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Time Warner Cable to Test Tiered Bandwidth Caps
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "According to a leaked internal memo, Time Warner Cable is testing out tiered bandwidth caps in their Beaumont, TX division as a way to fairly balance the needs of heavy users against the limited amount of shared bandwidth cable can provide. The plan is to offer various service tiers with bandwidth fees for overuse, as well as a bandwidth meter customers can use to help them stay within their allotment. If it works out, they will consider a nation-wide rollout. Interestingly, the memo also claims that 5% of subscribers use over 50% of the total network bandwidth."
I think that ISPs need to take a different approach other than imposing hard caps on the users, even if you can choose your cap with varying amounts of cash.
First, the users that occaisonally download large files should be treated differnetly than those that leave their p2p clients/home webserver/internet radio on all the time. For example, I often need to download isos for linux livecds or install disks. If my average daily usage is low, this download shouldn't count against my bandwidth usage. However if I'm downloading isos all day every day, then some of that bandwidth should be counted.
Also, during non-busy times for that region, large bandwidth use shouldn't be counted, seeing as it isn't disadvantaging anyone.
There should be no "hard line" between free bandwidth and 1$ per mB bandwidth. The users average bandwidth usage per month should be used in calculating their monthly rate, and they should pay for the next month based on their projected usage.
I once had an ISP that had a monthly cap, it was awful. My two cents (how much they charged per mb over the 2gb/month) on the matter.
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And to think that I was thinking about switching to Time-Warner, however now I will not.
There is no "disagree" moderation, and troll, flamebait and overrated are not valid substitutes
crap outta bandwith
As one of those 5% people, if they roll this out in my area, I'll become a DSL subscriber!
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
Ultimately, paying in proportion to traffic is fair. Use less, pay less. Use more, pay more.
ISPs have historically been reluctant to do that, because consumers don't want it. People hate having to pay in proportion to use, and would happily pay flat rate per month for gasoline if they could. But nobody will offer it. Maybe reality is finally coming to wires.
If they're only going by total bandwidth, this is probably palatable to most users. My biggest gripe with my cable provider is not the total bandwidth but the uptime... I expect my internet connection to be always available for small packets (web browsing, email, etc) as a priority over fast downloads/streams or sustained bandwidth.
Right now they already offere tiered service but it's all unlimited. IE: 5Mbps or 8Mbps
What the difference is here is that they will actually not be "capping" the bandwidth per say but actually metering it. That's akin to buying 1Mbps on a Co-Lo that is on a burstable 1Gigabit link. That is, you get the sum total of bandwidth you could use if you were at 1mbps for the month but your connection is actually WAY faster(wider). Then you get charged for overages. This is great because it charges for usage and make it way less expensive for people who simply browse the net in their off time as opposed to those people who have no life and upload videos of themselves whoring on youtube all the time.
Where is the news in this? Canadian ISPs have had caps and over usage charges for years. I can tell on any day exactly how much bandwidth I've used and how close to my cap I am.
I don't see a problem with this, having usage tiers with costs depending how much you plan to use is fine. The problem in the past has always been claims of "unlimited" until you reach a magical, secret cap. I don't think users will have a problem with tiers as long as you make the exact numbers completely clear, and of course that you charge reasonable rates.
US ISPs have charged different rates for different speeds for a long time, how is this any different? It brings clarity to users.
I, for example pay $35/month and am told I get 2.5Mbps down, 760kbps up, and 30GB total transfer. And if I want to transfer more, I pay more. It seems reasonable to me.
Maybe they'll use the revenue to renovate the infrastructure allowing them to have a larger pipe at faster speeds... ...Nah, who am I kidding.
I am paying for X MBps download and Y MBps upload (it is dedicated). If I don't use it, that's fine. Nevertheless, I should be able to have that bandwidth at my leisure at all times (excluding other considerations like the server to which I am connecting). Please (Comcast/TWC/ISP) don't use the excuse that 5% of the users use 50% so we need capped service. It means they are taking full advantage for what they are paying for just like if I had a 50GB download cap (or 1 GB upload cap), I would probably use all of it. I would prefer both options (bandwidth capped or transfer capped) so I can assess my needs and minimize my costs. Thanks!
I'm a Time Warner customer and I have enjoyed their service. If this is legit, at least, it sounds like the right direction for it, though I'm not happy about it.
1. Defined limits, overlimit fees, and prices for tiered service
2. Monitor software to show customers where they're at
I'm curious about the monitor software. Will it have options to shutdown internet access based on time frames and activity? This would be useful for people that want to budget their internet usage. Also it could useful if the computer is infected.
I'm not neccesarily opposed to limits. I'm a heavy user but not 200gb like the article discussed. The issue I would have is if I pay $40 for 100gb/month and I go over, I can see them charging $1/gb instead of upping you to the next tier, which might be a $50 tier, but I could see them screwing customers with exhorbitant "excess usage" charges. OTOH, if they do such a service, there would have to be no throttling or fake packets at any time for any reason. I would be suspicious if one would be given equal access at all times but it could happen.
Will these new, metered accounts be less expensive than their current standard charge, making this a good thing for the budget conscious, or more likely, will their current standard price become the lowest tier and unmetered will be a new higher cost tier, thereby making this simply news of a massive price hike?
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Once again, BANDWIDTH DOES NOT EQUAL CAPACITY. BANDWIDTH DOES NOT EQUAL BITS. Bandwidth is a measure of a channel's range of frequencies over which it is effective. A bit is an amount of information. Capacity is the rate at which a channel can transfer information. Channel capacity is a function of bandwidth and signal to noise ratio.
Claude Shannon, The Mathematical Theory of Communication, University of Illinois Press, 1949.
The expression is "per se". It means "in itself" or "by itself".
I will opt for the unlimited option at twice or even three times the price no matter if I will hit the cap or not, it's just the way I do business. I can budget $80 a month for unlimited, I can't budget $20 a month, except january where I have a $500 overage because MSDN licenses changed and I have to download 100 DVD ISOs before they lapse ;)
They are simply trying to protect their PPV market by limiting your use of the internet to purchase what you want to buy versus what they bother to serve you.
99.99% of the problems companies like Comcast and Time Warner have with Bandwidth will go away if they introduce hard caps. Everyone gets, say, 20gb per month or whatever the plan they have paid for contains. If you exceed that amount, you get cut off (or have your speed cut back to dial up speeds) for the rest of the month.
I'm in beaumont, and i'm one of those 5%... so much for the free ride.
An I.T. motto in the hands of an idiot is a dangerous thing...
... during the course of the year, the second option is actually cheaper for you. I'd recommend option 2, while putting $60 a month into a special savings account that only gets touched to pay for overages.
Of course, this all depends on the exact numbers that Comcast will use. I strongly suspect that I blow past a 2Gb monthly limit in about 1 week. That's about how often I download a full game demo, ISO or movie (iTunes, for anyone wanting to accuse me of Piracy) per month. And depending on release schedules, I can easily download 10 - 20 Gb in a month.
I don't mind paying for a metered internet, I'm just not sure that Comcast's idea of what a heavy user should is one I can afford.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
In SA we've always had a hard 3GB cap on DSL. Once you reach your cap international traffic basically comes to a standstill and local traffic is not much better. Another bonus ontop of the cap is that traffic shaping is the norm, all non http, pop3, stmp, ftp etc. traffic get a way lower priority, so stuff like online gaming, p2p sharing, voip etc becomes a huge pain in the neck. There are "uncapped" and "unshaped" accounts available, but at a price. So if I can give some advice, try and stop them before they introduce any cap, just in case this start a new trend for ISPs in the US.
How many average joes will get infected with a virus/trojan horse that spams out millions of emails, and not only have the hassle of disinfecting their computer, but also face a massive broadband bill at the end of the month for all of their bandwidth?
We have bandwidth usage caps in Australia and they suck big time. It varies between ISPs, but some charge additional fees (usually not too much) for exceeding bandwidth, but most cap the speed down to a ridiculous 64kbps! For someone like myself, who often exceeded usage (especially given that the bandwidth cap was so low), it was unbearable. My bandwidth cap was just 6GB when I was stuck on an ADSL1 plan due to lack of support for ADSL2+ at the exchange; the ADSL2+ plan for the same price was, I believe, 40GB (split between peak and off-peak periods, giving 20GB each). Even the 40GB was too low sometimes when I was able to get ADSL2+.
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ISP's cant actually offer "unlimited" access to everybody, unless you want to start paying $300/month for home Internet. Its not realistic. People will do things like P2P that just eat up way too much traffic. They have two ways of dealing with the problem:
1. Charge people for how much network capacity they actually use, ie: this. This is how gas, electricity, and other things are portioned out, and I haven't heard many people complianing about how its unfair.
2. Start trying to get rid of some of the traffic. See: Comcast screwing with P2P.
Of the two, I like this a lot better. My mom can pay for a little bit of network capacity, I can pay for a lot, and we both get what we paid for.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
I can't see how bandwidth caps would be a good idea for the cable companies, especially when there are competitors out there that don't need to worry about capping their customer's usage. I also want to know how this would play out if other cable companies followed suit, considering that they're promising much faster speeds. I would think that at 160Mbps you could hit your cap pretty quickly (depending of course on what the cap is set at, and your actual usage).
I'm a Time Warner customer, and as far as I'm concerned I'm paying for unlimited usage, and unlimited usage is what I should be getting.
God, schmod. I want my monkey man!
I moved out of the country before I could determine how it worked out, but some Norwegian companies tried a scheme under which you have two tiers of bandwidth. By default your connection uses the higher speed but if you exceed the quota it degrades to the lower speed until the end of the month. This works quite well since you will still have a fixed bill every month and you won't just lose your ability to use e-mail if you exceed the quota.
.... will be added to your bill automatically.
Of course, it is all about the marketing. You don't say "we degrade your connection if you exceed this quota", you say "In addition you get EXTRA HIGH SUPER SPEED for the first 20 gigabytes (ZOMG!!!! thousands of songs) each month". You then proceed to sell "top-up packs" at your website where users can pay for extra quota, and then offer an optional service by which quota... err... extra-bandwidth-top-up-packs
Give those 5% some virus scanners ! !
Is there a way to set up a network so that the people who have used the least bandwidth get highest priority?
say i download linux distro iso's all month. i use up 99% of my ISP's capacity, then one day my neighbor starts up a VPN and telnets in. Since he's used hardly any bandwidth, his packets get top priority. my bittorrent client slows down a little bit then goes back up when he's done.
that's a fair way to do unlimited service.
it just seems like any throttling back beyond prioritization is just a waste of installed capacity.
If you want to download warez and movies 24/7 then why should I subsidize your connection?
As long as they offer a nice selection of caps that is with maybe even an unlimited one (expensive as that level would be). And of course they have to actually let the customer know of the caps (ie: don't be fuckers like comcast).
I was one of Cablevision's very first internet subscribers. I saw their service degrade heavily over the years. They finally started secretly capping their users to balance out the bandwidth usage. It became unbearable.
I moved to verizon FIOS asap and i've been in heaven since. Its a quality service, that doesnt cap you for uploading or downloading.
I work in 3d animation and special fx here in NY, and i often need to tranfer large batches of frames at film res from home to clients or from home to the office... Optonline became a nightmare to live with. Verizon Fios is the solution for me.
