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The Facts & Fiction of Bandwidth Caps
wjamesau writes "What's the deal with broadband caps, like Comcast's 250GB/month data transfer limit, which goes into effect tomorrow? Om Malik at GigaOM has a whitepaper laying out the facts and fiction about Comcast's short-sightedness (which other carriers are mimicking), and how it will impact the future Internet: 'Given the growth trend due to consumers' changes in content consumption, today's power users are tomorrow's average users. By 2012, the bill for data access is projected to be around $215 per month.' Ouch." The white paper is embedded at the link using Scribd; for a PDF version you'll have to give up an email address.
I have serious doubts as to their projected costs. This will have changed so radically in 4 years that these predictions are about as stable as gas predictions that far out.
On the other hand, they are somewhat correct about bandwidth usage becoming more common. My sister and mother both have Skype now and use it regularly, and many people are looking to set-top boxes for NetFlix's on-demand and other services like that. It won't be long now before heavy bandwidth usage forces the ISPs here to seriously consider bandwidth issues.
Luckily, I believe in the market and I think someone will lay the groundwork for serious bandwidth soon, instead of continuing to use copper for everything.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
For those of you who can't be arsed reading the article, it can be summarised as such:
Bandwidth caps are a bad idea. The only thing they'll accomplish is increasing costs for nearly ALL users.
So, nothing we didn't already know, then.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
Well .. well.. another example of the wonderful harvard/wharton MBAs destroying the technological capacity of the USA to line their pockets..
With administrations and finances run by such self-serving f**tards, do we really require external enemies to destroy us?
You have only government restriction on the existence of competition to thank for the monopolies these jokers are able to maintain, despite customer demand for better services. In a more free system, customers would have threatened to leave for another provider by now. That would have forced providers to upgrade their systems to support the growing userbase. Not so here. There's no other choice.
"Accept our high prices and shitty service! What else are you gonna use? Dial up? DSL? HA!"
If they try to charge those kind of rates we will just route around them. We use the large ISPs because we find them the best bargsin. Jack up prices to that sort of level and there will be other options.
Get rates up enough and lots of alternatives get practical. Wide area wireless, new competitors like the power company using their universal right of way to lay fiber, etc. Kinda like everybody bitched and moaned at $50/barrel oil and didn't change much but as it kept going up we are talking serious about hybrids, biofuels, drilling in places that would have been political suicide to talk about, building nukes (Nukes! Who could have predicted the greens ever allowing that!), etc.
Get bandwidth expensive enough and we could just do local neighborhood p2p filesharing. Imagine a 10.0.0.0/8 wifi network covering a neighborhood and sharing the big popular downloads among themselves. Also would make the **AA goons job a lot harder.
Democrat delenda est
FTA:
Comcast made promises and failed to deliver, and that's the key issue. Comcast's reactionary (and secretive) policies are based on a scary dollar figure, and their fear of exponential increases in overhead due to customers overusing/abusing their networks with massive transfers that were not originally expected by Comcast management. Comcast is as a result of poor planning, failing to deliver on promises made to customers.
Personally I don't think the technology is there yet. We need to come up with a technology that can handle massive downloads without the huge overhead to companies. Reduce the cost, and increase the data that can be transfered without having the huge expense of wires... maybe there is a wireless technology of some kind around the corner that can make use of teleportation to help this situation get better? Once the wires and solid-infrastructure is under control, it's much easier to reduce costs and therefore provide service to a wider customer base, without having to clamp the valves on customers who simply want to download more information than could be anticipated.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Once upon a time, we had to pay dearly for a 60 minute-per-month cell phone contract, and some people paid even more dearly for 180 or even 300 minutes per month. Then competition stepped in, and one of the vendors started offering 500 minutes per-month for same prices as the competitors charged for 180 minutes. Now, it's hard to find a carrier that even offers less than about 500 minutes in the lowest price tier, and lots of people have 1500, and "unlimited" contracts are becoming common.
As soon as you are tempted to change internet carriers to avoid being charged for extra gigs, they will bump the gigs-per-month. IF there is competition in a metro area, the gigs-per-month in that area will increase rapidly.
But, if you live in a small town or rural area, you get screwed. That seems to be a constant.
That's ignorant. They made long range plans. They took a look at the long term trend of ever-increasing bandwidth usage and realized they could rake it in by capping the bandwidth.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
much like the power companies do. If I want anywhere near decent speed I basically have to be up by 6 before the file sharers get up. I'm sick of having to buffer youtube videos because someone upstream is downloading gigs of data. However, I don't really care what you do while I'm sleeping, so I think that they shouldn't implement caps, but instead do as much traffic shaping as necessary from say 8 am to 10 pm so that people who don't use a ton of bandwidth can still enjoy what they like and from 10 pm to 8 am its open season.
Monstar L
Could someone explain where the cost comes from? Why does using more of my bandwidth cost comcast extra money? If I buy a firewire cable, it costs the same whether I transfer 80 MB or 80GB using it, and it doesn't wear out with use. What are the expenses going toward? Costs for the routing/switching?
Metering bandwidth raises a few questions about what should be transferred over the internet. If your paying per byte then all of those flash heavy advertisements are suddenly costing you money. you are then paying to be advertised to. who wants that? What happens when your computer gets a virus and starts to send out gigabytes of email spam? Who's liable for that? How about when windows decides to update its self with that sexy new 500MB patch? Or when WoW releases a new patch and you have to pay for the 800MB-1.5GB patch for that game?
