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On Monday, AT&T Customers Enter Era of Broadband Caps
theodp writes "The Age of Broadband Caps begins Monday, with AT&T imposing a 150 GB cap on DSL subscribers and 250 GB for UVerse users, and keeping the meter running after that. The move comes as AT&T's 16+ million customers are increasingly turning to online video such as Hulu and Netflix on-demand streaming service instead of paying for cable. With AT&T's Man in the White House, some fear there's a 'digital dirt road' in America's future. Already, the enforcement of data caps in Canada has prompted Netflix to default to lower-quality streaming video to shield its users from overage fees."
I sit here, 90 miles above the polar circle in the northernmost city in Sweden, and I pay ~52 USD a month for an unlimited 100/10 (guaranteed minimum 60) connection from an RJ-45 jack in my apartment wall. It's an ordinary apartment, nothing special about it, this is something that is generally available. Bask in my smugness, etc.
Emotions! In your brain!
I called at&t customer service and spoke to a nice representative. After listening to my concerns about broadband caps being imposed on accounts, he explained that the rising cost of fuel was effecting the price of delivering the bits to my home, hence the need for the limits on bandwidth. He asked if he could place me on hold for a moment while he talked to a supervisor, when he came back he said had gotten permission to grandfather my account to keep it as unlimited for as long as the account remained open.
(this is probably only sad/funny for people that have actually ever called at&t. feel free to point out all the discrepancies/truths)
Maybe the FTC should force them to add a "Not suitable for streaming" disclaimer to all of their advertisements unless their cap can support high quality streaming (2.3GB/hour) for as many hours that a typical household watches TV (6.75 hours/day), which would mean a cap of 465GB/Month.
Come on a 150GB download limit, that is okay. If you need your porn faster then 150GB per second then... wait, it is NOT per second? Oh well, 150GB per day is still... not per day either?
Oh dear. You poor Americans... thank god in mainland Europe we have evil state sponsored businesses and no free market so we have a lot of choice of ISP's. But who will I now download my porn from at 100mbit and no bandwidth limit? Oh wait, Japan! Country of un-limitted porn AND bandwidth and now thanks to Fukushima, tentacle porn without special effects!
But I know the perfect way to get the Americans to shit up and enjoy the AT&T dick going up their ass for the thousand time. Here is it. Are you ready for it? Brace yourself:
The way to fix this, is government regulation.
Whoa, see? All the complainers now switched their energy to frothing at the mouth about the free market, small government etc etc and they stopped complaining about the ass raping they are getting. Always works.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
but that doesn't change the fact that he was right :(. My idea of quality of life is a rising income higher than my parents, good schools and good health care. All of those are disappearing fast. Real wages have been stagnant since the 70s, school funding is being slashed (and what little money there is goes to wealthy schools thanks to the property tax scam) and the only thing going up faster than insurance premiums is the speed they deny your claims. Here in Arizona we literally just let two people die because we didn't want to pay for organ transplants.
As for the manufacturing, the big threat to Americans isn't Outsourcing, it's computers & robotics. I know keep bringing this up in my posts, but there is a sleeping bag factory making 2 MILLION bags a year with a total workforce (including salesmen, marketing, accounting and all other non-manufacturing jobs) of JUST 120 people. Fact is, it's not just that we're outsourcing, we just don't need all these people. So far the only answer I've heard to this is "Tough titties, at least they're free to starve to death in the streets".
A free, inexpensive Internet is seen by a lot of progressives as the only hope. China is starting to see some progressive movements (very little, I know) because they have a well educated middle class whose brains work well enough now to realize they're being taken advantage of. If the schools & centralized media fail us, the only hope is people on the Internet. It's not much, but I still like it better than saying 'Oh well, time for 70% of our populace to die in a gutter'.
So, yeah, he was trolling. But ye was also right.
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Having a bandwidth cap per se is not a bad thing from a societal perspective; if there really is a marginal cost to carrying a GB of data you'll only get the socially optimal result if you price bandwidth at that marginal cost. From that perspective the Netflix degradation referenced in the article could be a good thing; if individuals value the higher video quality less than the price of transmitting it, the right outcome for society is for them to see lower quality video at lower cost.
Of course, the marginal price for a GB of data these days is near zero -- (one site pegged it at $.03). AT&T has a fine idea, they're just pricing it 150x too high. The fact that they're able to do so screams market failure/monopoly to me.
oh thank you, I have never thought of that before, lets see here in my area there is
#1) ATT
#2) Comcast
well fuck me, that showed them
The caps wouldn't be that bad if the service didn't *utterly* suck.
The gateway they give you is the only thing that works with the service (you can't use your own hardware, or at least nobody has found a way to). It won't do any kind of bridge mode. It won't talk to more than one IP per MAC address, so you can't put a router behind it (unless that router is doing NAT for *everything*). It randomly drops connections, especially long lived ones -- I can't make local backups of my server in a remote datacenter anymore, because the connection will almost never stay alive long enough to transfer the whole ~400MB. Sometimes it starts blocking random incoming connections, even to static, un-natted, unfirewalled addresses -- one day I can't get to my webserver from the outside world for a few hours... the next I can't ssh into my home server ("unknown inbound session stopped" ... of course it's unknown, it's the first packet of a new connection, you piece of garbage). It supports logging to syslog, but outputs a constant stream of useless messages so thick that it's almost useless.
