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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,
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
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.
Give more bandwidth to the people who don't download anything and less to the people who do...
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
...but the good news is, you pay the same low price for involuntarily downgraded service! Thanks for using Comcast! Have a nice day!
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?
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
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
1. sell service
2. don't deliver.
3. profit!
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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.
...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
Here's what Comcast Notice looks like.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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!
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...
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.
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