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AT&T/Comcast Consider Aussie-Style Bandwidth Caps
LazySiow writes "Having looked at Australia's pioneering efforts in cappedband services,
AT&T Broadband and Comcast are considering applying download caps of their own. Since the two approved a merger proposal last week, they will be the largest broadband provider in the States, and will not only affect a large percentage of of users, it will set a large and potentially unstoppable precedent for caps all around the country."
Just don't call it "unlimited internet", or it's false advertising.
-John
If they cap your bandwidth, you should simply "cap" them... Knee-Caps are usually a nice target...
-- "To ask a question is to show ignorance; Not to ask a question means you'll remain ignorant."
lameness_filter=0
:-)
I thought AOL already imposed CAPS ON THEIR USERS
Try NetBSD... safe,straightforward,useful.
Rogers Cable in Toronto capped our speeds so badly it is doubtful we could even GET to the 5gb transfer limit that Sympatico has put in place if Rogers implemented it.
On a more serious note, the Rogers answer was to cap speeds as opposed to a bandwidth cap. I went from 600kbp/s down to 150, and an upload cap of 40kbp/s which I can never achieve. =)
So has anybody heard about any other ISP's plans on doing this? I would hate for it to come my swbell way.
Gonna have to pick between latest red hat download OR all the pron and pirated movies.
I hope users of this service let them know how much it is appreciated. Vote with your dollar and cancel your service if they cap your account. There are no doubt many other providers that would love to have you.
The day it is introduced, call your provider and let them know you will be canceling due to this restriction. Have new service with another company installed and cancel on the last day of your billing cycle!
This is the real cost of P2P - providers always work on an oversubscription of their services, just to make it economical. They never expected to see the utilization that they are seeing, mainly due to p2p applications.
Once you start paying for each MB over the limit, then your MP3s will no longer be free. So, the big question is, are the ISPs in bed with the music industry ????
tom-george.comBecause geeks rate higher t
of this transaction are considerable; the potential harms negligible. We therefore conclude that the merger serves the public interest, convenience, and necessity.
...every time i saw one of those "whaawhaa i don't want caps" articles on whatever-geeky-news-site
They should just charge by the meg.
Looking for people to chat about multicopters, coding, music. skype: gtsiros
It's all Telstra's fault. They're an Australian company with a monopoly on Australian...well...everything. It's kind of sad that they can affect the US as well.
Even big bad Bill Gates has said "Telstra is teh root of all evil"...or something like that.
It took me four minutes just to post this stupid comment because of the bandwidth cap on my cable modem!
evil adrian
like it or not p2p is obviously costing them to much at the moment for them to continue selling broadband at there current prices .
I wonder if this will cause alot of people will switch to a premium service ?
Article seems to throw around the term "5Gb" making me think "e-gads, 625 megs a month?" but further research into other articles on this subject put the number at 5 gigaBYTES of traffic a month.
.. feel free to redo my math with exact precision:
Decimals hacked off
5 gigs / 30 days = 166.66 megs a day.
166.66 megs a day / 24 hour = 6.94 megs an hour
6.94 megs an hour / 60 minutes = 115 kilobytes per minute
115 Kilobytes / 60 seconds = 1.91 kilobytes a second...
and 1.91 kilobytes * 8 = 15.28 kilobits a second.
Comcast Online - 1994 speed at 2002 prices.
I am on Comcast and have been capped at 1500/128 Kbit/s from day one after @home went away.
A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
We paid about $80AU (around $40US) for a 256k down 56 up ADSL line. We liked it a hell of a lot, spent most of my time gaming, girlfriend loved it and got addicted to ifilm. Our biggest month was 11GB.
Then mid last year, they started capping at 3GB, no price reductions, nothing. Capping basically made it no longer cost-effective, so they gave us a chance to jump ship, which we did.
Within 2 months, all of the other broadband providers introduced caps (usually at 3GB). Only a few weeks ago has one provider re-introduced unlimited plans.
Point of my ramble is, that once you put a cap on broadband, you have to watch everything you DL, and that sucks. It'll just get to the point that you're better off with back with yor 56k. Yell at Comcast/AT&T until they back off. Do it for your own good.
?
Mergers are good for competition
If my cable ISP ever caps me, I'm going to mail them an envelope with about a buck in pennies and a note saying "this should be enough to cover the cost to quadruple my cap this month." Seriously, doesn't each gigabyte of data transferred cost ISPs something like 10 cents? If broadband costs $40+/month, surely they could afford to set caps at more than 5 or 10 gigs/month.
live(free) || die;
I really have no complaint right now with my cable, its upload is capped at about 50, and download I believe is ~250. This works for me, playing quake I get good pings, if I wanna download Redhat I just start it when I go to bed. I don't see how this needs to be changed to a limit of 5gigs, or whatever is agreed apon, Especially if they charge you for the extra bandwidth that is used. I guess what I would rather see would be fixed prices for what you get, unlimited upload/download would be one price, maybe getting your upload/download speed caps a changed a different price.
I put the m in oop.
Now I laugh at those losers who abandoned dialup in favor of those wacky-schmacky cable & whatever :-)
Caps are easy to turn off. It's the third button up on the left hand side. It's 'Stickey Keys' you gotta watch out for.
AT&T BI is a great ISP if you enjoy...
- 75% packet loss or more to servers in the same city as you.
- 300ms latency to servers in the same city as you.
- packet jitter so bad you could swear you really were SURFING the internet because the packets come in waves.
- not playing online games.
- your "always on" internet service being disconnected.
- paying 5x more for the same service that a 56k user gets.
- the worst customer support center EVER! One of the many outages took 2 weeks to fix, and thats because they didn't send anyone out until one and a half weeks after I called!
- having your ISP change the TOS on you every other day.
The one thing with ATTBI that has always worked correctly has been email... well, that is when I am connected.I will go back to dialup if I have to. Heck, its just $10 a month. Saving $40 a month and still getting roughly the same service... sounds like a wise move.
the FT protocol is said to be full of a lot of extra, unneeded bloat. gnutella is a bit redundant, but is nowhere near as bad. i wish someone would make a decent p2p program sometime. i was making one myself, that contained a very small protocol and allowed for compression, too, but im a lazy bastard and need to get back to work on it. too much counterstrike :P
While I can understand that capping is something that might very well be needed, I think that the broadband companies are going about it the wrong way...
What I personally would like to see (well, preferably no capping, but I cant see that continuing) is a daily limit - say 500mb-1gb, after which the connection slows down to modem / just over modem speeds, with up to 3 days (for example) which can be carried forward to the next
The main problems are caused by so many people running kazaa/etc and leaving it on - they should be the ones who are restricted, not a blanket restriction like 5gb a month which could easily be exceeded by "normal usage" (I am confident I have used more than 5gb in any one month without running p2p applications)
However, having said all of that, I expect that even though some companies will introduce capping, it will follow (atleast in the UK) the same trend as phone access...
Some phone access is capped, but there are always the "unlimited" plans still available (and some companies actually do keep to the unlimited promise!)
Bigger hard drives....
Faster Processors....
More memory than ever before....
Upstream/downstream/monthly capped internet access?
With all this talk about bandwidth caps I'm glad RR hasn't really talked much crazy stuff like that.
....
Bad spellers of the world, untie!
But still I can understand why they're considering them: gotta recoup all that money lost in the merger. Considering just how expensive Tx's and OC-x's are I'm not surprised that they're considering this. Not that I condone their proposal...
Depending on how they are implemented.
The local cable ISP where I live (western Canada) has been experimenting with selling "highspeed lite" internet access, capped at 16KB/s ("five times as fast as dialup" is the way they put it). It's considerably cheaper than the regular service ($25 cnd/month vs $40 cdn/month). They haven't capped download rates for users of their regular service. The download cap just lets them offer service at a price point they couldn't otherwise.
The conspiracy has one simple, ultimate goal: to transfer as much money from your pocket into theirs. They have the will and organized money to make it happen and there is very little you or anyone else will be able to do about it.
You can make false claims that you are all powerful and can take your business elsewhere, but then you will all realize all businesses operate in this manner. They will all charge bullshit fees, they will invent reasons to charge you more bullshit fees, and they will all utilize contracts that lock you into them. They will all, in short, steal as much of your money that can get away with.
Welcome to the "free" market---free not as in fair, but free as in free to steal.
<a href="http://www.joblessjimmy.com">Work is dumb and so is Jobless Jimmy.</a>
My idea is this; Everyone pays your ISP for bandwidth downloaded. The ISP pays you the same rate for bandwidth uploaded. The rate is one at which the ISPs can make a profit. Every bit of data being downloaded is being uploaded at the same time.
This provides an incentive to produce content, and to share it for free. No more banner adds.
I realize this is more complicated than I make it sound. But all the telcos got together on how to pay for long-distance services, so they should be able to do this.
I here-by donate my Fantastic Idea to the public domain.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
the good news is that, in a few years, technology will have made it so that its not so expensive for cable companies to let customers download to their hearts content every month. the bad news is, filesizes seem to generally increase with technology increases, too.
For people in my age group (20 something) DSL is a *lifestyle issue*. I download the TV I wanna watch, I get all my music from emusic, my musican friends send me their track (24 bit wav of course -- mp3 eats quality) ... we will not give it up easily :) ... and just think of all the things I wont admit to doing with DSL
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
I fail to understand the whole 'bandwidth is free' mentality. As someone who has worked for a telco that did everything from lay fibre to manage routers, I can assure you that bandwidth is not free. Users who saturate their connections should not pay the same as users who occassionally browse the web, but like to do so at high speed. The sooner people pay per meg of data moved, the sooner we see:
* Legislation against spam
* Fewer stupid graphic heavy websites
* Smaller more efficient programs
* Greater use of zlib
Furthermore, it means I can:
* Stop subsidising college geeks trying to collect 40Gb of ripped music for the hell of it.
Now, at the _commercial_ level, it's a different story, and I'd hate to see the removal of peering arrangements and so on. But at consumer level, gee, let's just pay for what we use and not pay for what we don't. Is it really so hard?
Ideally, signup and connection to broadband should be trivially cheap, and then payment should be usage based. This opens broadband to poorer people, with amount of usage based on inclination and ability to pay. Currently, broadband is expensive to signup for, meaning its users are exclusively rich people who then think they should be able to host websites / download mp3's eternally as a basic human right. Feh.
-----
"70 per cent of Telstra's broadband customers did not reach their download limits."
Telstra's most limited account is 300Mb limit per month at AU$54.95. Each additional Mb is charged at 15.9c per megabyte.
Some Australian ISPs charge for each additional megabtye over your limit, and others throttle your speed to something ridiculous (like 28.8kbps). I ordered the latter for my uncle when setting up his ADSL because many people are ignorant of their web usage (at least at first).
If a user on the 300Mb plan downloads 500Mb in their first month, they will pay
$54.95 + 200Mb * $0.159 = $54.95 + $31.80 = $86.75.
If you think that is bad, if a 3Gb user downloads 3.8Gb in their first month (like most teenagers I know), they're up for
$87.95 + 800Mb * $0.139 = $87.95 + $111.20 = $199.15.
I'm suprised no Aussies brought this up in the recent article Add-Ons Add Up.
Independent resources for market research include Whirlpool (Australian Broadband News) and Broadband Choice for indexed summaries of all providers plans. Read them first! Please!
As a capped @home customer I wouldn't wish this on anyone. I think the bottom line is what the limit is and how much customers pay per month. Basically, how much you can live with being ripped off per month and not wasting the time and money of finding an alternative.
Analytic & algebraic topology of locally Euclidean meterization of infinitely differentiable Riemmanian manifold
The way it works here in Australia is not quite what most people have mentioned. Our two cable providers (Telstra and Optus) now both offer caps, and most ADSL providers also cap their connections. They restrict the ammount of data we can transfer to and from our modems, with some providers also capping the maximum transfer speeds (Telstra cable at the moment offers an "uncapped speed" service, but I imagine that'll go in a few months time too -- they really can't help themselves). Most providers give arround 3GB a month for arround AU$80 a month for cable, and usually a little more for ADSL. If you use up your limit, you start paying ~13c/MB...
