too much).

You know what? Kazaa is very suited for impulse buy (only here the price is zero):
- You listen to a music in TV; you like it; you get it!
As simple as that.

What are the downsides:
- Irregular quality.
- Not that great speeds.
- No guarantee you will find what you're looking for.

Would i be willing to pay for a service that offered me any music, at a reasonable speed, flat fee, quality guaranteed (the files, not necessarily the music) and in a format i could freely use with whatever playing devices i have (MP3)?

Damn sure i would!!! For free access to The Universal Jukebox i would definitly pay as much as i pay for my cable connection!!!

Now - compare this to the stuff the music industry is offering:
- Pay per music.
- Proprietary format, incompatible with anything but a PC with Windows (how usefull can THAT be).
- Completly and totally locked-in into they system (c'mon, you cancel your subscription and you cannot listen to the music YOU ALREADY DOWNLOADED anymore - it's an insult to one's inteligence )

I'll stick to Kazaa until the music industry comes to their senses.

Re:Cue the inevitable ...

[phillymjs]

Reducing a product to an insanely cheap price won't work, because you just can't beat free.

Sure you can.

I'd pay a nickel a song in a second, for 128Kbps or 192Kbps MP3 files that downloaded quickly, and that I could freely burn to CD or transfer to any other playback device as I (NOT Hilary Rosen or any other of those RIAA fucks) saw fit.

Right now with KaZaa [Lite], I usually have to download the same song multiple times before I get a file that is the entire song, not cut off in the middle, and is of high enough quality to be a keeper. And unless you get really lucky (or listen to nothing but Top 40 corporate CRAP that EVERYONE has on their HDDs), you don't get really speedy downloads.

I don't mind paying for a decent product, but the RIAA wants to sell me the tires and then tell me when and where I can drive on them. As long as they want to foist DRM shit on me and take my money in exchange for a bunch of restrictions, they can kiss my ass in Macy's window.

~Philly

Re:Cue the inevitable ...

[shepd]

>A check on historical inflation rates shows that $5.50 in 1982 is the equivalent of about $10 today.

Computers have not followed inflation rates, though.

A Sinclair cost $149 at introduction. It did hooked up to a TV, so a purchase of a monitor was not required.

Today, a decent PC will cost $600 + $150 for the monitor. That's $750.

That's 5 times inflation in the computer market.

$6 x 5 = $30.

That's what I was basing my pricing differences on. Inflation rates only seem to work well for steady commodities and housing.

Upstream is already capped...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Upstream is already capped...

[ocbwilg]

NTL in the UK allow servers, albeit not publicly advertised on the internet

Interesting. I wonder if accepting anonymous connections on port 80 is considered to be publicly advertising the existance of a server on the Internet...

Wow, slow moving

[Dark Nexus]

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.

Kill the goose that is laying the golden egg?

[countach]

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.

Re:Kill the goose that is laying the golden egg?

[Stonehand]

On the other hand, everybody else on the same cable segments that had their bandwidth drop to nothing because some bandwidth hog was sharing full-length movies 24/7 will probably rejoice -- they'all actually be able to USE what they're paying for.

T1?

[techstar25]

How much is it to get a direct T1 to my house? Try to cap that!

Re:T1?

[karnal]

Actually, in Columbus OH, my friend looked into this, and eenet was doing a special for 200$/month, + another 200$ for line loop....

Okay, I'm stupid, that's darn close to 500$/month. But he's already got the csu/dsu and t1 router. We'll probably set up wireless links and assist in his payment for a T1 if it comes to non-flat-rate-cable modem access.

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.

Re:T1?

[shepd]

>How much is it to get a direct T1 to my house? Try to cap that!

The point to point line lease should cost $200-$1000 /mo depending on where you and the other point are.

As to wether your ISP caps the T1 would depend on the rate for internet you pay on top of the line lease. (The two are separate because a T1 was designed to service 23 phones or data, your choice). I'm betting an uncapped line would cost you about $800 /mo.

The nice thing about a T1 is the guaranteed uptime, since it is covered by the same rules as any other business phone line (usually 99.999% uptime or "your money back" for the day).

Re:T1?

[Cmdr Taco (luser)]

The company where I work pays about US$900/month for a T-1. That doesn't include data services, just the leased line from SBC.

It's about another 600 or 700 dollars for the data services that are provided by a different company, but that includes 100 DiD numbers and 6 voice lines in addition to Internet connectivity.

T-1 prices vary greatly by area, competition, etc. Supposedly, SBC's price is set based on the length of the run. Their bloody fiber stops about 1/2 mile from our place... so a 1/2 mile of copper costs 900/mo.

Stick with your cable modem.

Not even close

[adam613]

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.

Re:Not even close

[Peyna]

Except that many large universities than I know of (Purdue) have daily limits on bandwidth in the dorms, whereupon it starts dropping packets like mad once you use so much in a day. Also, the whole of their resnet is on a very crappy line, whereas the rest of the campus is on a very nice line to the outside world. I'm sure lots of people still use P2P, but not everyone is getting 3 mbps downstream on it like I am sitting at home on my cable. (Note: I don't actually do that very often, but I do get speeds of 1-3 mbps downstream very often, and about 356kbps upstream).

Re:Not even close

[Casca]

Heh, The University of Oklahoma regularly ships out ~400mbits of data during regular semesters. Approximately 80% of this data is P2P.

