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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.
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!
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?
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
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...
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"
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.
That's utter BS. Most of the cable news networks and the three major broadcast stations here in the US get their stories from the New York Times, or the major news wires (AP, Reuters, etc). Television is only a fraction of the news outlets out there. You have the internet, newspapers, magazines, journals, etc. To say that they are supressing this is utter conspiracy at best.
Secondly, they aren't taking control of the internet. There will always be several ways to get internet access. You have telephone lines, satellite connections, other companies that own the last mile fiber, and more. Ten years ago, it looked like the telephone companies would 'own' the internet. But looking back, it turned out to be nothing. The same thing holds true right now. Just because cable companies are doing a good job providing high speed access doesn't mean that it will stay that way ten years down the road.
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.
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.
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.
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
It's pretty evident that you don't have the slightest idea what "monopoly" means here. If there's a cable company, a DSL provider, a dial-up provider, a satellite provider, and a cellular dial-up provider, then there's not exactly a monopoly, is there?
I write in my journal
Exactamundo.
In the Texas Panhandle, it's flat. Really, really flat. It's so flat, that on a clear day, you can look off at the horizon and see all 360 degress of it... faded blue depending on the humidity, but there nonetheless.
Now, what do you need for a good wireless connection? A flat, unobstructed line-of-sight to an antenna or a repeater.
Heh... by sticking atennas and repeaters on top of granaries, water towers, and high buildings, wireless ISPs in Amarillo and the surrounds are getting *amazing* distances with their wireless shots. You can drive 30-40 miles away and still get a good clean connection via a pingle-can antenna. Thusly, Wireless is taking off in a big way here. A good number of the people I work with are already using wireless as their main form of bandwidth and out and out refuse to go back to cable. Most everyone else is actively considering switching. Those who are considering other forms of broadband bandwidth are going to DSL and not cable.
Cable companies and media conglomerates are screaming and making a big fucking deal out of a non-existant problem in the name of gelaning control. What it boils down to is that the technology is changing too rapidly for them to effectively impliment any kind of contols. Sure, they can nail some of the areas in the U.S. where it's impossible to get DSL or wireless, but they can't go everywhere. If my understanding is correct, DSL is getting cheaper and cheaper, and wireless is getting better and better. Cable is a flash in the pan. A bright flash, but a flash in the pan nonetheless.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
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.
From what bodily orifice did the author pull this nugget? Last time I checked, most people were still stuck with dial-up connections. Cable might have an edge over DSL as far as broadband connectivity goes (which would make sense, since DSL pretty uniformly sucks, at least around here), but broadband comprises a fairly small part of everything that qualifies as "Internet access."
Then again, considering the source of the article (tompaine.com is a well-known hangout for left-wing nuts and kooks), this lack of a firm grip on the facts shouldn't be surprising.
As for my own experiences with broadband, the only limit I've run up against with Cox was when it started blocking port 25 on dynamic-IP accounts. An extra $10/month for a static IP address fixed that (and generally made running a web/mail/SSH server more convenient). Other than that, I've been pretty much free to do whatever I want. My experiences with various DSL providers here has been underwhelming, but that owes more to Sprint's incompetence at keeping a DSL network running than anything else.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
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.
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.
eat away at your limit? Just think of how much you would hate spam then...
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.
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 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.
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.
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
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."
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.
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...
I've been thinking about this for awhile actually. Although wireless would be an option, it would probably be better to setup the entire complex in the following configuration:
:P:P
1)Main T-x or even OC-x connection to server room with webserver, mail server, etc.
2)From server room, depending on number of seperate physical buildings, Gigabit or Fiber connections to sub-servers/routers in the diffrent buildings
3)From building wire rack, 100Base-T wires going to every unit, possibly every room
That would make a complete network/ISP for an apartment complex, and would enable it to use the service to turn an additional profit (beyond the installation of the lines and cost of servers etc). Not to mention being convienent for the people living there. Add approx. $20-40/mth to the rent, enable unlimited bandwidth, throw in on-site technical support for computer issues....I don't know many people that wouldn't jump on this.
