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Cable Industry Taking Control of the Net
Tompaine.com has a piece warning of measures that cable internet providers are taking to control their users' experiences online. We've touched on this before, but this issue needs a lot of attention and it has gotten very little from the mainstream press.
Dude, that sucks. As if the price gouging isnt enough
What, me Tweet?
...it's not surprising that these kinds of stories don't get any airtime.
I am sorry Dave, I can not allow you to visit this non-TimeWarnerAOL site... The Media was not endorsed by the RIAA or MPAA
Sigs? We don't need no stinking sigs!
The Death Of The Internet
How Industry Intends To Kill The 'Net As We Know It
Jeff Chester is executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy.
The Internet's promise as a new medium -- where text, audio, video and data can be freely exchanged -- is under attack by the corporations that control the public's access to the 'Net, as they see opportunities to monitor and charge for the content people seek and send. The industry's vision is the online equivalent of seizing the taxpayer-owned airways, as radio and television conglomerates did over the course of the 20th century.
To achieve this, the cable industry, which sells Internet access to most Americans, is pursuing multiple strategies to closely monitor and tightly control subscribers and their use of the net. One element can be seen in industry lobbying for new use-based pricing schemes, which has been widely reported in trade press. Related to this is the industry's new public relations campaign, which seeks to introduce a new "menace" into the pricing debate and boost their case, the so-called "bandwidth hog."
But beyond political and press circles are another equally important development: new technologies being developed and embraced that can, in practice, transform today's open Internet into a new industry-regulated system that will prevent or discourage people from using the net for file-sharing, internet radio and video, and peer-to-peer communications. These are not merely the most popular cutting-edge applications used by young people; they also are the tools for fundamental new ways of conducting business and politics.
These goals and objectives are visible to anyone who cares to look at the arcane world of telecommunications policy and planning, either in the industry trade press or government documents. The bottom line is the industry want to kill the Internet as we know it.
Take a minute and wade through this bit of arcana -- and ponder its implications.
"The IP Service Control System from Ellacoya Networks gives the Broadband Operator 'Total Service Control' to closely monitor and tightly control its subscribers, network and offerings." So reads the Web site of Ellacoya.com, a relatively new firm, describing the business-to-business service that it is selling to large Internet service providers.
Ellacoya is backed by Wall Street investment powerhouse, Goldman Sachs, which sees a major opportunity to turn around the red ink-plagued broadband sector. Continuing, the website explains, "Establishing Total Service control enables operators to better manage traffic on the network, [and] easily introduce a range of tiered and usage based service plans... Talkative applications, especially peer-to-peer programs like KaZaA and Morpheus, tend to fill all of the available bandwidth... The IP Service Control System allows operators to identify, limit and report on these aggressive applications."
The fundamental character of the Internet today is that it lacks precisely these kinds of tolls, barriers and gatekeepers. But technology like Ellacoya's hardware and software is not just an enticing idea; it's more of a silver bullet for beleaguered telecom executives. It's being tested in industry trials and points to the kind of Internet the industry would like to develop over the next few years. The way telecom corporations get from today's open-access Internet to their version of the future starts by changing how people pay for the net.
Industry's New Business Plan
Most people now pay a flat fee for online access. But the big media companies offering Internet service; Comcast, ATT, AOL -- would like to change that, and already have in a few test locations.
The broadband industry's plans to institute tiered pricing have been widely reported in its trade press. There are numerous articles about replacing today's open 'Net environment with industry-self-described versions of "walled gardens" or "Internet Lite." (See "Cable Operators Seek to Corral Bandwidth Hogs", Cable Datacom News, 10/01/02) The central feature of these proposals is much like telephone companies; there's a price plan for everyone.
To make the case to regulators that such pricing is fair and overdue, cable operators have begun a PR effort, spinning that a small percent of users account for a disproportionately large amount of bandwidth used on broadband networks. They've created and embraced the pejorative term, "bandwidth hog," to describe those -- such as music-obsessed college students -- who find robust uses for high-speed connections. Already major news sources, such as the BBC, and technology journalists are using the term in their reports.
To deal with this "problem," the companies are considering a variety of approaches to ensure they remain in full control of their bandwidth -- unless consumers can afford to pay the hefty access fees. Under a typical plan, a user would be allotted a limited amount of bandwidth per month, and would be charged extra fees for going over this amount. This approach isn't very different from the software industry, where the free versions of an application are intended to frustrate and prompt people to buy the 'better' version.
Bandwidth caps have already been implemented in Canada by major Internet service provider Sympatico, Inc., and observers have been quick to note that the limit -- 5 GB per month -- would effectively restrict regular use of emerging applications such as Internet radio, streaming media and video-on-demand.
Consider this excerpt from an article about Sympatico's bandwidth caps in the May 6 edition of Toronto Globe and Mail by reporter Jack Kapica.
A classic conflict has arisen over streaming media, especially of radio. In a recent letter to globetechnology.com, Andrew Cole, manager of media relations for Bell Sympatico, defended the 5GB bit cap, saying that "In my experience, Internet radio stations usually transmit at approximately 20 Kbps. This equates to 1.2MB per minute, or 72MB per hour. At this rate, a HSE customer could enjoy 70 hours of Internet Radio per month and remain within the bandwidth usage plan."
But a 20-Kbps stream is considered poor quality by many people who tune into Internet-based radio stations for such things as classical music concerts. For these people, audio quality streamed at 20 Kbps has been described as "pathetic at best, somewhat akin to AM radio" by Tony Petrilli of Level Platforms Inc. of Ottawa.
"Decent audio quality starts at 56 Kbps to 64 Kbps, and really gets acceptable only around 100 Kbps," he said. This alone, continued Mr. Petrilli, "will blow the cap, let alone any other form of surfing, such as looking at movie trailers or even reading Web-based news. Heaven forbid that someone listens to 90 minutes a day of quality Internet radio. That way we'd blow the cap in 20 days.
When you consider the fact that the largest American telecommunications firms are often part of the same mega-corporation with music, video or movie-producing entertainment divisions -- such as AOL-Time Warner -- you can see how an industry-regulated Internet would handily end music and movie industry worries about Napster-like file swapping by people who don't want to pay industry-monopolized retail prices for content.
Thus, the strategic and technically feasible solutions embodied by companies such as Ellacoya is obviously why Goldman-Sachs was keen to invest in the firm -- as it offers the actual means to monetize the net and turn around the revenue-poor broadband sector.
According to Ellacoya's technical datasheet, operators can create "up to 51,000 unique policies that can be combined to generate limitless numbers of subscriber policies." Such rules, they explain, can either permit, deny, priority queues, address lock, rate limit or redirect access. The same technology also poses new concerns over privacy, since Ellacoya's technology "collects usage statistics for subscribers and applications, capturing service events, session details, and byte counts.... Operators can 'stamp' the subscribers identity on all records."
The Industry Spin
The cable industry will argue that such ubiquitous control systems and restrictive pricing structures are necessary to resolve bandwidth backups. But the fact is, this cannot be the case, because cable systems are constructed to avoid bandwidth shortages. But don't take my word for it.
Mike LaJoie, vice president for advanced technology at AOL-Time Warner told MultiChannel News, "The way that the HFC (hybrid fiber coaxial) architecture works, we never run out of bandwidth," LaJoie said. "We can always split or do other things that will give us the bandwidth that we want, so it really ends up being a desire to provide the best and highest experience for our customers." (See "HD on VOD Searches for Resolution", Multichannel News, 09/30/02) What these statements make clear is that the cable industry's goal for broadband is to monetize bandwidth. By charging a toll for every bit, the industry can simultaneously extract great profits from the new applications that it allows on its networks, as well as restrict access to those that it finds problematic, i.e. those that compete with its own content offerings. In short, the industry finally sees a way to make money online.
Of course, these calculations are utterly self-serving, ignoring the fact that the net was developed with tax dollars and has been an incubator for an array of innovations that extend far beyond creating new profit centers for big media companies. The envisioned control structures will inhibit robust Internet use by early broadband adopters, and discourage development of new high-speed applications such as Internet-based telephone and video-on-demand, thus slowing overall broadband growth.
Worse, this business model will erect high economic and technical barriers to entry for non-commercial and public interest uses of the high-speed Internet, threatening civic discourse, artistic expression and non-profit communications. In moving to implement this highly centralized vision for broadband, the cable industry does not simply ignore the democratic and competitive history of the Internet -- it is actively hostile to it.
Consumption-based pricing and other restrictive access controls contradict the spirit of openness and innovation that built the Internet in the first place, and will do irreparable harm to its future as a medium for small business initiatives, non-commercial users and democratic discourse. New threats to privacy are also clear, given the intrusive nature of the technology to closely monitor all online use. If you think spam is bad now...
And Where Is The FCC?
This new threat to online communications is a direct consequence of recent Federal Communications Commission policies by Chairman Michael Powell that permit cable companies to operate their broadband platforms in a "discriminatory, non-open access" manner. This legalese means the FCC, the historic guardian of the public interest in the communications field, has abdicated its founding charge: to serve the public interest before private interests.
In sum, the Internet as we now know it -- and its revolutionary promise -- may soon pass into the history books. In the absence of public policy safeguards, the emerging pricing and control structures will fundamentally change the kinds of information -- and way it's delivered -- on the Internet. The ramifications extend far beyond the quarterly reports and shareholder earnings for the nation's telecommunications corporations.
The consequences are cultural and will affect the pace and character of progress in the early 21st century. If the communications companies impose tolls, roadblocks and dead ends on the information 'superhighway,' they will be robbing public trust resources in much the same way 19th century mining companies pilfered public lands and 20th century radio and television networks privatized the public's airwaves.
Fry: heh, Yakov Smirnoff said it
Leela: No he didn't.
But the big media companies offering Internet service; Comcast, ATT, AOL -- would like to change that, and already have in a few test locations.
Would you mind telling us where these "test locations" are? This is the same rhetoric we've seen over and over again. There's nothing new in this article and no supporting evidence for ANYTHING that's stated. What a waste.
Is your browser retarded?
Someone must develop a way to drop a wire cord outside, or along a window frame for an antenna, and use p2p to access internet, bypassing isps.
Future computing power will be able to handle this.
If you want to have tiered pricing, you better damn well ensure I get what I pay for. I would give up an extra 10-20 a month for BETTER service, not the SAME service. (I have AT&T broadband right now, and it serves my needs, I game and play around on KaZaA alot, and FTP stuff around between friends). But if I get the same service I get now, thats a Damn Rip Off (tm).
This is my sig. Its pathetic.
this issue needs a lot of attention and it has gotten very little from the mainstream press
Strange isn't it? Since AOL/Time Warner (a major cable internet provider) controls a ton of the mainstream press.
Casual Games/Downloads
Repeat after me
... lather, wash, rinse, repeat
ISPs do not control the content.
ISPs do not control the content.
ISPs do not control the content.
As long as you are on the internet, and can connect to IPv4 or IPv6, you cannot be stopped. The technology inherently allows you to move around blockages or outage points.
Now, if you say "Wait! 3 Media Companies control 80% of the US Internet usage", I say 'Duh!' Like AOL, Compuserve, GEnie, controlled the dialup networks back in the day. It's economy of scale -- you're never going to have enough mom and pop goodie two shoe's scattered around the globe to make every locale capable of having yippie friendly internet access. The big companies with the big bank accounts are the ones that leverage access. Nothing new here.
STILL, the technology they provide allows you to sidestep any potential blockages they make. Ok, ok, so they block at the router your attempt at reaching 555.12.12.12. So? You want to get ther badly enough, you arrange with someone for a proxy.
I guess its time to switch to DSL, so you can wait for the telecom industry to screw you.
I'm starting to miss the small ISPs that couldn't screw you as bad because there were many more alternatives.
Oh well... long live monopolies!
People may just decide that an Internet Broadband Co-op is a good idea, form one, and snub their nose at the likes of ATT, Comcast, Rogers, Cox, and Mchsi. Policing users is not the job if the ISP, rather assisting law-enforcement once illegalities are done is. That is not a fine line but a really big one, and hard to miss.
It seems we have someone predicting the "Imminent Death of the 'Net" again. While this is concerning, unless we can have certificable proof (like the test locations for example), then we really ought to take these things with a bit of a grain of salt. Just IMNSHO.
Do you know why the road less traveled by is littered with the bones of the unwary?
When I read it at Broadband.com
I need to put together a perl script to scrape news stories from over the internet and mass submit them to slashdot. It appears everyone does that.
-- You see, there would be these conclusions that you could jump to
You cannot go and shove the genie back in the bottle in America. Once you give something to Americans they consider it their god given and constitutionally protected right. I have my bandwidth now and I'll be darned if I'll give some of it back and I'll be darned if I'll pay substantially more for it.
Enjoy your Karma, after all you earned it. Feel your Karma Joe, feel it burn.
Hmm.
tiered pricing is a GOOD thing. Not everyone needs a super fat pipe. Allow for free-market competition and let consumers pay for what they want and need. What's wrong with that? Death of the Internet, indeed *snort*.
NO CARRIER
In our socities around the world it has been demostrated time and time again that when you take freedom away from people and you seek to control them you will ultimitly fail. People don't like being forced to do things or be forced not to do things. What if they started to control us through their various means and we just unplugged? If I had to pay to send e-mail for example, I simply wouldn't do it. That is the great thing about capitalism. If we don't like the service we just don't use it. The media companies are going about things the wrong way. I went into a record store in the mall and an old CD from 1995 is $18.99. Now do you think that I said "Oh there is that CD I am looking for! Sure, i'll pay 20 bucks for it". Hell no. The CD I was wanting was a CD by Belly that when I bought it back in 1995 it was only $11.00. Now my copy is lost and why do they think i'm going to pay almost twice as much as I did when it was new, just to replace my copy? And if you are still reading this and looking for a point.. I lost mine ;)
So they want to monitor usage, charge and control access according to how you're using the service.
Wouldn't that be contradictory to the whole idea of being a common carrier? Hands off, except where we want to squeeze customers for revenue?
Sometimes I wish we could go back to the days when you could just dial in to a BBS and not really worry about people watching over your shoulder as you use the internet.
DRINK DUFF (responsibly) DRINK DUFF (responsibly) DRINK DUFF
because the "Mainstream press is the cable companies
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
For those who might be concerned that their cable company is controlling how they access the Internet, there's a simple fix for that -
Don't get your Internet access from your cable company.
There's still DSL, there's still satellite, there's still (ick) dialup...
there's still a free market, last time I looked.
Come to the University of Mars! Classes starting soon!
So if I am reading this right, the ISP, not only will they charge for copyrighted content, but they also will be able to control what I am allowed to see, what I am allowed to listen to and what images I am allowed to view etc?
Where does this leave the independant artist? The person who wants nothing to do with the large monopolistic and greedy organisations?... the person who is quite happy controlling and distributing their art through the free medium of the internet? Will their unofficial works be barred from being distributed through the net?
I seriously smell the RIAA behind this....:(
-- 7 string electric violin + live loop samplers
It seems that as technology gets better, more productive, and easier for Joe/Jane User to use, the entertainment industry's grip on content tightens. It's like they want it to be the next cable; full of content that may or may not appeal to the masses, but certain to be full of cruft with advertisements to support it. And with one of the biggest cable modem services ( Roadrunner ) ran buy one of the entertainment industry's big dogs ( Time Warner ), I see no hope in sight.
Personally, I've advised everyone I know to jump the cable modem ship. But the low competitive pricing ( It cost $55/month in my market, but my father-in-law can get it for $29.99/month which is much cheaper than DSL ), what can you say. But give DSL time and it will turn sour as well.
What's the best bet? Save up for a T-1.
This article is long on rhetoric and short on evidence. I don't deny that its logic makes sense, but it hasn't provided any reason to make me believe it.
