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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."
I'm with Zen Internet, based in the UK. I get x amount of bandwidth a month and when that runs out I pay for a top-up.
What's wrong with paying for what you use? Why deliberately degrade your service when you can simply get the customer to pay the difference?
Simon
There seem to be a number of ISP's now doing this at peak times. Again this is probably due to the lack of capacity in their infrastructure.
Now we see BT (here in the UK), AT&T(USA) and many others starting to offer IPTV. If there is one thing that is guaranteed to burn bandwidth then it is broadcasting TV this way. Other ISP's will sure follow this but win't have the kit in place to handle the traffic.
Therefore, on one hand we have ISP's promoting 'new' services and on the other limiting the amount of data they will let you receive.
In the words of a UK Politician, they are most likely "Not Fit for Service"
Bah Humbug
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
Bad math alert. An 80% restriction would be more like it. A 100% restriction would be a total cut-off. What would 500% be - take back the bits you already downloaded?
Kevin Smith on Prince
Hey, ISPs are just doing what they are able to get away with. The question we should be asking is why are they able to get away with marketing 10 MB/s and hide 1GB cap in the fine print.
It should come as no shock that ISPs are shaping traffic. They're out to make money and they only have so much bandwidth, now that the glut has been absorbed. That's not unreasonable. What would be unreasonable is if they advertise video access and then do something like this.
If you're not getting the service you expect form your ISP, you should call them (which by the way, really costs them quite a bit of money), and complain. If they can't or won't satisfy you, you should find another SP who will. Competition is important, and while it's difficult to find in the US and perhaps even moreso in the UK, alternatives should be encouraged. Just remember that you can't get something for nothing. That bandwidth does cost money.
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.
Commodore64_love: I don't comprehend people who're so frightened of death that they'll bankrupt themselves to stay alive
dark fiber optics sit unused in over 90% of the usa. europe supplements its existing fiber/phone/cable with data over power lines (BPL). there is no shortage of broadband, just a collusion of lies. much like the diamond industry does to keep wholesale/retail costs high. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=dark+fiber+op tic&btnG=Google+Search
It is the drive to replace dialup with broadband that has ruined the broadband market. ISPs battling to offer cheap prices that are no more expensive than dialup prices were.
Some companies even offer free broadband with their phone line packages.
It's this drive for cheapness at the expensive of service quality that is ruining broadband for those who see it as mainstream entertainment, not something to shop online with and check email.
I still pay a premium price for my service £35 a month for 2MB ADSL. Yet I have had a download cap applied retrospectively.
the service agreement you signed when you started with your ISP. Fine print exists for a reason.
uses peer-to-peer technology similar to that used by 'illegal' file sharing networks..
There are no illegal networks, we have enough FUD as the MAFIAA cartels say they are illegal, we do not need the blogger community to call them that... and btw WTF is it with posting a blog entry as a story? when did Digg acquired slashdot?
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
No broadband ISP has the bandwidth needed to deliver the advertised speed to every user on their networks simultaneously, not even the mighty Comcast (AT&T). The Internet backbone couldn't handle it either. I own a very old ISP here in FL and have been buying unlimited bandwidth for many years now and the cost of this type of connection is 20 times higher than most broadband connections.
The cheapest bandwidth in this area still costs around $100 per meg (OC-3, 155Mbps). Users on Comcast get 6 megs for half this. Broadband ISPs deliver the product most users want, intermittent very high download speed without sustained bandwidth use.
All ISP and even phone companies are based on what is called over subscription. ISPs buy bandwidth based on actual demand not theoretical maximum demand. Phone companies have infrastructure to support around 1 in 20 people making a phone call at the same time.
What is needed is for the ISP to be more forthcoming in there product descriptions. We sell a wireless broadband connection for around $38 per month and advertise 2meg download speeds. We are also up front that excessive p2p usage may result in throttling and or account suspension. This is explained before service is installed not just buried in the terms on service. Comcast terminates accounts without any warning and even deny there is any bandwidth cap on users accounts. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
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!
I pretty much represent a small ISP in rural Washington state. Bandwidth prices for us are so outrageous, $300 per mb, and this is only because there is one major seller of bandwidth in our area, NOANET. So we have to throttle types of connections, Bit-Torrent is the major one. We would love to open the net to what it should be but its just not possible with the price gouging that happens every place but the cities.
