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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.
...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?
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?
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
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.
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.
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...
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.
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"
If all you are going to use the net for is e-mail, some surfing, and sending grandma a picture of the new baby, you don't need broadband. A modem will do. Cable companies want to gouge the people who actually use broadband. To hell with the cable companies! I watch broadcast TV, and get my broadband from the phone company. Cable is down all the time. The phones aren't.
How ya like dat?
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.
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.
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.
actually the price isn't that bad.
....will be called net hogs and booted.
here in san antonio, people have FLOCKED to Time Warner/Road Runner cable internet.
it's a virtual lock in....dsl got it's ass kicked.
-they promised movies, music, and tons of stuff to download.
now the bate and switch plan is about to go into effect.
they are going to scrap the whole multimedia aspect, and now want people to barely use it....which at $40/month...now becomes expensive for the usage.
people who do stream movies, download large files
cable companies say one thing...."come to us...multimedia is plentiful...the internet is beautiful"
but what they really want is users that barely turn on the computer, check their email, read a text site or two, and sign off.
message to cable companies:
I'LL DROP YOUR ASS IN HEART BEAT....I'LL GO TO DSL, OR EVEN BACK TO DIAL UP...AND I'LL TAKE 100 PEOPLE WITH ME.
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'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.
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
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
I'd be using DSL right now if:
A) It was available in my area, as cable currently is.
B) They had a more competitive and consistant pricing scheme.
I've got friends that pay $29 per month. I've got friends that pay more. Personally, for the bandwidth, that seems like a good price. Anything more expensive seems like a ripoff compared to the faster cable modems. Curently though, cable is more bandwidth than I really need. DSL would cut it well for me, but why pay extra, and why deal with crap like PPPOE? It isn't worth it to me. SBC needs to quit acting like idiots or they are going to lose out on a alot of customers.
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.
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
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.
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.
No, they're not. Ping times in the 700 msec range make pretty much everything but email painful to use. Even surfing the web is annoying, what with the one- to two-second latency between clicking a link and getting the data for that link.
Games, shell access, VPNs, IRC, these things are all just short of impossible with a satellite Internet connection.
Can't improve it, either. That's a speed-of-light limitation.
I write in my journal
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?
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.
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.
You mean socialists...
Capitalism is the equal exchange of goods and services. Many people think it's greed and power, but that's actually a form of socialism.
In a capitalist system, corporations cannot exploit the clients. In a capitalist system, the compay and the customer must both agree 100% on a deal, otherwise it's not capitalism...
#Secret Windows Source Code, in MS C% - if (uptime >= "24 hours") then bsod() else print "Windows License Violation!"
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.
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.
One more thing, on the topic of economics... Most companies tend to be "interventionist", which means that they first please the politician and then the customer. A quick example of a socialist system is when the goods and services are forced upon you (basically 'fed' to you). In a socialist system, you cannot own anything yourself; everything you own is known as "public property", or "owned by the people" (a Marxist term). For example, if you bought a car in an extreme socialist system, the car would immediately become the "public's car", and everyone would be able to use it, in a fanatical attempt to remove jealously. Here a great economic chart which shows left wing/right wing systems: http://ministries.tliquest.net/politics/political% 20spectrum.jpg
Many corporations use force to promote and sell their products, which places them in the "radical interventionism" and "democratic socialism" areas on the chart.
#Secret Windows Source Code, in MS C% - if (uptime >= "24 hours") then bsod() else print "Windows License Violation!"
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 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.
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 ----
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.
| - | - |
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 ----
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!
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.
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.
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.
SBC/Yahoo DSL is advertised on TV for $29.99/month. I don't know about restrictions or availability, though.
Of course, SBC is still charging me $49.99/month for my DSL.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
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."
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.
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?
