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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. =)
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
...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
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.
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
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.
capping your bandwidth is not the same as capping the amount of data you can download.
capping your bandwidth is like having a speed limit on highways. most people don't have a problem with that. its when you start telling people how long a distance they can travel with their vehicles every month that they get pissed off.
two separate issues here.
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!)
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>
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!
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!
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'
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.
All I can say is that the ones hurt will be the internet marketers...People will rise to arms to keep popups, flash anims, and cascading pr0n from taking the precious 5 gig. Forget proxy systems... I forsee people using software to selectivly avoid servers that are bandwidth saps. Killing the online marketplace.
Mozilla offers a form of this, right clicking on a pic and telling it to never download a pic from this server again. dark days are coming and I see alot of Surfing dollars being spent where marketers could be footing the bill.
as a AT&T victim^H^H^H^H^H customer I think I'll be looking into this as soon as I'm done posting.
THE WORLD IS GOING TO END!!!! eventually.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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...
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.
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.
with all the recent articles posted on slashdot and other news events, it seems as if capitolism is starting to eat up america.
Good point. I'm starting to wonder if most of the laws today are created to patch capitalism. What we're experiencing now is feature creep (or was that code rot?).
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.
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.
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.
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 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 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
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.
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?
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.
capping your bandwidth is like having a speed limit on highways. most people don't have a problem with that. its when you start telling people how long a distance they can travel with their vehicles every month that they get pissed off.
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!
Exactly how is $75 a month good?
How is 56k/second good?
I don't see your point. Unless that's kB, instead of kb.
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.
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
"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.
Most leases that I'm aware of actually specify a total mileage cap for the life of the lease (or sometimes a year). So I can take it out once a year for my round the states vacation, then leave it in the garage.
This is more the equivalent of saying you can only drive X miles per day. Sucks when gram's house is X+2 miles away.
What if they told you, you could only drive 500Miles a month, how would you feel then?
-- RTFM:Slackware::Beer:Saturday
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?
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. .
"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
You're right this will be the downfall of P2P, but only international P2P - bandwidth caps will encourage localised P2P. International data costs, as the price of data reaches a more sustainable point, are the problem.
Almost all West Australian ISPs are connected to a peering point known as WAIX, and allow free unmetered traffic to it. The P2P hubs (DC and Edonkey) on WAIX are supposedly huge, and those in the eastern states on the iiNet are not insignificant in size. Queensland just got an IX called PIPE with free traffic for data passed through it. Really, it isn't as severe as the end of P2P, as long as you can find an ISP who are cool about local traffic. If bandwidth caps become predominant in other countries as they have here, expect it to happen.
Say what? Have you been in Japan _recently_? Unless you're in "Bumfuck Inaka" there are still broadband options for you.
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.'"
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.
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.