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Bandwidth Caps May Be Critical Error For Broadband Companies
Technical Writing Geek writes "An Ars Technica article argues that after many years of stagnation, the US broadband landscape is finally 'primed for change'. Companies like Time Warner that decide to cap bandwidth risk being relegated to a 'broadband ghetto. Alternatives to the standard cable modem vs. DSL conundrum will come from technologies like WiMax and (eventually) the 'white space' broadband that might be offered by whoever wins the 700mhz auction. 'All of that is to say that cable and DSL won't always be the only games in town. If wireless solutions are able to deliver on their promises of high speeds with no usage limits, capped cable broadband service like Time Warner has planned is likely to be unattractive, to say the least. Instead of developing plans designed to discourage consumers from feeding at the bandwidth trough, cable companies would be better served in the long run by making investments in new technologies like DOCSIS 3.0 and the kind of infrastructure improvements necessary to meet bandwidth demands.'"
Yeah but in these days of corporatocracy, who wants to actually provide better service to their consumers (since it's the shareholders, not the consumers, who they see as their customers), instead of just jacking up the prices and LOWERING service?
-uso.
What you hear in the ear, preach from the rooftop Matthew 10.27b
Let them try it, and let the free market decide.
It's funny that wireless internet access would prompt such a thing though. You would think it would be easier to deliver lots of bandwidth over wires than it would be over the air.
it's the lack of competition. Your consumer typically has the choice of either cable internet or DSL, or just one of the above. The FCC change in allowing telecos to lease their lines for more than bulk rates was a big part of this.
Yeah, because we all know that the backbones have unlimited bandwidth...
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Don't worry, it'll get "better". My big worry with something like this is that specific services I use will cause me to go over. Netflix watching, TiVo downloading shows, Apple TV (if I had one), etc.
Which means that they'll probably start adding exceptions. Soon your plan will be:
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Like the RIAA and Oil companies this is the last gasp of a company that can't adapt to the changing market demand with anything that won't screw the customer. Also like the above mentioned you have little choice in the immediate, all the options being talked about are down the road ideas. So, they're going to bend the customer over and get what more money they can before they die a painful death.
Which is more profitable? Innovation or screwing the customer?
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
With the choice of high speed providers for most people being limited to 2 or 3 at best, we will see an oligopolistic pricing model much like that in cellular service where all providers passively collude in a price structure that maintains high profits.
Fact is, most users want a fairly modest average bandwidth, with rare bouts of high-bandwidth usage. It's only the few rare addicts and power users that want a big pipe open to their PC all the time. That's why cable has succeeded as well as it has so far -- because the basic bandwidth-sharing paradigm works for most customers, who usually just write e-mail and every two weeks or so download some MP3s from iTunes or watch a video preview of some movie. The fact that jacking the price up for the average-bandwidth power users might drive some of them away (to surely more expensive options) is not going to be a bad business decision for the cable companies, any more than it's a bad business decision for an HMO to drive its sickest patients to other insurers.
The other thing most people want is for their Internet connection to be dirt cheap. Hence the pressure on cable companies from their customers has not been towards higher and higher average capacity, but towards reliability and cheapness. My cable connection costs the same in nominal dollars now, in 2007, as it did the first day I got it, in 1997. That means its real price has fallen steeply. But the bandwidth hasn't budged. If anything, it's worse. That's not because the cable company is stupid, contra this naive article, but because those have been the priorities of my neighbors signing up for the service. The fact that the cable company has made a huge pile of money operating as they have is the surest evidence that they know what they're doing, business-wise.
Will that change in the future? Will people start wanting to stream HD movies over the Internet? Got me. Maybe. But the demand for enormous bandwidth has been predicted to be Right Around The Corner(TM) every year for the last 12 years in my experience. That wouldn't inspire me to invest my retirement funds in any big pipe to every desktop tech.
I read it too. why does every front page story there need to be shunted here? Even if the larger majority of /. readers DON'T read ars, then at least we can refrain from linking >50% of the stories there. Ars has some great post-news cycle analysis of technical issues, and those deserve to be linked here (along w/ their product reviews, which are the best in the industry, IMO), but not every column in response to an industry change. There ought to be a soft cap of like 2 links a month to that site.....sigh.
after "ghetto" in the summary
(please mod up so that someone actually sees this!)
WiMax, cable, and DSL all deliver their bandwidth over the same Internet backbone infrastructure, i.e. a pipe to the Internet of a given bandwidth costs roughly the same regardless of how the ISP provides connectivity to the user. All of them are subject to the same bandwidth constraints.
Anybody who says they're not considering caps is a liar. Wonder what the Verizon flack would have said if challenged on their cellular data plan caps?)
Even going with the horrible misdefinition of "bandwidth" to mean "throughput", that isn't what this article is talking about. All high-speed connections have a throughput limit, and that certainly isn't measured in gigabytes (yet, for almost all people). It is more often in the megabits/second range, or kilobits/second for the unlucky.
This article is talking about a transfer cap, or a limit on the number of bits that can be sent in a month. 15GiB a month doesn't have anything to do with the throughput. For example a 28.8Kbits/second modem sending for a solid month can send over 5 Gibibytes of data.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
That would be nice, but the lack of real competition in television and movie phones doesn't make me particularly optimistic. The mobile phone carriers all charge virtually identical prices. Satellite and cable companies nickel and dime for every little thing.
The problem is that consumers just accept this. They'll complain, but they keep right on paying these companies. So if consumers accept this bandwidth cap all providers will start doing it.
With this general trend to charge people for every little thing how can they not do it? I guess I'm just a pessimist.
Change or do not change. There is no 'primed.'
When WiMax or whatever comes along then we will have change. The new whatevers will be good for both the early adopters and those that will get better terms for DSL and cable. If the market doesn't want caps. They won't get caps. As far a I'm concerned a published cap with teirs is better than the double-secret crap people are getting from comcast and others.
As far as primed goes, Wimax and whitespace whatevers are the DNF of networking until they deliver to the street. All the promises mean nothing. When the promises end, the competition can begin.
The power of DOCSIS 3 is not that consumers will be able to utilize all their bandwidth for downloading from the internet at large. Rather, it will be used internally by the cable companies for HD video on demand.
In the DSL arena there is ADSL2+ and VDSL which have lower absolute bandwith but that bandwidth isn't shared with your neighbors as is the case with cable so the end result is a wash aside from the distance issues with DSL.
On the wireless side of things, there is no way any service can compete with the hardwired services on speed. At some point the wireless systems have to connect to the hardwired network and that is the point where the bandwidth will be severely restricted. The telcos will treat these new providers the way they do the current CLECs.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
Caps would be a very poor business decision for all the reasons mentioned in the summary and more.
However metered billing on some sort of sliding scale (the more you use, the less each byte costs because the fixed costs of supporting a customer don't vary by bandwidth consumed) has the potential to be better for both the customers and the ISPs.