I'll express an unpopular opinion here: ultimately, bandwidth will have to be metered. Bandwidth is a commodity (I think it was the commoditization of bandwidth that is the part of the reason for the telecom collapse) like water or electricity: cheap, but not infinite. The problem, of course, is that if bandwidth is allowed to be monopolized like electricity and telephone service are, prices will be increased far above their levels in a competitive environment. I would like to think the FCC and other government agencies would follow such a policy, but I have no real confidence in it.
The classic net.geek blunder is at work here in this article, as it assumes that we're the majority, instead of the minority.
/. reader. AT&T uses port scanners to make sure you don't run services on their pipes. The neighborhood scheme is flawed, leading to saturated bandwidth, and frankly, it sucks for what I want. A side effect of this is that users like me are unhappy, but their continued efforts to work around restrictions placed on them by the ISP has made cablemodem suck for mom & pop web surfer, too.
Cablemodem has sucked for a while now if you're a user like the typical
There's a lot more mom & pops than there are net.geeks. Cable ISP's that survive on volume see more money in providing service to mom & pop websurfer, so they're taking steps to make the network suck more for people like me, and less for mom & pop.
Eventually, the very-lucrative-for-AT&T-Broadband mom & pop will be all that's left on their networks, and that's fine by me.
There's other providers waiting to pick up the slack that cable ISP's leave behind. I've already given my business to a DSL provider who lets me do whatever I want with my line, including hosting web/game/email/dns servers from it.
This looks like a win-win for everyone.
Cable ISP's get the market they want (e-mail & websurfers), I get the service I want from another provider (gaming, running http / ftp servers, etc.), the other providor carves a profitable niche serving me & those like me, and everyone's happy.
So what's the big deal?
Even Jesus hates listening to Creed.
They mess with my p0rn and they'll have a fight on their hands!
Seems a bit stingy - after you've downloaded the latest RedHat ISOs, and read your spam, you're left twiddling your fingers each month.
Actually, this will at least help in the fight against spam, as it eats away at a subscribers monthly allowance it would probably help make the scumbags pay through the courts.
Glad my ISP basically allow you to do anything - I've served >30GB from the web server on my DSL line in a month before now! I'm pretty sure I've downloaded close to that figure too, leaving ftp sessions to run overnight for ISO's...
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
What a puerile piece! The Net as I knew it was not about listening to the radio and downloading movies. The Net used to about contacting people, sharing views and knowledge. How usage caps could impede this?
-m-
I would like to die like my grandfather did - sleeping. And not screaming in terror, like his passengers.
The real question is what the volume pricing should look like. A 5GB limit is too low--if they charge that, they will likely lose lots of customers. Something that would make more sense to me would be:
A classic conflict has arisen over streaming media, especially of radio. In a recent letter to globetechnology.com, Andrew Cole, manager of media relations for Bell Sympatico, defended the 5GB bit cap, saying that "In my experience, Internet radio stations usually transmit at approximately 20 Kbps. This equates to 1.2MB per minute, or 72MB per hour. At this rate, a HSE customer could enjoy 70 hours of Internet Radio per month and remain within the bandwidth usage plan."
20 Kbps * 60 s * 1 B/8b = 150 kB/min
that means 568 hours worth..
I assume he was talking about kilobits, because the next paragraph talks about most good net stations being 56k...either that or the people writing the article messed it up.
We're talking about two entirely different things here:
1) Consumer broadband access
2) Hosting
Sure, in theory it would be great if those were the same thing and the little guy or gal could serve a web site, distribute files or relay mail through a box connected to the cable modem. In real life, 'bandwidth hogs' (scare quotes from the article, not from me) pay the same as the web browsers and email readers while indulging their warezing or the urge to run every last service that shipped with Red Hat.
I have a slow, free dial-up connection at home. How do I manage a web site? I pay $10CDN/month for web hosting, including CGI, PHP, MySQL and anonymous FTP, plus another $10US/year for a domain name.
If you want to reach an audience, or just play webmaster, paying for hosting is far cheaper and more effective than screwing around with cable modems. If you just want to warez, or just generally be a jackass, your complaining is irrelevant to the article's claims of corporate censorship.
(By the way, anyone else wonder where TomPaine.com gets so much money to run those expensive ads (NYT op-ed page!) that are witless enough to be rejected from a college newspaper? Bill Moyers nepotises a huge pile of foundation funding to TomPaine.com, run by his son John. The American Prospect is going to go under so we can get more trash like this.)
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Why would you want to use cable for internet anyway? I stopped using the cable companies' crappy service years ago and have been using a satellite provider for TV. Are their online services any good?
Worst. Sig. Ever!
Well go to cable and get screwed by a monopoly.
Go to DSL and get screwewd by a monopoly.
Go to Dialup and get screwed by a monopoly.
Go to satellite and get screwed by a monopoly.
Go to cell phone modem and get screwed by a monopoly.
Send up smoke signals, and have your monoply city government say "don't do that".
You know what? You can't seem to get away from monopolies. BTW the limits will hurt VOIP. So much for escaping phone company monopoly to get caught by another.
I'm currently subscribed to Rogers cable internet here in Toronto. Lately, speeds have been great, but we commonly go through weeks of terrible service which disappears after another big upgrade for bandwidth. I don't care what people do online, but it's a real pain in the ass to find out that people are downloading gigabytes of movies, music, and general warez over file sharing programs. Sure, they have a great concept, and I've used them in the past, but I truly think that users who abuse these services by downloading many many gigabytes a month should be required to pay more in order to compensate. Bandwidth costs a ton of money for large ISPs, and they're handing it out to us for a flat rate for unlimited usage.
I would rather spend my money at the local $7 theatre or buy a good CD for $10-15 once in a while than download tonnes of stuff which might push my monthly service fee to a higher tier. When it comes down to it, I want the 'net to respond fast when I want to look up show times instead of waiting for some kids a few blocks away to finish downloading a leaked copy of Two Towers over Kazaa.
I remember the days when I would pay for X amount of hours on AOL(Please don't stone me, I was a foolish freshman in college) and I would monitor it super closely with that little clock thingy. Then, it became all you can eat access after a while. And now, they want this?
I really wouldnt want to waste my time limit / bandwidth limit on junk(Videos, Audio) some other junk the roadrunner people want me to see. You know what I mean?
I can imagine the newest teeny band video loading up in a little Windows Media Player window while I'm looking at ESPN or something like that.
Then the bill comes, and I think, "Mierda!, where did all my bandwith limit go?" Just tracking it would be a pain for me, and, much like Sprint PCS, I can see the cable co. charging me to see my bandwidth used.
My fellow geeks, at what point will we stand up and give them a Stone Cold(c) "Oh hell no!" ??
What, me Tweet?
It seems every time I turn around I hear a new number as far as people connected via cable. Last week I head 10% of Americans use broadband and the whole article talked about how most people just don't think the speed(haha) is worth the cost. And now this article says this? It would seem that between cable, which provides to most Americans, and DSL, which is popular and must provide to a lot of people, I am the only mofo left with a dial up ISP. Is this the product of cable companies inflating their subscriber numbers to keep their stocks up, or are 80% of the articles I read on this wrong?
Using PC's as entertainment devices plays right into the hands of the cable companies, the entertainment industry, and folks like Microsoft. They're just drooling at the prospect of relegating the computer to an overblown entertainment node, with their pay-to-play servers feeding the addicted.
You can stop this by killing the market: Cancel your cable TV subscription. Don't download or play music on your PC. Play DVD's with you TV. You know the drill.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Frankly, I disagree with the article. It talks about 'bandwidth hogs' as if they are good people who are being screwed by the 'system' because they use kazaa or morpheus (or both).
Well, fuck them. I think people who sit there and download pirated DVDs and mp3s 24/7 SHOULD be charged more because it interferes with my ability to actually go to websites and get information I want. Bandwidth costs money, and to be honest, probably 95-99% of the people using those programs are downloading stuff illegally. I have a fast connection because I like fast connections- i don't download music and i don't download movies- i just like to hop around and get the information i want as fast as i can.
This article makes it sound like because we are having difficulties turning the internet into TV that we are being denied some fundamental right. if I want to watch television, I go into my living room. The internet is about free information- not annoying animations, blinking lights and surround sound.
That's ok, Jesus likes me anyway.
... the capitalists are going to try and milk as much money out of their clients as possible. And they get away with it too because humans are stupid.
This has been talked about and talked about and talked about to death. The mainstream media will never cover this, because there's nothing for them to cover. Anyone who cares about this kind of stuff already knows about this. They keep up on the technology, and likely come by here every so often.
The sky isn't falling. This won't kill the Internet, it will just make it more responsible, for once. Bandwidth isn't an unlimited resource. DEAL WITH IT. If you don't like it, start your own ISP and try to give everyone 2Mbit unrestricted connections, reliably, for $40/month. You won't be able to do it. Get all the venture capital funding you ask for and you still won't be able to do it. Look what happened to Excite@Home. If stuff like this ever happens, it'll be a blessing to networks everywhere. Maybe people will actually take some responsibility and secure their machines when their bandwidth is all used up 'cause someone zombified their machines and used them in a DDoS attack, or the next Internet worm uses it all up. That would make the neighborhood a whole lot safer, let me tell you.
People claim that restricting bandwidth in this manner will kill off the Internet economy. Bah, I say. It will save the internet economy. It will make people realize that this stuff costs something. It will make them at least be aware of how they use it. If they want to use it alot, they're going to have to pay for the privilidge. If they don't want to use it alot, they're going to be able to pay less, to only use it when they need to.
I'm all for it. Of course this is all hot air until the cable companies really crack down on it, so I guess let the good times roll as long as they can. That will only make the hangover longer I suppose. I did fine at 56K, I can do it again. No big.
The problem is that some operators are trying to prevent users from using P2P applications, that effectively convert normal PCs into servers that can be accessed by other users. In other words, the cable user should be able to use his computer as something like a TV or a radio (to access information from other people) or like a TV or a radio station (spreading his message to anyone in the world).
People of the Free Software Foundation say that the computer is not an ordinary machine that can process software, it is a machine that can be used to make new software. In a broadband world, it can be a new medium, accessible to anyone with the technical expertise.
Many cable companies block the ports with firewalls to prevent their computers to act as servers, and that is what we should fight against. Managing a server is no sweet cake, it can be used as a platform to generate spam or a hacker attack. But, if the user signs some form of responsibility agreement, he should be able to use his broadband anyway he likes.
the cable industry, which sells Internet access to most Americans...
Try again.
Not exactly the way I like to see an article start off.
-- Note: If you don't agree with me, don't bother replying. I won't read it.
Funny...Media conglamorate/cable ISP's want to control access and charges for boring content of the Internet..
What a Great Idea (tm)! Now my broadband will screw me just like my cell phone provider does. Once you step outside you "plan", your ass is theirs.
All it took for me was a family emergency that required me to keep in touch during the trip home. I got the bill, and nearly had a heart attack.
But here's the kicker... You can refuse to answer cell phone calls. You can't refuse incoming data! Even if you have a firewalled setup that drops the packets, they still come through your pipe!
That will be the next attack I'm sure... Don't like someone? Find out their address and packet flood them.
I believe fully in this! Why just the other day my ISP.... This transmission terminated for innappropiate use of Comcast Cable lines. Please refrain from going to any sites in the near future.
"What we have here is a failure to communicate"
The Warden, Cool Hand Luke
Sorry to blow your bubbles, but what is wrong with charging per GB of usage? Do you complain that a 1 hour call across the country costs more than a 15 min call?
This article is very biased. All I've heard of cable companies doing is either limiting bandwith, or thinking about charging people based on usage-- not about censoring or charging by making distinctions about content of the bandwidth.
Bandwidth (like phone systems) is a limited resource. It only seems natural to charge based on usage.
Most cable companies which have bandwith limits now have premium service options where you pay more for huge amounts of bandwith.
What nerve do these companies have for trying to get people to pay based on usage? What nerve do food establishments have for not offering "all you can eat"? It discriminates against the hungry.
Seems to me that the reasonable compromise would be to charge for bandwidth only in one direction. Make the people hosting the illegal servers, etc pay for upstream, give the flat rate to the downstreamers.
Otherwise, it seems to me that the cable company could charge people twice for the same bytes : once to charge the guy sending the file, once for the guy recieving it. It's like the post office charging you to recieve a letter after it's already got paid postage on it.
Really, if you want to host on the internet, you pay for it nowadays anyway. Charging in both directions is like burning the candle at both ends.
It's incredible that even the cable companies are too dense to realize that trying to sell someone a service by *reducing* its value is a losing strategy. It's ironic that the same applications -- such as streaming media -- that make broadband Internet access so appealing to the general public are being made less accessible (more expensive) through things like bandwidth caps. Furthermore, as the article notes, reducing the service available to the average user is a disincentive to those developing new applications (e.g., VOIP) that (ordinarily) would help to increase consumer interest in broadband services, because the market for such applications is effectively reduced.
Surely a more effective strategy would be to *encourage* customers to make use of broadband-oriented applications, thereby increasing their reliance on broadband services and solidifying and expanding the customer base of both the cable companies and of the content providers. The current approach will only drive to consumers to use existing, more affordable and more accessible non-Internet delivery channels (voice telephony, television, radio, print media, CD/DVD, etc.).
Please donate your spare CPU cycles to help fight cancer and other diseases
I normally get really worked up about this sort of thing - big corporations and evil are pretty much synonomous to me. However, although a move probably will force a lot of internet radio out of business, there really isn't any reason why the companies shouldn't charge you based on how much bandwidth you use. In fact, prorating bandwidth usage would likely speed up the internet significantly. It really sucks that internet is no longer the haven of free shit that it once was. But we live in a capitalist society, and STUFF COSTS MONEY. The late-90's tech bubble burst because they tried to make profit by giving stuff away for free. Internet providers are going to have to charge you for what you use - get used to it. Note that I'm talking only about bandwidth limitations - content controls are completely wrong in every way and do no good for anyone but the big corporations.
I've got a Comcast (formerly @Home) cable modem, and I would happily pay more for DSL from somebody like speakeasy, but it's not available in my area.
The techs laughed at my circuit-- it was the dirtiest they had seen in some time, especially in a major city. Bridge taps, unterminated pairs (one nearly a mile long), some sort of coil, and so on. He said every problem on their list was present more than once, on top of the distance being 50% outside their max window for IDSL (which would have been a whopping 144kbps anyway).
Satellite is out because of the ridiculous ping. Okay for web access, crap for games.
Don't forget that there are plenty of people who still live inside a geographically-enforced cable internet monopoly.
I recently saw a piece on the local news about some Senators (I believe) in Connecticut out-lawing car rental agencies placing GPS devices in automobiles, and surcharging the drivers additional fees for every time they go over the speed limit. Their rational was that they are fining people for doing stuff illegally, when there are no police officers or proper authorities involved. They plan on totally outlawing the charging of fees, and tracking of drivers through GPS... While it should remain local legislation for a while, they said they are going to try to pass it nation wide.
Can the same be done for broadband? I know their rationale is more to save them bandwidth, not enforce the law, but couldn't we say that the broadband providers are trying to surcharge us or fine us (I didn't read the full article, so forgive me if they AREN'T trying to add fees for using more bandwidth for P2P) in trying to enforce the laws themselves?
Hows that for run on sentences...
SuPz.orG
No, but the fuss is really going to be about control of content. The cable and media companies want people to pay for entertainment delivered down the network connection that they're already paying for. The industry will find a way to prevent copying and redistribution of the content they sell, which will trigger great and incessant rants about rights being trampled. Given the quality of the content likely to be on offer, this will be a bit like ranting about your "right" to reproduce and redistribute your neighbor's trash. Or, worse yet, a typical night's programming on the WB.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
run the numbers for a second.. the theorhetical maximum you can download from a 56k *dialup* for a 30 day period is 7G. So as far as im concered any cap below that is grossly unacceptable.
Open up the cable to competitors, just like the phone system was opened up.
There's no reason Comcast need be the only provider in town who can send stuff down that coaxial wire. It isn't the same as TV.
Let other ISPs have access to it too, and let me decide how I want my data routed.
