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ISP Capping Is Becoming the New DRM
Crazzaper writes "There's a lot of controversy over ISP capping with Time Warner leading the charge. Tom's Hardware has an interesting article about how capping is the new form of DRM at the ISP level. The author draws some comparison to business practices by large cable operators and their efforts to protect cable TV programming. While this is understandable from the cable operator's perspective, the article points out how capping will affect popular services such as Steam for game content publishing and distribution, cloud-computing and online media services. Apparently this is also an effective way of going after casual piracy."
In particular in Belgium, there are just a few ISP's that do not have any capping. The major ISP's make BIG profit of the users who want to download lets say, more than the 40GB they offer. It's NOT a DRM, it's just another way to squeeze more money from their customers.
Rather than have these ridiculous, confiscatory rates for so-called "unlimited" service (which will still be capped under some other excuse)... why don't the ISP's just provide metered service?
This way, Grandma who just wants a couple of recipies every now and then, and occasionally looks at baby photos posted on thier adult children's Facebook accounts (and is not pulling down 10GB/month)... only pays a little bit.
And the Torrent operators pay for what they use.
Pay for what you consume. Fair for everyone.
Or is that too much common-sense for all involved?
The problem with socialism is that they always run out of other people's money. - Margaret Thatcher
Too big to fail = too big to risk leaving whole. Too much concentration of power leads to abuses. When mergers happen and the CEO's gloat about efficiencies of scale, they're talking about putting Americans out of work. And where do all those savings go? Fat CEO paychecks. Keeping those jobs in pay ain't inefficiency, it's redundancy in the engineering sense, like "let's have redundant control cables on the airplane so if one set goes out, we won't fall out of the sky. Let's have lots of banks so if a couple fail, we don't lose the whole industry." When Republicans bleat about class warfare and wealth redistribution, they forget to mention that they threw the first punch.
This Time-Warner BS is no different from GE buying up a news network so they can create more favorable coverage of their business interests. Propaganda is wrong; propagandists are liars and should be treated as such.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
I run several huge sites (bigger than slashdot)
and we use 1200 to 1500 mbit outbound at anytime
our agreements with datacenter and carries mean we pay $US 4.5 a mbit @ 95th percentile during peak hours ONLY (thats 12:00 to 24:00GMT)
outgoing bandwidth offpeak time is FREE
incoming bandwdith is FREE
alot of large isps such as Comcast or UPC can peer for practically free with datacenters (who are heavily outbound) as these isps are heavily inbound
this whole bandwidth cap is a joke, and site operators already pay alot of the privilege and were talking about pricing per mbit per month here not per GB
If there's not capping or charges for bandwidth, then somebody gets rationed. There's a fixed amount of bandwidth available, and you have to decide who gets it. Whether or not that's someone that pays extra to get more or just some random assignment, you still have to decide.
This is my sig.
It's rapidly becoming impossible to find an ISP (especially where there's no cable coverage) who will provide reasonable limits. Many ISPs started out offering 'unlimited' plans. These ISPs ended up with fair usage policies- I pay for 30 gigs a month for the same amount I paid for unlimited, and this 30 gigs per month is actually only 15- at 15 they reduce everything except email/HTTP to a crawl, at 20 they block most things except email/HTTP, and at 30 it's just unusable, despite the fact that they claim I am still able to use everything but at a reduced speed.
I don't do huge amounts of downloading- I grab the occasional bootCD and download some TV shows, but considering the former only accounts for ~5 gigs a month and the latter is advertised as the main use for my connection (Or at least my ISP keeps telling me I should do it more!). I've called them up several times to ask them why they keep adding bandwidth usage on protocols I don't even use (VOIP I don't use, yet last month I had 4 gigs of usage on it. FTP likewise.), and their support was utterly useless every time I've called.
I'm currently with PlusNet, a subdivision of BT. My options are essentially A) Another BT Wholesale reseller, or B) An Entanet reseller. The Entanet reseller option was looking peachy but apparently sometime in the last few months they've gone for adaptive rate limiting and 'red flagging' high-bandwidth users. Where there used to be a 30/300GB (On/offpeak) package is now a 30/??? package.
Is there much scope for other telecoms companies? Does the cost of laying new cable and more fiber not get offset to some extent by the fact that people would use your service?
Let's see...people back in the 90s bitched about having rationed access, so companies got rid of it and went to unlimited use because their competition was. How long is it going to take a competitor to again figure out they can have all the business they can handle if they don't charge for volume?
where capping is the norm here in Australia. It's just a wild guess but maybe this is just an ambit claim to make more money, you think?
Next they'll be filtering the internets...
insecurity asks the wrong question irritation gives the wrong answer
A throughput cap will only hurt consumers and legitimate transfer-intensive services like steam, netflix, xbox live, and hulu.
The large few ISPs like to say that it's 1% of their subscribers who aren't playing fair. That's just not the truth. They see a trend emerging and they're not happy about it.
You don't institute major policy change because of 1% of your users. You do it because in less than a year, it could be 15%-20% using as much as the 1% currently uses.
Why? Online content providers are now offering larger quality services and more transfer-intensive services. Comcast certainly didn't like that. They have to pay for traffic outside their own network.
It really is a scam. They sold me unlimited service and they have reneged on their part of the deal. They altered the contract. That should be illegal, but they did it.
Caps and metered service are both money-saving scams. They will not prevent the inevitable.
The only real solution is to increase network capacity.
They're using their grammar skills there.
But what's got me worried is the fact that when I started playing around on the internet, the most heavy web surfing was a few gifs and/or jpgs.
Now, we have full flash animations, games, interactive multimedia presentations. Not to mention embedded audio and video.
Downloads use to be smaller as well. Now with more bandwidth available, software gets bundled with more features and more multimedia. Game demos have gone from 10-20 meg up to 500meg to 2+ gig, easy.
Hell, I'm a legit user, I don't download music (anymore, I did when I was younger) and I don't pull pirated movies/software either. I don't run bittorrent except for the occasional WoW update (when I did play). But I've seen a large jump in bandwidth usage with my new Roku box for watching NetFlix on my tv. That's a lot of streaming video. Are they keeping tech like this in mind? Doubt it.
So, say the caps are aimed at the bandwidth of today, ok, fine. What happens "tomorrow" when demos START at 2gig+? What happens when the only video online starts at widescreen HD? Our bandwidth usage, for simple surfing, has been going up. It would be shortsighted to think it won't keep going up. If the companies with hard established caps don't keep growing your cap, you're going to eventually have to pay for the top tier.
Bandwidth usage inflates with time. I'm not holding my breath that the ISP's will generously increase caps over time.
I think they are restricting usage by being a monopoly and fixing limits.
