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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."
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
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
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
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....
When cable and DSL first came out no one heard of Napster let alone Kazaa or eMule.
When cable and DSL first came out, we were all being sold on the idea of video-on-demand and bandwidth-intensive rich media. The media companies never delivered on this promise, which is where Napster, Kazaa, and eMule came into the picture.
NO CARRIER
Here's what Comcast Notice looks like.
Here's the deal. From my experience working for an ISP and the IT dep't at a college, the top 1% are not just using a little more bandwidth than the majority. At my college, the top 1% were using over half the school's total bandwidth. At the ISP, I didn't see the numbers myself, but was told by the admin that it was pretty much the same situation there. I strongly suspect that it's the same deal going on here.
Comcast here is actually going for a very friendly solution. They aren't imposing hard caps, which is a good thing. This means that the ISP can judge the network conditions and adapt their caps to accomodate them. So if their average user starts using 20% less bandwidth, then their power users can use a little more. On the other hand, if their average user starts using more, then they can clamp their power users a little more. This is also far more flexible than traffic shaping software, which will probably be their next step.
Bullshit, telecom corps are not doing charity (which is what you seem to imply). Edonkey, gnutella and kazaa are pretty much driving subscriptions.
If my provider would start 'experimenting' with throttling on me, I'd start 'experimenting' with changing providers. Here in the Netherlands the trend is quite opposite BTW. In november my bandwidth will go up from 768kbps/128kbps (up from 512kbps/64kbps when I got adsl back in 2000) to 1Mbps/160kps to match similar increases in speed from the competition (the increase won't cost me anything). At the same time they are going to be even less strict in enforcing the fair use (as far as I know it only exists in name) policy they were hardly enforcing anyway.
There are now several hundreds of thousands of ADSL subscribers in the Netherlands (on a population of 16 million and competing with even more cable users). These people pay upwards from 30 euro per month. ADSL is pretty big business here, thanks to filesharing. Without filesharing, few people would have a need for the more expensive subscriptions. As it is now, these subscriptions are very popular.
Maybe in the US it is different because you have not deregulated the telecom market yet. That throttles competition and makes telecom companies lazy in upgrading their infrastructure and organizations. It took a while here too but since a few years, prices are dropping and several new, presumably profitable companies have started to offer their services in the telecom market. Compared to a few years ago, international calls are dirt cheap, prices of local calls have dropped significantly (still not free though) and mobile services have become so cheap that you see kids on elementary schools carying a cell phone.
Jilles
The media companies have delivered this. You can download music from a number of services including MP3.com (free), eMusic.com, listen.com, etc.. You can download movies from MovieLink.
The thing the media companies haven't delivered, and probably will never deliver, is free music or free full feature movies with no commercials. The media companies never promised that we would stop paying artisans for creating things.
Here are three free songs from a musician I know. You have to pay to get the full CD (ha, ha) it's an ad. It's a teenager trying to get cash by writing songs and playing a guitar.
I also do not ever recall any ISP saying that the subscription fee that you pay for bandwidth pays for the content.
I don't ever remember being sold on anything other than 4 or 5 times faster than the modem. I guess I am not naive enough to think that 256K is fast enough to deliver high quality video. It delivers music well...not video. It takes several hours to download a movie from MovieLink.
P2P is not about the music industry failing to provide. It is about people wanting music for free. P2P is not more efficient.
P2P is probably the least efficient way to deliver music. KaZaA creates incredible amounts of white noise as P2P servers ping each other. The economies of P2P are all about externalizing costs...not efficiency. It is about driving an extra mile to avoid paying for a product. Rather than an investor having to pay for a $100,000 box to delivering music and having to pay royalties to musicians, you have a 10,000 $1,000 boxes sitting around buring up electricity downloading pirated music.
A highpowered server in a server farm with large bandwidth pipes is substantially more efficient than several thousand P2P servers hooked to DSL. It is just that P2P externalizes all of its costs. Rather than paying for the creation of a product, the P2P community is willing to bear a much higher expense to get the stuff for free.
As for the ISP, P2P externalizes its expenses to the community. A P2P is both a publisher and an end user. Essentially, the person using P2P is trying to get the service of both a web host and an isp in the same subscription fee.
KaZaA and toxic waste disposal are all about trying to externalize costs.
So, is capping really THAT bad?
Ah yes, the old "i cant think how to use it so noone must be able to" argument.
What if I want to send video of my kids school play to my parents, ready for them to burn with their new DVD-R. There's my 3-5 gb of uploading right there.
What if I want to subscribe to divx.com or one of those places that makes movies available for download? Or iTunes or rhapsody or streaming radio, for that matter.
Broadband promises a media-rich experience, there's a ton of legitimate content out there. There'll only be more in the future. I don't pay 40 bucks a month for sporadic web browsing and email.
