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High-Bandwidth Users Are Just Early Adopters
silverpig writes "Cisco has released a whitepaper on mobile data usage which has some interesting data in it. The top 1% of users consume 20% of the bandwidth, but that share is down from 30% previously. 'Regular' users are catching up as they watch more video. High-bandwidth users of today will be relatively average users by 2015, so network operators should look to those users for insight in designing their future networks."
huzzah
That means I actually have to spend money on my network!
I thought those heavy users were all supposed to be pirates?....now they say they are early adopters, does this mean we're all going to turn into pirates? Best get out my peg leg and shine it up....
The CRTC..
An IT infrastructure company came out with a report stating that operators should beef up their infrastructure.
When I say it, nobody listens. Of course Cisco isn't exactly impartial, so who needs to say it to effect some actual change?
I think the network operators and ISP's solution to those high bandwidth users is to cap bandwidth, shape traffic, enforce download/upload caps - pretty much anything short of actually spending money on designing a future network.
My postings are informational and does not constitute legal advice. Act on it at your risk.
I'm wondering if this means the same is true for all broadband. Obviously there will always be heavier users, and I think everyone here knows they need to worry more about upgrading infrastructure and less about how to limit users to make it work as it is, but could they realistically NEED to increase their capacity within the next few years to avoid having their pipes always clogged by what's become regular usage?
Network hardware vendor releases report encouraging more spending in network hardware!
Admit it. You post strawman arguments as AC so you get modded Insightful for refuting them, rather than Troll
In Canada, we are facing a fight over Usage-Based-Billing, and whether the federal government can effectively force it on ISPs. The idea isn't actually terrible per se, but the way they're trying to implement it certainly is.
One thing that has come up time and time again is that it's to protect the consumer from the excess of the 1% of extreme consumers. They're often implicitly labelled as pirates by the ISPs, but in fact are the vanguard.
An excellent article in the Globe and Mail had this to say on the matter:
The knowledge that penalties await heavy Internet usage does something quite terrible: discourage desirable behaviour. Most of Bell’s arguments for treating consumers as wrongdoers rely on the villainization of “bandwidth hogs” who use up everyone else’s bandwidth and generally bring misery to the land. But there are better words for big users of the Internet: “pioneers” and “innovators.” A nation that spends its time worrying about bandwidth caps is not a nation that leads.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
The cell phone companies are way ahead of the curve on this one. They've been working on ways to screw us over for years now... and the more you know about making the sausage (from sites like HoFo), the more you know how bad you're getting it. Especially in the US.
Just a few days ago, I got a text message from T-Mobile saying, "Texas Recovery Fee now included on monthly bill." Oh for crying out loud. Does the grocery store charge me a "Municipal Services Recovery Fee" to get back the cost of their food service license? Even the tire store doesn't charge the "tire disposal fee" if I tell them to load 'em up in the back seat. I'd drop 'em in a minute if it weren't for two things: 1) Everyone else is just as bad or worse, and 2) T-Mo makes it easy and *cheaper* to stay *out* of a contract, which actually makes me *more* likely to stay.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
You're talking about the same companies that knew IPv4 addresses were rapidly depleting for years and are just now taking steps to implement IPv6. Their main concern is minimizing expenses while maximizing profit. The less your average user uses, the more users they can squeeze onto the same pipe. I'm pretty sure most ISPs would love it if everyone bought an $80 data plan and only used it to check their email. There's no room for long term planning when you have shareholders that expect constant short term growth.
...so network operators should look to those users for insight in designing their future networks..
Network operators developing future netowrks? HaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHa.
... Good luck with that.
Oh, wait, you were serious? Wow
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
I have around 4TB on my main downloading PC, when I got 50 megabit broadband most of my torrents of all the tv and film I ever wanted to download took just a few days. Now my connection only gets light usage. I'd probably be happy with a capless 10 megabit over a capped gigabit connection.
Just call them "bandwidth hogs," oversell your capacity, and blame your connectivity problems on the people using most of the flow they paid for.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
"...so network operators should look to those users for insight in designing their future networks."
Umm... I bet I can come up this "insight" without looking to those users: Need more bandwidth!
today's early adopters will continue to be ahead of the curve, adopting tomorrows new tech as we do today?
Why can't we let people believe whatever they like? It's not like a little religion has ever hurt anyone.
...so network operators should look to those users for insight in designing their future networks.
...so network operators should look to those users for insight in pricing their future networks.
Warning - above goo.gl link is goatse.
goatse link warning
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The oft repeated rule of thumb is that 80% of a product is bought by 20% of the customers. Here, 80% of the product is bought by 99% of the customers.
The top 1% of users consume 20% of the bandwidth ...
