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ISPs Experiment With Broadband Download Capping
W33dz writes "News.com has an article detailing how some ISPs are now capping bandwidth usage by some of their high end users. Comcast claims this is an attempt to create better speeds for their average users, but you can't help but wonder how much of this is in response to the RIAA's subpoenas. Interestingly enough, there is no set limit, but just a subjective limit of 'more than the average user.' The World Tech Tribune has an article on the same topic."
Lose the tinfoil hat, Sparky. Home broadband is dirt cheap for what you get. It's subsidized by business accounts much like telephone service. When cable and DSL first came out no one heard of Napster let alone Kazaa or eMule. Those apps use up a huge amount of available bandwidth which we get damn cheap.
Personally I'd rather them use bandwidth throttling for P2P apps rather than dictating a certain amount of usage over the course of a month. Most P2P users leave the thing running all day anyhow (I do and check in to home via VNC through an SSH tunnel) so why not throttle it back? A few K less incoming for P2P isn't much, but when you're waiting for a website to load.. well that's where you want the real speed.
Trolling is a art,
Maybe 10 years ago this might have been news.. but today? Half the ISPs out there have caps of some sort.
I would normalize the distrobution periodically and set the cap at the higher 10% level.
The snow doesn't give a soft white damn whom it touches. -- ee cummings
Here in Wichita, prior to the Cox Communications buyout, we had 10Mbps down/up.
Now (since 2001) its been 3Mbps down/256Kbps up. Sucks.
First of all, this is WAY old news. Comcast had been sending out bandwith notices quite a while ago.
.02
Second, this has nothing to do with RIAA pressure. It has to do with tricky marketing, bait-and-switch, and money. Comcast likes to claim they are an unlimited service yet they want to give you an UNKNOWN limit of bandwith you can use (subjective to those users in your immediate area it seems - so if you are in Podunk and 5 people have cable and you are using X amount of bandwith above the average of the other 4, you are busted and lose your service).
Third, Comcast has a monopoly and almost 25 million subscribers. Like *I* have a choice of another provider for broadband (no DSL, wireless is cost prohibitive). I loved the note on my door on Friday: "Please note that we will be inspecting your cable outlets on Monday with your landlords permission, please move all furniture out of the way." How about no. Glad that the landlord changed my locks when I moved in and forgot to keep a key for themselves. I don't appreciate Comcast coming in in the first place, nevermind when I am not at home.
Comcast is real cute. Takeover a monopolized market, raise prices even higher if you don't have CATV, create bandwith caps if you go over some mysterious number, etc.
See here and here for more info.
Just my worthless
In areas where you do have a choice between broadband providers (DSL vs. Cable, or multiple DSLs, etc), the free market should be able to sort this out. Will be okay with it? Willing to pay more for "unlimited"? Personally, I hope they get users so upset, they start to turn to the idea of wireless mesh networks. Those would be great in cities.
Well... mine is already capped at 640KiBit/s.
It would be more interesting if the ISPs would start experimenting with uncapping speeds for especially law-abedient users(this group does not include me, unfortunately).
So if we start to do wide spread DOS on the "minimal users" PC's then that will bring up the average, so we can get more mp3's..
Maybe we should just apply a bell curve..
NTL started to disable people's broadband connections if they exceeded a certain amount of data download in a day.
I cant remember if they stopped it in the end because of complaints... anyone know?
Well, I get great speeds at my university, but ports like FastTrack and FTP are slowed down quite a bit. Pretty annoying. KaZaA download at about 1k/s (on good days). Not that I use it anyway, but my friends sure hate it.
I remember when legal used to mean lawful, now it means some kind of loophole. - Leo Kessler
So...the lesson here is that the average user just has to download 10 cd's worth of music per day or so, and then we'll all be fine...
Is it really so bad that users of broadband like to utilize as much of the pipe as they are appropriated? I think that if capping is implemented, the prices of the broadband connections should be decreased appropriately - since you will be recieving a lesser service.
This may be implemented very simple:
#1: determine the top 10% of the users
#2: cap their bandwidth so that they're no longer in that group
#3: if (bandwidth_used > 0) goto #1
#4: sell off your backbone
#5: profit!
mats
One man's ceiling is another man's floor.
If they stick to this, then the cap will, by necessity, spiral down.
Consider, if the current average is M, and people using more than M are capped at M, then the average will decrease to M'. Now, the former average is more than the new average, and presumably would initiate a new round of caps at the value M'. Lather, rinse, repeat.
I'm trying really hard not to take this personally.
Ironically enough, I moved recently, and the tech hooking up my cable at the new place pointed out that using the coax outlets on my surge suppressor was actually slowing my connection. Sure 'nuff, latency *feels* greatly reduced now. Of course, that may be due to moving to an area teeming with the elderly (no, not Flordia) rather than living amongst college-age riff raff.
I'll bet they'd be glad to hear their subcontractors are working against them on this front. Damn that helpful attitude!
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
Give more bandwidth to the people who don't download anything and less to the people who do...
Complain and protest about this action, and suggest that broadband ISPs consider mirroring some of the more popular Linux downloads within their networks (Speakeasy DSL already does this). Of course, Comcast will have no interest in this, but they're already in Microsoft's back pocket anyway...
Why on earth if someone changes a policy that somehow will affect mass P2P traders, etc., it's some underhanded effort behind the scenes of one of the hated groups, SCO, MS, RIAA, MPAA, etc.?
Could it just be that bandwidth costs money, and some people just use way too much of it? That perhaps this usage could hinder others in the area or across the whole network?
Nah, usual paranoia sets in, it must be the RIAA strongarming them to change their policy so people have to take an extra thirty seconds to download that song off Kazaa . . .
Human nature is the same everywhere; the modes only are different. -- Earl of Chesterfield
I use more than the "average" so am capped, thus the average is lowered. So again I am above average so am capped, and again the average is lowered. Rinse, repeat?
Eventually no one will be able download anything, right?
...but the good news is, you pay the same low price for involuntarily downgraded service! Thanks for using Comcast! Have a nice day!
If they start capping people with more than average bandwidth usage then the average goes down. Repeat until dail-up speed.
___________
"Build a man a fire warm him for a day, set a man on fire and warm him for the rest of his life."
When I pay my monthly internet bill, I'm not paying for an average download speed, I'm paying for a MAXIMUM download speed. Is it legal for them to change the contract for the amount of bandwidth I can use at any time?
If nobody's allowed to download more than the average user, the average will drop pretty rapidly. Soon, nobody will be able to download anything!
Well if you ask me these ISP's are nothing more than swindlers. Their ad says some fregging MB/second download and what they actually deliver a lower bandwidth. Doen't this amount to cheating or bad business practices. may be its time they get reported to FCC.
Does your bandwidth quota get used up if someone launches a DoS attack on you?
Why don't they just shape the traffic to their needs? I'm sure there has got to be some way to do this at an application level. Couldn't they just assign lower priorities to p2p traffic? It's not like bandwidth is some tangible asset that we are USING up every day. Just have us capped to under their bandwidth needs.
this sig limit is too small to put anything good h
Here in Edmonton, Alberta we have a choice of two high speed ISPs: Telus (DSL) and Shaw (Cable). Telus does not impose any download caps, while Shaw does.
I switched away from Shaw. My brother-in-law switched away. Several co-workers switched away. My neighbors switched away.
I don't know if you'd consider that annecdotal evidence only, but I see that as a pretty clear sign that people want unmetered downloads and are willing to switch to an alternative if one's available. I guess if you are using so much bandwidth that the ISP is losing money on you they might have an argument for capping, but otherwise it just seems suicidal.
"The market alone cannot provide sufficient constraints on corporation's penchant to cause harm." -- Joel Bakan
Having just downloaded three Yellow Dog Linux ISOs last night, I couldn't help but wonder if there's some anti-open source something going on here too. But then I remembered: Windows users should be regularly downloading updates, too, which must add up in terms of bandwidth. If "average users" aren't downloading critical updates, does that mean more responsible users won't be allowed to?
CNN story
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
I would like to note, the Cox Communications limit in Wichita is 30GB/month or 2GB/day.
I have by far exceeded that many, many times and have not been sent a notice yet. However they were rather irate when they bought out and changed policies to prevent my webserver from continuing.
Mathematically speaking, if they always go after everyone above the average, it'll just continually lower what the average is in a never-ending cycle of bandwidth oppression.
And if they're not speaking mathematically - that is, if there's no literal weight behind the 'limit' - then you can't even maintain the illusion that they're trying to be fair; it's entirely arbitrary.
Whenever I hear about bandwidth caps, suddenly I don't feel so bad about my archaic dialup - in effect, I have roughly the same cap, but at least my ISP isn't trying (too hard) to keep me from it.
Glog!
Here I define 'successful' as having such a strong effect in stopping people from downloading music, that sales of CD burners go down (no one is copying and/or burning their own CD's), sales of MP3 players go down (no one wants to even rip CD's to mp3 for fear of being sued). (and yeah, I know that won't happen because there's many legitimate uses, but bear with me for a second).
Now, suddenly, the $500billion electronics industry that makes CD burners and MP3 players is going to be seeing declining sales. And the $50 billion record industry sales went up a couple billion. Which industry do you think has more power?
The whole situation is pretty strange. Consider that Sony Electronics makes something like $40 billion a year. And Sony Entertainment makes around $4 billion. Sony Entertainment is a record company, and part of the RIAA. Sony Electronics makes CD burners, MP3 players, Car CD players that can play MP3's, Computers, and various other electronics used in these 'illegal' copying pratices. Do you think AOL-TW makes more money from their record company division, or their ISP division (that allows people to download using p2p)?
Maybe someone can shed some light on who's making these decisions in the RIAA and why these companies are allowing it to do what it's doing.
This is the Best Quote to Describe Slashdot...
Some geeks have switched from ineffectually whining about a lack of competition (a subject they truly don't understand) to semi-effectually whining about the possible institution of metered broadband Internet access (a subject they can argue incessantly about with lots of tech jargon they seemingly improvise on the spot).
Ain't it the truth! Say it with me now - sometimes, a Monopoly is a Good Thing!
Comcast already caps the uploads at 128k. Most of the p2p connections don't seem to deliver any faster. Seems much of the world is already capped.
If total usage is limited, I see no problem with that if it's explicitly stated in my service agreement.
Broadband ISPs have been including this clause in their ToS agreements for quite a few years. I worked in the department responsible for bandwidth consumption two years ago trying to deal with the onslaught of file-sharing and they were pushing hard on the arbitrary 'more than most users' limit. It was miserable to enforce. In our case, it was later changed to 'more than our lowest-end business broadband package.'
In the end though, most ISPs aren't out to cause problems for the average user or even the average file-sharing individual. Most will publish limits of around 2gb up, 6gb down, but within the industry you're not usually contacted until you break 10gb up, 40gb down in a month. That's a lot of traffic to be honest.
In the end, the biggest problem we ever saw was careless use of file-sharing software. Whole drives left on unlimited share 24/7 creating 300gb a month upload tallies. I know it doesn't sound like a lot but if enough people do it, traffic like that will grind a broadband network down.
It's also important to note that the primary concern on cable and certain ADSL networks is the upstream traffic. Cable in particular normally allocates 1/10th of their bandwidth to upstream and 90% to downstream. Too much going out and everyone loses.
"Be proud to be a fighter" - Martial Arts Adage
DirecPC was sued over this very same issue.
One result of the suit forced DirecPC to disclose the thresholds of their "Fair Access Policy" (ie. bandwidth capping) which was previously a "secret".
Why does DPC have to disclose the terms of their policy while Comcast does not?
1. sell service
2. don't deliver.
3. profit!
-
i would be ok with this if the thing they were selling it as capped from the day 0 they give it to the user and had spesific rules, so that YOU KNOW WHAT YOU BUY(around here, consumer protection makes a necessity anyways).
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
But this only assumes that people who use a lot of broadband are using said bandwidth for illegal purposes - i.e. downloading copyrighted material illegally. This simply isn't the case - what if you distribure Linux ISO's via BitTorrent or other such intensive usage? Should your service be cut simply because Comcast wants to bait and switch you? This is simply a VERY poor decision.
And they wonder why more people don't sign up for broadband? Maybe because there's no point with download caps, both speed and meg limits.
The day my ISP does this I sware I'll cancel the service. If no other ISP wants to sell me an unlimited broadband service I'll use cheap dial up or just say screw it all together and get a life. I'm not paying premium prices for unlimited services and then be told it's only unlimited for those who do not use much of it.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
I wonder if they calculate a new average after cutting off the upper extremes. And then cap the above average guys again, and calculate a new average. And so on...
...for residential users. Business users basically already subsidize the home market. The telcos and cable companies probably didn't forsee the impact of P2P when they promised "unlimited" bandwidth, assuming web browsers, email, and the occasional Quake server connected at home. P2P takes off and suddenly they need to back off on their promises a bit, but don't expect them to drop the price lower as they are already losing money on home broadband.
"We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers." Carl Sagan
I don't understand where the bandwidth costs are coming from for an ISP. The cables have been laid down right? How does it cost the ISP more to run them at max?
Online games. Cable companies scrutinize the upload much more than the download. Try plaing games online for a few hours a day and the cable company may not be too pleased. I've heard of people getting capped simply by hooking up their XBOX and playing online.
They're outsourcing usenet. Over a certain number of users, it become much cheaper to hold the usenet feed locally on the ISP network, and then feed it to users. "Local" bandwidth is much cheaper than internet bandwidth.
I like to call them Concast...
Since I'm flushing about 200MB/day, more or less, of copies of the Swen virus, it's obvious to me that it would be possible to get your enemies' bandwidth capped (or even get their service terminated) simply by mounting a DDoS attack that mailbombs them.
Turkeys.
Erm.. I'm guessing this may be technically too difficult for an ISP, but how about using class-based queuing and simply prioritizing WWW and real-time traffic like telnet and streaming over bulk traffic like FTP and P2P?
If my ISP even tries to put a montly limit on me, I'm cancelling the cable. I paid for "unlimited" access, so that means UNLIMITED.
I believe it was Telstra which gave users a 'download meter' which recorded how much you had downloaded in the month. Only problem was that it was never accurate, and you could well be paying through the nose for being above your cap, while your little meter said everything was just fine and dandy.
In other news, thinking this is in response to the RIAA sounds a little paranoid to me. Cable companies everywhere are looking to make everybody happy without have to spend a cent on infrastructure upgrades. At the end of the day, the very specific audience here at Slashdot means we're probably not getting a good cross-section of the discussion on this topic....
Submitted a story to Slashdot about it and it got rejected.
Comcast is shooting themselves in the foot by cutting off customers for "excessive bandwidth usage", yet never defining in their TOS what exactly constitutes "excessive". By being really ambiguous and saying that excessive is more than average, they give themselves free-reign to cut off users at anytime. However, once customers realize this, you can bet your ass that people will start flocking to their nearest DSL competitor. Currently I have RoadRunner at my house, and the day they start enforcing bandwidth usage is the day I switch to DSL. I realize that bandwidth isn't free, but if something's advertised as "unlimited high-speed internet for $49.50/mo" or whatever, then don't throw a shitfit when someone actually takes you up on it. And yes, I realize that Comcast supposedly took away the unlimited part from their ads like a month ago.
"Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned for SEGA. ..."
Govt. Regulations are the only way out of stuff like this, I know there are a few for cable companies, like you can't offer a service to part of a town, you have to have it avaliable to the entire town. Could someone sue over this as it's false advertising? I have Comcast and I've downloaded about 6 Linux ISOs since I've moved to PA, I don't live in the Philadelphia though, I live about 20 - 25 minutes away. Maybe there should be a regulation saying you can't do this if you market the service as unlimited. Cause really who else is there to help you, there really is no competition for things like this as you can't really going to switch to a differnet service. Satillete may be ok if all you do is surf the web but if you play games online like myself you can't use that because it's worse then a 28.8k because of how it transmits data in bursts, 56k isn't any better either. DSL is okay if can actually get it. What more choice do you really have. The only option is really the goverment to stop this abuse. That is basically what it is. It should be classified as fraud too.
In my area I have access to both DSL and Cable. Both were uncapped, both got capped, and now, guess what? They are starting to uncap!
Ma Bell found out people would switch over to them if they actually offered uncapped service. Most people won't even download near the cap they had set up anyway. Users who actually do bust the cap are usually a little more at ease with computers... Which means that when their low-tech friends ask which service to subscribe to, they'll suggest the uncapped one *they* are using.
Anyway, I think the capping will eventually go away if there is competition. Pray you have competition in your area!
Soon, you'll pay by the minute again for Internet access. They'll be service plans, just like cel phones. Your broadband with be capped at 56k speeds, and limited to 500MB a day.
If there is so much stress on the cable networks, obviously they wern't constructed or designed properly. Give people fast-as-hell access and everyone is going to sign up and take advantage of it? WELL DUH!
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
Set a rate depending on how much user's download.
Let's say they charge $0.01 for every megabyte you download. So, if you download nothing, you pay nothing. If you download 1MB, you pay 1cent. If you download 100MB, you pay 1 dollar; 1000 MB, 10 dollars; 10,000MB, 100 dollars, and so-on and so-forth.
This makes much more sense than setting caps on the download rate.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
I have a time/warner cable modem. I get almost 3x T1 speeds on downloads. The uploads are only about .5 x T1 speeds. But I pay $40 a month.
They have a policy that says they'll charge me if I use too much bandwidth, but they never have.
I used to pay $2700 a month for a real T1. I got a block of addresses with that, and better service (back in prehistoric times), but the memory of those giant bills prevents me from whining about my cable modem.