Metering bandwidth now when the internet depends on having an unlimited connection would truly stifle growth of not just the internet, of all computer software.
When people have to think, gee do I pay for the bandwidth for this massive patch to my OS/Email Client/Office Suite/Game/Misc App, then everyone looses. Too many people would make their systems not update, and leave themselves vulnerable to attacks if given that sort of choice.
Carried to its logical extreme bandwidth metering can be pretty scary.
IN the US the top 4 metros NY (18 Million), LA (12 Million), Chicago (8 Million), and Dallas (5 Million) together contain just 15% in those ares who's mean distance apart is far greater than Finland..
Finland's population as a country is 5.3 million. So New York city has more than 3 times the population of Finland yet Finland has better broadband service? I know, Finland is a country not a city. But if you examine the cities you'll find the numbers still don't favor the US.
Going by your cited area in your post, Helsinki has a population density of 3,060/km^2 while New York City has a density of 10,482/km^2. A large US city with similar population density to Helsinki is Los Angeles with 3,168/km^2. So Los Angeles has similar population density, yet 6 times more population (larger market) yet Finland still has better broadband? Furthermore New York City has more than 3 times the population density?
Why are more and more countries consistently beating the US in information technology infrastructure even in similarly populated areas? Clearly it isn't a population or density issue. I'd say a better answer is large corporations using monopolistic power and litigation to prevent smaller guys and even municipalities from improving or building their own infrastructure to compete in lucrative service areas.
Now I do get your general point. It is too hard for a single company (even a large one) to roll out nationwide high speed information infrastructure for a country the size of the US. I agree with that. But I don't see why the rules cannot be changed to allow smaller companies or municipalities from building their own infrastructure to provide for the needs of their local population whether it be a rural area out in the middle or nowhere or a high density area like New York.
Great. (Though I must admit your final sentence kinda lost me.) It sounds like you're saying that since Finland is more urbanized, they get better service. This still doesn't answer the question of why urban areas in the US still have crap service compared to other countries. The cost of wiring rural areas is a bit of a red herring, as rural areas often don't have very good service anyway (i.e. not a lot has been spent to wire them), and it would be much more cost effective and profitable to wire up the dense urban areas -- but these still lag the rest of the developed world by a sizable margin, in terms of median download speeds.
If you (or any other readers) are interested in download speed comparisons, have a look at the FA in the thread I linked to above -- or just click here for the linky. :)
Yes, the US is big. But that is not the (only / main) reason costs remain notably high and download speeds depressingly low in the US. Another major factor in this equation is the fact that the US is relying on private enterprise to install the infrastructure -- the same private enterprise that actively obstructs any public-sector attempt to fill gaps left by incomplete corporate efforts, and that increasingly owns the content on the other end of the line. Decouple line ownership from line transmission, and decouple line transmission from content ownership, and *then* the US 'net might just catch up to the rest of the world, in terms of costs, transmission speeds, and traffic fairness. Until this comes to pass (and I sure won't hold my breath), the inherent conflicts of interest in such monopolistic cross-ownership will keep the US 'net market from being anywhere close to a "free" market, and any attempt at analyzing it as one is a waste of time.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
the only people caps hurt are those 3% or less that are causing bandwidth slowdown for the other 97% of the populace. I'm in Aus, and while this may sound like a broken record, I find that I can easily get by with about 60gb/month. And I download several tv shows and have torrents pretty much constantly running. What the american ISPs also need to do however is set up better intranets in the major american cities, prioritise local traffic and make that traffic not contribute towards the cap. They could even do it on a per-state basis rather than cities, much like telecoms do when charging for national / local calls. you don't expect to have unlimited phone calls / unlimited electricity / unlimited water / unlimited fuel for a set fee, so why expect unlimited internet access?
-- Sex is the antonym of pringles. Once you pop it's time to stop.
The issue is, as many others have stated, that bandwidth has been effectively assumed to be unlimited. The problem is that increasingly more people are using increasingly more bandwidth as time progresses... and most importantly, the ISPs don't seem to be upgrading their bandwidth capabilities.
The ISPs have been marketing the bandwidth capability as unlimited up until now. And now that you have an ever increasing amount of people streaming youtube videos, etc. the companies are trying to impose caps on bandwidth use instead of upgrading the pipes. They prefer to both demonize and victimize the so-called "power-users" for their "excessive" bandwidth use, and impose anti-filesharing network shaping and bandwidth caps to try and fix the problem instead of upgrading the damn tubes to match consumer use.
This is false advertising on their part, up until now saying that you pay xx dollars per month for an internet connection with yy throughput. They never said anything about limiting use, and if they did not expressly say that usage was unlimited, it was implied. Now that more people are using big chunks of bandwidth they want to get away with putting caps on usage to altogether avoid upgrading their max bandwidth capability. If Comcast gets away with this without consumers finding alternative providers instead, this will likely set a trend across the board for ISPs to limit bandwidth.
The capability never was unlimited, and I can only assume that ISPs never mentioned it because they didn't think it would become an issue. That, and their lack up upgrades to their systems over time is what makes up their lack of foresight.
It's just another crap trend where companies want to pay less, market an inferior product and make profit instead of continuously channeling profit into development of a competitive product consumers want, market a superior product and gain profit by winning more consumers.
And unless some ISPs decide to upgrade their pipelines with all the money they're making off of us, or they're otherwise forced to upgrade, Comcast-esque bandwidth restrictions are where we're headed.