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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.
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.
Me too. Except for one thing, the market doesn't exist. The cable companies has Congress in their pockets and the state legislatures, too. How can market forces work when many cable and broadband providers have legislated local monopolies? Or in some cases, get their boys in the legislatures to pass pro-industry regulation to "protect" the consumer which does nothing but get all the companies to follow the same rules that lines their pockets.
When we have real competition, then we'll have decent service.
Fire your Congress. Vote against the incumbent or vote third party. Show those assholes who's in charge!
Same here. When I got my first DSL connection 2001 I was paying Verizon around $40/mo. for a 768/128 connection. Over the years, that went from 768/128 to 1500/384 to 3000/768 without any significant change in price. These days I pay around $60 for a 20000/5000 FIOS connection. The price of bandwidth has most definitely dropped.
"People that quote themselves in their signatures bother me" - athakur999
> Great idea. Quick question: how will that wifi network connect to the Internet?
Ok, work with me here. Imagine the bandwidth cap drops to 100GB/month. Hard drives are still cheap and huge and will be cheaper and even bigger by the time this problem ripens. 802.11n will also be commonplace by then. Ok, so everyone participating in a neighborhood net is expected to buy the current reflashable linky, at least 1TB of drive and a 10dbi omni antenna, The AP does all of your bittorrent action, something ASUS is selling now, a browser plugin offloads all .torrent links to the AP, you monitor your downloads on a webpage it provides and when it hits 100% you access the files via a samba share.
Ok, now put this AP on a 10/8 net and it can see the neighbors and your outbound net. It's torrent client has been modified to prefer local peers by a ratio close to the number of members. It also assists in torrents a neighbor is working even if you aren't interested in the file, at a lower priority on the pipe to the outside world. It does something else interesting, it only caches the blocks it downloaded, thus distributing a cache of those files amongst the peers and greatly increasing the effectiveness of the cache. If you later decide you want one of those files your client gets the rest almost exclusively from the local nodes.
Now imagine a future where video over the Internet was about to launch but the cable companies and telcos squashed it in favor of their video on demand pay per view crap. Get fifty neighbors together and together they have an aggregate bandwidth cap of 5TB. If everyone is watching a totally different set of shows it won't help much, but there will almost certainly be a fairly good overlap. When a new episode of moderately popular show X is available the dozen or so people who want it will be downloading it in parallel across their net links and swapping the blocks across a much faster 802.11n WWAN aided to a lessor extent by the 38 peers who aren't interested in that program. And cutting the hit on their bandwidth cap by that same factor of 12+ but offset by helping download stuff you didn't want to help somebody else. And if anybody else later decides they want to watch it before it times out of the caches their cost is zero. By having one smart host do almost all heavy downloading it can know the caps and adjust it's activity to avoid hitting them.
Democrat delenda est
What about subscription based services? what if I'm subscribed to MLB.com and and watch every game I can and use Vonage on a consistant basis to make calls and I stream my music online? what effect would this have on my bandwidth and would it move me away from competing vendors? Would I then find it more cost effective to drop Vonage and use Comcast's Phone service and watch my games via subscription through Comcast? I think there is more here than meets the eye and only after it's implemented will we see the true fall out. After all what better way to kill the competition than to make it impossible to do business in your area
no matter how good it is, it is human nature always wants to make things better
ISPs currently (at least to in the UK) have been racing to the bottom of the market.
Price is what is currently selling. Nobody cares about email servers, nntp retention (if it's even offered) etc etc - people are buying whatever's cheapest. Your ISP is a utility - in fact they care even less. Your water rate might be fixed, but your gas and electricity charge you on the basis of how much you use. Your ISP is generally accepted to provide 'internet' for a fixes price. A small sub-set of the market might care about the headline transfer rate, but it's an even smaller subset that care about the small print.
Basically we are so so so much the minority on these issues for even noticing they exist. More to the point we are the 'hogging consumers' - I can guarantee that you all download more than my mum.
The small print is going to get noticed soon, and it won't be my us - it'll be the people who signed up to netflix beacause of a mail-shot. It'll be the people that wonder why that 360 demo takes longer than it's supposed to.
So how will the market respond? Well there'll be new 'premium' packages that don't throttle for us - but 90% of punter would be happy if say a dozen sites were excluded from their caps based upon their popularity/kickbacks to the ISP.
Take Netflix or Amazon unboxed. Most end users have currently not heard of either of them - but in 5 years time they'll be watching media-less films on their TV. How will they decide which? Well their ISP will tell them.
The WiFi router most ISPS now offer pre-configged will have an HDMI socket on the back and a remote control. It will provide you movies from and the download due to peering will run at full whack.
Even if you're a 'low kbps' subscriber, your ADSL line will suddenly hum at 24Mb to get that movie onto your TV and that charge onto your bill asap. Market will then move subtlely - you'll be offered a slightly higher charge for, I dunno, 1 free film download a week. Then there'll be the premium unlimited rentals model - in summary your ISP will become your Cable TV provider.