It's rock solid, it does everything I need. If you compare what my cable company is charging me for bandwidth compared to co-lo hosting companies or anyone else in the biz, I'm getting a great deal.
Would I like more bandwidth? Sure. Would I like a block of static IPs? You bet. But I'm not paying much of anything for this. It always works, it doesn't go down.
I love it.
Comcast is sending messages to subscribers that they are overusing and not even telling them what the limits are.
According to a spokeswoman, the company began sending notes about two months ago to the top 1 percent of the heaviest users--people who collectively use about 28 percent of the company's bandwidth--telling them they were violating their terms of service.
And when that group is removed from the pool, another group will rise to become targets. Comcast is setting up a system that guarantees that only people who don't utilize broadband get to keep their broadband.
A new study out shows that 50% of users use more than the average amount of bandwidth.
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
Having no set limit is the worst possible thing they could have done. Being in Australia, I know all about broadband download caps, and not having a defined limit is the worst solution. It's subjective, you may or not be punished by the ISP, you don't know how much is "too much" so if you really do download a lot (even legitimately) you are hestitant to download too much incase you're punished.. besides, what does the "average user" download? You have no idea, so the ISP can define the "average user downloads" as whatever they like, whenever they like, and against whoever they like. It's the ultimate of evils!
This is what I have been telling some of my friends who have cable internet. One friend of mine has been enjoying 3-6 M/bit downstream speeds while I'm stuck at 768/128 ADSL. You can BET the RIAA/MPAA have a hand in this, once they get their (RIAA/MPAA) wish, downloading movies will be just as productive as downloading mp3s on a 14.4 dialup connection.
Just leave it upto the recording industry to ruin the term "Broadband".
Kind of reminds me of a comercial where they showed a PC displaying web pages and playing streaming videos almost instantly. Maybe with a 100 M/bit connection... maybe
"I bow to no man" - Riddick
Folks, if you want guaranteed bandwidth and availability, then you ought to be signing up for business-class service.
.ISO, you're using more capacity than they'll use in a month or more of surfing the net and reading email.
Yeah, it was great when you were the only house in the neighborhood hooked up to the cable, but those days are gone. Your neighbors want to have decent service too, and they're paying the same amount you are.
In downloading a single
... a month lasts 45 days, but you only get paid for 30.
Cry me a river. If you've got a contract for a set price for a set amount of bandwith, the fuckers should honor it. It shouldn't matter what the bandwith was used for, they signed up to provide it. Stupid fuckers.
Why would you want you want a superfast connection
unless it were for massive data transfer? You don't
need anything that superfast for your average web
browsing.
Roadrunner (Time Warner cable) bandwidth just went up around here (Rochester, NY) due to competition with Frontier DSL. Roadrunner used to be 2 Mbps and is now 3.2 Mbps. The Full DSL around here is 3.0 Mbps. Personally I get the $26.95 DSL that is 256K down and 128K up which is plenty for home use and saves me money.
Get in with your neighbors and set up a WLAN. Load balance between your neighbors. I think a good many people under-use broadband, and the few who over-use it can, if averaged in with the rest, go unnoticed.
;-)
This ofcourse only works if you haven't already begun selling them broadband internet for $20/mo
On top of that, it is important to note that Comcast has laucnhed a 3x service-- 3x the speed for 2x a month... No, it has NOTHING to do wit that, no sir!!!
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
I would normalize the distrobution periodically and set the cap at the higher 10% level.
I'd just throttle based on congestion, not on usage history. (Or just let the congestion take its course, as the internet was designed to do in the first place.)
Who cares if the "power users" max out when the net capacity is otherwise idle? When demand is higher than capacity, throttle back all users in proportion to their current demand. To do otherwise, without clear notice in the advertisements that you intend to do so, is fraud.
Comcast didn't include enough backbone bandwidth in their business model for people to actually USE the service they sold? Then they can buy some more, or let somebody who actually delivers what they promise take over when the users get fed up with substandard service (AND pay off their former customers for the service failure if said customers decide to press the issue).
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
According to dslreports.com, Cablevision's Optimum Online is one of the fastest cable/dsl internet connections available for homes.
I used to be able to get 500KB/sec download and 100 KB/s upload. But now, they've installed some sorta detection that if they notice im uploading a lot (lets say 50 KB/s for 2 minutes), they will reset my cable (meaning i lose connection and my cable modem will try to reconnect), OR if i have multiple users connected to me (as in a game server such as CS).
I believe this is horse shit. I cant get a connection to stay up ALL DAY. And since then, they've raised the price by 10 dollars.
I decided to call and ask Comcast for an official answer on this after reading the article. The official response was, "No, there are no limits. Go nuts!"
Here's a simple idea:
5 Gig/mo = $ x
50 Gig/mo = $ y
100 Gug/mo = $ z
unlimited = $Big_Num
Of course, that would be rational, and lead to happy customers. Never happen.
"If, therefore, any be unhappy, let him remember that he is unhappy by reason of himself alone."
~Epictetus
Do you have any idea how much a "real" Internet line costs? With "real" bandwidth guarantees? It makes your "premium prices" look downright cheap.
I can't stand seeing this type of measurements. It seems to me that half your users could be using more than the average. Hell, almost all your users could actually be using more than the average.
So the solution is to charge people who download more than the average? Guess what? That will force the average down. Now you get to charge even more people for using "more than the average." Is this supposed to continue until everyone has service, but no one uses it?
Also, the average user isn't downloading several hundred megs of updates from Microsoft a day, unlike the person who is trying to download ever episode of MST3K available...
Xaotik Designs
Yes its true, they are putting a cap on downloads but they refuse to actually tell people how much the cap is. Its extremely frustrating for me as a tech, comcast sends out these threatening letters of service cutoff then tells the customer to call me and I dont know what to tell the customer the cap is. Then we refer them to an abuse number and the abuse department which is an answering machine, abuse dept NEVER EVER calls the customer and the customer bitches at me. Our supervisors cant do shit about anything it seems and abuse department is like a CIA operation. We arent even allowed to know the phone numbers for abuse, just this stupid answering machine.
Here's what Comcast Notice looks like.
"It's subsidized by business accounts"
Baloney. Broadband is not subsidized at all; it a money make precisely because there's no real purpose for it for most people; they like surfing fast. Believe me, if you hit 1.5mb (bit), then it would only be for an instant.
These people are gravy for the cable company because they consume almost no resources, and still pay $45 to comcast each month.
I pay $50/month for Cable in Hampton Roads, Virginia. If they drop my monthly fee to $35 I would gladly go along with the caps. But for $50, I better be able to download Linux ISOs in an acceptable time frame.
I urge everyone who is able to get DSL from a good provider. I ditched Comcrap two years ago for Speakeasy. Sure, it costs a little more, but the only restriction is "no pr0n servers, please." It's nice to have reliable mail (Comcast's mailservers were anything but) and clueful tech support for the one time I needed it.
Comcast wants to sell you the car, and then tell you where and how often you're allowed to drive it, which IMHO is bullshit. Memo to Comcast assholes: Give people the bandwidth, take their money, and fuck off until the next month's bill is due.
Some people use thier dialups for updating thier systems. Like cvsup on FreeBSD or up2date on Linux or sup on NetBSD or windows update. I wonder if these ISP can be held responsible if a user is NOT able to update thier system because of some undisclosed cap and their system gets hacked / 'virusized', or somehow else exploited and they loose important information, like their quicken / gnucash checking inforation. If my ISP ever did that I'd switch ISP and tell them why. I'm allowed to connect 1 computer to the internet and what I do in my home is none of their business (except for sending spam which is bad anyway). Personally I HATE comcast and think their name should be comcrap. My cable tv keeps going in and out and in and out. It is really annoying.
Only 'flamers' flame!
Does slashdot hate my posts?
If they cap the highest, say, 10%, then what does that do to the average? If the top 10% uses 20% of the bandwidth, capping them will shift the "average" amount of bandwidth utilized per user downwards. The next time they go through the cycle of determining who needs capping, the bar will be lower.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
Please do. I'm sure that the broadband providers will be absolutely crushed to see you go.
All the more bandwidth for the rest of us, nerdo.
" Folks, if you want guaranteed bandwidth and availability, then you ought to be signing up for business-class service."
Let me get this straight... Comcast advertises unlimited downloads, so you take them at their word, and they're pissed?
Why would you defend it? What's wrong with honesty on Comcast's part? If you say "unlimited", then its "unlimited". No one is asking for guarantee, we're just asking for the cable company to do what they said they'd do.
I had Verizon ADSL at 1.5/384 and it was rock solid...I paid them to upgrade me to a business line so I could get a static IP...Suddenly my bandwidth dropped to 1.1/384. I bitched at them and they said: Bite me. I told them to put it in print and they did. I have a letter from them that explains that regardless what you THINK you are paying for, no Verizon DSL service is guaranteed at greater than 64K. Basically as they add people with static IPs, they are not adding bandwidth, so every month, my bandwidth trickles ever lower.
Sounds like there is an easy solution to this. Since they will be capping people with higher then average bandwidth consumption, then all we need to do is increase the average.
With this in mind, it is your sacred duty (and the duty of all those who you can contact that use cable modems and DSL) to make batch jobs that repeatedly download ISOs from random servers to consume as much bandwidth as possible. If enough people do this, then the average will be skewed quite nicely.
Please, no thanks necessary. I only do what I can to help.
this is great... first attbi cuts upstream to 32kb/s.
then comcast eats attbi and kicks me off my news server to replace it with a 1GB/month cap. giganews is complete garbage. I now don't use newsgroups. Thanks!
now this?
I mean EXCUSE ME for using no bandwith for five strait days then downloading 300kb/s for 48 strait hours on a service I PAY TO USE.
OK, I feel better now.
1.) "more than the average user"?? By definition, half of the people that use the service use more than the average user. (well, median user, but whatever).
2.) The reason for this is because bandwidth on a terascale is not getting cheaper like bandwidth on a residential scale. A T-1 line, at 1544 kbps will run you AT LEAST $400/month, and where I am, upwards of $800/month. However, in the same area, I am able to get dsl that's 768up/768down for $49.95/month.
Back a few years ago, everyone just oversold, and it was no big deal, cause there weren't huge things to download. Webpages were smaller, streaming video was less common. The nature of the game has changed, and what needs to happen now is either the big boys need to lower their prices, or the small frys are going to have to charge more. As a stop gap someone has implemented bandwidth caps for their top users.
Very intuitive. Nothing terribly unexplicable here.
~Will
sig?
If they have the capacity, then using that capacity doesn't cost the ISP an extra nickel. If they don't have the capacity, then they are selling you something they do not have. We call this fraud.
"Interestingly enough, there is no set limit, but just a subjective limit of 'more than the average user.'"
I hate to say it, but this really is completely fair. Of all the utilities where your usage affects your neighbors/fellow clients of Provider X, none is just given away unlimited for a flat rate/month.
The way this was phrased made me think of time-based caps, based on average usage per user per hour or half-hour or whatever; caps based on this would be much more fair than a 24-hour cap. And honestly, I'd rather get capped than get random harassing "You used too much." letters. My upstream is already capped, as is that of most people. If they want me downstreaming less, cap me, or stfu.
My ISP here in canada (shaw cable) says that their cap is about 1 or so gig of stuff a month!!, and they say that their ASDL competitor (tellus), is about the same (1gig) for a months downloading..whereas this article says that comcast is 1 or 2gigs cap a day!!...(another thisn, apparently, if you are a telus user and you exceed your 1 gig cap, you are dinged for a not-so-small bit of change for that overight). I think that I'm (and other people in canada are really getting ripped off...it's about time people really complained about this artifical inflated (out-dated telephone industry legacy )pricing for just sending bits through these high-speed fiber systems. With this sort of nonsence, what will happen in the future? ..will every ISP try to bring pricing down to what is what, $40/month for a gig of download...how are you supposed to download any big software package (borland, for instance or Eclipse say)..not to mention all those new-fangled video-on-demand stuff the ISP's and hollywood are trying to cram down our throats in the not too distant future. One of the most annoying thing about so-called broadband now is the obvious lack of what broadband was supposed to be..ie: good quality video from a server..just try to view a movie trailer (pick a format and screen size) and try to watch it without it burping and freezing...the present internet is a joke and these ISP's and their star-trek Jetson's future drivell and their 19th century telephone based pricing schemes are just too much.
As broadband gets adopted, the entry to provide service for it becomes lower in term of hardware. However, the wiring de-regulation efforts here in the US (telco and cable) are still a bit crazy. Sadly, those fights come in small waves.
If deregulation ever *does* open the door, I predict we're going to have another round of ISP start-ups, this time with broadband. Then, all kinds of tweaks are going to appear. This kind of competition is good for everyone, IMO. Customers have to be arena of what works and what doesn't. Ok, so I'm not saying anything new. Caps, Rates up and down, etc, should be on those menu.
For now, try getting most (DSL) ISPs to solve a line problem (they need to use the telco, who denies anything is wrong). Cable agreements are little better, but splitting the carrier and provider can be a headache anywhere.
But if the public knew the cost of broadband at the higher levels, they may not complain at 3.0Mbs for $50/month (my current Comcast agreement). Trying upping your agreement to a "business" service. What a whopper.
Just about every isp sells their packages as "unlimited". Unlimited downloads at 512kps, 1 meg, etc. And unlimited means unlimited. If they mean 20 gigs a month, then they need to advertize it as such.
of going back to dialup. If they do start capping download speeds, why spend twice as much per month for Cable/DSL when you can get half the bandwidth at half the cost with dialup services like EarthLink or NetZero?
This is a test. This is a test of the emergency sig system. This has been only a test.
I think that's a good idea, as the average joe probably doesn't know or care about the transfer limit, while more demanding customers (such as myself) are willing to pay extra for unlimited use (and higher throughput).
Instead of capping/limiting/whatever, why not simply implement a sliding scale of payment based on your usage.
.
For example, have a base cost per month ($25 for the sake of argument). That amount allows you 5G a month. This should be enough for the average user who merely surfs the web checking out porn or other such goodies.
Now let's say that someone uses a bit more than the 5G a month. During their second month they use 12 G (they found more porn than they could shake a, er, stick at (yes, stick) in the first month). Because they went over the 5G 'normal' usage amount they are now charged an additional $3 for that month. And so on and so forth.
In the end you'd have a scale something like this (just choosing numbers at random):
up to 5G in a month: $25
5G - 10G in a month: $ 2 extra for the month
10G - 15G in a month: $ 3 extra for the month
. .
The amounts would not be cumulative. This way you are paying for what you use above a certain amount which would be stated in your agreement (please, stifle your laughs).
So no one can claim they didn't know how much they were using the provider would give you metering software which would show how much you have both uploaded and downloaded. Either in direct number (you have used 2,987,765 K this month) or a simple bar graph (you have used 10% of your base amount of 5 G).
I realize this suggestion makes too much sense but we can always dream.
You cant be serious?
What you call "broadband" I call a poor quality, overpriced, asymmetric leecher link. The telecom monopolies have been trying to prevent broadband adoption inasmuch as they are averse to change of any kind.
Fiber to the curb should be here, and it should be cheap. I dont know why so many are happy to be bent over a barrel for a pittance in bandwidth. The network grows in value for each user online, and not the other way around.
I'm a freelance digital effects artist. Almost daily I upload video so the director can approve/disaprove of the footage.
Right now my upload rate is capped at ~30 KB/sec... that's quite slow enough. Takes nearly half of an hour of my day. If it's capped farther, I may have to look into other broadband services. I'm not too happy about Comcast's saying I can't use a NAT too.
-Derick
This kind of bandwidth capping in beginning to be used in Brazil. In Sao Paulo, Telefonica has set the cap at 3GB/month. In the state of Parana, one of the only two DSL providers is already considering doing the same very soon. An insider at Brasil Telecom has indeed told me that the decision to set a cap has indeed to do with P2P users (Kazaa was specifically mentioned). It seems that 90% of the bandwidth is used by around 10% of the users, so they will place a limit.
"Business users basically already subsidize the home market."
Not in cable. Cable for comcast residential is $45, $40 plus $5/month modem rental.
The average person looks at email, surfs every night, and probably looks at the occaisional streaming video from MSNBC.
This person is a MONEY MAKER from comcast. Comcast has 20 million subscribers that fall into this category. That's like money for nothing.
So unless you have something back up that claim, put it away, and don't pull it out again.
and don't forget: this "unlimited" internet access means no "servers". just imagine if everyone started to ssh home from a friend's house. it would be chaos!
the only thing "unlimited" is the bs in their ads.
... and I have not received any such letter.
So i've got to wonder, if the ~8gb/mo of traffic that i've been going through is ok - how much are these guys using that they're getting capped?
I mean, sure, it isn't right for comcast to cap without publicizing a formal cap - but these guys aren't saying what their usage is either.
Perhaps because we know what the price of bandwidth is, and would feel a little differently if we knew just how far on the fringe their usage was.
(i grab data regularly from for backup to my home network, as well as having a video game demo and mod habit. while i have a considerable quantity of music on my harddrive, it is all ogg rips done myself from CDs I own.
so snuff your flames and stay on-topic.)
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
and by god, I expect to get UNLMITED access.
I pay $60 a month and the contract says, UNLIMITED. If they begin to limit me, I'll sue them.
If I want LIMITED access, I'll downgrade to DSL or dialup. Personally, I would rather sandpaper a bobcat's ass in a phonebooth than use SBC/DSL..
Ok, so it's not the most vital thing I need broadband for but I bet my near constant use of Internet Radio is the biggest contributer behind Apple's humongous system updates.