The simplest solution I would think is to analyze what a user like myself would lose because I watch netflix.
Then simply force them to offer a cable package that was ala carte,on demand, 8.99, and commercial free in exchange for the caps.
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
And not only is there a fixed amount of bandwidth, but they oversell this bandwidth by a large margin. To build out a system where each and every person could utilize 100% of their bandwidth at one time would cost a fortune...and it wouldn't be sold for 29.95 a month.
Go and look at some prices for services with guaranteed bandwidth. Suddenly, the tiered prices don't look so bad.
As someone who worked at an ISP, I do feel for them. I quit my job because I could see the coming bandwidth crunch where I worked and I knew that no matter how we tried to play it, we would piss people off.
transporter_ii
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
The article should have read, "Apparently this is BEING EXCUSED BY PRETENDING THAT IT IS an effective way of going after casual piracy."
-- "At Microsoft, quality is job 1.1" -- PC Magazine, Nov. 1994
I wish in order to enact these kinds of changes companies had to cancel my service and then convince me to sign up again.
"I have great faith in fools: Self confidence my friends call it." ~Edgar Allan Poe
I don't understand why the ISP companies aren't excited about this.
If their network utilization is increasing then they must be doing something right as their customers are using their service more. Any other business would be thrilled about this.
Instead of limiting what their customers are able to do, they should invest more in building their infrastructure to accommodate the increase in demand and grow their business.
Instead they opt to shoot themselves by limiting their service and hinder growth so that they can make slightly more money now rather than potentially much more later on.
Also, why aren't we hearing more from the services you mentioned (hulu, google, netflix, etc) about bandwidth capping?
even in turkey without caps
1 Mbps no limit 28$
2 Mbps no limit 39$
4 Mbps no limit 51$
8 Mbps no limit 62$
you live in the heart of internet and you're capped?!. :)
consider your situation with japanese or korean
i'm thinking of starting cable company there
I wonder if this is an attempt by the ISPs to end around net neutrality. They set these caps low, users won't pay. But certain third parties who make revenue sharing deals with the ISPs (think Hulu, YouTube, etc.) are exempted from the caps. Since users won't pay higher for uncapped data, it will drive users to the "free" services, creating more revenue for the ISP.
are inherently evil so I feel no empathy there. Casual "piracy" I have no beef with OTOH.
Comparing capping, how secretive ever, to DRM is pretty weird. Not even in the same ballpark.
They're not excited. They're terrified. With services like Hulu, YouTube, Netflix, and other legitimate online video sources, the draw of their cable TV services is weakened. Why pay the cable company $50 a month if all of your favorites TV shows are online? (Legally, again. Let's not consider pirated shows for the moment as that introduces different arguments.)
So they institute caps. Now you can download and watch a couple of HD movies from Hulu, but that could eat up your entire month's bandwidth allotment. So you're less likely to use online video and more likely to tune in on your TV. Cable wins. And if you decide to buck the system and view online videos? They charge you overage fees which coincidentally add up to approximately the cost of a cable subscription. Cable wins again.
And just to introduce a Network Neutrality wrinkle into the equation, I'm pretty sure that they'll exempt any online video services that they introduce. If Time Warner releases "RoadRunner Online" where you can watch your favorite shows on your computer, they'll keep that usage from counting toward your monthly bandwidth cap. The net result will be that ISP sponsored online video sources will be given an advantage (maybe they will thrive, maybe not) while other legal online video sources will be held back with every attempt made to get them to wither and die. All to protect the cable companies' bottom lines.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
http://stopthecap.com/2009/04/10/why-is-time-warner-saying-costs-increasing-to-consumers-but-decreasing-to-stockholders/
Time Warner spent $150 million on network upgrades while receiving $4.1 Billion in revenue from their high speed data services. We're a long, long way off from getting our money's worth on services here in the states.
The right to protest the State is more sacred than the State.
Don't use their service. If you have to, get DSL or something.
I felt real good last week because my company had the discussion of going with a fiber line through Time Warner. Me being the Network Administrator told our Time Warner sales rep that we would not be interested due to the fact that the company practicing bandwidth caps. Yeah I know our company would not experience the caps, but it's a loss of business for them, and it gets the message across.
The greatest revenge in life is massive success.
Ask Earthlink's semi-automated chat service about the Comcast Cap applying to their cable-modem-over-Comcast's-wire service, and they'll tell you that it doesn't apply to you because you're Earthlink's customer and they have no such policy. You'll save a couple bucks based on the local Comcast price, but you'll be limited to to the 6mbps/768kbps which is Comcast's lowest speed level. (Though you'll still get the Comcast PowerBurst instant speed double.)
That, and people will wonder why you have a @earthlink.net e-mail address still...
And let's not forget, the cable company now offers phone, and the phone company now offers cable.
My advice would be to get business class while you can, WITH a contract.
About a year ago Brighthouse royally pissed me off with their slow roll out of SDV (switched digital video), and their horrendous HDTV offering. My solution was to get DirectTV and keep BH only for Internet. The problem was that unless you purchased their "all in one" package (cable, phone, Internet), you couldn't get their highest speed tier (20/5). I was told if I wanted just Internet, at that speed tier, that I would have to get business class and pay extra. This really miffed me at first, but now I see it was a blessing in disguise...
Bottom line, I ended up paying ~20/mo MORE for DirectTV + BH biz class, but I got much better TV service.
Now it looks like I am also going to see the benefit of having a contract. I am locked into a 3 year contract, but I am guaranteed that I am not going to be paying $150+ for unlimited bandwidth since that is included in the biz class contract (which they can't just arbitrarily change). As it stands, I pay $75/mo and that gets me 20/5 unlimited bandwidth, static IP, and NO restrictions on services (IE: no blocked ports).
Something to think about,
-- Brian
-- http://anonet.org -- The internet the way it was meant to be. Check it out, you may be surprised.
Inappropriate comparisons are the new Ford.
Maybe you can tell me then - I figured that a certain amount of money used from out monthly subscription would be re-invested into the company to allow it to expand indefinitely (or nearly indefinitely). Is this not the case?
Revenue != Profit unless costs are 0. It costs a lot of money to keep such a large network running and Internet is one of many services they provide. I do feel your point, though.
First!
On the surface level, ISPs are attempting to throttle and cap bandwidth for piracy reasons, pressured by the RIAA. However, isn't it possible that they see the emerging end of their business- when the internet is so large it would be impossible for a single carrier to control all the data? What if data transfer demand increases faster than they can afford servers... and what if it's beginning to happen already?
