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.

[sohp]

Luckily, I believe in the market

I believe in the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, and Santa Clause. Where's my pony?

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.

We need a bigger internet

[MisterSquirrel]

Can't we just add some more tubes?

Re:We need a bigger internet

[Lectoid]

Yes, but with the gas prices going up, the cost of running the trucks in those tubes is going to go up. And guess who gets to pay for it.

What were we talking about again?

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.

Re:Rates that high will force rerouting

[jmorris42]

> 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.

Re:Thank government restriction

[MozeeToby]

You seem to think that the average, profit generating customer is the one who is affected by bandwidth caps and monopolistic behavior, but that simply isn't true. The only people that these limitations affect are the people who generate the least amount of profit for the ISPs. Imagine you own a business and you have a certain part of your customer base that actually costs you money to service, are you really going to worry about them leaving you for the competition?

Re:Article summary

[neokushan]

There is actually a term for that, it's called a Cartel.

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:metered bandwidth

[zehaeva]

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.

Mabe trying ot cut the compitition out

[teknosapien]

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

Re:They should implement peak hours

[Hatta]

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

Re:Article summary

[genner]

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.

Re:Finland, anyone?

[tknd]

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.

So how come DL speeds in US cities still suck?

[zooblethorpe]

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,