No hassle, no bullshit. I absolutely hate cablevision as a result and i've also since moved my TV service to FIOS TV service as well.
I think the fair way to deal with heavy users is to give everyone the same fast rate for their first twenty gigs or so per month. If they exceed the cap, there are three things that can be done:
The first option is bad for customers because they don't want to have their connection cut off abruptly. The second is bad because it leaves open the possibility of getting a surprise bill for hundreds or thousands of dollars. The third option, imposing a bandwidth cap once users exceed their monthly limit, solves the problem and is much less intrusive: their internet still works (just not as fast), and they don't get any surprise bills. If they want their service to be fast again, they can pay a fee. (note: to avoid congestion, the payment cycle would have to be staggered so that everyone doesn't have their caps lifted the same time each month)
Another approach ISPs would like to use is to target specific applications (bittorrent, youtube) rather than users, but this is just a short-term remedy that doesn't address the real problem - users who don't care how much bandwidth they use.
Does this affect Earthlink customers who ride ontop of Time-Warner?
That's right. You pay some money each month and you get a fair amount of datatransfer each month. I think that is reasonable for both side. For the consumer side it is reasonable because they don't have to worry about caps(which bite) or varying costs(which bite even harder). For the ISP it is reasonable because they know how much the users can use at most and they know how much datatransfer to facilitate. If someone surpassing fair use they need to be charged heavily for that. It is stupid that networks bulge under the datatransfer of a small group who screw it up for the rest. So you probably get about 100 GB per month. If you surpass this limit regularly you need to get your ass kicked. I do NOT want a varying cost. It has been the main reason to switch from dail-up to cable. At one time we were spending in excess of 100 each month on the internet for a crappy connection. Now that we have cable, these problems have never arisen since I keep an eye on my traffic usage. Don't go back into the stone age, keep my fixed rates.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
One thing this dosn't seem to allow for, is the differences on bandwidth demand based upon time of day. If you're stealing all the bandwidth downloading huge files or torrenting around 7pm, well, then you're going to slow people down. But if you're downloading alot at 3 a.m. and nobody is even online to notice, who cares? This system is going to end up with alot of unused bandwidth if they have hard-coded caps. If they're going to cap, they should at least make it dynamic. I suppose they want money though...
GCS/MU/P d- s:- a-- C++++$ UL++ P+ L++ E+ W++ N o K- w--- O M+ V- PS+++ PE Y+ PGP t+ 5- X R++ tv+ b++ DI++ D++ G+ e++ h-
... you find out that your 1 gig monthly usage is in the 5% of users....
When I first moved to the UK and found that all my choices for ISPs had a metered usage plan, I was against it at first. My major complaint was that I had no way to predict how much data transfer I was going to use, so I didn't know what tier I should sign up for. Now that I've been on such a system for a couple years now I really do say that its more fair. The provider I am with now (plus.net) has a pretty good system I set a fixed monthly cost. For each £ I prepay I get so many GB of transfer. If I go over limit, I can choose to have my speed capped at 128K (Still plenty for email and most surfing), or optionally choose to pay a per GB charge that is slightly more expensive than the prepaid rate. Additionally They make a distinction between peak and off peak hours. So only transfers during peak hours actually count to my monthly transfer. The result is that I've learned to schedule my large downloads into Off Peak Hours. I have a had a few months where my home transfer was nearly 100 GB. However 80+ GB of that was Off peak usage which I did not pay for directly. Whats the result of all this? My ISP gets to manage their network performance during peak hours so all users have a pleasant experience. I still get big downloads, and I pay whats fair for what I use. The limits on my account are clearly defined. There is no mysterious 'use too much and we'll cut you off' amount.
I am very happy with this system, but to be clear, the reason why I am happy with this system is my ISP has provided choices. If Time Warner fails to provide similar choice then it will be awful.
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Don't know who modded this funny, but it's what they want. You aren't a customer they want to keep- you stress their network and force them to reduce the number of people on a single cable, which costs them money far beyond the $50/month you pay back. They'll be much happier with the grandmothers who download a few pictures of their grandkids every now and then.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
I'm on an 80GB/mo plan. You pay for speed and for traffic, and it works. It means that you can be pretty much guaranteed to get full speed on your connection ALL OF THE TIME. No more throttling, no more peak hour BS. I've got 10mbps connection, and I get 10mbps. If the carrier can't provide it, we get refunds (as we currently are).
Additionally, it puts a price on p2p. If you're paying $1.50/GB of traffic (each direction), then that 4GB torrent that you let run until 1.0? It just cost you $12+. It puts an entirely different spin on whether or not to torrent something.
Knowing how capitalism works, we'll see it end up more like: You use more you pay more... you use less, you pay what you currently pay.
Linux penalizes "CPU-hungry" programs that want to use all of the CPU time, by pushing their priority down. That way "nice" programs can still get CPU when they want it, the "greedy" programs get whatever is left over, and no processor cycles are wasted. It would be cool if ISPs could do something similar with bandwidth resources. Easier said than, done, of course... but it seems silly to me to bandwidth-cap a "greedy" user at 3AM when nobody else is using the network anyway...
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
At least in Australasia, a split tariff of speed + bandwidth has been the norm pretty much ever since charging-per-minute-online went away. We've not generally had pure 'flat rate' deals, except for some very shonky providers who went out of business rapidly. I've been watching the debates here over 'tubes' and filtering and wondering just what's going on in the USA, that people think they can get unlimited amounts of data transfer for free with no consequences - and then resort to weird restrictive contracts and double-dipping 'hold the website to ransom' schemes - instead of just simply paying for transfer capacity.
This looks like a sensible solution all round, to me.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
Looks like Ars found the link first via a story on the front page of Broadband Reports that was posted before theirs:
http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Time-Warner-Cable-Eyeing-Overage-Charges-91047
People pay for a download rate, and the cable company provides it. This is nothing more than a scheme to hit customers with additional charges that they have no way of monitoring.
I used to live in a small town in NE Pennsylvania. The only place I could get broadband was the local podunk phone company. I paid $70/month for 512 Kb/s, and I got it all the time if I wanted it. I think that Time Warner could do what my backwoods, East Bumblefuck phone company did if they really cared about a rise in bandwidth usage.
... and other internet distributed video is starting to standardize.
Once the Apple set-top box comes along and more companies jump into the competition with video-on-demand via internet services, everyone will be using lots of bandwidth.
But, if Time-Warner internet has caps, then those potential customers will look elsewhere for their video on demand--perhaps to that Time-Warner cable box they have.
Steven Palmer Peterson
I tell you, there is no pleasing some of you people. First people complain about cable companies limiting people for offering "unlimited bandwidth" and say that they shouldn't say unlimited if they don't mean unlimited. Now someone comes out with a plan for limited tiers and people complain that there are caps in place. Personally I'd be OK with just paying for what is used say $5.00 per month + $2.00 a GB for example, however companies may never do that because you don't get the big profits on the people who use the min, which is most people. That way if you use more you pay more, use less and pay less. Internet would be far more attractive the general non geek public if it was cheaper than $45 or whatever a month when all they want to do is just surf the web and do some email.
thread. Are people really OK with caps and/or metering?
I think the last thing I want to think about is how much the next byte of usage is going to change my bill. My internet usage habits would change dramatically under such a plan; I would do far less browsing, do less syncing with my computers remotely, etc.
There are completely legitimate methods of using your connection BW; if you use Remote Desktop or VNC to manage or use a computer remotely while traveling, you can quickly use up your caps.
I'm not saying that having tiered internet service is completely wrong . Certainly if it was applied correctly where exceeding BW caps just put you in the next tier for that month (as the article states), that is not a horrible approach. BUT, the REAL QUESTION is will TW actually pass on the savings for those in the lowest tier. In other words for those who really don't use that much BW on their cable line and fall into the lowest tier, what would their bill for the month be? If you are under 6GB lets say (I can use that much up in a couple days just using my computer remotely and browsing the internet), I really don't think you should be paying anymore than $5 - $15 a month. Do you really TRUST TW to pass on this kind of savings to these customers? I doubt it...I bet they still charge $25+/mo and just pocket the savings. And how ridiculous would the prices be for the heavy hitters $40/mo? Yeah right! My guess is TW would charge them $80/mo or more.
Just because it is a good idea in theory, doesn't necessarily mean TW will pass all the savings back to the consumer.
If I could pay for what I use, I would. I'd rather pay for 1mb full duplex than 6mb down and 512kb up. For what I do (working with remote sites and voip) I'd be WAY better off.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
The problem with ISPs (cable and DSL) is that they charge a flat fee regardless of usage. Thus their customer's have incentive to over-use the product (to 'get the most for their money') and the ISPs have incentive to reduce customer usage and put in the bare minimum infrastructure (and to come up with alternative revenue sources like downloadable-for-a-fee content). Thus the ISPs market is a zero-sum game.
Usage fees have the potential to completely rearrange the market. If ISPs are able to charge more the more their customers use the network, then the ISP's interest is now aligned with their customer's interest. The ISP actually benefits the more their customers use the network. Thus they have incentive to build up infrastructure and no need to search for alternative sources of revenue like selling download-able content (or screwing with network neutrality to blackmail 3rd parties). They should start to actively promote the usage of bittorrent and any other bandwidth consuming system because every new user (aka bandwidth consumer) will earn the ISP more money, instead of causing them to lose profits the way it does now.
More then likely they will screw it up. In the case that it does take hold, vote with your dollars if you can. (I'm on RR with 15Mbps down, I will switch if this comes around.)
I'll make sure, I'll pay only 50% of my bill since 5% of users are using up my "internet". If the cable company demands 100% of the bill, then I surely can reply; "You are using too much of my money. Oh and when I disown your bill, you have to pickup your cable modem off of my property."
"Don't let fools fool you. They are the clever ones."
Just how much bandwidth is used up by ads? Over and over again its the ads that hold up the loading of pages.
It always astonish me there are still transfer caps on most of the US ISPs. Where I live (France, go ahead you all french haters :-) ), all the ISPs switched a long time ago to full unlimited internet access, including P2P apps and other things.
I admit all french ISPs except one use DLS technology, witch allows dedicated Bandwidth to the end-user, but still, I wonder, if US ISPs cannot make a profit with unlimited access, given the massive amount of users there, how can 3 companies flourish in France only ?
The internet here is cheap (30-45 euros per month, that vouls be 40-60 US $) for a total uncrippled unlimited DSL line, including the wifi+ethernet switch router, VOIP access and TV over DSL (15-20 free channels). Down rate usually 18-24 Mbit/s and up rate is between 256 and 1024 Kbit/s.
I personnaly use an ISP called "Free Telecom" and have 24mbit/1Mbit with 18 TV channels for 29.90 euros per month, totally unlimited and I use about 650GB-800GB per month, lots of P2P here, since the french TV stations lag so much with the US TV shows (we will have Desperate Housewives Season 2 soon !!!)
If we poor "old europe" French can do it, how the hell US ISPs can't ?
just asking...
I could see this program working very well if they credited customers' accounts for 'unused bandwidth.' Say I have a plan for 40GB, but I only use 2GB because I'm busy doing other things outside. If TW credits my account down to whatever the smallest plan that covers 2GB, then this could be fantastic.
Another way of thinking about it: Pay As You Go system. You pay for 40GB of data, so 40GB gets credited to your account. As you upload and download, TW debits your account for the amount used. Balances never expire, and when you finally close out your account, you get the remaining balance back.