Optus offers a slightly nicer system. Once you use up all your limit, they drop you down to a 28kbps connection, so you join the hundreds of thousands of dialup users in australia on sub-par connections. But at least you don't then pay for phone calls on top of this.
And while I'm complaining about cable networks, it seems that Telstra & Optus can now give each other CATV channels, to "aid competition". Which is really strange, since they were always competing with each other anyway. And the ironic twist is this: Telstra (our partially-government-owned telco, soon to be fully privatized) is charging more for the extra channels from Optus, while Optus is charging less for the Telstra channels. We would have switched to Optus many moons ago indeed, but for some reason, the government wouldn't allow one single unified cable network to be installed, but insisted that both companies install their own. But Optus, not having the backing of the government, decided to put their cable up in more populated areas, so of course, people who actually might use it (like us) miss out.
In conclusion, you really have to fight it! Most broadband users just sat there and did nothing about the cap, and now we're stuck with it. I've always envisioned the USA as a "mondo cheap bandwidth" place, and now that you're reduced to the garbage that we have to face every day...
Viva la bandwidth!
Great.
Now we'll have to make absolutely sure we don't visit any sites with huge graphics or popup ads, for fear of running up against that download limit.
And of course, no more of that "rich multimedia content" they were hyping when they sold me the service - unless I want to pay an extra fee.
And all the spam I receive will undoubtedly count against the limit, including the spam I get from my ISP (DirecTV DSL - formerly Telocity) trying to sell me some crap "remote control" service that a. costs more money, b. eats up even more bandwidth, and c. does absolutely nothing that VNC doesn't do better and for free.
<sarcasm>Where do I sign up?</sarcasm>
"Alcohol, Tobacco, & Firearms" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
The main broadband offering is ADSL, here in NZ. The last-mile copper is owned by a monopoly - Telecom NZ, and so they are, with a few small exceptions, the only company who can provide DSL to the home user market.
Telecom provide two 'products' - jetstream, which is unlimited bandwidth (up to whatever you can get with DSL on your phone line), and jetstart, which is bandwidth capped at 128/128mbps (16 kilobytes per second)
With jetstream, you have to pay traffic charges, which has pissed a lot of people off when they have been stung by someone else's unsolicited inbound traffic, and had to pay for it. (Yes, you can rake up a big bill for your enemies who have jetstream by simply flood pinging them for a week)
Telecom NZ charges a monthly fixed fee for Jetstart (for the luxury of connecting your copper pair into a DSLAM at the exchange), plus your ISP charges a fee for routing your traffic.
On top of that, most ISPs in New Zealand that route DSL have their own traffic limit on how much you can use per month/billing period - eg, 5gb or 10gb. If you exceed that, most "fine" you by charging a hell of a lot per meg for every meg you exceed your limit by.
are goddamn rediculous
i have DSL thru interquest.net and my apartment complex.
according to my windoze XP connection stats, I have downloaded 7.5 GB and uploaded 1.1 GB in the last 12 days, and that doesn't include my G4 Cube and my roommate's computer.
If my ISP decides to start capping our up/down totals, I will drop them like a bad habit.
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
Despite the typically sensational headline of this article, an Australian ADSL provider, Green Telecommunications (formely Apple Telecommunications...can you guess why they had to change their name?) has recently re-launched an unlimited download ADSL plan. For AUD$160/month, you get unlimited 512/128k ADSL access. Not all Australian internet experiences are as backward as Slashdot would have you believe...try finding an affordable internet cafe in any major US city compared to the choices you have in Sydney...it's like zapping back 10,000 years when you get off the plane in LAX or SFO.
Green Telecommunications
I just took advantage of an offer from my provider (Megapass/KT), here in Korea...moved me from ADSL to VDSL. No increase in fees...no charges for hardware swap, etc. No cap.
With so much competition for customers, the providers here are looking for any method to gain new ones, and to keep the ones they have. The govt. is pushing the telecoms to make sure that citizens have tons of affordable, fast access. This will drive e-commerce, etc. I pay approx. $25.00/month for my internet...the service is top notch. I split it between three computers and never have a problem. I have a feeling I'll miss it if I ever go back to Calif.
So if it weren't for the fact that the ISP's would have to then endorse a system for home users that violates their own term of service, then yeah... I'd say it's a good idea. As it sits, however, it's only a good idea for businesses since they're the only ones who are entitled to run servers without violating their TOS.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
At least Microsoft would be fighting against the caps because this would kill Xbox live.
Some background for those non-aussies.
In Australia, after attracting customers with 'unlimited' internet, Telstra then switched all users over to 'capped' plans. I say 'capped' as they are not really capped, you just pay an arm and a leg if you go over your limit. It didn't take long after SingTel's takeover of Telstra's main competitor, Optus, before they too introduced capped plans (these are actually capped).
So it looks like the U.S. will soon follow....then what? Will this become the new standard business model for broadband providers?
Telstra was able to do it in Australia as they have a virtual monopoly on broadband infrastructure. Don't let this happen in your neck of cyber-space, it really sucks as the charges aren't even realistic, they are highway robbery.
For more information on Telstra screwing broadband customers, see The Australian Broadband User Community site.
I'm always surprised when I read stories like this on /. Here in HK 58% (as of October 2001... probably much more now) of all internet users are broadband subscribers.
Why? that's easy - choose between 3Mbps downstream speed and 256Kbps upstream for US$38/month or 6Mbps downstream speed and 256Kbps upstream for US$51/month. Theoretically you're limited to 100 or 200 hours respectively but they waive that as part of the continual promotions because the competition is so fierce.
The result? If you use the internet much you get broadband... it's become the norm. The mindset has shifted and dial-up is definitely only a legacy thing now.
All generalisations are wrong... including this one.
These incumbent telcos are obsolete
Quoting the original poster - "it will set a large and potentially unstoppable precedent for caps all around the country"
You simply can't make a statement like this, because this move is going to piss people off and thus drive people away from AT&T. There is always going to be a player that will move in to fill this niche market and pick these people up with a better service that meets their needs.
I rarely do gnutella anymore. I just pick a radio station from shoutcast and go with it. I've got a 128k stream running for about 6-10 hours each weekday. Capping will kill that. It'll also kill any broadband based service -- like those legit movie and music sites popping up.
And people will get extremely pissed off by paying to download all those x10 popup graphics. Not that I see those anymore. (Thanks, Mozilla.)
How much time did you spend searching and researching online for the last car you bought?
I think it will dampen the online economy.
Software Wars
I have a 1 GB cap at home, and I surf for a few hours daily, and don't reach it.
,the file area also gets used quite a lot for other software, for example, linux ISO's (I Dl'd RedHat 7.3 from there), Staroffice and other big downloads. People can request files to be put on there. It's not the Whole-Internet-For-Download(tm) but it's ok.
I admin a system with a 5GB cap at work (1500kbps down) and so far this month we've transferred 715MB, between 10 of us.
Capping is fine , as long as there's a local mirror of something that I want, for free.
Eg. I'm with Telstra - they have a area for a lot of online games - they then have a file area for files required for games etc. All this (being on a local Telstra server) is free. Now
So, If they drop a SimTel (or whatever) mirror in locally and don't charge, then the only people who'll *really* suffer are the P2P crowd.
Yes , it limits other uses of the internet , such as video-on-demand etc... but the infrastructure still isn't there for everyone to have a cheap, guaranteed X Mbit pipe to their door.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
I've had a fair amount of experience in rolling out DSL services, and one thing that I always found strange is that lots of people in the industry disagree in terms of the way that the bandwidth should be carved up.
/. users would prefer :
Generally the expensive part of the bandwidth is the fibre leg between the DSLAM and the equipment on the ISP's bandwidth.
The discussions always revolved around the most fair/effecient way to carve this bandwidth up, and there were basically two original ideas : firstly put a limit on the users modem and have a free for all on the fibre. The problem with this is that p2p users can degrade the perceived QOS for all. Secondly you could basically channelize this fibre and make sure everyone has their allowed bandwidth. This obviously doesn't allow for oversubscription on the fibre which is a bad thing for consumer networks (we were designing a network predominently for businesses, so it was OK).
The important thing that we came upon is that there is a third option, which I think most
Give all users a low guarantee : say as low as 64k. OK, I know that you're thinking that's low, and it is, but thats guaranteed. The point is then you can divide the bandwidth on the fiber by 64 and work out the maximum no. users that you can have, which will be a lot, definately economically viable. Even when you've got this maximum no. of users, you'd be surprised how many users don't use their bandwidth (even with the proliferation of p2p services). This unused bandwidth goes into a pool that all users can take from. It's a bit like a burstable service. It means that you'll always get 64k of low latency service (for me that's just as important as the bandwidth....) and with the tests we made, you still managed to get some pretty decent download speeds. And with this way, you don't have to start putting caps on to increase the perceived QOS
tom-george.comBecause geeks rate higher t
BEfore making any rash decisions based on any Australian model (under which I am currently exposed to) it should be made aware that Telstra Australia has an effective Monopoly on telephone services, with phone services and internet services being closely tied together, this leaves us with expensive internet service costs, only meagerly reduced if you are also using other Telstra services. We have to suffer these "justifiable" caps for no reason other than Telstra being in a position to dictate terms and derail competition. Remind you of someone else????They also own the physical network Australia-wide. Copy us at your peril.
Bandwidth caps are good. They will weed out some of the irrelevant b******t that makes it through the moderation process in /.
Or you could be like North Korea, and let everyone just worry about bringing food to each home.
I am firmly against bandwidth caps, and here's why.
The moral is: don't punish people who like your service. I don't get punished by DirecTV and TiVo because I watch 20 hours of TV in a week instead of 2. True, Internet access requires more infrastructure per user than satellite does, but DirecTV has a per-user infrastructure cahrge as well (more satellites; installation; tech support). I expect that additional infrastructure charge to be covered in my monthly bill.
Even traditionally per-use models, such as long distance, are moving to flat-rate fees for those who use them a lot. You can now get unlimited long distance for $30 a month thanks to VoIP, which was spawned by the same technologies that made the Internet possible.
Don't cripple the growth of the Internet by advocating bandwidth limits. The only thing you will end up crippling is the continuing introduction of new, interesting websites with full-motion video and audio. The last thing we want is people defecting back to 56K, or worse, moving away from the Internet completely because "it's just not worth it."
Broadband has made the Internet thrive. Don't hold that progress back.
Simpli - Your source for San Jose dedicated servers and colocation!
If its P2P thats adding the overhead then ISPs should consider adding some decent traffic shaping, to throttle p2p traffic.
I believe BT Internet (UK) is doing this, but you won't find it mentioned anywhere.
Jason
Will they cap spam, too? Or will the limit only apply to their paying customers?
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Charging by the meg is stupid; it's not like they are paying to create the content on Yahoo or eBay or wherever.
It's like cable TV: you pay a flat rate, and you get a pipe "yay big" in size, down which content flows from someone else.
Or like the federal highway commission charging you based on the number of miles you drive.
If they want to provide some useful content, let them charge for that. If I elect to look at it, which I likely won't.
If I'm going to pay them per meg, then they can damn well pay the content providers per meg (e.g. where's the kickback for Slashdot?).
Sucks to be the guy who sells the pipe once, instead of the water company, who gets to sell the water over and over... oh well... if you don't like it, stay out of the pipe business, or buy into a water company.
-- Terry
Oh, and btw, I guess this will kill the idea of delivering movies over the net. Who is going to pay a few bucks to download a pay-per-view movie that takes about 800 megs if that's going to add to your monthly allowance?
Telcos do *NOT* have to make money; at best, they can make 3-6%, or whatever the PUC defines as "fair". This is because they are a legal monopoly, and in return for that monopoly, they give up certain rights, such as the right to "charge what the market will bear" (which in a monopoly, is "all your money").
