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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
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!
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.
?
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.
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>
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.
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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!
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
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.
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!
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.