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."

Comments

On The Plus Side......

[wo1verin3]

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. =)

The real cost of P2P

[dew-genen-ny]

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 ????

Re:The real cost of P2P

[whois]

No this is not the real cost of point to point.

This is caused by providers not charging what bandwidth costs them. Major ISPs are not overutilized or oversubscribed, all the "problems" of p2p are happening on the edge networks. Why is this? Because nobody wants to pay to upgrade.

These providers are oversubscribing their networks by sometimes 6x their upstream capacity or more (3 is the norm). They do this so they can charge customers less for the bandwidth. Why would they want to charge less? Because they're in a price war with the cable modem company down the road.

They can't afford to stay in the market because they're in over their heads, so they switch tactics. Instead of fixing the problem, they blame the customer (a common solution nowadays).

So as someone said earlier, vote with you're money. If someone starts changing you're service in ways you don't like just go to their competitior. Saying "oh well, thats just the way it is" will only succeed in making this the standard practice for every provider.

In my opinion bandwidth caps are ok as long as they're agreed upon when you signup for service (i.e. you ask for 500kbps down, and thats what you get). Per byte charges are historically disfavored for home users even though businesses like the idea. When's the last time you paid per minute on local calls? How many of you would accept a cell phone plan that provided no free minutes to call anywhere? Nobody likes it when the phone company changes their plan. Nobody would accept a new phone plan that was worse than the old one. Hows this sound: "Hey, we're lowering the amount of calls you can make on you're phone. If you go over 70 calls a month we'll charge you 45c a minute"

Would you accept it? No. So why accept their proposed plan for new cable modem caps? Find a new provider, and let Chapter 11 convince these people not to play in a market they don't understand.

I wanted to say this...

[gTsiros]

...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.

As a former Telstra Broadband user.

[explosionhead]

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.

Re:Vote with your Dollar!!!

[Nogami_Saeko]

The problem is much like the much-loved "reduced warantee" on hard-drives where all the manufacturers conspire to reduce warantees at the same time, the same could be true for the broadband industry.

If all providers cap at the same time, then all of them make more money and nobody loses out...

Never doubt the power of the dollar to induce competitors to work together to milk more money out of their customers.

I agree though that companies should NOT be allowed to advertise their service as unlimited in this case.

Some sort of FCC/CRTC regulation is needed where companies MUST include information on bandwidth and transfer caps in their advertising, and not in 3 point font at the bottom of a TV commercial or print ad.

How capping should work

[GnomeKing]

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!)

Not all Australian broadband is capped!

[oingoboingo]

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

Korea

[djupedal]

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.

They're shooting themselves in the foot

[kaluta]

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.

Goodbyes streaming radio.

[mshiltonj]

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.

Re:Please please please usage based charging

[redshift-systems]

Sure, I agree - pay for what you use. But charge fairly, not the extortionate prices Telstra and optus force upon us - prices which are way above the US in relative terms. I mean, $AUD70 ($US40) for 3GB per month, gimme a break.

Re:Their prerogative.

[Bishop]

In Ontario, Canada the phone monopoly, Bell, implemented data caps, and yet continued to advertise "Unlimited Internet Access." Their reasoning is that the Internet is still available 24/7: there are no time limits. The sad part is that a large number of customers bought into this and went on to defend Bell's "Unlimited Internet" despite the 5GB data cap. To add insult to injury if a customer were to do the sorts of activities shown in the Bell ads, music jamming online, sucking back video content, the customer would very quickly hit the 5GB data cap.

The proper way to cap..

[jaseuk]

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

Capping spam

[SgtChaireBourne]

Will they cap spam, too? Or will the limit only apply to their paying customers?

Charging by the meg is stupid...

[tlambert]

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

I won't mind this if...

[weave]

If they are going to cap total bandwidth, then they should uncap the throughput caps. If I can't hog over 6 gigs a month, then the times when I do need to download something big, at least let me do it fast, get it through the system and re-clear up the line quickly.

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?

Re:Article Correction - 5 gigabytes NOT gigabits.

[JaredOfEuropa]

Your calculation is accurate and the conclusion is very cute, but this has no relevance whatsoever to the subject at hand. Comcast subscribers download stuff at the same speed as ever, until they hit the cap.

If, as your calculation suggests, you are one of those people downloading things 24x7, then Comcast and all the others will be pleased as punch to see you cancel your subscription. 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?