From a business perspective, the only answer is- well we need to stop the increase of bandwidth... even if it costs us our business model. They believe that they essentially "own" the internet- it's their "product" that they "sell". they believe that if they want to give it out as they see fit, it's their right as a producer and distributor. from their perspective, they need to create awareness for bandwidth capping. High profile torrenting is sucking up some massive amount of data transfers as is their nature, which is why they're being targeted the most. A typical torrenting download could go through 200 connections, and several gigabytes of data. Rapidshare doesn't come over half as much scrutiny when they traffic plenty of copyrighted material- simply because they're a working business model that's not dying from traffic.
If this were to be mainstream- all over required bandwidth capping- it would the the death of the unified internet. However, you can't give people pitchforks, axes, and spears and tell them to sit at home while they take away your rights. We have the open source anonymous "criminals" on our side, inevitably, several new Internets would emerge. New, torrent like software protocols would allow today's ridiculously fast processing to distribute internet bandwidth. HTTP would be used by big business slots and advertising until they realize that our generation doesn't go there and they're paying for nothing because nobody visits http sites anymore... and from it's ashes will become a unified, vastly more pirate-y internet- one that's not afraid to jump ship and switch protocol when the feds arrive. This scenario is described by many big heads in tech prediction, which is why this is known as the "golden age of the internet". in 10, 15 years, it will be commonplace for the internet to fight to survive. And Slashdotters will be on the front lines.
Of course there are network costs, but I wonder, how profitable are their Digital Phone and Cable TV services? TW claims that light users are subsidizing the heavy users, what are RR users subsidizing that TW should just get rid of?
The right to protest the State is more sacred than the State.
As someone who worked for an ISP, you should know pretty well that the connections were being oversold for profit margin, and this "coming bandwidth crunch" has been coming for what, 15 years? I have no sympathy for ISP's that couldn't see a slowly rolling tide that they have been putting off. Honestly they are the companies that provide the capacity and they know what's coming down the line as far as upgrades. Even now they bitch about small investments to increase capacity for longterm or longer-term.
Deploying more capacity takes time. It typically takes around 2 years for a major upgrade, and most of the consumer ISPs somehow completely failed to spot the fact that a lot of bandwidth-intensive services are being deployed. They now have high demand and lack the ability to fulfil it, so they are doing what every other company does in the same situation: charge the early adopters a lot. This lets them get the biggest return from their existing infrastructure, while they deploy more just fast enough to finish before their competitors. Of course, in some areas, their competitors would have to start from nothing, so this can be done very slowly...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Total transfer has a cost. Your connection to the Internet, if kept running wide open full time, would be a money loser for the ISP. There are essentially three solutions to this:
1. High transfer users are subsidized by low transfer users. This will fail as everyone becomes a high transfer user. My Mom now sends me YouTube videos occasionally.
2. Deep packet inspection (DPI), with the high transfer user of services the ISP likes being subsidized by the high transfer user of services the ISP does not like. IE: They charge company A or inhibit customer B, while allowing company C to send high volume content to customer D. Some ISPs think this it the right answer because some services are inherently high volume. Others like the idea of being a toll-road and getting to charge monopoly rents. Ultimately this is insidious because it hides the cost and distorts the free market.
3. Tiered pricing based on the numbers of 1's and 0's you consume, but without regard to which 1's and 0's you consume. IE: net neutrality with tiered pricing.
Of those three options, is there really any question that option 3 is the best?
One may argue, "The ISPs are charging too much, their profit is too high, it's an inefficient market and prices are too high because of lack of competition." Fine, maybe that's true. The answer to that problem is increased competition. Asserting that the ISPs should not be allowed to use option 3 to solve a problem which may be real, however, can only lead to either option 1 or option 2 being used instead. Option 1 would imply increasing the price to everyone. Is that really fair? Should I really continue to have my Internet access subsidized by the guy next door who doesn't use high volume media? I mean, I like it and all, but it's not fair, it's not free market, and it makes the ISPs want to find ways to shut me off so they can focus their business on the guy next door.
Option 3, on the other hand, makes me the most important customer to the ISP. It makes them want high volume users. It makes them more money when we use more Internet. Suddenly the ISP's profit incentive is directly in line with making the Internet faster and encouraging high volume services. Seems like a pretty good thing, no?
So choose your poison:
1. Subsidization with the ISP hating high volume users.
2. Deep packet inspection with the ISP choosing which 1's and 0's are "good" and which are "bad".
3. Net neutrality with tiering, and the ISP becomes profit motivated to encourage high bandwidth and high volume services.
Gee, tough question.
Tom, I love ya. I was making banner ads for your site back in 1997, and loved every little review you put out. But you're off your nut on this one.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
They had a cap, but once you hit the cap you just had your speed reduced.
So up to X gb (I think it was 5, which is low, but it was a wireless service) you had the full 1.5 mbps speed. After that, they dropped you to 300k, or you could pay extra to increase your cap that month.
I think that you need a much larger cap on cable for it for fair (maybe 5-10g for the cheap, grandmother style connection, 50g for the $40 standard one) and just drop your speed to 1-2 mbps when you hit that so it's harder for you to keep going over. I think people would complain a lot less about bandwidth caps if they were softer caps like that - at least, living with it for a few months, it was worse than being uncapped, but it was entirely usable and bearable.
Australia has the slowest and most expensive internet in the world. And if you go over your cap you end up having to take out a mortgage to pay the bastard ISP's, most non computer savvy people get burnt.
My sister pays $20/month for 1GB, doesn't know how to check her usage and got hit with $100 extra that month. Like most non savvy people they just surf away and wait for the bill. They should have it where your speed slows and you pay nothing extra.
I pay $40/month for 5gig... All the big Telco's in Australia are taking us to the cleaners
I would rather pay them $30-50/mo for the pipe to the data and then an additional $10-20 for the video over that data pipe if they offer a compelling package. It's better, price-wise, than me spending what I'd spend on the two separately- and most people are the same. If they could economically do it for me for what I need out of FiOS (Peak data, fixed IP's...) I would be taking Verizon up on at least the TV service from them because it's better than Dish, which was already better than the Cable providers were shovelling (Heh... There's a hint there for you cable providers...)- for about the same as the HD service would cost me from Dish, with MORE channels present.
They're being silly about this, as is to be expected. They see the business being cannibalized, but what everyone else sees is a new business where they could, if they were visionary, get what they were getting out of people and then get more out of those that can afford it and hand them all more of what they're now really looking for.
But then, when have any of the media providers of our era been overly clueful? :-D
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Apples to oranges comparison. One network upgrade vs the entire revenue for the entire service. You forgot the ongoing costs of maintaining the network.
Digital phone is probably wildly profitable, percentage-wise at least. I hate how everybody wants to bundle it with the other services. I already have a digital phone that goes wherever I go, as does my wife.