When ISPs charge by the byte their business interest becomes aligned with their clients' interests - the more bandwidth the clients use, the more money the ISP makes and thus the more money they can afford to invest in infrastructure which means even greater amounts of even cheaper bandwidth becomes available due to economies of scale, technology improvements, etc.
I know there are plenty of cynics out there (I am one too) who think that the ISPs would just use metered billing as a way to gouge customers rather than improve service and reduce costs - they do tend to be monopolies after all. But I don't see the current situation being sustainable (which is one reason things like network neutrality are so hot right now, with fixed pricing the only way for the ISP to make more money per customer is via tricky back-door schemes that conflict, rather than align with their customers' interests).
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
but its a mighty big assumption that if they offered tiered pricing and didn't see a significant increase in their churn rate that the other guys won't also jump on the bandwagon. Hell people act as if wireless will be the holy grail of internet connectivity convienently forgetting that it is the holy grail for PHONE companies. Getting people to pay for their minutes was probably the biggest cash cow they came up with in a long time with ring tones coming right behind.
Sorry, if Time Warner puts this out and doesn't lose people you can damn well expect it elsewhere. Besides, we don't know what their real pricing model will be, it might be akin to the various levels of slow dsl I am offered by AT&T which ranges from slower than the 80s to almost tolerable - but for download only.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
People sure do mind bandwidth caps, don't they?
They seem to mind it more then Comcast simply shaping-out certain types of traffic. They mind it more then the infamous "you used too much unlimited bandwidth, so we're cutting you off without warning" letters that used to go out.
Its really not as big a deal as either of these things. Being up front about how much traffic you're actually paying for is good. It means that when this competition appears in the market, they can offer up different pricing models. The current system of everybody paying the same rate no matter what their usage is sucks for everybody except the top 5% of users.
What I'd like to see is straight up metered usage, like power. Pay $10/month for the connection, then $0.50/GB or something. The people running BitTorrent 24/7 downloading every movie in existence will then have to pay their own way instead of paying the same rate as grandma chatting on MSN.
Its time for people to wake up and get realistic. Unlimited connections exist in very few places. What we can get instead is straightforward payment for the traffic we use, or lies and pretending to be unlimited while they actively interfere with traffic they don't like (or simply cut off people who use too much).
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
The quite independent cable company in this town has always had caps. 10 GB a month on the mid-range $40+ (even more if you don't want video) plan. No cutoff, but warning and overage of $2 a GB (but you can buy add'l GBs at $1 in advance).
I don't typically go over 10 GB. But, I absolutely *hate* worrying about what I've used. So, I live, just fine, on my 2.5/512 DSL line for $25 or so. I'm not even sure why it bothers me. I have no problem with PAYG cellphones.
Lots of people grumble about the caps. But, the cable company is doing just fine. Most people never hit the cap. Those who do are torn between the much-much-faster cable and the hands-off DSL. If they want cable (I'm in the deep minority who would rather have a rooftop antenna than pay $675 a year for TV that still has ads), they'll probably get a cable modem.
It's not about bandwidth from the headend to the home. They can shape that, price that, and build that out. It's about fiefdoms and petty accountants. People who won't sign off on intra-Tier 2 peering agreements because they can't make a buck on it.
If the content were available, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be stopping at 1920x1080 HD video. Monitors can already handle 2560x1600 fairly commonly and all we're waiting for is someone to come up with a way to put multi-angle video in a single steam.
What's been the limiting factor throughout? Bandwidth availability. As soon as it's available (or just becoming available), someone releases their next great idea that just hadn't taken off so far because the files were too slow to download.
Cable companies can release 100mbps lines... They can up to 1gbps, 10gbp, 100gbps... And we'll come up with cool ways to use them.
That's not to imply they shouldn't invest in new technologies and keep moving forward... but "just give people more" isn't a real solution either. That more will never be enough and you'll be back in the same position.
Realizing I'm going to be mocked as the "the intertubes are a series of roads" guy... It does have a lot of parallels to the road construction argument.
To many people, most even, the answer's simple: If there's congestion, build more and bigger roads.
The thing is, all the research demonstrates that people will drive up to a given pain threshold. You reduce the amount of pain they feel... they drive more until they're back up to it. You spend a whole load of money, destroy the environment, and everyone complains just as much about how sucky traffic is.
Of course, refuse to build more roads and you very quickly get voted out of office by angry commuters who "know" the system far better than any researchers with their numbers ever could. On the internets, we call them discussion boards.
Time Warner already has caps on bandwidth where you have to pay extra to get their "Turbo" speed. Capping the total volume used per month is the next logical step. The majority of the American people (i.e. not tech-savvy Slashdot readers) only need 5gb per month and would be very happy to have a lower bill. The wireless carriers will never come close to the raw speed of modern cable. Geeks will hate wireless and the wireless companies will soon learn to hate geeks for hogging bandwidth. The wireless companies will eventually have to cap their service as well.
I have been on mixed line + per-MB charges since I moved to cellular broadband and my costs have gone _down_ not up. This is compared to fixed line DSL!
In a commercial environment the best way to make sure that you aren't being screwed is that the cost model reflects the services provided. E.g. if you have the services of line+bandwidth then paying something for the line and something for the bandwidth:
* Increases the incentive for the line to always be working and fast.
* Decreases the pressure to keep bit torrent queued up 25 hours a day to 'get your money's worth'.
Any sort of unlimited bandwidth plan encourages a sort of game where supplier and customer repeatedly try and screw each other over by abusing the wording of the T&Cs. So, if you manage to arrange a contract where cost and incentive are equally shared it's much harder for everyone to end up unhappy.
After all price = cost + markup. If the markup isn't acceptable then expect something to give - businesses that run at a loss can't survive for long.
Beep beep.
The pluses:
- unmetered bandwidth
- I got my own sideband slice, so my speeds were constant (1Mbps up and down)
- $55.00 USD per month, constant. No contract extensions were tacked on when I later added a static IP
- lag was present enough to hamper game play in an FPS (my antenna was 33 miles away from the tower), but still fairly usable
- when cable finally did arrive, everyone else whined about speeds bogging down at certain times of the day, while I never suffered any of that
- Sprint stopped taking on new customers when things got full (IOW, they couldn't quite 'oversell the modems' as easily as a typical ISP could)
The minuses:Overall though, I'd say I was very satisfied. I experienced exactly one outage the whole time, IIRC... and it was back up in less than an hour. I'm in Oregon now, so it would be kind of impractical to use it here (it tends to rain a lot), but if they can overcome the limitations that I saw as late as 2005, then more power to 'em. It was one of the most pleasant experiences overall that I ever had with any ISP. Plus, I had the exquisite pleasure of telling a Qwest sales droid to fuck off when they finally did get DSL into the neighborhood three years later (really... 256Kpbs DSL, when I already had 1Mbps both ways? Pfft! whatever...)