Right now it just makes financial sense to act the way they are: every 'heavy' user you boot off can be replaced with a few dozen grandmas who only read email. Much cheaper than putting an infrastructure in place that can support the amount of service they've (over)sold.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
If you'd (wait for it!...) read the article you would have seen the example given in Canada; Sympatico, run by Bell, has recently done this very thing. 5 GB cap. Go over the limit.. and they dock ya.
I personally know a few people who were incensed enough about this to flee to the only other broadband provider in Canada, Rogers... which also has a tiered plan in effect. The difference is that Rogers will pinch the connection after a certain data-rate has been sustained for an unspecified period of time (basically warez kiddies snarking something off LimeWire). But it's not capped. Thus, the lesser of two evils.
But yeah, it's real today.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
It's true that cable and ISDN ISPs are trying to change their fee structure to make more money.
Of course they are. Just like a car salesman or a cellular phone plan, their goal is to make the deal as complex as possible to prevent you, the customer, from understanding just how you are getting ripped off.
Sadly, the solution is not to somehow force companies to provide service for flat fees, but to embrace the whipping boy of bandwidth hogs, pay-per-byte.
If you download 100KB, you pay $.0001. If you download 1MB, you pay $.001. If you download Suse 8.1, you pay $.60.
Of course, you say, that sucks because right now you are getting your Internet subsidized by the yuppies next door who only read Slate and Salon, and don't ever trade music or download linux distributions. Get used to it. You will get screwed, eventually, whether you notice it or not.
Paying for your bytes is the only path to useful competition in this market.
Chris Owens
San Carlos, CA
They'll need their wage slaves in Washington to outlaw a million competing technologies; for instance, how about 802.11 WAPs with T1's in every neighborhood? If the cable restrictions get too intense/expensive, the data (and bandwidth subscriptions) will just go around them.
Everyone will start to cheer when you put on your sailin' shoes.
Drop $100-200 bucks a month on commercial internet service. Then they let you do pretty much whatever you want :)
Jack Valenti and the MPAA are to technology as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone
or Pringle's will smack down your ass under the DMCA!
Sheesh, this is starting to make Max Headroom look like a sane future.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Surely you jest.
How many people run their own DNS servers (or point to ones other than those provided by their ISP)? How hard do you think it is to redirect the "wrong" sites to never-never land?
Even if people have their own routers, how hard do you think it is to install firewall rules in the routers just upstream from the customers to block any packets going to those "wrong" sites? Or to rewrite the IP header so that the traffic is directed to a new location? You suggest proxies, but how many people do you think will know how to set this up? Or that the ISP won't block all proxies, or sites that discuss proxies, ad nauseaum.
Bottom line: it would be trivial for an ISP to control what part of the internet you can see. They haven't bothered because it's still too much effort for the payoff, but don't think for an instant that it's hard to do.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
MSN and Disney together at last!
I called RoadRunner and asked them point blank:
Can I run a web or email server on my computer when I am connected to the Internet?
Their official response:
It is against our acceptable usage policy to run servers while connected to the internet.
My official response:
Where can I bring my cable modem back to?
I've since switched to DirectDSL, and am thoroughly enjoying the ability to run whichever servers I choose to, for the same cost per month as cable.
"To make a mistake is only human; to persist in a mistake is idiotic." Cicero
First, while I see why the author is concerned, the article is long on fud short on supportive substance on how the industry wants to control the consumer other than stopping bandwidth hogs and abuse with P2P systems.
The immediate issue is that there isn't a viable economic model that allows anyone to sell you a 1.54 megabits of bandwidth for what a residential customer can afford or would pay. Unfortunately, the cable companies have only themselves to blame for this situation by giving people just that and then trying to figure out how to make money at it after the fact.
All you can eat pricing only works where there's some form of physical limitation to the level of consumption. In a restaurant, it's the size of a person's stomach. In the Internet world, it was formerly the limits of dial-up.
While it seems entirely unfair that the cable companies would want some form of tiered pricing, it's a fact of life. There's no reason that someone who downloads 200 gigabytes of data per month should pay the same low rate for someone that uses their broadband connection to hang out on Slashdot, check out a little porn, read their email and move along with their life. In fact, I argue that permitting this type of use without charging more for it is patently unfair to the low-level users.
The other thing the high-consumption bandwith users need to consider is that the cable companies hope to woo in the customers that wouldn't mind the speed boost, but do not use the Internet enough to justify paying more than $20 per month. The cable companies need this customer desperately, and without these customers the high-consumption customer is going to be faced with paying even more for their connectivity.
One thing that the article does not mention is that there does appear to be some form of attempt by Comcast to stop people from using VPNs on their network. Sometimes VPN software works, sometimes it doesn't. Calls to their support desk is met with "that's an unsupported software feature, you need to get a business account". Too bad it wasn't discussed in the article, because that is a disturbing trend in providing network access. It seems to me that what ports you use and what software you use is immaterial to providing an Internet connection. Although, we all know why Comcast would prevent the use of VPNs.
It's pretty evident that you don't have the slightest idea what "monopoly" means here. If there's a cable company, a DSL provider, a dial-up provider, a satellite provider, and a cellular dial-up provider, then there's not exactly a monopoly, is there?
I write in my journal
Exactamundo.
In the Texas Panhandle, it's flat. Really, really flat. It's so flat, that on a clear day, you can look off at the horizon and see all 360 degress of it... faded blue depending on the humidity, but there nonetheless.
Now, what do you need for a good wireless connection? A flat, unobstructed line-of-sight to an antenna or a repeater.
Heh... by sticking atennas and repeaters on top of granaries, water towers, and high buildings, wireless ISPs in Amarillo and the surrounds are getting *amazing* distances with their wireless shots. You can drive 30-40 miles away and still get a good clean connection via a pingle-can antenna. Thusly, Wireless is taking off in a big way here. A good number of the people I work with are already using wireless as their main form of bandwidth and out and out refuse to go back to cable. Most everyone else is actively considering switching. Those who are considering other forms of broadband bandwidth are going to DSL and not cable.
Cable companies and media conglomerates are screaming and making a big fucking deal out of a non-existant problem in the name of gelaning control. What it boils down to is that the technology is changing too rapidly for them to effectively impliment any kind of contols. Sure, they can nail some of the areas in the U.S. where it's impossible to get DSL or wireless, but they can't go everywhere. If my understanding is correct, DSL is getting cheaper and cheaper, and wireless is getting better and better. Cable is a flash in the pan. A bright flash, but a flash in the pan nonetheless.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
I've said it before: Earthlink is a great ISP. I've had DSL with them for two years without any problems: no port blocking, bandwidth issues or restrictions, or major outages. Their customer service is the best I've ever found in any company, and their tech support is almost as good. They don't fully support Linux, but they don't have a problem with it either. I get a static IP address, and not only do they not block any incoming ports, they specifically advertise it as being good for running game servers and web sites. (the static IP is an extra $15/month). With DSL, I don't have any of the bandwith-sharing or security issues of "let's throw the neighborhood on a subnet" cable modems, and I only need one network card in my gateway.
I wouldn't touch one of those broadband ISPs with a ten-foot pole. The only thing better would be a real colocation for my server (and I'd need DSL anyway) or a commercial account.
hey man! quit it :-) honestly, i don't know where people get the equivalent of a car payment to pay the cartel for broadband? It's amazing... where's the milk and honey faucet already?
Does this mean we'll have to pay both Comcast AND the White House to view the content?
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Didn't you read the article? We're always ending up as guinea pigs for the US experiments :)
AC comments get piped to
Fascinating! Where can I learn more? This is the way news should be told.
If only there were more brave souls out there who would tell this story the way it should be told. Alas, Slashdot is crawling with idiots who don't understand the importance of this one simple message. Man-juice! Man-juice! Man-juice! Man-juice for all!
Hide the children!
Everyone is all up in arms about how the evil cable companies are going to charge us for the bandwidth we use. The fact of the matter, is that every other internet industry has always been doing this. I know the colocation I have charges a per GB fee of transfer, and I know anyone who has been /.ed, had a large site link to them, or just has a high traffic server knows this.
You have to figure, $45.95 per month for a 1.5mbit/s connection by 256kbit/s connection. Let's put this in prospective shall we? Standard T-1 through XO for a 1 Year contract is $800 for 1.544/1.544, with an SLA. You are paying 1/17th of that cost, for your connection. People complain that it isn't always up, that it slows down, that this and that happen. Well, for 1/17th the price, I'm of the opinion, that if you get 1/17th the service, it's worth it. I know that my cable doesn't go down, and that I don't cause problems for my Cable Internet Provider.
I also know that I am one of the individuals that is going to get hit pretty hard over the Pay-As-You-Go kinda deal for bandwidth, because I use 200 to 500GB a month of BW. It's the people like me (and there are lots of us!) that cause comapanies to go out of business. It's like a person with a huge appitite going to a buffet and eating 50 times more than the standard person does. Because people, a "typical" broadband user uses it go check their e-mail, and get to CNN... Fast. Not to download warez, and mp3's like a mad monkey.
Just think about the logic of charging people for what you use, and you will totally understand where I am coming from.
Fundamentalism stops a thinking mind.
I wonder how this will effect MMORPGs? It seems to me that most of the people who play these games spend a good deal of time on the net. Hopefully Sony/Verant and Lucas Arts will see that this could eat into their profits and maybe make a stand against it.
It sounds like they're merely taking control of their networks.
Nothing to see here; Michael hit the panic button prematurely. Had this been a real emergency you would have been instructed to write your congressman.
And I've recently been capped at 20 K upload speed, ruining my career as a p2p pir8...
It may turn out all the industry fears of piracy are unfounded and the legislation unnecessary when ISPs themselves are killing the illicit trade just to keep costs down.
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
..they'd probably be downloading a lot less.
It shouldn't matter one bit what you download. You don't have to like what I do, and I don't have to like what you do. If someone pays for unlimited internet access, then that's that, end of story. Bob down the street can play Quake all day long online, Jim can download movies 24/7, and you can read all the webpages you want, or whatever. People pay for unlimited service, so don't worry about what they're doing. If you paid for unlimited service, use it if you want to!
This article is right on and really gets my blood boiling. More evidence that the FCC simply doles out favors to corporations, violates the priniciples of individual and citizen interest, and is wholly not concerned with the future of communications technology. This is corporate welfare taken to its most extensive and disgusting manifestation.
Powell and his cronies argue its a "market dynamics" or "laissez-faire" approach, but in fact it is an active and structural campaign to lock out small business, individuals, and minority group interests. When you combine these efforts with the DMCA, the P2P disruption campaign, and the overstated concern for the "menacing hacker," you have a hoodwinked population and more corporate executives with fat pockets.
GetTheJob.com : Nothing but Real Jobs.
But beyond political and press circles are another equally important development: new technologies being developed and embraced that can, in practice, transform today's open Internet into a new industry-regulated system that will prevent or discourage people from using the net for file-sharing, internet radio and video, and peer-to-peer communications.
So internet providers, who set their no-state limit pricing structure on an estimate of how much bandwidth each user would be using, have discovered people like my roomate who download over 10 gigs a day on a 1.5/126 up connection and want to make an adjustment to compensate for this.
Consider that if everyone used the net like my roomate did, the rate that we pay would be much higher, and that if everyone on the used the net that like I did, the rate would be about where it is (some Net radio, a lot of games and a lot of Xboxing, etc.)
Recall back in the day when internet connections billed by the hour? Competition took care of that. And if consumers are smart and shop around (most places have the options between a cable provider and several DSL providers), they may be able to maintain being bandwidth hogs. Or folks may just wind up paying for what they use, sort of like the city charges for water. What's wrong with that?
How much bandwidth is consumed by a night's play on an online game like Everquest? Could it be that bandwidth is being taken, not by file downloaders, but by the many online games that are now popular, and have people logged on all night every night -- sometimes with many computers hooked up to one connection?
and their motto free internet for life. According to their commercials you can still use them for $9.99/month. Hey, wait a minute...?
Where does this say Cable Companies? How does this not include the other Broadband ISPs such as DSL, or wireline/fibreline or COLO ISPs.
There are many real needs to manage bandwidth as it enters or leaves your network, regardless of what level of infrastructure you maintain.
By grooming some traffic or assigning QOS policies to others, it is possible for any ISP to provide a better level of service to their customers in general. I say possible, because in real world situations I hardly see the benefit of such a system outweighing the costs of the system and its impact. The Ellacoya software does nothing more than a collection of other similar products achieve, it is just bundled in one package.
I don't see it heing difficult to block AOL/Time-Warners competitors from their network without fancy packages such as this, and if they wanted to, they would have already, and it would have been blatantly obvious to anyone on their service.
Fascinatinga! Wherae cana Ia alearn more? aThis is the way naews shaould be taold.
If only thaere were more barave souals out there who woauld tell thais story the way it should be told. Alaas, Slashadot is crawling with idiots who don't undaerstand the imporatance of this one simple messaage. Man-juaice! Man-juice! Man-juice! Man-juaice for all!
Are his numbers flawed? Granted that America Online, being the largest provider of ersatz access to the general public, is in bed with Time Warner, a major media (cable included) provider, but am I wrong in thinking that the cable industry does not offer the largest amount of net access? (Especially that many users are still using dialup, for the fact that they just can't afford broadband.)
In all reality, the site given sounds like a tabloid. If I want drek that predicts the death of the 'net, I know where to find it.
This sig no verb.
I don't mind paying for what I use. If I use a ton of bandwidth then I should have to pay for it; it's how most companies pay their upstream ISP. It's how I pay for phone or for power.
Having said that, if I'm paying my $5 per GB, I'd damn well be able to use that bandwidth for whatever I deem necessary. The part of the article that makes me nervous is the talk of redirecting requests and the like. Not good...
For starters, I think this guy needs a lesson in bits versus bytes in his net radio rant. Of course, that fact that nobody follows a 'b' = bits and 'B' = bytes convention doesn't help, either. 20kBps is 1.2MB per minute. And 20kBps net radio is damn good if you ask me.
I guess this guy's never priced a real connection to the internet. Bandwidth is just expensive. Now, I have no idea why it's that way - seems like it shouldn't be - but it is. Our business DSL line costs us $220/mo for 768kbps symetric. That fact that that same line costs me $70/mo at home is because my ISP knows that our business line is going to do more throughput that my home line. It's factored into the price that the expected behaviours are different.
Now, when people with consumer DSL/cable/etc. connections start behaving like business customers in their usage patterns, telcos start to put the brakes on and say "You need to be paying business-grade prices of you're doing business-grade traffic." What's so wrong about this that it gets every geek up in arms?
If you're going to be keeping the line at capacity >10% of the time, you deserve to pay for it. Any real connection you pay 95th percentile bandwidth charges (that means you pay for your actual metered usage, minus the top 5% of the measurements). And if you're pulling ISOs and MP3s and warez and porn over that, you're gonna get a bill that you may not like.
But...if I've got a 768kbps line that I use for web surfing and email and SSH sessions into work when something breaks, I don't really feel like paying the same amount as you. I say "Bring on the metered lines!" It won't raise my bill - I'm actually using the line the way the telco expects. I've got a line that's 12 times the speed of my old modem for about 4 times the cost. And I certainly do more than 4 times the transfers that I used to. But not 50 times or more.
So, to end my rant, I just wanna know why people think they shouldn't have to pay the actual costs of their transfers. Prices for high-speed connections via cable/DSL are SO low compared to what business-grade connections (T1, etc.) cost. Just be grateful you can afford 5GB/mo in the first place. Try pulling that over your modem.
This thread reminds me of some truly atrocious 'terms of use' in the most recent AT&T Broadband policy, including e.g. terms limiting your number of machines, even limiting who can use those machines to family members, and allowing them to re-publish any data you send or receive at their discretion. Perhaps someone can whip out their contract and post some of the gory details?
They don't seem to charge me extra for watching HBO for a 1/2 a day, or for 24 hours straight. Sounds like an infrastructure problem.
