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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."
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
Give more bandwidth to the people who don't download anything and less to the people who do...
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
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 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.
>P2P is not about the music industry failing to provide.
It is, though. They have failed to provide a popular product (while I like emusic, rarely is there a lot of current top ten hits availible) in a format people like (iTunes DRM + AAC Mac only? Blech).
They have also failed to provide it at a reasonable price. According to the RIAA, when CDs were first made, they justified the price divide between CDs and casettes as an extra cost to produce CDs. According to them this almost doubled the cost of the product, from $8.99 to $17.99.
Therefore, considering a decent casette costs $2.00, the cost of a digital music download, which incurrs only a minor ($0.01) penalty for transfer should be $6.99 or less per album.
It isn't.
Also, with the lack of physical art a digital download has, and the reduced quality, another rebate should be made for the consumer. I propose $1.99. The price for an album online should therefore be $5.
But wait, media companies want to further denigrate their online music by introducing DRM and proprietary formats. I believe an album that cannot be resold should sell for half price, like most AS-IS sales on working items. The price for an online album is now $2.50.
Media companies have failed to bring to market goods that are cost representative.
P2P is all about trying to rationalize costs. While free is far less than consumers are willing to pay, it isn't free. The cost to the user is working for various marketing departments. A value which I say equals the proper cost of a legally downloaded album, $2.50.
Heavy piracy is always an indication of failed market attempts.
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