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Optical network? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber_to_the_premises Some countries in Asia, Europe, South America, Ocenia, Middle East and Canada already have them available in some major cities. It seems like the U.S. carriers are fairly behind in that regards. I am not sure how the regulations are setup in the U.S. and whether it allows new companies to offer FTTH (fiber to the home). Because when this is available, who is going to care about some broadband service cap?
You know, never fails to amaze me how people are not looking at the larger picture of "services" offered by any provider, but especially by the cable companies. FTR, I used to work in business broadband sales for a major cable player, so I've seen the industry from just after the days where cable modems got installed until the dot-com boom from the inside.
The cable companies, as we speak, are caught in a precarious situation. Several factors came into play at the same time, which has limited their ability to make huge improvements, but, if they're lucky, they might come out on top.
So history: when cable modems first arrived on the scene, in the early-to-mid 90's, the technology was largely unproven and had tremendous issues, both technically and from a service delivery perspective. Much like the early days of DSL, the cable companies were essentially forced to re-wire infrastructure that had been in place for over a decade, sometimes up to 2 decades. Because of the technical issues, many cable executives didn't see the cost-benefit ratio of rewiring tens of thousands of miles of cities to be able to provide the service.
Plus, if you know anything about cost, doing so was a multi-million dollar effort, cumulatively probably costing in the billions.
However, with the advent of the dot-com boom and other highly profitable interactive services, the cable company PHB's finally got the picture and started rewiring and running fiber for the new cable plants.
Unfortunately, this was between 95-98, just before the internet boom really got underway, and well before DSL put any pressure on them.
As such, they did a reasonable job of getting the major metropolitan areas wired for a more modern infrastructure.
However, they failed in one major respect: they didn't have a crystal ball, and most, if not all, the cable companies put in the minimum infrastructure to support digital services. They didn't, however, put in overcapacity.
Now, if you swing forward 4-7 years, its pretty obvious that the cost-differential of putting in FTTP (or at least overcapacity of fiber to the neighborhood) would have been the smart thing to do. But at the time, wth DSL being crap, and no other real competition, they missed the boat. This wasn't maliciouos. They just did what they thought would be adequate.
Now, look at cable services today. On most cable infrastructure, the highest percentage of bandwidth (out of the 1000mhz available on the plant) goes to analog TV. Those 30-50 channels take up nearly have the space, each analog channel taking 6mhz of bandwidth.
This log-gain, low-profit bandwidth hog is the biggest impediment to modern services as they reside on the existing cable facilities.
And now there's another problem in the works: how to handle changes in Digital Broadcasting, DOCSIS 3, and PacketCable services, especially with HD programming getting more and more relevant.
While DOCSIS 3 has been out for over a year now, from the insiders I know its still a bit spotty on the internal side, and since many of the operators use Cisco (who fought DOCSIS 3 tooth and nail to get their own standard), they'd love to do it but are still unsure of quality. Not only that, but at least one smaller cable operator where I know the CIO is truly looking at how to deliver everything over PacketCable (TV, Phone, Data, etc.) rather than just make the leap to DOCSIS 3.
These aren't inconsequential issues, as the decisions made now will have some serious impact on the structure of Cable services for a long time.
And finally, when you add in the cost of maintaining hundreds of thousands of miles of fiber and copper plant, along with the huge increases in programming costs to the cable companies, along with the not-insiginificant support and CPE equipment costs of moving to Digital services, DOCSIS 3, or other advanced services, its not much wonder why the cable companies are moving a bit slowly. An error in judgement now could be fatally costly over the lon
...how to squeeze as many dollars as they can out of the consumers pocket.
Obviously any company involved in computer technology, be it R&D or application certainly know by now how fast things change. So much so that any decent size to large size company are looking towards the future. But they need money to R&D and implement the new, where the larger the company, the more finance they need.
The way to get such finance is of course to milk what is currently implemented. For example, dialup is still being used by some companies to subsidize broadband, for certainly the bandwidth over the same two wires as DSL, dialup is way overprice. And as a last resort on DSL failure for a DSL plan, you are limited to a small number of hours dialup.
Bandwidth caps on DSL and cable are a way of milking, though its rather false advertising too, just like dialup speed (I rarely get better than 28.8k dialup even with a 56k modem (non-winmodem).
So expect previous applied technology to subsidize newer technology.
See, you may be paying $50/month for an "unlimited" connection at 6 megabits/second. But guess what? 6 megabits of bandwidth costs your ISP *at least* twice that. If they aren't in a major metropolitan area, it can cost *50* times that.
Bandwidth is expensive. That's why ALL bandwidth is "shared" and "oversubscribed". There simply isn't any way to provide everyone with gobs and gobs of dedicated bandwidth. That's not how it works.
So, don't blame the cable or DSL providers. Blame the huge telcos that keep the price of bandwidth artificially high.
Maybe I am old fashioned here, but my problem is more along the lines of the asymetrical nature of home broadband.
Last I checked, bandwidth on the open (business) market is symetrical. A DS-1 is 1.544 megabits up and down, a DS-3 is 45 megabits up and down, an OC-12 is 620 megbits up and down, my home cable internet is 6 meg up and 80 k down (it's advertised at 256k, but I have never seen it exceed 80 k). Yeah, I know - restricted to make home servers inpractical and all that baloney...
It's not like it'll cost the home broadband providers more to provide a symetrical connection!
Ron Gage - Westland, MI
Ultimately every connection is a shared connection, since all customers of a given provider are sharing the same gateway to external sites. That's why unlimited usage is an issue. Providers will advertise their endpoint bandwidths, not what's available to external sites, which is what actually matters. Customers will gladly pay a premium for a 20Mbit pipe, then wonder why they still can't transfer anything from an external site at that speed.
I'm all for unlimited bandwidth plans, so long as they include a per-unit data charge. Those who use more pay more.
OK, so WiMax is being sold by who right now?
Nobody
Who's going to be selling it soon?
Sprint. Through their Xohm company.
So it's gonna be what?
A horrible offering with bad customer service, low availability, and an utterly nonsensical rollout plan.
I live in Kansas City, the home of Sprint. Guess where they rolled out their 1993-new wireless PCS Service? Was it in their hometown, you know, the town that gave them a huge number of tax breaks so they'd locate their world headquarters here and where all their employees live? Nope. It was in Washington DC. You know, DC, where nobody who can pay for a cell phone actually lives, they all live in the Burbs which had no coverage for a long time.
So guess where XOhm's rolling out? Oh wait, it's rolling out mostly in areas that ALREADY HAVE VERIZON FIOS. "let's see, I already have FIOS, the best intenret ever, so let me get this unreliable wireless thing that's less service instead". FAIL.