Re:Not even close

[Apreche]

Here at RIT we have, I think the best connection anywhere. Not only is our school full of nerds. Not only are we the supposed center of all software piracy (fbi and customs have been here more than once), and not only do we have a CIA scandal. But we have 2, count 'em , 2 OC3s, with a T3 also. One of the OC3s is for internet2, so when I download my newest mandrake isos from any .edu it pretty much takes no time at all. Oh yeah, did I mention we're on 100 base full duplex ethernet? It's so fun to sit in the computer lab in the library and stream DivX ;-)
I'll never be able to go to a cable modem. But this rate hike will sure help DSL out a lot. The DSL I have at home in CT is crazy fast. I'm used to 2 OC3s and the DSL doesn't bother me. I've clocked 900k/s on it at some times. The upload is less, but its reached 150k, which isn't half as bad as some cable limits now.

Yeah, so RIT rules, go to college.

Re:Not even close

[Sabalon]

Being a state school, we don't wanna do this because of censorship reasons - so we are gonna rate limit all of the P2P traffic down to about 28.8 speeds.

I really could care less, but when our limited bandwidth is being chewed up by this and legit work/study can't get done, then it is a problem.

If the cable companies wanna pretend this is for piracy reasons, then get a few Packeteer boxes and only hit the P2P stuff. But like the article said it's a scapegoat to make more $$$

Of course, that'd mean ratelimiting port 119 traffic if they wanna be thourough :(

56k Modem - Ultimate pirating machine

[nachoman]

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.

Re:56k Modem - Ultimate pirating machine

[PhxBlue]

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.

I did hear some noise made about this, actually, though it was some years ago. It wasn't the bandwidth that ISPs were worried about, though; it was having one less telephone line available for other paying customers.

By the by, ISPs talked about dropping flat-rate plans at the time, but it never happened. So don't panic--because unless every company buys into the variable-rate pricing at once, I don't think it's going to happen at all.

The media companies

[LennyDotCom]

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?

Re:The media companies

[techstar25]

Your point makes me wonder if Time Warner will do the same with their RoadRunner, which I use. Time Warner is one of those media companies who wants us to stream movie trailers and music. Or have you ever noticed how many streaming videos there are of news reports on CNN.com? I tend to think that they want people to be able to access these types of media as much as possible. It creates a conflict between the companies that make the media and the companies who deliver it. In the case of Time Warner, they do both, which is why everybody hates them. But ironically in this case it could turn out better for the consumer. AT&T doesn't give a rats ass about what's getting transmitted. All they know is that's it's costing them more to transmit it, so they rape the consumer.

Re:The media companies

[dcigary]

Yes, but you now have to pay extra on CNN.com for the privlege of seeing the videos. And no, you don't get a break on it if you're a RoadRunner subscriber, like me.

Seems Time Warner is hopping onto the bandwagon as well, just a little differently.

Re:The media companies

[Tackhead]

> Time Warner is one of those media companies who wants us to stream movie trailers and music. Or have you ever noticed how many streaming videos there are of news reports on CNN.com? I tend to think that they want people to be able to access these types of media as much as possible.

Funny, I draw the opposite conclusion - you emphasized the word "stream" in your original post, and that's why.

They want you to download it every time you view it. You need broadband to do that. (And if you pay AOL/TW by the byte, they rack up the dollars.)

If you downloaded the video clip, you could play it back whenever you liked without re-downloading it. ("Dude, check this out!")

A company that advocates streaming - which requires an always-on broadband connection - over downloading, to me, is the antithesis of "wanting people to be able to access these types of media as much as possible".

> I tend to think that they want people to be able to access these types of media as much as possible. It creates a conflict between the companies that make the media and the companies who deliver it. In the case of Time Warner, they do both, which is why everybody hates them.

By choosing streaming formats over downloadable formats, there is no conflict in AOL/TW's mind. You pay for the fat pipe you need to stream the video, you pay by the byte, and because you can't save what you downloaded, you pay again when you click "rewind".

Is AT&T a bunch of fucknozzles out to rape the customer? Sure - but unlike AOL/TW and other advocates of streamed media, at least AT&T doesn't mind if you click "SaveToDisk" after transferring your MP3 or DivX over their network. Once the file's on your hard drive, it's yours to keep.

Inevitable

[Cally]

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?

The Fat Cats

[T3kno]

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 :)

Hatchet job

[Alomex]

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.

Re:Hatchet job

[killmenow]

It is a mere accident that those hogs happen to be MP3 users.

I am a high bandwidth user and I have maybe d/l-ed a dozen MP3 files in my lifetime. Who is to say that just because someone is high bandwidth, they are into illegal shit?

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...

Ok, let's think this through

[torqer]

Their Hardcore MP3 downloader has downed 5000 songs in two years. That's just under 7 songs a day. 7 songs at 5 megs a peice for a 30 day month is 1050. Just barely a gig.

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.

Re:Ok, let's think this through

[sehryan]

But you are forgetting that up is capped at usually less than half of what the down is. 35MB/day is no problem when you are pulling at 100+, but when you are serving at 40(what I am capped at through RR) or 15(what comcast was capped at when I was with them), 35MB is a lot of juice to push.

While this might help limit some of the RIAA music sharing woes, I don't think it will be felt nearly as much as it will in the Movie sharing and software trading that goes on. When you only have 2GB/m, a few songs, even an album isn't that big of a deal. But an entire movie...thats a different story.

Warning: RANT below

[SkyLeach]

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.

Re:Warning: RANT below

[dada21]

Or, even better, how about deregulating the industry ENTIRELY, giving no subsidies or special benefits to anyone?

That way, anyone who wants to invest in the infrastructure of running lines, and building CO's all over, can get into the business.

Communications is NOT a right, my socialist friend.

It's merely a convenience.

Re:Warning: RANT below

[teamhasnoi]

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.

For future reference: Government = greedy AND controlling people.

Thank you, my work here is done.

Re:Warning: RANT below

[Wanker]

Unfortunately, telecommunications involving the last mile is a natural monopoly (check Google glossary for a definition of a natural monopoly).