-- Terry
They should charge somewhere in the neighborhood of colos/real bandwidth resellers... I can get a 1mbit pipe for what.. 300$/month? The current per-gb prices for metered isps are way higher than the actual price. I say; if the lusers don't want to subsidize my bandwidth usage, then I shouldn't subsidize their tech-support and bullshit advertising etc.
Basicly model where you pay by meg is pretty restricted. It even helps to stop innovation and exploration quite efficiently.
Lets see: Yesterday, I downloaded nearly two gigs of data from Redhats ftp site, just to play around with it.
as single download of that size per mont it does not use much of the nets capacity on month level. So in fact the effect, my download had was pretty minimal. When I normally use net in home just to read some weblogs and email, this 2gb chunk would be a pretty large increase to my monthly traffic. So, If I would be paying per meg, my financial balance would be devastated.
So I would not have done it
As primarily Windoze user, that would have stopped me from playing around with linux completely: because I would not have downloaded the iso images.
One solution to this problem could be system, that would let you have free traffic to certain limit per month, and then charge by meg. But again, on such system, would I have taken the risk of going over my traffic limit? No.
I could envision some sort of system, where you would be capped, or charged more, if you go over some large relational value, like using the net 50% more than average consumer, or the like. But again, if such usage would charge me more, I would not use it.
Umm, yeah, just some idle amusings. Some othes had far more insightfull answers to the problems I saw.
In dream society, people could be given the ability to mod replies. In real life, it would be disaster.
On Monday November 11, slashdot had a lovely posting about the new service. These caps would kill it right out of the box. If Movielink is for real, then the Hollwood studios may also fight against the caps as each rental was about 2GB.
Great people don't need people to complete them, great people complete other people. -- Matthew Pawlikowski.
A large part of the problem is the misuse of the Internet big companies are trying to force. Rather than treating the network as peers they want to have a few centralized services under corporate control and lots of little users that just sit there and suck up products and canned media. Essentially trying to turn the Internet into television/newsprint. It just doesn't work well.
If ISP's would embrace people that want to run their own web servers, P2P, etc they could reduce a lot of their upstream bandwidth usage. How many people look for local news on a server half way across the country? How many check their email on servers sitting somewhere at Yahoo? How many download the newest game, movie, or music from a distant P2P peer? That is a lot of bandwidth they don't need to waste.
Smart ISP's would provide community sites within their own network (and encourage power users to make their own sites) and provide nice web-based mail. A local IM server would be nice. Offering good proxy servers for web-surfing and a local P2P server that users can connect through rather than using servers elsewhere on the Internet. All are good ways to reduce the ISP's bandwidth usage while keeping happy customers.
I've seen community ran wireless networks that offer all these things and do a very good job at it. If ISP's aren't careful with their limits eventually enough users will join such community network projects that a good deal of the ISP's business may suffer. Wireless networks now are pathworking their way into covering most major cities and even rural areas. At the same time advances are being made in long haul signals for wireless. Eventually this will be a threat to the ISP/telco business and they just accelerate the shift by driving away power users.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Has anyone else noticed that the 5 GB/month caps on Sympatico users is under 9 days at dialup speeds?
Luke-Jr
Anyway, it isn't as bad as you make it out to be in your post. I live in Sydney and have iiNet ADSL, which has 12GB caps on a 512/128 link for AU$80. They shape you to 72kbps once you hit the cap, and they have a heap of unmetered internal content, including a few 128kbps Shoutcast streams and free P2P within your state. It puts the value you get from Telstra/Optus to shame.
i-green offer unlimited 256/64 for AU$80 too. Data caps aren't the end of the world - they just encourage competition in the market, and encourage ISPs to peer together to offer cheaper data to the customers.
Huh? I'm on 12 Mb/s ADSL here in Tokyo. And it's reliable, unlimited, and cheap (3000 yen a month ... what's that, $25 USD?)
;-)
Things have changed here in the last couple of years.
All of you who use a cable ISP should check out the agreement you signed.
Mine has a mention of a 5 gigabyte per month download limit. It's just a matter of when they choose to enforce it. And I signed this over two years ago...
Julie Moult is an idiot.
Broadband in Australia has gotten worse over the last year or so. Telstra broadband has market dominance in Australia and when they implemented their cap, the other big broadband carrier, Optusnet, decided to follow suit soon after.
If AT&T and Comcast put this cap in place, it would be a good idea to immediately terminate the contract(after considering termination penalties) and go with another provider who hasn't implemented the cap. The hope is that such action would send a potent message to broadband operators that by implementing caps, they'll lose customers to their competitors.
I think the situation with broadband in the USA won't deteriate as quickly as it did in Australia mainly becuase in USA there are more broadband operators(afaik).
I've always wanted to go to (permanently?) Japan. Hear they've got pretty good wireless internet there too now...
Luke-Jr
According to my logs in the last 16 months i have downloaded approximately 1,285 gigabytes of data through ATTBI (no home network so its not LAN transfers)
Personally I blame it all on ATT for actually having decent service in my area. 95% of the time I can sustain download rates of 180K/s. Before they capped my upload over a year ago I uploaded over 100 gigs in under 30 days.
T3 is what 6k or so a month, if you really want your speed 100% of the time. 100 ppl would get bout 56k/sec sharin a t3. thats 56k/sec each way. for less than $75 a month per person it could be done. That or just buy your own fiber line.
I'm the IT manager for a college here in Australia, and since we run a 'charge for what you use' system, I figured I'd recount a few of our experiences.
.anu.edu.au (and some other canberra institutions) - free .edu.au - 2.5 c (AU) per meg .au - 5 c (AU) per meg ...Although the actual prices have been falling each year, so they will likely be cut for 2003.
Our cost structure is driven entirely by our upstream providers, and since we're connecting students, we aim to break even on bandwidth costs, and pay for our infrastructure out of a $25 connection fee.
We have tiered charges, as part of an academic network, which look like this.
sites in
sites in
sites in
All other sites - 10 c (AU) per meg
In any case, our customers, I'll admit, are a fairly captive market as far as getting broadband access from their doom rooms go, however computer labs are run by a different division, and work quite differently. They have a 5meg per day quota, which accumulates over time, but is capped at 40 meg (and below at -20).
A lot of people have recently been asking for this system to be expanded to the dorms, although from what I gather, it's more because this access is 'free' rather than being billed, not out of preference for the cost model.
I would say, then, that we have a fairly good representation of how a system like this can work, and I would say on the whole it does so pretty well. We have a wide mix of users, from those who spend $100s per month, to people who don't even go through $25 in a year.
For a time last year, there was a hole in our billing system which was allowing people to get free web access through a proxy server on campus. People who discovered this, approached $400 a month before we found the problem (and luckily we had ways of tracking the usage, it just wasn't built into our standard billing process). Some of these people were rather displeased at having to pay back for the access, however it was all resolved without much trouble. What this proves, I suppose, is that the billing becomes a consideration for the residents, and they adjust their habits accordingly.
For an average user, however, people seem happy with the system. I can't imagine justifying a move to a flat fee structure, even if it were capped, because it would be impossible to sell to the vast majority here. I suppose that's the main moral, Average users aren't willing to subsidize the heavy users, and it's the average users who make up the majority.
There will always be some unhappy people when their loopholes are taken away, but these same people, in another area, are unhappy about subsidising others. Compulsory residents association fees, for example, most of which are spent on sport and alcohol, tend not to go over so well for those who don't participate, and hence don't get their money's worth. Of course, I could go on and on...free health care and so on and so on.
Anyway, I should put an end to this rambling...
The billing system we developed for all this is up for (open source) grabs if anyone wants to maintain it, since I'll be moving on, although it's very hacky and not exactly documented at all.
On the whole, I'd consider our experience positive, and I would personally look for a usage based system despite being a rather high end user myself. Basically, I figure there's always going to be someone with more time than me who I'll be subsidizing.
but the truth is there is not! And that is the whole problem. Allow 3 cable providers in my town and let them duke it out for my business. But now there is just one cable co. and the regional bell, neither seems to want to compete on price with the other.
I cancelled my Comcast cable internet after 2 months because they capped my upstream at 128kB which was useless for me to send my kids pics to grandmother.
When they start wrecking internet use with windoze-favoring caps (costly ISO downloads for linux installs), get together with your community (say 100 locals or more, plus a small business or three) and go in on a T1 line to share. Among the group will be a few solid linux-heads that could quickly setup a mailserver and the like for everyone to use.
I'm considering this option myself - no cable, no DSL, only satellite is available here (too much cost for too little benefit). With enough users, the cost wouldn't be too bad and you could run it your way.
As a DSL customer (or cable, for that matter) you are connected to a circuit of the speed that corresponds with your billing agreement. But, you might say, why can I only get 350kbs when I have a 768/128 circuit? Well, that's because there are several people that either think it's their God-given right to do P2P at full throttle on the upload, or sustain a constant 500kbs download 24 hours a day.
Everybody here on /. is smart enough to realize that cable and DSL are consumer products, and as such, the pricing model is not designed for 24/7 max upload and download. If you want 24/7 1.54/128, buy a T. That's only about $700 a month.
It's kinda like dialup; if you and a bunch of other customers are connected 24 hours a day for $19.95/month, but the phone line that you are connecting to costs the ISP $25.00/month, the ISP loses money.
High speed is similar. The _average_ download/upload is maybe 20kbs/8kbs. If enough people sustain for days (or weeks) 300kbs/128kbs, the network is gonna get thrashed, and the ISP will do one of three things - charge more, throttle bandwidth, or go out of business because enough of the customers bailed out due to slow download speeds, attributed to 5% of the customers using 50 or a hundred times the bandwidth of the "normal" customer. Or, if they are really gluttons for punishment, they'll order up more T's to handle the psycho bandwidth, then go out of business, because 5% of the customers thought that it was their God-given right to go full throttle 24/7.
To further belabor the point, I recall a really good analogy, and that is of electric power. If there were no power meter on the outside of your abode, and you thought it a cool idea to set up a Beowolf cluster of a thousand machines, all with monitors, you would be getting more power than your neighbor, but paying the same amount. But let's say PC's (with monitors) were $1.00 apiece, and lots of your neighbors could install clustering software in an hour. So, you and a few of your neighbors are each using 50KW, while the _average_ power usage is maybe 400W. Free lunch? For a while...until the power company figures out that they are losing a ton of money to the Beowolf gangs.
Hey, I have fairly sucky cable service. It drops off every couple of days, and the latency is so bad sometimes that I have to go to our office to do any work using vi!. (I can't get DSL from my employer...too far away from the DSLAM.) But still, as evil and sucky as the cable company is, there is only a finite amount of bandwidth available, and if they want to get more, of course they have to pay.
I hereby propose an inititave to P2P developers: default upload is not full-throttle. THAT is what is making P2P the black-sheep of ISP's. Something like a dialog box that spells it out for the user. "At what percentage do you wish to upload? If you choose 100%, Your ISP might not think you're very nice.
At colos you can get something like 300GB per month for under a hundred dollars. So people in big cities with caps of 5 GB are only consuming a couple of dollars in bandwith ... somewhere along the line the ISPs seem to manage to spend a whole lot more money on other things than bandwith wouldnt you say? Say ... what was your salary exactly?
There are lots of good options here now. Any number of cheap DSL (8 and 12Mb/s) providers, 56/128 Kb/s ISDN, 100 Mb/s fibre, 10 Mb/s wireless, and cellular network (56 Kb/s?). Most of this stuff is around 3000 to 4000 yen ($25-$35 USD) a month, flat rate.
:-D
Just incredible to think what I am getting now, when just 3 years ago I was averaging the equivalent of $250 to $300 USD a month for my dialup (local phone calls are tolled).
Something to be said for a high density population and competition.