How'd that ION thing work out? FAIL.
The problem is we're relying on Sprint, a company that could dip into a vat of win and come up with a bucket of pure fail, to provide this service. I doubt you could find 3 people in their executive offices who could pour piss out of a boot with instructions on the heel.
And their marketing will fail. OK, so you know what an MVNO is right? Basically it's a company that buys cell service and resells it under another name? So like Virgin Mobile here in the US actually resells Sprint service. Sprint has the lowest rated network in the US. Virgin has the highest. AND IT'S THE SAME DAMN NETWORK.
Sprint = Fail.
I live in a rural (slowly becoming suburban) new development that doesn't have any PSTN (Phone)lines nor cable installed yet. Fortunately, my local ISP offers a wireless solution. It works well, although unfortunately it's based on proprietary Motorola technology. For around $60 a month I get 4Mbit down and 1Mbit up. I have a static IP, and they let my run my web/ssh server from home. I have no formal bandwidth cap, although I was told that if I exceeded 75Gigs a month they might want to talk about upgrading to a more expensive business class connection. The ISP will sell you up to 6Mbit (symmetric) connection per antenna/subscription.
------ Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.
One thing in particular that bugs me as when service providers sell a variety of packages, none of which actually perform as claimed. Comcast and AT&T provide broadband in my area, but having seen a variety of the different packages first hand it's clear that none of them live up to their billing. More typically, you can rely on getting service equal to the quality level in the bracket below the one you're actually paying for.
False advertising, which is flagrant in these markets, is an unfortunately common side effect of market failure due to monopolies, oligopolies and cartels.
A-Bomb
ngoo arthantim yeset ngoo'geselin. ngoo asis saq pelus!
in the long run. Many years ago I worked for BBN and our group was experimenting with the first ever cable modems, that become a "Roadrunner" (still have a t-shirt). At the same time we were looking at DSL (ADSL). Both technologies had their share of problems. In case of cable modem the major issue was the fact that the bandwidth is shared among what's called "Neighborhood Area Network" (NAN), so so protocol had to be in place to insure fair share of bandwidth (as well as user's satisfaction in general). I think at that time that protocol was not the part of DOCSYS, so different vendors had their own protocols (i'm not sure if anything like that is a part of DOCSYS 3.0, or it still leaves the room for competetive advantage). But that was only one showstopper with cable modems. With ADSL things were much worse. Highly sensitive to noise on a line, distance, anything you can think of. Just read about DSL and you'll see why. The best results we had with 'rate-adaptive' modems, those that vary the rate depending on line conditions, so connection was stable, but the throughput was - BLAH. So I remember saying that seems from technical perspective cable modem technology should be more stable vs DSL. Then someone else, more experienced in business of communications that myself said: you may be right, but the cable companies are going to screw it anyway because they have no experience with broadband communications, whereas phone companies do. The guy was right, at least for a while. I still hope cable companies will take advantage of better technology/media they have in place.
(PS. My brother switched from Verizon DSL to COMCAST data over cable a few months ago. He told me the throughput is much better and the connection is stable. He got the whole enchalada from COMCAST: cable, internet connectivity, and voice. Voice is the worst part of the package. He even changed his greetings on answering machine to: "Hello! If you can't get through within the next 30 minutes, call 1-800-COMCAST and complain!")
In reality, based on license and usage fees, WiMax is an attempt to get people to pay for what increasingly is free Wireless access that most people have with laptops nowadays.
That said, bandwidth caps are also not a smart move, as most modern industrialized nations already have high speed Net access that is typically 2 to 10 times faster than what we have in the USA - even Canada has higher speeds.
A smart policy is to realize that more bandwith (e.g. the Comcast 160 speeds) should be pushed to give the USA a greater competitive advantage, and that bandwidth caps work to cripple our industrial and commercial competitiveness as a nation.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
After the first bills come in to people unknowingly hosting part of the bot net, seeing the huge charges they will get for bandwidth when they barely used their PC, and refusing to pay their $3,000 monthly bill, this will go down in the flames it deserves. It's one thing to meter the traffic going to and from a server. Grandma & Grandpa's virus infected PC being used to send thousands of spam letters every night is quite another.
I know I shouldn't reply to a troll - it only encourages them. But this one demonstrates what an awesome thing MLK, Jr. did and how far we've come.
The civil rights movement had to deal with millions of people with the same attitude as our Anonymous racist here, and yet it prevailed. While at one time you could be a US Senator and publicly espouse the same sentiment as CmdrIdiot here, now the racists number far fewer and can only safely spew their venom from behind a mask of anonymity. Frankly it is amazing when you consider how short a time has passed.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
What a rubbish article.
It isn't a "bandwidth cap". It isn't even about bandwidth. It's about usage (at least they used the term "usage" in the title).
It isn't a "usage cap". It's tiered pricing. Your basic subscription covers a certain amount, and then you pay more. A "cap" would mean you got cut off, which you aren't.
And it isn't even the end of the world! People who use more resources pay more. Sounds pretty efficient. Now you may quibble that the specific prices they set are high due to low competition, and that's one area where Ars may have a point. But god you have to wade through a lot of crap to get there.
I always mod up spelling trolls.
Will I have to pay for ads too? Or will Time Warner block them. That alone may get more people to sign up.
Skip ------ See the latest from http://www.anArchyFortWorth.com
Comca$t disappointed the analysts, but cable is still bulletproof, and with the cost of everything else doubling every year, why shouldn't they raise rates?
Okay, so we get shared wired connections and things can go slow because people are trying to use their 'unlimited' broadband. Random maths: 1GB pipe / 1000 customers != actual speed caps on accounts (which can be up to 24MBps now and 1MBps is becoming a rare bottom end).
So instead we'll all move to wireless, because that has no problems with sharing the available bandwidth/airwaves? What? Sorry, but last I checked wireless degrades worse than wired when in mass usage because of collisions. How are we going to get these super-fast speeds if we're getting interference from everyone else using their super fast speeds?
Shhhh! Don't give those bastards any ideas! Although it probably doesn't matter anyway ... it's not like those idiots don't raise their rates several times per year anyways,...
The day I pay per byte is the day I install AdBlock. There's no contest. There's no way around it. If I pay for the ads -- or even if I pay for the DNS requests to resolve the ads -- I don't request the ads.
They can't whitelist every ad server in Creation, and if I pay for even one ad, that's one ad too many. Not happening. I'll even block Google's scripts. And I'll do the same for every member of my family.
Yahoo! Pipes are awesome. How awesome? http://pipes.yahoo.com/jesdynf/slashdot
Opinion Piece: People and/or companies should give me what I want, regardless of actual cost to deliver.
I have seen many writings that boil down to this.
-- "Oh. This guy again."