My god, I would love a plan like that.
The bandwidth is how much of the digital broadband you are allowed to use. It comes in a wild number of varieties from the age old 64kbps ISDN to the OC-x series fibre operating at many GB/s. Most consumers are happy with the 1Mbps ADSL, most power users (you and me) want our ADSL2+ @ >10Mbps, and Universities and Governments want their 155Mbps and above.
The data transfer limits are a measure of how much you utilise your bandwidth over a given time, that is why the slower speeds (256kbps mum & dad connections) get a paltry 1GB before hitting the 'cap' (either shaping back to 64k, or paying for 'overs') while higher bandwidth plans get more data (up to 60GB a month on some plans here in Aus). The overall utilisation is within the business model the ISP set of say a 5-8% utilisation, they make some money while you enjoy your fast connection and you mum can still get her email once a day.
Ramp your bandwidth up to 10Mbps and put the same utilisation on it, you get 30-50GB a month, and hence you pay more. Now pump this to 100% or even 80% utilisation when you can pull 10GB a day... Here's where the problems start. Our obsession with bandwidth has far out grown the ISPs capacity to suck all that data from their backhaul carrier (Telstra, NTT, AT&T, etc. - the big boys with the global networks).
So while I am all for speedy internet for all, you gotta realise that you can't use it like you used to with P2P running all the time and expect the low end users to pay for your excess consumption. Bandwidth limits are what once to spread the load, but now you will find that as ISPs are more and more relying on data limits instead as technology pushes the connections faster and faster and human nature presses our desire to have/offer the fastest connection.
What the hell could you possibly be doing with more than 60GB a month anyway?
Dan. -- So what if it's spelt wrong, nobody's perfect
Will customers who use Xbox360/Joost/Vuze to watch TV and movies suddenly less likely to use these new services? I know I will be if Comcast suddenly starts testing this new system. Please Verizon ... come to my neighborhood soon!
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your politician, and hitting them?"
First, determine a baseline amount of monthly usage that covers 95% of users. Charge a fixed price for this usage level, or possibly a few different prices based on max. peak bandwidth. Set an overage fee for monthly usage in excess of this amount. Voila. Now we don't have to worry about all this network neutrality crap. If all I do is check email, use google talk and browse the web, why should I have to subsidize the guy who streams 12 hours of netflix movies per day?
As a Beaumont, TX subscriber, I will never purchase any kind of limited service. If they apply these limits to me, I will cancel the service and switch to DSL or another competitor. I wouldn't mind so much if they lowered the maximum speed (within reason), but the possibility of overage fees is intolerable. If their intention is to get me to start worrying about how much data I consume, then they can die in a fire.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
I absolutely hate the idea of a download CAP. But, tiered speed is okay with me.
Cox has three tiers of service - entry level (1.5Mbit) at $20/mo, normal (5Mbit) at $30/mo and high speed (20Mbit) for $40/mo. I don't have a problem with this. I pay the $40 a month and my internet is really quick. I do get 20Mbit sometimes, but usually only on multiple downloads (not too many Internet servers let you download at 20 MBit) and so far, I haven't run into any caps (I've downloaded many, many gigabytes in a month and never had a letter or call or anything.)
Then there's my mom, who never needs more than 1.5Mbit at this point. So she gets a deal for that. $20/mo isn't too shabby at all.
Shared bandwidth of Cable Modems can be solved relatively easy for cable companies. They just have to split the nodes. It's not nearly as expensive as the initial roll-outs and it should be considered part of doing business. I mean, Internet bandwidth need is only going to keep growing.
I REALLY don't want a pay-per system like cell phones. If Time Warner does this, it's not about capacity issues it's about greed.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
Does everyone get their bandwidth caps lifted at the same time, or do they stagger them to avoid congestion? When do they start capping users, and what is the capped bandwidth vs uncapped bandwidth?
Figure out what it's going to cost to support my usage, bill me accordingly, and upgrade the infrastructure as necessary. I'll either cut back or bear the cost of my higher usage.
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
Why don't they sell bandwidth on 95th Percentile like they do servers at datacenters?
Give users 1Mbps on 95th percentile and that should take care of the needs of 95% of your users. Tier it for 2Mbps, 5Mbps, and 10Mbps for those who want to pay for it. Then those 5% who need more bandwidth can pay the extra $$ for those always leeching connections.
You could deal with overages in one of two ways: (1) Limit bandwidth to 1Mpbs (or whatever level they have) for the duration of the billing period, or (2) charge a flat fee per GB or per Mbps for overage.
I've been on a low-bandwidth tiered internet connection for years now for lack of a better option. When I go over the bandwidth limit (approximately 200MB a day) my connection is throttled to about 3KB/s or so for the following 24 hours. I may just be a little bit biased when I say I favor non-tiered unlimited bandwidth connections for cable subscribers.
Not sure what's wrong with the approach chosen. To me, this looks like it's been handled by my ISP (and others) for quite a while now. My cable provider has tiered plans and for me, it works fine. I get 20GB/month "peak" volume (12pm-12am) and 40GB/month "off peak" (12am-12pm). If used smart, it gives me 60GB/month. There are no excess fees but the speed will be capped to 64kbit. The imposed cap sucks a bit cos it also affects the IP-phone and I think they should give at least 128kbit. But to be honest, I've only reached the speed cap once and that was about 5 hours before the new month started.
Sure it isn't ideal but anything bar a REAL flat rate isn't ideal.
Have you all gone crazy?!? where am I? My browser window says slashdot.org but I feel like I'm at a luddite convention! You're all talking like a bunch of nansy-ass accountants and librarians.
Applauding the implementation of bandwidth hard-caps at the ISP level? You're all fucking crazy! 60GB/month?!? And you're happy with that?!?! You've got to be kidding, do you know how many Slashdot readers that kind of cap would cripple? (by Slashdot readers I mean people who actually value technologies like the internet, and call and complain to their ISPs if it isn't delivered properly...which is apparently almost noone in this thread)
As a poster further up said, this is a money grab. If I pay for a 3mbps connection, or a 6mbps connection...then dammit that's what I should get! If the infrastructure of cable is a limiting factor then they need to RE-INVEST IN INFRASTRUCTURE instead of putting out another dividend to their pigs-rolling-in-telecom-monopoly-shit stockholders.
I can't believe how many of you are bending over and giving a nod to the telecom monopolies, they should be INNOVATING! I.e. Improving services, reducing latencies, increasing bandwidth, expanding coverage, and ultimately PRESERVING THE YET UNTAPPED AND UNEXPLORED APPLICATION SPACE OF BROADBAND.
The next thing they'll do is standardize tiered billing for low-latency connections (not lower latency mind you, but the one you ALREADY HAVE NOW), are you all going to clap them on the back for that brilliant idea too?!?
my god wtf...
If used smart, it gives me 60GB/month.
What nauseating crap...I guess we should all count our blessings and be happy we aren't living in 1970s east berlin...that toilet paper isn't considered a luxury item...of course the 2008 east berlin has FAR better broadband coverage than we do now...but then what civilized country on this planet doesn't have better broadband than us? "Gimme 60GB/month, at least I can say I'm an american where consumers come first and we have access to the the best services and technologies"...what a crock. It grieves me terribly to read comments like these on Slashdot of all places...you've all turned into complacent kowtowing pussies!
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
A good analogy is cell phone and land line rates. In the USA, most people pay a flat rate for local calls on their land line, but have a limit on how long they can use their cell phone without steep overage charges. Not to say doing this for Internet is a good thing (I hated it when I was in UK), but it's not like the Internet is the only place we meet this kind of pricing.
I'm gonna have to move to Taiwan to get decent broadband.
Assholes, all of them.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
If they are going to be capping the monthly usage what about services like NetFlix that offer (now unlimited for some plans) video streaming? These videos are obviously going to be a good size (probably 300mb-1gb, haven't tried it personally). I also heard that iTunes is letting you rent movies via download. All these new services are coming out that require heavy bandwidth, and the ISPs response is to cap it? If they do cap it, what kind of cap are we talking about. I currently have a 10mbps connection and pay $70/mo for it.. if its capped at 10-20gb/mo (although I probably would never use that). That pretty much limits you to what you can do... I didn't pay extra for a faster line so I could download less...
This is a good thing because it puts the ISP on the side of the heavy P2P user. P2P users suddenly become an ISP's most profitable customers instead of the least profitable. If this became widespread ISPs would start standing up to the copyright cartels (well, those which aren't wholly owned subsidiaries of same, at least). Also, it gives them an actual incentive to upgrade their networks instead of just trying to squeeze more out of the ones they have.
I know it's painful to have to actually pay for the bandwidth you use, but rational pricing structures are, in the end, good for everyone.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
Interestingly enough they're doing just about what you described in Brazil (I'm talking about the major cable provider, I don't know about other services). Apparently they were clever enough to foresee the bandwith usage problem from day one, and their contracts from when they started up until last year stated that you'd pay X cents for MB if you'd excedeed Z transfer rate (I don't remember either amount), only they never charged the extra.
Then they got real smart, and decided to promote new speeds (from 300kbps to 2Mbps) for almost no price difference, and sneakily introduced along with that a new contract that said you had a 20 gig limit, and exceeding that you could either be capped to the slowest speed they sell (200kbps, which is slower than the 300kbps or 256kbps they offered earlier) or you could buy another 20 gig for half the price of the monthly fee (and after that, another 20 gig and so on).
You gotta love it, don't you.
One common setup is to have your monthly allocation (eg I am on 20gb/month) and the 'month' starts on the date that you signed up for the service. Every anniversary date it gets reset. Therefore it tends to naturally stagger out pretty well.
Of course, the biggest ISPs just reset everyone on the first of the month, but that's the least of the problems with their service.
Bandwidth caps are normally lifted at the same time billing is done for the next month. For example, the summary page provided by my ISP currently shows;
If you go to their plan page you can see that when you hit your limit on any of the 3 metered types of data they limit you're download and upload speed to 64kbps, nearly as slow as a modem.
I believe they run a script to update your stats from their routers every fifteen minutes.
Back in the dialup days it was common to pay for bandwidth by the MB, with plans that included a certain amount per month. With the move to broadband, the same types of plans were used initially. Until there were a couple of highly publicised cases of multiple thousand dollar bandwidth bills, because someone had left some p2p program or other minimised for the whole month. Then came the "unlimited" plans from telstra (with a bandwidth cap in the fine print as I've outlined above).
While exact terms and implementations vary between AU ISP's, there are no cheap truly unlimited connection plans. And there is no where near the amount of bandwidth overselling as occurs with US ISP's.
If I'm downloading something, and it isn't flooding my downstream capacity, the main bottle neck will either be outside of the country, or the machine at the other end of the connection doesn't have enough available bandwidth. It is extremely rare for any internet connection in AU to experience congestion in the backbone of the ISP's network.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
Maybe it isn't the same throughout the U.S., but in SoCal, that's PRECISELY how it works. Gas, electricity, AND water rates go up steeply as you use more and more.
Looking at my electric bill, the first jump after the "baseline" is ~2x, the 2nd is ~6x, and the third is ~8x.
I suspect some other major cities do this as well, but I grew up here, and it's just not a topic that comes up often.
Merde, il pleut encore!
we need real QoS. You should get a certain bandwidth marked "low latency/high priority" (say, 500Kbps that's dedicated to me) and a certain bandwidth marked "high throughput/low priority" (like up to 24Mbps depending on what's free in the network). That way my torrents don't kill Granny's web browsing or some dude's VOIP call. If the bandwidth isn't being used by anyone, what's the harm if it goes to my torrent? The ISPs should't actually care about my traffic as long as I'm not squeezing anyone else out.
I don't know how you'd actually implement such a system, but it seems like the only answer that's likely to please everyone.
Hell, I'd be happy if I got 24Mbps from 12AM to 8AM when nobody's online and a quarter of that during the day when there's contention for it.
Cable ISPs have determined that 5% of their users are using 95% of their bandwidth; accordingly, the cable firms have decided to reduce the rates for 95% of their customers.
Back in '02 Internode http://www.internode.on.net/ introduced Flat Rate plans, whereby you could download as much as you wanted while the network wasn't congested, however when utilisation reached 100%, those with the highest downloads over the last 28 days (rolling period) would be progressivly slowed down, to as low as dial-up speed. Once the network was less congested, your speed would ratchet back up (again depending on network congestion and your priority based on your downloads).
Those that only occassionally downloaded large files would get full speed pretty much all the time, those that downloaded continuously would see their downloads slow during peak periods.
It wasn't rocket science, but that 28day rolling period and how it worked was a confusion that eventually forced the cancellation of these type of plans - which is too bad, as they essentially gave everyone a fair go depending on how much you downloaded. No excess charges, just a flat fee and as much GB as you could squeeze out of the link.
It was a great system and I was sorry to see it go. I'm sure the developer of the software was dissapointed in much larger ways - this system could have made bandwidth provisioning & customer charging a lot easier to predict and manage.
More info in an FAQ http://whirlpool.net.au/article.cfm/1037
Boolean logic: True, False, and File not found.
Time to move to Japan where competition provides REAL high speed internet at a reasonable price. This is what happens when you have limited options for internet connectivity. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/28/AR2007082801990_2.html?nav=rss_technology
Iraq billions
What I don't understand is WHY the freaking cap is so onerous. If you have a 6Mbps line when do they cut it down to 1%, why not 10% which is still usable for many broadband uses but should still keep them from needing to massively overbuild for the big downloader (IE you are now like a "normal" user).
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
good thing you're not trolling with your sockpuppet today, twitter... um, erris.
At an end user level..
I would imagine Botnets make up a significant amount of the 5% (if those figures are correct) of those "over-using".
Maybe people will take their PC security seriously if more ISPs did this...
"Norton said I was clean! What do you mean my computer is spamming people?"
Why can't we go back to using jumpers to configure slot adapter cards? Why? I say!
Why don't they start by shutting down the zombies?
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
This is a slippery slope you guys are talking about. Fight this as hard as you possibly can, because if you don't you will sorely regret it.
Here in Australia, we have had caps for years now, after the only ISP at the time (the incumbent teleco, Telstra) introduced limits on it's Cable plans. It is normal to have an ISP offer a mere 10GB/mo or lower of bandwidth to normal people, often going as low at 400MB! And this is using cable (at 8mbit/s) or ADSL2+ (at 24mbit/s)! It takes seconds to blow your monthly allowance.
Most ISPs go for the rate limiting approach, limiting you to 64kbit/s after reaching your quota. Then, even dialup is faster as you have compression on dialup but you don't get that on cable and DSL. The incumbent teleco has it's higher level plans (12GB/25GB) as being rate limited, and it's lower plans having excess fees. These excess fees are 150$/GB - which is between two and four times the monthly fee!
What's worse, is three ISPs (two of them major); Telstra, Optus and Dodo "double dip", that is, they count your uploads as well as your downloads, and add it together to say how much you've used, rather than only counting downloads. It is quite common for kids to leave P2P applications running and not realising the consequence of this, and parents just think it is normal.
We somewhat have an excuse, we don't have a lot of uplink to the rest of the world, and surely if all caps were gone, it would flood these connections. They're talking about having a new uplink installed via Guam in 2009 right now, which is supposed to lead to higher quotas. Here's hoping...
At the moment, my ISP is rather nice. They have 128kbit/s download only cap once I download in excess of 40GB. I can upload as much as I like.
But, you're on a very slippery slope. This will not lead to lower prices. Your average user will continue to pay the same amount they do now (maybe 5-10% lower, so that the ISP can "sell" the idea to the customer) for a 10GB plan, and charge 2 to 4 times as much for the higher tiers, upto about 100GB.
"and ISPs have a very limited amount of backbone capacity"
ISPs have limited bandwidth because THEY OVERSELL THE FUCK OUT OF IT. End of story.
Might want to watch what you say. I've worked in the ISP realm (Back when IXL Memphis was a big provider) and it was always a case of overselling the hell out of a fat pipeline.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Just keep track of the amount of data that is advertising and SPAM, and be sure to factor that out of the data that you meter from my use. Better yet, just block everything that I don't want coming through. ktnxbye
If knowing is half the battle, what is the other half?
"They'll be much happier with the grandmothers who download a few pictures of their grandkids every now and then."
And when the grandkids can't upload pics to grandma due to the stupid data cap and they finally get the reason why across to her in a form she can understand, grandma just cancels and insists on snail-mail polaroid pictures.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
I think the ISP's approach of selectively targeting the worst bandwidth hogs when they became aware of problems was the best one: it's easy to do and it doesn't limit what you can do unless there's a problem.
Bandwidth caps and tiered pricing are a result of a few people not being able to exercise some self-restraint. It's the tragedy of the commons again. And the result of it is that bandwidth costs will go up significantly and everybody suffers.
The culprits here are not the cable companies, it's people who believe that "unlimited bandwidth" entitles them to running BitTorrent and Joost 24/7, in clear violation of the actual TOS.
"Flat pricing just means that someone like me - who isn't downloading movies all day - is helping pay the bills of people who are."
Not really. Broadband rates are set by the market, and only marginally by the cost of the bandwidth.
Think of a nice restaurant. You go in and order all-you-can-eat chicken for $15. So they bring out this big friggin' chicken and you eat and eat and you can't eat it all... and you look over and this fat guy eats it like nothing and he keeps eating. Way more than you. So you think. Man... the only reason they charge me $15 is because that fat guy over there actually eats all the chicken.
So you think... if they serve me a smaller chicken, and charge the fat guy more, then they'll charge me less. So you bring it up with the manager and he agrees.
So you come in next time, and the chicken is 1/2 the size, the fat guy is there, but he paid $30, and you paid... $15. How can that be? I thought if the fat guy paid more, I would pay less. But I was charged the same. How can that be?
There are a couple of very real factors at work here:
1)First, you already have shown the restaurant you'd pay $15 for chicken. They'd be stupid to charge less.
2) The restaurant needs a "minimum" price per customer. If you ordered ketchup on a chip, you'd pay $15 because that's what it costs to run the overhead of the restaurant.
3) The fat guy is paying more, and that's just more profit for the restaurant.
So this tiered pricing will not cost anybody less, but will *certainly* be used to raise prices, and everyone will get less data for their monthly price because you've already admitted you don't eat all that chicken anyway.
You're not getting slowed down by the fat guy, and the fact that it's hard for the ISPs? Well, shit.... we're all paying them $40-50 a month for broadband, and their revenue was $16B last year. They *should* have to work hard for $16B. If it was easy, nobody would pay them $40/month for broadband.
Providing that kind of bandwidth wouldn't stop the biggest users of their network from leaching 24/7. At say 60KB/s you could still download about 5GB a day or 150GB per month. Even at 64kbps you can download 675 MB per day or about 20GB per month. But your connection would be useless for anything else.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
I assume if time warner is so concerned about screwing more money out of the heavy users, they're also looking into giving refunds to the low users who don't use the bandwidth that TW planned for us to use under the "unlimited" scheme. Right??
gci.net added tier and caps years ago, course no national but this makes time warner the first ever to do it
a few things need to be considered when looking at what cables "limited" bandwidth. First all bandwidth has a limit for what can be sent down the line downstream signal is from 54 mhz to 800 in my area with aprox 400 digital channels of which about 30 are high def and 70 are analog.
745 mhz spread tells us we can fit 124 channel paths in the forward path per node
about 10 digital channels can be carried in one 6 mhz analog channel path
about 5 hd channels per 6 mhz spread
400 digital channels divided by 10 per path gives us 40 channel paths
70 plus 40 is 110 used channel paths out of 124 this is not however the total network load with fiber and nodes this is strictly the limit per node ie last mile
in that last mile the 70 or so channels being taken up by analog will go away in 09 freeing up 700 digital channels 350 hd channels or 21000 mbs per last mile (last mile is not always the last mile the number of subscribers is taken into node count for a given area
even with most populated nodes at 400 subs per node the extra bandwidth is 52 mbs per sub, we already have the channels we need converted to digital so that does not need to be figured into the "new" bandwidth, also we have tested our network to at least 1 ghz and are being pushed hard to get our network to 1 ghz thats an additional 200 mhz or 33 data paths 9900 mbs other new tech such as multi streaming (feeding multiple subs the same stream will utilize our network more efficiently.
Technology will default in society to its most rudimentary level:::stupid computers for stupid users:::
Consumers should never attempt to solve a corporation's problems by not demanding the full product or service. Corporations will not lower your fees when you are in a tight spot.
/. readers would without a doubt create several hundred times as much traffic as people who only use email and read news on the web. On the other hand, the casual users will make frequent use of the ISP's helpline to configure an email client or "fix the internet." The heavy users on the other hand would not be caught dead calling ISP support staff. Which do you think is more expensive, upgrading routers or paying people to handhold customers through everything remotely related to your product?
The first fallacy is to assume that there is a problem which can be solved by generating less traffic: New uses will always require higher bandwidths and generate more traffic, so even casual users will exceed any perceived "acceptable" limit. Back in the nineties, students were asked not to use the web (with its bandwidth eating graphics) too much. Internet access was much more expensive back then. Would the internet be as fast and as cheap as it is today if people had restrained themselves? The web dwarfed email traffic. P2P dwarfs web traffic. HDTV streaming or whatever is next will dwarf P2P traffic. The only solution is to keep upgrading the net.
The second fallacy is that generating much traffic is unfair towards casual users who pay the same price. There's always someone who uses the net much less. Even without any P2P, most of the
The third fallacy is that imposing traffic limits would reduce the problem: If you can't download all you want, are you going to use up your limit at night or when it's convenient, i.e. when everybody else uses the net because that's when it's convenient for them too? The problem isn't the total traffic, it's the bandwidth at peak times. Whether anyone downloads hundreds of gigabytes at night is totally irrelevant, because there is no off-peak bandwidth shortage.
And here comes the moment I start feeling old:
This is how things used to be, back in the early days of AOL, Compuserve, etc. You got a certain number of minutes of modem access per month. Presumably disagreements like that did happen, but somehow or another people dealt with it. It was a big deal when AOL first came out with an "unlimited" plan, and the immediate result was that they couldn't handle the load. So the problem of "unlimited" access and overselling access isn't anything new either.
Hopefully now someone will come along and talk about using gopher via the BBS they used to dial in to or something, and I won't feel so bad.