Once solution is to have all the broadband customers install/use wireless routers that can interconnect as many as possible to a geo-local area ( your local neighbourhood ) virtual private network that shares the bandwidth load for bulk content distribution across multiple customer to ISP connections. If N users wish to fetch the same content, each person only need to download 1/N of the content, using neighbourhood network to swap the different parts. Think of it as a neighbourhood bittorrent.
This could be set up/managed as a web service, with the client P2N2P ( Peer to Neighbourhood to Peer ) software running on each users computer ( or running as a proxy service on the wireless routers ), via managed a multi platform subscription aggregation client such as Miro 2.0 Open internet TV.
The service could operate like this:
1) Via a website or web2.0 interface, people create content "channels" which are a list of URIs ( HTTP/FTP/TORRENT) of content with descriptions, just like podcasts.
2) The service would then fetch the content, on demand and store the content temporarily on its host/distribution site. The host service would do sharing via torrent, so uploading is not done by the Neighbourhood Peers.
3) The service would hold the content and distribute it to P2N2P clients so that the content can be recombined via a local Neighbourhood VPNs.
4) Each piece of content itself be encrypted at the URI source, so the service need not hold the keys, to deal with any concerns over end use privacy issues.
5) The subscription aggregation client could incorporate and distribute advertising as a means of paying for hosting the service.
I know the market freaks will have a hissy fit, but if you want standard rates, good service, and the ability to punish price gouging and other nefarious practices, look no further than your local electric company. Asking "how much does this service cost to provide" and "how much are people willing to pay for it" will give you two entirely different numbers for the same service.
And, once it's regulated and subsidized, you can pass regulation that will actually get implemented. Or continue dealing with corporations in natural monopoly situations and acting surprised each time they fuck you.
And for anyone about to say, "What about censorship! What about Big Brother!" - you probably need to read the news.
If ISPs really wanted to reduce bandwith costs, they wouldn't have all dropped their internal Usenet feeds, and would be caching the heck out of everything.
The reason no one has complained much before:
Comcast:$43 for 250 GB - Seems mostly reasonable. 250 GB is a lot of traffic at the moment, if you're pulling more then 10 GB every day, you're doing some serious stuff and should probably get a business connection.
Time Warner: $40 for 10GB? $60 for 40GB? - Not reasonable at all.
Blessed are the pessimists, for they have made backups.
Sorry for the misprint, that was the amount they spent on maintaining the network exact quote:
"In 2008, TW made $4,159 Million, on high speed data alone, and then had to turn around and spend $146 Million to support the cost of the network. 2008 total profit on high speed data: $4.013 Billion"
The right to protest the State is more sacred than the State.
FRAK EM ALL
the simple fact that most telco's, and cable providers are unscrupulous monopolies. the government has essentially granted them a stranglehold over
communications systems with little or no regulation. Will the us government, which has long since outsourced their portion of the internet network to the telcos,
also be a part of these bandwidth caps?
these are the same industries that charge access for the GPS receiver already built into your phone or disable its features outright, cant tell the difference between a tenth of a dollar and a tenth of a
cent, and receive historical immunity from warrantless wiretaps.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Here at IBM, our company has just decided to stop reimbursing work-from-home employees for Internet access. Combined with this new data transfer capping trend, I fully anticipate having to explain to a customer why I can't take care of that server problem until next month because my daughter used up our bandwidth allocation on the Playhouse Disney web site. That's going to go over really well...
(better if read with slightly double plus non-good Russian accent.)
10GB cap. Meh.
Why in my day we didn't have the fancy, pants Internet you kids have today. We used our favorite browser lynx from the terminal and read our webpages, not the other way round with your fancy flash and AJAX and what-have-you.
Really, the Internet suffers from bloat, just like the fancy programs you kids run on your netbooks with processors that servers from the 90's would have killed for.
More, more, more is all that you can say. What happened to the people who used to get on Slashdot and say less, less, less?
I say keep your fancy, pants Internet and I'll keep using the Internet for what it was built for; Gopher and WAIS. And stay off my lawn you net urchins!
will ISP's do the 'right thing' and maybe set some 'free-leech' whitelist where people who use services such as steam/youtube/wow/itunes that can accrue a lot of bandwidth over the course of the month, while trying to bill UPSTREAM to entice legitimate content-providers to buy themselves a slot on this 'whitelist' so their business model is not affected by this sudden loss of 'capacity' on the ISP networks? I'm hoping not, but at least it would keep those who are legitimately paying for products and services to continue to receive the value that they are paying for. ie, 100gb cap, but anything going thru itunes/wow/steam/youtube etc would not be counted against your quota, everything else does, hopefully this isnt where things are going, but who knows :( its time for a 'public internet' where you pay for your access and thats it, u are free to do as u please on the connection u pay for, if you do something that is illegal and get caught then thats between you and the authorities, the ISP should not be involved.
Content providers have finally found their businesses on the wrong side of the law of supply and demand. For a long time it appeared that the public's voraciously insatiable appetite for entertainment and news would fuel ever growing profits indefinitely. Now thanks to the series of tubes the world is flooded with instantly accessible free media content. I think that the massive amount of available free media is curbing public demand for media with a price. I think that this effect is independent of the phenomenon of media piracy which just rubs salt in this wound. ACTA will be the industry tool for attacking piracy. In addition to being a simple money grab, I think that metered traffic and caps on use are intended to reduce the competing effect of free media by making you pay more heavily for access to any media or information. If you watch streaming video all day instead of cable TV you could end up paying for it as if it was a cable bill; indeed a cable bill that behaves more like a cell phone bill, i.e. rising with consumption. Content providers are sick of trying to compete with free...this is a means to impose a higher price on the free media products that they are competing with.
Go and look at some prices for services with guaranteed bandwidth. Suddenly, the tiered prices don't look so bad.
This is disingenuous in the extreme. If you are guaranteed bandwidth you're guaranteed uptime as well, you have a SLA, and you are a totally different entity than some DSL consumer. I call shenanigans.
As someone who worked at an ISP, I do feel for them. I quit my job because I could see the coming bandwidth crunch where I worked and I knew that no matter how we tried to play it, we would piss people off.
The bandwidth crunch is entirely artificial. Compared to the money Ma Bell (for example) is milking out of customers with their deceptive trade practices and monopoly status (Across most of the USA ATT gets some money when you get a phone line no matter who you get it from) the amount of money it would take them to increase backbone capacity is negligible.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Am I the only one that's sick of the "download caps" == "network neutrality" thing? Am I the only one who thinks the author of this article is an idiot?