The problem with running a wireless network is:
1)Unsecure unless you have someone that knows what their doing
2)Expensive for new tenents (having to buy a wireless network card, or if the complex rents them to tenents, replacing stolen ones)
3)Slower than 100Base-T, or possibly even Gigabit
4)Problems with wireless during storms/possible electical wire interferance (depending on age of complex)
If anyone knows a complex that is interested, tell them to get ahold of me!
--CypherDragon
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 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"
BD Phone Home!
Shameless plug. Like you weren't expecting it.
Most of the cable news networks and the three major broadcast stations here in the US get their stories from the New York Times
Do they have to log in first?
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
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 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.
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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As is the case in these sorts of situations, ISPs are in the difficult position of either leaving it largely alone and arguing that content on USENET is decentralized and nearly impossible to monitor and censor; or attempting to do so and thus implicitly concede their own liability for that content and their responsibility for failing to censor it when it's illegal.
Most ISPs do one of three things with USENET: they either carry all groups and don't censor (although I believe--but could be wrong--that most everyone uses filters to fight spam); or they don't carry the binary groups (which they are probably doing mostly to radically reduce bandwidth and disk usage, but it also gets rid of the illegal porn, too); or they carry the binary groups but monitor group names for egregiously illegal content. For example, they don't carry "alt.binaries.pictures.erotics.pre-teen" or "alt.binaries.warez".
One reason that you may still see these sorts of groups even if your ISP is attempting to block illegal content is because people are creating new groups to get around the block.
And while it may sound simple to monitor for the child porn that you are objecting to, in reality it's nearly impossible. They can block groups that are named obviously enough. But that doesn't stop anyone from posting child porn on other groups. An ISP that's taken responsibility for censoring child porn is arguably just as responsible for it when it appears in "alt.binaries.erotica" as when it appears in an obvious child porn group. And there's no way that anyone could actually monitor the content directly, since in the erotica groups alone there are probably more than 100,000 individual images posted every day.
Putting aside the issue of dedicating resources to all the binary traffic, were the decision ever to be mine, I'd chose to leave it alone and argue that I'm no more responsible for the content on my news server than I am the content on my http caching server. (That's a precarious argument, but only because technologically ignorant courts have made unreasonable rulings involving this sort of thing. These issues are still being fought over, obviously in the case of P2P.)
Finally, I previously used Time Warner's Road Runner cable ISP, and they seemed to be pretty "hands-off", although (since I do look at the a.b.p.e.* groups every now and then) I think I noticed that flagrantly child-porn groups would eventually disappear. The teen groups they seemed to keep. Now I use SBC DSL, since I got annoyed with TW, and they block quite a few groups. I'm actually more weirded out by the child molestation and adult-child incest stories in the alt.sex.stories groups than I am upset by the photo groups. I guess because I think that there's not really that much real child-porn out there (children and pre-teens), but there sure are a lot of people posting and reading stories about daddy having sex with his daughter. Or nice Mr. Smith seducing the neighborhood children. Maybe it's an outlet. But I've scanned over some of these stories (out of the same sort of curiosity one looks at a traffic accident or murder scene) and I've thought "this guy has actually done this. I'm sure of it by how he is describing his 'strategies'". It really, really disturbed me. But then, my ex-wife is an incest survivor, and my ex-father-in-law (the abuser) was the creepiest most evil person I've ever met. I don't like these people. Many or most are not just turned on by children the way the rest of us are turned on by adults--no, a lot of them are honest-to-God predators who primarily enjoy "catching" their pitifully weak "prey". It is absolutely horrifying. But sorry about that rant.
(The coolest thing about news via cable modem was since their news server was local, and in those days there wasn't as much neighorhood traffic, and there weren't caps, the DL speeds from the server to my computer were enormous.)
DISCLAIMER: I am not, nor have I ever been, a news admin. I may be mistaken about a few things in this post. This being Slashdot, I don't have to request that more knowledgable people correct my errors. They will. But please do.
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.
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
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.