Sympatico took a lot of flak when it introduced caps on its high speed service of 5gig uploads and 5 gig downloads. Something must happened as they recently changed their policy to 10 gig total of up/downloads. That is better except now everyone will be tempted to just download and on Kazaa not share for uploads. Maybe that is a concession to Hollywood who wants us to download(and pay) for their movies but not share with anyone else?
Today's vices may be tomorrow's virtues.
My optus account has gone over the limit every month and the banwidth has never been reduced. I don't know if Optus is actually enforcing this. Has this happened with anyone else?
"Also metered bandwidth by time of day, just like my phone, would make a bit of sense."
Just so! I am very much in favor of metered access done right. Based on how various people use the Internet, ISP's are looking at:
- Per-megabyte charging, possible variable based on usage and selected pricing plan
- A (variable) allowance of free megabytes, per month.
- Possibly a carry-over of unused free megabytes
- Peak and off-peak pricing
- Different options for exceeding the monthly free allowance: a hard cap (cutoff), a per-megabyte charge, or bandwidth throttling
- Etc. etc.
Unsurprisingly this looks a lot like the charging models that phone companies use. Why haven't ISP's implemented this yet? I'll tell you: because such complex billing systems aren't easy or cheap to set up and implement. Also, no ISP currently has the infrastructure and procedure to handle the complexity of the whole billing process: metering (collecting usage data), guiding (matching metering data to a particular subscriber in the billing system), rating (applying the correct price plan to usage data), invoicing (bill printing), and payments (direct debit, and applying incoming payments to a subscriber's balance). Most ISPs are comfortable with sending and collecting bills for maybe 2 or 3 different billing plans, all at a fixed price. But billing and collecting a variable amount is vastly more difficult, and not just for the billing process but for other business processes also. For instance: how many phonecalls do you thing phone companies get from people who do not understand their bill, or do not agree with it?
There's a very good reason for the fact that over here, ISPs rarely punish you for going over your cap every now and then: their systems and administrative processes cannot cope with handling a cap or a surcharge.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
here is a good way to price broadband (DSL in particular):
you are charged a monthly access fee which would include, say, 5 gigs per month download (enough for most people I would think)
then, if you use more than your 5 gigs per month, you get charged for it at the end of the month (perhaps by directly charging your credit card or something). Basicly, they could charge a certain fee per gigabite or part thereof.
That way, if someone wants to download huge amounts of MP3 files, movies, games, software or anything else for that matter, they will have to pay for the privilage of doing so (if they dont like it, they can stop downloading so much)
Most of those costs you mention are only weakly linked to the total bandwith they consume ... so they are utterly irrelevant to his arguement.
... but usage based costs per MB ISPs charge are far in excess of the real cost. So low bandwith users arent really subsidizing the high bandwith ones to any real extent ... with usage based fees the opposite is true!!!
... but not a whole lot more after they have all left, and stopped subsidizing the likes of you, because bandwith simply isnt expensive.
But let's be generous and say their services doubles the price of bandwith. In big cities that would still only mean he would have to pay around 3 bucks to pay for an extra 5 GB per month.
The only real thing a high bandwith customer uses more of from an ISP is the bandwith
My guess is that if this goes on we will see a resurgence of local ISPs near the big NAPs which charge realistically, him and his high-bandwith friends will go there and pay slightly more than with your castrated broadband
In Australia we have 2 main broadband providers Telstra and Optus.
Telstra caps thier retail broadband at a certain limit, and then starts charging.
Optus also caps their retail broadband and then throtles the speed to 40-56k once the customer goes over, but does not charge more.
For retail customers optus's system is better because they know exactly how much they have to pay. I had one customer who paid AU$700 ($400US) for his internet because he did not understand how much 300mb was.
Business is another matter all together.
This is what happens when you give one company too much control over a wide spread market.
Now its true they have the right its their lines, but considering you cant choose your cable company, we dont have a lot of alternatives in many areas. Hardwire cable service IS a monopoly in any given market area.
I'm not debating the rational of *reasonable* capping, only the lack of options if i want to go somewhere else for my broadband that does cater to my needs.
I also dont agree with changing agreements during a contract.. but that's a whole different topic.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
There is a very good rationale for bandwidth caps.
Telcos are charge by the MB for data, ie the more data the more expensive the customer is to the telco. So why shouldn't high users pay more than the casual user? It's very fair. The only problem I have is the high cost of data in australia.
Secondly networks with Unlimited internet have higher contention ratios (usually 1:30 or 1:50 or even 1:100) leading to a few high-bandwidth users slowing down everyone else. Business users on the other hand pay a lot more (2-3x) than retail, but get better ratios, 1:5. This extends to dail-up as well, the ISP who don't have unlimited accounts have better overall speed.
(A contention ratio is how many people share a pipe. Say on a 1.5mbit ADSL connection, on a 1:50 ration, 50 people with 1.5mbit connection share a 1.5mbit connection to the internet. So if all users were to use their connection at the same time they would only get 1.5/50mb/s = 30kb/s. I should know, I work for an ADSL ISP)
Don't like it? Pay for it. If you want a guaranteed download speed with very low data costs, get a T1 . The top speed is equivilent to a 1.5mb/s ADSL, but costs 3-4 times as much because you will always get 1.5mb/s. It is much cheaper to multiplex several, bursty data lines over the one line. This is because if you look at typical end-user usage it varies wildly.
Bell Sympatico are changing to a 10 Gbyte cap, with a
$30.00 (Canadian) maximum extra charge/month on anything over 10Gbytes upload or download.
To be fair to Sympatico, their servers tend to be always available.
Semper ubi sub ubi
Welcome to the 80/20 rule. 80% of the bandwidth is used by 20% of the users, and 50% is being used by the top 10% of users. (Or it could be the top 5%. I did the sums back when I worked at an ISP, but my memory of these things is hazy now) Now, a little mathematics. You rewrite your user contracts to target the top 10%, and they leave.
Suddenly you have effectively twice as much bandwidth for your remaining users as before. With decreased expansion costs and increased service-levels for your remaining customers, you could quite easily profit from your customers "voting with their feet".
I bet the cable companies are just shaking in their boots over your threat to leave.
Flat-rate pricing is a myth. It does far more damage to the Internet than it heals, since the need to artificially prevent people from fully utilising their connections without charging them more is is the cause of stupid rules like "You can't run a server and we'll cycle your IP occasionally" that really do impact on user freedom.
Charles Miller
The more I learn about the Internet, the more amazed I am that it works at all.
Due to this, I have a $930 Internet bill. (about $10 American)
I don't know what you do online except poke around in your broswer cache and chat on IRC....
:[ ); just downloaded a few mp3s and a few games and i've hit 1.6 gigs so far this month (in 18 days). I have a friend on the same plan as me who basically just uses the 'net to chat online and check his comics and he's up to 900 megs in 18 days.
I'm a pretty heavy user online; i'll admit it. I'm on a 3 gig/month plan and this month i haven't downloaded any movies or anything large. No shoutcast streams (
Realistically according to optus's figures 95% of their users don't hit 3 gigs, let alone 5 gigs. Yet. The problem is that as streaming movies become commonplace a 5 gig cap really starts to dampen the capacity of the 'net, esp. with moore's law and all.
Don't just take my word for it though - there's plenty of tools for monitoring your bandwidth usage over a given time for windows and linux - could make an interesting poll...
Anyway, my point is that most users won't have a problem with a 5 gig cap at the moment, it'll just start giving headaches when all these brilliant services come out and no-one can afford the bandwidth.
'No publisher will ever pay you enough to successfully sue them' - Dave Sim
Not for nothing, but if Comcrap, now that they are a complete monopoly, start capping anything (They already throttle news to 1 gig/month in my area) then they better provide software to stop FRIGGEN BANNER ADS, flash ads and ANY piece of spam from hitting my computer. Period. They want to cap stuff? Fine. I don't want to pay for things I didn't order.
Xtra Jetstart was the 15k/s version of their extremely expensive ADSL plans. By going to a speed cap instead of a data cap, they immediately got tonnes of customers. Within a few months they imposed a 5gb cap, with no price reduction, with a 10 cents per meg over the cap. Yay for monopoly!
s200.org - visit it (me), love it (me).
it is worth the money.
too many years of dial up... when life started at 2400 baud modem, and you still remember what it was like surfing for porn back then (couple of minutes to see part of a picture), the extra few bucks a month is worth it.
dial up service is what, $10-22 per month? Something that is hundreds of times faster for 2-5 times the cost? sounds like a deal to me. probably won't last forever either.
ATTBI/Comcast is my local cable provider while Ameritech owns the phone lines in the area. If I wanted to get rid of cable and move on to DSL I'd have to go to one of Ameritech's "partners" or Ameritech itself. Not surprisingly their partner's offer the exact same service for the exact same price as Ameritech. Earthlink and other providers which have better DSL service for better price are not allowed to use Ameritech's lines.
:(
It looks to me that my choice is metered cable or Monopolistic DSL at half the speed for 1.5 times the price. I think I'm going back to 56K.
Australia is being quoted by the major telco's as a model for domestic pricing, if that 10c per MB he quoted was accurate though the prices in Australia really are 2 orders of magnitude higher than what you would pay domestically if you were near a NAP ...
If telco's want to take a country as a model where the bandwith to service cost ratio is totally different than our own I think there is something fishy going on.
So, let me get this straight. AT&T owns miles and miles of dark fiber. And they are also an ISP.
Instead of coming up with a way to use all that fiber, they're actually REDUCING the amount of traffic that's going over their lines?
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
Oh, sorry, no you won't -- you're used to e-mail actually working. Oh well, be prepared for that to get shambolic.
I opened up a complaint to Comcast because my "always on" internet service kept getting disconnected, just like a dial-up. What really irritated me was the constant TV adverts promoting "no disconnects" as a benefit over those poor dial-up people. I told them they should either fix it or cease that advertising ploy because it was false advertising. Their response was that they're not perfect (I'll say) and you can't help but get the occasional disconnect, and, well, that whole false advertising thing...actually, they never did give me an acceptable answer about that.
During one of the many outages, I called customer support and told them there was an outage, and was there a server down, as that's usually what caused my outages. No, I was told, there's nothing showing up. This didn't mean much to me; usually nothing does show up until I call in, when after a few minutes a downed server magically appears on their scope. Not this time. The guy told me they'd have to have someone come out to my house. In two weeks. I asked him if there was any possibility it could be a configuration problem on their end, as I was getting suspicious from what the status lights on the cable modem were telling me.
"How do you know what they mean?", he asked belligerently.
Because that's what the manual says, I replied.
"No, that's wrong, you can't trust the manual." Then why the hell do they send it out, I wondered?
"So you can guarantee me there's nothing wrong with my configuration as recorded in your database?"
"Absolutely. I guarantee it."
I called back the next morning because I couldn't stand dealing with this rude idiot, and surprise, surprise: the serial number of the modem which they use to register whether you've got a valid account or not was wrong. As soon as the tech changed it in their database, my service returned.
Comcast is dreadful. Zero concern for customer service, thoroughly incompetent support center and totally useless server administrators -- if I had as many outages as they have, I'd be unemployable.
Oh, and one other thing -- at one point I started to discuss the agreement and ask about their SLA (service level agreement). They told me they don't have one. No requirement to provide up-time. No requirement to fix problems in a timely manner. The most they'll admit is that you can get a refund if you're out of service for a day or more, and you should count yourself lucky they offer that. If you press them on this, their answer is that if you want consistent service you should get a T1 line from the business unit. Excuse me?
Comcast is truly appalling. And the worst part of it is -- my wife doesn't want to go back to dial-up speeds, but they're the only high-speed game in town. I truly loathe them.
Mod parent up. Its insightful if a little unpolised.
Thus far there have been none of these issue, and not even a sign of them coming from Charter cable. These guy's rock, they give you a pipe then they go away and let you have at it...which is the way it should be...in fact they keep adding new services! (note that all the screen shots for Moxi, have a Charter Logo)
Every town and their cable provider have to negotiate to stay the cable provider for that town every so often. Perhaps its time for towns to start breaking the AT&T Strangle hold, and switching thier cable providers.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
Get a group together and buy stock in a company, and as a shareholder tell them not to implement download caps.