That's not what the net neutrality debate is about at all (at least as far as I'm concerned). It's about Verizon charging Google to give their service priority over other services. Say maybe prioritize YouTube traffic over Hulu traffic. With that you have end users fully paying for their bandwidth, content providers fully paying for their bandwidth, and then content providers also paying extortion money to ISPs so that their content won't be degraded.
If I sign up for a contract that says "Your download speed is X Mbps, and you're capped at Y GB/month." It's not violating network neutrality as long as all providers are being treated the same. If your ISP had a deal with Netflix where streaming their movies didn't count against your cap, that would violate the principles of network neutrality. This is at least as far as I understand the debate, it's also the only behavior I'm willing to get up-in-arms over, anything else is just leechers whining that they have to pay for what they use.
Furthermore, the author of the article goes on to say:
So let me get this straight... If I only watch 3 to 4 movies a week for every week in the month I'll go over. By the way, this is 12 to 16 movies a month via the internet only. If I'm doing this through my Netflix account, it means I'm also get DVDs in the mail which I'm watching as well. I don't think it's fair to say that watching 20+ movies a month is normal. The author is an idiot.
We always knew Comcast was corrupt, here's the proof: http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1909890&cid=34545432
So they institute caps. Now you can download and watch a couple of HD movies from Hulu, but that could eat up your entire month's bandwidth allotment. So you're less likely to use online video and more likely to tune in on your TV. Cable wins.
Probably true for a percentage of the population. In my case (and I'm mind-numbingly average in most of my daily routine), if I can't watch a show online I won't watch it on cable/tv. The simple reason is that the timings of the broadcast never line up with my schedule.
I agree absolutely that you should not call it unlimited bandwidth if you don't plan to honor it. And as you point out the current trend is larger quality services. But if this requires more expensive networks, someone somewhere must pay for this. Capping and some kind of pay-by-volume could both be a part of the equation.
They sold me unlimited service and they have reneged on their part of the deal. They altered the contract. That should be illegal, but they did it.
Chances are your contract allows them to change the terms provided they notify you; at which point you can accept the change or cancel the contract. Nothing illegal or unreasonable since both sides have the option of continuing or ending the contract.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
You quit your job so as not to piss people off? Man, you'll never make management.
When I first heard about Cable TV companies supplying internet connections through their shared pipes, I knew this whole bandwidth crunch was coming. The only way the whole thing makes sense is if very few people actually *use* it. It's like the old retail joke: you can sell a product (i.e. unlimited bandwidth) at any price you want if it's not in stock.
The architecture is fundamentally flawed, given the current technology. To put it another way: we're trying to live a Star Trek lifestyle using stone knives and bearskins (with apologies to Harlan Ellison).
"My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." --Senator Carl Schurz (1872)
Those are reasons that it sucks. Notice that not a single one is even in the ballpark of DRM.
Quit diluting the meaning of DRM to simply mean everything stupidly any-business that the companies are doing to reduce their own revenue. DRM is about just one of those techniques (and the probably the most destructive one) they use to lose money: making the content you've bought not be playable.
ISP capping simply interferes with the business of selling (or pirating -- it hits both of them equally) content, but has no bearing at all on whether or not the content (however you get it, which may include means other than your ISP) actually works once you have it.
Yes, it's bad. But it's not as bad as DRM. We got by for decades with effective caps (due to the simple fact that you can only download so much content at modem speeds per month) and it didn't hinder playback at all; CSS and the legal threats from DVDCCA and MPAA over DeCSS were what kept us from buying DVDs, not our slow modems.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
If the local ISPs start this crap here, I'll buy business class service with an SLA (or even a T1) and start running CAT5 to the neighbors, which happen to be my family, and split the costs. Maybe even set up a WISP.
Or get a group together to lobby the city council to join Utopia.
We should just run cat5 to all of our neighbors' houses, and sidestep the ISPs, doing the same for the internet that F/OSS has done for operating systems. Yes, someone has to have a good (ie, pricey) internet connection, but I'm willing to bet that a feed large enough for your block could be had for less than each individual connection is currently costing.
Doing it with wireless N routers instead would eliminate the cabling requirements, as well... admittedly, it increases the lag, but if the ISP suddenly starts losing customers a few blocks at a time, maybe the rates will drop on the lower-latency existing infrastructure.
Of course there are issues with this idea, but nothing is perfect. If you find this to be an untenable plan, come up with a better one (and share it with us).
Take the power away from the monopoly, and we start to see more/better competition in the marketplace.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Doesn't this give broadband companies a vested interest in ensuring that botnets stay active?
How do they plan on resolving situations where the traffic isn't requested by the customer? I understand that mobile phones charge the owner of the phone for an incoming call, but even mobile companies have started moving away from that model.
Do they plan on giving us a breakdown of our usage? If so, I'd like to see what kind of breakdown they'll provide. Phone companies have to provide a listing of the numbers and the charges for each.
The comments about Steam are true though. I recently reformatted and reinstalled my Steam collection. I downloaded over 80Gb in three days without realizing it.
My reality check bounced.
Here are the parts that really get me:
a) Telcos are so secretive with their data that nobody has a reliable broadband penetration map of the USA. They figure if competitors know more about their network, they would have to actually compete with eachother.
b) Telcos claim that Grandma, who only uses 5MB/month, is subsidizing netflix users and bittorrent users. They claim to fix this problem by capping standard connections and offering higher caps for higher prices. But for every $150/mo uncapped connection they sell, they ought to be able to sell three Grandma 100MB capped connections for $5/mo. Everyone knows they won't do this.
c) Even if they adjust prices down for capped connections, their claim that it is for consumers' benefit is obviously bogus. If so, where's tiered cable TV service? If I want just discovery, comedy central, and CNN - where do I go?
d) The bleeding obvious conflict of interest: video content is way better to consume over IP than it is with a TV. So the only way to kill online video content delivery and keep their lucrative (non-tiered!) cable TV customers is to break IP video.
I hope these things are as fucking obvious to the FCC as they are to me...
That is true only the most simplistic analysis and incorrect. The costs don't include any of the costs of discharging the debt incured on building the network. It also doesn't include the costs that would be applied to general cable usage that share the same communication system or any labor and tax costs that are incurred running the either system. It's just a subtraction of two lines (total data revenue and direct data costs) in the 10-K form and the "implication" that the result is 4 billion in pure profit.
While they're making money, 4 billion they are not. At that profit rate the market would be flooding with other competators who would undercut them (see cell phones).
I'm pretty sure that DRM is still the same old DRM.
However, it does seem unlikely that even a doubling of network costs would bankrupt them, and yet they want to cap usage.
The right to protest the State is more sacred than the State.