"Simon Says, Fuck You" - George Carlin
My cable company (Charter) has implemented Tiered pricing -- however, they are NOT doing it by gigabytes per month. Instead they have implemented a speed tier:
:)
256Kb/s down -- approx. $20/month
768Kb/s down -- approx. $30/month
1.5Mb/s down -- approx. $40/month
the upload is capped at 128Kb/s for all tiers I believe.
This strategy allows the heavy bandwidth users to choose the fast connection (and pay for it) while the "check your email and look at tomorrows weather on the 'net" person can choose the cheaper options. It's a good comprimise, IMHO -- and you aren't penalized if a new version of redhat comes out
eat away at your limit? Just think of how much you would hate spam then...
Whenever somethong like this comes along, the debate degenerates into one side exaggerating their "right" to cheap, fast service versus the other trumpeting the miracle of capitalism and dubbing the complainers "whiners."
... in a nascent field like broadband, the absence of competition can only increase cable company profits. Whether they tighten the screws on bandwidth usage or not is irrelevant: the abiding problem is that either the low-bandwidth users are being overcharged, or the networks are overbuilt, or the wide-bandwidth users are getting a free ride. I would suspect a little of each to be true, and that in most cases the cable company comes out farther ahead that it "should" in a competitive market.
... which were monopolies not all that long ago. Remember how improvements like fiber-optics burst on the scene when AT&T was chopped up? I bet the internet was an incidental benficiary of that -- of competition.
But the just objective is fairness. The way economic freedom is most efficiently pursued is regulated competition. The buyers and sellers may want to cheat each other, but competition means each is more likely to get what's fair.
The problem is that you can't say free-market, problem solved. One of the biggest stumbling blocks is monopoly, and cable is one of our most familiar non-public monopolies. We happen use a cable modem (having switched from DSL on price) and its reliability and performance happen to be very good. Yet I wonder what unimagined options we might get if there were any competition. Although we can also access DSL, many in this country can't, and DSL isn't the same thing as cable anyway (our cable, for one has much faster dowstream of over 5 Mbps, another reason for our switch). Then there is also satellite, but as the recent FTC block of the DirectTV/Echostar merger illustrates, competition in the sky is already very limited as well. Then there is often the equipment to buy or abandon when getting or leaving satellite.
So
I believe the common problem to be monopoly and the resulting absence of multiple, competitively-priced package plan providers such as we have in conventional long-distance telephones
There, how many times did I use the word "competition"? I get $5 for each one from the Competition Institute for Competitive Competing Competitors.
Without a doubt...the donkey in the whole situation in this system are the providers, cutting to many corners to put a shitty infrastructure to too many users. If you scale your services, they will come (tm)
"Simon Says, Fuck You" - George Carlin
to be fair, i have apt stuff in cron so my debian box is constanly updated...but usually the sizes of the packages are small...untill a new stable is released and i have to do a dist-upgrade...but that's rare.
in any case...this looks to me like a bit of FUD...wow...FUD on ./??? i never thought i would see the day ;-)
-frozen -frozen
I'm not always the brightest pixel in the stream
The main issue is the ability of the end user to get access to the backbones of the Net.
When the ability to hook up is a monopoly (like cable, where no 3rd party company is permitted to provide access over the cable company's coax), there is no competition incentive. All these "problematic" uses for the Net get banned, and there's no where else to go.
The situation is not much better with DSL, since the 3rd party providers are at the mercy of the Bells, and are pretty limited to what they can provide because of it.
The air, however, isn't owned by anyone (regulated, yes, but not property). If technology can allow for fast, reliable, two-way Net access through airspace, this removes the telco & cable companies' ability to ignore these undesirable Net services. If they start to lose too many subscribers to over-the-air providers, they will have to back off on the restrictions.
Note that the tone of the article was not an issue of cost: it was an issue of what you are *allowed* to do on the Net *regardless* of cost. If the telcos and cable providers are allowed to continue, they simply will stop permitting P2P usage on their lines, with no option to turn it on (they would rather kill high-bandwidth usage than bother to administer its usage).
End result: if we have other high-speed options, Net access will cost more (as it likely should), but at least we will still have the freedom to do as we wish. But if we do not get other options (through restrictive regulations, likely at the request of the copyright industries), then the article is bang-on.
Look at the tomato! Isn't it sad? He can't dance! Poor tomato!
I am a DSL tech for a insert big company name that used to be GTE and not all DSL has to use PPPOE
Beware the fury of a patient man
- John Dryden
is absolute poetry.
Bandwidth limitations are bullshit. In the age of multi gigabit fiber connections and the ability to multiplex connections across a single strand of fiber, there is no reason to limit bandwidth. Hell, half the fiber in the US is dark, all because the Bells and the cable companies want to suck the money well dry. Now, they want to eliminate unlimited usage all together.
Here is an idea, if you have a monthly cap of 5GB, then rate limit your connection.
5GB/month = 170.67MB/day = 7.12MB/hour = 121.37KB/min = 16Kbps
There you go. Just rate limit to 15Kbps and you will never go above your limit, even if used 24 x 7 x 365. Makes that 56k modem look even better.
I don't think there's as much to worry about as this article indicates. In a free market, tiered plans that are overpriced and overly restricted will ultimately fail to competition. People in small markets might be hurt for a little while until competition moves in, but it is only a matter of time.
There are actually two providers here in Columbus now that have tiered plans but they're both based on throughput, not total monthly bandwidth used. In fact, it's actually pretty sweet. One of the companies offers 150kbs down and 75kbs up for $4.95 per month. Their "power user" package is 1.5mbit down and 300k up for $15.95. One of my friends is going to try it out for a month or two and compare it to roadrunner. I guarantee if it's as good as it sounds, half my office will be switching within a month.
It's actually tempting to grab the lower tiered service and adjust to the slower speed just for the price savings. $4.95 is stupid cheap for broadband internet acess.
Imagine that in a small community (eg. a college) you could P2P over the air with UWB, without the need to involve any other company network.
Transmission should be encrypted and the bandwidth is virtually unlimited...
Who needs the cable companies, let's turn our computer into routers...
...richie - It is a good day to code.
It's my 400th post, so I thought I'd make a totally offtopic post on whatever topic was at the top of the page.
Happy 400th post to me!
Happy 400th post to me!
Well, that doesn't even match syllables with the bidrthday song does it?
11*43+456^2
You really should try thinking more than 4 times a year.
If you have to receive the ad into your pc for it to be blocked ( most, if not all, of those programs function that way currently ) then it wont help you a bit.
You just use up your monthly bandwidth allocation for things you dont see..
what needs to be done would be more like a policy where you wont be docked for incoming spam/popups/virus/etc..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
We've touched on this before, but this issue needs a lot of attention and it has gotten very little from the mainstream press.
AOL/TimeWarner IS the mainstream press. They're not going to publicize this stuff! Their competition won't, either, only because they have similar plans/motives. If we're lucky, AOL will bankrupt the corporation and there will be a deluge of ex-internet users who need new accounts. A new ISP boom, even. Realistically, we the enlightened will eventually be compelled into AOL/TW's ISP consumer base through some shoddy legislation.
main(){char I,l,O[]={'-',1-1,0,(1<<5)-1,0+'-',-10-1,-10,11-0,
This take it or leave it attitude is exactly why most people are not switching to broadband even though they have cable and phone access in their homes. I find it very irritating to shop for rates on service just to find out that there is only one person in my area and they will do everything in their power to keep it that way.
I may have misconstrued notions of cable broadband, but for rural and suburban areas, There is usually a single option with inflated prices. Woohoo, I can choose Screwyou broadband or nothing at all... hmmmm...
And lets not get into customer service! You might as well send a letter to the company. It will probably arrive there before you get off of hold.
This is just my experience.. Your mileage will vary.
| - | - |
Time to take advantage of non-descriminatory pricing laws and start your own local network.
Seriously, it bothers me like mad that our political climate allows corporations to usurp public networks, but the best way to combat it is to compete. Get 50 people in your neighborhood together and split the cost of a T1.
Want to stop me from sending music files? Movies?Whatever?
They have to understand they won't be able to have as much control as they did before. Computers programmers will be able to write programs that go around any restriction
Computers are an amazingly powerfull tool in people's hand, and they let people do what they want.
The solution for controllers is to go straight to the hardware, which MS/Palladium & co understood...Hopefully to late.
And eventually *all* of those connections will be metered too.. Eventually..
It may sound impossible, but once the idea of paying for bandwidth *usage* is commonplace for private citizens, it will migrate to the business world.
Much like it was when this whole online ( non BBS ) experience firsts started.. or has everyone forgot about that? X hours a month for $ then you got cut off totally.. or paid ungodly fees per minute.
Sort of what we do with cell phones now.. Hmmm nothing new here i guess. Enjoy it while we still can.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
And yes, believe it or not there are bandwidth hogs out there.
RR tries to use a decent connection to the internet...but with idiots out there running IIS and Code Red (what's a web server?) and Windows machines (Broadcasting on Port 137), my firewall box is blazing day and night. (no traffic on the INSIDE...but damn, there's traffic on the outside).
Try to connect to a real server and watch your latency. (Sorry, time out error---try again, gee it's there!) I won't even try online games anymore.
(I'm this close to going to DSL.)
The thing that cable providers as well as any ISP is trying to do, or more correctly HAS done, is turned the internet into a "consumer" experience. By that I mean the internet is heading to more of a cable tv model. That model means crappy service and less innovation.
The true potential of the internet will never blossom if bandwidth continues to be so expensive and hard to come by. Even with cable providers, God forbid you want upload something regardless of what it is. Your ability to produce or upload content threatens any future revenue stream they have. I'm not saying you should be able to run a million hit a day website for $50 from home, but the constant pressure and threats to reduce bandwidth to consumers has a chilling effect on their ability to produce and distribute content which is not commercial or self funding. There are so many things besides P2P copyrighted music sharing that could occur, but won't because your expected to poney up the big bucks for hosting.
Ask yourself, why would any company invest in a product that requires lots of upstream capacity on the consumers part? They won't and that's the problem. Beyond webcams or some lame VOIP attempts, what innovation has been happening in the consumer broadband space in the past several years? None. Whose to blame? You guessed it.
The Non "big business/commercial" side of the internet is stagnating and going downhill. Currently P2P is setup for MP3 and file trading, does anyone else see why this is only a fraction of what could be possible?
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
No, the word is oligopoly.
Or do you maintain that it's a coincidence that cable, dsl, and satellite access each cost $44.95/month here?
Envy my 5 digit Slashdot User ID!
over $150/mo for dual ISDN 64kbps+56kbps+8kbps
And then you want to share it?
I don't know how, but we need some kind of standard for internet service.
When someone buys internet service, it should be like phone service; a set standard of protocols, and a class of service (how bandwidth is allocated). This should be made clear from the beginning.
Your telephone company doesn't tell you who you can phone and who you can't, but they cna tell you how much it will cost to call different places, and they are required to keep this somewhat clear.
Practices no ISP should be using:
1) Filtering incoming traffic.
- I pay for access to the internet; not parts of it
2) Transparent HTTP proxies that you can't turn off. This would be fine if they were truly transparent, but many try to resolve the domain in the headers. This is a problem. What if I'm not using the same dns system as them. I've been accessing some sites in development using a hosts file entry only, and the transparent proxy refuses to fetch the page because it thinks it doesn't exist)
3) Filtering incoming or outgoing ports and protocols.
Alternative solutions:
1) Make bandwidth more expensive. Provide proxies and such as a way to REDUCE your expense (use our proxy, and the bandwidth you use will be added to your total at 50% off). They could even make money on this.
2) Don't tell me what I can and can't do, just charge me for it accordingly. The ISP should not care if I run a mail server or a dns server; they should only care about their traffic.
3) Offer filtering and such as optional services for users. Let them turn them off and on at will. It's fine to filter common things to prevent problems with your users, but let me turn it off if I want to.
This seems like a big circle to me. People either face paying artifically high prices for music, movies and software or use p2p apps to download them for free. Internet access drops in price and increases in speed, allowing people to download more at a lesser cost instead of purchasing them. Corporations see this and raise internet prices and increase their strength to control and charge for features and bandwith. Not to mention the increased size in software, music and movie files that people are getting from their p2p services, which increases the amount of bandwith taken by each user.
If you look back this cycle started back when BBS's were popular spots to download files and programs. Then the internet came and created a global network to share files, programs, and information. Im sure this will repeat itself again when technology creates the next best thing to share these same things.
Maybe if the prices for these goods was reduced to more realistic levels people would have less of a reason to download them over p2p networks. But that would never happen, since its in the corporations interests to squeeze their customers for every penny they can.
I wish.
Uh, is it just me, or does anyone else remember the days of acccusing people with 8 line sigs or those who mindlessly copied the entire message of emails without [snipping] into their replies of being bandwidth hogs?
KT --must be getting old
I install cable modem termination systems in mostly small communities (30-500 users) with the local cable operator. Typically, they have 1-2 T1's coming to the property and redistribute this bandwidth through a cable modem system.
Now, the cable modem system can handle around 27-38Mbps on the downstream channel and around 2.5Mbps on the upstream channel (yes, there are systems with multiple upstreams, but they are less common). And upstream overloads will strangle your downstream.
One of my latest installs in the midwest had a single T1 and 42 users. Within a week, customers were calling the operator to complain about download speeds. When we checked the logs, we found that 2 (two) users had UPLOADED > 40 GIGABYTES in less than a week. Can anyone say Kazaa!
Obviously we had to limit their upstream capability to make the system work for everyone else.
Now, where I live, I also have a cable modem. I consistently get 2-3Mbps download speeds (and I limit my P2P use to less than 5 hrs/week) and yet, my provider chose to eliminate newsgroups (and not just alt.binaries, but also all computer/linux etc related - none!!!). I have not noticed anything else being blocked, so I can't really complain.
The point here is, that it all depends. If you have the bandwidth, let em rip. But if you don't, you have to impose some rules to make it a good experience for everybody. An don't nickel and dime them to death. Put that energy into getting lower prices from telco's for T1's.
From the first day cable companies came on the scene with broadband, it has been apparent that they have wanted to change the internet from a democratic peer-to-peer communication medium into a gatekeeper-controlled broadcast medium.
You need to look no further than the lopsided access to bandwidth: fast (1.5 Mbps) coming into your house, slower going out. Oh sure, the outgoing connection wasn't all that slow (initially 256 kbps, and recently cut down to 128 kbps) but there were so many restrictions on the use of that outgoing bandwidth that it eliminated the promise of the internet as a two-way communication medium. You can browse corporate websites at high speed (perhaps even higher on the sites of their corporate friends that they cache) but communicate directly in real-time with your friends, family and neighbors? Hah! Forget it.
Imagine you have a special telephone in your house. The phone company won't let you use it to call your family, friends and neighbors, but you can call the phone numbers of corporations. It seems to be easier to call certain corporations. And when you start talking, you notice that for every sentence you hear, you can reply with only one word.
Welcome to the new internet.
Big business wants to control EVERYTHING! Their mantra is: If we can't make $$ from it, kill it! Also, the govt. is so corrupt that they're partners in this plan. C'mon..this shit has been going on for years! I don't know if any of you read last week's L.A. Times article where a VP of Enron admitted that they deliberately created an electric shortage in California during the summer of 2000 to raise electric prices. Not only that, but the (now proven fake) shortage resulted in rolling blackouts, which caused inconvenience at best and were downright dangerous at worst. Sempra Energy just announced record profits because the rates in CA SKYROCKETED thanks to this. My monthly bill went from 45 bucks a month to 72, with no increase in usage. Look, big corporations want to rape consumers. Paid off politicians LOVE to HELP them do it! Until consumers begin empowering themselves (ie: tossing the dirty pols out of office) the trend will just keep going.
I have broadband, but it occurs to me that, really, what is the point! ...more than half the pageviews I make come from slashdot, and what with the /. effect and all, my cable modem is usually no faster than dialup, as somewhere a server screams silently to itself. </humor>
---
the pen is mightier than the sword, the sword is mightier than the court, the court is mightier than the pen.