Market forces for industries with very high entry costs (like telco, with all the infrastructure needed to provide service) will form monopolies with all the potential abuse of customers that goes along with them.

So unfortunately, in these rare cases, deregulation generally does more harm than good.

yeah, right, P2P stopping, whatever...

[iainl]

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.

What's a Fair Market Rate for Bandwidth?

[Schlemphfer]

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?

makes me rethink my subscription

[Hooya]

well, apart from the convinience of having an always-on connection, i can't think of anything that i'd need to fork over ~$40/mo to access. i stopped 'file-sharing' a while ago and my connection from home is starting to collect dust. i'm starting to realize that there's nothing on the internet that compelling (mind you -- not talking about graphics/flash heavy sites that i avoid anyways) that would warrent such bandwidth. except for slashdot and a few other news sites that update frequently, a cron-ed wget to 'mirror' the site is a very viable solution for me. and that can happen over a dial-up in the middle of the night.

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.

Re:makes me rethink my subscription

[iceT]

Where your logic makes sense, I believe you are in the minority.

First, it's the graphics intensive sites that drive people to faster connections to start with. People like web pages that 'snap' up. Whether it's something as complex as Spider-Man or as simple as Google, people want it to be there.

What these people DON'T realize is that they'd probably be happy with a single-channel ISDN connection that gets you 64Kb.

For unlimited phone access, you still have to have a dedicated phone line ($20/mo), plus an unlimited ISP ($22/mo). You've aready spent $42/month, and it's only 4K. For another $5/10/15, you get two less bills, and a way to get viruses faster than ever.

Also, it doesn't take much bandwidth to consume. All it takes is the understand that your PC can do a lot of downloading when you're not there.... and you're not there a lot more than you think you are (aren't?)...

The best solution would be for the cable providers to provide bandwidth based services (you know.. like real ISPs do for businesses)... not surcharges for bytes transferred.

$20/mo for a 64Kb service.
$30/mo for a 128Kb
$40/mo for a 256Kb
$50/mo for a 512Kb
and
$60/mo for a 1Mb.

They don't look like the heavy, they can easily attract the $20/mo user with a nominal impact to their bandwidth and people can REALLY buy what they need.

Re:makes me rethink my subscription

[iceT]

Oops.

Spider-Man, not Spider-Man

Re:makes me rethink my subscription

[evilviper]

The reason that only those using Napster/P2P were willing to get broadband, is because it IS so expensive. If you could get 1Mbps down, and 756Kbps up for $20/mo as long as you stay within a certain limit, wouldn't you think more people would be happy to get it?

If they have decent rates for those going over the cap, and give some serious incentives (like lower rates or a higher cap) for non-peak hours, I'd actually like to have this system.

I've got Charter Cable right now. If they switch to this system, and do go crazy and over-charge, I've got DSL to switch to, or I can always get together with my neighbors and get a T-1.

Another thing about this, is that they will no longer be able to dictate that you may not have multiple computer attached. Mainly because they WANT you to use more bandwidth, and if they even slightly restrict your options to put up a firewall, there is a conflict of interest.

Good news, Bad News

[Dark Paladin]

*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".

Re:Good news, Bad News

[Uttles]

Hillarious!

My only comment is that people will just move to something else. For these changes to happen, DSL, Cable, and all other internet providers will have to do this metering system, and that will piss way too many people off.

Re:Good news, Bad News

[SirSlud]

Hopefully this will stop the folks who collect bytes for the sake of collecting ithem (dude, I got the Muppets Movie on Kazaa last night! are you actually going to watch it? No, but its the Muppets Movie!), thus weakning MPAA/RIAA's position on the wonton mass theifdom going on online. If the 'cause I wanna be the man' pirates are exercised from the net, I hope that file sharing will become a tolerable evil. Plus, it leaves all the rest of the 'criminals' as us (or me), who downloads and burns casually (read: songs here and there, stuff thats hard to get, stuff that I need to hear immediately when I think about it, never entire albums, no movies), but still buys music.

AS a bonus, I'll never have to ask why the fuck anybody would be excited about having just downloaded a mediocre movie, DivX'd and all but unwatchable on that 15 inch monitor in their bedroom.

Re:Good news, Bad News

[SirSlud]

> who downloads and burns casually (read: songs here and there

full disclosure: I made a few (maybe arond 40 or so over the course of a few years) audiocassettes in the late 80s by copying songs from friends' CDs, or the radio. I made mixtapes for friends. I was just as much of a criminal (if you call that criminal behaviour) before filesharing was even coined as a phrase. I suspect that many of the 'filesharing = theivery' accusers did the same. For some reason (might be because the media companies that are chomping at the 'profit is a right' bit also own/provide/edit 99% of the news and opinion pieces on this matter), there's been a mindset shift on whether any level of piracy can be tolerable.

Re:Good news, Bad News

[Amazing Quantum Man]

No company will ever charge more for banwidth than its worth,

AH HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!

Mod this guy up +1 Funny, or +1 Clueless!

Seriously, what planet do you live on? Let's look at a hypothetical. Bandwidth is free (to the ISP). Do you really think they wouldn't charge for it? If they do, then they're charging more than it's worth.

Let's look at CDs. One of the big memes running around here is that CDs are ridiculously overpriced.

But no... "No company will ever charge more for bandwidth than its worth".

Joel, I have this really nice swampland in Florida I'd like to sell you, along with this bridge in Brooklyn.

Re:Good news, Bad News

[Dark Paladin]

I agree - as we've all known, Competition is Good. You can pry my 12 Gigabyte transfer/month DSL connection from my cold, dead fingers. (Those AT&T bastards keep sniffing around the house. I guess I'll have to put out some more ammonia on the garbage cans to keep them away.)

