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Will ISPs Spoil Online Video?
mrspin writes "last100 writes: "With an ever greater amount of video being consumed online, many Internet users are in for a shock. There's a dirty little secret in the broadband industry: Internet Service Providers (ISPs) don't have the capacity to deliver the bandwidth that they claim to offer. One way ISPs attempt to conceal this problem is to place a cap of say 1GB per-month per user, something which is common in the UK for many of the lower-cost broadband packages on the market. Considering that a mere three hours viewing of Joost (the new online video service from the founders of Skype) would all but use up this monthly allowance, it's clear that lots of Internet users aren't invited to the party. But what about those who (like me) pay more for 'unlimited' broadband access? There shouldn't be a problem, right? Wrong." The article then goes on to discuss the recent trend of bandwidth throttling based on techniques such as packet shaping which punishes p2p traffic whether it's legitimate or not."
Demand goes up, supply stays the same: prices will rise. People will either pay a bit more for a good service (I would) or save and stay with the lower-bandwidth plans (most people would). Of course there's also the scenario where supply grows because suddenly the market is more profitable, so new investors enter it and drive the price down to where it was before; but this can never happen unless the gov't fully deregulates the market itself and we all know this will never happen.
Global warming is a cube.
The ISPs (Verizon, Comcast, AT&T, etc) see P2P as competition for services that they offer, either currently, or in the future. Why get video or other data for free (after having payed your ISP for access) when they can charge you for it, control what you get access to, and charge a premium for premium content? The ISPs by law can not examine what data is being transmitted without loosing common carrier status (at which point, they get a lot more government regulation). So they do the traffic shaping to get around the regulation issue while degrading any possible competition to their own premium services. This is what the whole net neutrality fight is really about. The ISPs want more money for selling you content. Claiming that they don't have enough bandwidth is just an excuse.
Here in the US, most of the services I've seen that offer unlimited bandwidth don't have a lower-cost option that offers limited bandwidth. If the market for un-throttled P2P bandwidth grows, perhaps the ISPs should offer tiered service. Personally, I don't mind the pay-as-you-go model. In short, I want a service that combines TV, radio, phone service, and internet access, and I want to only pay a $100/month fee. If this isn't enough to get the on-demand video I want, perhaps I'd consider that as a premium option, but frankly, $100/month seems like it should cover me for the kinds of realistic use that would be done in my house. Also, I sure-as-hell don't want to be locked into AT&T for all those services, and net neutrality in the form of non-discrimination against packets based on origin needs to be enforced.
Beer is proof that God loves us, and wants us to be happy.
Is web caching at the ISP not generally accepted? It would seem sites like YouTube would be very interested in caching their data remotely so their bandwidth can take a breather. If they're worried about statistics then perhaps just the video files are cached locally but the html and db requests are all going to YouTube's servers. Companies like YouTube and AOL or Comcast could both benefit greatly from such technology.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
Here in germany you can have slightly cheaper ISP that suck.
Or the slightly more expensive Telekom (T-Com) which rules.
According to my logs I never had bw issues and I'm leeching with the whole 6Mbit for at least 90% of 18 months straight now.
A friend is Arcor customer and everything sucks.
The problem isn't your ISP. It's your misguided sense for saving money. You have to invest sometimes or things will turn out to be cheap ans shitty.
Nobody has a problem paying for what they use. However, plans here in the US generally aren't sold as "x amount of data per month, then y amount of money for every z amount of data over x" but as "unlimited bandwidth until you stop paying us." Actually, I don't know of any broadband service (here broadband being defined as cable/dsl, since those two are the ones that a consumer is most likely to use) that advertises "x amount of data per month, then y amount of money for every z amount of data over x." The companies here in the states have severely screwed themselves. If they actually begin advertising "x amount of data per month, then y amount of money for every z amount of data over x," then there will be consumer outcry, because before they thought were getting "unlimited bandwidth." Even if they actually weren't, they thought they were. Of course, this leads to the whole net neutrality thing, but really the telcos here want to get more money out of the government (supposedly to build new lines, although they have received such money countless times before and nothing got built) and to legally have more control over what goes over their lines, with the obvious orwellian implications that may have.
When broadband became widely available, it worked for them to push speed and ignore the issue of traffic volume as only a small minority of subscribers were capable of using large amounts of bandwidth. Safe to advertise the unlimited abyss Internet service as it appeared that way for all intents and purposes to the subscribers.
The explosion of Internet video (and other rich content) has now provided the catalyst for the "average user" to generate significant data transfer volume, and it was never the case that they could actually provide unlimited access to everyone all the time. It was a statistical game really =).
What would interest me is what effect this is going to have on the cost of broadband in the near future. This is my living so I'm content paying more for a better quality connection; however, what kind of service can the "average user" realistically expect for $30/mo. or whatever. A marketing faux pas if they end up hurting their own business getting users used to the idea that unlimited data volume in and out of your home was actually something you can get cheaply.
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~AC
Many services on the internet would not be viable if you had to pay per bit or packet. They would simply be too expensive. For example, want to download a Linux ISO? You might think twice if you might wind up paying an extra few dollars every time you did that. The ISPs do not want customers who will use their service heavily. They want users who pay a lot of money but place little load on their system to keep their overhead down. In the US, some cell phone companies have started dropping subscribers who don't upgrade their phones often enough or subscribe to premium services, because they don't make *enough* money off of those to be worthwhile. These companies only want to deal with their most profitable customers.
This problem pops up regularly on the web. I feel sorry for you people that actually encounter it IRL, because in Sweden, and I'm sure in many other countries aswell, this is not an issue.