Aside from DSL, the most obvious solution I can come up with is: get your apartment building or townhouse community or neighborhood chipping in together, buying a T1 and splitting it out to everyone, either by wireless or running Cat-5.
DirecTV sells Satellite Internet service. High latency, but that's not really a problem for web, email and usenet. ISDN is still an option, too.
I see the future as wireless, though. You can find out right now whether it's feasible. Call the phone company up and ask them exactly how much it would cost to get a T-1 line to your house. Get pricing on routers, wireless access points and such. Put a flier together, distribute it to your neighbors, asking them how much they would be willing to spend for fast access. A wireless access point with strategically placed antennas can go pretty far. I've seen people say they've gone as much as 4 miles. If you get 20 people ready to go for $50, you could be making money within a couple of months. There are solutions. (The downside in this case is: Who provides tech support? Could be a problem, depending on your neighbors.)
Everyone likes to complain about cable companies being monopolies, but I'm not sure they qualify in the Internet access business. Can't believe the phone companies would let an opportunity slip by, if they saw a bunch of people ready to leave cable companies. I know that Sky Dayton (Scientologist head of Earthlink) is working heavily on getting wireless everywhere.
Well at CNN an article talks about how America is starting to fall a little behind in areas of IT. A big focus is on how all these companies are bickering about price's and trying to squeeze as much money as possible out of the consumer. Any how I know you can get DSL in some European countries at a cheap price. Hell in Germany you can get a 256Kps connection for 14 Euros/month, and Italy can get you a ADSL 256K with modem and all for 35 Euros/month!
This SIG pulled due to lack of funding. (This damn war is costing too much!)
If the cable companies want to go to a tiered payment system, they should give more options.
I'd happily pay more for superior service if it were offered.
Those who choose to pay $100 a month should expect to be able to do more, have less blocked ports, etc. that would make the price worth it. They should have less of a cap on their connections than those who pay $40.
These will be the people running fileservers, using remote connections to/from work, and so forth.
Most of the users who pay $40 won't know the difference, since they'll be the 90% who are using less than 10% of the bandwidth. They'll use it for web surfing, email, and perhaps an occasional video or music file download or online game.
Cable companies claim that the 10% minority "bandwidth hogs" slurping up 90% of "available bandwidth" is f'ing up their system? Funny that, since a good number of their owners and CEOs are part of the 10% minority of Americans slurping up 90% of the wealth...
Tell you what, I'll submit to 5GB per month when they agree to $100K per year.
"When it rains, it pours." --Morton's Salt
I have ATT cable and live in SLC, UT and have heard nothing about any kind of different rate plan than what I pay now. 50 bucks is a little steep for the DL speeds I get. It's better than I dialup I guess.
Hold up, wait a minute, let me put some pimpin in it
Let's assume that half of them are on at any given time (20)...that's 77k per user (1544000/20), barely faster then Dial up! I'd be complaining too if I were them!
"If there's a cable company, a DSL provider, a dial-up provider, a satellite provider, and a cellular dial-up provider, then there's not exactly a monopoly, is there?"
Unless, of course, they're all owned by the same people. AT&T is selling cable service and Cox is selling telephone service when last I checked. (And the FCC is worried about EchoStar buying DirecTV?!?)
And then there's the fact that some of these companies can and do abuse their monopolies in other areas while competing as an ISP. "Sign up with our (telephone/cable/etc.) service and get 'free' internet service!" Where "free" means "paid for by jacked up telephone/cable service prices."
Surely you jest. They won't report what their corporate masters don't want them to report.
If a "few" cable users are using excessive bandwidth, how much is too much, and what percentage of the users are "abusing"? Methinks this a a brilliant (unfounded) excuse to jack up our fees while cracking down on access to competitive high bandwidth applications (its OK to watch AT&T sponsored video (for a fee) but not OK to watch a competitor's...) I might be convinced there is a problem if the data is provided to prove it (I am not holding my breath). Lacking convincing data, this is likely a ruse to control and extort (not that this is a new objective when someone controls resource access). This sounds like it is (at the moment) limited to cable ISPs. I hope my alternate options of DSL or 2-way satellite will allow me to drop my cable service if they try to cut me off.
Hey - Norm Crosby has a slashdot account! OK, about 4 people will get this.
Missed the point didn't you?
Yea if you have all the above then you don't have a monopoly. However most people don't, and the point was where ever you turn your going to run into a monopoly. Regardless of form.
The cable providers better cash out while they can because the future doesn't have cables and will be carrier free.
$G
-- $G
Coincidence? Of course not. It's the same reason that a gallon of gas costs about $1.20, plus or minus a dime, at every filling station in town. That's the price that the market will bear.
"Oligopoly" implies that there's collusion going on. That's a pretty strong statement to make, Paul.
I write in my journal
read the article, the last 3 paragraphs about the FCC. Chairman Michael Powell decided that cable companies are not common carriers.
it hasn't begun to suck. just wait, cable operators are going to ruin everything.
A lot of apartment complexes used to run their own TV cable. They'd set up their own dishes and sell their own cable service. Of course it sucked because they had a limited number of channels. Digital cable kinda killed it off.
But the internet doesn't have that limitation. So what's stopping an apartment complex from running in a T1 or T3 and popping up a wireless network they can sell to residents?
That's not an abuse of monopoly power, any more than a McDonalds giving away free french fries with every Happy Meal. It's absolutely okay for a company that sells two products or services to offer customers incentives to buy both of their products or services rather than just one.
I write in my journal
It's always been my contention that the current economic model used for the Internet is fundamentally flawed, and that some form of "pay-per-bit" is inevitable. Anybody familiar with "The Tragedy of the Commons" want to explain to me why that principle doesn't apply to the 'Net? Bandwidth is neither infinite nor free; at somepoint, people need to be discouraged from grabbing as much as they can, otherwise our ping times will be measured in minutes. Why do we take it as a given that the Granny checking her email once a week should pay the same as the student hosting a huge peer-to-peer file sharing node up 24/7? Next you'll be telling me that bicylists should pay the same road use fees as semis...
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
And how many of those media outlets have interlocking "content" deals? Let's see, Washington Post (which owns Newsweek) is in a content partnership with MSNBC/MSN News. CNN is of course AOLTW and is seriously talking about a shared-news partnership with ABC/Disney.
NY Times and NYT-owned papers (e.g. Boston Globe) have similar content partnerships.
And since when do the "three major broadcast stations (sic) here in the US get their stories from the New York Times"? The major Networks (not stations) get their stories in part from their own news staffs - such as NBC (GE-owned, MSFT-partner) News, ABC (Disney-owned, future AOLTW/CNN partner), and CBS News (Viacom/Paramount Pictures/MTV/UPN).
Every one of them has a parent or partner with good reason to put limits on content, bandwidth, and on all us "bandwidth hogs".
Associated Press reports are typically supplements to the news, not the main content of the news (except for tiny low-budget "rip and read" stations), and the "associated" part of it in many cases means stories contributed by stations and papers which are subscribers/members of AP.
No, it's not at all surprising that the mainstream media ignores this issue.
I live in Columbus, Ohio, just North of the Ohio State University. It is a middle class neighborhood built in the 1920s and full of OSU profs, Ohio civil servents, etc. We are lucky in that we have 3 last mile pipes in the neighborhood. Time-Warner and Wide Open West each offer cable/internet and SBC offers phone service w/ several DSL offerings (SBC, Earthlink, Speakeasy). The Time-Warner cable lines also have at least three ISPs offering service (AOL, Road Runner, and Earthlink). I buy my ISP service from Time-Warner. I've read several articles like this one and I have my doubts that the apoclypse is near.
First, the current Time-Warner service is quite good. The system runs nearly 24/7. I have seen only 2-3 outages lasting about 4 hours each since I bought the service about 3 years ago. My electric service from AEP has been less reliable than this (the 1920s era electric wires in the neighborhood can't handle the load increase from all of the computers and other new electric gadgets). I work from home and only one of the ISP outages caused a minor inconvenience with a customer deadline. Second, the bandwidth is plenty enough to meet my needs - mostly surfing for manual pages and news stories and dl of source code and the occasional shn concert. The bandwidth only seems to slow a bit when kids get out of school in the afternoon and I suspect that the occasional slow speed I see when retriving files is due to bandwidth limitations on the server side, not my local pipe. The so-called "bandwidth hogs" are not causing me any problems. Third, I run the odd service or two on the box in my dmz and have yet to recieve any complaints from Time-Warner. Fourth, the service has actually gotten better in the past year. All of the competition has forced TW to add dial-in service to the net for road warriors who need occasional access.
Given the three lines behind my house and the six or seven companies offering broadband cable or DSL over those lines, I'd be surprised if competition doesn't keep prices pretty close to cost + normal profit. I looked into some of the other companies a few months ago and there are some tiered pricing plans. But they are mostly for SOHO users who want symmetric ul/dl speeds w/ fixed ip addresses or gamers who want to have the fastest speed they can get.
FreeSpeech.org
Bandwidth is a commodity like water or electricity: cheap, but not infinite.
This statement seems to be repeated a lot in this discussion, in various forms. I think you are right, but there is a key difference with bandwidth: it can't be stored.
With water or power, the amount of water or coal that isn't used today can be saved, and used tomorrow. So it makes sense to meter it as a commodity.
Bandwidth is different. If the pipe sits idle, that bandwidth is gone forever. It can't be stored and used later. So it doesn't make sense to charge people for a resource that is going to go to waste otherwise.
What I'd prefer is a traffic-shaping scheme that just adjusts a user's priority based on their usage.
If the pipes start to get full, and you're one of the heavier users that month, your packets are the first to get dropped. On the other hand, at 3 am when the network is idle, your traffic would be unrestricted since there are few other users competing for that bandwidth.
A system like this would be fair to everyone, and still address the problem of "bandwidth hogs".
the point was where ever you turn your going to run into a monopoly
Dumbass. My point was that "monopoly" has a very specific meaning. Being the only company in town that offers cable modem service does not mean you have a monopoly on Internet access. As I've explained elsewhere, the word "monopoly" loses its meaning if you make the domain too narrow. Lots of companies make hammers, but only HamCo makes hammers with a rubberized yellow grips with blue spots. Does that mean HamCo has a monopoly on hammers with rubberized yellow grips with blue spots? Of course not. The word "monopoly" doesn't apply in that case.
If you can buy Internet access from six (or whatever) different companies, then there is no monopoly on Internet access. Poof.
I write in my journal
Here, hear! I would gladly pay for my bandwidth too, just like they do their upstream providers - which is how the internet was supposed to work! But I too agree that they shouldn't tell me how to use it - if I want to run an MP3 streaming radio station, a major porn server, or simply sell my bandwidth to my neighbors, I should be allowed to do that - they can do it when they pay their upstream providers - why am I limited? Just because I don't have "Inc." after my name?
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Long live p2p. I doesnt make sense to go to all the trouble of setting up a ftp server,website, etc just to share files.
You heard me. Move to Norway.
You can get 704/384 ADSL (actually it's 864/384 but they advertise likely actual speeds) for the price of 5 super sized Big Mac menus a month from my ISP. Latest news on the site says that 9/10 of their users are telling everyone about how great they are. And one of their advertising points is about how you'll be able to surf the web with just a flat fee, because the local calls you make to your dial-up ISP here in Norway cost money.
Or move to Korea, 'cause I hear you get like 8 mbps optic really cheap there.
Lalala
Unless things have changed a great deal since I worked for one of the Telus DSL resellers two years ago, these "independent" ISPs turn over almost all of each subscriber's monthly fee directly to Telus. They have no control over the connectivity they supposedly provide, and are powerless to set network policy (other than how much of the per-megabyte bandwidth charges to eat before passing the remaining cost on to their clients).
The resellers provide you with an installation CD and a mail server, and exist only so that Telus can maintain the illusion that there is some kind of competition.
There are no issues, that's the beauty of a free economy, as long as the government makes sure there can be competition (I'm not informed about cable internet access, but I know just about any company and be an ISP over PacBell DSL lines) the market will take care of itself.
So they want to now allow bandwidth hogs, that's fine, find a different ISP that does allow them. What? There aren't any that allow them, well then there's either a open market that needs filled, or that much bandwidth can't be supplied at that price and you just need to buy your own damned T1 if you want that much.
Don't like them limiting your content, also fine, find a different ISP.... see above...
I am a DSL tech for a insert big company name that used to be GTE and not all DSL has to use PPPOE
When did the company formerly known as Bell Atlantic drop the silly PPPoE crap?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Here in Moscow I pay $40/month for 10mpbs connection, that includes pathetic 500 _Mega_bytes of traffic, everything else is $ 80/gig. I do not, I repeat, do NOT feel owned by my ISP, although I do hate these greedy bastards. This is just simple economics at work, get over it.
------------------------ Optimists learn English; pessimists learn Chinese; realists learn Kalashnikov
I use mozilla, and quite nice it is.
I suppose I could also run a dumb webserver in the background, restricted to access from localhost, but why should I have to?
Ali
Ph33r m3!!!
isn't there some law that says certain types of providers can't be held accountable since they don't control content?
True. In October 1998, the United States Congress passed a law to that effect as a rider to the DMCA, and it shields an ISP from liability for copyright infringement as long as the ISP responds to takedown requests that contain a given amount of information.
Will I retire or break 10K?
quote from the article itself "When you consider the fact that the largest American telecommunications firms are often part of the same mega-corporation with music, video or movie-producing entertainment divisions -- such as AOL-Time Warner -- you can see how an industry-regulated Internet would handily end music and movie industry worries about Napster-like file swapping by people who don't want to pay industry-monopolized retail prices for content. "
because I have been enjoined by this Holy Office to abandon the false opinion which maintains that the Sun is the centre
A friend in Sacramento had his AT&T cable modem service shut off repeatedly. He was at home all day, and listening to internet talk radio (most commonly his own show, just to see what was on). Apparantly a 24k stream from Live365 was enough to enforce a AUP shutdown... of course, he wasn't doing anything that was against the AUP, and he go them to turn it back on every time, but they would turn around and shut his account down again a week later.
And yet I know a dozen attbi.com users in the SF Bay Area who listen to Live365 up to 8+ hours a day, 5+ days a week (myself included), and none of them have ever had their service shut off.
Are you sure that your friend isn't just getting poor service from ATT ? They are known for their outages, and their supplied cable modems have trouble dealing with network hiccups. Did the support folks actuall say the problem was with the AUP?
During the rainy season earlier this year, I had a period where my ATT connection died every several days. When it happened, I called tech support, they asked me to do the 'unplug the cable modem. Wait 5 minutes, plug it back in' trick. It worked, but my connection would die just a few days later. After a few rounds of this, and alot of complaining on my part, ATT finally sent a technician to check on the problem.
Lo-and-behold, the problem was actually a corroded connector on one of the telephone poles. Apparently my connection would die, and the cable modem couldn't cope with the degraded network connection. It's been 8 months and several hundred hours of streaming audio later, and I've only had 2-3 more outages, and of which were all resolved within 10 minutes.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
ISPs do not control the content.
Really? What if Road Runner were to throttle all hosts not on AOL(tw)'s whitelist to dial-up speeds, or to block them entirely for users who cannot demonstrate proof of age 21 or older in the name of "parental controls" about which the parent doesn't really have much of a clue?
You want to get ther badly enough, you arrange with someone for a proxy.
Not if the router between your ISP and the Internet blocks everything but outgoing TCP port 80 connections. There's not as much money in being a consumer ISP as there is in being a W3SP (World Wide Web service provider).
Will I retire or break 10K?
And where exactly do we get the majority of our oil from? A couple of nations interested in healthy competition? I knew that was what OPEC was...