Spelling/grammar nazis welcome (English is not my first language and I am trying to improve my spelling/grammar)
Yeah, that's completely wrong.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_deployed_WiMAX_networks#U
"USA
* MetroBridge Networks serves businesses in Arizona and Greater Seattle with connections up to 2500 Mbit/s with >8000 sq miles of coverage area.
* Valtech Communications deployed network in Northwest Ohio in beginning of 2006. Planning to deploy in Columbus, Ohio in fall of 2007. Currently holding licenses for Ohio and Southwest Florida.
* Clearwire holds 2.5 GHz licences in several regions, and is running a test market in the Northwestern United States in preparation to deploy a nationwide network to rival the other nationwide carriers.
* Sprint Nextel holds licences in the 2.5 GHz band covering most of the U.S. Sprint plans to build a "Nationwide advanced wireless broadband network expected to cover 100 million people in 2008." [20] Chicago, Baltimore and Washington D.C. are named as U.S. cities scheduled to be online by the end of 2008 under the brand name Xohm.[21]
* NextWave Wireless holds licences in the 1.7 GHz and 2.1 GHz band.
* Xanadoo operates Navini-based pre-WiMax networks in the 2.5 GHz spectrum in 6 markets in the midwest.
* Open Range plans to deploy on Oregon Coast in first half of 2007
* Conterra in Columbia, SC, Charlotte, NC, and nearby areas.
* Illinois, Quad-Cities Online ISP to Build 4G Network with Nortel WiMAX Technology - QCO's 802.16e WiMAX network will run over 2.5 GHz spectrum[22]"
So, when it comes to accurate posts?
YOU=FAIL MISERABLY.
File cache, like Squid proxy can retain commonly downloaded files
such as images from the major websites.
These are updated periodically from the website in question.
So if a person #1 visits yahoo, the images are downloaded,
and other simultaneous visitors to that site instead pull
the images and flash files from the cache, not long haul over
and over.
That is moronic.
So charging ppl bandwidth usage for locally cached files
on a metro area network file cache is just more greed.
If they only charge for long haul xfers than I agree with them.
But ppl who do not understand the technology just get sucked
in and screwed over, business as usual.
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
I'm confused. What is "the 'white space' broadband that might be offered by whoever wins the 700mhz auction?" Unless I'm very much mistaken, the 700 mhz auction and the white space spectrum are unrelated. I guess winners of the 700 mhz auction could go in on white spaces if the FCC decides to allow it.
...if they stopped sending me 12 fracking pieces of junk mail every month. Each.
I changed from Qwest to Cox for broadband, and ditched my Qwest landline. Since then I get not only the regular mail pieces begging me to take Qwest VOIP, or just POTS, or ANYTHING, PLEASE!
And I get Cox mail, both asking me to buy what I ALREADY HAVE, and of course to buy what I gave up from Qwest.
Seriously, they could cut their costs list a little with smarter mailing lists.
As if.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
I can see how they're setting themselves up for failure. Apparently, they failed to notice that the vast majority of users exceed those proposed limits on a regular basis. I mean, it's not like it's a few obsessive downloaders who use up most of the bandwidth, while the rest of the population is checking e-mail and surfing CNN. And it certainly doesn't make sense to charge those obsessive downloaders more than the other folks. And if upstart wireless providers start to become viable and provide meaningful competition, the cable company is stuck in a "broadband ghetto," just like the article says. I mean, it's not like they could raise and/or remove the caps in response to competition if/when the competition becomes a problem. In short, these guys are morons. If this is what they call business sense, they must really be struggling to make ends meet.
Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e.
the subscriber base varies around the maximum profit point in a 'broadcast' model internet. As the internet becomes more and more like interactive(text your opinion to 88993) TeeVee the audiences will converge.
I strongly suspect that if you added TeeVee time to internet time you'd find that most people subscribing to both are spending a smaller sum than they did a few years ago. I know I've lost a lot of interest in the internet as the diversity of small hobby websites has decreased. No number of teenage angst publications on facebook can add up to one good hobby site devoted to a particular model of motorcycle or outboard motor.
The only way you will have the mesh you want is if there are billing arrangements so nobody gets stuck holding someone else's bag.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
"If wireless solutions are able to deliver on their promises of high speeds with no usage limits,"
Excuse me? NO usage limits? At all? Even if you envision the wireless solution as a peer-to-peer cloud rather than a fix for the last mile issue, 'no usage limit' sounds unrealistic.
Assume that everyone who comes to the cloud brings excess capacity to the party. Assume that the cloud is given free rein to use the spectrum currently being wasted (IMHO) on broadcast TV and radio. Is even that going to be enough to sate everyone's demand for rich media?
When (not if) the cloud needs to connect to a backbone, there is certainly going to be a limit there.
If we're talking about service at a price that a mere mortal can afford I expect there will be limits, and they will be set low enough to pinch.
"Ain't no right way to do a wrong thing."
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20070810_002683.html
Most people in cities have a choice of at least 6 ways to connect to the Internet:
* dialup, slow
* DSL, relatively cheap
* cable modem, a bit more than DSL but a better bargain
* wireless through cell phone, expensive for what you get
* satellite, expensive for what you get and long latencies, may require phone uplink
* T1 and other business-grade, dedicated-bandwidth solutions, very expensive compared to DSL or Cable
Now, if you want faster than dialup, don't need mobility, and don't need dedicated bandwidth, DSL and Cable happen to be the cheapest options today.
The question is not, "Will WiMax, IP-over-power-line, blimp-wireless, and other technologies come online soon," it is "Will they be competitive?"
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I may want my torrent to download at full speed, but if I'm only downloading 1 2-GB torrent a month and spending the rest of the time doing "normal user" traffic, I'm classified as a normal user and the cable companies are happy to have my $29.95/month.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
If a wireless radio tower can handle 10GB/sec of radio traffic at 3MB/sec per customer x up to 10,000 customers, and it has a 10GB/sec pipe upstream, that will have more usable customer bandwidth than a telco that has 3MB/sec DSL for 10,000 customers but only a 5GB/sec pipe to the outside world.
Typically, things don't work out this way. For one thing, the telco KNOWS how many subscribers it has on that switch. The wireless provider is theoretically vulnerable to "flash mobs" where 90,000 people near the tower all decide to suck down their favorite movie all at the same time.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The idea of WiMax, area-wide WiFi, and satilite internet are not catching on because the providers are rationing the Interent as if it was piped in like water or electricity.
It also does not help that civil leaders and power companies want kickbacks for free services.
How can wireless internet have a cap but terrestrial broadcasts (TV and Radio) are free to broadcast 24/7/365?
The Rapture is NOT an exit strategy.
Your point doesn't mean much based on the assumption the story is making, which is that soon there will be a number of high-speed wireless providers vying for your business as well.