So as an ISP I'm saying we could do it if we didn't get bent over all the time for bandwidth.
...once you get a reasonably broad number of people using reasonably known services for legitimate video. Even if you throw in the latest Linux distro, WoW patches and whatnot it's not exactly a massive amount of mainstream media. Your complaints will land on deaf ears. Once people start complaining that they can't watch full episodes from ABC and similar services, the tone will be different. "ABC, you say... you mean I can watch the latest episode of Lost online, but the ISP is throttling me?" You'll get a helluva lot more people who'd a) understand WTF you're talking abou, b) would like to do it themselves and c) can unite around.
Besides, I'd think the P2P hogs should have pushed the envelope far enough that they can't really stop people starting to use these services a little - and that's what they're concerned about anyway, the masses moving. That guy who wants to watch IPTV 24/7 is more of the exception.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I pay 29 EUR a month for 24 Mbps down / 1 Mbps up. Plus free international phone. Plus wifi. Plus TV. Free PVR which I don't even use for lack of a TV. Also 1 GB of hosting space, unmetered.
Within a year I should get 50 Mbps (symmetrical) FTTH.
http://www.free.fr
Some of the most successful rollouts of high-speed broadband have happened with significant government regulation and involvement: South Korea, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Denmark, among others. Conversely, in the United States where there was less regulation to begin with (and a steady push towards even less), we have seen much less broadband growth, and we are behind other countries.
[The U.S. government actually did invest in broadband (during the Clinton administration) but since effective regulatory oversight did not accompany the money, we didn't get what we'd hoped for from the Baby Bells.]
Some argue that this is because the US has a low population density: This argument ignores the fact that there still exist within the US large, dense markets on the coasts (the Northeast corridor, from Boston to Washington, for instance), that are surely as profitable as, say, South Korea, which have remained underdeveloped. Why?
There are some things that monopolies, like governments, can better provide than many smaller competing companies; infrastructure and technology research are two of the most important ones. The simple reason for this is that monopolies can be relatively sure that they will be around in many years' time to reap the benefits of their investments, whereas in a hypercompetitive market, risk is higher and the "rational" investor will focus on smaller, shorter-term investments; this maximizes his expected return.
Full deregulation in electricity caused blackouts across California in 2001. Our deregulation so far has not produced an American broadband market comparable to other countries'. So no, the evidence I see does not lead me to blind faith in 100% laissez-faire economic policies.
See The Liberal Paradox: Markets by themselves are not sufficient to create a Pareto-optimal society.
Occasional government involvement, and well-designed, unencumbering regulation are useful and promote growth. The world is full of prisoners' dilemmas and tragedies of the commons: Markets cannot solve these problems by themselves, which is why we need government.
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.
--
~AC
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.
As much as Comcast has both a terrible service department and a terrible PR department, how they do it is correct.
You pay a "high" price for service ($45-60) per month, depending on the plan, and you can have as much bandwidth as you want, as long as you aren't adversely affecting the node that you are on.
This means be reasonable. Right now, their "flexible" bandwidth cap is 200 GB. Even better, it's not like that boot you after one month of 200 GB usage; and they don't charge you again, either. They monitor your usage over a couple months, and if you're over 200 GB on average, they send you a warning, and then boot you.
It's also notable that this number has gone up significantly as they've upgraded their network, and I suspect it will continue to go up.
At my office we pay approximately $275 for a dual T1. This gets us, at most, 900 GB per month (that's maxing out the connection 24/7/365). I'm happy to pay 18% of that for 22% of the bandwidth, with burst speeds vastly in excess of that (my cable modem bursts at 24 Mbps for up to 10 minutes).
As I said; their PR doesn't explain this well, and their service people (both on the ground and at their call centers) tend to be not up to part with their competitors. However, the companies polices are more than reasonable, and they do an excellent job upgrading their network. I would have never thought that the cable cos would be competitive with FTTN or FTTP, but Comcast is beating the crap out of AT&T's U-verse, and is approaching the speeds of Verizon's FTTP network.