Steam requires us to download most games and mods. I know Steam is DRM, but if ISP caps to be like DRM, then it is a double negative.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
too expensive to go from 200gb or 1500gb
at 35/45$
to 60gb at 55-65$
with overage fees
welcome to facist canada
Are you telling me it is only $10-20 more a month to get biz class service over residential class? I don't think most large cable companies have this small of a premium, but I guess I'll have to check.
In my case (and I'm mind-numbingly average in most of my daily routine), if I can't watch a show online I won't watch it on cable/tv. The simple reason is that the timings of the broadcast never line up with my schedule.
And the mind-numbingly average would either purchase a PVR, use a DVD-RW recorder, a good 'ol VCR, or they just won't watch the show.
You, however, are not average. The very fact that you regularly watch streaming TV on your computer as a replacement for regular broadcast television demonstrates that fact.
but remember, you still have to pay for the bandwidth if you download from iTunes.
The large few ISPs like to say that it's 1% of their subscribers who aren't playing fair. That's just not the truth. They see a trend emerging and they're not happy about it.
Excuse me, do you run an ISP? Do you have access to their network traffic logs? I'm not saying you're right or wrong, but getting on your high horse and making these bold assertions about their deceit with zero evidence on your side is not commendable by any means.
You don't institute major policy change because of 1% of your users. You do it because in less than a year, it could be 15%-20% using as much as the 1% currently uses.
Sure you do, if that 1% is in fact using 50% of the network capacity.
The only real solution is to increase network capacity.
Which costs money. This is a cost that will have to be passed onto the consumers, and if I am not part of the small group of people using up huge chunks of capacity, I fail to see why I should pay that cost.
Dislike the Electoral College? Lobby your state to join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.
Quit diluting the meaning of DRM to simply mean everything stupidly any-business that the companies are doing to reduce their own revenue.
What he said.
Haven't seen 1 mention of COX here.
COX has limits you can find by digging through their agreements online - something like 30 GB 60 GB and unlimited based on your tier.
However, they never enforce them.
I can't wait for that paper bill with a printout of each packet to come!
After all, you can't risk running out of legitimate use (since you have to pay or there's a time value to it), so you can't use ALL your cap.
What you CAN do is at the end of the month, use the last few days to download anything.
BitTorrent, for example, doesn't CARE if it takes 30 sessions over two years to download content.
A required update to Steam does.
So set off a BT client in the last few days and use up all your cap. It can't be used otherwise.
"There's a fixed amount of bandwidth available, and you have to decide who gets it."
No, there is not a "fixed amount of bandwidth available". Do you have any idea of how Verizon/Comcast/TW peer with each other? They don't actually buy fiber to run between their data centers (which is the 1997 view). Their core infrastructure is essentially co-located with so much bandwidth that you could watch all the blue ray movies in the world at the time for thousands of people.
The issue for some major players is old last-mile infrastucture (not a problem with FIOS or DOCIS 3.0). For tiny ISP's they may actually peer in an 1997 way, but by definition, these guys aren't the problem. The primary issue is two fold:
1) The big growth days of adding customer is over, so they have to figure out a way to continue revenue growth (not profit, that's different) from a fixed user base.
2) People's viewing habits are changing and they are putting the cable-tv side of the business (which is still most of the revenue) in jeopardy. Joost, Hulu, Netflix et al) are huge competitive threat and the TW doesn't like hastening their own demise by giving their own customers a "free" (in their view) way around paying for cable TV.
Stop this "bandwidth is limited, we must ration". It's factually wrong and it's parroting the PR BS that the cable companies are pushing.
[quote]But I've seen a large jump in bandwidth usage with my new Roku box for watching NetFlix on my tv. That's a lot of streaming video. Are they keeping tech like this in mind? Doubt it.[/quote] They are precisely keeping tech like this in mind. Many ISPs also provide cable service. What happens to cable if internet streaming becomes too convenient?
That's Time Warner's own information to their investors. They claim they made $4B in profit off their data services. You talk about their other services, like cable TV, but don't forget that those other services also have their own revenue streams. You act like they are being run purely off the profit from the data services. The bottom line is they have plenty of money to upgrade their network, but instead they would rather implement caps and squeeze the consumer for even more profit.
You might prefer that, but they would prefer that you paid them $50 a month for cable TV, $50 a month for Internet usage, $45 a month for Internet bandwidth overage fees, and $45 a month for phone service. Don't worry though, bundle it all together and sign up for a year's worth of service and they'll chop $5 off your monthly bill. It's a bargain!
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Maybe its time for the Cable ISPs to port their on-demand cable TV channels to a web based platform. If someone could get the licensing to do this they could develop a Hulu competitor with their own cable content. This would give users an easy, legal way to watch TV with a bigger library while letting the cable companies compete with web-based services.
One more thing, you talk about undercutting other competitors, but whom are you really talking about? In many places cable ISPs are a monopoly. Or maybe a duopoly with a telco that offers DSL. Most people don't have many choices for broadband. Where I live I can choose between 1 cable company and DSL. That's it.
As Abcd1234 said, you're not average. You're slightly ahead of the curve. The cable companies (and phone companies too since they sell cable TV now too) don't worry about one or two online video users. However, when they see a trend forming towards online video (like the one that has slowly taken shape over the last couple of years), they start breaking out in a nervous sweat and looking for ways to protect their profits. In this case, "protect profits" = "institute caps so that no one can view too much online video without paying obscene overage fees."
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
If the internet is too expensive for you, get out of your basement and go find a job which pays better. Why all this permanent moaning and complaining?
All these ISP's seem to be running a race for the worst consumer experience possible.
I use time warner in NC and they oversubscribe their links to death, I get a cool 16/1 at most time except the peak or holidays where it slows down to an 800kbps crawl. Every call I make to customer service gets answered by a blank 'The networks is overloaded'. This is what they are using as a excuse for introducing draconian bandwidth caps.
Nice approach Time Warner, This solution reeks of typical MBA incompetence. Invest some money in 'real' solutions, hire a couple of decent engineers and upgrade your infrastructure. Upgrade your gateway hardware, networking compaines now sell switches capable of handling 100Gbps+ of simultaneous traffic.
Lease more dark fiber, hell there's 28,000 miles of that stuff just sitting around with 8-16 extra conduits for expandability, and it's not that much of an overhead.
The cost of the guaranteed bandwidth connections is driven by the SLA (service level agreement) rather than the committed bandwidth these days. That is, it's not expensive because 10Mbps means 10Mbps 24/7, it's expensive because they have agreed that if you call them at 3:00A.M. to report a problem, they'll dispatch a tech RIGHT NOW. If it's unavailable for more than 45 minutes in a year, they owe you huge service credits (it's typically guaranteed 5 nines uptime). If you have such a connection, it's not uncommon for them to call YOU to report a problem and resolution. That's why it's so godawful expensive.