"This is crazy, you realise we could all go to jail for this?" - my manager, somewhere I used to work.
I had an apartment where the landlord used to come in all the time, without notice, and with dubious cause.
The last time it happened this way I had taken a day off and had just gotten back from the gun range. I heard a soft knock and a key enter the lock. When the door swung open, I was standing there with a gun in my hand asking who the guy was and what he wanted.
He mumbled something about an upgrade to the door buzzer system. I stood about 6 feet from him, gun in hand, the 5 minutes he spent in my apartment taking apart the 1920-era intercom and fishing wire from below. He said he'd be back in 10 minutes, which he was, and he installed the new unit.
After that, I never had an unannounced entry into my apartment again.
Does your bandwidth quota get used up if someone launches a DoS attack on you?
Yes.
Note that one of the recommendations in the warning notice from Comcast is to install or update antivirus software.
The ISP could care less who originated the traffic or why. They only care about the amount of traffic.
Imagine if the phone company - which uses a similarly oversubscribed design for unlimited residential phones - cut off the service of people who receive a lot of calls, rather than giving out an "all-trunks busy" signal when the network congests, then treating excessive occurrences of all-trunks busy as a bug and increasing the infrastructure to reduce it to near-zero. (Similarly with slow dialtone for outgoing calls.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I've talked to a few different individuals at Comcast, and what I've heard is that the excessive bandwidth issue is directly linked to server usage. What I gathered is that if you're listening to a lot of MP3 streams or downloading ISOs, you won't have any issues on a residential connection. If you are providing MP3 streams to lots of people or uploading ISOs to other people, you are likely to get in trouble for that usage. Note that servers of any sort are completely forbidden on a Comcast home connection, anyway.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
In my home country, South Africa, we have a monopoly with regards to telephone companies. Our ADSL service has a 3Gig per month cap that has been in place since it was implemented.
After the cap amount has been exceeded, you are dropped to another IP range with lower bandwidth. Terrible idea in my mind. If there is to be a limit, 3Gig on broadband is far too low.
The solution is to offer tiered services at different prices. My ISP (Andrews & Arnold) offers a choice of 'lite', 'standard' and 'all you can eat' DSL services at a choice of 512, 1024 or 2048 kb/s down (all 256 up) at prices ranging from GBP 27.95 to 235.00 per month. They can be found at http://sod.ms/ !
This works out to an average inbound utilization of somewhere around 184 kbit/sec, albeit sustained. So, in a sense, they are saying, they are only willing to support an average sustained download of this speed. Anything greater results in you using your allocated bandwidth quicker and you will reach your cap sooner.
It is possible I could easily reach my daily limit by doing nothing wrong...
Some days, I visit Yahoo! Games on Demand and play 2 new games. This could easily take up 800MB or more. Download latest single disk ISO image of linux/xBSD or whatever, now I am up to 1.4G. Fireup Xbox live and play an hour of games or so, another 100MB transferred. Oh yeah, do I get penalized for the 20MB of daily scanning against my firewall? In this scenario I am over 1.5GB in the course of a few hours and I am not file sharing or downloading illegal or questionable content. That certainly wouldn't happen every day, but I can see how it would be frustrating to get cut off because you used the bandwidth you were supposedly paying for.
For most cell phones these days there is a browser and some companies offer unlimited wireless internet figuring one isnt going to surf that much with the cell.
Although you can get a USB cable to connect your phone to a computer and many people are doing just that, getting up to 2 channel ISDN speeds. Not great but hey if your paying for it and on the road its wonderful.
Now that cell companies have figured out they arent making money on this or mis-projected what the usage would be they are telling customers that exceed 1GB of data a month that they are no longer allowed cell phone internet. When asked why "Excessive usage", when asked what is excessive usage there is usually no answer just some arbitrary number that changes with each rep you talk to.
Lets hope they dont start pulling this business with cable or DSL soon.
I have a Comcast cable modem in metro Atlanta and just received a notice that my service would be upgraded to 3Mb/s download from the ~1.4Mb/s that it currently is. Sounds like a pretty good deal to me and I don't see any strings attached at this point.
I expect my ISP to allow me to open ports to allow useful services to come through (25, 22, 23, 80, 53, etc). Without the ability for me to have these services running an WSP is of little use to me. Thank God there is DSL to compete with Cable Modems so I can still get an ISP that is worth something
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
"a subjective limit of 'more than the average user.' "
ok, so If you download more than average (I'm assuming average == mean) you are capped at the average....
This then obviously reduces the average.
This then promotes a whole load of previously 'average' users to above average.
repeated enough times, this results in the cap being at the usage level of the lightest of users.
Canada's largest ISP implemented bandwidth caps while the competitors didn't. Several months later the caps were removed because customers fled to the competitor.
Any ISP would need everyone in their competing market to agree to introduce bandwidth caps or it will fail. That's good for the consumer but bad for the ISPs.
Yahoo/Geocities used to send me emails saying the website I had with them (now long gone) has exceeded the 3gb limit and will go offline for the rest of the month, even though my largest files were under 100kb and the download statistics proved the usage to be less than 1/100th of their claims.
That's really very interesting, considering that Charter Communications just sent us a letter saying that they were upping our bandwidth from 1.5Mbps down to 2Mbps down. Not a big leap, by any means, but they increased the cap.
Now, if only their network was operational long enough to use that bandwidth...that would be impressive...
Jeremy Baumgartner
... my Comcast bandwidth was capped at zero, starting Thursday evening, and hasn't been above that since.
I think I'm going to ask for a credit on this month's cable bill. My neighborhood didn't lose power (for more than a few seconds at a time) or phone service, but the cable and internet have been solidly down since the storm.
Grumble...
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
This has been attempted with DirecPC satellite internet. A search on deja retuns thousands of unhappy users, which would make a majority of users.
Any ISP choosing to follow similar politics will be commiting suicide.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
50% of the users use "more than the average user."
So, when you cut them all offline, you can give me all of that bandwidth just for myself. I promise I'm just an average guy. Really.
Since day one about 6 years ago when I subscribed to the local cable Internet connection in Montreal, Canada, I've been subject to download caps. It started off with 6 gigs of download and 1 gig of upload a month. Downloads were 300k/sec max and uploads were capped at 15k/sec. Over the years, the service has IMPROVED (well, competition helped a lot for that to happen) and now I have 450k/sec in download and 50k/sec in upload, plus I get 15 gigs in download and 5 gigs in upload. Now, I wonder what legal uses people are making of 15 gigs a month.
Personnally, the only times I was able to download over 3 gigs in a month is when I decided to download all the Alias episodes so I could start watching the show on ABC this season. I did the same in the past with 24, Smallville and That 70's Show.
Otherwise, I mostly watch trailers on Apple.com and video trailers off Gamespot or Xbox.com, read the news and do instant messenging. That typically sums up to about 2 gigs of usage in download. And I use the Internet often. So, what can you people legally do with 13 others gigs of download? Yeah, I know, Linux distributions are 2 gigs now and VNC is pretty bandwidth intensive, but I bet more than 99% of broadband users don't give a flying squirrel about VNC or Linux and thus have no LEGAL use of 15 gigs a month. With only maybe the exception of multiplayer games, are there really any reasons to have 15 gigs a month in download?
Of course, if you're into heavy music, movie and software piracy, I'm sure that 15 gigs a month is not enough for you. Especially since the only people I hear complaining about download and upload caps are the ones who are using their connection for illegal activities. Me, I complain only when I have to wait another month to download the last 3 Alias episodes. But it's over now, and I'm back to my normal Internet usage.
So, is capping really THAT bad?
Road runner did a cap a LONG time ago. I used to have as much bandwidth as my computer could use (downstream, up was like 25-30K/sec.) I downloaded redhat ISOs in 40 minutes for each one (700 megs from ftp.cdrom.com) think it was like 600K/sec. Now I'll be lucky if I can get 250K/sec. But as they were capping the downstream they were increasing the upstream so I considered it a fair trade off. I get around 45-50K/sec now which make a big difference when you're hosting a game. I liked having 600K/sec but 250 is just as nice, and uploading to people at twice the speed is worth it.
my cable provider, communicomm ,has ALL of their 1.5mbit/sec modems capped to .9mbit/sec down and .8mbit/sec up.
When questioned about it, they give their customers the runaround about how 'all cable providers do this'.
Also, they completely block all ports of filesharing apps , such as kazaa, emule, and even bit-torrent.
I think its about time to cough up the extra $10 a month to switch to DSL.
Sad.
This is such a sad state of affairs. Every month we get news about how Japan is finally catching up with Korea and Hong Kong and even Canada is looking good.
Pundits suggest the US may begin to pick up in the next decade or so although it's no guarantee as they've fallen so far behind. I mean what would you expect? It's just the US after all. They've always had a backwards telecoms system, right?
What is wrong with this picture?
No, let me guess. It's that bandwidth REALLY is expensive and all those other countries have mistaken bits for bytes? It's all a big misunderstanding.
Nah, too simple. Here we go, they're all commies and they're using state subsidies in a big plot to make the US look bad. That seems to go well with the pot thing in Canada. Could that be it?
Perhaps. Maybe it's something else.
Hmm. What could the matter be?
SPEED LIMIT
55
MINIMUM
40
Broadband was marketed to us with concepts like streaming video and audio, video conferencing, etc. So it does seem unfair to limit this stuff.
However, it is not bandwidth capping that offends me, mainly because I don't concider myself being in the top N% of users.
What offends me is explicitly limiting what I can do with my connection. AT&T used to block port 80 on incoming traffic so I couldn't host a webpage on my (albeit 128k uplink) connection. Now Comcast took over and it seems that port 80 block is gone, but I think I'm still violating the TOS by running apache on my system at home.
One of the main reasons I like having a 24/7 connection is so I can run a [file|web|vnc|cvs|...] server at home and connect from anywhere.
no comment
Is it? Then how come I pay $45 per month for a 0-3Mbps/0-256kbps cable line with a cap of 2GB per day (not even a distro) with blocked ports and strict AUPs not allowing me to run servers, and $77 per month for an unrestricted 768-1536kbps/256kbps DSL line, while my friend in Norway gets unrestricted 10240/8192 VDSL for about the same as I pay for my cable?
Could it be because there's so little competition that the companies can turn up their prices and lower their service pretty much as they want?
It's probably going to get worse too, as pending legislation will make it almost impossible for mom-and-pop ISPs to enter the market -- any company that can't afford to provide 24/7 monitoring for the govnmt will basically not be allowed to provide service. I'm sure the big ogilopolies are thrilled about being given this extension to their market control.
Regards,
--
*Art
Since it seems that they don't give you a set 'limit' you went over... what would be the best way to track the amount you use ?
Specifically... I have a standard linux masquerading firewall setup using iptables, what would be the easiest way for me to track total up/down stream usage on an hourly/daily/monthly basis ?
Any good solutions for the windows users out there ?
How about for people using off the shelf linksys/netgear/etc. firewall/routers ?
-Steve
By definition 50% of their users are using "more than the average user", and 50% are using less. In addition, as pointed out in another post, the more they throttle the users, the lower the average gets, and they STILL have 50% using "more than the average user!"
Reminds me of government work... "more with less"... "more with less." Eventually, you must do everything with nothing!
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced. - Geek's corollary to Clarke's law
I help administer a mid-size linux cluster, and we use PBS Pro to handle job scheduling. In many ways, allocating cluster resources is similar to bandwith:
The scheduling algorithm we use on the cluster is called "fair share". I think it would also work to share bandwith, and it works like this:
Usage is tracked with an exponential half-life of 24 hours. For example, someone who used 20 cpu-hours today and 20 hours two days ago would have a total usage 20 * 2**0 + 20*2**-2 = 25 hours. A user's priority in the queue is based on their past usage, and optionally their number of shares (users can be given an unequal number of shares, if desired).
To apply this to bandwith, you could track the bandwith usage the same way. During peak usage times, when the lines are congested, a traffic-shaping router would give a lower priority to packets from the "bandwidth hogs".
It seems to me that customers and ISPs would both benefit from a scheme like this. I'm not exactly a networking guru, so I'd be interested in what other people think about it. Is there hardware out there that has this capability? Could it be done with Linux's iptables?
I work for a cable ISP, and I set up an Allot NetEnforcer to do some packet-shaping. The P2P apps just KILL us, and really any other broadband provider. I throttled that shit down to 16 kilobytes/sec down/8 kb/sec up (per user), and watched in amazement as network utilization by 40% during peak hours. And so far, no one has complained. Keep in mind that I throttled ONLY P2P stuff. It's not that we want to screw you, but the truth is that P2P apps use up more than their share. E-mail and web pages and even games are a higher priority. It's all kind of a moot point anyway. I expect that within the next year or so, most ISPs will simply block all the P2P stuff to avoid the legal hassles.
I've been on the "net" for over 11 years, I started with a 2400 baud Hayes modem and AOL, quickly replaced within the first year with a 14.4 modem and an ISP, in those 10-11 years where has it progressed to? A 700k modem and I still can barely send anything more than keystrokes and a few postage stamp sized images to another person across the Ether. We all sit here like monkeys with a coconuts hammering away at keyboards and cellphone keypads.
It's the 21st century and they're talking about rolling back the bandwidth?
Where are the Gigabit Ethernet lines over glass, or better, to every single household? Where are the video conferencing screens in every living room? Why can't I call my friends and see them on my flat plasma screen via voice command? Where are my HD Dolby Digital movies on demand? Are we going forward or backwards?
To affect real change here I think it can only be done on a federal level by throttling the telecommunications industry by the neck away from it's profit model and back into a citizens utility so it can truly serve the citizens like it was intended to do 40 years ago and earlier!
All of these wonderful dreams of the future of technology and the internet are being strangled through the 300k broadband bottle necks that half the populous can't even get and those that can are paying double what they were before for no real improvement.
Comcast shouldn't be figuring out caps, they should be figuring out ways to offer 10 times the throughput to everyone in their service region and expanding that service region beyond what it is now.
The pipes need to be bigger or we're just spinning our wheels on this information superhighway.
Comcast is trying to save money. They say that the internet use is increasing every day... new applications, etc, but they don't want the heaviest users to be able to take advantage of it? Comcast should bite the bullet. If the phone company called up and said you've been using your phone too much, we're cancelling your service, the news media would FREAK! People would call their politicians, this would be a big deal.
Comcast doesn't send letters telling cableTV subscribers to watch less TV. Policing user habits shouldn't be their responsibility.
Comcast is just trying to pinch pennies. Frankly, I'm tired of the cableTV monopoly. I wish cableTV was regulated exactly like the Phone companies. I wish, as a resident, I had the ability to tell them to get out, and choose someone else. I could with DSL, but it won't reach to where I live. CableTV picture sucks. Digital cable sucks too. They simply carve up the bandwidth. Some channels have color that has to be less than 16 bit! I switched to DirecTV, the picture is fantastic.
Sadly, I had to keep my cable modem. No other solution in my neighborhood. Comcast really went overboard when they raised my rates $15/month after cancelling cableTV. Isn't that extortion? $60.00 per month for cable modem?
-- No sig for you!
I'd just be curious to hear an example of what someone did and got warned. With DSL there is at least a somewhat legitmate claim that you're buying the bandwidth, on cable you are sharing the stream with other people. I could see non-stop streaming being a problem. Somebody downloading 6 stream 24-7 not listening is somewhat upsetting, especially if he was on my link. From my personal experience with DSL, Sprint Wireless Broadband and then AT&T and now Comcast cable based internet, I'd have to say that Comcast/AT&T handedly spanks the others.
The article said that some people were downloading the equivalent of 90 movies a month. Divx 700mb movies, times 90 = 63,000 megabytes or 63 gig. I downloaded that much off my isp in the last week.
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Why are providers jacking up the price without adding any value? Because they can get away with it, quite frankly.
Although someone who works for Bell Sympatico said that when they capped bandwidth, they were losing upwards of 100 customers per day across the country. They recently rescinded their cap clause and are allowing unfettered access again. Although they still charge extra for the 3 mbit connection. They finally got it through their heads that grandma doesn't need a 1 mbit connection to check mail. It is a luxury, not a necessity.
"People should be allowed to keep midgets as pets."
- Gov. Jesse Ventura
Even people who never come close to the cap will be outraged, but it should translate into lower prices for them in the long run. If ISP's charged by the byte for low bandwith users access would be so cheap that everyone would sign up. Really, /. users generally use lots of bandwidth, and most folks just check their email a couple of times a day and do some casual surfing.
We should have been paying more all along, be thankful you were in early enough to enjoy the golden age.
I'm not a troll, just an bandwidth hog with an MBA, which many of you will consider even worse...
Actualy, if he was an above average user, it would be less bandwidth for you given that loosing a high number is going to bring the average down.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
they have a limit, Telus has a limit. Videon used to have a much stricter limit. (if you went over you were charged per Megabyte) I've known a guy who was consistantly downloading well above Shaw's "limit" and only recieved warning letters, they didn't charge extra, they didn't cut him off, they just continually warned him. they did ultimately throttle his modem down, I download around 10 gig a month, and have never seen shaw get mad at me. never wrote a nasty e-mail, never contacted me about it. because they're more concerned with the people downloading 50 gig a month. who are cutting into the bandwidth of the other people. Bandwidth is not free for shaw, they have to pay for it too. And if one person's hogging a T3(equivalent) all to themselves, for the cost of cable internet, they're going to do something about it. its costing them more to supply the internet than they're taking in from that person. now while they do work on the principle that not everyone's downloading at the same time, it generally works out, but if to accomidate this person they have to do some work, puting in more lines into a neighborhood, they're going to seek out alternate means of resolving the issue. and sending "threatening" letters is one way to get them to ease off. besides shaw mostly cares about upload bandwith more.