I agree that theoretically free-for-all bandwidth is untenable and that some charge-per-use system would seem to make sense. But none of the pricing schemes I've ever seen make sense. If they start charging $0.20/MB after the first free GB/month, that means I couldn't even download one complete Linux distro per month (two or three CDs) for "free", and I think most people would agree that's hardly excessive bandwidth use. At $0.20/MB that would be around $13 per CD, so it would be cheaper to just order from CheapBytes. The sad thing is that those $0.20/MB are most likely FAR above the actual break-even point of the provider, so far as to actually make you bitter and cynical, which is exactly what we are around here.
Suddenly I'm glad I didn't switch to broadband yet... Sure, apt-get is painful over 56k, but I'd hate to be doing an install and have it cut me off in the middle. "Please press continue... NEXT MONTH".
Does anyone know if they were openly considering this before the FCC approved their merger? If not, then it seems that they might not have been completely open with the FCC during the hearings. In that case, would the FCC be able to intervene in some way?
How can we afford to ever sleep
So sound again
--ebtg
...I see no direct evidence presented in the article which even begins to prove that these kinds of caps are going to be implemented in the near future--by Comcast/AT&T.
Rather the article sounds like speculation based on the merger. I am sure that the new company is "looking at" a wide variety of things. That's a long way from implementing them, however.
Basically, in the current economic climate I think they'd be nuts to rock the boat by implementing something like caps charges. Seems to me that by restricting up/down bandwidth they are already effectively curtailing most of the abuse.
Linux Home Automation
Neil Cherry
http://mywebpages.comcast.net/ncherry/
As if I needed another reason to be glad I switched over to DSL from cable internet after @home went bust last year... Cable already offers sub-standard performance, now its being debated to make it worse? And since we are talking about cable, are they gonna start to cap my TV channels once they realize they are streaming me 60+ channels in real time?
I agree with you that caps are fine, as long as you understand when you sign up. Per byte charges will be the death of streaming video service (as though it's not dead already).
I can just see customers paying for a movie online and then finding out that they used up their monthly bandwidth and must pay extra for web surfing and email!
...richie - It is a good day to code.
I've been an at&t bi customer for about 3 years now, and until today i have had zero trouble with any of it and infact i've told my friends they should go with att for broadband.
What gets me though is that once caps are inplace i doubt i'm going to be able to even *pay* for uncapped service.
Now yes, i understand Joe User isn't going to soak his cable line, and i also understand how capped service can bring lowwer cost broadband into Joe User's home....
But i'm not Joe User.
Heck, i can't even pay for a static ip from att.
But each time my broadband bill goes up another $10, it seems i'm getting less service.
I doubt anyone from at&t is even reading this, but here it goes...
AT&T- i would be willing to pay $65 (that's $15 more than i currently pay mind you) for a single static ip and uncapped or at least a capped connection with a very generous amount of bandwith.
I know that I, and I'd guess that most slashdotters, use notably more bandwidth than the average person.
In my case, it only happens once every two or three months, but I'll have days when I mooch down five gig or more in a day. I run my own mail server and web server, both of which are quite small. (My web server pushed out 42 meg in August. And that's the big number for the year...)
I've resigned myself to the fact that eventually, to continue doing what I want to do, I'm going to have to buy a T-1 line. I'll enjoy it while I can do what I want for the same price as everyone else doing what they want, but eventually, it's just not going to be possible. The ISP I'm using now may currently have a very liberal AUP, but it's going to slowly get whittled away by the beancounters. So eventually, if I want to keep doing what I want to do, I'm going to have to be my own ISP.
-JDF
The notion of capping bandwidth has some interesting side effects -- a couple which have been mentioned. However, unless properly administered, the end user will (as usual) loose out. To recap a few:
;)
Pop-up ads -- this is an unwanted addition to most (read: All) subscriber's internet experience. Start charging for bandwidth, and in the end -- you're paying for the priviledge of of viewing unwanted advertisements. [As mentioned previously -- Mozilla, Opera, and a few other browsers allow you to 'disallow' this nuisance. However, that's not going to help most mainstream, especially AOL, users. Me, hell -- I'm rather partial to links.] Granted, this may only be a small portion of the whole -- but it is, still, an unwanted portion.
The 'wording' of lure advertisements (commercials) -- If a company is going to place a limit on the amount of information an end user can receive (w/ in the guidelines of their service contract), then their commercials should (read: never will) be more honest about the capacity of the service. [In other words, quit tempting people w/ heavy bandwidth usage, if you don't really want them to use it.]
ISP's need to investigate their subscribers needs -- and accomodate them accordingly. [Common updates (application, OS, firmware drivers, etc...) should be housed on local mirrors. As should common/desired services -- game servers, chat servers, etc... If your user base requires/utilizes a service on a regular basis -- then make all provisions to house those services locally as to cut down on the bandwidth overhead.]
Finally, provide the customer w/ the overall product that they are paying for before you even consider upping the charges. [Example: I recently moved from Mousetown, Florida to a small western village in New York. I used to subscribe to a (for the most part) well balanced cable service for my connection -- and paid a reasonable fee ($49.95/month). -- This was good. Now, I'm DSL subscriber that pays $32.95 a month for a DSL connection -- PLUS $49.95 a month for my bandwidth (supposedly, 768/256). However, in actuality, my connection is really (on a very good day) 400/200. -- This is bad! (Of course, I was actually informed by the lead tech @ the phone company/ISP -- the problem is that I use "weird stuff" [Linux on a laptop, OS X & YDLinux on a G4], and if I'd use more "normal stuff" [Windows], it would "all work out okay". Wow, such keen technical insight -- I'm sure his role playing buddies must be proud.
In the end -- before an ISP can really start griping about the small portion of users who "abuse" the service they are subsribing to [read, already paying for]; mayhaps they should optimize the service they are providing as to make it more cost effective, usefull and productive. Until this happens, it's rather like buying a car & charging extra for the tires, windshield, gas tank and transmission.
[/long windedness]
#SickNotWeak
Here's my prediction... 1) AT&T Broadband/Comcast will try to convince the general public that this change will be a good thing, using the logic: "it's only fair that those who use the service more should pay more, and those that use it less would pay less". 2) Once the general public is convinced, they will announce that the current pricing scheme (which is for un-capped transfers) will be the "low cost" end of their scale, and that people who barely use their broadband will still pay this price (not saving them a dime) 3) Anyone who uses over the cap they set (which will probably be low, in the interest of generating more revenue for them) will pay EXTREME per-megabyte charges. And considering that in many areas, there is NO choice between cable-modem companies, and that DSL isn't available everywhere either, they will have a captive audience. These unfortunate customers who have no alternatives for broadband, find themselves making the decision of either paying inflated prices (for equal or even lesser service), or doing without broadband altogether.
What? ^ Look up there! ^ He already said it!
#SickNotWeak
Sure, Comcast, go ahead and get upset when I download an ISO image of Red Hat at peak hours. But give me a way to get the ISO during non-peak times.
This needs to be implemented by a "download agent" installed on my system that can consult yours and operate only when traffic is not saturated.
If you don't have this, then don't complain.
[If you see someone doing 24/7/365 max upload/downloads, then figure out a proper way of telling THOSE USERS that they are using too much bandwidth, and put in a reasonable cap for them - don't take it out on the rest of the users.]
Something just stinks of elementary school discipline w/ that one -- Who threw that spit ball? Anyone? Anyone? Anyone? Fine, no pudding for any of you! It's nap time!
Hmmm... that would seem to be corporate America's mentality, though.
C.A.: Go to sleep!
American public: But I'm not tired!
C.A.: We said, Go to sleep!
A.P.: But, I wanna go outsi...
C.A.: Go to SLEEP!
#SickNotWeak
I wonder where the real "congestion" is going on.
The good news is that this problem is mostly one of first-mover networks getting bogged down in their own technology (and perhaps debt).
We know the long-distance fiber backbones are very, very underutilized.
Now 10 Gig E can take you 20 miles over fiber, so the distribution part of cable service should become much less congested soon.
With 3GHz processors available, cheap PC-based routers should start to eat into specialty devices.
Hmm...I wonder if anyone has made a Beowulf router?
Do I end up having to pay for the following?
These are just the first things that come to mind - will Comcast make me pay for the privilege of receiving this garbage that I neither want nor really use? If I come close to the limit, I don't want pay for the ARP sh*t and [insert favorite Windows virus/trojan here] that I don't ask for or have any control over.
"Wow, you're like some kind of superhero able to ward off happiness and success at every turn."
-- Ryan Stiles
In the U.S., a cable television franchise is awarded by a community's cable television board. Find out who is on the board, make them aware of the issue, your stance, and some logical reasons supporting your stance.
You want to keep caps out of your town? Do it! Cable board members represent a vote that can be used to take away the cable franchise in a community and award it to somebody else. (Not immediately, but they can choose not to renew next time around...)
If you need action taken against your cable company, this is often the best way to go about it: They may not care if you take your $45/month to a competitor, but they wlil care if somebody who has a vote on whether or not they can do business in your municipality brings it to their attention.
It's funny how interested the cable company gets in everybody being satisfied when you've got a board member on your side. If your complaint is reasonable and logical, chances are you can find somebody from the board to help.
Who did what now?
I am curious, who is going to pay for the script kiddies pinging your IP?
I havent had this happen myself but, I had a co-worker who told me he was getting pinged 24hrs a day. Seems to me that this is traffic and bandwidth that the suscriber should not be responsible for.
Just for the record, there is NO "off the record" record.
Make a record of that.
People will still go to the provider who gives them the greatest bandwidth per dollar. Be it DSL or Cable (and cable should be opening up to competitors by a few years' time) people will still want the most bang for the buck. This may be a Good Thing(tm) as it will highlight bandwidth as a reason (among the pleebs) for choosing a provider. The providers will advertise "Most Bandwitdh per Dollar" and compete in this arena.
Maybe it's a Good Thing...
If this happens, I would definitely be the first one in on a class-action lawsuit for the years of false advertising ('unlimited internet' with a limit, etc..).
This is complete bullshit.
I could see them doing something like charging $25/month for all the 'low usage' users, and giving them a bandwidth (say 768/128 Kbit) cap AND a 5GByte traffic cap. But don't forget about the geeks who helped you start it all so many years ago (what, like 5 or so, maybe 6 years?). Have a 'high usage' package for those people. Charge us more per month if you like.. I think i'd pay $80 or $90 per month (similar to the price of current 'business' class cable packages) if i got: (5Mbit/at-least-512Kbit) speeds, guaranteed low latency to the fringe of the provider's network (my ATTBI pings right now are ~200ms to the LOCAL GATEWAY) and unlimited traffic. It may cost more to support the geeks who download alot, and I am willing to offset those costs, but for christ's sake, don't fucking nickle-and-dime me. I want unlimited traffic, and i'm willing to pay more for it.
P.S. - Go ahead and use Bandwidth Shaping on the KaZaA ports, fine by me. But traffic to/from your local mail server/local NNTP server should NOT count against any cap. I want my NNTP.
ELiTeUI out.
If the start applying those transfer caps, it'd interesting to see what happens to all those SPAM. ISPs might be more pressured to do something about SPAMMERs..
I get hundreds if not thousands of SPAM every week; that must account for something.
Sucks ass.