Now, to my mind the flaw in this assumption is not that we'll not see more competition - it's that wireless providers will not have even MORE stringent caps on bandwidth than cable companies do. Wireless is more a shared resource than cable is, or at least cable can more easily solver overcrowding of a node - so the idea that caps on cable will drive people to wireless is kind of a pipe dream I think based on frustration with cable companies (which I wholeheartedly share).
What I want, is tiered pricing from cable companies so that I can get something truly in-between consumer level internet and business level internet, cost wise. Currently three's a big gap in pricing there just waiting to be filled.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If you count the bandwidth used by pay-per-view it's already that way today. It's just on a separate channel from IP traffic... for now. Within 10 years, except for highly-watched traffic like live major events like the Super Bowl or Oscars, people will watch shows when they want to and bits will be bits will be bits.
I'd still go to the theater from time to time but only when it was an "event" like a gala premier, an art film played in an art house where they serve wine during intermission, or a high-quality dinner-moviehouse venue.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The science behind routing and bridging protocols for relatively fixed devices is quite mature.
The only problem with a wireless mesh vs. a bunch of routers all tied to each other in a several-nearest-neighbors arrangement is volatility: With wireless you have constantly-moving devices and constantly-changing transmission characteristics. That tends to complicate things a tad.
The OLPC project has done some work in this area.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Some ISPs in Australia have relatively low caps or relatively high metered usage.
However, they say "anything on our servers is cheaper or free."
In Australia this actually makes some sense since it's cheaper for the ISPs to host a few dozen terabytes of popular files than it is to ship them over an undersea cable.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
That and spam too!
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Cable has a difficult problem that many customers share a cable segment and bandwidth that is much harder to expand than splitting a DSLAM.
One bandwdith hog might ruin performance for the many normal users on that segment. For them, it would be unfair _NOT_ to throttle the hog.
If they charge $30/month for 40GB, they should be smart enough to charge $60 - or less - for 80GB, and no more than $90 for 120GB, and so on.
Let those users who insist on sucking down 8Mbps 24/7 pay for it, but don't cut them off.
Of course, give people a way to limit themselves so they don't get shocked if their PC gets turned into a file-sharing zombie behind their back and they get stuck with a $2000 bill.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
"But I don't see the current situation being sustainable "
When everybody started dial-up internet services, initially, all the ISP's were "unlimited". Their customer base was small, and of course, dial-up limited the amount of stuff you could send. Then when everybody hooked up, they went with "metered" service on the argument that they had to pay real money for lines, for telephone switches, and backend bandwidth.
A lot of ISP's tried to do it. And they typically got their butts whipped by ISP's that didn't meter their service. The net result was although we were told it was "impossible", it turned out the ISP's really didn't have a problem handling "unlimited" service. They were simply forced to invest in infrastructure.
That's what we have here. It's not "impossible" to provide the bandwidth that people want; it's just that they would rather not, because it cuts into profits. I'm not "blaming" them. I would try the same thing. What I don't get are people who advocate this as if there was some universally accepted fairness in broadband that dictated what companies should provide and what people should accept as "fair" service.
If Comcast wants to charge by the byte, by all means they should. But that doesn't make it fair or right, it's simply more profitable for them. And I would expect Verizon to kick their butt either with fiber or DSL. Comcast is a very profitable company. Their investors will have to decide if they want to invest money in their infrastructure to compete with the Verizons of the world. If they value short term profits over market share, they'll add bandwidth caps. I expect it will be a short experiment.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
We can find out what the bult transfer rate is for the ISP. We know what they pay and we know then that if we're charge 2x the rate to us, they are taking the piss.
They'll have problems if they don't use ALL their bandwidth then all the time then.
And we won't download anything bid because we know how much it costs EXTRA.
So no digital age. No broadband. Dead as a Dodo.
"Letting the free market decide" won't leave me with a lot of options in the near term. Where I live, the options for broadband service are basically Time Warner (cable) and AT&T (DSL). I currently use Time Warner, and if they start capping bandwidth, voting with my dollar means switching to AT&T... which is like voting "yes" to content filtering.
So, currently, I have a choice between supporting one of two evils, or having no broadband service whatsoever. Awesome.
I'd rather have an honest bandwidth cap, where the rules are clearly outlined in TOS, than have secret rules, and if you violate one of the secret rules, your service gets terminated.
I'd also like to know that the bandwidth cap may well be a function of time, so I can move bandwidth or volume intensive things like my Gentoo source code downloads to the wee hours of the morning. Power companies have been doing "peak time" stuff like this for years, certainly ISPs ought to be able to.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
I wish that there would be a piece of software that could function as a gateway to a SOHO setup, and route packets over multiple links to the Internet. For example, the gateway computer could be on a DSL line provided by SBC/AT&T, get cable internet from Comcast, phone in to a dial-up service by Earthlink, and be connected via bluetooth to the cell phone internet service by T-mobile. The gateway computer would accept connections from the other computers on the home network, and distribute the packets over these various DSL/cable/dial-up/GPRS connections so that we could form an aggregated faster Internet connection. More importantly, the Internet connections would not all fail at the same time. (E.g. if Comcast decided not to play ball, we would still have other options.)
...
I brought this up before, and was told that it wasn't feasible, but I figure if I mention it from time to time, maybe someone will be inspired or hear about something related, or otherwise somehow or other make this move toward reality.
I just started learning about the Linux "route" command the other day when we had some wonkiness in the SOHO network; maybe something can be done there
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
In that telco example, the bandwidth limits mean that traffic gets effectively unicast from the DSLAM to the user, because you can't fit 1000 channels of broadcast into 25 Mbps. (By "effectively unicast", I mean it's either actually regular unicast, or it's multicast with only the channels you need on the wire. Same bandwidth etc., just a difference in whether you're in Class D IP address space with multicast handshaking or whether that's all hidden from the home router.) On the other hand, if everybody's watching TV at once, 10K-100K houses at 15 Mbps is 150-1500 Gbps, which isn't realistic. If you feed the CO with multicast, then a GigEthernet can handle about 200 channels of HD or 500 channels of SD, or an OC48 can handle both, and farm it out to everybody who's watching. That's one of the reasons that the telcos want to sell TV as a competing-with-cable service, as opposed to just providing pure transport. (Another is the usual money, competition, etc.)
If everybody's doing typical Internet usage, there are a couple of reasons that the network doesn't melt. The big one is that not everybody's actually burning high bandwidth at once - most of the time you're looking at web pages, maybe pictures, and occasional videos (Youtube etc.), but in practice you can oversubscribe by more than 10:1. Another reason is that TCP reacts to congestion by adjusting transmission speeds and window sizes, so if there are too many people watching Youtube at once, everybody's downloads slow down a bit, but unlike live TV, Youtube doesn't care much.
