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."

Comments

Throttle it.

[grub]

.. but you can't help but wonder how much of this is in response to RIAA's subpoenas. Interestingly enough, there is no set limit, but just a subjective limit of 'more than the average user.'

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.

Re:Throttle it.

[Torinaga-Sama]

Someone has to be a grub fanboy, so I suppose it will be me.

He is right. Tinfoil hat and all. The problem is really noticable on residential Cable networks.

When I am actually reading text in a browser noting upsets me more than having to wait for the next page, where on the otherhand if I am downloading something that takes an hour, an additional 15 mintues would not even be noticable (as I usually get up and go something else while doing that anyway)

Also I think there are a lot of people on file sharing networks that are pack rats, they download everything they think might even be vaguly interesting even though a lot of it they will never use it.

This f's my ping and I hate that too. :-)

Re:Throttle it.

[danila]

Wow, that was good. :) You almost persuaded me to uninstall eMule and KaZaA. :) Still, the common sense took me back over. ;)

P2P doesn't create much noise. Actually you can easily get the whole traffic picturee simply by measuring your own searching and download traffic. You'll see. Dedicated server might be a good idea in theory, but the truth is, it's not so bulletproof. Just look at Steam and it's recent problems and compare it with eDonkey2000. Do you think eDonkey will slow to crawl when Half-Life 2 is released? I don't. ;) But anyway, P2P was specifically designed to avoid the need for servers. It's not its fault, it's part of the specification. And claiming that P2P users consume more electricity is just plain nonsense. But you might want trying to sell this idea to RIAA for their PR^H^H FUD campaign. :)

Now back to topic. When P2P was created, there simply wasn't a feasible alternative authorised by labels. To deny labels' partial responsiblility for the emergence of P2P is to ignore reality. Today there are such alternative (still not perfect) and people gradually start using them. But the problem is that users are now accustomed to another consumption patterns and labels still try to ignore that. People want a more active role in selection of the music. They want to taste much more than before and only then buy what they like. Labels still can't face this reality and continue pushing their 15$ CDs, now copy-protected. That's simply not what consumers want and in the end consumers always win.

May be, if labels had offered online music services in 1995, P2P would not emerge and online piracy would remain confined to Usenet, IRC and private FTP. But now people know the taste of music without limits and nobody will be able to take it away. At least I hope so.

Re:Throttle it.

[acidrain69]

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.

This is COMPLETELY inaccurate. First of all, you are trying to DISTRIBUTE something to people, they are going to need to play it on something. So it's a $100,000 box AND all the players that will use it, which includes computers, DVD players, and portable devices.

And who says P2P is inefficient? Bit Torrent seems DAMN efficient to me. The more people downloading, the faster it goes. Compare this to a client-server model, where you have a huge amount of bandwidth available to the server, but it is prone to a cyclical-usage pattern. Busy during prime time, and very low usage at night.

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.

Bullshit. That is an artificial construct. You need an upstream and a downstream to do anything useful on the internet. TCP/IP requires it, UDP doesn't.

ISP's aren't exactly suffering from this. Why do you think it's called ADSL? A stands for Asynchronous. That's why people have a much higher downstream than upstream. It's PRIMARY use is as a consumer, but you can't guarentee that, nor should you. If they have a problem with this, they can cut the upstream down further. I only have 128kbit upstream on my cable modem anyway, and a 3.0MBit downstream. Very lopsided.

Re:Throttle it.

[BryanL]

You are making a distinction between free content and paid content. That is really irrelevant. The article makes no distinction. It may be that high end users that are being asked to cut back are paying for their media content. Further, the poster you are replying to is making a valid point that DSL/ Cable services are sold with enticement to use bandwidth intensive media (free or paid, they make no distinction either.) Now they are capping usage or requesting users to cut back. That smells of a bait and switch to me. While I agree that the "all things free" mindset needs to change, what are ISP going to do when people pay for their content?

Re:Throttle it.

[shepd]

>Oh I see, YOU are setting the price.

That's what consumers do in a capitalist society. Sure, the shopkeep is free to set prices as he wishes, but it doesn't count if it doesn't sell. And things are only sold at prices consumers are willing to pay. Ergo, consumers set the price.

>Where do we draw the line?

*We* don't draw any lines. That's the RIAAs job. One could say they're trying, and failing horribly.

Perhaps they need to ask what people would be willing to pay and see if it's profitable. If they ask me, it certainly is. If they ask you, well, then there'll be no online music, ever.

>I said that piracy (or, to be charitable, whatever you want to call it) is an INDICATOR of nothing except the convenience of and lack of consequences for getting something that costs money without paying for it.

Okay, and I disagree with that, for reasons already stated.

>I've got an idea, maybe the RIAA is trying to become like Ferrari. Their new motto: "You want the cool music, the status symbol music, you gotta pay for it."

Sounds great! Did you know that Ferrari makes almost the least amount of cars as compared to any other factory?