Disconnects all the time. They change my IP whenever they feel like it. My speeds are about 10kps when they used to be 100kps. I can't seem to stay connected for more than 30 min at a time, so playing WCIII is a lost cause. $45 a month, plus digital cable (with ads on the channel selector), and digital phone service.. ugg.. $120 a month to ATTBB and I loathe them. I hate verizon, my phone lines are compressed, and I can't afford a T1.... I wonder how hard it would be to purchase a fractional t1 and sell access via wireless to my neighbors
As a result of the dot bomb and stock market downturn, a lot of unemployed MBA's have sought work elsewhere. Some have gone to ISP's, some to Cell Phone services companies, some to Cable Television service providers. All have one thing in common - they are implementing the standard b-school "Suck 'em In and Fleece Them" tiered service model:
Dear Valued Customers,
We are pleased to announce our new tiered service plans, specially designed to suit your specific needs. Now there is a plan for everyone! You may choose from:
$9.99 Unlimited - The basic unlimited. There are limits and they're pretty damned low. No one will ever want this ( we just put it here so that our ads can scream "$9.99 UNLIMITED ! ")
$19.99 More Unlimited Plan - still limited. Just not as limited as the Unlimited Plan.
$29.99 Super Unlimited Plan - more unlimited than the More Unlimited Plan but less unlimited than the Ultra Unlimited Plan.
$49.99 Ultra Unlimited Plan - this one is really, well, unlimited. OK, not really.
$99.99 Mega Unlimited - Awesome! Really, really unlimited (on Tuesday nights only from 8:00 p.m. to midnight).
$299.99 Ultra Supermega Supreme Unlimited. - Totally unlimited. Some restrictions apply. See contract for details. Offer void where people eat toast and in the state of Tennessee. Available only to new customers. Who live in Pittsburgh. On 4th Avenue. In a red house. With blue trim.
$122,999,999.99 The Totally Ultra Supermega Supreme Buy the Damned Company Unlimited Plan. The most unlimited of all the unlimited plans. You can truly use all you want! Almost.
Note: All plans are subject to cancellation if we feel like it.
Sigs are bad for your health.
anywhere?
... @Home should have been a success, I was a pilot area, in '96, and service was stupendous, knowledgeable techs, ungodly speeds, and enthusiam for success. To bad they couldn't stay with their core business and got sucked into their own success. Anyway these morons now, the broadband ISP's, are creating such B.S. services that any entrepenuer with the proper capital could corner the broadband market within 5 years.
I mean I'd gladly give my money to a an broadband ISP, that has unlimited downloads, is up all the time or atleast attempts to make sure they are up all the time, and has reasonable prices. Damn all this greed B.S.
I wish I had the capital to start a DSL/Cable ISP, I think earthlink is the only one that remotely has a clue, static ip's, etc
So, anyone want to give me $100 million loan, I gaurantee we'll see returns within 5 years, and majority market share within the same time frame. The formula is so simple, quality service = quality profits.
You don't need a T-1. I've got speakeasy DSL. They let me run servers, they don't care what I do with my network. They openly encourage people to get wireless equipment and share their network with the neighbors.
They cost more than cable modems and most RBOC offered DSL services and they are worth every penny. I'm sure many people will flee the cable modem subscriber roles when caps are rolled out, and I'm sure this will make lots of providers happy. AT&T doesn't want these people on their networks, and there are other providers out there who will gladly take these customers (and charge them a little more for the privelege).
It boils down the old standard that you get what you pay for.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Microsoft would like nothing better than to see faster internet end users so they can sell new services/software to them.
Doesn't Microsoft already have to approve ISPs (meet certain transfer requirements) before they can offer XBox Live connections? If other companies (media producers, gaming companies, etc.) start requiring cetain minimums criteria from ISPs we may end up with better service all around.
" We on the other hand think that unlimited means no download limits and no bandwidth caps. Unfortunately that won't ever happen. "Unlimited Internet" is not the same as "unlimited bandwidth" or "unlimited downloads", so a company saying "unlimited Internet" is correct from their FUD-ish marketing point-of-view."
It's still dishonest no matter how it's twisted and you know it. The bandwith caps and download limits are dishonest when you look at them in the context of their advertizing. The last in a long line of Comcast ads show people engaging in activities that would either be eleminated or greatly reduced in functionality to the point of near uselessness with these in place, while still charging pre-limit prices. Legally they may be able to get away with it, but what's legal doesn't always make good sense, especially considering that the whole economy is soft, and the uptake of Broadband in generally has been slow. Me as a Comcast customer isn't worried. DSL is available. Satellite is available (funny thing there. Those TV dishes are kicking cables ass. You'd think the cable companies would take a lesson and be a bit smarter). Dialup is still viable, and cheaper to boot. All the other solutions are there as well renting a T1, etc. But I don't see why one has to in essense start a business to overcome someone elses stupidity. To sum up. Business is stupid. Will continue to be stupid, and as long as they don't hurt the consumer (Enron,Worldcom) they should be free to put themselves out of business.
If you just up and leave, the cable providers won't know why you're doing this unless you explicitly tell them -- and not that many people may do this -- and even then, the result is only a sprinkling of isolated instances fielded by bored, underpaid, front-line customer service reps.
A better idea may be creating a pre-emptive petition -- not one of the useless petitiononline.com things, but rather a petition signed by current AT&T Broadband or Comcast subscribers, with their AT&T or Comcast e-mail addresses attached, stating unequivocally that you are opposed to broadband usage caps, and will cancel your service for that exact reason if caps are ever implemented. Send this regularly as it grows to as many AT&T/Comcast corporate marketing/customer service/decision-making addresses as you can find. Add a note to the effect that each signer is perfectly willing to verify his or her position if contacted by AT&T.
(Obviously, there's a logistics problem of how to handle the upkeep without having everyone's e-mail being picked up by spammers. Some sort of moderated listserv would probably work.)
I wouldn't mind seeing a lot more cooperative networks like this one (in Palo Alto, California), but not because the situation was forced by gluttonous corporations who try to fix a problem by creating an even bigger problem.
-------
I generally agree with the posts about how current single-tier broadband pricing is inefficient, and that people who just want the convenience of a reasonably fast, always-on internet connection without using a whole lot of bandwidth don't have any logical options. But usage caps are not the way to go. Most of the problem probably lies in "peak hours" -- so find a technical solution that deals with that specific problem. Restrict bandwidth capacity for everyone during peak hours (defined by relative network overload) -- or during those peak hours, just restrict the capacity of users who have gone over a particular usage cap.
Saying "if you value your P2P and streaming radio and ISO downloads that much, that's fine, they're just going to get really hamstrung around 7pm--10pm on weeknights" is MUCH better than saying "up yours, better count those kilobytes."
Sorry if I'm waving my hands too much about "find a technical fix to address the specific problem," but after a certain point you just have to ask for some level of accomodation on the part of the service provider towards its customers.
>which of the following persons incurs the highest
;)
>operating cost to an ISP: the W4r3z d00d who is
>leeching a few gigabytes a day and hosting his
>warez on a server to others, or the housewife....
Truth is they are probably the same customer... she just probably has a teenager
* I am the one TRUE Coward*
"115 Kilobytes / 60 seconds = 1.91 kilobytes a second..."
So if your calculations are correct, you can pay for the equivalent of having your 56k modem saturated a little under half of the time. Yet you pay double what an "unlimited" dial-up ISP would give you the account for. Where does that extra money go? I don't think a short-term speed boost for the really low amount of data you move is really worth that.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
If I'm paying by the meg for my surfing, my ISP had better ensure that I don't get a single pop-up, or a single unsolicted email message. I'm NOT paying to subsidize someone to advertise to me.
Because the vast majority of people don't download ISOs, movies, or other huge pipe-cloggers, we shouldn't model the entire system after the few exceptions.
Bandwidth should be paid for by the provider of the content, not the receiver. Spammers should pay to send spam, rather than the reader paying for it. Companies that create massive shockwave web presentations for their products should pay for thier extravagance, not the guy who wants the specs on the product. Why should I pay by the meg to download patches to a faulty OS that I've already paid for? Let MS pay to distribute their fixes to their flawed product.
Bandwidth isn't free. But at least have the people with the control over the content be the ones to pay for the resource.
When the internet is advertising-free, THEN I'll be ready to pay by the meg.
Well what they're doing is indeed a legitimate business decision. However using legal and legislative means to keep people from even attempting to compete with you in an honest manner isn't legal or ethical. Running an economy isn't about setting up fiefdoms, but about companies (big and small) competing in a fair and equitable manner for your dollars. BTW you have a contradiction in your statements. "Any other company is more than welcome to lay down some fiber to my house. The cable company is the only one that has actually gone ahead and done it. They deserve the exclusivity of their service. " If it's "exclusive" (deserving or otherwise), then no one else can run that fiber, now can they? As for the "sharing" part, what your implying (companies not getting compensated) isn't true. Forcing them to share really isn't a problem, because as long as the companies are fairly compensated for their investment in the resourse being shared. There shouldn't be any complaints. The complaints however do come from the fact that companies all have an "inner monopoly" waiting to break out. Competing be it two grocery stores on opposite sides of the street, or companies sharing infrastructure, but not customers. Threaten that "inner child". It's kind of hard to "make as much money as possible (gouge?)" when you have to compete with someone else for it. As far as the other issue you mentioned. As technology becomes both cheaper, and easier to use as well as more powerful, coupled with broadbands unwillingness to capitulate to reason. Getting that $50 from your neighbor may not be as hard as you think.
It is not unusual that when the system use is ordered by quantity that Zipf's Law holds. It hapens with most stable, randomly distributed, self-organizing systems.
That is all.
The 'caps' presents a diverse perspective from the chant that ISP's have been using to get people to broadband.. they keep saying they want that 'killer application' that'll get people over to broadband. They talk in terms of video and streaming data, etc. Then on the other hand, they set up roadblocks to insure that, from the viewpoint of the 'masses' that they'll avoid that app becuase it'll cause them to go over their monthly 'allocation'. They can't have it both ways.
... this is why if we're going to deregulate and NOT have PUC established rates, then there should be NO availability of ANY protected government monopoly. The cable companies should NOT be premitted exclusive franshise rights in any area and each RBOC should be forced to split into two entities, the non-refulagted voice capacity/switches, etc, and the regulated entity that provides ONLY the last mile and CO physical space. Every competitow (including the RBOC's) would then be forced to pay the same rates for CO space and last mile 'usage' and the competiton would be real). Where's Judge Green when you need him.! OFF-SOAPBOX
It's absurd notion. The telco's have planned and set capacity on the voice networks over the years to insure that they have enough capacity for calls, utilizing studies to know what they need in a switch knowing that some percentage of people will make short calls and others till hang on the line telling their life story to every person they talk to. In the states where the PUC's still insure flat rate service, the system works and there's sufficient capacity for all.
The ATTBI's and Comcast's (now one in the same, both with the split personailty) want to change that. They, of all organizations, should be precluded from doing so since they STILL have the wired monopoly protected by government entities.
BUT... if they DO want to implement caps, then I want the 'minimum' cap implemented so I get a REFUND every month, since I'm a user who wants the speed when I'm online, but probably hit that cap once a year at most. If they're segregating and using a 'usage' table to set rates and for network planning, then as a 'minimal user', I and everyone else, should get a rebate. After all, we're the opposite of the 'excessive user', in that we're using the service less than their 'average' user and therefore should get a 'minimum user refund'.
SOAPBOX
implement virtual circuits for each subscriber, offer various tiers of commited information rate/burst rate. that's how frame relay works, lots of businesses are happy with that service structure. why are the basics of capacity planning so beyond the grasp of these cable companies?
I'm the average /. user - I know my stuff and have never phoned "technical support" due to the fact that I know they're all morons. I do however suck down shedloads from KazaA and ISOs.
The average AOL user who is just surfing uses far less bandwidth than me, but is probably calling Support 24/7 because "the thing with the lights is flashing" or somesuch.
So, why don't they charge for support, as surely that costs more than bandwidth. It's not as if these ISPs aren't already making enough, jees AT&T used to charge the same for 8Mbps as they do for 1.5Mbps now.
I'll be the first to cancel my ATTBI account if they cap downloads, they've already capped bandwidth.