Re:Good news, Bad News

[sehryan]

...Flash animations...

Hate to break it to you my friend, but your average Flash navigation is small potatoes. I made a Flash navigation that slid menus around and did all kinds of crazy stuff...total file size: 9k.

That is smaller than most DHTML options. Thats smaller than an image map.

Re:Good news, Bad News

[curunir]

The Bad News: So much for seeing new screenshots of Star Wars Episode III: Portman Naked and Petrified.

Even with metered access, I think most /.ers would gladly re-finance their morgage to pay for this...some things are worth the cost.

Re:hmm Cable suporting Increase use of Wireless wi

[Chanc_Gorkon]

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.

P2P must Evolve. And some other stuff too.

[teamhasnoi]

I have no doubt that this will lead to a smaller, faster, more efficient P2P, one that doesn't 'waste' lots of time and bits searching.

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.

BW caps or blocked ports?

[Boone^]

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.

Re:BW caps or blocked ports?

[ocbwilg]

If broadband companies would just block ports of the major P2P programs, it should curb the bandwidth usage greatly.

Yes, but then someone at Kazaa or Napster or whoever is the Next Big Thing changes the port that their application uses, and bow suddenly you have to keep running just to stay in place (Red Queen).

The current equation is supposedly "expenses > revenues". You have two options to shift the balance, either decrease expenses or increase revenues. But what if you can increase your revenues first and then decrease your expenses later on? Suddenly your profits go up even higher...

The broaband ISPs have no interest in reducing the usage of their customers. They just want to make more money off of the usage that is already there.

Riiiight.

[EnVisiCrypt]

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!"

Re:Riiiight.

[MeNeXT]

Not as simple or as inexpensive as you might think. First you should price a T1 it will come out around $1,000 to $1,500 per month. Now how many neighbors would be willing to share the cost 10, 15, 20. For this point I will give you the benefit and say it's only 10. That would be 150kbps if you all decide to use it at the same time. Total bandwidth in a given month (assuming 24h operation) aprox: 440G that would represent 44G per user based on 24 hours. Now we all know that most will use it between 6:00pm when they get home from work and 12:00am midnight since most people work the next day and need to sleep. This is only 6h but I will give you 8h. That is 1/3 of the total bandwidth available to you wich gives you a total of 147G. divide this by 10 and all you have is 15G per user at 1/10th the speed of DSL at more than twice the cost.

Don't get me wrong I do not agree with the cable/telcos but unlimited bandwidth was a carrot that helped them sell the service. In most cases you probably sold more for them than all their marketing. Now they do NOT need your marketing any more they have the idiots who do not need hog speed Internet and who use less that 1G per month. Since you probably transfered (and took your friends with you)from a mom and pop ISP who did not have the $$$ to compete in the high speed game you no longer have them to turn to because they have gone belly up.

"You just cant fit 10 pounds of SH1T in a 5 pound bag." Now that the mom and pops have gone out of business cabel/telcos can no longer afford to give it away and are starting to charge a $$$$$ rate.

Re:Riiiight.

[MeNeXT]

I would really like to see that quote as well as the conditions/restrictions. I have not been able to get any quotes form AT&T, Worldcom and Sprint for TRUE unlimited access under $1,500.

Re:Riiiight.

[EnVisiCrypt]

At any rate, I'm talking about taking subscribers in a well-to-do neighborhood. If we have to spend 100, 200, or even 500 dollars a month to register our disgust with the company, we will.

I've not seen T1 access for as low as $300, but I have seen it in the $800 - $1000 range.

filter

[oyenstikker]

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 down side

[cr@ckwhore]

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:

1. Penalization for legitimate uses, such as downloading RedHat .ISOs for example.

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.

Time-Warner/Road Runner

[K_E_Morr]

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)

Re:Time-Warner/Road Runner

[Peyna]

You will be happy to notice that Time Warner is not on the list of companies in the article that are planning on implementing this. I know it makes me happy to know that my sweet-ass 3 mbps downstream speeds aren't going away anytime soon.

In the past 5 days I've had 1.5 Gb downstream (728 Mb upstream) received from my cable connection. That includes running a counter-strike server on it (which handles about 10 people very nicely,) As well as downloading Office XP from school (legally, mind you.)

I'm curious how much the average person transmits/receives over their cable connection in an average month if you don't include P2P traffic? There's absolutely no P2P over my connection.

This isn't helping the RIAA's case

[dstone]

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?"

lacking vision

[kootch]

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.

This could be a Good Thing(tm) in the long run

[lysurgon]

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:

The /. 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.

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 /. 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.

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.

Re:This could be a Good Thing(tm) in the long run

[Ryan_Terry]

For mre information on communities/groups working on this check out Freenetworks.org.

They have a bunch of info for people looking to get involved in such a project.

Just an example:

Several folks in Corvallis, Oregon that run "open" wireless access points have banded together and formed the "Corvallis Area Federated Wireless Access Providers," or CAFWAP. Our website is www.cafwap.net. If you live in the willamette valley, please visit our webpage!

Communications is NOT a right

[SkyLeach]

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.

it won't work

[asv108]

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.

Re:An Alternative to transfer limits

[RedX]

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.

Call them? Excuse me while I go off on a tangent here (and I'm certainly not attacking the poster), but few things bother me more than when an ISP or other company that sells Internet services requires you to *call* them in all cases rather than use email. I can understand calling them if you connection is down, but for simple things like account maintenance, tech support, or general questions, what's wrong with email or some sort of web app if security is an issue? Afterall, they're selling a service that is primarily used for communication, so why not take advantage of the supposed benefits that they're selling?

twice the dial-up rate

[wiredog]

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.

