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."

Comments

the whole isp capping is a big scam

[ionix5891]

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

Re:Why Not Just Metered Service?

[TheRaven64]

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.