#include <sig.h>
"Tell me this: which of the following persons incurs the highest operating cost to an ISP: the W4r3z d00d who is leeching a few gigabytes a day and hosting his warez on a server to others, or the housewife who likes the convenience of fast surfing and not having to dial up, but only surfs 1 hour a day and writes a few e-mails every now & then? Then tell me: is it right that both these persons should pay the same monthly fee? "
Well since we're stacking the deck. The latter. However the later example when doing the math in their head is going to say that it isn't worth $50 a month. No sane person would. As for your "home server" example. If the companies were truely smart, instead of supremely greedy. They would host your server at their headend and charge you a fee[1]. That gets rid of a lot of problems on the network as a whole, and moves it up further to were it's easier to manage the issues brought about from a server, as well as taking care of that "who's going to pay for the...?"
[1] Streaming servers are a bit thornier, but there's always business class.
Rogers is a cable company it probably has way more to do with the number of subscribers in your area. Considering the fact that shaw in calgary has the same problem i can download at 15 kb/s at one buddies house drive 14 blocks south and surf at 300 kb/s at anothers. The major probelm is that one buddy lives close the the U of C.
TELUS also has bandwidth caps on their DSL offering, but they never enforce them, they have them so they have a recourse for customers that are abusing the service by hosting content or running kazza 24/7.
To be fair companies have to do these kinds of things, your average use does not sit and download streaming video 24 hours a day, or stream music all the time. It's the people hosting ftp sites, and running kazza that are the problems, since they're computers are sapping networks resources at all times even when they aren't personally using them.
Some people have just fallen into this habit, much like how we leave our televisions on all day, so at any moment we can walk by and catch a snipet of our show. But with the internet that always on approach, always running in the background has a signifigant and direct drain on the experience for others.
If you can't fix it ask the 3 year old down the street.
- It's like cable TV:
- Or like the federal highway commission charging you based on the number of miles you drive.
And as for this: Sucks to be the guy who sells the pipe once, instead of the water company, who gets to sell the water over and over, I really don't know what to say. I'm speechless.No it's not. Cable TV is sending out the same amount of data to you all the time, whether you use it or not. It's not packet data, it goes to every customer at the same time. The transmission costs are minimal compaired to packet data where each user's data is seperate and needs to be routed bith directions.
Not the Federal Hiighway Commission, but state a local governments. Ever hear of toll roads? How about taxes on your gasoline? Guess what they get used to pay for? That's right: roads.
I have capped internet, 512K down, 128K up, 10GB a month bandwidth limit. I'm on the Net at least four hours a day and I have never once even hit 80% of my bandwidth limit. It absolutely flumoxes me to think of what those people out there sucking down 30-40GB a month are doing to eat that much bandwidth.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
Value of capped broadband to me: $0 per month
Call (206) 338-5780 COLLECT for information about a genuine BA, BS, MA, MS, MBA, or Ph.D.
who's the ass-lick in the FCC that said there would be no downside for consumers?!?!?! Somebody needs to shove one of those vibrating shoes up his ass. just because you mod me troll/flamebait, doesn't mean that i'm not really pissed off.
between the greater and lesser infinities sleep the dreams undreamt
Here's a free whack on the head with a Clue Stick: most people won't care. Most customers don't get anywhere near their bandwidth limits unless their teen-aged kids are downloading porn or gigs of MP3s all day and night.
You want to watch TV, get a damned TV and turn it on when what you want to watch is on. Your programming not on when you want to watch? Get a Tiivo or a VCR. Why watch crappy 1/2 scale DivXes of "Love Boat" anyway?
Here's your vocabulary word of the day: "TANSTAAFL" Look iit up.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
If they must.....
Cap my bandwidth OR cap my downloads. Don't frieking do both!!!
Your're funny. You think a city is going to allow a cable company's charter to be revoked for a simple change in billing plans? Throwing how many hundreds or thousands of people out of work just to placate a minority of geeks who don't want to pay what they should for broadband usage? Right.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
We live in a society where we are all spoiled ROTTEN.
Where our biggest problems are 'I pay the cable company $100/mo.' ($40-$50 of which is for internet...) '.. therefore if I can't download everything, my world will come crashing to a halt'.
Man, I'd love to live in a world where that was my biggest problem.
Most people don't realize bandwidth limits are in place to prevent slowness for other users, not because the bandwidth itself costs money.
They charge money to make people think twice about putting all their warez available for download, it will make other users slower if everyone in you upstream is cranking out gigs of data.
For the people that honoestly need this bandwidth can surely afford a busines account or a T1.
There is no false advertising. Even under these new terms its still unlimited. You see, the unlimited could be used for the amount of connection time. Since you are connected 24/7 to your cable connection, it can be said to have an "unlimited" amount of connection time.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
ohh the irony ... I don't think this was flamebait as much as a very subtle troll.
between the greater and lesser infinities sleep the dreams undreamt
at all IF:
1) Bandwidth from others within your ISP wasn't counted.
2) There's an "after hours" - 9PM to 9AM... just like my cell phone.
3) Bandwidth served by the typical invisible web proxy isn't counted.
4) They aren't "hard" caps, they instead slow the connection down a bit, with a baseline around 128k.
5) The cap costs are directly related to the actual cost of delivery - as bandwidth prices come down, so should the prices for capping.
I get ~1.5/.320 Mbit with my ADSL.I don't expect to be able to saturate $800/mo T1 lines 24x7, and at $50, I shouldn't expect to be able to.
But, even if I *were* using all sorts of bandwidth, and my bandwidth was gradiently scaled down to 128k, I *still* would be able to function in my line of work. (which is my reason for having DSL =)
Then, I could pay for higher caps. If I only want 1-2 GB/mo, I should be paying $25-$30/month. If I want 5, $50 is reasonable. If I want 100, well...
And these numbers should change and come down as cost of bandwidth drops, EG:
Cat5 network cable.
1985=1.2 Mbit
1990=10Mbit
1995=100Mbit
2000=1000Mbit
Same cable, different hub. This should be reflected in the caps.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
I would think creative ways of packing information into less bandwidth would count as "innovation" as much as anything else.
http://www.comcast.com/contactus/customerservice.h tml
Go to this site to protest the capping of our internet usage! We can fight this!!!
If you use up your quota, you get shaped. [Hit the cap]. Peak time is 7am to midnight. Offpeak is midnight to 7am. If you go over either peak or offpeak quota, you get shaped for both sections.
There is also the fact that its not 'monthly usage' - its a rolling 30 day window. This has the effect of leveling out the user, who tries to maintain an even usage graph. The reporting tools in the customer web site are really quite good.
The daily average is about 200 meg a day in peak times. Its ok. If you want to download an iso, or leech from p2p, you need to go easy for a few days afterwards.
However, I do think bandwidth charges will kill p2p faster than anything else. Why would I want to share if it costs me?
Yay me!
The problem with niche players is that they often get swallowed up, starting the whole churn thing again.
Here in Aus we have a great many small ISP's offering broadband, and the big thing they have in common is paying way to much for their bandwidth. They then have to pass these costs on. They find out their first customers are the guys who just left their competitor who just introduced caps. They freak. They didn't plan for this. They have to introduce their own caps.
For more of an idea, have a look at the Whirlpool to see how Australian broadband is faring.
Yay me!
Comcast has been a significant dissapoint for me. When I first got the service, I was able to upload at 150K/s and download at 400K/s. Thats KiloBYTES a second, not kilobits. So you can imagine my dissapointment when the price went up and the service was capped so that my downloads were roughly 1/3 of the previous amount and the uploads a mere 1/10th.
.
Perhaps if comcast had started me out at this service level I would not complain, after all, that was far more than the speed levels offered by most of their competitors. But Comcast wasn't through yet. You see, I pay for an extra IP address. There are two people in my house and 3 computers, since only two need be connected to the internet at any given time, there should be no need for a third ip address. However comcast must disagree, because they've recently changed my modem configuration so that it will only remember two mac addresses at any give time. Meaning that in order switch from one PC to another, I would need to restart my cable modem every time. And did I mention that the price keeps going up?
There is very little seperating me right now from DSL. I'm not getting better speeds; I'm sure as hell not getting better service. So what does comcast have to offer me? I will switch as soon as the inconveinance of doing so outweighs the inconveinance of not doing so. Be warned Comcast, you can only push a llama around so much. .
Our company imposed bandwidth (bit) caps when we first rolled out our Internet platform over three years ago. This has worked extremely effectively for our company.
:^).
Here in Alaska the cost of bandwidth is a bit higher than elsewhere in the U.S. (except for Hawaii) due to us having to maintain an undersea fiber and pay for facilities to transport the traffic to Seattle or Oregon (depending on which undersea fiber your traffic traverses). Our company found that the bit cap was the best way to cope with people who might abuse the services.
Most (like 95+%) users of our cable modem users use 1GB per month. Our basic plan starts at 5GB per month and with upgrades you can get up to 20GB per month with no additional charges in large population areas. This means that the average (and even most "heavy") users will never even have to think about their Internet traffic.
For all the complaining people do they also need to recognize the advantages we have by using the bit cap:
1. Because of our metering system we don't force users to install PPPOE clients or anything of the sort. Just plug-in to the Ethernet port on your cable modem and DHCP an IP Address (up to 8 devices can be plugged directly into our cable modem). It is that easy. If you desire more, put up a NAT box or a firewall and get all the IP's you would like.
2. We don't limit the number of users you put on your cable modem. Due to us using a bit cap vs. some other system we don't care if you have 1, 10 or 100 users hiding behind your cable/dsl router.
3. We don't limit people from putting servers on their cable modems. You can throw anything you would like on your cable modem. Just be aware that once you pass the bandwidth cap you will get charged for additional GB's.
So, what it comes down to is that when you aren't using E-Donkey, Gnutella, Bearshare or whatever the P2P client of the week is then all you need to do is shut it down; and don't setup a Warez site or share your MP3's and stick them into a search engine.
People act like it some sin to put a bit cap but after most people use our competitors products they are very happy to be on our cable modems. They may have to put up with a bit cap but they can do just about anything else they would like without any complaints from us.. and no PPPOE clients to deal with
For those of our customers who want even more bandwidth they can always upgrade to our DSL product or some other un-metered service. We charge a bit more but then they can transfer all day long with no bit cap.
When people think about the good/bad of a bit cap vs. other user-control systems I think the bit cap is the way to go. It maybe lame only having to download 50 VCD's in a month rather than 200 but that type of thing is exactly what the bitcap prevents - people who abuse the system. For us it isn't a way to line our pockets, it is a way to make sure that EVERYONE (including the non-computer geeks) get good service all the time rather than 2% of the users screwing it up for the rest.
If Comcast acts out of line, simply switch to DSL. This doesn't just apply to the /. crowd either, since a lot of people who own cablemodems have them because they like downloading large files. If Comcast doesn't watch itself, it could lose quite a chunk of its customer base.
Comcast is a services company (literally just saw one of their crappy commercials). One of they're services is "High Speed Internet"; another is cable television (digital and analog flavors). As a subscriber to their service, they are merely providing an infrastructure upon which I can read all the witty comments on /. Does this mean they are no longer sellling the service, and are going to the "prepaid hours" (like cell phones)? If so, when will this mean there are TV Show caps -- a message pops up saying "Sorry, you can't watch Farscape. You've seen 12 espisodes this month. Please insert your quarter into your set-top-box." (don't slam me about how far the analogy goes before it breaks down... I'm just trying to convey a concept)
Yes, there are bandwidth hogs out there, but I'm paying for a service, not a vending machine.
[Of course it's client-server; it runs on a LAN]
"I transfer more or less 5MB a day thru my crappy 56k dialup. Do you know how much that costs me per month? About $100. Even if my connection idles i still get to pay $100. Do you think that's fair?"
I think you are outside the US, because your costs are about 3 times the average US costs, and about 5 times the US costs, if you shop around for your dialup provider.
With a 56K dialup costing $100/month, you are obviously not in the U.S., which is where AT&T/Comcast is located. Flat rate local telephone service is US$18/month, and flat rate dialup Internet service for 56K is, to pick the high end, $20/month.
So unless you are amortizing what you paid for your computer into it, you would, if you never used your voice line for anything but dialup, you are paying, at most, US$38/month for unlimited dialup.