Limit bandwidth, but open ports. Many large P2P users consume significantly more bandwidth than many of the small sites I work on combined. Allow small organizations to host a website/email, and charge based on the amount of bandwidth used, not the types of service used on the connection.
If you don't want limits, allow unlimited bandwidth, with email warnings as you get closer to your quota. Overages will be charged per MB, similar to cell phone minutes.
While we are on the subject; Users with unpatched, infected boxes should also be warned and then bumped. My cable modem activity light has been solid for weeks now with the Blaster et al traffic.
As much as we would like to have it, bandwidth is not free.
They may be jackasses, but they do a good job of looking the other way. When they haven't caught MSBlast that is :)
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
If these companies are using the "business user" ISP use cahrges as a benchmark, that is missleading because business users have no choice and cannot go any where else, just look at the rates for business phone charges anywhere in the world, it's like 5 to 10X the rate for a hmoe phone...it's the principal applied to busisness, charge massive amounts for this service since businesess are assumed to make money (as viewed by the phone company and ISP provider), but this won't work with the typical howe-owner, so they charge less but compare your home service with artifically-over-priced business service and use that as a justification for limiting and over-charging for "typical" home use patterns...
I can't imagine any state where his entering would be legal (WARNING: assuming you're in the USA). In WA State they need to give 48 hours notice before entering. The manager of my former apartment once posted a notice Saturday night (after 10pm), and entered Monday morning (7:30am!) while I was in the shower getting ready for work. This little stunt netted me two years' rent. A week later there was a new apartment manager. Two weeks later, I was outta there.
Of course Comcast has a right to place limits on the service. But, what they need to do is:
A) Clearly spell out the terms of service. What is "abuse".
B) provide the tools for a user to measure their use and know / get a warning when they are near the limit.
C) provide notice, with a specified amd reasonable period to cure.
D) provide second notice that service will be terminated unless specific conditions are met
E) provide an appeals proccess
F) provide at least 90 days notice before they change the terms of service.
Let them do whatever they can sell, but the Government ought to make them have reasonable process and notifications. We know, for sure, that you can't count on Comcast or just about any of the cable companies to ever be reasonable and treat their customers well.
The day my ISP does this I sware I'll cancel the service. If no other ISP wants to sell me an unlimited broadband service I'll use cheap dial up or just say screw it all together and get a life. I'm not paying premium prices for unlimited services and then be told it's only unlimited for those who do not use much of it.
I applaud the sentiment, but I doubt that they would miss you too much... If you were one of the capped downloaders, they probably weren't making money on you...
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
More than the average user would encompass precisely half of their users. You are either on one end of the spectrum or the other.
50% is obviously average. Seems a little too broad of a statement if you ask me. Nothing like some ISP's bullshit jargon.
The fundamental problem is, of course, that their actual bandwidth needs are outstripping their flawed projections, and instead of buying more bandwidth (which costs a lot of money), they're trying to force usage back into their models. This is a cap on usage, whether or not they will admit it.
Also, the AUPs on many of these networks are horrible; if you read them, for the most part you are not allowed to run a server of any kind. Period. Some of them even say you can't use VPN software. At least one provider was going so far as to block protocols and ports used for VPN, unless you upgraded to a "business class" account. (ie, if you actually want to USE your circuit, well, that costs extra.) Moral: read your AUPs carefully.
I'm currently a Speakeasy customer and very happy with them. Their AUP is quite liberal; it's basically "don't do illegal things with our network, don't DOS people, don't spam, and don't abuse our staff." Their fundamental business model is sustainable; it's built on the assumption that you will use your bandwidth. As long as you're using it legally, I don't think they care how much traffic you send. The network is good, with no visible packet loss and reasonable latency, although I wish the latency was a trifle better. (I got spoiled on PacBell's ATM network.) It's still lightyears ahead of the Comcast connection my sister has.
When I was in California, PacBell was very similar. I was one of the very first people to sign up for DSL when the price got reasonable, so their AUP may have changed, but as of several years ago it was very similar to Speakeasy's. At the time, their network was incredibly good, with super-low latency and great connectivity almost everywhere. I've been gone three years, so I don't know if it's still as good now, but when I left they were stellar.
Many cable companies are, in my opinion, involved in a bait-and-switch with their networks. You get higher burst download speeds, but usually the latency is much worse, and they can terminate you for daring to actually use the service you're paying for. You'll pay more, but I believe DSL from a good provider is a better bet.
The article is talking about total-download caps, not speed caps. That is, if you up/download over a certain number of Gigabytes a month then they nail you.
Just remember things could be worse,
Look what we have here:
Paradise High Speed Starter*
* $59.95 per month + $17 per month for your Cable Modem rental
* 256kbps downstream / 128kbps upstream
* 10GB of international monthly traffic
* 20c per additional international MB
* 2c per additional national MB
* up to 6 email addresses
* access to paradise.net's helpdesk support, 24 hours, 7 days a week
Paradise High Speed Express*
* $92.95 per month + $17 per month for your Cable Modem rental
* 2Mbps downstream/256kbps upstream
* 1GB of international monthly traffic
* 20c per international MB
* 2c per national MB
* up to 6 email addresses
* access to paradise.net's helpdesk support, 24 hours, 7 days a week.
I wouldn't mind seeing bandwidth capping on my line if they did 3 things to make it fair.
1) Use the "toilet tank" method of capping people, instead of completely cutting them off entirely. This method has been deployed in several places, and people of course don't like it, but it is the fairest system that has been devised so far. Unlimited downloading (or uploading) is allowed, up to a point. When that point is reached, downloading will continue, but at a dramatically lower speed. The download will not be interrupted, but it will be capped to that lower speed. If the customer stops downloading for a period of time, they will re-earn the right to download at a higher speed, as their toilet tank slowly refills over time. This system also doesn't require strict time intervals (such as 24 hours, 1 month, etc.), because it is both triggered and released by the user's behaviour. If the user voluntarily downloads at a speed slower than the top speed, they can stretch out the length of time during which they can enjoy a noncapped connection. This is a good system because it has its intended effect (keeping high-volume users from abusing the service for everybody else) while not punishing people by cutting them off entirely or charging them a huge bill (important for cases in which the user isn't to blame for the high bandwidth usage, such as a virus or a Slashdotting). Also note that uploads and downloads are treated separately and independently, with a different toilet tank for each.
2) Make it clear what the cap level is, for both upload and download, including both the capped speed and the "toilet tank" size. Include this both in customer contracts and advertisements to non-customers. Advertising a connection as "unlimited" is false, when it could be capped! An example of an acceptable service description that could be advertised would be "1.5mbps download (capped 1GB/64kbps) and 256kbps upload (capped 128KB/64kbps)". This refers to a system that would have a toilet tank size of 1GB for downloads, after which the download speed would be reduced to a mere 64kbps. At this speed, it would take roughly 36 hours to refill the toilet tank once drained, but the user could still use their connection during this time (they just wouldn't be able to download another full 1GB without hitting the cap again). There's another similar toilet tank for uploads.
3) Provide tools for the user to monitor their current bandwidth usage, and how it applies against the cap. At the minimum, this should include both a live program that can be installed on the user's computer, and a webpage that can be visited occasionally should the user not wish to keep an extra program running. I would set that webpage as my homepage! The program would display the user's current usage and the threshholds at which capping would occur, and the current fill level of the "toilet tank". It should be made absolutely clear to the user what is going on, and how their current behaviour affects their cap, so there will be no guessing or finger-pointing.
I currently use DSL, not cable, because my connections are largely two-way. I do just as much uploading as downloading (no P2P, just old fashioned stuff like web servers), and cable companies are hostile towards uploaders and servers. The reason I use DSL is because so far my ISP (SBC) has not instituted any unfair caps! If they were to cap the line in an unfair way, I would be screwed, because I can't switch to cable. A friend of mine eats the cost of having a full T1 to his house. Maybe I'd have to do the same?
Dr. Demento On The 'Net!
Earthlink via Slime Warner Cable has imposed a 30 day rolling download limit of 1.5 Gigabytes on newsgroup downloads for each account name. When the 1.5 Gig limit is reached, the download speed drops to 50 kb/s per connection.
I find that newsbin allows me to open up to 4 simultaneous connections, increasing the download rate to 200 kb/s.
The un-capped d/l rate, however is 1.8 mb/s, so I find myself adding and deleting sub-accounts several times a month as a work around. I will likely drop Earthlink broadband if they impose further restrictions on this workaround.
And furthermore, he blames the client, since if he never made a claim, this would not be a problem.
Why does this remind me of the skit? Because the broadband providers are saying you can't use all the bandwidth they're selling. If you sell me a pipe to the internet, and call it unlimited, then unlimited means, goddammit, unlimited. Don't blame me if I start using it for all the stuff that broadband is good for. After all, that's why I'm paying you guys $50-60/month.
Don't sell us broadband expecting us to use it like dial-up. We won't.
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
Heh, My landlord did the same thing, till one day he found out that, since I live alone, I tend to walk around in various states of undress. I happened to be getting out of the shower and walking to the living room to turn on the TV while I got dressed and he walked in with someone to show the apartment to. I just looked at them and said, "Dunno what you want, but unless you get the fuck out now, you're gonna see a fat, nekkid man** kick the shit out of you." I've gotten phone calls ever since anytime the landlord is even coming to the building. :)
-Ab
** I'm 6'4", 285#, a part-time bouncer at a sports bar and an ex-minor league hockey player.
Nothing fails quite like prayer.
I am moving and I was looking on Comcasts's website to determine availability in new area. I saw updated website where they are offering the *new* "Comcast High-Speed Internet Pro" service (with download speeds at up to 3.5Mbps and uploads as fast as 384Kbps).
The price is -
"Standard monthly rate of $95/month applies, with no additional charge for modem rental. Installation fees may apply. "
You can read about the new service offering here - Comcast High-Speed Internet Pro at $95/month
Try my college.
250MB a day.
'Nuff said.
"Do I dare disturb the universe?"
The phone company has to pay for the DSLAM on the other side of the loop to split out the data part of the signal and wrap it into a ATM circuit. Think of this as an additional line card the phone company must buy/finance/install/fix/power/administer. When I was working with these things, they cost a ~$500 a line to buy, and a small DSLAM would service 64 lines. But that few hundred per line would be much more if the phone company did not sell all the space on the DSLAM. I'm not sure about the additonal equipment for the uplink to the phone company's network.
I used to work maintenance for an apartment complex. The law in the State of Texas was, in brief, that if you hadn't paid your rent, you didn't have any rights. And, realistically, when you're three days delinquent in your rent the management simply must stick their head in your door to find out, at minimum, if you've skipped on your lease.
:-)
So I go out with the manager while she's looking for skips. Everyone got a note on their door two days previously and they're now three days late on the rent. She always knocks loudly and waits a reasonable period before opening any doors.
So she cracks open one door and a knife comes flying out the crack. It was a pretty good throw, hard and accurate to hit that little slit when the door opened, but it was just a bit high. She closed the door and called the police. They refused to do anything since she hadn't seen the thrower. But you better believe that she enforced the lease and we moved those idiots out 7 days later.
My point? When you live in an apartment, at least in Texas, there are a bunch of folks who have a legal right to enter your apartment at any time, often with no notice. Know your rights and know the law when you rent.
PS - Mercy, do I have some stories about the stuff I saw in apartments. Mind you, outside of an emergency, I only entered apartments in response to a call for service. I was invited in, in writing, usually to perform work while people were gone to work during the day.
So why on earth did they leave their pot stash right out on the coffee table? (I swear, it was half a kilo - the pile was 6 inches high and two feet across.) So why do people call for service when they know that as soon as I enter their apartment I'm going to figure out that they are the folks who stole all the furniture from around the pool last month? It's just amazing the way some people don't think before they act. And yes, I moved all the furniture out of their apartment and put it back by the pool and they never said a word.
and of course, you have to be in an area in new zealand (ie. wellington or parts of auckland.) where cable is available. sigh. its really dismal, im staying with 56k until conditions improve.
Dont ask me, im just the bass player!
MOD THIS UP!
DirecPC tried this with their satellite service back in late 1997. This is like deja vu except DirecPC never sent out letters. They just cut download speed with no explanation. Tech support was initially not allowed to tell customers that their speed was being restricted. It took a class action to get them to release any useful information.
These days, DirecPC (now DirecWay) is a "last resort". Anyone who has it would give their left nut to have real broadband. As soon as they get a choice, they drop that satellite "service" like the turd it is. Any ISP that imposes a "mystery cap" like this will suffer the same fate.
Had a cap of around 750megs a month. I could monitor it. Even excessive quake2 playing could really cost me if I wasn't careful. I think it was a few cents per meg after that.
This was 7-9 years ago too. So its nothing new to cap or charge extra for those 1% of the people that use up 60% of the bandwidth (or put in college stats)
Maybe some of us are old enough (say, 23) to remember modem speeds under 2400bps, CompuServe's $36 an hour rate, and email charged by the PAGE.
Not much more than a decade ago.
So forgive us if we're happy with our 'pittance' always-on connection to anywhere in the world for the same price as a couple of landlines, but without international call charges and running at upto 8Mb/s.
I can drool over HDTV quality video-on-demand via Internet as much as the next guy, but give it some time man. Wiring the planet with that kind of bandwidth isn't cheap, nor is supplying the content, and there's no profit in doing it early if people aren't going to pay a premium for it. You'll just have to wait a couple of minutes for your latest VCD pr0n like the rest of us old fogies used to wait a couple of minutes to download crappy GIF pr0n. Give it time, technology will get there.
Opportunity knocks. Karma hunts you down.
I thought the first article was pretty balanced, but the second one (from worldtechtribune.com) was the quality of "reporting" that The Register would refuse to publish.
The writer (Scott McCollum) basically takes for granted that everyone who criticizes the policies of broadband providers are 1) ignorant of basic economics, 2) whiny geeks who don't know how good they have it, and 3) shroud the ineffectiveness of their arguments with tech-speak (which they simply make up on the spot).
His superiority complex would be more palatable if he at least gave the impression that he actually understood the economics of broadband better than the average geek. But then he tries to compare the price of broadband to the price of dialup, and says that broadbanders must be getting one hell of a deal. In fact, they're totally different situations.
First, comparing bandwidth-for-bandwidth, a $20/month dialup account is quite pricy. Why is it that, even though the price of bandwidth has dropped enormously over the last five years, the cost of the average dialup account has held constant?
One reason is that there's no reason to drop prices when $20 is what everyone is used to paying. But more important, I doubt bandwidth is the major cost for any dialup service. I'm guessing the cost of the T1 line going out is dwarfed by the cost of the 100+ phone lines going in. The dialup service I had before switching over was about $8/month, and they're still in business (and probably doing even better now that I'm gone).
If you assume that a T1 line costs $1500/month, then the maximum monthly bandwidth provided is about 486 gigs. Let's assume that traffic patterns drive effective usage down to about 300 gigs a month. If the provider caps a $40/month service at 5 gigs, then the line would be supporting a minimum of 60 customers and bringing in $2400 a month. More likely, there are at least two regular users for every power user, so they should be able to support a good amount of traffic from power users without raising prices. But it's cheaper to kick off their biggest users than to actually build more infrastructure to provide the amount of service demanded.
Basically, the whole story came across as whining about other peoples' whining, and was insulting to the geeks who are most likely to be reading it.
Oh, and worldtechtribune's decision to redirect the story back to their hideous front page after about five minutes isn't making me any happier.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
Your bandwidth has been capped, but the good news is, you pay the same low price for involuntarily downgraded service! Thanks for using Comcast! Have a nice day!
F*** that! I'm dumping them if I notice any difference in my service. My message to them...
Your income has been capped, but the good news is, you are one step closer to freeing yourself from those pests called users! Thanks for f***ing your customer! Have a nice takeover! Hope the layoffs go well!
Blarf.
Over here in NZ, you can't get broadband without a cap. If you're using the 128k limited version, you get between 5 and 12 gigs per month, but if you're using full-speed ADSL you get either 500 or 1000 megs per month. That's it. And that's charged by Telecom, so if you want ADSL you don't have a choice in the matter.
"More than the average user"... if that's automated, it sounds like a recipe for a downward ratchet to zero. The calculated average can blip downward due to statistical randomness, but never rise, since the new maximum is capped at the previous average.
Is that if there were ANY Comcast subscribers that actually petitioned Comcast to do something about their slow broadband connection? If not then the whole kaboodle is a load of poo no matter how you look at bandwidth usage.
That's what ALL the ISPs here do. Looks like Johnny Howard and Dickhead Alston have made quite a mark on the rest of the world. They both sit by and let Telstra continue to screw its customers to raise the share price, because they have big plans of selling off the other half of it.
The only strange thing is that, as far as I know, the IMF & World Bank have had nothing to do with it...
But I digress. Every ISP in Australia follows this download capping scheme, and blame their upstream supplier for it, which invariably is Telstra. Sure there are a few 'all you can eat' plans, but either the price is absurd, or the supplier has plans to go out of business real soon. Either way, not a good choice for consumers.
If you want to conserve the network's bandwidth, get multicast up and running. Multicast is by far the most efficient way to distribute data, free or otherwise. Tell your ISP that, when they get IPv6 up and running, you want to have access to multicast content.
There's no pre-set bandwidth limit! (IOW, we'll let you know when you've hit the limit.)
Call (206) 338-5780 COLLECT for information about a genuine BA, BS, MA, MS, MBA, or Ph.D.
And where is our hovercars!??!
