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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."
I'm paying 44EUR for 1Mbps but no limit. (well, not at least any real limit. They just check the stats and say "Hmm, that poor pirating bastard has used 5GB of our precious bandwith this month." and press the button. No letter nor anything whatsoever.) This is madness. My ISP cut the phone lines where I live (is that even legal?) and the only wireless connection available is by that ISP! They simply forced my neighborhood into using their pricey and low quality connection. (1Mb max, 6 hour waiting line in the service phone and sometimes the connection just vanishes for a couple of days.) No mattter, I'm moving out in a few months. It's rare that someone moves because of their ISP...
If all the customers are using their connection in such a way then that is the capacity that is being demanded and that is the capacity that the infrastructure needs to be able to handle. If it can't handle it, then the answer is simple; upgrade the network. Now that's an exaggeration, but the truth that no one at the ISPs wants to deal with is that raising price to encourage people to use less is not a long term solution. Eventually there is just going to be too much data being moved around and they'll have to expand their capacity. This is going to cost money and no one wants to spend it, especially when it's easier (in the short term at least, but they're shooting their own foot) to just charge more and change their business model to an arbitrarily priced metered service with hard caps.
You're never going to convince the private sector that investing in more capacity is a good business move. Business can't look that far into the future. They see an easy way to make more money and that's what they will go for despite the fact that it's completely irresponsible and shortsighted.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
ISPs need to fess up about exactly how much bandwidth each customer will get
Yes, they do.
I wish ISPs would be more transparent in their pricing policies, bandwidth and contention ratios, because then the people around here who want 8GB unlimited traffic for $10 a month would get the abrupt reality check they seem to need.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
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.
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.
I completely believe there is fine print. Regardless, they sold it as "unlimited". Yes, 6M is a peak throughput, but there was no restrictions on WHEN nor HOW LONG I use that 6M peak throughput.
I'm actually ok with caps as long as they're sane. 5GB per month is not sane. 1 Steam game can put you over that quite easily. Caps simply will not be viable in a future where everything moves over the connection; esp when it's the same ISP moving IPTV.
Metered would be ok with me as well. It would be interesting to see what happened if metered billing became the norm. I wonder if AdBlock would become a norm, and if there would be a movement back to more thin looking websites to save the bandwidth for the actual data rather than the look n feel.
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...