"The early adoptors of today are using what main steam users will be using in a couple of years!" OMG, Stop the presses, I have NEVER heard that before!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_adoption_lifecycle
Say, aren't the top 1% known as the Innovators? The next 14-19% would be the early adopters, followed by the early majority 30-40%, the late majority 30-40%, and then the Laggards 5-20%. And the statement "high bandwidth users of today will be relatively average users by 2015." fails to anticipate any change in applications driving usage.
I think the network operators and ISP's solution to those high bandwidth users is to cap bandwidth, shape traffic, enforce download/upload caps - pretty much anything short of actually spending money on designing a future network.
That's because if the ISP did spend what would be required to design and build out the last mile to NOT have to do any shaping or traffic cap enforcing, they'd have to charge so much for accounts, that all customers would flee to the competitor that does shape/cap but charges less.
It's hard to be profitable with no customers.
Seriously. Cisco wrote a whitepaper saying, essentially, "bandwidth usage goes up"? Early adopters use more bandwidth early, and then everyone else catches up. Let me check; yep, translation: "usage goes up."
There are bacteria growing in my fridge that worked that out in seconds. What was that Cisco author doing with the rest of his time? (Oh right; downloading porn in HD 3D...)
That's assuming most people have access to that kind of bandwidth and speed. I got one of those Verizon MiFis and they are already throttling after 2 gig of your 5 gig limit. The joke is most of the time the speed is 120K to 300K of the 1.5 meg promised and I've never seen it over 750K. Whatever happened to truth in advertising? If you can never hit even close to the speed and they throttle you at less than half your limit it's hardly what I was sold. The trend isn't for raising limits it's towards dropping them and throttling speeds. It's like selling you a car that goes 100 miles an hour and has a 500 mile range then after you bought it they limit the speed to 35 miles an hour and cut the range to 200 miles. Not exactly what you paid for or was sold.
The problem with the structure of both DSL and cable based residential internet connections in the US is that it is a "star" configuration with a "neighborhood node" or DSLAM at the core. You can connect up many homes to the node before things start to degrade, but the limiting factor is the upper limit on the bandwidth between the Internet at large and the neighborhood node. Once you reach that limit all you can do really is split up the homes onto two nodes with separate feeds to the head end and the Internet.
Unfortunately, splitting a node is going to likely require running a new fiber link from the head end. Think that comes cheap? We are talking about trucks and heavy equipment here - digging, running fiber ducts, and burying it again. Where do they get the right-of-way for this? Consider that in many parts of the country the neighborhood node fiber link was put in 10-15 years ago when the neighborhood itself was being built on former farmland.
End of the story is that the "cap" is going to exist for a long time because there are major physical aspects to be overcome. This isn't upgrading a Cisco router to get better throughput. It is going to require substantial physical changes in the network that involve digging a lot of trenches in places where nobody wants a big trench dug these days.
The Internet in the US has been sold to users as what kind of speed they can achieve in "burst" mode for short durations. It has never been sold on the basis of getting consistent speeds over long periods of time to watch a movie from Netflix. The fact that you can get 20Mb/sec while downloading a 10MB file is meaningless if your average over an hour is 1.5Mb/sec. We are rapidly approaching the point where the node to head end connection cannot support IPTV requirements and Netflix will probably be the first on the block to notice. IPTV will be unusable for anyone with a crowded residential connection. I hope you have enjoyed your early adopter status because that is about to change.
I recently bought a Roku box and I give it two years maximum before it is unusable here in Phoenix. I suspect the "upgrade" will be to a box with a hard drive that downloads movies to buffer them but that will be a while in coming. And it is a completely different experience for the user.
I'm a forward thinking person using technology that I purchase for my own benefit and that of my ISP, who takes my money in exchange for internet access. Yet, I'm labeled an ABUSER by the company that sells me this service. It's Comtastic's super-dooper faster than a liquid pooper service and I like to stream (no pun intended) LEGAL music and video services that compete with my internet service provider. Yep, I like Netflix, Pandora, Hulu, you name it and I game it, as long as its legal and less expensive than the diarrheal service offered by my ISP.
-- Wondering how long until the internet becomes fully corporatist, like television.
Once you have had the net for a few years you have downloaded most of the movies/games/tv shows/programs you wanted. And new ones only come out now and then.
Man they're smart. I'd never figure that out.
Hivemind harvest in progress..
As per the norm, the summary has little to do with the article.
The scale won't compress, it will slide. There will still be high bandwidth users in the future, just as there were in the past. As a side note, how is this in anyway news?
More people are buying smart phones over time... Crazy.
Not to mention the hypocrisy of these same company's selling there wears with promises of super fast downloads, streaming video, movies, fastest network, etc....
Oh but don't dare actually use it, you're a pirate then!
They are like some sort of petulant child, that's also crazy...
Hi. I make network equipment. I know a lot about network equipment. I think a big change is coming to network equipment. I think you should learn to use a lot of network equipment. A whole lot of network equipment. You need more network equipment. Oh, and did I tell you I make network equipment?