Why are there only 19 people folding@home for slashdot?
Yes, capping is THAT bad. I would prefer to run my web-site (www.icarusindie.com) out of house and have been doing for for almost 3 years now. I went with DSL because it's a hardware cap. I can't physically do more than ~60GB a month out. Cox Cable caps it at 7.5GB a month for no good reason even though it runs 50% faster out. I was regularly doing over 50GB a month from my site. With the All Access Pass it's gone down to ~20GB.
Neither DSL or Cable can supply me a faster line (both are too stupid to supply the needs for a business like mine) so I'm going with colo which is 10Mbit but has a 30GB cap with a per GB over fee.
Of course, if ISPs were to uncap port 80 you'd just see a bunch of P2P apps running on that port or whatever other port wasn't capped. Too many idiots out there making it a lose lose situation for ISPs. At least comcast is trying to be reasonable about it. Cox is just braindead. And it's not just residential. I was calling about a business line and it has the same cap.
It's amazing how hard it is to throw money at a company to get what you want.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
What the hell is the point?
Well at least you can get "high speed" where you live. In a certain suburb in Dunedin we have absolutely nothing, yet at least you can get something in freaking Oamaru.
Heh, you have to laugh at those new Telecom ads - where they admit that Jetstream Starter isn't broadband ! What are they smoking...
I see people jumping to the conclusion here that anyone hitting these caps must be doing something illegal. Try this scenario on for size...
Listening to a 160kbps SHOUTcast/Icecast stream will cost you over 50 gigs per month if you left it on 24/7. Wasteful, yes perhaps. But legal. So less hypothetically, let's say you work and hang out at home a lot and listen to a high quality stream 10 hours per day. That's still 21 gigs per month. Shave the bitrate down to 96kbps (below many people's threshold of "high quality") and you'd still be using over 12 gigs per month.
This seems like a reasonable, legal use to me. The selection of music available in online streams is amazing, and could be one of the more compelling reasons to get a dedicated internet connection, especially after checking out the cost and selection of alternatives (eg. satellite, digital RF, or digital cable radio)
The truly sad part is that the same people who are complaining about unequal bandwidth usage don't seem to care that 1% of people in the US own 34% of the wealth and I've heard varying figures that the top 10% controls 90% of wealth. If they want to our regulate bandwidth, let's regulate their income;)
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
They refused to do anything since she hadn't seen the thrower.
Ha Ha! You can bet your sweet ass if someone threw a knife at a cop they'd be busting the fucking door down, right now, and putting a cap in anyone's ass who didn't get on the floor, right now. None of this shit about "I didn't see who it was, so I'll let them go."
I guess its true that we get the governement we deserve in this country. Too bad we deserve to be assreamed.
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
I'd be too busy skiing and swimming in that land of yours to worry about my downloading. You should switch to trading CDR/DVDR by snail mail instead.
Why are there only 19 people folding@home for slashdot?
I don't watch sports, so i want to quite payingf or ESPAN and the salaries of sports teams comcasts owns or subsidzies.
I want cable a-la-carte since half of it is shit anyway.
I also want cable companies to keep there greedy hands out of my services and off my network.
When i pay for something, its mine. Don't lie to me and say 3x faster then dsl if i can't use it at that capacity either.
Cable companies suck!
Then you must have a bad memory, at least if you live where I do. The "last mile" cable or DSL is fast enough to deliver video (think 1MBit+) but they're not willing to let you download 1Mbit/s from halfway across the earth, that's why your Internet connection is only 256k. The promise was delivering streaming services from the ISP at reasonable prices, none of which has happened. The only thing you have is Internet-services where you use your generic Internet bandwidth.
Of course P2P is inefficient. But official services are non-existant, and the "peer" services that were more efficient (like usenet) have been completely crippled here because of legal liability (as in 7-digit fines, not just potential liability). What you should have, is a huge fileserver, something like your personal TV or radio station, at a reasonable price. Something that wouldn't count towards your Internet quotas. That'd be a hit, if only you could get the content there. Served "locally" by your ISP.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
So they increase speeds so that you cant download as much... What is the point of downloading less faster? For browsing the internet or other "average" uses, the speed of the hardware of the computer tends to be more in relation to how long it takes to load the page. The only people who could use the speed are those that already do heavier traffic. Isn't that like giving someone a convertable without any gas?
I do believe that the current pricing structures could not be sustained with every broadband user saturating their pipe. We pondered this back in '98 and as far as I can tell it's still an unresolved situation. (Message-ID: <354fa3fe.376130416@news-2.sni.net>#1/1)
Broadband providers need to make it very clear up front in their TOS and advertising if they will not support full use of the pipe. Else you're paying only for a "peak bandwidth" figure that is meaningless over the span of a week or a month. If they impose measurable caps, they need to explain to customers in plain terms what they mean. (E.g. you will exceed the monthly bandwidth cap by full use of the pipe for 72 hours). Typical non-tech customers just won't understand otherwise...
If you were in an apartment complex, you could attempt to get the place to get wired up with a business line of some sort and 'share' that way.
If in a house, then the only way to defray a T1 would be to have great neigbors that want the same thing. Or offer a Wi-Fi point for the neigborhood. SOunds like a lot of work. But fun if you had the time & talent.
Why are there only 19 people folding@home for slashdot?
How come I pay $22 per month for a 56k dialup connection while my friend gets 1.5Mb/256k DSL with a static IP address for just over twice that amount?
/28 for under $100/mo. but, until that happens, I'm not going to cry over what I've got when it's so much better than what I had five years ago.
Actually, that's what I'm paying for my DSL and you know what? I think it's a pretty good deal. Compare what you've got to the alternatives available to you, not what's available to someone halfway around the world.
Don't get me wrong, what I'd really like is a completely unrestricted 100Mb/s network connection to my house with my own
I like my women like my coffee... pale and bitter.
--Mike--
Tough to find specific references to business subsidizing residential rates, but here's an old reference (Requirement 3), and here's another. (1996) It's discussed in this 2001 hearing at the US House of Representatives.
Don't forget that residential means rural, suburban, and urban. How much money does Comcast make wiring Oklahoma and getting $45 per month when they can wire NY, LA, or Chicago and get $100 per month from a business? Residential does not pay it's own way in communications.
"We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers." Carl Sagan
Is there some requirement that no-one may read an article, before or after it is submitted to slashdot?
A guy got a letter from his Cable Provider. It said, "Stop uploading and downloading so much crap. It costs us more to give you service than you pay us. If you don't stop being so damned expensive to deal with, we'll stop doing business with you under the current agreement. Have a nice day."
Last time I checked, this is a good thing. The company is being forthright and honest with the user. They're not dicking him around in unusual, untraceable ways. They're not going out of their way to make his experience worse.
They're saying, "Change your usage, or we'll stop selling you service. Thank you."
What kind of pig-fuckers live in a world where this is a bad thing?
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
I thought you said you had broadband...
ISP's pay for volume, not speed. Dial-up users average 500 bits per second. Pre-P2P DSL measures show DSL customers using just under 4000 bits per second. Looking at the graphs for last week, our DSL customers are averaging 24,000 bit per second. As a result the ISP is paying six times as much for bandwidth as was expected. That is why the ISP broadband model is broken.
So, should ISP's increase DSL charges six fold to reflect the increased cost due to P2P even though 90% of their customers don't use P2P?
Dynamic bandwidth shaping allows a customer to run at full speed for, say, 3 minutes but then starts cutting the speed down so that it doesn't exceed, say, 60MB in an hour. This restores the ISP's pricing model.
The side plus of dynamic bandwidth shaping is that it reduces network congestion providing a snappier connection for web surfing and game playing.
So, the question is, will ISP's trade 10% of their revenue for an 85% decrease in bandwidth cost? Hmm... let me see? Maybe they will sign up with my competitor, trash his network and I can pick up 90% of his customers. Bonus!! 80% increase in revenue and 70% decrease in bandwidth cost. YES!!!!
Speakeasy.
Okay, some more words: fuck Comcast, they suck and are evil. And their cabel service blows too. Get DSL if its available in your area (if not, sorry for you) and go with an ISP that respects theyre customers, such as Speakeasy. I've been speakin' easy for almost 4 years and have been happy since day one. They even surprised me by dropping their prices 10% a month or so ago, with no prompting from me, just out of the goodness of their own hearts.
1) Capping is better than throttling, as throttling essentially turns broadband back into narrowband.
2) By setting the caps levels at a rate that sweeps up the top 2-5%, ISPs will greatly reduce the risk of exposure to legal liability (it is likely to hit mostly illegal file sharing people) and it will reduce their costs. I am aware of many dial-up isps that set hourly rate caps per month (usually at something like 150 per month, which translates to 5 per day). The heavy users represent lower margins than the light or infrequent users.
It is not surprising that businesses are making this decision.
Well, I just switched to telus(mainly for the cheap 6 months) but looking at their TOS:
-5 gig down/month
-1 up/month
I may not keep it for 6 months. I know people that have downloaded a lot more than this using telus and they haven't been harassed, but they weren't doing more than a gig a day, prob. 6 gig a month upstream total.
So...2 questions:
1.) How long has this TOS been in effect?
2.) Do they actually enforce it as written?
Knowledge of enforcement is useful before you break rules:)
Some of the local ISPs in town would set you up with a T1 line for around $800 and you could get a fractional one starting at around $200.
$200 a month seems to be the low-end price point these days. That's about the point where you can start calling the shots and get a fairly decent throughput, though not as much as in the heyday of cable modems (At least down.)
If all your neighbors are whining about the cable co throttling them, you could always talk to them about splitting the cost of that T1. Then you'll have to worry about that bozo downloading 6 gigabytes a month through the P2P services...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I think the above statement depends LARGELY on how you define "what you get".
I find it interesting that the cable companies have no problem feeding you nearly 100 channels of television, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week (remember, that's bandwidth too - voice and full screen video), for, say, $50 a month -- yet when it's *Internet* bandwidth people want, suddenly we're supposed to respect all these artifically set limits/caps, and understand what a "great value" we're getting for that additional $49.95 per month.
True, home users' Internet broadband is currently subsidized by businesses - but that's only because they've got the current rates jacked up so high for T1 and T3 connections. There's no real, concrete reason I can see why a T1 should cost a business many hundreds of dollars per month. They've simply created artifical "costs" for connections, and tried to justify them by claiming they "help offset" expenses giving home users service.
DSL runs over existing copper, and shouldn't really present a telco with any additional overhead - other than maintaining the routers and the customer support/billing aspects of it.
Nononono!!!
You're supposed to recover the pot stash *and* the pool furniture.
Above average = > 5 GB/month
Welcome ... to the worrrrrrrrrrld of tomorrow!
If a train station is a place where a train stops, what's a workstation?
I totally agree...they priced their stuff too cheaply. They failed to realize that a home user that understood the benefit of broadband would also be a user that would take full advantage of the fat pipe. Nobody ever accused the telcos and cable folks of being very bright when it comes to Internet service, but it is still surprising that they assumed everyone would be just doing email and instant messaging.
The cable companies are probably a bit sharper than the telco folks, as they anticipated high bandwidth demands...they just planned that it would be users downloading premium cable content and not MP3's and p0rn via P2P networks.
The premium content was going to be the "profit" from the home cable modem user.
"We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers." Carl Sagan
Get real.
Laying fiber costs money ... real money. Don't believe me? Try calling up a few contractors and asking ... or call up the power company and ask their rate on having your own lines placed on their poles (which you have to hire them to do). You'd better be sitting down before you hear the answer.
And then someone's got to pay for the switches and routers, and the NOC staff, and repairs when some jerkweed with a backhoe cuts a line, and maybe even reimbursement for property easements. Not to mention whoever you're getting your data from has to pay port and loop charges and will pass those along.
As for telecom monopolies preventing broadband adoption ... I have plenty of complaints about the telcos, their anticompetitive practices, and the lack of real oversight into same, and I could talk your ear off bitching about Verizon (I co-own an ISP), but the idea that they're keeping symmetric DSL under lock and key in some vault along with those carburetors that get 200 miles per gallon is ridiculous. DSL is asymmetric for technological reasons, not political ones.
Want a symmetrical line? They have them, they're called T1s, and your local ISP will gladly sell you one. Not fast enough? Call UUnet and ask about port and local loop charges on a T3. But depending on where you live, you may be coughing up twenty kilobucks or more per month.
I'm a Comcast cable modem subscriber. As far as I know, I'm not on their black list yet. However, I find the very notion of a black list fundamentally unacceptable.
I'm paying for a service which is supposed to give me a certain quantity of upstream and downstream bandwidth (384/3.5 in my case). As far as I'm concerned, I should be able to use every last kilobit of that allocation, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, if I want. I don't, and I don't ever plan to, but I should have the option.
The problem that the article glosses over is that the consumer-grade ISP's are massively oversubscribed. Yeah, your transfer rates are theoretically what they say they are, but you're sharing that pipe with 5000 of your neighbors. And the ISP's often don't have enough bandwidth at their headends to support the triburary peak busy hour traffic. They need to fix this or stop making such hyperbolic claims about the speed and capacity of the service they offer. And if they are going to limit your total bandwidth consumption, then they need to tell you how much you get and allow you to monitor how much you have left (and even allow you to buy more).
To be fair, Comcast has reasonable prices (I pay about $43/month for my service) and once I got everything working, I've had excellent service for going on two years. From an availability/uptime standpoint, they do great. The value is quite good. Being secretive about their bandwidth consumption policies is not good.
This all highlights the point that an increasing number of users require very large amounts of bandwidth in their homes (for whatever reasons). The ISP's need to realize this and impliment solutions that enable this level of service.
What you are describing is a variation of the token bucket algorithm. It's normally used for a smaller amount of tokens, however (for instance, it can be used to allow for a small burst of a few k before going to the normal value).
It would not be hard to implement in the ASICs to reach line-level speeds (in fact, it's already implemented, but probably cannot deal with huge amounts of tokens and loses data on router reloads). The trouble is that you would need new line cards then, or you will have to pay the price of dropping to the router's CPU (which would be slow).
From what I have been reading, the top 1% uses HALF of the total ISP bandwidth. It isn't about reducing the overall average, it is about the top 1% of the people causing the entire customer base to pay twice as much as they would have otherwise (as this thread indicates that the ISP buys bandwidth upstream by volume, not max or theoretical throughput.)
Using your example, top 10% of the users using 20% of the bandwidth is a very slight skewing of the bandwidth distribution from a statistical perspective and is not something I would want the ISP jacking with - but if the reality is the top 1% using 50% of the bandwidth then I can see where they are coming from. Doesn't mean I approve of their methods (particularly not disclosing what is 'ok' by them, keeping the limits a 'secret') but I understand their business perspective on the matter.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
Ah, you should have said. All these years of not understanding the gun-rights people, you should have told this story.
C'mon, let's have uzis for sale in England already. Are you allowed to carry them holstered when you're cycling to work?
as i was reading these posts i see that everyone is waiting to hear the excessive bandwidth of a so-called "abusive user"....i have a download/upload meter installed on my cpu and my totals for the month of august is 38.20gb dl 28.55gb ul that gives me a grand total of 66.75gb for the month, almost all of this bandwidth was used with bittorrent....i have adelphia as my isp and so far have no complants for them
I had a cool idea for this sort of thing. Gnutella clients usually connect to any of a number of 'master servers' for a list of 'ultrapeer' index servers. If my ISP intercepted those requests and responded with nodes INSIDE their networks (preferably in ascending order of 'internet distance') the gnutella clients would be much more effective AND the bandwidth costs on the ISP would be much lower.
If I'm on Cox.net and I hit up a gnutella master for a list of index servers, I'd like to have it give me the index server on my subnet or network FIRST, then move out from there. 'Internal' traffic (that which doesn't traverse another company's lines) costs next-to-nothing for an ISP, they only really pay for the traffic that passes their routers.
This would also keep the RIAA at least a little bit farther out of the picture, as the P2P networks would be a little bit harder to plumb from outside the ISP.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
This comes up so often I wrote about it in my journal
I'll paraphrase for the lazy. Carrier grade IP bandwidth costs $40 or so per 64kbits. If you're a big dog you can cut your cost to half of that.
94% of residential users are cheap retail users, the other 6% are largely music/movie traders and they're often paying $40/mo and using 10x or more that in bandwidth.
You are not ENTITLED to free music because Kazaa exists. You are not ENTITLED to carrier grade bandwidth because 24 of 25 users follow a retail usage pattern.
Some whine about it on slashdot, but I've suggested that a 'special education troll' moderation category be created for those that do.
I am very easy to get along with, but I don't have time to waste being nice to people who are being stupid. -Theo
In other news, 50% of your children scored below average in a national literacy exam! OMG! (Yes I actually saw something like this being used to hawk some crappy home education system on TV once)
Damn it, stop and think about exactly what an 'average' is eh?
A single Video On Demand movie from Gamelink can be up to 600mb in size. 15 gig a month in porn is not difficult to accomplish. Now add in online gaming, voice over IP and internet radio and it's very easy to go over 15 gig a month.
RTFA and mod parent down. This isn't about rate caps, it's about total bandwidth/months caps.
"Telephone companies offering DSL service in the United States say they have no limits in place for their users, unlike Canadian, British or Australian counterparts that routinely cap their subscribers' usage."
I can only think of one in Britain: NTL.
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce
Meh. Who needs pool furniture when you've got a half kilo of pot?
...how can there be violation of Terms of Service? What's it say, "you're not allowed to be in the top 10% of users"?