I use a small local ISP here in Canada that charges me $25 Canadian a month for 100 hours dial up. We are soon to go wireless which will cost $40 Canadian a month for unlimited bandwidth. The other day when they found out that I was running an international news site updated daily at (http://www.newsfromtheedge.org) as a public service/hobby, they got me the registered domain name and hosted my site for almost nothing in aid of what I was doing. Likely I would have gotten this gift from Telus, Bell, AT&T or Rogers. Yeah. Likely. Support your small, independent ISP. They're the only thing that will save us.
If the pendulum swings too far-- cable modem providers arbitrarily limiting service in ways that customers don't like-- then somebody will see a business opportunity to offer unmetered, unshaped service
Over what last-mile technology? Most municipalities have granted the local telco the exclusive right to bury DSL wires, and the local cable TV company the exclusive right to bury cable Internet wires. What's your plan to go around the last-mile duopoly?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Rubbish. A company that has no real competitors is a monopoly. A cable company, a DSL provider, a dial-up provider, a satellite provider, and a cellular dial-up provider, they all provide very different services. It is like saying that even if we have a single bicycle manufacturer and a single car manufacturer, then we will have no monopoly. It's pretty evident that you don't have the slightest idea what "monopoly" means.
For a tech audience, the non-routable IPs are obvious enough.
And they have a connotation of "non-routable IP" such as "if you keep it on 192.168.12.34 then the world can't see it". If I want to make an example hostname, I often use www.example.com, and if I want to make an example routable IP address, I might put a 257 in there.
Will I retire or break 10K?
A suicidal business decision resulting in the loss of all users with a brain? Yes.
Do you feel sure that the loss of all users with a brain will outweigh the increased margin that the ISP can skim off less-clued users? If not, a decision to do dirty DNS tricks may not turn out as suicidal as you may think.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Exactly, if they aren't willing and/or able to provide the bandwidth they advertise 24/7 then they should have lower thresholds. I should be able to max out my connection from the minute I install my modem till I cancel their service, or whenever. Yes, I can be called a "bandwidth" hog, but I payed, and they should deliver. Don't blame people for your ISP's faults.
btw, I don't usually do this, I just used myself as an example.
If you can buy Internet access from six (or whatever) different companies, then there is no monopoly on Internet access.
But what if you define "high-speed Internet access" as "at least 10 GB/month up and down burstable to at least 256 kbps up and down, with no mandatory 750 ms satellite lag and no restrictions on operating systems or use of ports or NAT"? Then you may find that nobody provides high-speed Internet access in your town cheaper than $500 per month (fractional T1 from the telco). The Internet is not port 80.
Will I retire or break 10K?
You mean only if you have to connect to the backbone.
You can't get to Slashdot except through the backbone.
Will I retire or break 10K?
All the people complaining about cable prices confuse me. I have ATT cable for 45 bucks a month and get 1500-3000 Kbps upload, and 256k download. I researched every single alternative, and nothing else comes *close* to this for cost per byte.
Now I am not allowed to put a server on the cable modem, so I have an IDSL line for my server. It costs 70 bucks a month and only gets 144K bps both ways. This is the cheapest thing in the area by far which allowed a server. Upgrading my bps to fractional T1 or full T1 gets exponentially more expensive.
I am annoyed that I don't have the option to pay more for putting a server on my cable line, which I'd gladly do. But on the whole, I am supremely happy with my cable service because I know they could quadruple the cost and they'd still be the best thing available.
On one hand, I can understand that the up-front capital expenditure for all the cable infrastructure has yet to pay for itself, and that while bandwidth is currently a somewhat scarce resource, it does need to be divvied up more fairly.
But a real menace lurks within all this: the prospect of cable companies charging different fees according to types and providers of content.
What this could mean is that there could be a list of news sites, music stations etc which can be accessed freely, even gigs per month. But accessing any site which isn't in the cable companies' "good books" (read: payola), runs up the traffic charges.
This to me is the bigger threat.
-- In the beginning was the WORD, and the WORD was UNSIGNED, and the main(){} was without form and void...
The real problem here, that is causing both the abborhent behavior of the broadband industry and has control over broadcast networking, is the FCC. Frankly, private industry is usually rapacious and shortsighted. The government is supposed to regulate in an attempt to channel those impulses in positive direction. However, Michael Powell is, even in an administration full of regulators who are nothing but lapdogs for the industry they theoretically control, remarkable for his willingness to let the big ISPs do whatever they want.
If wireless broadband is to be a big competitor to the big broadband providers, the FCC will have to be complicet; the FCC regulates broadcasting even more than land lines. And, frankly, if that starts to happen, then the big ISPs are very likely simply to have their pet FCC chief step on wireless broadband (it causes brain cancer! Won't someone thing of the children!? Use safe fiber optics!).
http://www.ftc.gov/bc/compguide/index.html y I want to interject here for a moment.
Actual
To most people here a monopoly is defined as one choice and only one choice. Now let's set up a situation. Company A has a a lock on broadband access in it's geographic region. Individual B comes along and decides that he doesn't like the wacky terms that company A has, so he goes out and spends a million dollars building the structures needed to get the broadband access he wants. Now from the viewpoint of individial B the monopoly effectively doesn't exist. For everyone else if they too spend a million dollars they can be relieved from the perception that a monopoly is present in their midst. Does the fact that one has to spend a million dollars, mean that there's no monopoly? Does the idea that the legal definition of monopoly isn't dependent on absolutes ring anyones bell? The word "reasonable effort" comes to mind. Would the situation be any different if instead of one it was three, but all pretty much had the same terms (sounds like our choice of politicians doesn't it)? Choice can only be said to be a "choice" if there's an element of "reasonableness" to it. Presently for a great number of people there is indeed only one. Usually a governmet "endorsed" one. Where there is more, the terms between them are very similiar, kind of making a mockery of "choice". Others it's more chose your poison. Fast but costly. Available but pings are terrible. Monopolies are the natural state that companies aspire to. Maximumn profit for minimumn effort. For consumers it's maximumn benifits for minimumn cost. The middle ground is the war ground and unfortunatelly companies have the upperhand due to people's complacency. If broadband is truely as important as people say, then we need to decide who's going to be the horse, and who's going to be the wagon.
How does someone using 2K/s (about what is needed to meet the cap) for a month qualify as a bandwidth hog
When you buy consumer broadband, and it's capped, you're really buying what amounts to a 28.8 kbps connection "burstable" to higher speeds. You're not supposed to "burst" all the time.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Ummmm. Let's start with this site if massive media companies want to cut down on bandwidth!
-- Ken Kinder ken@_nospam_kenkinder.com http://kenkinder.com/
but i sorely doubt they'll be able to live without tv.
Unlike in the UK, the major broadcast television networks in the USA do not put a levy on owning a television set. You can probably still watch TV; you just won't get cable.
Will I retire or break 10K?
53/8*3600*24*30/1048576
53 Kbps connections don't happen over the majority of phone lines; use 48 Kbps. Error correction, PPP, IP, and TCP overhead eat about 20 percent of bandwidth; change to 10 bits per byte. Now your calculation becomes 48/10*3600*24*30/1048576, or about 12 GB per month.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I've seen satelite; it's expensive and rare, and the latencies are outrageous. Most of the time, only downstream is broadband, and upstream is over a modem. Most importantly, however, is that it doesn't scale. Modem doesn't count, and neither does cellular (except perhaps for some mythical 3G solution I haven't heard anything about yet in Japan or Korea, let alone in this country). We're talking about broadband - one of the many ways you've confused the issue.
The TA96 mandated that phone companies could drop a bunch of regulations, but had to share hardware with competitors. The result was a spate of competition in both local, long-distance, and internet services firms, and a dramatic price drop. The RBOCs saw their end and successfully bribed the government to change course. Cable had never really been deregulated in that sense, and have successfully kept it at bay; their approach is more akin to blackmail.
For an agency that found its niche after the Bell breakup, the FCC has authorized some inexplicably massive telecom mergers lately. The notoriously corrupt Michael Powell made his position eminently clear on competition at the outset, with zero enforcement against the RBOCs' many egregious behaviors toward their "client-competitors." Then, he decreed that Cable providers wouldn't need to share their hardware (as phone companies were "theoretically" required to do by law), and he's since gone on record as being opposed to the CLECs as well... in short - he's sold out any notion of competition, and his figleaf is basically your sham argument, that because we have a choice between Time Warner and Verizon, there's no monopoly.
Which is completely absurd.
It doesn't take a genius to fix prices and rig restrictions in a market with two suppliers in any given region, and less than a dozen nationwide. Prices are already on the steady rise, but TomPaine hits it on the head: the money is unimportant to them compared to control - and they may get it, since this hijacking of the internet is in the interests of the same companies that control the major media outlets, including almost all of the TV news... Putting the internet, ironically, at the center of one of the largest media conspiracies of our time.
Want to Know How to Cheat the GPL? Read On!
No, it's not a monopoly. It's a fucking cartel.
And where exactly do we get the majority of our oil from?
The USA. Next question, please.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
"That's not an abuse of monopoly power, any more than a McDonalds giving away free french fries with every Happy Meal."
That's because they can still go to Burger King. It is an abuse of monopoly power when customers, through (for example) BellSouth's monopoly on local telephone service, are forced to decide to pay for internet service for somebody else or to do without telephone service at all. Or being forced to pay for IE or do without Windows.
Providing you with better service is not a sufficiently profitable venture for these times. The underlying drumbeat of our economy is to provide zero service for infinite prices. that goal will never be realized but it is the direction many fools in industry are trying to navigate towards. One year warranty for hard drives. Six year light bulbs that last six months. Disposable twenty thousand dollar cars, with warrantees that require inhuman effort to enforce, parked in a garages made from particle board. Our society is based on the zero service model. Safe to expect any change a given provider makes, will be to offer you less for more money. It is a popular business model in the new millenium. the pox of a new generation.
Just like Microsofts infamous benchmarks, the data about "bandwidth hogs" and "mom&pop" usage is being supplied by the cable companies.
I think we need an open source project to gather a couple of months worth of data on actual usage.
I'd imagine it could work like this:
The client could be placed not only on our machines, but also on friends and family's machines so that "normal" users would be recorded. Basic info like tested speeds, area, type of connection would be recorded, but not the type of info that may cause accusations that it's a marketing scam. At the start of each new internet session (or once a day) it would send usage data to two or more servers. The raw data would be accessable to anyone so that any conclusions or statistics derived could be verified.
The main problem I see is preventing false data from being submitted to the servers.
Wouldn't it be nice to show up at a hearing with proof that the companies are lying to the committe? Of course the flip side is that this project may definitivly prove that the cable companies are correct, and that slashdotians are bandwith hogs.....
Personally I put a lot of stock in the evolution of ideas over time, in this case the old corporate model vs. new forms of free expression (the Internet). This would be an example of such a case, granted in the access to the Internet and the freedom inherant thereof. The corp's (old corporations) have a vested interest in the status quo, its makes them money and it keeps their stock holders happy (the money not the quo), which keeps them in business. So what do they try to do? Apply old ideas to new, conflict arrises and one wins out, usually the one with the most social impetus behind it. In this case, as in many others there are mitigating factors surrounding the conflict, namely the benefits offered by broadband and the scarcity of it.
In the article Mr. Chester argues rather forcefully that Ellacoya will try to put an end to the "free" broadband Internet so many of us enjoy, through tiered pricing, though an unremarkable idea, Ellacoya is based almost exclusively on control of broadband and access to the Internet, which its backers, including Goldman Sachs (large "old" money), wish to control for their own profit.
Mr. Chester goes on to site this quote:
"The way that the HFC (hybrid fiber coaxial) architecture works, we never run out of bandwidth,"
and monopolizes on it, drawing the conclusion that cable companies are after controling the Internet and are "openly hostile to it". Of course he could be right.
But IMHO, Mr. Chester is engaging in quite a bit of fear mongering saying that this software is the end of the Internet as we know it, true if succesful a tiered pricing structure would severly hamper bandwidth intensive Internet applications, but only if the physical and technological basis for the Internet remains unchanged, which it shows no sign of doing (the Internet2 for example). Mr. Chester also goes onto imply that this service will immediatley be adopted by every major telecom in the US and quickly give them absolute control over every form of high speed Internet access. Of course this is entirely possible, as broadband is "scarce" (as in not ubiquitous) and dailup is maddeningly slow for the majority of us who've made the switch and are loathe to go back and those that use it now. Of course the success of this endeavour depends on what people are willing to pay for high speed Internet access, if it becomes more widely available (as in area coverage and competing mediums) then people won't buy tiered service, but will instead switch to the most reliable, cheapest, most flexible service. But if things remain essentailly unchanged, as Mr. Chester assumes or implies that he assumes, then it all depends on whether people are willing to switch to a high speed connection for more money, or stay with a low speed one for traditional rates, in other words a personal preference, and the conflict that would arrise from that choice; due to the unpredictable nature of personal preference I won't try to guess the outcome.
I believe that public demand for broadband will insight the telecoms to expand service as well as offer tiered service ala xDSL (1mb for $40 6mb for $150 or somewhere around there), a compromise in other words a good ammount of bandwidth for a good ammount of control.
You're probably one of those guys who says that Apple has a monopoly on Macs, too, aren't you?
The service is what we're talking about here. Not the details of how that service is delivered. Coca-Cola is the only company that sells cola-flavored soda in red cans. (Are they? Don't care. This is just for sake of argument.) That doesn't mean they have a monopoly. If you can get internet access from six different providers, then there's no monopoly.
Is it too bad that you can't get multi-megabit access for $12.95 a month? Yeah. But does that mean there's a monopoly on internet access? Of course not.
I don't mind if you complain. I just get annoyed when you complain about the wrong things.
I write in my journal
And where exactly do we get the majority of our oil from?
Alaska. Oh, you mean where do we get the majority of our imported oil from? Canada.
I'm really not seeing your point, here.
I write in my journal
Why do people pay for high speed connections? Obviously so they can download files easily or stay online all day. I hope they realize people aren't going to want to pay that if they end up losing what they already have. I'm not lucky enough to have a cable connection since I'm a podunk little college with bad dial up....
bastards.
catgirls and fairies
"Dumbass. My point was that "monopoly" has a very specific meaning. Being the only company in town that offers cable modem service does not mean you have a monopoly on Internet access. "
What a lovely human being you must be.
In most local markets cable companies have legal agreements with local governments to gain access to public right of ways. Usually this is exclusionary. A company can't come in and run cable and connect to the same customers as the preexisting company. Our present area is two cable companies A and B. A can't connect to B's customers, and B can't connect to A's customers.
Besides from the standpoint of consumers oglopolies and monopolies really are little different as far as end effect.
Here in canada, my isp is shaw cable and they ballyhoo'd all about how when they took over the cable and ISP services of rogers cable (they actually swapped services at both ends of canada), they said that they would give better faster service with no limits and now they have limited the amount you can download per month, introduced a two-tier pricing structure..it's basically them or the telephone co's high speed asdl, (same limits essentially). All this microsoftian behavior is getting out of hand especially, since moor's law says hardware will get cheaper exponentially and fiber optics laser bandwiths will grow exponentially (using existing cables). basically, it's stupid to get ripped off by this corporate artificially limited access to high-tech services. What's it going to cost to use the internet in the future, as much as running your car and still have a stunned service quality??????
One thing I've noticed with all of this FUD floating around here, is that people constantly refer to users taking up a total of their bandwidth. But bandwidth is the theoretical total of how much that can be pushed through the pipeline.
When they say 1 percent of users are using 16 percent of the bandwidth, they really mean is the "hogs" are 16 percent of the total traffic.
That doesn't mean the total amount of traffic is consuming all of the bandwidth. If their network is configured well, the total traffic in any given region could very easily be a small fraction of total bandwidth.
This will also vary based on time of day, and other factors.
Moekandu
"It is a sad time when a family can be torn apart by something as simple as a pack of wild dogs."
Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself; but talent instantly recognizes genius. -- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
http://directory.google.com/Top/Society/Issues/Eco nomic/Monopolies_and_Oligopolies/
s _and_Oligopolies/
http://dmoz.org/Society/Issues/Economic/Monopolie
this stuff makes me angry to read. and so they'll give me a coupon and i'll think about my nifty new coupon and when i get to use it! and then i'll be merry, having saved a small percentage on my new restrictions. give me something. let me get used to it. ok, now take it away. remember teasing the dog with a bone when you were a little kid? remember mom telling you that the dog would bite you back? you were so smart, you knew exactly when to pull the bone away without getting bit. dazed, you sat there staring at the white gashes in your hand before they gushed red- and so shall they when they realize that i will not accept a filtered, throttled connection. ah to jump to the day when a consumer milking a little extra gets the personal vendetta of a megacorp, as if to avenge having been spat upon.
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
Is it just me, or does this all ring familiar?
Remember AOL when it first started? Didn't it charge by usage? And it was a rather premium cost, if I recall.
Let's give the benefit of the doubt. Let's say that the reason that there was a by-usage cost was for the same reasons that the cable companies are (supposedly) claiming from the article. The technology was not cheap, and it cost big bucks to carry that bandwidth and maintain the modem pool.
So what ultimately happened? Technology improved and got cheaper. Rival ISPs started up, and started offering a flat-rate plan. Why? Because they realized that they could make a decent profit from it and undercut the competition. So what did AOL do? They went to a flat-rate plan as well to remain competitive.
So the cable companies want to charge by usage. Let them. The same thing will happen. Technology will improve, and someone will come along offering flat-rate again and undercut them. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Karma: Frotzed (mostly due to the Frobozz Magic Karma Company)
From Videotron's promo: "Allocated bandwidth of six (6) GB download and five (5) GB upload. $7.95 per extra GB."
If a company spends billions of dollars wiring up a cable infostructure, why do customers and the govt. think they have the right to tell the company how they can use that bandwidth, and what types of terms they are allowed to offer? Given the existance of DSL, you can't even claim they have a monopoly. Yet here's another liberal who thinks consumers have the right to regulate how a company does business just because he thinks their practices are unfair. It's amusing since it's a lot easier to argue that a per/bandwidth fee is more fair, yet this author is so sure he's right, he expects the govt. to side with him and impose laws forcing the cable companies to do business the way he wants them to. Business is based on the concept of trade, in two parties mutually agree upon a price for a good or service. If you don't like the price you have the option to refuse to do business with them. You do not have the option to use force to get your way, in this case through govt. regulation. This is an attack on a fundamental civil liberty.
Vote for Pedro
Scientists and engineers gave it to us. Cerf, Berners-Lee, and thousands of others who aren't so famous
If the cable company started telling you what you can and cannot do with your computer you'd be outraged. Yet you feel you have the authority to tell the cable company how to configure their network. If they feel like blocking any or all your packets, it's their right. It's their network. You have the right, in turn, to not do business with them, if you do not like their policies. If they allow you to run a web server, but charge you a higher, business level fee, that's their right (which is an option from most cable companies, BTW). I don't understand this mentaility where consumers think they have the right to tell companies how to run their businesses. Business is trade. Both parties must agree to the terms. Not just one party.
Vote for Pedro
I have read the DirectPC (satellite broadband)policy (disclaimer - I don't use them so I don't know if it really works this way).
Their approach achieves appropriate allocation of bandwidth, at least on downlink, with a mechanism that seems to be very fair. They do so without regulating any particular application.
The approach is to have a bit bucket. Not the traditional trash can bit bucket... but a bucket used as a capacity measurement. They continuously fill your bandwidth bucket at a specific rate (I think it was 46 kbps for a home user). When you use bandwidth, it depletes the bucket at the rate you use it. The bucket, of course, has a maximum capacity... it never can be filled over a certain size (a few hundred megabytes).
Thus you get good peak bandwidth. You get decent average bandwidth. And you can't hog the system at the expense of other users.
Sure, this would be a pain for downloading a CD, and it breaks big P-P sites if a similar approach is used for uplink.
But I have no sympathy for those wanting to serve up a lot of P-P stuff, consuming vast amounts of upstream bandwidth compare to normal users. Hey, if you want to P-P serve up movies, *pay* for the bandwidth.
As a number of other posters have pointed out, correctly, why bandwidth indeed must be limited, and the average bandwidth to a home broadband user needs to be a lot less than the peak bandwidth. You may have a peak bandwidth of 5Mbps, but you sure aren't paying for it as an average bandwidth - see the other posts - and you haven't been guaranteed that bandwidth in any way unless you bought DSL or a dedicated line (which would cost thousands per month for 5Mbps).
The only good weather is bad weather.
It's not a conspiracy if the prices are the same. If there isn't a big difference between the services, the prices always will be the same. Otherwise, everyone would sign up for the cheaper service, and the alternative would go out of business. Cable and DSL give you similar bandwidth, and therefore cost about the same. Dialup is much cheaper, on the other hand, because you get noticably less bandwidth. It's called competition, not oligopoly.
Vote for Pedro
We Americans may only import like 10% from the Gulf (half of that from Iraq, would you believe) but the American producers aren't going to sell for less than that price because they don't have to. Oddly enough, America is also an oil exporter -- the best price wins.
This article mixes together two different things: the genuinely sinister drive to close off the internet, and the perfectly reasonable desire of the telecoms to stop losing money on poorly-thought-out internet access offerings.
With regard to the latter, please realize that ISP's usually pay for their bandwidth. To make a profit, they must charge (bandwidth cost) + (distribution cost) + (overhead) + (profit). The marginal cost of 1 gigabyte of transfer is very roughly $5.00. I base this on rates charged by colocation providers, so realize that it doesn't include distribution (last mile) costs. Therefore a typical consumer bandwidth allocation of 5 Gigabytes per month costs the provider roughly $25. If the provider charges $40/month, he has $15 to cover (distribution cost) + (overhead) + (profit). That's slim. If the consumer manages to double his transfer, and consume $50 worth of upstream transfer, he is now costing the provider money.
I think that under the current system many customers are costing their providers money. We've gotten so used to subsidized bandwidth (subsidized by the foolishness of telecom marketers) that we've lost sight of the underlying economic reality, which is dictated by the backbone carriers.
Look at it another way. If you want a full 1.5 Mbps internet conection, you must pay from $700 to $1500 for a T1, depending on location. How do you expect to buy the equivalent for $40-$60 a month, even if the last mile capacity is that high (which it sometimes is)? Just to break even, the provider would have to dilute that bandwidth by a factor of 20 (fit 20 consumer circuits on one T1) - and that's without considering distribution and overhead costs. Therefore, you can use an average 70 Kbps - little faster than a modem.
For better or for worse, the providers estimated very low usage when they planned their offerings. They now want to ditch the high-usage users who are like Homer Simpson at an all-you-can-eat buffet. You can call the providers foolish, dishonest, etc. and probably be right. But you cannot expect them to subsidize you indefinitely.
Eventually users must start paying for their own bandwidth or reduce their consumption to meet their budget.
I don't know what you're smoking, but the cap went on here about three months ago, following *simultaneous* rate hikes of *identical amounts* by both DSL and cable.
Yes, and I stopped browsing there because some carry content of very questionable legality. Some even seem to be dedicated to providing illegal content (alt.???.toofrickingyoung). How do the ISP's get away with providing these, and more importantly, WHY?
it's no different than any cable connection.
Just turn on your router, do your setup, and you're signed on whenever your system boots up.
And it's not like a 5 port router is going to break your back either.
South Korea comes immediately to mind. Could things get to the point where we're buying the next generation of high tech from them or from other nations that go the "turn our nation into a set of interconnected CitiLECs" route instead of selling new technology to them?
Is US political leadership planning on ceding control over all technology but the obviously military to ... everybody else who can get it together to wire their nations for broadband in exchange for a few million dollars in campaign contributions?
Note: this is a self-defeating strategy because if the US falls behind in commercial technologies... most military technology derives from COTS, not the other way around if it used to be.
Stay tuned.
Tech Public Policy stuff
No. Very few, and a goodly number of those who do not have the option of Cable Modem service are complaining dearly about upgrades to their local infostructure not occuring fast enough. ^_^
is pursuing multiple strategies to closely monitor and tightly control subscribers and their use of the net.
Many ISPs are blocking or throttling data across certian ports, I will give that.
One element can be seen in industry lobbying for new use-based pricing schemes,
Lobbying? Huh?
First off, it has been the USERS lobbying the ISPS for tiered pricing. Many Cable Modem users are *MORE* then willing to pay an extra $20 or even $30 a month for more throughput to play around with.
Related to this is the industry's new public relations campaign, which seeks to introduce a new "menace" into the pricing debate and boost their case, the so-called "bandwidth hog."
So called? As I recall, the Bandwidth Hog on Broadband Networks was an idea that everybody has been aware of since the very start of the rollout of broadband service, it is just that the network's subscriber base has reached that critical mass where by such bandwidth hogs are having a determental effect on service for everybody else, as well as seriously eating into the ISP's profit margin, sometimes to the extend of eliminating the profit margin all together. A situation that nobody wants.
*cough* pallandium *cough*
Or any sort of "secure computing" setup. When the user is limited as to what they can run on their OWN system, THEN there are troubles.
AT&T and Co have very little to do with this.
Heh.
First off I have not heard of anybody limiting the use of streaming technologies. Granting limiting all ports but Port 80 and 20/21 and the E-Mail ports WOULD have that effect, but it would also be a death toll for the ISP when people could no longer user AIM/ICQ/MSN Messanger, etc.
Hell MICROSOFT itself would start lobbying against any such efforts, they have worked hard to roll out a usable Internet audio/video streaming system with every copy of Windows XP. Not to mention all of their other services that rely on ports besides 80.
What's new, who doesn't? I mean seriously, everybody wants to "Kill the Internet As We Know It"(KIAWKI). Hopefuly they just won't all go and join forces.
Hehehehe. So they sell routers right?
Oooh, and Goldman Sachs just neeever makes mistakes. Heh. They invest in what looks promising, hardly a conspiracy. If killing babies became a legal profitable business, Goldman Sachs would invest in it. Yeesh
God Forbid if the ISPs should control THEIR OWN BANDWIDTH.
Listen, bub. The ISP PAYS FOR that bandwidth and the ISP PAYS FOR the local infostructure that the data runs across. They can use it for WHATEVER THE HELL THEY WANT TO. It is THEIRS. THEY OWN IT. PRIVATE PROPERTY/RESOURCE. D-E-A-L.
Should be better written as;
"Most people now pay a flat fee for online access, but a goodly number of them want to change that. Those who use less bandwidth would like to pay less, and the majority of those who desire more bandwidth would be more then willing to pay for it."
And customers have been bitching for ever that they are taking too long to implement it.
Oh no!! The Hooorrrooorrrr, only pay for what I use!!!!
yeesh. I don't make long distance phone calls, I do not pay for a fancy shmancy long distance service. Why should people who do not download 10GB or so a month of data be paying equal to those who do? (heh. 10GB a month, heh. I have pulled that in a week easily. ^_^ )
Ummmm.
They do.
duh.
Read
Many college students use their colleges networks. Wait, no, sorry, limits placed on college network resources is ooold news, no sense reporting that riiiight? Yeesh.
HEHEHEHHEHEHEHEHE HOHOHOHO OOOH my word.
Hehehehehe.
Let me repeat that one there for ya;
Heh.
Once again, what a HORRIFIC though, a company actualy CONTROLING what it LEGALY owns.
Yeesh.
Well seems to me that it is about time that media content providers start making deals with the ISPs then. Cable Modem networks already use a local proxying system, why not expand that? No charge for data taken off of the proxy, and hey look, for $5 a month you can gain access to the complete streaming library of {insert major content producer here}.
The users win, the ISPs win, and the content providers win.
Hell, it could even be touted legitimantly as being a feature. Imagine ISPs COMPETING to offer more and more features to users.
"Well sign up with us and get complete realtime streaming access to Show Time 1 2 and 3, all for a mere extra $6.95 a month!"
Well fuuuuck yah, sign me up. Hell, make it on demand. Why the hell not? On Demand Digital Cable TV services are going to be shipping out MPEG2 streams, no reason that that last few feet of cable can't be CAT5, shit, same damn data stream! LOL!
Or why not even more? What if I had a mini-blockbuster video sitting on the other end of my cable modem pipe? The line from the cable modem head end to the user is what, 40mbit a second, and I believe that the newest generation of cable modem technology even increases that. Sending data over the line from the cable modem head end to the user costs nearly nothing, but it COULD be being used to send over data that the users would be willing to pay for.
Oooh, lets see here now. Nearly ZERO opporational costs, steady revenue source. Oooh, step three, profit? Hell, splitting the profits straight up 50%/50% with the content producers would even be a viable option, and if the video streams sent to the user are just a tad bit below in quality what current Digital Cable MPEG2 streams are at, nobody will be using them as source streams for pirated material. As it is Digital Cable MPEG2 streams already such for doing rips from, drop the bandwidth down another 25% or so and it will be watchable as a real time encode but nobody would bother stealing it and recompressing it to MPEG4.
Prooxxxyyyy. No, seriously. Of those X hours of music, how many of them are going to be original new songs?
The solution here is to have smarter player applications. Have the stations playlist sent to the user from the get go, and cache the darn songs that are repeated.
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ATT seems to block my SIP traffic to vonage.com. I signed up for Vonage's service and it mysteriously stopped working. I called Vonage, and we determined that the traffic is being blocked somewhere along the line. Strangely enough, I'm able to pass SIP traffic to anywhere but Vonage's network.
I called ATT and after about 2 hours talking to tier-3 people, they fixed it. But 2 weeks later, it didn't work again.
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For instance, I can buy broadband only from 2 companies (one offers ADSL and ISDN, the other is a cable TV company). Both block their ports. I don't have a choice. If I want to have a homebrew server, I shouldn't need to buy an expensive T1, that I wouldn't use anyway.
Linux is not only a low-price operating system. It is a Unix-like system, something very powerfull that previously was accessible only to big corporations. It is about empowering the citizen adn the small comapny in a digital age.
Read http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d107:h.r.0 5211:
for another scarey look at the future of the internet. This gives corporations the right to disable, interfere with, block or impair a p2p node without any probable cause or warrant needed. Now that is a scarey thing. This is just another great bill from Howard Berman, who is a bed-buddy with the MPAA and RIAA.
This is not right!
- Andy Gray
I don't know if this is comment worthy, but The Bell Canada Sympatico DSL service BLOCKS port 25... so if you have a remote server (ie: your own mailserver out there on the net) you can't use it as your smtp server.... you only allowed to use sympatico's smtp servers.
You have many choices. You could get a business level connection if you want to run servers. There are DSL, Cable, and Satellite providers. Broadband is not a monopoly. Govt. regulation is surest way to kill any incentive for new companies to get into the game. If you go the govt regulation route, you will end up with a monopoly that's just good enough to pass govt. regulations. There will be no incentive for anyone to improve this service since they can't then charge you more money for the improved service because the govt. controls the price. If you don't believe this, just look at CA power. No one built any new power plants even though the increase in demand over time was easily predicted. The reason was there wasn't any hope of making money in such an investment because the govt. controls the price to the end user. Now I have to listen to commercials telling me to conserve power because the govt. is too inept to regulate power effectively. This is no surprise since they only need to regulate well enough to avoid losing reelection. The last thing I want is to start hearing commercial encouraging people to conserve internet bandwidth because the govt. can't run that well either. A company must answer to a balance sheet, so your guaranteed much better service in a free market, which is the case in broadband. I'm sure in the Soviet Union they had lots of commercials telling people to conserve this and that for the good of society. In a capitalist society, companies should want you to buy more, not less of something.
Vote for Pedro
Any recommendations?
Then it's time to get organized and see how much it really does cost. If you're in a major center, it's quite likely you can work out an alternative to current ISPs - go get pricing on a T3 level connection (hint: they're not cheap), and look at some distribution options. You might be able to get a long way with 802.11 - crummy latencies though - or look at running your own wires, cobble something together. There are alternatives to the last mile problem. It -is- possible to lease wires (or run your own!). Expensive, maybe. But then you're free.