In contrast, a cable ISP promises that your business is VERY IMPORTANT to them and if you leave a message someone will be out to fix it in a few days or so. In other words, 2 nines at best and a response time over 72 hours.
A big clue that they're trying to pull a fast one: Whatever the cap is, using double that amount costs well more than double the amount. That's inevitably a sign that they're playing fast and loose with the numbers somewhere.
When you were at an ISP trying to make 10 gallons fit into a 5 gallon jug, you wouldn't have been high enough in the organization to see that they could easily enough provide 20 gallon jugs for what they were charging.
... your actual data transfer speeds from your ISP will outweigh the amount of data you can actually transfer. Better choose carefully before clicking that link...
8==8 Bones 8==8
UK ISPs are actually pretty good now because there is a lot of competition.
I have an 18Mbit DSL line with no limits - the company only raises eyebrows if you approach 1TB a month, even then they just ask you to lower your consumption. It's also very reliable, it's only ever hiccuped on me twice in 2 years and a quick ticket raised with tech support got the issue solved within a matter of hours.
Oh and I pay $26 a month for this.
but not for DRM protection... it's protecting from litigation.
Offer a data plan that exceeds that of the closest competitor, and you might soon find yourself on the bench defending yourself against charges that you are facilitating piracy by offering unusually high transfer rates compared to the rest of the industry.
In the meanwhile, many foreign countries have data rates commonly available to users that are 5x the fastest speeds you can find here in the US.
8==8 Bones 8==8
I am using SneakerNet. Never underestimate the bandwidth of a portable harddisk in my pocket.
Even if you win the rat race, you are still a rat
Easiest way to circumvent deep packet inspection is to simulate bonded packets (MLPPP / MPD) , which are usually not inspected.
The Cable ISPs are just opening an easy way for the telcos to take away their business. Once capping is in place, jump off the bandwagon and add great value to the consumer (unlimited inet) for a similar price. I would imagine those angry with their original ISP would jump ship and be hard to woo back.
I work for a large WISP and it is impossible to offer everyone unlimited bandwidth all the time. The advertised packages are peak that the system can handle and are rarely the continued throughput. We keep a close eye on our bandwidth and upgrade backhauls whenever necessary but throttling is a necessary evil. The way it works here is you can download a certain amount per day and then you are throttled to 2Mb (depending on the plan), download a certain amount more and it goes to 512K, then 256K. Then it resets at midnight. There is also a monthly cap that will throttle you to 256K for the remainder of the month if you hit that amount. We recently did a company wide bandwidth analysis and found that usage has been increasing for every aspect of user over the years so we have raised our limits. Now we figure that 99% of our customers will never experience throttling. That other 1% are usually pirates and torrent hounds and if they want an unlimited pipe then they can go elsewhere and get it because it is not our intent to provide unlimited service to those types. I happen to be one of those types and I can say that the service is not for me. However, it is all that is available in my area so I have to live with it. We have an unlimited 4Mb business plan which runs about $450 a month if people want it but most people would prefer the standard 2Mb or 7Mb packages (for $30 & $35 per month). The terms are clear for anyone who wants to read them and nobody who knows the cost of operating a network like this can realistically expect an unlimited 7Mb connection for $35.00 a month. Before throttling was implemented the 1% of the users who use most of the bandwidth would slow down the network so that the other 99% could almost not use it. VOIP services especially suffered. So really it might suck for that 1% of people who run torrents 24 hours a day but that is not our target demographic.
I have a 110M cable for about 70 euros per month and we don't have any caps. I live in Finland.
If my ISP restricts me to X GB per billing period, then it can be expressed as $ per GB. Thus if I don't hit my cap, my bill should be reduced by that same rate. That the FCC would allow any ISP to cap their customers without providing the customer a real-time tool of their data usage borders on immorality.
Being a WISP is far different than a Comcast or TW.
A large WISP is like a small ISP.
You forget that Verizon has a gov't-mandated monopoly on its phone-line service areas, inherited from when it was poor little GTE that needed to be protected from the Big Bad Bells. There IS no competition for phone lines, thus for DSL, in Verizon areas. "Competitors", if any, are essentially Verizon resellers.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
My ISP guy (the company is a one-man band) told me that downloading costs him effectively nothing, so he didn't care how much we download. However, he throttles uploads, because THAT costs him money by the gig. (My ISP connects directly to an AT&T backbone.)
I expect this is fundamentally true across the industry -- so what's with download caps and limits anyway? Price it on how much uploading you expect a given tier to use, and don't worry so much about download bandwidth.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Pay for what you use. Is that so hard? Why should your granny who only surfs an hour a week have to pay for your 24/7 GB torrent seeds?
The cost of the guaranteed bandwidth connections is driven by the SLA (service level agreement) rather than the committed bandwidth these days. That is, it's not expensive because 10Mbps means 10Mbps 24/7, it's expensive because they have agreed that if you call them at 3:00A.M. to report a problem, they'll dispatch a tech RIGHT NOW. If it's unavailable for more than 45 minutes in a year, they owe you huge service credits (it's typically guaranteed 5 nines uptime). If you have such a connection, it's not uncommon for them to call YOU to report a problem and resolution. That's why it's so godawful expensive.
Yeah, $100/month for 20Mbps/20Mbps is way too much for anyone to afford.
That's the cost of a Verizon FiOS business account with an SLA. I've had less than 2 hours downtime in two years of service. That's not five-nines (which would require less than 5 minutes outage per year), but it is four-nines. Response has been great the few times I've called. Once, it wasn't even their problem...my router (not their equipment) had flaked out, even though all the logs and stats showed it as working.
I have 100/10 Mbps fiber. No caps. In rural Finland, 55eur/month.
In principle, we could download many TB per month. In practice, we rarely exceed 400GB per month. The System Monitor says 3GB so far today to this PC, probably a similar amount to my daughter's PC.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
I should have specified that I was paying ~$20.00/mo more for my total TV / Internet bill compared to the TV / Internet / Phone bill I was getting from Brighthouse (notice I no longer have phone service).
My bill for all 3 services from Brighthouse was ~$150/mo with $30.00 of that being for fraking phone service that I didn't even want, but had to get in order to get 20/5 speeds.
So now my bill with them is $75/mo for 20/5 biz class and I am giving DTV ~$100/mo. So I was paying ~$150 and now I am paying ~$175 so ~$25 extra.
Here is the thing though. I had to tell them to take a hike when they sent me the first quote for $95/mo for the biz class. They got the residential retention department on the phone with the business department, and a few days later I had a quote for $75/mo (which I grudgingly took -- little did I know what a deal I was getting).