So when are the cable companies going to start treating cable modem access as a utility? You give me a pipe that can support a certain bandwidth. Then you advertise it as always on and x times as fast as dial up. Then you encourage me to sign up and use the service. Your commercials advertise downloading music and movies. So I do use it and I use it 24/7. Then provider complains that I use the service too much, yet all I'm doing is using what you sold me.
I wish they'd make up their minds. Either charge everyone like its electricity or water or give everyone true unlimited access for a set fee. They can't have it both ways and expect to keep customers.
DSL providers sell more bandwidth than they have on the assumption that people won't be using their peak bandwidth all the time. This is perfectly legitimate if and only if they tell people about it. It's not unlimited, it's "within reasonable limits." It would be nice if they codified exactly how much bandwidth you could actually use. If they don't do this, they should get nailed for any applicable truth in advertising laws.
Litigious bastards
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
If I'm a home user, or even a user who only uses 10-20gb a month, the extra latency from the 5 people who combined push ~500gb a month through the pipe will make my websurfing, online gaming, and VoIP stuff not-fun. Untill we're all using IPv6 and I can rely on QoS fixing problems, there's no way I can live with 5 people ruining the service for the other hundreds of people.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
According to Comcast, just 6 percent of subscribers use about 78 percent of the company's bandwidth.
If thats true, I'm seriously impressed. Nice work.
I am aware that is common boilerplate, particularly in EULA land.
How can our legal system even allow this? It sure as hell doesn't have a leg to stand on ethically.
If you have a clause like that, there's nothing to prevent the company from completely replacing the contract you agreed with to "all your base are belong to us". (Hmmmmm, I just got an idea for a business plan. I'll have to contact my friend in Nigeria about this.
I have been a Cox broadband service customer for aproximatly two years six months. During the time I have been a customer I have not experienced many problems besides an occasional network outage in my local area.
Recently I recieved an e-mail message from Cox concerning their new bandwidth usage policy which is addressed in their FAQ.
"What Are the Current Cox High Speed Internet Residential Bandwidth Limitations? The Cox High Speed Internet acceptable use policy allows each user a maximum of 2GB per day and/or 30GB of downloads per month. Uploads are limited to 1GB per day and/or 7.5GB per month. This is an extremely high limit - for example 2GB of content is equivalent to about 60,000 pictures, 2000 minutes of MP3 music or 3 to 4 full-length movies."
I don't know about other service providers, but for a SOHO network running five workstations with two or three users surfing at any given point, even downloading music, this policy doesn't seem to unreasonable.
I wonder how cheap broadband is around the world...
What is the best broadband deal you can get where you live?
Here in Hamburg, Germany, EU you get:
2MBit d/l, 192KBit u/l for 62EUR/month
4MBit d/l, 384KBit u/l for 97EUR/month
no other limits
With p2p-apps the upload is already the limiting factor!! Even the http-traffic is lagging with to much p2p on the line
I read this entire thread and now have a question. :
... would you go for it? Your P2P stuff would go twice as fast, and your web pages would load twice as fast (and your gamer pings would halve, in theory, for this quesiton.)
Here is a serious question to all the nay-sayers
Assuming that the top 1% of users is using 50% of the bandwidth, and by eliminating that top 1% of users from the customer base the other 99% would get their bandwidth doubled and their pings halved - would you agree when Comcast's business solution?
If you were part of the 1% that kept the cablemodem pegged wide open 24x7, moving more than 300 Gigabytes per month (that is 10 Gigs each and every day without letting up) then you get sliced off the network, but anybody short of that gets their pipe doubled
Just curious.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
"you may be coughing up twenty kilobucks or more per month."
KILO BUCKS. hehe. Isn't a dollar in English units? I was told some time ago not to mix english units with metric prefixes. But Kilobucks! I like like it.
To the land down under! We have had this for over 2 years now. Eat it up while you can;
I did get Basiclinux to run Opera 6.03 with a day's downloads of packages, and I'm damn proud that I can post this using that setup without Opera crashing.
I dual boot this box with Redhat 6.1, and had to use that to download most of the packages until I could get opera running in Basiclinux.
The sad thing is... *there is NO shortage of bandwidth* If comcast or DSL providers didn't over-charge and limit download, their profit would dry up.
Of course this is being fueled by the RIAA/MPAA! Look at this quote from the article:
Eder said there was no specific line crossed by these subscribers, but she added that some of those people were downloading the equivalent of 90 movies in a given month.
Why is it that when the Comcast representative described someone's bandwidth usage they instantly described it in terms of "movies downloaded per month"! Comcast has the raw data to give a number like 2Gig per day, but they chose to use a metric that made the user instantly look like a criminal.
What frightens me is that I love to listen to Internet radio. This is a legitimate use of my bandwidth, but how long is it before my ISP labels be a criminal because I use enough bandwidth as "someone downloading 90 movies a month"?
Just a thought.
At my company we have a special kind of broadband subscription for people who are tired of the disturbance caused by the others peoples carelessness about their internet usage.
We call it a "broadband transfer subscription". It basically means that each customer gets a fixed amount of data (download/upload combined) that they can use for whatever they wish to, at full speed, no bandwidth cap on file sharing software or such.
We usually set the limit to 10GB data transfer per month.
The customer can log in to their personal account any time and have a look at their counter, see bandwidth graphs, etc.
After this limit has been reached (Which really does not happen that often) the users bandwidth gets throttled down to a low (but still usable, think ISDN) speed.
They can then choose to wait until the next period when their counters will be reset, or log on to their personal account and buy another set of data, which will be billed together with their normal bill. The bandwidth cap gets removed instantly and they can go ahead and do whatever they like to do, and they do not have to worry about their internet connection being slow like syrup because their neighbors left their machines online with some file sharing app clogging the network.
Whenever they want to download something, surf somewhere or tune in some music/video-stream, they can do that at full speed (via 100Mbit fibre/ethernet, 11Mbit WiFi or whatever they are using) without interruption. And at a very low price.
The average internet user seems pretty happy with this, especially those who just use the 'net for surfing/mailing/chatting/gaming.
If the customer on the other hand prefers to leech movies 24/7 he can use the normal subscription and get a capped bandwidth which he shares with his neighbors.
But frankly, we would not be sorry to see him go, because there is no chance that we can make this customer happy in consideration of price, bandwidth and stability without losing money.
Who became a comcast customer when they bought out AT&T broadband, who bought out MediaOne...
We just received notice saying Comcast was doubling our bandwidth (on a trial basis) for free.
As for your question, with simple numbers like that then, sure, let the hogs either pay more and subsidize me, or get capped.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
It's no secret that there will always be a small minority that will spoil it for everyone else. With respect to capping excessive use, I have no sympathy. This small minority is typically self-centered, unable to assess how their actions will impact others - they share the same mentality with the boomcar crowd: Usurp the commons for your own personal gain, and screw everyone else. It might work for a while, but fortunately, they won't always get away with it.
That's dead wrong. Most of the people who have high usage are either using p2p systems or downloading from the ISP's own news servers. The p2p users are already likely covered by other "no servers" clauses in their Terms Of Service. The ones who are downloading usenet from the ISP's news servers are using bandwidth, but they are only using local bandwidth - bandwidth within the ISP's own system. They are already bringing in the news feeds across the backbone, and that does cost. But within their own system, that capacity is already paid for and mostly sits idle when the user isn't availing himself of it.
I too doubt they will miss me much. If enough people react to this they will notice, however.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
F**k the average user. All they do is read emails all f**ckin' day. I use the internet, and for me to use the internet, I have to have some pretty high speeds. Hell, even my email requires some high speeds! Unfortunately, the price that I pay my ISP is apparently not enough for the promised "unlimited" bandwidth. I know that if there was a high speed ISP with unlimited bandwidth for maybe 10 or even 15 (~5 to 10$ amu'rican) dollars more, I would DEFINITELY switch to their system.
in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
More like increased profits. Telstra Australia's largest ISP thinks that average download limits are fair at for every meg over this is charged.
No, they're advertising "unlimited" service, and then individually cutting off people who exceed some undisclosed limit. That may be good for them, but it's hardly "forthright and honest." In fact, it sounds to me exactly like something a "pig-fucker" would do.
Call (206) 338-5780 COLLECT for information about a genuine BA, BS, MA, MS, MBA, or Ph.D.
Yeah mate, you've really got it tough.
For around $70 NZD (that's around $42 USD) I get 256k cable, with a 10Gb cap per month. And I'm about to move to Australia, where you pay even more and have a much lower cap (usually around 3Gb per month).
But the reality is that I don't view unlimited pr0n, , warez and pirated music as some kind of birthright. My connection is fast enough to do what I want to do in what I define as a reasonable amount of time (whether that be downloading the latest Debian distro or VPN'ing into work), and the price is reasonable enough.
New Zealand is a small and under-populated country with a hell of a lot of water between us and anybody else - broadband (midband, whatever) internet access is never going to be cheap.
But let's get real here folks - if it's that much of a problem, then turn your computer off, go out into the sunlight and live a little. Let's keep things in perspective, eh?
Dave
What is wrong with wringing every cent of value off of your internet service? You pay for it. If they don't like it they can advertise lower speeds or something, instead of being deceptive and limiting people who are doing nothing wrong.
True genius is grasping a situation like a peice of fruit, and peircing it just right so that it drains dry.
So tell me if I understood correctly:
1. You have N customers using an average B bandwidth
2. Kick users with B in the top 10%
3. Repeat each month
Result: no bandwidth used, no customers
78.4% of all statistics are made up.
It's not the same thing.
TV is one way. They blast content down a one-way pipe in a continuous stream with little intelligence to it. No real switching or routing involved. And there is greater margin for error in the data flowing down the pipe, even with digital cable. Lose a few packets? Oh well, no problem, probably will show up as a tiny graphics glitch on the screen that goes by so fast the viewer won't notice.
Broadband internet is two-way. Information travels in descreet packets that cannot simply be blasted down the pipe but must be carefully routed. The real bottleneck is not the physical cable running to your home or the copper wire, it is the routers and switches. Packets must be actively read by the equipment to know where to send them. There is also much less margin for error. Lose a few packets? Oops, gotta retransmit.
This is why cable is a latecomer to the broadband market. Their expertise was in one-way content delivery. They took awhile to build up the infrastructure to handle interactive communications over the coax cable.
Karma: Frotzed (mostly due to the Frobozz Magic Karma Company)
Porn surfing and game playing are HUGE demands that drive cable internet subscriptions. So put P2P and its questionable (yet unresolved) legalities aside for a moment. When you say things like "even games are a higher priority" than P2P traffic, it displays some kind of deep inner bias that completely legal, legitimate (yet, gasp!, entertaining) uses of bandwidth are somehow inferior to others. You work for a home cable ISP. People at home play games. So drop the condescension. Your subscribers' demand for game playing helps pay your salary. Ditto for SHOUTcast streams. Ditto for webcams. Etc.
"True, home users' Internet broadband is currently subsidized by businesses - but that's only because they've got the current rates jacked up so high for T1 and T3 connections."
Its not subsidized at all, because the cable company doesn't supply T1 & T3 connections: they are provided by a combination of the LEC for the loop and a business ISP (UUNET, WORLDCOM, SAVVIS, etc) for connectivity.
The 1.5/128 assymetrical link I have is great, but the cable company is making a ton of dough for $45 a month.
We're not getting anything free or even subsidized, we're paying for every byte we get.
*buzzz* wrong... Comcast is increasing its bandwidth in some markets to test to see if its possible to ofter it to all consumers...
Current Comcast Bandwidth for Comcast Residential(the basic package) is 1.5Mega Bit down and 256kilo bit up.
The Trial run is 3.5Mega Bit down and I think 386kilo bit up.
but they aren't jerks about enforcing them
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
It seems strange to me that US providers do not offer differential pricing.
Let me give you an example from Germany:
If you want to have ADSL, you have to pay a fee of ~EUR 20 to the phone company, Deutsche Telekom (That's for DSLAM & bandwidth, 768/128, etc).
In addition to that, you choose an ISP for your traffic. And there is a lot of choice. One of many providers, 1&1, offers no less than 7 home user tariffs:
20h time tariff, EUR7
40h time tariff, EUR10
100h time tariff, EUR15
1GB volume tariff, EUR7
2GB volume tariff, EUR10
5GB volume tariff, EUR15
"Flat Rate", EUR40 for unlimited use, but in every month you use less than 20GB, you only pay EUR27, and if you are also less than 100h online, you only pay EUR17
(minutes or MB above your limit cost 1.2 Cent each)
Or an example from Belgium: ADSL is EUR40 here for 3300/128 and 10 GB per month with the largest provider (there are many others). If you want more than 10GB, you can always buy one or more extra 5GB for EUR5 each. Interestingly, if you go above your limit (and you don't purchase extra 5GB packages), you are not charged more but your bandwidth is capped to 64kbps. You can also increase your upstream somewhat if you pay a bit more
I don't understand why the providers in the US don't offer pricing like this. I believe they could achieve much higher profits by such price discrimination as well as making more consumers take up broadband - after all, they are monopolists as it seems to me!
I think your toilet (idea) is full of shit Sorry couldn't resist . . . .or maybe
I piss on your toilet idea
weeee potty humor
Sorta. The real problem was they had to 'upgrade' all their networks. Some of these networks were extensions of extensions of extensions of extensions of 30-40 year old cable networks. Also some of these lines were not exactly in good shape when they put them in. You got ch 2-12 good enough. Put a few repeaters and a spliter (for the new subdivision) on a line and now you can get 2-40 good enough. And so on. These things are not conducive to a good running network. They were cost saving hacks that have cost them a LOT of money now.
It wasnt till they started priming for video on demand that they saw their crumbling network. Whole blocks of channels looked BAD. That would not do for data. People probably would not pay 4 bucks for a show that looks like crap. They quickly looked at techs that would last them another 30 years. Fiber was the winner. That we got better service and cable modems is icing. They had a network that was simply unmaintanable. They realized it in the mid 90's. They fixed it in the late 90's and now we get some small bit of the bw. There is a SERIOUS amount of bw in those cables. But a new channel that shows how to basket weave generates more revinue in advertising than a bit more bw will ever do.
Also that the BW costs them lots of money is hogwash. BW is chhhhhheeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaaappppp these days. There are hundreds of companies out there that have more than they have customers. Have a friend that used to work on a network a couple years ago. He said 98% of that network was dark. And the bw they did have lit up was OC numbers I had never heard of.
When I see cap's imposed I usually see a bad network. Usually the companies tech support sucks. The tech support is over worked. The installers are sub's that dont care. And the main company is just hoping to get a bit more money out of you.
That is why we see 2Mb not because the routers can not handle it. But because there is an artifical scarcity and a HUGE cost burden that has been placed on the cable networks. We get to pay the bill...
There should be a web site to swap landlord tales. My parents have 500 apartments and I have worked for them since I was a little kid. People would do the dumbest things. No pets in the lease yet call us up because they saw one spider. Suddenly a $25 fine hits them for the kitty cat. Or how about not paying rent but having tens of thousands of cocaine sitting in your living room. Now you go to jail for many years all because you didn't want to shell out a few hundred. Each landlord could write a book on their stupid tenants.
...and I RESENT the implication that equates me to an employee/executive of a cable ISP!
How dare you!
I've got no problem with capped bandwidth, but Comcast ought to at least have enough integrity to offer tiered service. I don't use my broadband connection for anywhere near the $50+ I pay per month for it. I know people who use it nonstop for online gaming, video and music and I'm sure, in a fair world, I would pay considerably less than those folks. So, if Comcast and others want to insist on caps, they need to do it right and let those of us who use less pay less. I suspect that's why they don't want to get into specific usage limits. If they did, people like me could start computing the "value" of what they use it for and start insisting on lower, more reasonable pricing. Wouldn't want that!
--Rick "If it isn't broken, take it apart and find out why."
...What is a *legal* use that justifies using the entire capacity (in either direction) of a cable modem for days at a time and yet does not justify upgrading to a business-class connection?
You guys misunderstand. I'm all for game playing over the net, that's why I don't limit it, or plan to. In fact, I've thought about prioritizing game traffic for a few of the big ones (Half-Life, BF1942, Q3) just so that games work extremely well. The "even games" bit was supposed to reflect how many people don't see games as a priority.
find it interesting that the cable companies have no problem feeding you nearly 100 channels of television, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week (remember, that's bandwidth too - voice and full screen video), for, say, $50 a month -- yet when it's *Internet* bandwidth people want, suddenly we're supposed to respect all these artifically set limits/caps, and understand what a "great value" we're getting for that additional $49.95 per month.
The bandwidth required for video is not affected by the number of people tuning in. Don't forget that cable is still just RF, like airwaves, it's just that it uses coaxial cable as the transmission medium. When you have 100 channels on your cable TV, each channel just occupies a part of that frequency spectrum. High-speed data services typically occupy only one channel. And since that one data channel is still broadcasted to all the modems on your node (your modem just listens for the data intended for it), the bandwidth you see on your end IS affected by the activity of everybody else.
The point is, with regular video, it's the same bandwidth whether you broadcast to 10 people or 1000 people. Once you start dealing with 2-way communication and trying to deliver point-to-point data over a broadcast network however, it's easy to see how your speed can be affected by everybody else.
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
What I find interesting is that they are allowed to claim (as they do in Australia) that they are selling unlimited internet and then go on to explain in the small print that it does infact have a limit! How can you have unlimited internet that is infact limited.
On a slightly related note. I had a friend who received a personal signed letter from the head sys admin at Austar satelite internet congratulating him on breaking the maximum monthly download record. A cool 120gb back when four speed burners were top of the line.
Comcast can stuff that deal up their asses.