I say bring on metered internet access! Charge a low monthly fee that is attractive even for casual users, then charge by the megabyte. I think the only way ISPs will survive in the end is by such price differentiation, by passing on the (non-zero) cost of bandwith usage to the subscribers.

(+5 informative? What gives?)

Re:Please please please usage based charging

[squiggleslash]

Are you happy to pay the market rate for bandwidth someone else uses on your behalf? Say, a pissed spammer ping flooding your host, or some such?

TCP/IP is NOT X.25. It does not contain billing information in every packet. And the only "solutions" I can think of that'll prevent a person from being a victim of charges they never originated involve the ISP refusing all non TCP packets addressed to customer's machines and all incoming TCP connections. Certainly this would suit some people, but it would be a nasty clamp on the 'net and probably the end of it as we know it. Applications from IP telephony to remote access to just the ability for someone to manage their own email would become impossible. The net would become the web.

Byte charging is a bad idea. There are alternatives (as an example, have a slow link as the permanent unmetered link and allow a customer to buy minutes of faster access), yet everyone wants to give spammers and hackers a field day.

Why?

Re:Somebody has to pay for it

[yoshi_mon]

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.

As someone who also managed a small ISP for a time I can understand what your saying, but there is a solution.

Find out who these BW hogs are and TOS them out the door! Thats the great thing about being a private buisness, is that you can refuse service to anyone.

Yes, I know that those who are useing full bandwidth 24/7 will scream like bloody murder and generate some bad PR over it. But it is better in the long run imho to get a rep for killing users who are obviously violating TOS rather than the alternative.

Re:The vast conspiracy

[doug363]

Let me just point out that you're free to do the same. Lie, persuade, complain, change services, take undue advantage of introductory offers... Really. Being aggressive is sometimes necessary, and standing up for yourself will usually get yourself a better deal. But don't be rude if you can avoid it. Get angry, sure, but rudeness often just gets you a bad comment next to your name, and less patience the next time you have to deal with them. Treat them in the same way as they treat you.

This sort of stuff has been going on ever since there was competition. People have been taking advantage of each other for thousands of years. It's not new, it's just obvious in this case.

And since when did "free" ever mean "fair"? Fairness is nice, but for the most part I'd prefer to have freedoms than government-mandated "fairness".

Re:Please please please usage based charging

[Soulslayer]

Whoa there a second.

There are several big problems with the treatment of internet access in the modern world.

One issue is that telcos and cable companies imitating telcos are in control of the market. These companies take the physical asset cost saving approach of assuming certain peak loads and usage patterns per customer per hour of the day. The problem is that internet service is not a static one use service like the telephone was originally. As deliverables and uses change and grow, so do the bandwidth needs. This messes with those lovely assumptions about how much time and how much data each customer will expend while using their connection. In fact when people started using modems in large numbers the telcos started crying about how it was screwing up their careful usage calaculations because a modem user staid online for hours when the usage rates were calculated for the average 3 minute phone call. The internet is not a bloody phone system. Deal with it. There is a ton of dark fiber laying around out there that is not being used despite having already been paid for and having the hardware to connect it all. Give me the fiber link to my bloody house and light all the fiber out there before you start charging me more based on poor customer usage predictions.

Another issue is that american buisness has a horrible case of short sightedness (encouraged greatly by the reactionary and short sighted tendencies of the stock market). Bandwidth does not incur huge ongoing costs. Bandwidth incurs a huge initial cost (the laying of fiber/copper, routing hardware; etc) followed by rather reasonable maintenance costs (in most cases cheaper than regular telco lines). There are three ways to recoup your losses from the initial setup:

1) Charge a huge amount of money for use of the service because (in a wonderful self fulfilling prophecy arrangement) you have decided that not enough users will purchase the service.

2) Charge a very low amount of money for the service in the hopes that you will gain enough customers fast enough to reduce cost of operation per customer.

3) Charge a moderate amount of money to attempt to get as much back initially as possible while not alienating an overly large chunk of your customer base with prohibitive rates.

For a while now providers have been going with option number 3 (which makes the most sense) and charging about $50 a month for high speed access.

The recent moves towards usage caps is mostly in reaction to hemoraging money from failed or miscalculated ventures elsewhere and is an attempt to belatedly go back to option nubmer 1. Option number 1 being a huge reason why ISDN never really took off despite being around for a long time.

