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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."
With you there. :-(
I live in Belgium too, and what they're charging here for bandwith and download limits is WAY of the charts compared to most other western countries in the world
To make it clear: I'm paying 42,91 (that's $56,69) / month for 15 Mbps and 25GB limit...
Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice - Grey's Law
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
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
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
> Because the cost to the ISP isn't based on how much I use.
No. Their last mile capacity depends on your peak uasage but as soon as you get far enough upstream to be dealing with the aggregation of a significant number of users it depends on average usage. There is no ISP that would not have problems if all its customers maxed out their connections at once.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Unfortunately, you are entirely wrong. ISP have two sets of costs. One is for providing a connection. The other is for the amount of data you transfer off-network. It costs them the same amount to provide me with a 10Mb/s connection that I use to transfer 1GB/month or a 512Kb/s connection that I use to transfer 1GB/month. The fact that they provide me with any connection at all incurs fixed costs in terms of infrastructure. The amount of data I transfer incurs costs from their upstream providers (or, in the case of the really big ISPs, the traffic affects the networks that will peer with them for free).
This is why ISPs have been slowly moving from tiers based on different speeds to tiers based on usage amounts. The cheapest packages generally don't seem like good value, because the cost of providing the line is a fairly major part of them, and per-GB they are very expensive. The only reason that faster lines cost more is that they make the usage spikes bigger. If you go from 0 to 100% usage on a 512Kb/s line, it produces a much smaller spike than if you do the same on a 10MB/s line, and this makes it harder for the ISP to estimate their maximum total transfer and therefore the capacity they need for their upstream links. This is part of the reason why a lot of them have started providing different on-peak and off-peak caps.
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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...
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.
I completely believe there is fine print. Regardless, they sold it as "unlimited".
This requires a bit of context, doesn't it? "Unlimited" began being advertised at a time when dialup was charging for hourly use. The cable companies saw an opportunity here - "always on" connections that were not time limited. Hence "unlimited". I don't think there was a discussion around unlimited bandwidth even then -- just an assumption of unlimited connectivity in comparison to the time-limited usage of dial-up.
So you think they'd get with the times and stop advertising unlimited, right? Well... guess what, they have. I can't find any of the major carriers advertising "unlimited" service, and haven't for several years now. So maybe you were among those who did sign up when they advertised "Unlimited" [connectivity] - your TOS agreement also lets them change that whenever they want.
This isn't what we want to hear, but it seems to me that they're the basic facts of the matter.