Comparing the RIAA to Ferrari is like suggesting your high-school garage band is trying to become the hottest, most expensive, most sought after band on the planet. Okay, you can have delusions of grandeur, but lets get real. The music coming from the RIAA is common. It isn't special in any way. If the RIAA cut production to, oh, say 100 CDs a year, they probably *COULD* sell them for a few thousand each.

>Who am I to argue? I'm a consumer and I can buy / not buy what I see fit, but where is it any of my business to tell the RIAA what to do? "No RIAA, you can't sell CDs that cost this much, you have to sell them cheaper, because I said so."

Exactly! Now your getting the hang of it! Bartering is a fundamental part of capitalism. I'm so happy you understand that!

You see, I run a computer business. If you walked in here and said, "That price for that item, it's too high. I'd give you $xxx for it." I'd consider it. I'd look at my cost for it. Then I'd tell you "Yeah, I can do that." or I'd say "Nah, sorry, can't do that." I wouldn't say "If you don't pay $yyy for it, I'll sue you. Or you can buy a knock off from me at *ever* so slightly less. But if you sell that knockoff, I'm sending goons after you." I'd never survive.

>Why is it that the pricing practices of the RIAA must conform to your mathematical formula?

Uhhh, because I'm using their own data?

>Why do they have to make sense, or be based on anything at all?

Because it is illegal to sell items below their cost. Also, it is generally illegal to run a corporation for the purpose of *not* making a profit, unless you're registered to do so.

>If I'm whoever is in charge at a record company, and I want to charge $52.99 for the next Nelly album (let's say I'm a total dazed cokehead), why should I not be allowed to do this?

Because you have shareholders and this will destroy your profit line. There's no "in charge" at such businesses. Sure, there's a president. He won't be president for long if all the investors jettison their stock.

And if you want to charge that price, again, it isn't illegal, because it's certainly above cost. However, expect that within 1 week you'll be out of business.

>Let's say I want to outsource the printing of all my CD booklets to some print shop in Tibet where each booklet is individually blessed by the Dalai Lama, and as a consequence, each booklet costs me $152, causing the price I charge for the final product to increase to $169.99.

Go ahead and enjoy!

I really don't see where this has a bearing on my argument, though. What are you getting at? I only see this as strengthening my original argument:

They have failed to provide a popular product (while I like emusic, rarely is there a lot o

Ass hats

[mao che minh]

Those were the first two words that came to mind. Ass hats.

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.

Makes sense...

[Anonymous Coward]

Give more bandwidth to the people who don't download anything and less to the people who do...

Why is it always a devious plot?

[DragonMagic]

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 . . .

Re:Why is it always a devious plot?

[MKalus]

One word: Internet Radio.

Let's assume right now I am listening to it 8 hours a day, 8 days a week (at 128KBit/s), that means I am "downloading" roughly 13.1GB a month.

Now add some ISO's and other stuff and let's say I am at around 15GB a month.

Of course, that's not 90GB, but still, more than the 5GB the "unlimited" one is giving you, no?

More than the average user

[Fuseboy]

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!

Effect of RIAA's war on piracy?

[Ophidian P. Jones]

The article submitter mentioned his theory that the RIAA is behind this latest ISP tactic to impose new, fuzzy bandwidth limits on their customers. While I don't doubt that at all, (lots of fingers in the pie with those guys...) think of the backlash if the RIAA is 'successful' in their current endavours to end illegal copying and filesharing.

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.

Re:Download caps hurt Linux!

[11223]

And I bet you've seen how Comcast defines "abuse", right? @Home used to shut people off for complaining about the service on the newsgroups (and posting documents revealing their ineptness), claiming they "cross-posted to too many groups" - something they had never done. AT&T even shut down someone's home phone service for this. It's too bad the old @Home newsgroups are gone - there was some really scary shit going on then.

They're not as nice as you think they are. They can and will shut people down arbitrarily.

Re:old news, Comcast is really sucky lately.

[hackwrench]

There should be a class action lawsuit in the works.

Stop being a troll

[Anonymous Coward]

" 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.

Re:Stop being a troll

[SirChive]

Are you an absolute idiot? You admit that their terms of service give you unlimited downloads. Unlimited means without any limits. Nobody is a "freaky weirdo" because they actualy use their "unlimited" service as much as possible.

This is the way it is...

[Crusty Oldman]

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.

We've seen this before

[mugnyte]

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.

You must be joking?

[Srin Tuar]

Home broadband is dirt cheap for what you get.

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.

Re:You must be joking?

[jasonditz]

I can see where he's coming from though.

I'm paying $40 a month for cable modem service right now, two years ago I was paying $30, and it was twice as fast, and there weren't any restrictions on what I could do with my bandwidth.

Everything else in the technology world is getting faster, cheaper, and less restrictive. Broadband is going to opposite way.

In the wake of Isabel...

[alispguru]

... 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...

I'm all for it

[realmolo]

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.

Opposite of progress

[ChicagoBiker]

Doesn't this just go in the opposite direction of progress?

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.

You've watched too much TV.

[bs_02_06_02]

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?

It is fair pricing, .

