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New Broadband Capping Techniques?
doublea16 writes "Upon calling my broadband cable company to see why my modem's upstream was so slow as of late, I was told I had been capped due to excessive uploads. When I dug deeper for more details, I was finally told by a manager that any upload in excess of 35 minutes (size of file or type, etc have no bearing) would result in an automatic capping of the user's upstream. The Terms of Service provided are very vague when it comes to their rights to restrict speed. I was wondering if anyone else out there's broadband company had resorted to tactics like this? Is this fair to the consumers or even legal?"
Fair? Hardly. Legal? Depends on your terms of service, but almost certainly so, due to the weasely nature of most companies.
What to do? Time to go DSL, of course. Not as fast as most cable connections, true, but DSL providers are on the losing end of the Cable vs DSL "war", and tend to provide more services & rights for their higher cost / (usually) slower speed / harder to get service. Hopefully you can _get_ decent DSL service where you are.
A more important question: Is this worth posting on Slashdot to whine about?
Hardly.
(Cliff, what were you thinking? (yes, hit my karma - I don't care))
We _really_ need to be able to moderate the editors.
Up here in Canada we went throu a period where everyone who used more then about 5Gig a month( a lot of people, easy to do ) on DSL provided by Bell moved to other providers when Bell capped people. (Apparently they have taken off the cap now that all the major downloaders are off their network...) And I can understand why... Looking at my usage graphs on my router shows that I have a 30 day max both ways of about 6.25GB and for the past week I have averaged around 5.5GB both ways, with most being more than 3GB/day outgoing...
They want to cap you because bandwidth, while cheap, still costs money, and money is what every business is about. If they can find a way to reduce their costs without significantly reducing their income, they will. Convince a few people to download or upload less and they save money, but usually the customer is still paying the same amount. Some will leave, but that probably saves the company more money to a point. And they can live with the loss of a customer.
Anyway...
On Arrakis: early worm gets the bird. Magister mundi sum!
I have to post this AC because whenever I post it logged in, conservative corporate whorshipping shills accuse me of not understanding that you get what you pay for or some other crap, and mod me down so much I can't post for a time.
As far as I know, there is no piece of equipment in the cable modem infrastructure that is naturally a one way device. If you think of lots of water hoses coming from a single connection, the bottle neck is still a bottle neck whether you are pumping or receiving water. This rude analogy holds true for the cable modems too, unless they purposely make it a directional device.
The cable modem itself, that is in your house, is where the capping is done (it is controlled centrally of course). The claim by cable modem companies and their self-appointed defenders on slashdot is that if these cable modems were not capped at the edges of the network, something would clog up further upstream. This is not true. There is no piece of equipment upstream that would clog up, because if there were, it would already clog up on the download (ok sometime that happens, but never to the extent that they cap the modems).
Another argument sometimes presented is that uploading somehow costs the cable company more in bandwidth than downloading. I have noted that the people making this argument tend to be particularly ill informed, and I believe they are extrapolating the fact it costs them more to by upstream bandwidth than downstream to others. If this were the case the cable modem network would cap bandwidth leaving it's system but not the connections from one customer to another.
In fact, the first cable modem systems to be rolled out, in California I believe, offered 4 to 6 Mbs both up and down. Of course I never had such a system myself, but that's what people have reported.
Now think about how the internet will be when almost everyone is on cable modems. If the whole internet was on cable modems, you would never be able to use that download speed, because if you are downloading someone is uploading. Unless, of course, you were downloading from dozens of places at once, as with BitTorrent.
And that's what BitTorrent is, an attempt to route around this artificial obstacle placed on the natural working of the internet. And that is the real goal of these new caps that cut off the and upload that continues too long -- to kill BitTorrent.
My personal view is that the ToS should not prohibit anything, but instead give you a certain amount of TX (ie upload) bytes (maybe allow unlimited uploads to hosts on the ISP's network), and either (at your option) drop all uploads or charge you extra for everything above that, with no service degradation.
I really think that that approach would solve a number of the problems (both real and perceived) with the Internet. First of all, it's an absolutely permissive ToS. If you want to start your own webhosting provider, you could try and run it off your DSL line (but be prepared to pay for the transfers). If you want to run an IRC server, ditto. At the same time, now viruses and worms have a real economic cost to the infected host; if one's computer is trojaned and turned into a zombie spewing out huge numbers of spam, your connection dies for the remainder of the month, or you end up paying through the nose to your ISP. After Mr. Smith gets a bill from his ISP for $300 for being a spam zombie, two things happen: a) Mr. Smith educates himself on running a firewall, scanning for trojans, etc. b)_Mr. Smith begins agitating his representatives for greater legal repercussions against spammers and zombieware makers.
If a significant number of ISPs used this approach, illegal downloading of movies through the P2P networks would likely cease. A decent DivX rip is around a gig. If the breakpoint is, say, 5 GB a month, then you've got 5 uploads before the guy running KaZaa is paying per upload. What with various Universities' recent move towards bandwidth throttling of traffic that looks like P2P traffic, US cable/DSL ISPs have become the main providers of files for the networks. Cutting down on the impulse to share files, would thus increase the amount of leeching on those networks which would presumably have deleterious consequences for those networks.