It's called a co-op, and it's worked in locales where corporations have tried to screw over the consumers before. Talk to a farmer.
Yes, I know it's unfair that the FCC et al are doing this. If they won't listen to you, very publically take matters into your own hands. The sad fact is that the majority of users don't make use of their broadband connections and the providers bank on that. Then they try to get rid of those that do - that's not right.
If you get 100, 500, or 1000 people together in a urban area that are willing to pay more - like, $100/mo - for better service, that's a serious pile of money. If they pledged that in advance and ponied up, you could probably match it again in some sort of local investment. Or maybe even 10 times that. Getting $100k together -will- attract attention. Maybe the initial cost might be worse than $100/mo, maybe it'll be better. Get a solid foundation and then you can bring those costs down.
If you're geeks, you should be able to find the technical know how in a group that size to make it happen. Maybe even the legal expertise to CYA in this legal-happy world.
Networking gear is CHEAP fellas, and I know not everyone out there makes big money, if you want to make a change, do something about it. If you live in a big center, take control of your own fates. Be smarter than the telcos. If the worst-case scenarios happen, it might be your only alternative.
It beats bitching to people who apparently have been coopted or straight up don't care.
..don't panic
But they haven't presented me a good reason to block ports other than castrating what you can do with your computer. Spam and hacker atacks are an issue, but could be resolved with a term of compromisse: "if you let spammers and hackers use your computer, we will block your ports".
It would be great if broadband wan't a monopoly, but where I live it is. I can not vote with my dolars and pick the best company. There is only one telephone company and one cable TV. Regulation might not be perfect, but sometimes it is the consummer last resource.
NY Times and NYT-owned papers (e.g. Boston Globe) have similar content partnerships.
:shudder: Fox News. None. Don't you think one of those organizations (ok, maybe not Fox) would LOVE to have the NYT as a content supplier?
/. trolls who lump the Times in with that crowd.
Wrong. The Times has no major media company involved in ANY deal for content, and that is INTENTIONAL. No CNN. No MSNBC. No
Same with the BBC, and same with the AP (which is completely independenty of any media organization.)
How dare you make blanket comments? Yes, the Post is working with MSNBC, yes CNN is owned by AOL/TW... those are obvious. I hate seeing
What IS scary about this trend is that, with this kind of fine-grained control over network traffic, it would be a breeze to cut off access to a particular web site, or exclude certain protocols. When service providers start differentiating based on the TYPE of data you're downloading, not the QUANTITY, it's time to worry.
That's all fine and good if you have a choice of companies. The fact of the mater is that the cable companies were granted exclusive franchises in most areas that they have never relinquished. Many have been bought be the same giant telcoms that opposed the internet to begin with. Tada - your choice in most places, if you are so lucky to have a choice is telcom or telcom. You know, the same folks that fought tooth and nail to keep people from hooking up 300 baud modems to their phone networks that we paid for as an exclusive franchise and really own. Would you complain if that were your only option? 300 baud modem at $5.00/min or 300 baud device that works on a different principle at $5.00 a minute, or just plain voice service with rotary dial? How about the honest nursing home that mentions that they kill their patients?
Just remember that companies that use public rights of way, which ARE scare resources, owe the public a service. The public, such as myself, don't tollerate those rights of way on their property out of the goodness of our heart or to make big_fat_telco's lots of money. We co-operate in this way to realize a group benifit. Demand your rights to your property! They are uspposed to serve you not skin you.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I get 1MB/second from Optimum Online for $40 a month. My friends with DSL one town over are lucky to get 90kB/s. There aren't enough people in my neighborhood to suck up the bandwidth. The tech guys at optonline are total morons. They couldn't block ports if they wanted to. My advice: look for the dumbist ISP around, and go for it. You'll be glad you did.
The dream reveals the reality which conception lags behind. That is the horror of life- the terror of art. -Franz Kafka
Wow, the FUD claiming people are certainly obtuse, when I first heard about this months ago(ie the leaked AOL/Time Warner bandwidth cap memo). Someone shut the "this is FUD" people up by posting a link to a dsl provider that has caps.
I called the company and inquired about the other side of the coin things like; unsolicited traffic, web ads (popup and integrated), spam, hacker probes, tech support pinging customer machines, interrupted/corrupted downloads, spyware, automatic updates, etc, and he was at a lost for an explanation. I said you would have to do a little better when customers start taking your company to small claims for charging them for "bits" they did not request or even worst that may be harmful.
And the infrastructure whine is just that, I'm sorry ISPs are notorious for not maintaining their infrastructure to handle their customer base. (example the biggest ISP provider; AOL had a federal injunction place upon for failing to maintain adequate infrastructure to maintain it's customers)
Granted there's little the common folk can do when corporations pretty much own our government's regulatory and legislative process. However, tech always seem to be one step ahead complacent corporations.
So all those screaming FUD out there might want to re-examine their assertions regarding their unquestioning trust of corporate actions and intentions.
One more thing to note. Most broadband providers advertise; unlimited and always on connections. I think their customers will take great issue if the decide to reneg on those elements of their service. All those flapping about tier service, I know several low usage folk that have reverted to dial-up because unrealized value of broadband.
Since then, there's been some loose talk about the "tragedy of the commons" from people who know a little economics but not much network design. These people usually seem to have a bias in favor of markets as a solution to a wide range of problems. Their arguments are not compelling.
Sometimes a market isn't the solution. The feedback loops implicit in a pricing model are usually far too slow to regulate a datagram network without introducing instability. Realize that markets are control systems, and are subject to the stability problems of control systems. Most economists don't get this. Classical economics assumes that if there's an equilibrium point, the system will stabilize at or near it. That's not true; all you're really guaranteed is that if it oscillates, the oscillations will pass through the equilibrium point now and then.
In addition, a pricing system itself imposes costs. In telephony, billing now costs more than transmission. Billing, setup, and support typically cost an ISP more than their backbone bandwidth. There's so much underutilized fibre installed now that backbone bandwidth just isn't a problem.
Most of this talk is an attempt to justify a price increase by an incumbent monopoly.
I don't see metered bandwidth being the wave of the future; but tiered packages most certainly should be.
1) We already block port 80.
2) If you tell us you're losing thousands of dollars a week running a home business (usually in a misguided attempt to get an earlier service call), and we don't like you... our TOS allows us to now charge you a business rate.
3) Our TOS also prohibits your running a server of any sort for any purpose (yup, "business" too.) And yes, I realize the lunacy of this clause, but it stands printed.
For the vast majority of our customers, who consider themselves skillful after setting up Outlook Express and making the AOL browser work with "yous guys", the above three examples are non-factors.
For the minority who read Slashdot, who would max out a T3 if given access, who agree that blocking ports is dubious, there should be a different package with less draconian TOS.
If you want to charge me $100 a month, let me do what I damn well please with my computer, and change my upstream cap to a nice 256 kbps compromise, done and done.
If there's a cable company, a DSL provider, a dial-up provider, a satellite provider, and a cellular dial-up provider, then there's not exactly a monopoly, is there?
Dial-up and cellular dial-up are not broadband and, for many purposes (e.g., streaming video, audio, ISO downloads), are worthless. Satellite is only slightly better, but it does not compare to DSL or cable modem. The latency makes it useless for gaming (as an example) and speed that is 20% of a decent cable modem is not very impressive. Also, many people have no way to mount the dish.
In my area, I tried for five years to get DSL and was constantly told "not yet -- call back in a few months." Cable modem came in and that was my only option for broadband. Hence the term "monopoly."
I keep being amazed at how broadband means either "cable" or "DSL" to Americans.
I am not American. Where I live is unimportant, except that I don't live in America. I have cable television service in the building, and they keep trying to push me a cable modem. I don't want it. In fact I don't have a TV. I don't need one.
Further, screw DSL. I don't have a fixed land-line phone. I don't need one. I have a mobile phone. Why would you want to call a location? I expect my friends to call me (my person), not my apartment.
On the other hand, I _do_ have an RJ45 jack in the wall that connects to fiber in the building and gives me 10 megabit connectivity. This is helpfully provided by the local energy company, which gives me several options of which ISP's backbone to connect to from them.
Hell, DSL and cable don't even match most people's bandwidth expectations on "broadband" (2Mbit/s bidirectional).
I'm amazed daily at the amount of corporate repressivity you Americans put up with. On the other hand, you do have a great environment for entrepreneurship. Why don't you (yes, you reading this!) go start an ISP in a metropolitan area and offer real broadband to the people there, fibring large condo buildings? My bandwidth costs $20-$30 a month here for me, there's no reason it should cost consumers more in the US. Given cable and DSL, I believe that's even fairly competitive pricing. When Americans, too, ditch fixed land-line phones, you're going to be at an immense advantage.
In the USA, citiLECs been selling 1-10 mbps via fiber optic to the curb for rates comparable with dialup ISPs. Unfair competition? Your friends at the cable companies and telcos seem to think so, they've lobbyied legislatures into making future systems illegal in more than one state. California, for instance. Los Angeles and the City of Alameda just got in under the wire. Cable companies think regulation is wonderful, as long as its used to shut out potential competition.
So you think it's OK for cable companies to buy laws designed to interfere in the marketplace but not for laws in the public interest to interfere with their activities. Well, the politicians agree with you.
Your version of fundamental civil liberty as implemented by politicians has put the entire US economy at risk.
When you find yourself asking "Do you want fries with that?" and wondering if you'll get to keep that job because nobody can afford the "Happy Meals" your employer is selling and hearing from your friends who emigrated how great things are in IT anywhere but here... just remember your devotion to Libertarian theology... and what it's done for you and your nation.
Tech Public Policy stuff
It seems we're forgetting that in the free world (outside the US borders) this is not a problem. The US has already lost it's telecoms infrastructure advantage to Asia. Who's to blame, the politicians are just doing what they're told. The American people need to accept responsibility for their mounting problems.
After one ISP was fined... about $60-70000 somewhere after carrying CP groups, every other ISP dropped the ball dead. Certainly noone dares to keep the most obvious groups at least with that kind of liability and certainly no goodwill for doing so. For some mysterious reason I've never heard anything about the warez groups, or mp3 groups or anything else, but oh well.
Oh and about the CP groups, they move. I've been trying to report posts since the stone age, and when they're driven from one group by censoring/trolls/spam, they find another. Either they start a new group, or the simply do a takeover of some other, little used group. The name matters very little for those "in the know". Ever wonder why there's a group called alt.binaries.pictures.asparagus?
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Correction: the landlord doesn't decide on an ISP, that's for me to decide. The landlord decides on a last-mile service provider.
Using the term monopoly here is really fuzzy terminology.
The problem isn't that there is no competition at all (true monopoly), but that there is inadequate competition.
If I want broadband, I can either pay ATT or Bell South. If I try to pay a CLEC instead, Bell South will make sure that my order is prioritized just slightly lower than the crank complaining that the phone pole is all scuffed up. (In other words, there is no true competition in DSL as long as a single company acts as a gatekeeper).
A choice between two is not a true monopoly, but IS an unusually small choice for a popular product/service. If I want a burger, there's 5 major competitors and dozens of lesser ones. A CPU? Even if I restrict the choice to IA32, there's 4 I can think of off the top of my head. If instruction set isn't a constraint, the choice opens up a good bit more.
Cola has two huge players and dozens of smaller ones. That's an interesting case really. At the top where there are two majors, prices are pretty high for sugar water. The next tier down (store brands), there are dozens of players and prices are less than half the majors.
Gasoline has sevaral (at least 5 choices).
In short, in order to have a healthy competition, we really need 4 or 5 comparable broadband choices.
The other source of broadband complaints is the screwy and quasi-ethical marketing. Rather than offering a service level that will be profitable at a decent price, they offer the moon, and then impose a bunch of bizarre constraints to make sure most can never actually manage to use more than a profitable amount of the service. The net result is that they unnecessarily constrain the usefulness of the service and close off choice.
The guy here (Andrew Cole) is wrong in his calculation, and it proves us he have only little knoledge about computers... He does not makes the difference of Kbps (Kilobits per second) and KB/s (Kilobytes per sesonds). Since there in 8 bits in one byte, we have to divide by 8.
However, the last time I listened a 20Kbps internet radio feed was about six years ago when I was on a diallup, and now it's been a very long time since I listen to 128 Kbps radio! (Under 112 Kbps I just call it poor quality, not even as good as FM radio) Divided by 8, it still makes 16 KB/s, and it's just a little less than what have been calculated above. 16 KB/s is 960 KB per minutes (0.9 MB/min), 56.25 MB every hour, witch means 90 hours of internet radio per month under a 5 GB cap.
Sorry guys, even with 90 hours per month, I can only listen 3 hours per day. For anyone who listen to internet radio every day this is ridiculous!
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
If I try to pay a CLEC instead, Bell South will make sure that my order is prioritized just slightly lower....
That's funny. I've had DSL service through a third-party ISP for going on three years now, at two different addresses. When I first got it, the phone company said it would take 3-6 weeks to fill my order. The third-party ISP got it done in 24 hours. Sounds like you're overgeneralizing here.
I write in my journal
They block ports because people who use those ports tend to run servers that use a lot of bandwidth. Again, you can get business level service if you want to run a server. The alternative is to charge per packet. If they did that, there would be a whole new set of people complaining about that system. You can please everyone. Who says the govt. has the right answer. If you think they know how to run a business, just look at what happened to the Soviet Union, or look at the mess CA made out of electric power. There's no God-given right to broadband in the constitution. If you don't like what's offered, get a T1.
Vote for Pedro
What doesn't makes sense is blocking ports before you actually use any bandwith. If you want to operate a server for a couple of days, just to learn how to do that, or to experiment something you wouldn't do on a production server, why shouldn't you do that on a ADSL conection?
Yes, maybe the press don't cover this sort of thing enough, but that's because the resources needed to write intelligently about this issue are rather large. It's an incredibly complicated topic, involving the need to understand the economics of running different kinds of networks, the history of regulation in this area and how the Internet came about in the first place, and the issues of Quality of Service, which the activists, though well meaning, conveniently ignore or dismiss. And the solutions they offer aren't perfect either.
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For more information on regulating competition across broadband networks, check out:
1.) "The Potential Relevance to the United States of the European Union?s Newly Adopted Regulatory Framework for Telecommunications" Paper No, 36 at: http://www.fcc.gov/opp/workingp.html
The thesis:
"The European Union?s telecommunications regulatory framework adopted in March 2002 represents a bold and innovative response to the challenges of technological and market convergence in the area of telecommunications.
"It recognizes that much of telecommunications regulation exists as a means of addressing potential and actual abuses of market power. With that in mind, the EU attempts a comprehensive, technology-neutral approach to regulation, which borrows concepts of market definition and of market power from competition law."
2.) Recent speech by FCC Commissioner Kathleen Q. Abernathy on broadband regulation and the need to apply technology neutral regulations http://www.fcc.gov/Speeches/Abernathy/2002/spkqa2
3.) And finally, my story on open access in the Seattle Times:
4.) "Sparring Over Internet Access" http://archives.seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin
I firmly believe that if this starts to become prevalent a return to the 'BBS' days will result. Only this time instead of fidonet running over 9600bps modems. It will be apartment complexes/neighborhoods etc tied to each other over dark fiber links served to their users with high speed short distance wireless. Already where I live there are numerous apartment complexes that provide 'free internet' as part of the rent. Companies like Cogent will be more than happy to provide high bandwidth backbones between major cities.
"What doesn't makes sense is blocking ports before you actually use any bandwith. If you want to operate a server for a couple of days, just to learn how to do that, or to experiment something you wouldn't do on a production server, why shouldn't you do that on a ADSL conection?"
The broadband provider can charge whatever he wants for whatever service he decides to provide. Who are you that you think you can tell them how to do business. Maybe they don't want to take the effort to monitor bandwidth, and blocking ports is the simplest way for them to limit bandwisth.
Vote for Pedro
Sorry. No such luck.
Ceci n'est pas un post