24/1 or 21/3 Mbps DSL lines in Sweden go off for ~25/mo. If fiber is available 100/10 Mbps go for the same price. It's been this way for the last five years, and people have been playing online games, sharing files et.c. like crazy. I've never heard of anybody that had problems with their ISPs for too heavy traffic, not even with the cheaper plans.
And right now, the good old bastards at ComHem is digging to provide 4 Gbps bandwidth for every household in my neighborhood. Granted, the plan is supposed to include TV, internet and phone lines in it, but still.
What kind of crappy ISPs do you have that limit your internet access in this way? And why the hell do you accept it? Start rioting!
Most major UK ISPs that advertise unlimited broadband do so with an asterisk right next to the word unlimited, that little get-out clause which enables them to have something called a "fair use policy", which in the case of Pipex (and probably several others) is an "unfair use policy".
I'm an ex-Pipex user because they kicked me off for over-use of an ADSL package sold as unlimited, when I phoned up to complain about the situation of paying for an unlimited package but being told my account was to be suspended for using it too much I asked what the monthly limit is - they couldn't/wouldn't tell me, saying that each individual user has a different upper limit which is determined by the amount of users in my area and how much they were downloading.
They oversold their service so they're making up the rules as they go along.
During the 'conversation' with the support monkey at Pipex I asked that if they won't tell me how much is too much then how can they determine I've used too much, and will they give me stats on how much I've transferred, they wouldn't give stats and their suggestion was to install a Windows program that monitors bandwidth usage, which is a fat lot of good if there are several computers using the same ADSL connection, but more importantly what's the point of telling me to install a bandwidth logging program if they won't tell you how much is too much? Un-fucking believable.
This farce of a service Pipex are offering and the subsequent suspension of 'heavy users' is a reason why some long-term subscribers to the service, who haven't been told they've downloaded too much, have also left for pastures greener.
So basically if you're on Pipex ADSL with an "unlimited" package then you have absolutely no idea how much you can download/upload before they send you a letter saying bye-bye.
A fundamental concept of packet switching is that there will be a statistical use pattern that allows more efficient use of available bandwidth than a dedicated circuit switched network would provide. If you actually want to force the allocation of dedicated bandwidth to each subscriber you need a circuit switched network or some equivalent over IP like the old PSTN. Costs and scalability of this sort of service would be far less attractive than packet switched networks.
Use of p2p 24x7 continuously by a customer has to be traffic shaped for the economics of packet switching to work. If you want guaranteed bandwidth for your p2p use you had better be prepared to pay a lot more for your service.
This is one thing I don't get about IPTV - the economics of this sort of service over packet switching don't make a lot of sense unless it is not a large fraction of the total traffic. That doesn't appear to be true.
It's worse than you think. The actual transfer cap isn't even specified in the fine print (at least it's not in my current Comcast contract). There's just some weasel language about how "excessive usage" may get your service disconnected, but no word on how many gigabytes a month constitutes "excessive" in their minds.
"$29/mo for 20GB plus $5/GB beyond that, and we throttle bittorrent when our backbone connection is at full capacity" would be acceptable.
"$39/mo for unlimited access. There's a transfer limit but we won't tell you what it is and we make it difficult to get your service turned back on if you go over, and we throttle youtube whenever we feel like it" is not.
0 1 - just my two bits
Come on, give us a break from the slashvertising for Joost, alright?
The article is not about people getting angry but about sad reality that the exitsing bandwith is not enough for extensive advertised use.
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There are ways out of this abyss however.
One can imagine that at the end market forces will suceed in dealing with the problem and either new tariffs emerge where you pay for what you use instead of flat rate or additional bandwith will be created. One can also imagine that the contracts written in lawyers speak will prevail and customers will have to buy a lot of lubricants to alleviate pain in their swollen rectums.
There may be third way - outright lie. After all - Joe Doe does not have a clue anyway (and does not realize the pain in the bottom). If he does then one can tell him that commies or terrorists or creatures from outer space are guilty of bandwith theft and proceed as usuall. Even if general public was not gullible as it is, it lacks knowledge. The funny thing is that 'cause all the IT jobs will become either management or outsourced ones soon there will be nobody to clarify this to avarage Joe.
BTW:There was this study I read recently about emergency plans for case of massive epidemics of infectious desease. One remedy was to let people work from home to prevent economy collapse while quarantine is enforced. One small problem was pointed there - not enough bandwith.
BTW2: the idea about the use of mobile networks etc is a splendid one. Only there is a problem of bandwith there too. Even if solved on RNS the problem with backbone remains. Gosch but I am spoiling a party now - oi!
BTW3: As for TFA. I understand that there are people that use bandwith resonably and they need plenty of it. But why would any half intelligent person want to load a movie from the net? It is a waste of money (movie) & time (you have to watch it). So why bother?
*BEEP* Wrong Answer
As demand goes up and supply stays the same, both quantity and price rise.
Then, suppliers see the economic profit, new firms enter, and supply expands, lowering prices and increasing the quantity.
Why isn't that happening? Market failures. Monopolies/monopolistic competition, regulation, rapid technological change... there are a million factors leading to it, but we let our information distribution industry grow badly, and now we're paying for it with bad service.
But don't worry, our legislators have expert knowledge about this series of tubes, so they should fix it soon.
A megabit to the US costs $200 AUD plus, in bulk. Since no one is willing to pay thousands of dollars per month for a home connection, caps seem to be here to stay until this cost comes down. While Telstra have not helped, this is Southern Cross not Telstra.
The reason why some countries have cheap bandwidth to the home is the traffic is mostly local.