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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."
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.
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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.
"Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence." - Charles de Gaulle
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
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".
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.
Once more unto the breach dear friends...
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.
-30-
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.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
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.
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.
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:
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.
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.