You guys really should stop whinning. 200 GB a month is plenty in this day and age, and I pity the people who pay $15,$30, or more for 1-70 GB a month.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
With the exception of a very few high-priced services, no ISP has as much back-end bandwidth as they have customers. Instead, they have enough to guarantee a certain level of service on average, plus some extra for bursts of load.
This has been true since the days of the 300-baud acoustic coupler, and isn't going to change. Unless, of course, everyone hits the lottery jackpot at once and decides to give a million or two to their favorite ISP.
What one does to deal with finite bandwidth is to prioritize interactive traffic over file transfer, which is a variant of what we're seeing here. The problem is that the mechanisms used to tell interactive from batch gets the wrong answer right now.
So we (::= the IETF) improve the technology and prioritize video streams tagged "real-time" over streams tagged "on my way to Dave's PVR"
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
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.
If you say that ISPs should not advertise "unlimited" internet access, then I agree. That is correct. The ISPs are definitly engaging in deceptive practices, and should stop.
But there isn't some big conspiracy by ISPs to kill internet video. There is actually SCARCE BANDWIDTH!!! There simply isn't enough bandwidth for everyone to be watching high-def streaming video, or sharing multi-gig video files, legit or not. Thus far, people have gotten away with that sort of thing because only a handful of users actually used that kind of bandwidth... it was easy enough for the ISP to allow a few "power users" to hog the bandwidth, because the vast majority of people used so little. With the popularity of video with common users, that is all changing.
While ISPs should be more honest about their policies to restrict bandwidth, that doesn't mean that they shouldn't restrict bandwidth. If the ISPs don't intentionally throttle bandwidth on hogs like P2P and streaming video, it means that bandwidth will be restricted randomly (like when you need to send an important email, or when you are trying to telnet into your server).
Telus
Down/Up/Cap/Cost
6Mbps/1Mbps/60GB/$51
3Mbps/640Kbps/60GB/$46
1.5Mbps/512Kbps/30GB/$37
256Kbps/128Kbps/10GB/$22
Shaw
Down/Up/Cap/Cost
25/1/150/$100
10/1/100/$49
5/512/60/$39
256/128/10/$30
I believe I have the prices without any bundling. If you buy other services, then it can be a bit cheaper.
Maybe we could just give the telcos like $200 billion dollars and have them built new hardware that would keep us competitive and stop the outflow of our tech industry to countries like Korea... Oh, wait... Seriously, why hasn't something been done to hold the telcos responsible for what I see as a MASSIVE fleecing of the american public? As I see it I already paid for my unlimited bancwidth for the next couple years...
Kharma is like a boomerang. Mine is broken.
My "digital cable" TV coax has at least enough bandwidth to push at least 2 or 3 MPEG-2 movies to my TVs at 4Mbps each, plus 8Mbps download on the segregated Internet bandwidth. I'd gladly take the total 20Mbps as download, especially when the TV is off (which would be most of the time with that bandwidth available).
DSL and telco fiber has to compete with that, or install their own coax (plus fiber, probably). Verizon has FiOS for 20-30-50Mbps, but Optimum cablemodems deliver 30Mbps (plus the 4Mbps TV channels).
In other words, ISPs have the bandwidth (or their bizmodels and net infrastructure is too 1990s to survive to satisfy modern consumers). They're just screaming as usual to get exceptions to market demand, while they build cartels and monopolies on government subsidized infrastructure. It was all BS when 9600bps, then 19.2Kbps, then 33.6Kbps, then 56Kbps, then the jump to 1.5Mbps they said was impossible, now the 3-6-8-20-30Mbps. The fact is that these bandwidth investments not only get cheaper every time the market demands it, at higher prices, to many more customers. The bigger bandwidth makes more apps possible, apps closer to the ease and appeal of watching movies, without even the infrastructure and licensing investments to produce/buy more TV channels to sell people. Plus it gives the ISP the infrastructure to deliver on-demand movies and live events that are wildly profitable, and sell even more subscriptions, plus the "triple play" including telephone.
ISPs want all that, plus exceptions to further subsidize them when they do provide the bandwidth. Every time, it's the same. But this time, we can google for their whining the last time it was "impossible".
--
make install -not war
*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.