Recently I've started to notice having periodic problems downloading content (like the slashdot style sheet!) from akamai-based sites, which a little bit of goggling shows to be an ongoing U-Verse problem since 2008.
The support sucks massively. If you call with basically any problem beyond "my internet is down" they will forward you on to their "advanced" support department, who has a fee of $39 (might be $29... don't remember)... which they'll charge you even if all they do is tell you that they can't help you and you need to call regular support.
Netflix, on my 24Mbit downlink, varies from "great quality" to "OMG you can barely do SD quality"... many other people report this as well. Some days the performance is great, some days the performance is just absolutely miserable. I'd try to see if there was some common network path causing problems, but they basically disable traceroute for all of their internal nodes (I'm guessing they just stop them from sending TTL exceeded datagrams completely).
You can't switch back to ADSL -- they wouldn't even let me get U-Verse service unless they disconnected my ADSL at the same time. But it is "no longer available" so now I'm stuck with this garbage.
I'd gladly take a usage cap if it meant any of this crap would get better. I'm somehow doubting it, since not a bit of it seems like it's related to network saturation... just lousy service. And my only other choice in this area (AFAIK) is Comcast, who also has caps, along with their own set of problems...
I'd say "welcome back to the 90s" ... but my network worked a lot better back then. So I guess... welcome to the future!
FUCK YEAH! FREE MARKET WINS OUT AGAIN!
YOU TOTALLY HAVE A CHOICE!
But you forgot:
#3) No internet at all
The amusing thing is that the free market libertarians argue very much like religious people (usually they're one in the same), in that the choices religious people present to you are:
#1) Bask in God's glory and accept Jesus Christ into your heart and be saved.
#2) BURN IN THE FIERY PITS OF HELL AND BE TORTURED FOR ALL ETERNITY
Doesn't sound like much of a choice to me, but for them, it is.
Back to the market for a second, the obvious excuse is "Well, if you feel that you cannot do without the service, that means having the service is worth whatever they're willing to charge and whatever you're willing to pay before you'll do without."
But me, I prefer to live in a more modern society, with an elected government body that represent the people. And I want laws that I know are good for *everyone*, not just for a *select few*.
In an ideal world, perhaps that'd work. As it stands, it's exactly the kind of net-neutrality destroying idea that so many geeks are worried about: it'd give the ISPs an incentive to create ever more onerous (and artificial) transfer caps, to encourage more content providers to pay for hosting on their cache servers. It would disincentivise costly upgrades to the backbone network (since many of the big names that customers demand are already on the caching network), further marginalising the wider internet by reducing the speed available within those strict transfer limits. Eventually, as even the last mile network becomes saturated, you might even end up with secondary transfer caps being introduced on data from the cache servers.
Looking at the past actions of the ISPs, can you honestly say that kind of behaviour is beyond them?
It's because many issues foster an us-vs-them mentality where it's either kill-the-market or kill-the-government, never anything in between. Meanwhile the Social Market Economy works just fine in some countries.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
You don't understand how the politics break in the US.
In general, it is the old people who have the money who are complaining about taxes, government regulation and state how the free market will fix everything.
But it's the young people who watch a lot of video over the internet (specifically torrent a lot) and they aren't anti government-regulation in general. Mostly because they wouldn't mind voting some older people's money into their pockets, which is (to circle back) what the old people are worried about in the first place.
So you've created a false dichotomy. Those who are up in arms about caps likely would not complain if the government stepped in.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
The telcos have done *everything* they can to cripple expansive growth, so that *they can save infrastructure investment dollars*. In the offing, they have paid off our legislators and others who are supposed to be looking out for us. Their actions are nothing short of criminal, and are legal only because they pay for the laws that are supposed to "protect" the consumer.
In a word, these capping policies are UNAMERICAN (and, I'm not a nationalist, by any means.) What do these caps do to things like scientific research, education, legal artistic sharing, etc. etc. They *cripple* those innovations, thus crippling the forward promise of Americans, and America. Something HAS to be done; the pure profit motives at any cost of the grotesquely greedy telcos must be legislated. It's time to nationalize these companies, or else slap them upside the head so hard that they will start *serving* their customers instead of crimping their futures.
What's more, we need to start with the people who run these companies; we need to see them for what they are, and the large-scale harm that they do. They may be scions of their individual communities, and good parents, and all that, but they are literally putting us on a path that will disadvantage this country for decades, if someone doesn't put a stop to this egregious insult to information access, invention, and innovation.
Bandwidth is (theoretically) unlimited; we don't need to meter it; we need to *make it accessible*, and let 1000 ideas bloom. From now on, we must *insist* on nothing less - our future depends on it!