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.'"

Comments

FP?

[dosius]

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.

it's not the bandwidth caps stupid,

[Scudsucker]

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.

Uh Huh

[MightyMartian]

Yeah, because we all know that the backbones have unlimited bandwidth...

Re:Uh Huh

[ultranova]

Mod parent up past the max. This is the only response such a stupid article deserves. Bandwidth doesn't magically exist free for wireless providers.

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.

Don't worry, it'll get "better"

[MBCook]

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:

10 GB per month, except stuff coming from Netflix, TiVo, or Apple... you get 200 GB there. Our site(s) are unmetered, watch our ads all you want. Also, you can add any site you want to the list of exceptions for only $5 per month, but we don't have to honor that.

Re:Don't worry, it'll get "better"

[Sneftel]

Hey, let's improve on that a little! We can throw out the randomness and just do deterministic binary search. The advantage of this is, you never have to send your 64k to the server! Since the server already knows what 64k number you were going to send (since it's deterministic), it can just base its answers on that, sending a stream of highs and lows, each taking one bit.

Hmm, some more specifics. The first guess is, of course, halfway through the range, and a "high" answer means "your guess was equal to or greater than the number I was thinking of". A "low" answer means "your guess was less than the number I was thinking of".

Looking good! Let's try it with a sample four bit number... say, 0110. So the server knows that your first guess will be 1000, so it sends a "low". Your next guess will be half that, 0100, which is too high, so it sends a "high". So your next guess will be 0110 (halfway between 1000 and 0100); the server responds "high" because that's equal to or greater than. Finally, your guess will be 0111, and the server sends a "low", thereby reducing the range to the only possible number, 0110. So it sends four bits: low, high, high, low. Encoding a low as 0 and a high as 1, we get... 0110

Whoopsy.

Your introduction to Information Theory has begun. :-)

They know most of us are boned

[techpawn]

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?

totally naive

[Quadraginta]

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.

Re:totally naive

[div_2n]

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

I think that if Bittorrent has taught us anything, it's that when content is available (either legal or otherwise) that people want, they WILL saturate their pipe to get it as soon as they can.

I sincerely think that this is a chicken and egg scenario where the demand _would_ be there if the content owners would get over themselves and work with tech companies to meld content and technology in an inexpensive and unrestricted manner.

The past decade has proven so many lessons that organizations like the MPAA and the RIAA are either unable or unwilling to learn. Sadly for them, in trying to be a damn in the path of the river, they are quickly becoming a bump in the road slowly being pound level to the pavement.

The saddest part of all is that we could all be enjoying inexpensive access to music and video content legally _right now_ with those organizations profiting instead of this stalemate we're in where we can last forever while those relying on profit cannot.

There's your corner and while I can't possibly predict how long it will take for us to get around that corner, rest assured that we will and then you will see demand skyrocket.

Transfer Cap, not bandwidth cap, right?

[corsec67]

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.

A little perspective...

[Gybrwe666]

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

Bandwidth isn't free, you idiots

[realmolo]

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.

Advertisers Will Never Allow It

[jesdynf]

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.