"You call it a new way of thinking; I call it regression to ignorance!" -- Operation Ivy
5% of subscribers use over 50% of the total network bandwidth.
That's their own damn fault for under-engineering their access network and offering speeds they can't reliably deliver. I'm guessing those 5% users are the ones making them the money. These are the customers with their $80/month internet Ultra-BlastOff(TM) 8Mb/768 with Mega-Boost®.
Is it just me or do all the ISP providers really need network analysts and computer scientists in R&D! It just seems to me like too many marketing firms and businessman are not listening to international statistics for total bandwidth per capita. ISP's just don't seem to get that bandwidth requirements are not the same as they were 2-5 years ago. This is a new digital age, embrace it or get left out in the cold.
If the ISPs don't want to invest more money in lines, then they sure better be finding faster transmission methods with what they have (i.e. the new DOCSIS standards).
Speaking of Toronto, Teksavvy provides ADSL up to 5 megabits, with 2 options
Unlimited (yes really) for $39.95/month for peering via Cogent
Premium for $29.95/month for peering via Peer1, with 200 gigs/month, and excess usage at 25 cents/gig
Ping times are 5 to 10 ms faster on Premium
Your choice.
I normally use under 5 gigs/month. If their basic DSL (actually SDSL) was 512 down / 288 up rather than 288 down / 288 up, I'd switch over to that. Even with the 10 gig cap I'd be comfortable.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
Have you all gone crazy?!? where am I? My browser window says slashdot.org but I feel like I'm at a luddite convention!
No, you are at Slashdot - but most of us have gained a degree of business understanding along with technical expertise at this point to know TNSTAFL (There's no such thing as a free lunch).
You say "If the infrastructure of cable is a limiting factor then they need to RE-INVEST IN INFRASTRUCTURE", but are you also willing to pay $200 a month? Is everyone? The cable companies incur very real interconnect fees from high bandwidth usage, never mind expensive infrastructure that not everyone makes full use of.
There is more going on here than a money grab. What's going on is a way to try and balance the competing needs between two very different kinds of users while still keeping a price point most people will accept. That's why I personally think a tiered pricing system is a great idea, because I want to be able to use my dollars to say "Yes I really do want a lot of bandwidth and am willing to pay a reasonable fee for same". If you just go spouting nonsense that everyone on earth should get 6MBs for a nickel, well it's just not going to happen and there are very valid reasons why.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It's kind of surprising that you guys in the US aren't more familiar with caps and shaping of broadband. In Australia there was only every completely unlimited internet for a year or two...I guess it's harder for us since a lot more of the internet traffic is international and therefore more expensive, plus we have less users. I think it's a reasonable measure to save the company money (as you can see from the stats, it's only really going to upset a very small percentage of users, but save a lot of money) however it seems some companies take it a bit too far just because they can. Most of the plans over here are capped at a monthly usage of 10-20gig for the average plan, with usage being slowed dramatically after the cap is met (64kbit/ps). Quite a few plans have shaping which count your cap or limit your bandwidth differently based on the time of day which I think is definitely a good idea. The company I'm with counts upload towards your cap and limits upload speeds (to a fairly low speed - 16kbyte/ps) which really gives me the sh!ts...makes internet multitasking very poor and effectively limits your download speeds because of the DL overhead. I think the ideal solution is a teared design where the more you use the slower it gets, the more off peak it is the less it counts, the lower the consistency of high usage the less it matters. I don't understand why everything always has to be implemented in massive steps rather than something with a gradient.
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!
> I am paying for X MBps download and Y MBps upload (it is dedicated).
No F***ing way a residential line is dedicated. It's "best effort" on an oversold connection. You want "X MBps download and Y MBps upload" guaranteed with an SLA, go for it. Just don't come back here whining about the several hundred dollars a month you'll have to pay for a business line.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
1) ISPs implement surcharges for high-gigabyte-downloading customers
2) 5% of customers leave
3) Net traffic usage goes down 50%, while revenue only decreases 5%
4) Increased profit!!!
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
When you can get a 100mbit connection in Japan for the equivalent of $14 / month, I feel like, if anything, Time Warner should give me this 8mbit crap for $2 / month -- and even that wouldn't be as good a deal as the Japanese are getting.
:) ). Here we are 9 years later, and speeds have hardly improved. Meanwhile, the rest of the world has leapfrogged us.
Our ISPs really dropped the ball here. I had 6mbit internet in 1999 (had a really cool uncapped DSL package through Sprint
Don't tell me that we're putting too much strain on the Time Warner network. I'm paying those bastards $45 / month. I should be able to use my full 8mbits 24/7 if I want to. Internet in Japan is 40 times better (in terms of megabits per dollar) than it is here. Give me a break!
It was a number I chose arbitrarily; substitute 2GB or 200GB if you like. I expect the median value of bandwidth usage is far below 20GB per month. Heavy users might find that too low, but they can buy service plans with higher limits with a higher per-month fee. I would much rather have ISPs state their bandwidth caps publicly and let customers decide if they're reasonable, than to randomly disconnect customers who "use too much", or for ISPs to start filtering or rate limiting specific applications or web sites.
When they get all their new tiers and pricing in place it'll turn out that the light users pay the same as they always have and the heavier users will pay much, much more. No improvements in service will be provided and the cable company will collect more money for the same old thing. Good old corporate greed is alive and well...
Metered is bad because it introduces bandwidth into the accounting sheet. It also links probably faulty meters with your pocket, and trust me this is a bad thing.
Unmetered is also a problem because many times it is used as marketing speak for "come into our network and if we don't like you we will kick you out" and the acceptable use is never mathematically defined.
Both of the above introduce human complexities, and there is nothing more unpredictable than human behaviour. You never know when your server may get slashdotted. You never know what your home ISP considers acceptable (they won't tell you because they want to be able to oversell).
There is only one way to remove such complexities and this is to have unmetered service with speed adjustments.
So for example, for a server you get a 100 Mbps unmetered pipe but if you use way too much you get capped to 10 Mbps. You still have service, just a bit slower. For home ISPs you have fast ADSL but if you use way too much you get capped to 64k or 128k. You still have service (way too slow, but you can still ssh and email). Of course these adjustments should be on a per-month basis, and there should be appropriate plans for those who constantly use too much and need the highest speed.
My Cable ISP in the UK provides me with a 20Meg connection. If I download over about 5 gig (about) during peak hours (4pm-midnight I think) my bandwidth gets throttled down to 5 Meg. Throttle is removed a few hours after it was imposed and off-peak.
When this was introduced I was spitting feathers, but after a bit of thought, it's really not too bad - and better than the alternatives. Internet doesn't vanish on me, my bill doesn't go up and I don't have to 'do' anything to deal with it.
Obviously I'd like the cap to be raised, the off-peak hours to be relaxed etc, but the general idea is OK.
Only alterations I'd like would for there to be some sort of exception system for when you need to download something big and you need it right now during peak hours. No idea how it'd work though. You get three 'free days' a month and you click a button on a webapp somewhere to use one and remove your cap for a day?
In Belgium on the 30th of December there was a 'heavy download day' to get attention to the fact that 10GB/12GB per month is not realy serious anymore.
A few thousand people started to download heavily that day. They downloaded way more then just the average with some 8GB per person for that day. The providers did not even see a blimp on their usage.
The ONLY reason they do it is so that they can charge extra, without the need to invest, Just like they charge some 30 to 60 EUR for fixied IP's for broadband and cable. No investment, big return.
As there is a duopoly, there is no serious competition in pricing.
The bandtwith is available to give everybody unlimited access. It is just so much nices to sqeeze the last penny from the customers, blame piracy for it and at the same time advertise how you can see movies and listen to music you download from the Intertubes.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Instead of a hard bandwidth cap, the UBR is instructed to throttle the connection of anyone who exceeds a certain usage threshold during peak hours (1600-2100). Their connection is throttled for 5 hours from the trigger.
This means that your connection doesn't suddenly grind to a halt, it just slows down to 25-50% of your rated speed.
Yes, I agree that the solution that is ideal for geeks is to simply upgrade the infrastructure until we have all the bandwidth we can eat. This is not going to happen any time soon - P2P programs are just too good at eating all the available bandwidth (it is after all what they were designed to do). Even heroic measures would rapidly be offset by a ravening swarm of people downloading HD movies as the original ISO.
ISPs rely on the fact that the "masses" are usually not heavy users. Alas, P2P is now beloved of the masses. P2P is the application that changed the way the average Joe uses bandwidth. Why else is my ISP offering 10, 20, and soon, 50MBit/s packages? 10MBit is enough to stream a full, broadcast quality, digital TV channel (8Mbit/s is the most I've seen DVB-T channels use in the UK). It's more than enough to stream several movies at once, if they are compressed using something more efficient than MPEG-2. It's enough to download a Linux ISO in 10 minutes. In other words, 10MBit/s is fast enough for most personal uses. The marginal gains of upgrading to 20MBit/s are minimal, unless you are doing something that can eat the extra bandwidth - and the only (non-business) application that does is P2P. That goes quintuple for 50Mbit/s!
I'd be interested to see similar usage figures for urban Japan where they enjoy 100Mbit/s fibre to the home. I'd be willing to bet they are all P2Ping their asses off.
ISPs have been constantly upping the ante in their advertising, promising more and more while simultaneously delivering less and less. Since broadband started with 256k/512k lines, up to today's 20M+ lines, they are obviously telling you their line is faster, you can do more, etc etc. But with bandwidth usage restriction, total download restriction, not to mention banning services on ports they don't like, there is absolutely no need for high bandwidth connectivity. 24Mb/s is useless if all you can do is email and web browsing. Perhaps streaming video gets faster, yeah, but:
a) most streaming video is tailored for lower bandwidth, eg 300k/s
b) watch a few of them and you'll hit your bandwidth cap anyway.
These restrictions are only about "fair use" in that the network has not invested enough in its infrastructure to actually support all their customers. They are selling ultra-fast connections but not expecting people to actually use them, and thus putting small-print restrictions on these accounts while still accepting more customers and more revenue (which is ostensibly being spent on marketing rather than bandwidth).
Vote with your feet, refuse to sign up to a deal with bandwidth restriction, and tell them why. Would you buy a car, if they only allowed you one liter of fuel a week?
I cant believe how people here are now embrasing companies screwing them over and locking them down. I wonder if they get a warm fuzzy feeling every time they are told "YOU CANT DO THAT".
Here in Australia, most broadband plans consist of a set quota with shaping applied if you go over that. This is actually a good system since service is guaranteed up to your quota (so you get what you pay for). Compare that with what I see in America where most broadband plans are 'unlimited' with vague excessive usage conditions and slowing down protocols they don't like. Also, with different quota plans, you will have a choice with regards to price.
I don't know why they just don't come out and say what they really want. A pricing system that is identical to that of the Electric Company. You get charged a flat fee, plus a fee for the number of packets down loaded and a fee for packets up loaded. Obviously there are technical hurdles for this method of billing, but I'm sure they will try and get there. Lucky for most folks, and unlike that of electric (regardless of what they tell you), there is still some competition for your ISP dollar.
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
Liberal-artsy major questions incoming, please bear with me. Assume a plan offers 60 hours of peak usage monthly, where "peak usage" is more than 1Mbps downstream.
First question: How might the limited upstream limits for a cable line get worked into this plan in a consumer model?
Second question: Under such a system, am I interpreting these usage scenarios accurately?
