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.

Comments

The projected costs are worthless.

[Aladrin]

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.

Re:The projected costs are worthless.

[samkass]

I think bandwidth has gotten to the point where you can't measure your capacity by assuming you'll be consuming 100% of the bandwidth all the time. Take electricity... no one seems to be bothered by the fact that if everyone consumed even 50% of their capacity at the same time the system would die a flaming death. And very few people even think about consuming 100% of the electricity available to their home.

I really, really appreciate that I can get 20Mb down and 5Mb up whenever I need it, even if I don't transmit 250GB a month. It's dramatically better than having a 800kbps line that I can max out 100% of the time.

Re:The projected costs are worthless.

[Captain Spam]

Take electricity... no one seems to be bothered by the fact that if everyone consumed even 50% of their capacity at the same time the system would die a flaming death. And very few people even think about consuming 100% of the electricity available to their home.

However, there's also the fact that, in almost all cases, electricity is a metered resource, but in the US, broadband generally isn't. As in, if you're using that 50%, you're paying more than if you were using 25%. If it were unmetered and people could (theoretically) run at 100% capacity 24/7 without any increase in cost, I can assure you we'd have the same people complaining about similar changes here, regardless of the damage it would do to the infrastructure. "Oh, I can't run my array of arc welders constantly anymore with these oppressive 4GW/month electricity caps!" "NOW how is my Tesla coil going to work all day and all night? I need that protection!"

Granted, there is far less "damage" to be done with broadband (and I have a hard time believing that if the telcos/cablecos were actually upgrading their lines with all the money they rake in they can't support it), but if the electricity power-users got used to a (to them) unlimited resource and it suddenly changed to a metered one, the same problems would arise.

Rates that high will force rerouting

[jmorris42]

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.

Remember cell phone minutes?

[natoochtoniket]

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.

Re:They should implement peak hours

[Hatta]

File sharers saturate their links 24/7. They are not the cause of prime-time congestion.