-- Brian
-- http://anonet.org -- The internet the way it was meant to be. Check it out, you may be surprised.
Actually, your report supports mine. You dropped 1 nine and probably added a few hours to the response time and suddenly 20/20 is quite affordable.
So why can't TW and co be affordable at that level when they drop 2 nines and add DAYS to the response time?
So what this means is that I should stop buying my games online and have them sent via the USPS instead of Steam/EA Download Manager/Microsoft Live? (Maybe it will save the USPS.) Maybe I shouldn't install MS Windows/Linux/other OS due to the amount of bandwidth the latest patches will incurred? Maybe I should forget about MMOs? This is a signal from Time Warner that we should all go back to 80's and use the Atari console again. To the time when content came in a cartridge. (Which Warner Bros. did own Atari at the time.) All things must be shipped in a box and come with manuals big enough to be used as a door stop. To the time before Al Gore invented the Internet. BTW I should stop reading /. to save on bandwidth.
On the other hand I can joke here. Time Warner isn't my ISP and isn't going to get my business anytime soon anyways. Luckily a consumer still has good choices today.
Most cable companies have exclusive agreements with local municipalities. So there can be no other competitors to undercut them. That's what keeps the prices so high, and enables the quality of service to decline.
Things like help desk (cause people need to call when things break), contracting services (cause someone needs to fix the broken data lines), ERP (cause workers need to get paid), accounting services (so investors know whats going on), etc are always listed as costs to the operation and not listed as costs to individual projects. An investor who the 10k is written for would understand this. You cannot really tell anything about a company from a 10k.
Someone reading it off the web would not. It's written in a combination of legalese and accountingese so it's a little dense.
TimeWarner has already stated that the cap hit 14% of their customers in Beaumont. I have a hard time believing it won't be higher in Austin which is a hi tech city unlike Beaumont, which I'd rather not describe.
$4,159 Million $4,159 Million $4,159 Million
If 1% of your users can grind your network to a halt then your network sucks.
Here in Australia we've pretty much always had caps. One or two ADSL providers introduced "All you can eat" accounts and got to watch their peak time supply slow to a crawl across ALL their customers 'cos of the kiddies hopping on after school and downloading shitloads. Suffice to say, they lost a lot of business customers who were paying for 1.5Mb and getting 56k modem speeds. Ooops.
Another ISP I know of checked their utilisation levels for their customers and found that only 5% of their customers were using over 50% of their bandwidth (often more). So, they introduced caps and tiered charging. Those who used stuff all bandwidth had a REDUCTION in their connection fees while those who slurped the most saw an increase. A lot of the slurpers got pissed, wrote nastygrams and left. The majority of people paid the same and started complimenting the ISP on their improved service.
Same level of upstream investment could suddenly handle more customers and those few who left actually made it better for everyone who remained.
Fast forward to now where I'm downloading patches & updates, torrenting TV shows that aren't out yet (or are long gone), downloading some (legal!) videos and my teenage son is playing games & watching YouTube. We've got a 40Gb per month cap and are staying within it every month.
Have you lot actually checked how much you're using before you say "Caps are bad, mmmokay?"
It seems the biggest problem the US has is that there's not a lot of competition for Internet connectivity all over the country. Here I've got stacks of options to choose from to get connected with ADSL (cable is a bit more limited) so there's reasonably good competition. Over there, as has been noted by others, the cable companies are running scared 'cos the 'net is getting ready to eat their lunch (Hulu, NetFlix, etc) so they're doing all they can to ensure they still have money flowing in when their cable revenues drop.
Amazing that the USA (home of the free market and competition theory) can be in the position where people can have no choice when it comes to getting online. Who ever would have thought that could happen...
I left my body to science, but I'm afraid they've turned it down...
Cable companies are losing revenue to Netflix as more and more people learn they can get more for less than $10.00 a month then they can get from the cable company premium channels that cost twice as much. They hide behind "piracy" but they are just using it for an excuse to impose usage taxes to offset the revenue they are losing from customers dropping their expensive premium channels, and if those taxes and caps keep some customers from taking advantage of unlimited streaming from Netflix, it is all the more profits for them. People need to wake up and realize this is NOT about piracy it is about monopoly power and protecting their bottom line.
>>>please remove "nospam" from email address
I think that bandwidth caps may actually encourage piracy and/or casual downloading. If I am near the end of my billing period and I still have several hundred MB before I hit my cap, I am going to download something, anything to make sure that I get every penny's worth. I will let no bit that I pay for go un-used, assuming that I have to live with bandwidth caps. TW should have known better. No one pays for 15MB/S service and expects to only download 40MB/month! My wife fires up Netflix the way most people turn on the TV and it is not un-usual for her to use more that 40MB in a single day. I have U-Verse scheduled to be installed later this week and I will be cutting TW's cable very shortly afterwards.
This is disingenuous in the extreme. If you are guaranteed bandwidth you're guaranteed uptime as well, you have a SLA, and you are a totally different entity than some DSL consumer. I call shenanigans. That's exactly the point the OP was making.
Charles Wyble System Engineer
To the people in America, if you let capping ISP's win, you will end up with shit like this
http://www.bigpond.com/internet/plans/adsl/plans-and-offers/
Even then, my speed is 3 Mbits/s down because we live 150 m from the exchange.
Oh and we have had this for years. Not in the past 6 months, but since 2000.
I don't care what they want to call it. DRM, whatever, it is going to have the same effect.
In order to deter the "casual pirate" from torrenting the day away, they will be deterring a paying customer from watching Netflix all day. It doesn't matter WHAT your doing, the end result is the same. The direction media marketing is going, it will not be long before everyone is using the same amount of bandwidth as the P2P crowd does.
This, bandwidth capping, is quite simply a revenue stream adjustment. Don't let anyone convince you otherwise. They have determined people are willing to pay more for internet service(at least the ones in Texas) and the ISPs are willing to CHARGE more for it.
I'm an Australian running on a 20GB Cap, at 256Kbps. It costs 60 bloody dollars.
I'm sorry, Americans, but the net situation is far worse in other countries than what's coming up for you right now. I can't help but find this all slightly amusing.
Anyway, It'll blow over. If one or two companies try to screw you, then their customers will swap over to another, uncapped service.
Even if all the big companies swap to capped services, there will be one or two smalled companies that will stay uncapped. And as a result of such generosity, they will get more customers. And then the big guys in the business will say "...Whoops. That was stupid of us."
If you don't stand for it, then they'll be forced to swap back to keep their customers.
Our culture doesn't get smarter, it just finds new ways of being retarded.