The problem with most capping policies is that the caps are arbitrary, and will slide lower and lower. Say the top 1% of bandwidth hogs use 30 gbs a month now, after they're gone the top users are using 25 gb a month, then 20, then 15. DirecPC lost a class action lawsuit for similar behavior.
If they cant deliver the service they promise for the price they offer, that's their problem, not mine. Let 'em go bankrupt.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
> I don't understand where the bandwidth costs are coming from for an ISP. The
/month for our connectivity to three different ISPs. This gave us three links of 1.54mbit/sec, which no single TCP connection would be able to exceed, but multiple TCP connections, or UDP/ICMP packets will take whichever route is best at the time, so may appear to be 4.5mbit/sec.
/month. THen you are given a contract that states how much bandwidth you are garenteed, and if the ISP fails that, they credit your account.
:P
> cables have been laid down right? How does it cost the ISP more to run them at
> max?
I used to run an ISP (dialup, but still) so can provide some authoritive numbers for you.
To get a carrier class T1 line (carrier class meaning you can push traffic 24/7 at the lines max, as well as do things such as BGP which are needed to be more than just a leaf on the internet) you get 1.54mbit/sec up and down for anywhere between $1200 and $3000 per month.
Also, you need at LEAST two T1's for redundancy alone.
So, we had 3 T1's at one point and total were paying around $6000
So we pay $6000/mo.
Dialup accounts are $15/mo.
This requires 400 dialup accounts just to pay for the bandwidth (let alone any other costs such as servers, staff, electricity, rent, etc.)
Now with dialup, you know all 400 wont be on at once, and if they tried alot will end up with busy signals.
Cable and DSL work a touch different, as they are 'always on'.
With a dialup who cant possibly exceed the hardware limits of a 56k modem, 400 modem users transfering data will only be about half of your total bandwidth, so your all OK.
But with broadband, you generally get more than 56k down, its usually closer to 1000k/sec or more.
So lets do some happy fun math with madeup numbers to see if this can be a little more clear.
Broadband user pays, oh lets say, $40/month (Ive seen $35 and $50, $40 seems a happy medium to me)
I dont have prices on T3's handy, so will stick with T1's, even though I can assure you a cable/dsl company would not do this if they had a customer base over one digit.
3 T1's cost $6000/mo and provide (for the most part) 4.5mbit/sec in both directions.
At $40/mo to the end user, you would need 150 customers just to pay for bandwidth.
150 cable customers at 1mbit each is 150mbit/sec.
So there is a huge problem here.
Either you charge $40/mo and all those users cant have full bandwidth because it simply isnt there, OR they raise the price to $1500/month to the end customer.
At $1500/mo to you, they only need 4 customers to pay back the $6000/mo, and 4 customers can share the 4.5mbit (assuming 1mbit each customer) and have not step on eachothers toes.
So really you can take your pick.
You can have cheap service at $40/mo and share it with a TON of other people and mostly not get your 'fair' share, or you can get garenteed service but pay $1500/mo.
BTW, an end usage T1 (IE for a home or business) will be at or under $1000
My T1 at home is a touch over $400/month total.
I get a Class-C of IPs (253 usable for machines) and can get more IPs by requesting, I can do anything with it that isnt illegal, and I am garenteed 1.54mbit/sec both ways.
Yes its 10 times what broadband users pay, but I get what I pay for and can enjoy it, instead of getting what you pay for and realize its almost nothing and then bitch about it on slashdot
Oh yea, and about your "The cables have been laid down right?" comment...
The ISPs dont own the cables that have been laid down, so no they can not do anything at all with them without 'renting' them from the phone co.
That part is called the loop, and is usually the cheapest part of the line.
I can get a T1 loop for around $200 (Price is based on distance from the CO in miles, added to a base fee.) Its the port charge (ISP charge at the other end) that is generally $1000 or more.
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
Shaw does cap, but it is not a hard one.
If you download 5-10GB/month, you will be well under their radar. Now, hit 50-60-100GB/month and you will get warned, warned again, then shut down (At least temporarily)
Internet infrastructure in Canada is actually pretty damn good, and readily available. Hell... I pay 29.00/month (Canadian) and can get 700+ KB/sec (NOT Kb) down. Sure, my upstream is lucky to pass 70 KB, but that still ain't too bad.
I am become Troll, destroyer of threads
What you're talking about has already been done by my ISP in Australia. They introduced their FlatRate plans when every other ISP with unlimited download plans was either changing them or going out of business. Their plans have remained sustainable. Since then, other providers have started up again with the unlimited plans, although not using Internodes priority system.
One unintended consequence is that any packets going through the priority system, even if they're at a high priority, are slowed down. In response to this, Internode has put most of the main gaming servers people use outside of the priority system.
Internode use CISCO routers and a homebrew software solution to manage all this stuff.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face