1. News (RSS feed, social net site, and 8 web sites loaded simultaneously). Easy, I'm guessing ~45-60 seconds of downstream congestion per shot.
2. E-mail (download 40-50 spams and 20-30 desired e-mails. Then, upload 10 e-mails with 400kB-1MB files in tow intermittently over the next ten to twenty-five minutes). The first part's easy -- one to three minutes of downstream saturation. I have utterly no clue what would happen with the second part. Does the plan track my usage by the second, or does it gobble precisely ten to twenty-five minutes of peak time?
3. Web surfing (download 6-12 sites over an hour, complete with graphical UI elements and ads freshly loaded for each). A downstream version of the previous e-mail scenario. Assume each site takes 10 seconds to load; is the user charged for 60-120 seconds of peak usage, or for 6 to 12 distinct "blocks" of peak usage time?
4. Gaming (1 hour with a mid-quality VoIP client chatting to 4-6 people). Yet another spiky usage graph. Lots and lots of bursts that might bounce over 1Mbps, but fairly low total data transfer. Could be less than 5 minutes real "peak" usage, but blocky time units could turn it into an entire hour of usage.
5. Usenet retrievals (say, 24 hours chugging along at a modest 50kB/s). Presumably, this doesn't get counted at all, even though it could account for over 120 GB of transfer in a month.
6. Large file, high transfer rate (Netflix movie, software updates, whatever, say 400-800MB at full download). Big, solid, "peak" downstream usage for 30-120 minutes. Easy, but maybe relevant when compared to...
7. Medium file, medium transfer rate (say, 15 minutes of flash video from YouTube). Probably fast enough to break the 1Mbps barrier, but nowhere near most current downstream caps. I'm predicting this will eat peak time for however long it takes to download -- effectively charging more per MB than would be true with a faster transfer.
8a. BitTorrent, plan A (60 minutes or so at >95% up and down saturation, THEN several hours "seeding"). Here's the one everyone gripes about. Obviously, one hour usage for the download. However, what might this plan do with seeders? Maybe the user downloaded 1GB in an hour at ~300kB/s. However, seeding a full copy at ~50kB/s takes another 5-6 hours. Is the user hit for 1 hour or 6?
8b. BitTorrent, plan B (6 hours self-regulated to 50kB/s down with negligible upload, then finishes seeding at sub-peak). Does the user duck peak usage entirely?
9a. Non-botnet spyware (always on, sending bursts intermittently). Yes it's bad, and no, I don't think I have any. That said, depending on how traffic is tracked, it could eat up many customers' peak usage while not actually causing hairy problems for the network.
9b. Botnet (always on, busy traffic). This one seriously calls for some sort of intervention, but as botnet recruitment is a malicious attack from the outside (and isn't always preventable or immediately repaired by average users), should an unholy usage charge (what would a >200 hours peak usage penalty look like?) be levied against the (probably somewhat computer-illiterate) user?
9c. Direct malice (I'm not good here. I'm thinking some sort of bulky, direct DoS stuff...ping flood? Port scan? Mass redirection?). Even barring actual infiltration, if someone starts flooding the user's access point and the router DOESN'T happen to be intelligent or well-enough configured to ignore all such requests, does the user start losing peak time to network "overhead?" Or, worse yet, does the penalty apply even if the user is running a network that's as unresponsive as Stonehenge?
Understand that I actually find a peak-capacity-hour proposal somewhat attractive, but am simply unsure about some of the finer details.
Tiered bandwidth is the surest way to kill IPTV. There are several complaints in this thread about streaming radio and video, which is what all the file-sharing group is trying to achieve. The media providers like RIAA and such are starting to realize that content on demand is possible and desired by the public (netflix and video rentals knew this a while back). Tiered internet IPTV and Steaming Radio will either standardize to the lowest tier of quality (yuck!) or give up all-together because those NOT in the article's 5% will have no economically viable access to decent streaming bandwidth. 95% of subscribers in a Tiered or Metered bandwith system will simply not order the services over the internet.
And what about WOW?
Always going forward, 'cause we can't find reverse.
I have seen several articles on Slashdot complaining of Comcast's unknown cap, where they will tell you that you are transferring too much, but won't define how much is too much.
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/27/0040220
I think I would prefer a system with a known quantity and a method of purchasing more if you exceed the limit rather than just being cut off.
You can always argue about the top 5% using more than the others. I know people who spend the majority of their time on the Internet and others who only log in for a few minutes to check their mail or get a stock quote. The enthusiasts will always be at the top of the curve.
Why should I pay to download content from my ISP's server? The server sits on their network. I'm doing them a favour by not going outside their network.
All ISPs should offer a server like this.
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
mod up
Judging by past cable company actions, this will not lower anyone's costs except the cable company's costs.
Do you really think that ANY cable company will offer lower priced packages for those that DON'T use a ton of bandwidth? If they did, according to their own numbers, 95% of their subscriber base would end up paying less than they do now since they don't use very much bandwidth. Those light users would pay only for what they need - just enough to check email and browse the web.
Cable companies will implement tiered pricing for one reason only - to push heavy users off the system (to lower their costs) and to maximize profits from the light users.
It's not about "ensuring network performance" or "lowering subscriber costs" - it's about cable companies not liking the deal they cut with their customers, and reneging on the deal.
Too bad our spineless, corporate controlled government, can't regulate the companies charged with the stewardship of our public resources. Without that regulatory oversight, anti-consumer policies like this will continue to hurt the public.
-ted
Um... because there's no such thing as unlimited bandwidth? Any claim of "unlimited" just means "we've estimated your usage and we think we can handle it."
Buying a product in bulk that expires every month makes no sense for the consumer. Doing it in "unlimited" amounts just means that those who don't use much have to subsidize those who use a lot.
I think it makes perfect sense to pay for bandwidth and cellphone minutes in proportion to usage. Think about cell phone plans: if you don't use all your minutes, you're overpaying; if you do use all your minutes, you pay a big penalty for any additional use. End result: almost everyone overpays.
I would much rather pay a very low rate per minute. That way I can buy exactly as many minutes as I need in a given month, at a known rate, and not worry.
Why should bandwidth be different? It costs money to provide it, and those who use a resource most should pay in proportion to their usage. Just make the per-megabyte fee very low. This fixes everyone's problems: every consumer will have a fair bill, the provider will profit in proportion to usage, and if, like the grandparent stated, you only have occasional spikes in usage, it won't affect your budget very much.
Glad I put in an order for dryloop DSL a couple of days back. Time-Warner can suck it.
Why can't we just get to a point where we just pay per bit? And I mean for everything, cellphone, internet, television, etc. If I'm downloading / uploading a bit, I should pay for that bit what it costs to transfer it plus say 20% which can be the profit margin split between the ISPs and carriers involved in the transfer. Such a system would be efficient, provide margins far higher than in many manufacturing industries, and would encourage bandwidth providers to build out the fatest pipes they can to the home.
:)
For example: Theoretical small local ISP Foo.net has a pair of OC-12 connections (622mbps each, 1.2gpbs combined) and pays $30k / month for wholesale bandwidth, the ISP has 5 employees at an average salary and benefits of $120k/year each ($50k / month employees), and an additional $20k / month in overhead. So if they had 1200 subscribers, each sustaining a 1mbps connection, their price per month would be $120,000/1200 = $100 / month.
Now my Verizon Business class DSL (2.4mbps down, 700kbps up real world), runs $90 / month. I know that I don't sustain a 900kbps connection 24/7. Verizon posted $1.68b profit on $23.3 revenue last year according to Bloomberg, which is a 7% profit margin. Obviously Verizon is no where near as efficient as Foo.net. But these numbers are not unrealistic.
If I have a bandwidth cap I will:
1. Not ever rent or buy movies or TV shows from iTunes or XBOX Live.
2. Always use Adblock, Flashblock, and Noscript and never support any websites by "clicking on the ads".
3. Avoid Youtube and other video sites unless it is important.
4. Avoid buying games with very short single player modes but large online components.
5. Will no longer buy games off of Steam or other digital downloaded websites.
6. Cut my podcast subscriptions by approximately 95%. (no video podcasts at all)
7. Cut back random surfing, blog reading, and social networking.
8. Will go back to buying CDs instead of legally buying digital music from iTunes and Amazon.
So if your business model is related to one of the above items, you will not be getting my support because you will be competing on my bandwidth meter against MMOs and P2P.
I'm a heavy internet user. I do a fair bit of downloading files, plenty of surfing the net, some uploading, etc. Technology is something I care about greatly. On top of that, I make a fairly good living off it.
With that in mind, I point out two things:
1. Stop trying to sugar coat illegal downloading with legitimate use. Yes, there is legitimate use of P2P. WoW's patch downloader, being one of them. However those guys downing 5-10gbs (or more) of movies/music/tv a day, are using a hell of a lot of the bandwidth.
2. Internet is a service. The more you use it, it seems to make sense you'd also need to spend more. I for one would be happy to pay more for my internet service each month; if I get good a fairly decent SLA, and lower latency, and high download speeds. Do I download 10gs a day? No, but I might download a few 100 megs, and the faster that gets done, the nicer.
I don't have TW, I have some small cable company called Service Electric. I *wish* they offered tiered plans. Fact is, I want high quality internet service, and I'd be willing to pay for it. (Although within reason, of course. I'm not going to pay $200 a month for it.).
Is that right? Isp's can't actually offer unlimited access to everybody? Then why do they do it, as they have for years? Why do they advertise unlimited internet access in print, radio, TV, internet ads all day long if they cannot actually provide it. If you are correct, that means that it is false advertising! Paying top dollar for a falsely advertised service is acceptable to you? Well it's not to me!
Firstly, if your incorrect assertion is true, that they cannot provide unlimited access as they have advertised, then they owe their customers refunds and they need to stop the false advertising immediately! Indeed, anyone advertising an unlimited service that is not in fact unlimited needs to be sanctioned by the FTC.
Second, if you expanded your myopic view a little bit, you'd see that there are numerous other places in the world that offer and deliver unlimited internet access at higher bandwidths for LESS money. These places don't seem to be suffering "poor" Time Warner's odious problem of "limited" bandwidth.
Finally, I pay for a service that promises unlimited access. If Comcast or Time Warner feel that they can redefine the term "unlimited" to mean finite and very limited then they will lose my business. I may not be able to find the high-speed services of other nations but, there are more than enough services available for me to tell the top half dozen services to go to hell!
Unlimited means without limit. What part of that do you not understand?
We've had this in the UK (and probably the rest of the world) for years now, with each ISP implementing it in different ways while continuing to advertise "unlimited bandwidth*".
Here's a suggestion: send a letter to the heaviest users advising them that they're screwing with their "fair use" policy by transferring so much data (porn and torrents, I'll wager) and that they need to cut back or they'll be throttled. While doing this, apply a blanket weekly bandwidth limit to all their accounts that can deal with occasional spikes of traffic if a user wants to download a few GB of data at the weekend, but will shape the traffic of those users who are, as we say over here, "taking the piss" and leaving their computer on 24/7 with a queue of 100 torrents, or running servers off their home connection.