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
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
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
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
Bandwidth isn't free, the facilities for distributing bandwidth aren't free, the people who maintain those facilities aren't free, and I think it's entirely fair that companies charge more to the people who use more. I do think the caps could be a bit more reasonable in some cases; something like 10-20GB/Month with the ability to carry your unused KBs to the next month. That would be enough to curb the continuous 200KB/Second all day, all night, all month types (ie; people who queue a dozen movies, a couple binary newsgroups, then play various 3D online games for a few hours until their movies are transferred) and still allow the majority of users to continue regular use without noticing a difference. Maybe as an added benefeit they could allow people to purchase 'chunks' of extra bandwidth to add to their account at a reasonable discount.
We may yet see a day where continuous 100MBit/Sec connections are as standard in homes as water pipes, but today isn't that day.
BD Phone Home!
Shameless plug. Like you weren't expecting it.
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
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?
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?
I use PPPoE on xDSL and run servers with no problems. Why would PPPoE have problems with servers?
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
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?
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?
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.
What's so bad about PPPoE? I run a Linux box on my DSL with no problem, and I use do run PPPoE under FreeBSD... for me it's not much different than straight DHCP, once it's set up (and even that was a snap)...
NGWave - Fast Sound Editor for Windows
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...
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/
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!
And likewise, people like me who like to go for drives on the weekend, or visit their friends in distant towns should pay extra 'road-use' surcharges for the additional mileage. After all, roadways aren't free, the facilities for maintaining roadways aren't free, the people who maintain roads aren't free, and I think it's entirely fair that the states charge more to the people who drive more.
After all, they're both public networks.
You see the problem? The flat fee structure (taxes) works for the roadways, in which the high-use users are covered by the low-use users (the ones who drive to the store and back once a week), and in average, it pays for the costs.
As another point - what if the cap was 10 GB/mo and you intentionally downloaded 9.9 GB of data (web sites, files, music, etc.)... and then the pop-up ads and spam push you over the limit to paying higher surcharges? Is that fair? That's like the mailman charging you a fee if he has to use two hands to carry your junk mail to your mailbox... or like your cell phone company charging you for connect charges when telemarketers call you - something that has been ruled illegal.
-T
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.
BD Phone Home!
Shameless plug. Like you weren't expecting it.
Diablo II, for example, uses about 15Mb/hour.
The easiest way to find out - if you have a firewall - is to count the traffic from your games machine while you're playing the game. Some ISPs have a "usage meter" which lets you see how many megabytes you've sent/received - this could also be useful to you.
Compare 15Mb/hour for a games like Diablo II to downloading a movie. Games are very low bandwidth compared to warez leechers. I switched to ADSL for low latency - we've had pay-per-megabyte plans in Australia since the first ISP.
Australian ISPs pay upstream for their bandwidth - and the ISPs are quite happy to pass the costs on to their customers. That's the way things go in a Capitalist economy. If you sell unlimited bandwidth, expect the user to use all the available bandwidth, all the time. I don't know why your ISPs made the assumption that people wouldn't comsume all the free resource. I don't think their business managers had their heads screwed on properly.
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
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
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
I guess I can't resist rebutting the previous poster. Sigh.
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.
There's more to bandwidth than long distance fiber. As George Gilder, who probably mis-influenced your thinking, found out - the "last mile" is the problem. Most of the dark fiber is wholesale fiber - long haul stuff. It is a lot more expensive to get it from your house to the backbone! The cost of installing the fiber is very high. The cost of switching it onto the net is also high, and bandwidth related. In fact, few people have fiber to their house. In most cases, it is coax that goes to a nearby multiplexor that goes onto fiber. And guess what? That multiplexor costs a lot. Furthermore, ultimately all the bandwidth has to go through the ISP's infrastructure and extremely expensive access points to get onto the net. It ain't free. Your dark fiber reasoning is terribly naive.
Now, as to your bandwidth calculation, you conveniently ignore the issue of peak bandwidth, which to most people is far more important than 24x7 bandwidth. Your calculation is for the latter. When you have a wideband connection, you have high peak bandwidth (my microwave connection typically gives about 4.7mbps). But since peaks average out across users, this is not nearly as expensive to provision as the same amount of bandwidth average.