The other way to get enough bandwidth to the CO is to cache a lot of popular video material there - so either the Akamai model (which is driven by the content providers) or transparent caching run by the ISP (a much older model) can do some of it. It won't catch everything, but I'd hope you could cut Youtube bandwidth demand in half that way.
Disclaimer: This doesn't even *pretend* to be my employer's opinion.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Who is this guy and why is he pontificating on things he knows little about?
1 ^ 20 =
Hmm, lemme just check that with my calculator
1 x 1 x 1 x 1 x 1 x 1 x 1 x 1 x 1 x 1 x 1 x 1 x 1 x 1 x 1 x 1 x 1 x 1 x 1 x 1
= 1
Yup, confirmed! My bandwidth usage is going to rise all the way to 1 Mb/s!!! That infrastructure had better be ready to handle that sort of load ten years from now!
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
Mod parent up! I didn't previously think of this, but TWC may be doing this precisely to make bandwidth hogs go slow down their competitor's network instead of their own.
Bandwidth caps were introduced many years ago here in Australia, and everyone made all the same arguments against it that I'm seeing here. It still happened.
All it takes is one company to introduce them, and then all can happily follow suit. Sure, some companies will hold off, to get the people who switch, but eventually they will introduce them too.
Once it's in place, it can actually mean cheaper broadband for a lot of subscribers. My mother doesn't need 10+GB of downloads a month, and can quite happily go onto a plan that's less per month in cost, with 1-2GB of downloads for checking email. Me, I'm on a plan with 12GB peak and 24GB off-peak (midnight to noon) downloads and only once have I hit the cap. I just schedule my downloads to occur off-peak whenever possible, which is exactly what my ISP wants to happen.
What I don't agree with is, are caps that can be exceeded and then you get charges excess usage charges. One ISP here has a two-level cap. The first if you go over your stated cap - at that point you're charged $0.15 per Megabyte (yes, it's a lot) until you hit an additional 2GB and then you're throttled to 128kbs or something like that. My plan that I'm on, when I hit my cap, I'm throttled till the first of the month. No excess charges.
Charging extra if you go over your cap is pretty sneaky, especially in the above-mentioned plan, where your internet can run up an extra $150 in excess usage charges before it's throttled.
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
I pay $50/month for cable TV and still have to wade through the commercials.
Even pay channels have commercials now.
Whatever the market will bear. Sigh.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Damn right, it's lack of competition.
.pdf), where he talks about how chasing 'productivity' and 'shareholder value' are destroying American enterprise. Basically his point is that market analysts exert enormous pressure on senior management to keep increasing their share price, never mind the long-term effects on the company.
Where I live, I have a choice of paying ~40/month for service from company A or a nearly identical package from a nearly identical company for almost exactly the same price.
In a situation like this, never mind a free market, can it really be said that a market exists at all?
I think another problem is how corporations are run. Academic and author Henry Mintzberg has a great aricle here: http://www.mintzberg.org/pdf/productivity2008.pdf (apologies for the
So, where companies like ISPs should see the eventual competition they'll face from WiMax or something similar and the 700 Mhz spectrum auction and start planning for it now, they're locked into this short-term, next-quarter outlook (as if you could measure a change in a large company's fortunes between October and December) that leads them to essentially 'liquidate' customer satisfaction and goodwill.
The plural form of "anecdote" is "anecdotes", not "evidence".
customer controlled optical networks!
http://209.85.207.104/search?q=cache:zQXhdMx0MlIJ:www.canarie.ca/canet4/library/c4design/customer_controlled.doc+customer+owned+wavelength&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=2&gl=ca
- Public municipal fiber network with no services
- Let the ISPs sell their services from the public exchanges
let's get the ISPs out of the last mile.
We know fiber is future-proof (as much as anything can be).
We can do it just as we did our roads and sewers!
It would be great for our economy, great for our quality of life...
Actually, I'd draw a distinction between oil companies and RIAA members, (who I think are both dying industries in their own ways) and ISPs. ISPs should (or at least, could) be a long-term viable business model.
I think a problem that isn't discussed much is the constant chasing of the share price by senior management. Financial analysts exert enormous pressure to keep upping the share price, irrespective of the long-term consequences to the company.
So, right now, companies like ISPs should be looking down the road and seeing wiMax or something like it and the 700 Mhz spectrum and start planning for it. Y'know, like, invest in their infrastructure, put a lot of emphasis on keeping customers happy, even if it costs them money. But that would require a slight dip in profits next quarter or something, so CEOs see that sort of thing as out of the question.
This obsession with share price is keeping companies that should be taking a long-term view of what's coming in the next 5-10 years locked into a mindset where "long term" means "six months from now".
The plural form of "anecdote" is "anecdotes", not "evidence".
My ISP is reselling telco DSL, but I've got a static IP address, no bandwidth caps, no Port 25 blocking, and I can share it with whoever I like. Their policy on running servers and file sharing at home is that they're not selling me walled-garden couch-potato service, they're selling me Internet Connectitivity, and it's up to me to do something cool and worthwhile with it if I want. And there are lots of other ISPs like them - Speakeasy's one of the best-known, and there are also other ISPs that resell telco DSL who do offer "features" like bandwidth caps, URL-censorship to protect your kids, and walled-garden content if you want that sort of thing. I do pay a bit more than I would directly from my telco, but it's in the same general range as other ISPs' static-IP prices. When I first signed up with them, they were doing cool stuff with 802.11 roof-top networks as well, but that hasn't gotten to my town yet.
From an ISO Protocol Stack perspective, who's providing what layers in the US (YMMV in other countries)?
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Also...don't forget the extra latency introduced when using wireless over any sort of wired connection. Granted, it's not nearly as bad as satellite or even dialup...but it's still there, additional latency. This makes wireless solutions unattractive for online gaming (especially MMORPG's) when a wired solution is available.
The pre-digital cable TV model is flat rate because it was an always-on medium. If the cable company offered 100 analog channels to all of its 100,000 customers, it didn't matter if those customers were all watching TV at the same time or not, and it didn't matter if those customers had 100 TVs each hooked up (assuming they used powered splitters) or one. The cost to the cable company was the same.
Now, the Internet is more like electricity - if you aren't using any it's not putting a load on the service provider. If everyone turns on their air conditioning at the same time or everyone starts downloading videos at the same time it causes problems.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
But let's talk about peering vs. transit for a moment - there are roughly three kinds of ISP traffic aggregates out there - content providers, consumer-eyeball providers, and balanced traffic carriers. Balanced carriers will peer with each other for free if they're both big enough that it makes sense, because it lets them offload traffic that they'd otherwise have to carry, and they want to charge money to the content and eyeball providers who have unbalanced traffic. But the content providers and the eyeball providers both want to peer with each other for free, because it lets them serve their highly-complementary customer bases cheaply, and only pay the transit providers to balance geographical and size issues. So BigWebSite and BigCableCo will probably connect for free in San Francisco and New York, but if the BigWebSite doesn't have a server-mirror in Boston, then either they'll use internet transit providers to get that content to consumers in Boston, or else one side will pay the other to cover the transit (e.g. BostonCableCo might need to pay YouTube, but SiliconValleyStartup might need to pay Comcast), and at some point the content provider may want to reduce costs by locating a server in Boston, or paying a caching service like Akamai or AT&T to host one for them. On the other hand, a non-consumer-content user would still need to pay a transit provider, e.g. RandomWidgetFactory probably wouldn't get free service from Comcast because they're not entertaining couch potatoes, and they might be consuming as much inbound bandwidth from their employees browsing the web as their outbound website traffic to potential widget buyers.