[Essron]

I know we are all used to a relatively low access fee, and psychologically its difficult to accept a price hike, but really we have been enjoying an artificially low price due to firece competition and a general lack of knowldege around a newly emerging market. If 1% of your users are consuming 28% of your capacity, they should be charged more. This trend will continue and the new pricing is the only way to stay in business. Capacity issues aside, such pricing may be necessary simply to differentiate higher priced business services from residential access. The prices were poorly set from the beginning.

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...

Re:Broadband is already pretty cheap...

[neurojab]

Just to be devil's advocate... Gym memberships work much the same way as broadband access. A certain set of shared resources are used by those that show up, but the majority of the profit comes from the people that buy a membership, but don't actually go to the gym. Now in the broadband scenario, the low end market (people who don't use the net very often) is cornered by simple dialup. People buy broadband so they have a much bigger pipe to the internet. Why do they buy it? Because they want to use it. I find it hard to sympathize with providers that never thought of that. If my gym decided it could sell more memberships if its members used less resources, and started telling me which days I was allowed to appear and which hours I could use the facilities, I'd switch to a different gym. Likewise, there's no reason to put up with ISPs that don't figure out their business plan up front and offer a service they can actually provide.

Re:old news, Comcast is really sucky lately.

[poot_rootbeer]

"Please note that we will be inspecting your cable outlets on Monday with your landlords permission, please move all furniture out of the way."

I don't know if it's the same everywhere, but where I live the cable company only owns the cable lines until they enter the building where you live. The internal wiring is the homeowner's to do whatever he or she wants with.

As an apartment renter, you need to know that Comcast has no right to enter your apartment without your permission, and your landlord has no right to grant permission on your behalf unless the entry is for essential maintenance. Given that Comcast's maintenance responsiblities end at the outside wall of the building, it's doubtful they have a legitimate case to 'inspect' your outlets.

If they continue to give you grief about this, research your local tenant laws and speak to a lawyer if necessary.

Re:Been "victim" of this for years.

[JFMulder]

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.
Yes you're right, but honestly, I don't think you'd find it really viable to send a 5 gig video file to someone. I recently uploaded 100 megs to someone and it took an hour. Even if I had 10 times the speed, it would still take me around half a day to send the file. But you're right, it can be done. Now, I don't agree that ISP should not put a cap because one out of a ten thousand people are sending 5 gig video files. It's like saying stores should always have size 18 shoes in stock because some people wear size 18 shoes.

What if I want to subscribe to divx.com or one of those places that makes movies available for download?
Well, I guess a streamed movie is about 700 megs. So technically, I could download as many as 20 movies in a month, which I bet is a lot more than what the majority of people are going to rent in a 3 to 6 month period. Again, this is a pretty hardcore use of your connection.
Or iTunes or rhapsody or streaming radio, for that matter.
While I highly doubt you can BUY 15 gigs of music in one month, I think streaming music is pretty much falls in the same category as multiplayer gaming on the Internet, as a steady flow of data is coming to and going from your PC. And I agree with you, that is the kind of usage than is probably prohibitted by download caps. I haven't done the maths, but I'm sure you could stream more than a few gigs a week.

But of course, counter argumenting each of your point is useless, since we probably have different opinions of the subject and you're more than likely to come up with some other clever idea but. There will always be people who have special needs (even streaming music for 8 hours a day should be considered a special need), and that why my cable modem provider has an uncapped service, and it costs 60.00CAN$/month compared to the normal 39.99CAN$/month. Now if others ISPs follow, everyone will be happy.

Re:OT: Landlords

[bellings]

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.

Re:They didn't deliver...

[IM6100]

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.

Ironically, Earthlink recently did what is effectively the reverse. They imposed volume caps on their Usenet servers. Basically, you can download x Gigs per month of binary content off in-house Usenet servers, then your connection to the servers is severely capped for the rest of the month.

Any determined Usenet binary enthusiast is just going to subscribe to a third-party Usenet server, and now instead of consuming essentially 'free' for Earthlink to provide, they're going to be consuming huge amounts of bandwidth travelling off the Earthlink network, which is going to likely cost Earthlink MORE to provide to said enthusiast.

Re:This isn't "degredation of service." RTFA, MF.

[vegetablespork]

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.

Re:OT: Landlords

[Metaldsa]

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.

Re:And I should have a pony

[shostiru]

Last time I checked our LEC couldn't handle SDSL and I don't even know that they're tarriffed to offer it here. And we can't guarantee a CIR or uptime on DSL even if we wanted to, given the constraints of the LEC's equipment. And then there's that little problem that most of our customers do NOT live close to the switch.

We do guarantee CIR and uptime on T1s, we also provide 24/7 NOC support (which one of the more expensive chunk of our costs), we don't limit bandwidth or filter ports.

DSL (and other consumer-grade) port-charge pricing is *always* based upon average consumption, not on the idea that you'll saturate the line. If we ever run shy on bandwidth I suspect we'll start traffic shaping or rate limiting consumer-grade lines. We're no different than any other ISP in this regard.

(Oh, and a T1 in the states is 1.544Mbps)

Ah, but they do!

[kevinatilusa]

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.