What the article didn't even mention...

[Orangedog_on_crack]

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.

Clarification

[SkyLeach]

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.

Short sighted

[Srin Tuar]

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...)

UConn.

[Grendel Drago]

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

Re:UConn.

[hyacinthus]

"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."

As Kate Hepburn once said so memorably, "I am not moved to tears." 5 gigabytes _per week_? You're not exactly hurting. So you can't "help" people? Help them to do what? You don't "share"? Share what? Is amassing a huge music collection some kind of prerequisite to passing multivariable calculus?

I know that this is an unpopular view, but you're supposed to be at college to study and earn a degree. Everything else--a distant second. While your daddy or the student loans are paying the bill, you're supposed to be getting an education, not "sharing" the latest flight-sim on the university dime.

And don't tell me that you need 5GB/week to do you schoolwork. You want to do research, that's what the library is for (and, having tried recently to do a little research into analytical chemistry online, I can tell you that two hours in the library is worth a week of fruitless sifting through corporate webpages.)

hyacinthus.

Re:UConn.

[ocbwilg]

I know that this is an unpopular view, but you're supposed to be at college to study and earn a degree. Everything else--a distant second. While your daddy or the student loans are paying the bill, you're supposed to be getting an education, not "sharing" the latest flight-sim on the university dime.

Blah blah blah...here is someone who obvious didn't enjoy university life.

While I do believe that the primary purpose for attending university is to get an education, one would be a fool for thinking that there were not other secondary benefits of campus life that are equally as valuable or important in the development of individuals. When one is at college it is a moral imperative to avail oneself of everything that is a part of college life. Anything less will leave you highly educated and woefully maladjusted to reality.

The real problem

[peterdaly]

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

Changes the way the net will grow

[mactari]

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.

Monopolies.

[Grendel Drago]

"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

We all knew it was coming

[Rogerborg]

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.

bushwa

[Scudsucker]

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!

[Grendel Drago]

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

Possibly bad ramifications

[sean23007]

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...

So, who will foot the bill for the next Code Red.

[Z0z]

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.

Re:To quote Michael Jackson

[kindbud]

One bad apple don't spoil the whole bunch.

...girl.

Re:Service improvements too?

[bluGill]

Your probably right, which is even sadder when you recall that the largest cost of providing service to you is the wire to your house, and the doesn't change between someone who cancled their subscription, and someone who has the cable filled to the max physics allows.

Thats right, if you buy service for a month and cancle it, the cable company loses money on you. The phone company has it worse, the cable company only has about 100 feet of cable that isn't shared to pay for (they generaly buy high quality cable, not home depot special), while the phone company has 4+ wires from your house all the way to a central office. (although the cable is cheaper, there is more of it)

The cost of cable is large enough that wireless will be cheapest for those who don't mind the limited bandwidth avaiable. (and interestingly some wireless providers give you a shared 10Mbs, while cable is often shared 1/Mbs, and DSL an unshared .5Mbs. I'm not sure how much DSL can increase, but cable should be able to go much faster.

Here's an idea

[cr@ckwhore]

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.

Re:Here's an idea

[rtaylor]

Has nothing to do with you. What you use is trivial. GBit nics / routers are cheap and you're probably no where near those levels. 10mbit stuff is even cheaper :)

That said, it's the multi-terabit routers (the fridge sized ones) that cost big bucks. Thats the reason most fibre is dark -- unused.

The infrastructure is in the ground, but it costs way too much to actually turn it on.

Sharing.

[Grendel Drago]

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

Bigger impact?

[artemis67]

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.

Cable guys offer what they cannot provide

[narftrek]

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.

Re:Try istop

[PowerPenguin]

Two additional points in their favour.

1.> They support Linux!
2.> They don't care if you run servers.

Worse, worse

[DaveWood]

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?

Stopping P2P pirates is easy...

[anthony_dipierro]

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.

Sounds like an oppourtunity to me.

[Mustang Matt]

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.

Sounds reasonable to me... perhaps

[HiThere]

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!)

Re:Sounds reasonable to me... perhaps

[Fizzlewhiff]

The real solution is for cable companies to quit spending millions of dollars on worthless fucking web portals. Pardon the language but it just offends me how much time and resources ISP's put into a "start page". It is even worse when the fork out millions to buy out a portal like Excite just to avoid the time and expense of having their team of highly skilled web developers cut and paste a clone together.

Ok, done ranting...

Re:Sounds reasonable to me... perhaps

[realdpk]

The spam problem could probably be taken care of if they did not track bandwidth used within their network. IE traffic from their mail server to you. This could be expanded to include their news server and web server (it should definitely include the web site that contains the tracking information, otherwise people will be paying to see how close they are to the cap. :) )

1% Myth

[alexander.morgan]

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... ;)

Re:Not just P2P

[delcielo]

The hell of it is that this will also apply to iso's I want to download.

Please don't tell me this is news...

[Zspdude]

My first reaction : "Wow, this is completely unexpected." You will forgive me (waves hand) for reading Slashdot daily and not noticing that this was an issue. I've completely managed to miss the daily stories over the last 2 weeks predicting this very event.

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.

The real pisser here

[drinkypoo]

Is that for many of us, we're already getting amazingly shitty service compared to what we signed on for.

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.

I've been expecting this for some time

[DaveWood]

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.

Goodbye internet radio

[mshiltonj]

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.

Some answers and some rambling

[Kazimira]

1. This isn't about the RIAA, it's about the cost of providing services.
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 /. 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.

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.

Cable companies: we need a "low priority" download

[emil]

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.

Usenet

[Sludge]

I'm very intrigued if they are going to count bandwidth between people on the same subnet, or to the usenet servers. Afaik, they don't incur the same transmission costs on those transfers.

