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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
personally, i hope they cap speeds, not download limits. my cable company (time warner, who privides road runner) already has an option for "business lines", cable lines that download twice as fast and upload several times faster, for about double the cost per month. there are even more choices beyond that. while i dont need the extra bandwidth, id gladly pay an extra 10 bucks a month for my service now.
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>
There are no doubt many other providers that would love to have you.
The funny thing is, no there aren't.
Hear me out.
If you're the kind of user who downloads a gig a day, runs a web server, a MUD, a webcast radio station, and several sessions of KaZaA, the providers don't want you. They'd much rather do without your 30 or 40 dollars or whatever you spend a month than have to spend more providing you with bandwidth and technical support. To them you're more trouble than you're worth, and if by instituting a cap they lose you, well that's the price they're willing to pay.
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!
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.
i think this was meant as a joke, but it does raise a (semi)valid point.
We've always been paying for spam via higher access charges, cost of ISP resources, equipment, etc. Nobody really cares because it's an abstract cost. But in a system where, after a certain transfer threshold, you are charged per byte(or megabyte, gigabyte, whatever) i can tell you EXACTLY how much any given spam is costing me. Sure, it's likely a trivial sum, but multiply it by the huge volume sent to everyone, and we'll have a rough idea of how much money spam costs the recipiants. That number might not be so trivial.
Then again, maybe it will be and we would need to rethink the "it costs us money" line from the antispam arguement. (not to try to vindicate spam in anyway, it mearly helps to have the facts straight) Anyway, i'm curious about it. Anyone have numbers for this?
btw, similar arguements can be made for popups and banner ads for stuff i'd never buy anyway.
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.
Unless you consider "move" a choice, which believe it or not is exactly what I was once told by my cable company (before they were bought by TCI, later bought by AT&T). They had the nerve to tell me to my face that they don't have a monopoly on cable TV because I am free to move! With this attitude, is it any surprise they will cap downloads? It's simple math: Those who use the most have the least option to switch, so they're the most likely to pay whatever you charge. Those who use the least could always go back to dialup Juno for email, so you have to treat them nice.
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.