Now this trick (basically a big bait and switch) of hooking customers at a moderate pricing scheme and then swapping it out for an expensive one will work in the short term, but it is ultimately going to wind up less profitable than charging a lower amount for services and increasing your customer base by nearly 10 times. Right now the US is way behind other countries in terms of broadband deployment. And it is not so much because the infrastructure isn't there. It's because the costs are still outside the comfort levels for most consumers.

Leave broadband unlimited at $50 for decent (read higher than 512Kbps downstream/128Kbps upstream) connections and add lower cost plans at $12-$20 per month for low speed (below 512/128Kbps) and you will see a huge jump in subscribers that will also even out your bandwidth usage per customer (most people don't eat nearly as much bandwidth as gamers and the like do) and allow you to expand services.

The below is way oversimplified, but helps illustrate the point a little.

Current US households with broadband is estimated at ~15 million. 15 million households with broadband now at $50/month = $750 million.

Assuming you would keep those subscribers (with no usage caps) but offer the lower speed (again with no caps)at around $20 and you can add the remaining US households (85 million of them) for an addition $1.7 billion a month.

This brings the theoretical total to $2.45 billion per month or $29.4 billion per year.

Re:Vote with your Dollar!!!

[buysse]

Not bloody likely. I'm in Minneapolis, MN. Here's my traceroute to the University of Minnesota:

traceroute to 128.101.101.101 (128.101.101.101), 30 hops max, 38 byte packets
1 xxxxxxxxxxx.rr.com (24.xxx.xxx.xxx) 1.480 ms 1.212 ms 3.600 ms
2 10.y.y.y (10.y.y.y) 12.314 ms 19.837 ms 8.476 ms
3 mplsmn01-rtr2-srp-2-0.mn.rr.com (24.26.162.2) 19.682 ms 9.169 ms 8.995 ms
4 mplsmn01-rtr1-srp-2-0.mn.rr.com (24.26.162.1) 20.112 ms 12.612 ms 12.008 ms
5 pop1-chi-P3-1.atdn.net (66.185.141.89) 28.199 ms 26.546 ms 23.704 ms
6 bb1-chi-P0-0.atdn.net (66.185.141.84) 24.655 ms 25.107 ms 36.789 ms
7 bb1-kcy-P7-0.atdn.net (66.185.152.125) 40.153 ms 38.884 ms 36.182 ms
8 bb2-kcy-P1-0.atdn.net (66.185.152.127) 38.371 ms 71.896 ms 48.152 ms
9 bb2-den-P7-0.atdn.net (66.185.152.188) 48.200 ms 48.099 ms 50.597 ms
10 bb1-den-P1-0.atdn.net (66.185.152.136) 48.182 ms 48.030 ms 56.077 ms
11 bb1-sun-P5-0.atdn.net (66.185.152.253) 74.332 ms 72.269 ms 73.656 ms
12 bb2-sun-P1-0.atdn.net (66.185.152.1) 104.375 ms 73.225 ms 73.054 ms
13 bb2-las-P7-0.atdn.net (66.185.152.22) 79.735 ms 81.554 ms 80.461 ms
14 pop2-las-P1-0.atdn.net (66.185.137.163) 91.439 ms 78.519 ms 92.356 ms
15 aol-gw.la2ca.ip.att.net (192.205.32.101) 98.355 ms 79.452 ms 81.495 ms
16 gbr3-p50.la2ca.ip.att.net (12.123.28.130) 83.982 ms 99.443 ms 93.248 ms
17 gbr4-p20.sffca.ip.att.net (12.122.2.69) 92.254 ms 90.989 ms 112.171 ms
18 gbr3-p50.dvmco.ip.att.net (12.122.2.66) 111.926 ms 110.579 ms 110.642 ms
19 gbr1-p100.dvmco.ip.att.net (12.122.5.18) 115.916 ms 111.989 ms 111.105 ms
20 gar2-p360.dvmco.ip.att.net (12.123.36.137) 111.924 ms 111.556 ms 112.587 ms
21 12.124.158.46 (12.124.158.46) 115.931 ms 120.008 ms 118.364 ms
22 den-core-02.tamerica.net (205.171.16.17) 116.331 ms 117.854 ms 115.497 ms
23 min-core-02.tamerica.net (205.171.8.98) 151.716 ms 141.178 ms 144.119 ms
24 min-edge-01.inet.qwest.net (205.171.128.10) 156.578 ms 141.673 ms 152.590 ms
25 65.121.10.62 (65.121.10.62) 151.691 ms 141.701 ms 242.474 ms
26 tc2-qtr.northernlights.gigapop.net (192.42.152.129) 145.372 ms 144.367 ms 141.991 ms
27 tc3x.router.umn.edu (160.94.26.97) 144.602 ms 143.957 ms 147.239 ms
28 ntc-1-rsmx.rswitch.umn.edu (160.94.26.1) 144.811 ms 148.737 ms 144.713 ms
29 ns.nts.umn.edu (128.101.101.101) 145.145 ms 161.426 ms 144.250 ms

Note: the private network (10.0.0.0/8) is not mine -- it's Time Warner's.

