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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
Can't we just add some more tubes?
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!"
I've been paying ~$180/month for 64k ISDN to my secret lair in the hills of California. On Monday, though, I get my T1, for $250/month! I think most people that use that much bandwidth may bitch about it, but they'll pay.
I've been paying ~$180/month for 64k ISDN to my secret lair in the hills of California. On Monday, though, I get my T1, for $250/month! I think most people that use that much bandwidth may bitch about it, but they'll pay.
64k ought to be enough for any secret lair!
If you have something that you dont want anyone to know, maybe you shouldnt be doing it in the first place -Eric Schmidt
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
Bandwidth caps are America protecting its poor infustructure. Were we in a backward place like Korea, Japan, or Singapore we would enjoy HUGE bandwidth and no limit for a reasonable monthly fee. The Duaopoly here is protecting its rusty wires and milking that much more out of them. we need fiber please, and not FIOS. Bring us real 21st century bandwidth here in the third (online) world..
- Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum.
for a PDF version you'll have to give up an email address.
ok, how does bill_gates@comcast.net sound?
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
"Were we in a backward place like Korea, Japan, or Singapore we would enjoy HUGE bandwidth and no limit for a reasonable monthly fee."
You mean geographically small and dense areas with less infrastructure needs to get glass to the curb than the US who have all built the majority of their physical infrastructure (roads, electricity, telephone, ...) in the past 30 years... oh yea that's apples for apples /sarc
"Ahh! Arrogance and stupidity in the same package, how efficient of you!" --Londo Molari
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.
There is actually a term for that, it's called a Cartel.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
We have had stupid caps up in Canada for at least a year now.
I am with Cogeco Ontario (Rogers Communications), for my cable internet, have been for years. I have a 60GB cap. They have 3 levels of service. Crap at 40GB. Normal at 60GB. Better than Normal at 80GB. They also implemented this cap pretty much without notice. So one day I had no cap, the next I did. I have even had my account disconnected due to going over cap (in fact it was the only way I found out I actually had one in the first place).
So don't cry about your 250GB a month cap please.
Ultimately unless the feds wake up and do something about these telecommunication giants taking advantage of markets and ripping consumers off not a bloody thing will happen. People are getting fed up, which will only become more apparent at time goes on. I would think it will only be a matter of years before the politicians start leveraging this for votes and then some sort of change will take place. However until then, it will be annoying, and we will all live in sucksville (at least if you stay in North America).
Bell can also stuff it as far as I am concerned. In Canada there is only Bell and Rogers, a duopoly, so there is not much choice. I hope the CRTC rips them all a new one and soon.
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
for a PDF version you'll have to give up an email address.
Fortunately, those aren't hard to come by.
"i live in the suburbs of L.A. but my broadband bills are still several times those of similarly dense population centers in other countries."
The cost a provider puts out there is distributed among all its customers so while comcast has high density areas it also has low density areas.
"but most Americans live in metropolitan areas or their surrounding suburbs."
But more than a fifth live in rural areas and of the 80ish percent that live in 'metro areas' 20% live in area with a population of less than 200,000! Much of America does *not* look like the suburbs of LA..
"check out this chart of average broadband speeds to see how far ahead Japan and Korea are. if we want to catch up to those countries"
more than 25% of Korea's population lives in *1* city (and well over half live in that cities metro area), and Japan fits half the population of the United States into a nation smaller than California I really don't think you're wrapping your head around the Geography of this whole thing..
"Ahh! Arrogance and stupidity in the same package, how efficient of you!" --Londo Molari
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.
"So, is your argument intended to suggest that the USA cannot improve its internet access?"
Nope, just pointing out the reality of the task. May here (some Americans and some not) believe laying fiber to improve service in the US is a simple matter when they don't get just how big and spread out this nation is (most Europeans cant wrap their mind around it either).
"You might not be able to reproduce internet access to the levels enjoyed by many other countries at the same cost, but you can improve it so that people are not tied to a a single provider"
People *are not* tied to a single provider. I can go with Comcast, Verizon, Road Runner, SprintPCS, and others. When people say 'you only have one option' they generally mean for a cable modem and ignore other methods of access.
"Tell me that again in a few years time when your businesses cannot compete because they cannot communicate"
Businesses generally don't use the kind of access that were discussing here, the bring in a T1 or use a co-location for hosting. You're confusing residential options with commercial options.
"when a large proportion of your population cannot get adequate TV coverage because the digital revolution has left them unable to get analogue signals"
Ummm, what? the US is *giving out converter boxes* for the digital signal conversion and TV access in the US will be as far wide and deep in march 2009 as it is today.
"Ahh! Arrogance and stupidity in the same package, how efficient of you!" --Londo Molari
And Albany, Syracuse, Utica.... Get out much?
In Korea 50% of the population lives in *1* metro area, in Japan 14% live in and around Tokyo, and 25% of the population live in just three metro areas! with the average distance between metro areas being next to nothing.
"Ahh! Arrogance and stupidity in the same package, how efficient of you!" --Londo Molari
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
Cable services are shared for the last mile between the homes that they pass. For Comcast, the last numbers I saw (from the fairshare information threads) were ~250 homes per downstream. The higher the per-household usage, the more they have to split up that grouping - which requires putting more cable in the ground, setting up equipment, etc.
This is the bandwidth crunch the cable companies have, not the core of the network. The article actually does not address that fact at all, and seems to assume infinite edge bandwidth with limited core bandwidth. This is true in an enterprise network, but is not true in a cable network today.
They're talking price, not cost. The two have nothing to do with each other.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
People *are not* tied to a single provider. I can go with Comcast, Verizon, Road Runner, SprintPCS, and others.
That's rare. The reality for most people is you have one DSL provider and one cable provider.
20% of Finland's population lives in the Helsinki Metro area, another 10% live in just three cities..
40% of the population in 4 metropolitan areas..
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..
"Ahh! Arrogance and stupidity in the same package, how efficient of you!" --Londo Molari
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.
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."
Actually with many VoIPs like SpeakEasy or Vonage, we can get unlimited phone calls (locally, nationally, and even internationally) for a fixed rate. Many POTS phone providers and Cell Companies also provide unlimited plans.
The problem with VoIP (and cell phones, and even land lines now) is that it (they all) relies on internet access, which is usually not metered for end users (different deal for providers, if you've ever used shared hosting). Once data to customers is limited, VoIP costs may take a hike and you'd be correct.
Internet is not a common utility like water or electricity, you can not judge it as such. Only phones can be truly considered similar, as they relay information and not physical goods.