So that cable/DSL company probably isn't paying close to market-rates for bandwidth, because they're getting it from the big content providers for free (well, for the cost of interconnect hardware, plus some rack space and GigE cross-connect at Equinix, but that's still in the $1/Mbps/mo range for big users.)
And yeah, the industry's still going to find ways to haul fatter pipes to the chokepoints, and the costs of doing so keep going down, but at least until people are receiving more bits on their computers than on their televisions, multicast solutions of some sort are going to be big players. One thing that helps is that dumb televisions are getting augmented by Tivo and other PVRs, so the video-on-demand business can still use broadcast/multicast to ship the bits to your house, and you'll watch them a bit later. I've certainly stopped watching live TV except for rare random events (or when there are two programs I want at the same time so I'll watch one and Tivo the other) or maybe the evening news; otherwise you've got to wait for the commercials to play.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The whole point of consumer broadband is to download media - there are no bandwidth hogs, only ISP's that oversell their connections. Period.
I am an American who has been living in Australia the last few years. All Cable/DSL services here have usage caps and you pay for faster speeds / more downloads. When I first moved here the idea of the usage caps pissed me off but I have warmed to them. I pay ~US$60/month for 8 megabit down and 384 kbit up DSL with a static IP. I get 24 gigabytes per month and any downloads I do from 1am to 8am are counted at half so it is really more like 30 to me most months. They have a usage meter website that is updated about once per hour and is quite accurate telling me how I am using. If I go over I pay $4/gigabyte.
This is great for a number of reasons. Firstly, everybody has a motivation to do their non-essential torrents etc overnight which improves gaming/voip performance during the day and peak evening hours. Secondly, I have an agreement with my provider where I get such and such amount of data at such and such speed and we are both on the same page - I will never get an email saying to use less and hassling me like I received from Adelphia (now Time Warner I believe) before I left. It doesn't serve as a huge deterrent but it is enough to ensure that you don't waste a precious resource (bandwidth) as readily. If you bought electricity, water, or natural gas on an "unlimited" basis don't you think that would lead to waste as well?
I think that the current "unlimited" system does a disservice to many on a shared-bandwidth medium like cable as well. A few teenagers on a street who saturate their connections 24/7 downloading things like the entirely of the Simpsons etc they may never actually watch make the rest of the neighboorhood slow for things like telecommuting and voip that are much more essential and time-critical. There is no reason/incentive for them to stop or to try to do their larger torrents overnight etc. It is also the shadyness of what the limit really is on the "unlimited" service questions. All in all we can argue about where the pricing and the cap are set but I think the idea is sound and reasonable. They will always let you do what you want but you may have to pay more for a service where you can download 100GB/month than granny pays to do 1-2% of that - as you should.
Its been like this for a few years in Australia.
My ISP(iinet.net.au) charges me $XX dollars for XX GB of usage per month on a 24Mbps ADSL2 connection.
But if I get me email off their POP server that doesnt count.
And they have some kind of agreement with Apple (mirror maybe?) that itunes downloads dont count
They also have a mirror for just about every linux distro and for game demos and patches. Not only does this not count, but it means I can get these at the maximum speed of my connection.
About the only thing that really counts towards you usage is web browsing (which even in a month of heavy use doesnt come close to the limit) and BitTorrent/P2P.
If we all downloaded legal video content the ISPs wouldnt have to look at this. They would just setup legal mirrors for large files.
Now, if a zombie infects your computer and turns you into a spammer, you will getting zapped with huge price increases. Bad or not ?
the lowest tier's price will be what I'm paying now and it will only give me 5GB of transfer per month? And to get their top tier (40GB/month) I'll probably have to start paying above what TW's business class service costs. It wouldn't surprise me if that's what happens but ideally they should set the lowest tier to below what customers are currently charged ($45/mo for me right now) so that upper tier customers don't have to pay too much more than at present. I think I'll call TW tomorrow and let them know if this is rolled out nationally I'll be switching to someone else.
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
This will absolutely cause users some headaches. I've been dealing with this kind of thing every since I got pseudo-broadband. I live in a rural area, and using Wildblue, I'm limited to 17gb/30 days. This is the biggest pain in my butt I've ever lived with. I have to be careful with iTunes, downloading updates, etc. And recently, anything with my AppleTV, iPhone, and anything else that uses the internet. I'm serious people, capped bandwith sucks. A bigger problem that I haven't seen if Time-Warner or anyone else is doing (but that satellite companies have always done), is a FAP. Fair access policy with Wildblue says that if I download over my bandwidth limit (17gb/30 days download & 5gb/30 days upload) I get kicked into FAP mode which drops my connection speed down to 128kb up/28kb down. Now, you think the idea of satellite is bad because of latency, can't run VPN's or VOIP apps, etc. is bad? Try just browsing web pages at 128kb. What's worse is that their FAP throttle control isn't as perfect as they'd like to believe. Sometimes, I can't even get pages to load completely. I just hope users will stand up to them before they start implementing this widespread. Good luck all.
But those of us who are stuck with satellite broadband from the wonderful companies like Hughesnet will be stuck with vague but enforced 'Fair Access Policy' caps, should you ever decide to download a patch or more than one MP3 file. Moving closer to somewhere that supports cable or DSL would be nice, but for some it's just not an option. Someday hopefully I'll get better service since I already pay three times what the average cable or DSL user pays, for maybe one third to one fifth the bandwidth. Yeah, it's a real deal....
Don't fear the penguins
There's technology to cache bittorrent stuff. Go google.
The problem is if ISPs do that for all torrents the *AA will come after them.
If it weren't for the "Copyright issue" there would be no big problems with bittorrent - the ISP could have a bunch of Super Peers - then they'll deprioritize their customer's inter-ISP p2p stuff, while getting the Super Peers fetch torrents that customers are fetching.
Most customers won't care about the inter-ISP P2P speeds being really slow as long as the Super Peers fetch the stuff fast and start seeding at top speeds to the customers (who presumably also start seeding too).
No, I didn't make it up. It was in the news in 8/06.
Company tests robotic blimp for wireless communications.
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