Even in the same state, I'm bouncing through 26 hops to reach the U of MN's border. More to the point, if I'm reading this right, the path on atdn.net is MSP-> Chicago-> Kansas City-> Denver-> sun(?)-> Las Vegas-> L.A.-> San Francisco-> Denver (again)-> Finally, back to Minnesota.

Jebus, that sucks.

Re:Article Correction - 5 gigabytes NOT gigabits.

[radish]

One important difference is support - I may use a fair amount of bandwidth but I never call the support desk. One might suppose that the non-tech housewife (or whoever), whilst using less bandwidth, could cost a fortune to support.

Do this a different way.

[emil]

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.

Ping?

[mehip2001]

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.

Re:Sympatico changing to 10 Gbyte

[ckedge]

Charged at $8 per gigabyte over the cap. Reliable estimates by people in the know estimate that Bell's actual costs for bandwidth are in the range of 50 cents to $1 per gigabyte.

And the $30 maximum charge? The Sympatico website CLEARLY states that it is TEMPORARY.

There are a number of DSL competitors who give higher caps and charge between $3 and $1 per gigabyte for bandwidth. And they have to pay Bell for transit over the local loops!

(Thank God the ILEC, Bell, isn't screwing the competitors over wrt provisioning like the US ILEC's did to their competition.)

Unfortunately the Cable companies up here haven't yet been forced to share their infrastructure in the same way.

Re:Somebody has to pay for it

[kcbrown]

I'm a small-ISP manager, so take the below with the corresponding grain of salt: Bytes cost us money.

No, bytes don't cost you money, your connection does.

Understand this: there is no fixed relationship between traffic and cost.

Here's what a connection costs:

1. Equipment acquisition: variable, one-time charge. Varies based on the capabilities of the equipment. But this equipment is more or less subject to Moore's Law, so the acquisition costs of equipment with a given bandwidth capability should be dropping over time unless the market's broken.
2. Provisioning: fixed, one-time charge. More or less independent of bandwidth. It costs about as much to run a copper wire as it does to run fiber, but fiber has a lot more bandwidth.
3. Support and maintenance: Fixed, periodic cost. There may be some variation here because the highest-end equipment tends to be rarer and thus getting people who can maintain it well will be more expensive, but other than that the problems are the same and the expertise required to keep it going is the same.
4. Business overhead: Variable, periodic cost. Varies based primarily on the size of the company relative to the number of customers it has.

The only cost that has any relationship at all with bandwidth capability is the acquisition of equipment, and as I noted that should be something which drops significantly over time because of Moore's Law.

So: the fact that your upstream provider charges you based on your bandwidth usage is artificial. It needn't be that way. I'll go so far as to say that it shouldn't be that way.

It seems to me that a lot of this nonsense would disappear if upstream providers charged for what they're actually providing: a pipe, and little more.

Anyway, people need to get a clue about what bandwidth costs and why it costs. Then they'd realize that download caps are nonsense.

Re:I have ben capped since @home went away

[Charm]

No, it IS telling me how long a distance I can travel. At maximum allowable speed in New Mexico (75mph) I can travel at most 55,800 miles in month (75x24x31) and THAT PISSES ME OFF!

What if they told you, you could only drive 500Miles a month, how would you feel then?

Re:ISP's need to think.-"Inner child".

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Sympatico changing to 10 Gbyte

[ckedge]

I'm confused. I think you've got your analogies backwards. (Either that your you just *couldn't* resist the comment, even if it didn't fit perfectly with the situation :)

If Sympatico never gives up the $30 maximum charge, it means that they will allow you to download as much as you can get for only $30 per month extra. Which would cost them money.

There are already people out there who are leaching 20-30 GB per month above the cap and "taking advantage" of the $30 per month cap. Removing the cap sometime in the near future is to Sympatico's benefit, and to the user's detriment.