I've been hit repeatedly by the hard, monthly limits set by most ISPs. Let's say you download a few game demos over Xbox Live, or you (legally) download a movie and some music. Do this a few times and you'll hit your ISPs monthly transfer limits, which are often as "low" as 10-30gb. I hit my previous ISP's limit within two weeks just from downloading backups of our servers every few days (off-peak, while Hamerica is sleeping). You've then got several weeks of crippled (10KB/s) downloads, while your ISP continues to bill you for the $50 "Unlimited" account you signed up for to escape similar bullshit at your last ISP.
It's their own fault for overselling their capacity like a lot of "unlimited space and bandwidth" shared web hosting companies do; they promise unlimited monthly transfers and crazy speeds, because they believed that 90% of their customers will be light users who would essentially be paying the bills for the heavier users. Now that the "average" customer is spending more time with music and video files, downloading Jigabytes of porn and warez, or chewing up bandwidth on retarded Youtube movies, they can no longer support the business model.
Here's another way to think of the situation: a restaurant offers "all you can eat" on a Friday night, where customers can eat as much pizza as they want for $20. Knowing that most customers will probably only eat $10 worth of pizza before they puke and/or leave, while only a few will eat $30 worth of pizza, they are using the same business model to make a profit. The "normal" pizza-eaters are paying for the fat bastards, who are the only ones to actually benefit from this type of deal.
I haven't gotten a notice of change of service yet. I pay right at $100/mo for "unlimited" bandwidth and basic+ cable. I *will* go somewhere else if they try to cap me. There are DSL options in this area.
FYI, with DOCSIS 2, that limit is over 40Mbit/s and with DOCSIS 3 its over 170Mbit/s
Considering net traffic is mostly burst traffic, I wonder how many end users the cableco's are putting on each segment.
you can shut the tap off and you get to pay less. ISPs are still going to sell you a fixed amount (just like cell phones) except that they're not going to roll anything over (they can't roll over bandwidth). So the vast majority of people will still be paying for more than they use (and not less per month for it), this is simply justification to charge some users more than the current rate.
What they're trying to do have tiers for both speed and transfer amount, which is the insane part. Imagine if your water company said you could have X gallons of water per month but only through a 1/4" pipe. If you wanted to pay extra, they could upgrade that pipe to a 1/2" and if you go over X gallons, it is this much more per gallon...everyone would be furious.
ISPs can't reallocate bandwidth the way utilities can allocate natural resources. They have a certain amount of bandwidth whether it is being used or not. They won't even guarantee a minimum amount of bandwidth you will have, just a maximum that you can theoretically hit (other user usage notwithstanding). It is just fancy marketing to try to disguise their actual capacity per user. I mean, why upgrade the infrastructure when you can just try to sway the masses into charging a few users more for trying to use what they pay for?
Finally the end of the unlimited, undeliverable, service promises.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I'm in Beaumont, TX and have been a happy RR customer for a few years now. They kick ass over Bell's DSL service.
But since I'm looking into a few online movie rental/purchase solutions (Dish, Apple, NetFlix, etc.), I could see myself becoming one of the affected users.
I'm ok paying for my heavy-use times, just as I am with my cell phone, provided FOUR things happen:
1. NET NEUTRALITY. They can charge me to eat cake, but no more whining about the baker's "free ride."
2. EMAIL ALERTS. I don't want to go check some lame "bandwidth meter" every few days.
3. NON-PUNITIVE RATES. If I go over one month, bump me up a tier that month, DON'T charge me some ridiculous "punishment" rate for exceeding my tier.
4. BI-DIRECTIONAL. Current pricing is based on "average" current usage, so if I'm out of town a lot one month and I end up downloading less than the average bear, I should get the "grandma downloading recipes" (lower-tier) rate that month, automatically.
I'm in upstate NY and TWC already does this with thier RoadRunner. Standard resigential service is at the low tier with around 8mbps/1mpbs, then Business Class at around 12mps/4mbps, but the modems will do around 15mpbs down and 15 mbps up, uncapped. ** All this came from the technician that last visited us at work.
The uncapped ones aren't really a tier, since they're pretty much only used internally, but the residential/business tiered model is already in use. And anyone can subscribe to the business, for an increased rate. I think the business might actually have QoS preference over residential, too, but I'm not sure of that.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach.
the only other alternative in my area, is DSL, and the ISP that provides that (AT&T) has the same problems I experience on my cable connection, but doesn't offer nearly as much bandwidth for the price. If timewarner/roadrunner starts capping me, then I may be motivated to switch. I really don't want to switch to DSL though, and I sure as hell don't want all my unencrypted data passing through the AT&T 'tubes' (if I can help it). Not that I have anything to hide, it's just the principle. *monoliths* meh...
the only permanence in existence, is the impermanence of existence.
Everyone here needs to relax... I'm sure that no matter what those pesky customers say, this will be a great success!
-jX
Don't you just love politics? It's like a comedy of errors.
60GB is only a lot if you are downloading low quality content. But if you aren't downloading the crappiest YouTube videos you can find thats about 7 dvd porn images(not hd) or 7 video games not including the bandwidth you used to upload. The idea with Bittorent is that you have to upload content during and after your download is finished until you get a decent sharing ratio which is around twice what you used to download the material. So a 60GB limit does not mean you can download 60GB of content. On Bittorent that could be as low as 20GB of downloaded material if your client doesn't download any junk with it. With the crappy service in the US it does not take much to be in a situation where BT is running all day at low speeds that aren't worth mentioning.
Disc image downloads are very common. Do I actually have to explain where you put it? Burn it to dvd. Have you seen the size of hard drives these days? You wouldn't exactly be filling 1TB or more of drive space anytime soon.
The problem is not that %5 of the users are using up half the bandwidth, it's that those %5 of users usually leave their torrents running 24/7. This means that in times of heavy usage those same %5 of users never let up, and it makes heavy periods that much slower/more expensive for everyone.
The problem is, people expect the internet to work like air (always there, never-ending), when in fact it works more like traffic. We need to change this lack of understanding through creative ways.
I think the solution is not to charge penalties for overuse, but to offer incentives for off-peak usage. For instance, I would suggest that a user get a $5 credit on their account if their TOTAL bandwidth usage off-peak versus peak is greater than 4:1, or something like that. You could also add to the category people who use less than a few GB in a month, to encourage light users to sign-up.
So long as you make the peak time slots long enough, and make the threshold high enough, people will have to switch their torrents to specific times to actually quality for the credit. You could provide tools that remind users of the peak periods, and offer to automatically download data at non-peak times.
Don't raise prices, don't punish consumers; entice them with credits, and let them make their own decision.
*** I will now return to the real world, where none of the above will actually work. Meh. ***
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
ok, so most of this fault lies with the ISPs for claiming to provide something they can't, and wasting monetary incentives besides. but for the life of me, i can't understand why so many intelligent individuals here can't grasp the concept of pay-per-use in a service. i know it challenges and, indeed, infringes upon most internet users here who think they deserve to gobble up as much bandwidth as possible and pay exactly the same as someone who uses very little... but come on slashdotters, i really have higher expectations... put aside you're biases and see this issue for what it is - an attempt at some form of fairness.
You're right, they wouldn't go for it, because it's cheap for the consumer and fair. All I'm saying is, if we as consumers are going to argue for something, "unlimited" pricing shouldn't be it. That's the way The Man wants you to think. :)
I knew what you meant. :)
1. If I hit my monthly download limit, I will begin using a wireless connection my neighbors unsecure wireless router. It will be slower probably but I will at least be able to get to the internet and charge up their cable bill instead of mine. Maybe even invest in a van and do some WiFi surfing in the neighborhood.
2. Cable companies will begin charging us more to access the same networks we have become accustom.
3. Without some type of monitoring device for end-users, many people will be shocked to find cable bills of $200-$300 or more.
4. Cable companies will begin to use this as differentiating service and may start imposing "usage taxes" on those who choose to use services such as "Vonage".
5. What about those ads that download the same content eahc time you access the page? Are you now paying for advertising you dont want?
AT&T has already announced that it may begin policing traffic on their network for copyright compliance and (oh yeah the real reason) differentiating service. We may end up being stuck with whatever crappy VOIP solution your cable company provides since they will block or at the very least slow down access to competitors software.
This is no different from the phone company that offered a flat rate for unlimited calling adn then got pissed, cancelling the contract of someone who took them at their word and was using the network beyond what they considered "reasonable."
This move would undoubtedly push me back to consider DSL service even though iw ould need a regular landline to make it work. In my area, they also have Wireless service so maybe that would be a solution.
Thats my $.04 (adjusted for inflation)
This is true, and yet at the same time not true. Even if there were competition, the ISP is still not capable of delivering unlimited bandwidth without overcharging people who use little bandwidth and undercharging people who use significant bandwidth. This is because bandwidth isn't free at any stage of the peering. You pay your ISP for bandwidth, they pay their upstream carrier for their bandwidth, and they pay their peering points for the switching. Providing unlimited bandwidth would require they have unlimited money.
So as such, not having competition is a big problem, in that he can't get better pricing. However his neighbours are also a different problem, were he on flat rate.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
1) Telcos/Cablecos/ISPs have dial-up mentalities in a broadband world. They need to face reality. This is no longer 1995.
2) I have no sympathy for their costs. They've been handed over billions of dollars in publicfunding aside from their subscriber fees, not to mention partnership funding, etc through various governmental and private programs across the US. I don't want to hear their whining about the costs of infrastructure. The High Cost portion of the Universal Service Fee alone brought in $4 billion for payouts to the telcos during the 2006 fiscal year.
When I read stories about them using money they receive for broadband roll-out in rural/suburban/small-town areas to subsidize phone-lines to mansions and resorts in Maui, I just want to send them a big FUCK YOU in the mail instead of my bill payment.
3) They are finally figuring out ways to get back those "walled gardens" that AOL, Compuserve and the like practically killed the internet with way back when. If they can't buy the laws, then they will force it via "tiered" services and "data caps". They want a monopoly on the connection, the content, and the bill payments. I've read many, many comments on here trying to defend this disgusting pigopolist behavior. Fucking pathetic.
4) I wonder why telcos/cablecos/isps are allowed to get away with fraud on such a massive scale? I don't know what else you call advertising, promising, and selling one thing while delivering something almost totally different. They either need to buck up and deliver the goods or stfu and go bankrupt. No more of this weasel-word crap. If they say they offering unlimited usage, but really are giving you "Our definition of unlimited means you can't use your connection for anything other than email on days ending in Y", then that is false fucking advertising, and if it isn't spelled out that way in your contract, sue the bastards.
5) Disclaimer: I sued Verizon and won. For false advertising. So, you too, can win.
[/end rant]
@Mindless Drivel: 100% of Twitter posts ever Tweeted.
All domestic broadband in Australia is capped (ADSL, cable and wireless) - the better ISPs will limit you speed (typically to 33Kb/s once you reach your monthly cap, the more rapacious ones will charge you per kb (ouch).
I would love to purchase an always-on, burstable service, billed by the Mbit. I think it's a great disincentive to the use of horribly inefficient protocols and sloppy huge Flash applications on all the web pages everywhere. If there were some pressure for Web developers to be frugal about their bandwidth demands, then maybe the internet would be useful over cheap wireless carriers... once again. And things like community wireless mesh networks could be practical for Internet access.
All 19 hijackers were known terrorists 09-10-2001. Lack of FBI intelligence does not justify warrantless wiretaps..
"5% of subscribers use over 50% of the total network bandwidth". I can TOP that.