I pay $105/mo to Speakeasy, and that gets me 1.5M down, 384K up, 3 static IPs, no bullshit usage caps, and the freedom to run all the servers I want as long as they don't host porn.
...It's scary if they could somehow legally use a mathematical average of their users. If nobody can use more (or significantly more) than average, that means that the *new* average is (gasp) lower... and lower... and lower... Until nobody uses any bandwidth whatsoever.
I doubt it'll happen, but it's an interesting scenario.
Service levels vary widely, but, the CRTC requires that independent operators have access to the public telephone network. This means, you can often find very geek-friendly ISPs servicing the DSL market throughout Canada.
Of course, most of these providers are resellers of resellers of resellers--and ultimately, the service is identical to what the big telcos, Bell & Telus, etc., offer. However, the smaller ISPs don't generally cap bandwidth, will generally grant out static IPs and blocks (maybe not with PTRs), and don't restrict the service (i.e. no web servers).
To give you guys an idea of the prices in a MAJOR city (nyc) my old company had a fractional (6mb)T3 from Sprint, the cost was 5500ish a month. (Free "install" for a 1 yr agreement.) Of course it should also be mentioned that one of the BIG holdbacks of true broadband access is that the backbones of the internet hasn't advanced enough to support each house having a full t1. ;-)
Step 1: At the end of every month, all above-average bandwidth users get capped to that month's average bandwidth.
Step 2: Repeat every month, and pretty soon nobody gets *any* bandwidth!
Step 3: Profit!!
*sigh*
High-speed Road Trip (18.000KPH)
but anybody short of that gets their pipe doubled ... would you go for it?
That's a rather broad assumption. Has it occurred to you that maybe they want to drop the top 1% because they simply want to make more money off the other 99%? If you haven't read this, then do so now. To quote from that article,
The good news is that this particular performance issue can be resolved by the cable company adding a new channel and splitting the base of users.
In other words, with 6 Gigabits/s available in that coaxial cable the bandwidth on the cable company's network is not the problem. The traffic generated outside their network, and costing Comcast $X is the problem. You're connection isn't going to get any faster when the pigs are gone. At best you'll get a short lived boost while they find other 'desirable' customers to use that bandwidth. Considering we are being sold on 'Always on, super fast connections' with no mention of bandwidth limits, I would be supremely upset if it were my ISP trying to pull this stunt. If they did, I would probably be shopping around for a new ISP. They provide no guidelines as to how much is too much, effectively making it a 'we can boot anyone we don't like' agreement.
And the worst part of it is, this crap happens all the time when something is internet related. Ridiculous stuff like $150,000 dollar fines for downloading a song. Let's see an electric utility try to pull a stunt like this, citing overloaded power grids and making the grids work for the other 99%. Or maybe the water supply, we'll just cut off LA's water supply then the rest of the state can use all they want! Wouldn't happen in a million years.
I was just telling a friend at the office about this little tidbit. Our local DSL provider in Toronto (Bell Canada) has just removed their download caps after adding them over a year ago.
:)
Of course, it seems more and more that we Canadians are protected from the corrupted empire that is the RIAA... that and given the timeframe that Bell did this on make me sure that it's unrelated... but still.
I say... between my uncapped downloads, the free and easy pot laws and the open season on downloading, Canada is still the hippest place I've ever been... thank goodness I live here.
bash-3.00$ uname -a
SunOS panda 5.10 Generic sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-2
Now it is totally rooted. I have a 3Gig limit, which means If I download a full distro in a month, I have to be very careful not to blow the rest and restrict my surfing.
I have figured that I can use my broadband monthly limit in less than a day, then get restricted to 2-3kbs for the rest of the month.
Just shows you how screwed Australia's broadband is.
Deterministic Networks' QoS products do this. They're in place in some ISPs around the world, mostly satellite networks.
Yep. they are self-absorbed landlords that PROVIDE your lazy ass with a place to live. Without landlords you'd be living in a gutter somewhere.
So buy a house and quit whining. Oh yea that's right. You're so fiscally irresponsible you couldn't get credit to buy a candy bar.
I know landlords who own 50+ apartments and they provide 50+ families a place to live who otherwise would have to live with their parents. So STFU.
...except, of course the fact that the ISP does pay for its traffic to the upstream providers. But that's their problem, not the users'. If they advertise their service 'unlimited', then they should be prepared to pay for what they customers use.
Which leaves us with nothing but the argument that a few people are hogging bandwidth from everyone else. There are a lot of things that could be done about that, even by using just some Linux boxen as a traffic shapers.See the Linux Advanced Routing & Traffic Control Howto for some ideas.
I signed up for a
When there's a drought, what is the first thing my home city does? It requires that people who water their lawns every day "cut their bandwidth" by not watering as often.
Overloaded power grids? Rolling blackouts do the trick there.
If they want to limit bandwidth use, fine. They must stop advertising "unlimited access" if they do. There are laws against false advertising, and for too long no one has enforced them when it comes to ISPs.
If the bandwidth use has a magic number where it transform from "acceptable use" to "unacceptable use", that number needs to be listed explicitly somewhere. Otherwise you are driving down an unfamiliar highway with no speed limit signs. Is the limit 55 here? Or 65? or maybe it's 70? Oh wait ... this is Montana .. no speed limit .... right????
Likewise for dialup since I'm on this rant. "Unlimited access" is false advertising when a timer kicks someone offline after 6 hours no matter what they are doing at the time. If there are idle, fine then, kick them off. If someone is 200MB into a new .iso file, that ISP has breached its contract by kicking them offline without authorization or cause.
Someone needs to call these ISPs on this behavior, because it's gone on for far too long.
If it were available here, I'd be signing up for Speakeasy DSL. There, at least, the operators remember who pays for all their pretty hardware, the customers.
10Mbit wireless uplink on each end. A steady 900K/sec no problem... In six hours I can dump 18.5G in one night.
:)
That's averages to about 400G a month. Don't think some of us don't do it...
I know people who use some p2p programs to exchange video files legal and illegal that do around 10 gigs a day X 30... wowwy :)
But then again i do pay $99 for 700 gigs of multihomed bandwidth (more then 5 providers)for my server so it can't be that expensive to the isp.
Hmmm... Pie...
I think the problem is that COMCAST is just plain lame and they are doomed to failure in any market where they have competition. In my area we have COMCAST and WOW (Wide Open West) which offers tierd service, everything from 128k up/128k down to 3Mb down/500k up and WOW just released the 3Mb last week in my area. (I immediately jumped on the bandwidth bandwagon and upped my service and monthy charge.) COMCAST on the other hand offers one take-it or leave-it plan and they are always playing with the service.
Hey COMCAST, check out the WOW Speeds
As far as I can see here the only real problem is when ISPs bring in download caps, but won't tell you what they are. Basically so they can keep advertising their service as Unlimited.. I have no problem with caps (ill just choose another ISP), but they should be stopped from doing this if the service is still advertised as unlimited.
To expound on your example, what if a water park in Hollywood was entertaining only 50 people a day and using half the water available to California every day (like maybe it was being used in a particularly wasteful manner.) But they were only paying 50 regular people's worth of water bills, based on people and not based on actual consumption.
People are not dying of dehydration in CA, but it is a limited resource. And 50 particularly wasteful people were using enough water to supply half the state, every day.
Good analogy, I like it.
Remember this isn't about folks like us that burn through 10G a month. This is about the top 1% of the mega-warez/P2P/Anime sites moving 300G or more a month. All you can drink liquor at a party means all you can consume. The minute some lamers just start uncorking bottles and pouring them on the ground is the minute us serious drinkers say - enough : all you can drink is all you can drink but even unlimited drinks has a reality check.
Just based on the fact that you had enough bandwidth left over to post that thread indicates to me that you are one of us, not one of them. From what the rest of the thread is pointing at, we are talking about sick amounts of bandwidth, not the 20G/mo you or I would normally consider 'excessive'.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
Yes, this is true - but the cable companies are moving more and more towards receiving data back from the viewers. Even the satellite providers are working on this. I have Dish Network and they're starting to offer a learning channel for kids where they interact by using their remote control to answer quiz questions, etc.
I realize we're still talking about two different technologies, but the trend is towards making TV more interactive. As that happens, I don't see them being able to get away with raising prices much to cover the costs of going 2-way. Again, I say they'll gladly eat those expenses as a "developmental cost" and "expense of operation", as long as it helps them retain/gain new viewers.
When it comes to the telco offering broadband Internet (or even the cable co. doing it), they seem to always take a different attitude. They don't want to invest in the technology until govt. puts pressure on them. If a project looks like it will mean a big short-term financial loss, they'll skip it - rather than look at long-term potential gains. (I dare say we'd still not have cellular networks today if they treated wireless phones the way they're treating broadband connections for the masses right now.)
As a Comcast subscriber, if I see it affects my gaming or downoading, or website... I'll switch to another carrier, and inform all prospective Comcast customers to steer elsewhere. Cable companies continually raise their prices. In metro areas like Boston it's just under $50 a month, and I don't really get the 3MB down 384K that they advertise. So if they decide to throtle that back, why won't I just switch to cheaper solution. If all the companies decide to do it, and the speed is throttled down too much... many people will start to sask themeselves... What exactly am I paying this ever increasing cost for. It maybe cheap in some regards, but heck I can get a wireless T1 for $350 and then resell the connections in the neighborhood for up to $20 house. If they try to stick it to us... what's to stop someone like myself in the know from sticking it to them? So why don't I do it now... because I don't want customers at the moment... but I will do it, if it comes down to it.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
Here in New Zealand, we have "broadband DSL" charged at $0.20/Mb, and a monthly charge of $100 that gives you 500Mb. Or you can go with 128Kbs connection at $60 with a 10Gb cap, which is charged at $0.20/Mb if you go over. For 10Gb broad band it costs $1000 a month. This is what you get when you have a monopoly, nice aint it. I have wireless (from an independent company) costs me $140 a month for 256Kbps with 'unlimited' downloads (has the typical, 'excessive usage' clause, whatever that may be). The service I have is a 'bussness' solution so guess they are a bit laxer on that since I go through about 30-40Gb a month.
Count yourselves lucky...
GPLv2: I want my rights, I want my phone call! DRM: What use is a phone call, if you are unable to speak?
They also impliment traffic shaping, can you say 0.1KB/s for Kazaa or any other port besides 80. It sucks, I hope it does not get as bad for you guys.
GPLv2: I want my rights, I want my phone call! DRM: What use is a phone call, if you are unable to speak?
First of all, the reply before your's didn't see it as a weak analogy, he made a good point. Second, bandwidth is just as essential to internet use as air is to life. Third, bandwidth isn't that difficult to create and only costs as much money as it does because companies are creating regional monopolies. Fourth, that being said, bandwidth could very easily become just as limitless as air should these monopolies dissolve, and finally, capping users who use "too much" bandwidth is wrong. The ISPs should expand the amount of bandwidth available if they're encountering a shortage. If they honestly cannot afford that kind of expansion, then and only then does capping become moral in my eyes. And I, being the subscriber to what I consider a fairly capped ISP, am no hypocrite.
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
So how about you buy your own apartment then? The landlord is loaning you a place to live, usually at a fairly decent price, so why wouldn't you have to pay for it?
To quote futurama:
Professor: "Get off my property!"
Hippy: "You can't own property, man!"
Professor: "I can, but then I'm not a penniless hippy."
Of course the po-lice wouldn't do anything: you were fucking trespassing.
No, they weren't trespassing. Tenant didn't pay their rent, therefor they don't belong there. Sorry, there are taxes on property and if you don't pay you get the fuck out.
You know, landlords ought to have been strung up in the revolutionary war. It's a fucking shame. People whine and whine and whine about taxes and levies and "without representation." And we've got these illegitimate owners of the places people live.
Illegitimate? They bought the property with their own money, I'd say that's fairly legitimate. The "illigitimate" ones are the squatters who try and stay in said apartment after they stopped paying their rent.
You make money by doing what? Nothing. You have title ona piece of land, that's it. You're a piece of shit, you belong in jail you stupid fucking tyrant.
Upkeep, mowing the lawn and such. That and like I said before, taxes aren't cheap. So, you pay to live there like anyone else should. You don't have good credit so you can pay them to live there.
Tyrant? Is anyone forcing you to rent? No? That's what I thought. Either buy a house or stfu and work for a living hippy.
If the ISP has not given any clause in the their agreement, how is this even legal? Especially if they say unlimited usage. If they feel that a usage above a certain limit is hampering their business then price it appropriately. Say that upto a certain gb its covered by a monthly payment beyond that it is a certain amount to be paid per gb of download after that. And to those who say cable is subsidized so we should pay more, frankly that's bull. I as an end user want a certain quality at a certain price. If it is not offered I go to some other provider. If no provider offers it I look for another solution and so on. Market forces, demand, supply, consumer is king, etc.; the core principles of capitalism. And these companies know it. Which is why none of them will state the restriction i suggested above. They are scared that they will lose their consumers. so they are trying to be decidely devious and hope that majority of their consumers will not notice. And most probably majority of them will not. But they should not be allowed to get away with this. Bandwith usage will increase in time especially if video on demand or other stuff become really popular. Its like saying that in the old days when graphical content on the web came the ISP would dock they person who browsed too much graphical content instead of just using lynx to browse text pages. If they ahd happened there would be no technological innovation no internet as we know it today, we would probably be stuck with 9.6 kbps. Restrictions like this hamper growth in technologies, by artificially restricting its usage. And to the others who say what about the file sharers who who hog the network. Well frankly speaking it is their right. Legally the terms of contract have not indicated that there is to be a limit. By saying unlimited the ISP has accepted that the user can push it to any limits he chooses. IF HE WAS NOT PREPARED TO MEET SUCH A DEMAND HE SHOULD NOT MAKE SUCH A CLAIM. and besides why so much animosity versus file sharers? How would u treat someone who say sets up an apt repository or something.Or somebody who just t puts up a mirror site for OSS stuff? He is perfectly within his rights according to the terms of the agreement. It is equivalent of saying free XYZ with every purchase. (OFFER VALID ONLY TILL STOCKS of XYZ LAST). Notice the last line. If he didn't say that he would have to supply XYZ whether or not stocks are there with every purchase. And if he didn't he would get sued. And basically the ISP hasn't added that disclaimer. But they are trying to enforce it anyway. What the ISP must do is make it very clear there are some new regualtions and change their terms of service. They can't just decide one fine day that they will dock anyone who uses what is according them excess bandwith. another solution may be to say ok u can use bandwith for only one purpose, but i would say who the hell are u to restrict what i use the bandwith for. I am paying for the bandwith at the terms u specified and now out of the blue u decide that what i should use it for? Uh Uh. The water example well water is a natural resource, and natural resources are limited. Whereas if i am right cable bandwith can be increased if the ISP decides to switch to a new frequency or something. Of course the cost to him may not be worth it. But he can't complain of sour grapes just because some users decided to take his offer exactly as he offered it. You make ur bed u sleep on it. This isn't a public service a chaity or something this is a business and they are obviously making profit, or they would be pulling out of it. Instead of trying increasing their profit through what are the traditional means (technological improvements, economies of scale), they are trying to take advantage of all the fuss that has been generated by the RIAA over file swapping. I firmly believe that if this encouraged its not healthy, There is a general rot in the business world which seems to be increasing day by day. As consumers we better do something to check this or the entire country goes dow
This is it in a nutshell. I LOVE the 'toilet tank' description. :)
Years ago, I had a cable modem and that ISP ran around telling it's users don't do this, stop downloading that, no more than 64K bps in any 3 hour period (as if I could tell Microsoft to stop sending me MSFT CDs so quickly), etc.
But you see, there were no tools to do this then - not even for them. Now I suppose there are, although I haven't actually used them. Are you familiar with the kind of tools that ISPs and users can use to monitor their own usage? I suppose I'm talking about software?
Anyone?
Thanks!
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
If the ISP has not given any clause in the their agreement, how is this even legal? Especially if they say unlimited usage. If they feel that a usage above a certain limit is hampering their business then price it appropriately. Say that upto a certain gb its covered by a monthly payment beyond that it is a certain amount to be paid per gb of download after that.
And to those who say cable is subsidized so we should pay more, frankly that's bull. I as an end user want a certain quality at a certain price. If it is not offered I go to some other provider. If no provider offers it I look for another solution and so on. Market forces, demand, supply, consumer is king, etc.; the core principles of capitalism. And these companies know it. Which is why none of them will state the restriction i suggested above. They are scared that they will lose their consumers. so they are trying to be decidely devious and hope that majority of their consumers will not notice. And most probably majority of them will not. But they should not be allowed to get away with this. Bandwith usage will increase in time especially if video on demand or other stuff become really popular. Its like saying that in the old days when graphical content on the web came the ISP would dock they person who browsed too much graphical content instead of just using lynx to browse text pages. If they ahd happened there would be no technological innovation no internet as we know it today, we would probably be stuck with 9.6 kbps. Restrictions like this hamper growth in technologies, by artificially restricting its usage.
And to the others who say what about the file sharers who who hog the network. Well frankly speaking it is their right. Legally the terms of contract have not indicated that there is to be a limit. By saying unlimited the ISP has accepted that the user can push it to any limits he chooses. IF HE WAS NOT PREPARED TO MEET SUCH A DEMAND HE SHOULD NOT MAKE SUCH A CLAIM.
and besides why so much animosity versus file sharers? How would u treat someone who say sets up an apt repository or something.Or somebody who just t puts up a mirror site for OSS stuff? He is perfectly within his rights according to the terms of the agreement.