I bet they do. I will give them pure hell, if they try to charge me or give me shit for this.

It would still be worth it

[DeadVulcan]

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?

They already cap

[blair1q]

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 Would Be Were it Not for the Last Mile Monopoly

[FreeUser]

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).

What if?

[SirKron]

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!

bandwidth hogs?

[fmaxwell]

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.

Limiting the experience..

[Thomas Charron]

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..

US worker productivity down, sales up, & disco

[gillrock]

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

Look at what it can be used for...

[stienman]

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

Re:Try istop

[frank249]

I am a high speed sympatico subscriber but I think I will try either istop or any one else who can give a flat rate service. How many subscribers will sympatico have to lose before they go back to a flat rate? With the glut in capacity and firesale prices for equipment prices should be going down, not up. I guess this proves that competition is good and monopolies are bad.

Re:Subscribers should sue...

[Kamel Jockey]

Any lawyers interested in a nice big class action suit?

This reminds me of when a bunch of idiots sued Blockbuster video because they were too lazy to return their tapes on time. Each member of this class got about $18-$22 credited to their Blockbuster accounts, which essentially cost Blockbuster nothing.

Of course, if people do sue, the cable companies will then raise their rates to cover legal fees, court costs, settlement payouts, etc. In essence, the consumers would be suing "themselves." The only way to protest any kind of metering (if it happens, I highly doubt it will) is to simply cancel the service. Companies don't listen to anything but the almighty buck. You can whine and complain all you want but they won't care until you stop the gravy train.

Closed ports

[crazyj]

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.

Re:Closed ports

[realdpk]

You could pay me a few bucks to go to their place and teach them how to use bookmarks. :)

Yet DSL companies using MP3s to sell their service

[sdo1]

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

P2P is the killer ap that is killing them.

[Restil]

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

eMail

[adamjaskie]

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)

Not too bright, are you?

[legLess]

I just turned WinMX on, gave high priority to all of the anime uploads, and then set GetRight to download as many episodes as possible. And it's not because I'm afraid that I'll lose my high bandwidth. It's because I feel like sending a nice little "fuck you" to Comcast while I still can.

That's like protesting a possible water rate hike by running your tap all day, or an electric rate hike by leaving your fridge open all day. Your sad little "protest" is cutting off your nose to spite your face, and doing demonstrable harm to everyone else who wants to use the resource. You're a short-sighted, anti-social idiot.

Re:Not too bright, are you?

[Travoltus]

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.

Re:Not too bright, are you?

[Catbeller]

How is harming anyone? The broadband going to be controlled soon anyway. The other users might as well get used to the slowness.

Re:Not too bright, are you?

[Rakarra]

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

You realize that ATTBI won't miss you at all, right? They want people who download 80gig/month to get the hell out and pick alternate providers. They don't want power users, they want a lot of people who use less than a gig per month. So don't think you'll somehow be hurting them. This pricing increase is merely a way to get rid of the power users or at least make them pay their fair share. Now all the users in my area will move to Pacbell DSL instead, and then they'll have to increase prices in a similar manner too. Thanks a lot.

Re:Not too bright, are you?

[Rakarra]

What sort of game are you playing that racks up the bandwidth charges? Just about every game currently designed is made so that 56k users aren't locked out. Modem users suffer more from latency problems than with bandwidth problems.

Re:Not too bright, are you?

[DarkZero]

That's like protesting a possible water rate hike by running your tap all day, or an electric rate hike by leaving your fridge open all day. Your sad little "protest" is cutting off your nose to spite your face, and doing demonstrable harm to everyone else who wants to use the resource. You're a short-sighted, anti-social idiot.

People like you keep assuming that these corporations are doing these things because their customers are forcing them to. I seriously doubt that that is true. Much like the way the RIAA and MPAA just pull ten digit financial numbers out of their ass when they complain about piracy, the cable companies are probably ecstatic about the fact that they can now take advantage of their monopoly and are blaming the effects of their greed on... well, on customers that use the service that they pay for, really ("unlimited bandwidth per month" and all). Thus, regardless of what any of us do, the prices are still going to steadily go up until there is competition in the market.

The numbers are just going to be inflated anyway according to what the cable companies want them to look like, so if we're going to feel the negative effects of "abuse" of the service anyway, why not just full-on abuse it and cost the cable companies as much money as possible?

Something else you'll see...

[Guppy06]

... 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. :)

Good, but with some caveats

[gdyas]

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.

Re:Good, but with some caveats

[Bouncings]

In actual cost though, they keep saying on CNBC, MSNBC, and other financial channels, journals and whatnot is not the cost of bandwidth, it's the cost of support staff. So why are they capping bandwidth, when tech support costs are really what's out of whack? Well,

Because most of the support issues on cable-modems are because the cable providers cut corners and used substandard equipment. But only the more avid (and thus, bandwidth consuming) user notices and bothers support about it. It's the guy who calls in because he has 10% packet loss that most users wouldn't notice, who wonders why certain ports don't forward, who questions the security of the firewalls the sell. That user also tends to use a lot of bandwidth, so it's easy to skapegoat the bandwidth issue when you're really trying to get rid of experienced users.

The cable companies are squarly to blame for prices being high, cable modems being unreliable, and their own lack of profit.

Re:Good, but with some caveats

[sean23007]

Yes yes, but they said nothing about trying to do it "right." These bandwidth caps and speed limitations and graduated prices for high-bandwidth users all come at the same time as they raise the price of their basic, flat-rated service. I'm not a paranoid man, and I don't wear any kind of hat, much less one made of tinfoil, but these cable companies are not operating as a real business should. In fact, dare I say it, they are worse than Microsoft. Their "innovation" comes only in the form of new pricing schemes, while they roll back technology to the golden days of yesteryear.