:)
I was in a small college town when they rolled out cablemodem in 1997. Their SLA's did not specify any limits of any kind. No total transfer limitations and no limit on the bandwidth. Since the cablemodem was capable of 10mb/s, as was the backbone provider, I actually had a 10mb/s connection back in 1997. Very Cool. Especially since I had a 128K dedicated ISDN line right before that. However, I found out much later (about 17 months) that they were just about to go apeshit with me over my usage when I moved and canceled the contract. Between my buddies and myself, we downloaded over 4 terrabytes of data per MONTH (don't ask what). We were less than 1% of 1% of their user base and accounted for 99% of their traffic. Their lawyers had advised them that due to the structuring of their SLA, they could not forcefully terminate the contract. I actually had the audacity to complain when I turned in the equipment, since I had noticed our speeds dropping BELOW 1000kb/s in the last few months
I don't say that to just get outright bragging rights, but to point out that I had NO IDEA of what I was doing. I paid for the connection and reasonably assumed that if I could "drive" 100 miles per hour, that I could do so continuously for the length of the contract with no penalty for mileage accrued during travel. This is actually a quite reasonable assumption and one that just about EVERY user makes with their connection. They have to have it explained to them otherwise.
Most users are not aware that a 6mb/s connection can theoretically achieve between 1.5-2 terrabytes of transfer per month. I have personally seen cablemodem providers attempt to limit total transfer to the SAME approximate usage that a 56K Modem will use in a JUST A MONTH.
It's bullshit and I have said it for years.
The ISP's have taken advantage of people by advertising that they are 50+ times faster than a 56K modem, while failing to tell those same people that they can only ultimately transfer as much as they could with that modem. They have called it "gig limits", "overusage fees", etc. It's all the same crap they have been pulling for years.
It's dishonest. Now that people are actually starting to use the full capabilities of their connections, the ISP's are facing congestion and bandwidth issues themselves. Their customers don't understand that if they went full speed, they would hit their cap in less then a few days in the month. It's like advertising Millenium Falcon speeds, but then dropping out of lightspeed after 10 minutes and using sublight the rest of the trip.
In more direct terms, the ISPs are OVERSELLING their available bandwidth. Just like some concerts and airlines do. Sure, you make more money in the shorterm, but if everyone shows up at once...... your fucked. They loved advertising those speeds, but refused to tell you that ultimately it was no different than the crappy phone line connected modems they replaced. Hell, they even refused to advertise the DIFFERENCE
I have no sympathy for the ISPs at all. They made their bed by offering faster and faster speeds to everybody, and now they should lie in it. Even if it means a tombstone for a headrest.
P.S - I know some people may be doubting the speeds, but keep in mind this was a completely unrestricted cablemodem located on bandwidth next to a major university. A lot of our traffic was directly between this university and a few other universities at the time and those pipes were pretty direct and free back then.
This will be as successful as the RIAA lawsuits, for much of the same reasons.
The people using the "5%" of the bandwidth most likely fall into the following categories:
Three of these four groups are doing what they are doing because they don't like to pay for more that they have to, or at all in some cases.
The problem is that technology is constantly changing, and the push is for removal of limits. Heck, Korea has faster average bandwidth than we do in the US. Even Belgium is ahead of us in that department.
This smacks of Time Warner using area-monopolies to increase their profits.
What is an area monopoly, you ask?
In many areas, the cable companies have colluded to price fix the market. For example, in Indianapolis, where I live, they have carved up the city into various areas. No two cable companies exist in the same areas of the city, meaning that consumers have the choice of cable, satellite, or AT&T. You can't pick and choose your cable provider, except by where you live.
This allows them to charge whatever they like for services. About two years ago, I moved from one location to another within the same cable company's service area. They charged me $180 to move the service, even though they did not replace the modem or cable box, the technician was incompetent to the level that I had to step in and finish the install, and they nixed their promotional pricing because, although I had a few months left on the promotion, because I wasn't a "new customer" at the new location, they did not feel obliged to live up to their end of the deal.
This is normal here, because Comcast and Brighthouse have carved up this market like a Thanksgiving turkey.
For many years, Comcast was better with customers and reliability, but that has been changing.
What I find ironic is that the market for television is shifting so that consumers do have viable options. The problem is that unless you want to pay more for DSL's limited service, you are pretty much at the cable companies' whims.
Luckily for me, I am in the Brighthouse network now. Same high price, but at least they have good service. I get ~4mbs down now, although late at night it can peak pretty high.
So, what is the result of this? AT&T, Verizon and the like, which were fighting an uphill battle to reopen the data market despite backing the loosing horse of residential DSL, ends up being handed customers through this approach.
How about the push toward Digital Downloads of our games. I own Many games that are download only. Two from Direct 2 Drive, a shit ton on Steam, an expansion on EA, and GameTap has a good 1000 games. Those business models stand to be hurt by this. Add Apple and Netflix's push toward legit movie downloads and the average user can use a ton of bandwidth depending on the size of his family
One thing I never see mentioned in these discussions of bandwidth, especially cable Internet bandwidth, is that the DOCSIS standard quite clearly provides for cable Internet providers to utilize more than one cable channel slot for packet service. Do they do that? Not as far as I know, and definitely not in the Time Warner Houston service area where I first signed up. I've been paying a total of about $140 a month incl taxes for a static IP cable Internet feed. Having read the DOCSIS standard and the Cisco technical data I would have thought that people with business accounts, paying 3-4 times what residential subscribers pay, would be fed through a different channel. Nope. If some kiddies down the block get busy downloading MP3s or movies, my business bandwidth will go in the crapper. It's generally pretty good but I've measured it at times slower than a dialup. A bad dialup.
I once got to talk with the inner sanctum of technical support in the Houston area. The guy quite frankly confirmed that just one channel is in use for Internet. They deliver tons of channels of pure crap, but use only one for Internet.
So the next time you experience bandwidth clog on your cable segment, or want to formulate a position regarding cable bandwidth, just remember that just one of those junk channels like Home Shopping for Lesbian Dwarfs with HIV or Home Gardening for Locations between 35.5 and 35.6 degrees North Latitude or those pay-per-view channels that no one watches, could double the Internet bandwidth in every head-end segment.
But cable companies have never shown signs of intelligent life.
Look at the bright side: there's always seppuku.
I telecommute 100% of the time. As a software developer I often have need to transfer large data sets both upstream and downstream. I've come to accept the slow 128kbps upstream. At least it's consistent. It's the downstream bandwidth where their official polity departs from their practices. Within an hour of starting a large transfer I find my bandwidth "mysteriously" drop to 48kbps and remains there for exactly 24 hours after the transfer is complete. My neighbor's bandwidth measurements seem unaffected at these times. Time Warner support claims no such bandwidth caps exist and try to baffle me with their poor understanding of network implementation. At least two level 3 support reps have referred me to a paragraph in their TOS stating that P2P is an unauthorized use of their network. Other level 2 reps press a hard sell for their business class service which would (officially) only get me hosting space in their data center at twice the market rate.
All the wink, wink, nod, nod feedback from their support staff leads me to believe that not only are they capping bandwidth but doing so in a legally shady manner. I suppose the prospect of an official tiered bandwidth package is appealing so long as they actually deliver the promised bandwidth.
Unfortunately, Time Warner Cable is the only broadband provider for miles around. If there were anything else (even a decent satellite signal) I'd switch in a heartbeat. I've had nothing but trouble with them form the get go and don't even get me started on VOIP through their network. I don't believe the only reason their service is reliable and others aren't has anything to do with the expertiese of the other providers That makes them a local monopoly and in my opinion a "Public Utility". So why do we keep exempting them from PUC oversight?
I strongly think it's really unfair to deaf community if they cap it. Deaf people now use videoconference type of relay service to communicate with the world using videophone similiar to Dlink's i2eye. Check this link below to explain why it is a problem. The blogger in this link is deaf as well as I am and having broadband connection has been one of the greatest technological achievement for us deaf people because it allows us to be independent and better access to communication.
.....LOL )
http://jarednevans.typepad.com/blog/2008/01/time-warner-cus.html
Here are an example of video relay service. http://www.sorenson.com/ That company is one of many company that provice service to deaf and hard of hearing community.
Since internet came into being, accessibility for the deaf has improved tremendously (Sidekick, Blackberry, videophone, videorelay,WWW,and etc etc) basically we deaf finally have equal access to information easily as hearing counterpart.
So Time Warner's plan to cap broadwidth will seriously offend deaf community (5gb/a month bandwidth is equal 3.5 hrs of video phone a month). I wouldn't be surprised if FCC is investigating this.
(I think i need to go take class to learn how to write better
At least in areas with competition. Now, in places where you have a choice, the providers will compete based on GB per month per $$.
Is this a good thing? Doesn't this mean that market value for bandwidth will drive companies to upgrade their equipment?
It would be _excellent_ for local governments to encourage this sort of behavior while providing incentives for new entrants to the ISP market. In fact, I think it would change the way the U.S. broadband infrastructure worked.
And eventually, some provider would find the "correct" quantity of bandwidth to satisfy most customers, and then the financial model necessary to justify rapid last mile improvements will be there.
Frankly, the reason we don't have "really fast" last mile connections is because the ISPs of America (except for AT&T, which is just bent on being backwards, and Verizon, which is already working on "really fast") are terrified of what super-duper connections to each customer will do. Comcast/TW could _easily_ setup their network to burst 50-500 mbps downstream, and split nodes as needed (that's a fairly static per subscriber cost). The fear is what would happen X subscribers began using an average of 25 mbps 24/7, breaking their financial model in the backbone costs. Even if this is _unlikely_, the risk is such that a public company will be unlikely to try it; simply because this is what caused @home, to fail.
Find the "right" number, that you have to offer "5 TBs" per month for $XXXX, and you know that your customers will unlikely use more than that on a monthly basis, and you know that if a customer does you more than that you can bill them for it, and suddenly there's nothing wrong with spending a fixed network upgrade cost to buildout nodes capable of bursting 500 mbps downstream to _each_ customer.
The key is competition. The market will function to find this "appropriate" number, and even make sure that ISPs are passing on the correct level of "per GB" cost, if and only if there are enough ISPs around to keep each other honest. The big issue here is last-mile costs, and I think that new technologies (WIMAX and others), plus localities providing incentives and rights of way could resolve this.
Until then, however, capped pricing will be counterintuitive, because it is less profitable for a monopolist to delivery oodles of bandwidth cheaply than for it to gouge consumers (look up monopolist pricing in an economic text book). What we need, as always, for the free market to function is low barriers to entry.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
Show me where Comcast actually calls the service "unlimited" without any qualifications.
But even if Comcast's ads were misleading, the consequence is simply that the contract between you and them becomes null and void and they reimburse you for the last month. If that's what you want, just give them a call.
... and they're right. I dont want to see this Australian limit crap spreading elsewhere in the world. There are next to no tech companies here, telecommuting is out and any new media business or legal downloads is out because when your internet ceases to become a conduit and considered part of the expense of anything you get through it, you start to feel double charged because you are. No one in Australia is happy about the current situation. It has REDUCED infrastructure investment, broadband application, the whole nine yards.
... MORE?
Telecommuting and starting a company from home? RIDICULOUS. These are the things America are strong at and are still leading the world on. And you guys want to shoot yourselves in the foot?