I don't know about you, but I have never seen a broadband ad (other than DSL) that guaranteed continuous high bandwidth.
The only good weather is bad weather.
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.
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?
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
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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Truth is. We're owned :(
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
Well, I don't work for directtv DSL but I believe that GTE got rolled up into them at one point. Anyway, these guys don't give a rats ass about servers as long as the usage is reasonable (though they do reserve the right to yank you if you get abusive using a residential service for business), they give you a static IP standard, and no caps. the actual service agreement is here.
Oh, they explicitly support Windows, Mac (including X) and Unix. Unfortunately, they don't serve my new central office (neither does anybody else) so I'm screwed but I'm getting my church wired (as soon as the gateway arrives) so consider this a testimonial from a former and future customer.
YMMV
I assume that business lines there, as here, are unlimited bandwidth pipes. Why not band together with your neighborhood and make a WISP? The collective business community usually has enough clout to outbid any one abusive business so if residential service is priced too high, you should be able to get a T-1 (E-1?) to a central point and turn a small profit while charging the same money for more (no caps) and better (symmetric, not choked off) bandwidth.
Hardly unrestricted as there are a large number of sites that are reachable from most any country but yours.
A general point, you are in a communist country and the basic rule of all these countries is that the prices paid for just about anything is not the true price. It might be higher, it might be lower, but it is very rarely a market price. PRC communism may be somewhat better than most of the rest of the communist nations in the respect as its economics have moved more towards the fascist model than classical communism but I doubt that your telecom sector is properly priced.
Good luck in getting your system straightened out to something honest and self-sustaining.
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
There currently are no good ways to store large quantities of power without incurring huge losses to heat or using very expensive storage media. Electricity is generated and used largely on-demand.
Umm, what's the difference between "generating on demand" and "storing power until needed"? The above poster wasn't suggesting some kind of big capacitor or chemical cell battery to hold the electricity until used- just reminding us that power companies can reduce their consumption of coal/uranium during periods of low demand.
They need to plan ahead 12-hour or so make those sorts of adjustments, so they can't instantly adjust the generators to moment-by-moment demand.
But with ISPs in the bandwidth industry, their window for adjusting costs is much larger- they can't just bring a generator offline to compensate for a lull in demand. Their investments are staff and capital equipment, whose costs come not from using them but just having them. If they prepare for 50 gig/sec (across all users), and customers only use 20, they're not saving any money.
The routers have already been bought, the staff on duty, the frames with the international carriers have been contracted. There's not much elasticity.
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.
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
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
What's your connection speed to the actual Internet? Can you honestly tell me that you can transfer at 12MBytes/sec from halfway around the world?
BD Phone Home!
Shameless plug. Like you weren't expecting it.
Correction: the landlord doesn't decide on an ISP, that's for me to decide. The landlord decides on a last-mile service provider.
$18k/year AU = $10k/year US = $833/month or actually a bit cheaper than what I was quoted for my T-1 and that's 1.5Mbits/sec (it sounds like Australia's on the 'E' scale that's used in Europe). The only problem is the bandwidth caps. If you have any sort of competitive environment, it looks like you have an open market niche. What's keeping new entrants out?
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.
that highway will last 10-15 years
What dream land do you live in? In PA, ONE good winter will destroy even newly repaved roads. In other places, it seems to about ~5 years.
A place where a researcher can write a piece of software... and change the world. Ever heard of Tim Berners-Lee?
The major cable providers and telco are trying to stuff the genie back into the bottle, to turn the Net into a place like broadcasting, where the only technologies that gets deployed are ones they can put toll meters on.
But the US isn't the only country on the Net, and the places where people can work on stuff without worrying about bandwidth caps and which ports are blocked upstream are the ones the US will be buying that new technology from.
The politicians and the FCC think they've made this choice for us. Will we let it stick?
Tech Public Policy stuff
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.
Sorry. No such luck.
Ceci n'est pas un post