On the other hand, I buy my DSL from Qwest, and I'm still considering the switch to cable... and yes Qwest is that bad.

Re:Good, but with some caveats

[sacrilicious]

Why should broadband be exempt from similar controls

A few partially formed thoughts that might lead to an answer with a bit more work:

One position could be that internet access should be conceived of the way air is conceived of for individuals: we breath as much or as little of it as we need, and we don't measure individual lung capacity or exercise habits when deciding how much of the ozone protection costs people dole out.

The phone company bills most consumers extra for the purpose of subsidizing phone access for people who can't afford it. This is because phone access has been deemed something that people must have. In a way the ISP cap proposal is pushing the opposite philosophy: instead of increasing access for those who can't afford it, the proposal would reduce access for those who can.

RCN does this

[linuxlover]

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!

Exactly

[TechnoLust]

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.

Re:Subscribers should sue...

[Kamel Jockey]

Their not necessarily metering just charging you more for more bandwidth.

That's not a bad thing. Metering not only ensures cable companies keep their costs down (figuring the worst downloaders will either buy the cheapest service and download at slow speeds, or they will buy the most expensive service and pay their cost), it also ensures indirectly that people with smaller budgets can get access to broadband, since presumably these people would buy the cheapest service.

Capped isn't the same as per-second.

[verloren]

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

P2P a victim of it's own success

[cryptochrome]

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.

Re:P2P a victim of it's own success

[cryptochrome]

To the various folks replying here -

Perhaps I phrased things a bit wrong. Obviously you don't HAVE to pay any more than you feel like. If dialup is good enough for you then feel free to switch. Consequently broadband companies, being businesses, will offer plans at prices people will accept at bandwidth volumes acceptable to their expenses, because no business is bad business. Exactly what those expenses are, whether wire or executives, is their business, not yours. If anything, you should gripe about the lack of competition due to local broadband monopolies. Regardless, my statement still stands - unlimited flat-rate broadband is untenable.

they were darlings of techies.

[zoftie]

Now they are will try milk they customer base for all its worth. If my cost goes over 60$/mo, I will be starting a wireless service myself. Because most people will not tolerate over here
bill of over 60$ 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 ... and other alike convinience services.

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.

Bandwith Hogs

[intermodal]

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.

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.

DRINK FROM THE FIREHOSE!

[tlambert]

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!

TW conspicuous by their absence

[ocbwilg]

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?

Re:Uhh..

[anthony_dipierro]

you're obviously getting your news only from /., which hasn't mentioned it yet.

Wrong.

Big sharers on the Gnutella and Kazaa networks are getting RIAA and MPAA DMCA notices..

They shouldn't be getting DMCA notices unless they registered with the federal government as an ISP. Otherwise they should be getting notices to appear in federal court.

Sharing your files on gnutella, unless you are registered as an ISP, has absolutely nothing to do with the DMCA.

billing system

[skidrash]

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,

riaa seems a bit misguided

[WebMasterJoe]

The prospects of the cable companies' moves has the entertainment industry cheering. "Everything else in life has restraints -- except digital music and movies," says Ted Cohen, vice-president for new media at EMI. Cohen is optimistic that tiered pricing for broadband could introduce a "financial consequence" for piracy and cut down on sharing of pirated content. "Tiered pricing won't help artists or labels get paid, but it's a step in the right direction," he says.

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:

But hard-core file-swappers such as Jon might have second thoughts if they get hit with steep cable-bill hikes for downloading hundreds of music files that, even in compressed MP3 form, comprise several megabytes of bandwidth.

Hundreds of mp3s comprise several megabytes? What bitrate is Jon using, 2?? Or maybe the songs are just very short.

You believe in the myth of free trade, huh?

[dave-fu]

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.

Ya down with DSL?

[Travoltus]

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!!

m******** SOLUTION *******m

[Kether]

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.

I would get a dial up

[SmoothCriminal]

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.

An alternative for the cable co's: graveyard rates

[mbourgon]

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.

Obscure Modern Music

[Jon Howard]

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)

Gee only 16%?

[hellfire]

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.

Re:People cost money

[Amazing Quantum Man]

I said it was a hypothetical.

I'll rephrase it.

Let's say that bandwidth is free...

Re:You're right, and wrong: Solution is pay-for-us

[martyn s]

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.

SOME FIGURES: What are you getting? Less than 56

[JohnDenver]

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

Re:Isn't it funny....

[martyn s]

Your cable company *is* the company you're stealing from. At least, most likely, more than any other company. AOL-Time Warner is the largest copyright holder in the world. They make it so hard to boycott, everywhere I turn they're there.

It's all Congress and AT&T's fault...

[--daz--]

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.

Been there, done that...

[Loki_1929]

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.

Re:Been there, done that...

[Loki_1929]

Internet customer service is 888-793-9800. Internet customer service should be able to upgrade you directly over the phone if it's available in your area. If they ask what you need it for, just say you have a home office. If it's not available, talk to a supervisor and let them know you'd like it to be available, and you'd be willing to pay for it.

The funny thing is, the Comcast rep (for the store I work at) and I were talking about the subject of bandwidth the last time he was in a few months ago back in March or so. I had mentioned that I tend to upload alot of large database files to the servers at work, but that it takes forever. I said I'd be willing to pay around $90 or so per month for the extra upload. I have no idea if he brought the message to the big boys at Comcast, but I'll bet they'll offer anything that means more money for them so long as there's an established customer base in place; especially in this situation, where the extra bandwidth should be little more than a "flip of the switch" so to speak.

Re:What do you know about the economics of broadba

[warpSpeed]

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...

