Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
I wouldn't really expect it, every ISP will be worried that someone will stick with the flat-rate scheme and customers will flock to it.
Back when AOL was actually worth getting (at least Neverwinter Nights made it so for me), they started out with the pay-as-you-go idea. You paid a basic fee for access and a few minutes and then they charged you for anything beyond that at a per-minute rate. Worked out OK, though I did find myself going over pretty regularly. But when they switched to the flat-rate all-you-can-eat plan, AOL exploded. The number of users shot through the roof and they had a lot of trouble keeping up with demand. In my own little corner of the world at that time, I could spend an hour or more dialing, getting a busy signal, dialing, getting a busy signal, etc. It took them a while to catch up with demand, once they did though I never looked back and never would have wanted to go back. Then they killed NWN and my account was canceled shortly afterwards, but that was just a matter of not wanting the hassle of AOL's crapware just to get on the internet.
The pay-as-you-go idea has been tried, it worked when there wasn't another choice; and, unless the recent changes in the requirement for access to small ISP's really does kill off all competition, I don't see ISP's going back. They will be far to scared that their customers will go elsewhere.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
There are several places where ISPs are apart from reality.
First, there's abuse of the term "bandwidth", which has nothing to do with the amount of data downloaded. Bandwidth is how much of a frequency range is being used on the wire to provide the service. That's it.
"Date rate" is how much data the bandwidth, encoding, compression, and such allow you to get out of the bandwidth. It's also what ISPs limit you to when they say "megabits per second" or "kilobits per second".
Total monthly data transfer available for an always-on connection at a certain data rate can be calculated as the data rate per second times the number of seconds per month. Capped usage for total monthly data transfer, which is what this article is actually about, can be thought of as the data rate times the number of seconds time the percentage of utilization. What they're wanting to limit here is that percentage of utilization of what they're selling you access to use.
One way to lower total monthly data transfer for a customer is to lower the data rate. That means things come down slower all month. Another is to limit the amount of time for which the line is fully utilized. Many business users of truly high-speed access pay for what are called "burstable lines". You get the whole DS3 or entire OC-12 or whatever type of line it is. You get billed with the understanding that you use a certain percentage of data rate or less a certain percentage of the time, and that the rest of the time you can use all of it without paying extra.
When I was in the ISP field and buying our backbone lines from bigger network providers, we typically leased lines with the first 15% or 25% of the full data rate included, with the stipulation that 5% or 10% of the time we could use all the data transfer the line had to offer without being billed extra. That meant that if we experienced abnormal peak demand, we didn't get our lines saturated. It also meant we didn't get soaked paying for peak capacity all the time. We in fact got a report each month showing the percentage, on average over each 5-minute increment, we used of the line's data rate the whole month. We could look at the chart being built (by MRTG) as the month progressed, too.
The reason total traffic is the way ISPs want to deal with end users is that it's easier to explain "you can move 20 gigabytes" than "90th percentile usage will be at no more than 30% of the data rate capacity of the circuit". Still, I think people would understand easily enough if they were told, "For 60 hours a month, you can max out your line. The rest of the time, you're going to be at 1 Mbps".
Not to excuse the cable company but they see it as that they're in a bind trying to trade off how many TV channels they can support (and how many analog ones in particular - (the sooner they die the better) with how many qams they dedicate to cable modems - and the expense of injecting the internet feeds in lower and lower down in the plant to support more and more customers with more and more bandwidth (ie sharing with fewer neighbors)
They shouldn't have ever offered 'unlimited' because as we all know it really isn't and for technical reasons can't be as the customer base increases - they're depending on statistical models which those 5% who use 50% of the resources (if that's a real number) break
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
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!
Actually a the maximum bandwidth of a downstream channel is about 48Mbps not 25. This is with a 3.2Mhz channel width. I know the 1.x/2.0 spec says 42 but trust me, its actually 47 or so on most head ends. A single modem can achieve this speed.
DOCSIS 1.0 upstream is approximately 10Mbps and 2.0 is 30 or so. The maximum speed for a single modem is upstream is about 18Mbps due to the way the upstream works. (time slicing)
You are correct that there is much less space for upstream channels then there is downstream. My memory is really fuzzy since I haven't been working in cable modems for a few years now but I think upstream channels are limited to the 5-42Mhz range and downstream for North America is 200-800 or so.
> WTF do you do if 60GB will "cripple" you? Download 10 TV shows/day? Where do you put all the stuff?
When I lived in Toronto with 3 other engineering students, we ran over the 60 GB limit within a couple weeks when we were trying to limit our bandwidth usage (there was no surcharge, but frequent threats from Rogers to cut us off), with "regular" usage, where "regular" includes frequent multiple-ssh sessions with GUIs being displayed and ftp'ing bulk data to and from the school servers and so forth. If we would have been cut off, we would have been forced to commute to the school on all weekends and stay the night on many weekdays, and given the money a student can't afford and the time this takes it could well be crippling.
I agree with much of the rest of your point, though.
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.
Um, I'd say that is accurate, I run an ISP, and without getting out my graphs and doing some basic math, I am tempted to say that is a _conservative_ estimate.
It is the same in tech support, 5% of my customers are the morons I hear from on a weekly basis. They account for about 75% of my total time spent on the phone.
--Nuintari
slashdot : where an opinion can be wrong.
I mostly deal with video qams which are also qam 256 but different from that point on - 25Mbit/sec is a number we use for reasonable estimates of reality - I think one could argue that it's low for docsis (1/2) and I'd give you that - getting 42 though is pretty unreasonable - however my main point was that wthere it's 10, 25 or even 42 it's still statistically shared with your neighbors, the cable company doesn't give you a whole qam to yourself permanently - sometimes you get all the bandwidth available to you, sometimes you don't - depends on the other users of the system - if they did that they'd have to push the CM plant equipment onto every block (with a modulator per house) and might as well just run the fibre the last 100 yards
real-world channel widths in the US are 6MHz though, not 6.4 and have to be pretty carefully managed - drop 400kHz worth of digital dross into an adjacent analog channel and the results are crud
the upstream/downstream freq thing has to do with how/where the diplexors sit in the plant, especially if you have fiber to the block as many places do now
Like vtechpilot says pretty much all ISPs in the UK offer metered services. Some offer "unlimited" services but these generally have a published "fair use policy" which in effect puts a cap on your usage. It is pretty fair becuase the low tiers are pretty cheap and if all you do is send email and shop online then they are perfectly adequate. If you do want to download movies etc then you just go onto the higher tier and pay more. I.e. you get the service you pay for. Most tiered plans do offer a fixed bill, it's just that your connection speeds gets restricted if you go over your usage limit.
I am on the top tier of cable company virgin media. I have a 20 Mbit connection. I can download up to 3gb per day between 4PM and 9 PM and as much as i want for the rest of the time. If i exceed 3gb during this time then my connection drops to 5Mbit for the next 5 hours. To me this seems pretty fair and in practice i don't think it has ever kicked in.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds