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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
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.
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.
Costs a lot less to toss up a couple of towers than it does to negotiate rights of way, dig trenches or erect poles, maintain a fleet of trucks and techs to go from residence to residence making connections, et al.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
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
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.
Actually, you are wrong. It does. After all, nothing stops two neighboring wireless networks from exchanging packets directly, without going through the backbone, or relaying each others packets towards third parties. Naturally this is slower in the latency sense than going through the backbone, but that doesn't really matter for BitTorrent, streaming media, or other high bandwidth consumers.
At some point we need to get rid of this silly notation of Internet Service Providers and simply let any device act as a wireless router for any other, forming a worldwide mesh. Then again, this would be a nightmare for the control freaks who want to keep exact logs of who does what online, so it might take some time to happen.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
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