How are they going to deliver Video on Demand then

[PotatoHead]

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.

Multiple Connections Support Please

[aengblom]

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.

What I would like to know...

[Eric Damron]

...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?

We all knew this was coming

[Catbeller]

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.

Re:Just like beer...

[rirugrat]

And 20% of beer drinkers drink 80% of all the beer in the world. Anheuser-Busch needs to stop providing beer to everyone at a flat pricing rate...

Oh yea, they already pay by the drink!

Chris

Change is the only constant

[sydbarrett74]

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.

This company might help out...

[velcrokitty]

Sandvine, Incorporated has a p2p optimizer for ISPs - could prove to be interesting...

Re:What do you know about the economics of broadba

[DaveWood]

What you say is really interesting, and I want to thank you for sharing your ideas.

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. :) I don't think there's an exceptional level of hardware attrition but correct me if I'm wrong.

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.

And where's my rocket pack?

[Grape Shasta]

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?

Community College Busting your Ass?

[JohnDenver]

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.

Idiotic

[dh003i]

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.

WOO HOO! Now Spammers ARE costing me money!

[Razzious]

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.

Never gonna happen...

[Archfeld]

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.

Re:What do you know about the economics of broadba

[warpSpeed]

So my question is, what do you see in the future for your business?

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...

Good.. It's about time they did this.

[mindstrm]

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.

Re:I'm confused about the need to limit downloads

[Sabalon]

Actually, I was trying to watch Cheers last night and was told the channel was in use - damn neighboors :)

Seriously - you cable TV signal is put in at the local office from their satellite feeds. They wanna add a channel for all their customers, the setup the feed and send it down the pipe. If you and your neighboor are watching the same show or different show, it doesn't affect anything - the signal is still coming down the pipe to every house the same.

With you internet data, you and your neighboor could go to the same site and that data comes down from their limited internet connection twice (disregarding proxies). And if you and your neighboor go to different sites, that is still 2x the data coming down.

So, watching the latest tripe on HBO all day = 1 HBO feed coming down from satellite and being distrubted to all their customers.

1000 people watching the latest tripe on HBO all day = 1 HBO feed coming down from satellite and being distrubted to all their customers.

1 person downloading divx all day = ~650MB per movie over their pipe

1000 people downloading divx all day = ~650MB per movie over their pipe x 1000 or 650GB!!!

Don't know bout phone.

Re:What do you know about the economics of broadba

[DaveWood]

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.

Re:SOME FIGURES: What are you getting? Less than 5

[dasunt]

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.

Re:What do you know about the economics of broadba

[warpSpeed]

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.

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.

Electricity troll is good.

[twitter]

The cable market is in a crunch right now because they didn't charge enough for their flatrate. Because they're a monopoly, they may be able to get away with charging per use like electricity, but that's only because also like electric companies,

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!

all victims of own success

[twitter]

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.

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?

Re:all victims of own success

[cryptochrome]

Beat it, Troll. That's a spectacularly dumb and irrelevant arguement.

People lived without all of those things for a long time, and even when they were invented can't get them when they can't afford them. You don't get an unlimited supply of food, or as much power as you can burn, or whatever car you want for the same price (nor whatever salary you want for your work). At best, the prices may be negligibly low for your level of consumption and your salary. But there is no consumption maximum on bandwidth. There's always a flashier website, or a bigger higher quality media file, or a rapidly expanding p2p network to file serve on and carelessly browse. And more network traffic means more cable has to be laid and maintained and powered, and more workers have to be hired and so on. And suddenly the costs are no longer negligible, until someone comes up with a cheaper way of doing it. But no matter how much they expand, and how much cheaper it gets, some people will still be sending and getting as much as their connection allows, which is generally more than the broadband provider can afford at the prices they offer for flat rate. A classic tragedy of the commons.

Cable Companies Can Eat a Dick

[Stalyn]

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.

Phynd? No thanks.

[Grendel Drago]

(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

Filesharing Apps.

[Grendel Drago]

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

"bandwith" != "total bytes downloaded"

[DunbarTheInept]

I hope it's just a case of poor journalism that called the proposed pricing change a charge for "bandwith". If what they actually wanted was a charge per downloaded byte, that would make sense and truly nail the biggest users of the service with the biggest cost, as is fair. But if they cap my bandwith instead of capping my sum total bytes, then that means if I am a typical user, who wants intermittent bursts of speed with long gaps of silence between, I end up having to buy the high speed that goes unused most of the day.

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.

Re:You're right, and wrong: Solution is pay-for-us

[Dun Malg]

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.

Re:1% of the subscribers use what % of the help de

[Dun Malg]

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...

Re:SOME FIGURES: What are you getting? Less than 5

[JohnDenver]

That's close to what I estimated for 100% utilization which was 16 gigs.

Just multiply 56K Videos (16538 * 1 Meg)

Re:Service improvements too?

[bluGill]

While I agree it goes to a multiplexer in many cases. (I was trying to weasel out of central office, but couldn't find a good way to do it), that isn't really relavent. The largest cost of wiring is labor. Most people prefer underground utilities, and labor to put it into the ground is very high. Just from your house to the little green box (not the multiplexer) is ~100, and cable companies will generaly do that for free (phone companies often charge for it).

Re:Couldn't get into Community College?

[JohnDenver]

I can't prove everybody assumed bulk discounting, but I can prove that anybody with half a brain wouldn't assume what you assumed.

Small Children understand that 10 apples cost more money than 5 apples. You accused the original post of not understanding that 10Mbs of bandwidth costs more then 5Mbs of bandwidth, and that he didn't understand that more users need more bandwidth.

Personally, I think you were quite proud of yourself for exposing the "more costs less" fallacy that's been suckering the rest of us. Way to go!