If you use your telephone for voice calls, you have to amortize it, and the Internet costs go down. Likewise, there are a number of national ISP's who have US$10/month unlimited dialup.
Basically, this means that you are more likely paying US$19/month for Internet service over a voice line that is half the time used for voice calls.
"You obviously use your connection a LOT and you see that it isn't your best interest if they start charging by the meg."
Surprise! I use dialup, too, which is one of the reasons I know that your costs are exagerated for the market we're discussing (I'm in the Silicon Valley, where you can not get high speed Internet service t save your life, unless your apartment complex is across the street from the LATE).
-- Terry
Your points are good. However, I'd like to add one:
Imagine the billing & customer service nightmares.
People already call their phone company and say stuff like "I never made that 2 minute call. Credit me." and the parents call and say "My kids made that call, I demand you credit me."
People will nickel & dime whoever they can to death. They will abuse the system. Seems that whatever system is available will get abused. Blah.
"OK, you can suck anything you want off the internet - only one catch, no uploading!"
Uploading to *where*? You're not allowed to run a server at your hose, if you have a cable modem from AT&T/Comcast.
Cable modems and ADSL are high-speed downlinks... and that's all. They exist to push content at you, just like cable TV.
Do the math. The uplink speed is 1.5 times the necessary speed to handle *just the *ACK traffic* for the download speed you have.
These people have a business model: they run a fire hose into your house, and it's your job to drink from the fire hose.
There is not enough bandwidth up to upload anything, let alone establish a peering relationship with, say, your mother's house so that you can make a video telephone call at a full screen, full frame rate, or even upload digital pictures of your children to an ISP managed server in a reasonable time, so that your mother can download them from her own "mostly one-way" pipe.
"Pipe vs. water. I'll hook up a real nice, fat data pipe to your house for a small, one-time fee. However, if you happen to want data to flow through that pipe, its going to cost you extra."
That's because you have a monopoly on endpointing me. Luckily, there is legislation which requires AT&T to open up their infrastructure to other ISPs, to remove that monopoly.
"The dotcom crash happened because nobody actually had a way to make money."
Oh bullpuckey. The dotcom crash came because there were people who thought they could enter into the V.C. community just because they had money, and make the same level of returns as K.P.C.B. or the Netscape IPO, and they all had so many $ in their eyes that they though "selling eyeballs" was a viable business model.
And if you don't think this is still going on, you're a fool: why do you think AT&T is offering $20/month to the end of the year, with free installation"? It's because they are not really selliing cable plant, so much as they are selling an amortized future revenue stream to Comcast. They are pushing very hard in a loss-leader to get their apparent value up for the sale to Comcast to push their sale price up. Comcast is betting the other side, that people will take the price hike in the shorts like good little consumers, and not change providers, even after the window closes on other ISPs being permitted to, but not having infrastructure in place to, provide endpointing to their customer base at a lower rate.
In other words, AT&T is rediscounting paper on billable contracts, at some expectation value, and that's all.
I really like packet switched networks: it makes it nearly impossible to bill based on the source/detination pair for each packet. Screws the phone company, though, whose recenue model is based on determining virtual circuit end-points, setup and teardown charges for the circuit, and how long it stays up.
Sucks to be the guy who sells pipe, in a world where people want to buy water, doesn't it?
-- Terry
"What irony. The costs of running an ISP are much more comprable that of a water company than a cable TV company. The cost to a water provider is proportional to the amount of water you use, hence their pricing model. The cost to an ISP is proportional to the amount of bandwidth you use, so why shouldn't they charge accordingly?"
Please prove this.
The bandwidth is not "consumed". After I send a packet, the same amount of bandwidth is still there.
I think what you are trying to say is that the people who the ISP pays for bandwidth charge on the basis of usage, just as the ISP does.
At the top of this pyramid you've built, though, there are fixed costs for infrastructure.
If you are claiming that the ISP is screwing consumers because the NSP's are screwing the ISPs, that's a little believable.
But then you try and apply it to a telecommunications giant like AT&T, which already owns it's own infrastructure, and can get non-limited peering arrangements through benefit of having such a huge network to use as leverage in the other direction (if anything, the only people AT&T might have to pay to peer is UUNet, and probably not them -- I'd like to see financial statements).
-- Terry
"No it's not. Cable TV is sending out the same amount of data to you all the time, whether you use it or not. It's not packet data, it goes to every customer at the same time. The transmission costs are minimal compaired to packet data where each user's data is seperate and needs to be routed bith directions."
?
Where the heck do you guys live... in the universe where "Spock" has a beard?
You are acting like each packet has to be printed out on a thermal printer, examined by an elderly man wearing pincnes glasses, and then typed in by hand on an old teletype.
It doesn't cost dick-all extra to route extra packets; the Cisco Catalyst doesn't even take more electricity as the packet load goes up.
Routing packets is an automatic function; it's nothing like the mess at the U.S. Post Office, even if that's the analogy they are teaching in public schools these days. It's all handled by hardware.
-- Terry
Maybe you've just had REALLY bad luck, but I've had excite and then at&t cable for almost 4 years now. In that time, I've had 4 outages, only one of them lasting more than 24 hours. That's no big deal. Latency is fantastic (40ms is common for online games). I'm pleased as punch with their service. I can't help but think you're exagerating. I admit their customer service is bad, but what company's isn't? Remember, you're not talking to AT&T when you call, you're talking to whatever company they've outsourced their support to.
And where the fuck do you get 56k for $10/mo? If you're talking about NetZero or Juno, I'm afraid I'll have to laugh in your general direction. Surfing the internet through them feels like AOL dipped in molassis at 0 degrees kelvin.
Joseph?
i just wanted to get the first post, yet say something that meant something - unlike anyone else who gets first post, just had to do it quick, got the second post though :-(
What if it's streamed services or services that compete with the real cash cows... telephone service. International VoIP is incredably cheap and getting cheaper by the day. Looks to be a real threat to the hig international rates.
Say what? Have you been in Japan _recently_? Unless you're in "Bumfuck Inaka" there are still broadband options for you.
I'm not sure where you are located, but in Perth iiNet's cheapest accounts are
$49.95 - 128/64 500MB peak limit 500MB off-peak limit
For 59.95 you get 256/64 with a 2GB peak and 2GB non-peak limit.
If you exceed your limit you get shaping - you're speed gets limited (shaped) to 72k. The calaculation for this is based on the last 30 days useage, rather than a calender billing period basis.
More importantly however - all downloaded traffic from iiNet servers, iiNet customers (P2P) and traffic on the WAIX network (WA ISPs) is not included in calculating your downloads. That means you can download all the Linux/FreeBSD isos you want - all without contributing to your download limit.
But you still get your bandwidth capped - I hear you reply. Yes - but 72k is much faster than 28.8 as you suggested. Also - shaping, rather than charging for extra bandwidth, means no nasty surprises when you get your bill. That's right you can reliably busget for your internet connection!
Some may complain - me I'd rather have my connection shaped than get an unexpected bill. I imagine that this is particularly good for families.
Finally it would be beneficial if you allowed people to put a certain amount of money in their account and then access a website to transfer money in their account to additional GB of data so that they don't overspend (people hate that, it makes them want to use something simpler) and it doesn't require human interaction which only slows the process down. This is not required but is suggested. You could always take paypal or something but I'm not sure I'd want to associate myself with them, either, if I were AT&T.
It is understandable that bandwidth caps are coming. But don't fuck me over, eh? I expect and demand some decent level of service (ISDN-quality will do) after I have used up the amount of bandwidth you are telling me I'm entitled to -- though I signed up for unlimited service except the bandwidth throttling you instituted on the modem. I assumed that you (AT&T) would have gotten this shit right in the first place. Your business plan was incorrect and now I, the consumer, must pay? Maybe a class-action lawsuit is in the making. Bait and switch, baby.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
"NECG senior analyst Iain Little, who conducted the research, said 70 per cent of Telstra's broadband customers did not reach their download limits."
Gee.. lovely bit of reasoning there - All the other cable companies going hey.. Telstra did a bit of research and they reckon 70% of people didn't hit their download limits.
There's several reasons for this:
a) Anyone who wanted choice changed to another DSL provider when Telstra started imposing and enforcing their '3 Gig cap'.
b) Anyone who IS still stuck with Telstra doesn't want to go over the limit and incur the massive fees they charge per MB over that 3GB limit.
c) There are plenty of other providers out there offering MUCH better deals on DSL in Australia, including ISP's that offer free traffic off peak, free WAIX (local traffic), and shaped traffic (Down to 72KB/s speeds) after hitting that cap.
But of course to know any of that you have to really be in Australia - and Telstra certainly aren't going to tell anyone their data analysis is flawed!
-- Wireless WaFreenet user since March 2002
Getting that $50 from your neighbor may not be as hard as you think.
/. The Internet is still a thing of great mystery to many people. Hell, *electricity* is still a thing of wonder. Getting people to understand that an alternative is available to them from the "guy next door" is a near-impossible sale. I'd probably have an easier time getting everyone to convert to wind-power than a community ISP model.
Were that only true. Unfortunately, we often lose sight of the fact that our neighbors are not as techno-savvy as our friends here on
Still, I will keep my eyes open for the opportunity to help educate the masses.
Ryosen
One man's "Troll, +1" is another man's "Insightful, +1".
Yep, the 1st 3GB every month is unlimited, once one passes that 3GB, the rest comes at modem speed.
Well that's how the default Optus plan works, there's also cheaper & more expensive plans with different thresholds.
a la Singapore.
Cable infrastucture has huge fixed costs (relative to other costs), meaning only economies of scale can sustainably lower costs
Privatly owned monopolies are unnacceptable - it means hugee prices (MS could sell Windows boxed CDs for $45 are still make above average profits). So govt Telco utility monopolies are the go - if they charge too much the politicians get voted out, plus every dollar in net profit is one less dollar in tax that's needed for hospitals 'n schools, etc.
Take electricity, the only state in Oz that has problems like California's is Victoria, & that's the only state to break up & privatise it's electricity Utility, & it has the most expensive electricity in Oz to.
The internet is a utility and should be treated as such. They should bill like the power compaines do. The bill would state how much you downladed (bits or mega bits or giga bits) and they should chage for every bit you download. They may have some additional overhead charges but overall that would be more fair, and there would be no limitations on how much you can download.
Fast Federal Court and I.T.C. updates
Not at all. Just tell people you know and let them tell people they know and so forth. Unlike alternative power there isn't a lot of investment or skill needed to join a community network. Might take a while but eventually the trickle effect goes a long way.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
One major problem - stop thinking megabyte. Raw costs for a GIG of transfer are something like 10-20c for these big guys. I'm a small fish and I pay less than 50c per.
Saying "per megabyte" is playing into their hands. Start saying "per gigabyte".
Cheers,
Backov
In the law there is no overlap between theft and copyright infringement whatsoever.
And I confess that I personally don't want to pay more to get what I've been getting already at a lower price.
But I have to admit that the idea of paying a flat rate regardless of usage simply doesn't make economic sense. Do you think the big companies pay the same for a T1 line as a T3 line or bigger? Of course not. So why are home broadband users special? Tiered service for home users is just an extension of this.
Of course, I fully agree with the person who grumbled about how all the spam we download counts against these caps. ISPs should put in better spam control before imposing tiers.
Mencken had it right. So glad that's old news.
No wonder the broadband movement has yet to take off...
Two men came before Nasrudin when he was magistrate. The first man said,
"This man has bitten my ear -- I demand compensation." The second man said,
"He bit it himself." Nasrudin withdrew to his chambers, and spent an hour
trying to bite his own ear. He succeeded only in falling over and bruising
his forehead. Returning to the courtroom, Nasrudin pronounced, "Examine the
man whose ear was bitten. If his forehead is bruised, he did it himself and
the case is dismissed. If his forehead is not bruised, the other man did it
and must pay three silver pieces."
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...