It is equivalent of saying free XYZ with every purchase. (OFFER VALID ONLY TILL STOCKS of XYZ LAST). Notice the last line. If he didn't say that he would have to supply XYZ whether or not stocks are there with every purchase. And if he didn't he would get sued.
And basically the ISP hasn't added that disclaimer. But they are trying to enforce it anyway.
What the ISP must do is make it very clear there are some new regualtions and change their terms of service. They can't just decide one fine day that they will dock anyone who uses what is according them excess bandwith.
another solution may be to say ok u can use bandwith for only one purpose, but i would say who the hell are u to restrict what i use the bandwith for. I am paying for the bandwith at the terms u specified and now out of the blue u decide that what i should use it for? Uh Uh.
The water example well water is a natural resource, and natural resources are limited. Whereas if i am right cable bandwith can be increased if the ISP decides to switch to a new frequency or something. Of course the cost to him may not be worth it. But he can't complain of sour grapes just because some users decided to take his offer exactly as he offered it. You make ur bed u sleep on it. This isn't a public service a chaity or something this is a business and they are obviously making profit, or they would be pulling out of it. Instead of trying increasing their profit through what are the traditional means (technological improvements, economies of scale), they are trying to take advantage of all the fuss that has been generated by the RIAA over file swapping. I firmly believe that if this encouraged its not healthy, There is a general rot in the business world which seems to be increasing day by day. As con
Actually I was thinking he'd be best leaving the pot, along with a nice note:
"Well, since you're dealing pot from my building, I have a sneaking suspicion your rent has gone up 500%"
Sincerely,
the guy with photos of your apartment full of pot.
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
I can't really prove it.
Scenario: I am probably one of their top downloaders, with 24/7 downloads from edonkey (english originals of TV shows that I cannot get where I live). Anyway, after many days of downloading, sometimes my line will "die". It is still active and I still get a few packets, but it's really a trickle. If I reconnect to get a new IP, everything works fine unless I restart high bandwidth apps. Then it will die again. The only solution is to let my edonkey rest for a week or two, then everything will work as expected.
It can be reproduced, but of course it's difficult to figure out when exactly it will occur. There are really only two explanations: A bug, or bandwidth capping. My ISP claims not to "filter" anything. I really don't believe in a bug but I cannot discount the notion, of course.
Still, I've stayed with them and I will stay there. The cap, if it is one, must be set VERY high, and otherwise the connection and service is pretty decent.
So, to sum it up: It shouldn't come to anyone's surprise that ISPs will be doing this to protect themselves. Of course, if I were to get annoyed by my ISPs actions I'd file a lawsuit against them. If they sell you a 1Mbit flatrate, and it turns out to be limited, I am sure a very simple, straight forward case for false advertising or something similar could be made.
Since I moved from Canada back to Australia, I now pay AUD$99 (maybe CDN$90) per month for an ADSL link that gives me 50 KB/s down, 13 KB/s up, on a good day.
There are cheaper options, but most are volume-capped (usually 3-6 GB/month), whereas my ISP uses "unlimited", prioritised traffic (based on previous 30 days usage).
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
You really miss the point here, and it's quite obvious you never worked in telecommunications.
For starters, a T1/T3 connection is full duplex. That requires a higher strength of signal on your end plus additional error correction. The equipment required on each end is more expensive than cable/DSL.
With DSL/High Speed Cable, you get no bandwith guarantees. You get a max speed, and if it bogs down, you just have to live with it because there is no guarantee of Quality of Service (QoS). That is the main reason DSL/High speed cable is sooo much cheaper than a dedicated T1/T3.
When you purchase/lease a T1/T3, your contract specifies minimum QoS. A minimum guaranteed bandwith, and if that bandwith drops below that amount X times in the month (X is determined by the contract), you get a refund.
For this reason, dedicated T1/T3 lines require a significant amount of extra monitoring and maintenence to ensure the company doesn't lose out due to bad QoS. I used to work in the control center of WorldCom in Tulsa, and part of my job was to monitor T3 circuits.
That monitoring costs money (my salary, monitoring equipment, software) and that is part of the cost of the cost of the T1/T3.
Your DSL/Cable connection at its peak might very well be faster than a T1, but you have no guarantees that bandwith will stay that way.
Yes, DSL runs over existing copper, BUT you must be within a certain distance of the Central Office, or your connection speeds plummet. (That distance is getting bigger with new technologies, but it is still a limiting factor.)
Fiber over the local loop is just not a possibility. There are just too many local loops and no real incentive for anyone to lay all that expensive fiber (expensive meaning way more than free lines already in the ground).
After the telco bust, do you really think companies want to lay all that fiber to replace millions of local loops? There are still places in rural oklkahoma with old tar paper covered copper lines in the ground. When it rains hard, their phone service is horrible (if working at all.)
Next time know what you are talking about before posting.
Main Entry: backup
1 a : one that serves as a substitute or support b : musical accompaniment
2 : an accumulation caused by a stoppage in the flow
3 : the act or an instance of backing up a computer's hard disk
4 : the term for an illegal unlicensed copy of an electronic medium used by warez kiddies in a sad attempt to avoid using the word 'piracy'.
Is it actually so easy to implement this on the provider side? Do switches have the processing capacity to count every passing packet (possibly 100000 per second), and determine what to do with a packet depending on whether the user is marked as capped in some database?
Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
as a @home/Comcast/ATTBI/Back to Comcast cable user I've seen great (@home) not so great (ATTBI) and downright crap (what I have now) I just think it's kind of odd that this 'cap' comes out on the heels of Comcast being the 1st of the bunch of providers who hold my monopolized area (no DSL/Fiber/Wireless) to release a tiering system (Regular 1.5mb down /256 up and "Pro" 3.5mb down /384 up) .... I'm guessing they want to save some bandwidth for the people who are willing to shell out another 50.00 a month ($99.95) for something we had 4 years ago when @home was in town.
... we pay twice as much for what would probably be around the same speeds we're getting now anyway.
:)
They'll throw in 5 "Static" Addresses for you (Their disclaimer: 5 Persistent IP Addresses- As a result of Network enhancements or upgrades, it is possible for your IP address to change periodically. We will be unable to notify you of an IP address change)
Other gotchas: Actual speeds may vary and are not guaranteed. Many factors affect download speed...Available in Comcast wired and serviceable areas only. Service may not be available in all areas. Use is subject to Comcast High-Speed Internet Subscriber Agreement (and when installed in a business location, the Comcast High-Speed Internet Pro Addendum). Up to 5 computers may be connected to the service and no servers may be installed on the service.
So basically, they still don't want us to use our routers for more than 5 computers, and still won't let us have servers, and and and
Until they spank all those bandwidth hogs!
If anyone upgrades to this Pro deal in 95843 Sacramento County, let me know what kind of speeds you get. I'm curious.
Home broadband is dirt cheap for what you get.
You cant be serious?
Cost of OC3: $300/mo, plus $4/Gig, plus $2000/km to CO for installation in YOUR home.
Cost of T1: $1300, 100 GB per month included, $6/Gig over, plus $2000 installation.
Cost of ADSL: $34.95/mo, 6 GB limit, $10/Gig over. No installation fee.
Having a job to pay the piddly $34.95/mo: priceless.
There are some things money can't buy. For everything else, there's Mastercard. Accepted everywhere but your mom's place.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
About 1%. So 99% of Comcast customers have nothing to worry about. If you look at the threads on DSLR, where this whole thing started, you will notice that it's a small minority of people bitching about the fact that they can't leave their connections "pedal to the medal" or at least partially going 24/7. The people who got the letters appear to have been using 100's - multiple 100's of gigs per month, combined with significant upload.
It'a all very nebulous, and no one knows for sure how much they were uploading or downloading. So the problem is that we don't really have any cold hard facts - other than that if you are using your internet connection to the point that it is affecting those around you, at least in theory, you will be notified. That's what the deal has always been, it just hasn't been enforced.
We are not talking about someone who downloads 75 gigs a month; we are more than likely talking 3 digits - 100's of gigs per month. Remember, this is a cable network, this is not FTTH. Each 6 Mhz cable channel running at QAM 64 is 27 Mbps down, and the newer QAM 256 is something like 36Mbps down. Upload is probably somewhere between 3Mbps and 10 Mpbs depending. This is being shared by a couple hundred people or so.
It's not about a limit. It has nothing to do with a limit. The only limit is that you can't use your connection in a way that interferes with network capacity, and something that is streaming 24/7 does affect the peak network capacity whenever those peaks hit. Intermittent downloading is different than unattended use. Simply claiming a portion of network capacity on a 24/7 basis is a lot different than using the network when you need to download a new Linux distrubution or something. It has to do with interfering with the network. It's as simple as that. At least that's the perspective that Comcast is coming from.
Most of the Comcast customers have absolutely nothing to worry about. It's as simple as that. And if I were a reporter, I would be a _little_ more careful about my sources. I wonder if the reporter actually spoke to "Keith", or did he just read the DSLR threads.
It's a good question why there aren't limits. No one at comcast seems to know about any kind of limits. People who are interfering with the network capacity are getting letters. Interfering with the network capacity has nothing to do with a download limit. Those are two different issues entirely.
I still have yet to see any hard verifiable evidence that someone who has downloaded less than 100 gigs per month has gotten any kind of warning whatsoever. It's certainly not as big of a problem as some people make it out to be.
i have yet to see anyone make a complete copy of a ferarri F355 in less than a second with no costs and no materials involved whatsoever. get your head out of the 19th-early 20th century ecconomics and mabye, just mabye, then open your eyes. working for 2$ an hour while being fed drugs just to keep a job to pay 400$ rent a month, while starving myself because i couldn't afford food while saving for university tuition and the riaa has the balls to charge 40$(of course, this being without tax...) per fucking cd? thats insane! thats working a 20 hour sweat-until-you-faint shift for one hour of music, which is mostly sampled off of other cds...that cost .25 cents to manufacture, .10$ to the artist...and the rest goes to TRYING TO CONVINCE ME THAT I WANT TO BUY IT?!!! i dont want my money to be spent in making my life worse. period.
honestly? i myself am done with all the riaa. with some few exceptions, i am in the future going to get most of my music through p2p/radio, and legal/independant ones at that.and ill be laughing when most of the riaa's catalog succombs to bit rot as no one has 320KHz 64 bit backups handy of their entire catolog. or when some enterprising induvidual finds their warehouses and lights them on fire.
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
Thanks to our 50% government owned monopoly, broadband and bandwidth in any form is horribly expensive. Most ISP's that have lasted more than 6 months here impose caps of some form or another on data transfer (for AU$90 a month, I get 8 gigabytes of data download and free upload at 256/64k, not a bad deal). ISP's have sometimes tried implementing rolling limits, usually along the lines of 'your transfers must not exceed 25% of the last three days average transfer', but these generally have a bad name due to the difficulty involved in working out exactly how much you can shift.
[clever sig]
Are you allowed to carry them holstered when you're cycling to work? It's unlikely.
I've had crapcast HSI since january 2000, with the exception of a few minor outtages i've had no trouble. When my second modem started getting quirky, (the first had already fried, they replaced no charge), a call to them and a day of intermittent service found that the cable modem had a defective power plug (RCA cable modem, 4 prong thingy) that had been known about for MONTHS, this modem, BTW had the nack for resetting if you so much as touched the thing. they replaced it with a SA Webstar and it's been stable ever since, as stable as my linux router. I run KaZaa, only a few hours at a go when i want something (during which time it uploads stuff), but the box it's on hates it (PII 266, 256MB win2kPro) as it sucks CPU cycles. Most of my downloading is done with BitTorrent, during the day, i cap the uploads at 10k/s (the entire line grinds to a halt otherwise while BT is blowing packets 30k/s upstream (max cap, also slows the downstream due to the half duplex nature of the beast). I would switch to DSL if it was cheap, but it isn't, a friend of mine has a 768K SDSL line through IJ.net, runs several web servers including 2 of my own (pay him $35 a month for it) and it costs him $150/mo for said service. granted it's static IP (why mainstream providors dont do static is beyond me... oh right, 90% of users cant even to winipcfg... granted comcast's idea of static is 1 IP per MAC address on their network, so swapping which NIC is the WAN link in my router is the only way to change the thing (convenient for getting around IP bans ). I RARELY pull 300k/down 30k/up and the worst thing i serve is a 5 person teamspeak server for personal use (beats the crap outta the phone for group chats).
Logistical Chaos Officer http://www.slagg.org - LAN Gaming in Sarasota FL,USA
Or, let everyone use all availible bandwidth. However, each person is allowed to have x amount of bandwith no matter what. So, if it is used by someone else above and beyond their guaranteed amount, they get that bandwith from them.
So, for example, if 10 units (unit being some amount of bits per second) are allowed per person, and there are 1000 people on the line, the line is capable of supporting 10,000 units. If only one person is online, he should be able to use all 10,000 units. 10 guaranteed, and the other 9,990 from the pool. If another logs on, they get their guaranteed 10 units, leaving 9,980 in the pool, which is split amongst those who want to use it.
I believe sprint does this with their microwave connections. Each person gets a timeslice, and they only allow a certain amount of people per server. However, when noone's logged on, you get much more bandwith.
Have you read my journal today?
Yes. People who cost them too much money are sent letters. The letters say, "change your usage patterns so that we have a mutually beneficial business relationship, or we will terminate our business relationship."
That is how business works. Welcome to consumer law 101.
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
I agree. I've run into a lot of people over the years who seem determined to constantly look for some kind of loophole, an angle, an edge... They don't seem to be willing to cooperate with society, it's all about them and them only.
The boomcar guys are so annoying, aren't they? I take one consolation, though: they are slowly making themselves deaf. Remember, as loud as the music seems to you and I, they're basically sitting inside an echo chamber with the speakers only a couple of feet away from their ears. That's devastating on the tissues of the ear... I think they're nuts, personally.
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
They refused to do anything since she hadn't seen the thrower.
Ha Ha! You can bet your sweet ass if someone threw a knife at a cop they'd be busting the fucking door down, right now...
If someone threw a knife at the cop, he would have seen it.
What was your point again?
Cops are normal human beings, just like you and me. They, too, learn what they should say in the common situations they experience every day on the job.
Of course any cop would have seen the person throwing the knife. Any cop who hasn't yet learned enough about America law enforcement to know that he did see the person throwing the knife frankly is not smart enough to be a cop.
Judge: Did you see the accused throw the knife
Cop: Uhh.... not really.
Judge: WTF? Can I talk to you in the back?
five minutes later...
Judge: Did you see the accused throw the knife?
Cop: Yes.
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
Yeah, *noooobody* had anywhere to live before landlords... everyone just ran around in circles at night.
To quote me: "Only idiots quote TV."
I don't know why some packet shaper hasn't come along to do this. The idea is simple, probably somewhat complex to actually impliment, but not too hard I would think.
Basicly, everyone has a "priority ranking" in the system based on IP address. Your priority rank is the inverse of your usage averaged over some time period. So if you you use it a lot, your priority is lower down to some threshold. If the pipe is not busy, and you're the only one on, you get all of it regardless of priority. If someone else comes on, they get higher priority than you when they are using the net. This helps evenly distribute bandwidth to many clients, while not letting one big user harm the connection for the light users. But when there aren't that many users, the heaver users get big bandwidth. This way, everyone gets what they want and the heavy users are still happy without caps and worrying about per-meg charges and such. They just get lower speeds durring times when the network is congested. The light users see a blazingly fast connection all the time even if some P2P user has thier P2P app running 24/7.
Then they should cease advertising unlimited service. Or does your "Consumer Law 101" course not address false and misleading advertising?
Call (206) 338-5780 COLLECT for information about a genuine BA, BS, MA, MS, MBA, or Ph.D.
I am not familiar with the "unlimited service" word you use. Could you please define it? Are you perhaps confusing this term "unlimited service" with the totally unrelated term "unlimited bandwidth?"
/dev/random. When I discovered the transfer wasn't completed within a few minutes, I'd sue the bastards for breach of contract.
I think it would be funny if some company put "unlimited bandwidth" in a contract. I think it would be downright hilarious if it was included in a $35/month contract.
I'd immediately try to tranfer several hundred thousand terabytes of
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
The bandwidth is already limited, so the "unlimited" must refer to time. But those who received the letters couldn't have used more than the cable modem was capped at, so they must have violated the contract with respect to time. If you got one, I'd say sue.
Call (206) 338-5780 COLLECT for information about a genuine BA, BS, MA, MS, MBA, or Ph.D.
The second "they" in that post should refer to the cable company, of course--sorry for the ambiguity.
Call (206) 338-5780 COLLECT for information about a genuine BA, BS, MA, MS, MBA, or Ph.D.
You sure you're not saturating your upstream? The inability to send ACKs timely will kill download speeds.
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
Pretty sure. Killing edonkey and waiting does not help at all. Also, it's not a decrease in speed but a loss of 99%+ of all incoming packets. It also doesn't explain why it works just fine for weeks.
You could ring them up and say "Gosh, it looks like I can hardly download anything at all--it's so slow!" as innocently as you can and see if they admit to the practice :).
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
I tried that, they claimed "no problems".
It's really not such a big deal since the limit must be set very highly. And I can't *prove* it... Also there is no other acceptable DSL provider where I live. Still, the practice is disturbing.
Only idiots quote themselves?
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." - Thomas Jefferson
I was making fun of his language construction-- I've never said that. It would be the same as me saying that, though.
No buts it a mutual relationship. College kids and people under 30 don't always get a house. So landlords need tenants and people who can't afford a house need an apartment (or its their parent's house/street).
I have heard some stories of landlords being scumbags but I am pretty sure that there are 10x more scumbag tenants (who skip out in the middle of the night) to the number of landlords who don't fix shit.