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Will Capped Data Plans Kill the Cloud?
theodp writes "With the introduction of its Chromebook, Google is betting big on the Cloud. As is Apple, with its iCloud initiative. So too are Netflix and Skype. Unfortunately, their very existence is threatened by data-capping carriers, who have set a course to make sure that the network is NOT the computer. 'I don't know what the solution is,' writes David Pogue. 'I don't know if anyone's thinking about this. But there are big changes coming. There are big forces about to shape our lives online. And at the moment, they're on a direct collision course.'"
The solution is taking the networks away from those who don't want to provide the service they promised to provide when they were given monopolies by the government.
"Only in the United States, where caps are popular." But in truth, I'd be more concerned about unbrided capitalism and monopolistic practices killing not just the cloud, but any hope my country has of competing in a global marketplace. We've already hamstrung ourselves on an antiquidated patent and copyright system that is forcing our talent overseas to produce, we have our government busy chasing down music pirates while ignoring the massive amounts of identity theft and fraud perpetuated by malware and botnets, and the list goes on.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
There are datacaps, but also, and most of all I'd say : connexion speeds !
Even when you have a fast download bandwidth, upload is usually shitty, like 10-15% of the download on usual DSL...
FTTH is another story and could make the cloud worthwhile, but I'm still waiting for that to happen, and I live in Paris...
David... it's just that -- just as with everything *else* important over the last 3 decade (SCADA security, anyone), *no one important is listening to us*.
Good think we like saying atojiso.
Capped data may bring the cloud and the users to reason.
I like the cloud for some things. But i also like it if a device which has more memory than i need for all my personal documents (including 10000 Photos) is used wise enough not to require 24x7 online access.
If i use a local imap idle client i seldom exceed 1Gb/month. I can sync my music at home (why wouldnt i do so - i dont buy 100cds on the way to work each day).
capped data is the expression of a physical reality vs. a marketing tool used to push users quickly into freshly build networks without investing in the sw and forcing them to new phones.
It's sad to see everyone trying to kill it from different angles.
Sony Movies Pulled From Netflix Streaming Service Over Starz Contract Issue
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/18/sony-movies-netflix-instant-play-starz_n_879727.html
a single user isn't going to hit their cap with word and excel documents, even with photos and music its going to be hard, and I doubt that most will have the patience for movies since all US ISP's suck ass at upload... and companies have better internet plans
I think it may be worse news for the carriers. If they wont provide suitable bandwidth, eventually someone will develop a more popular alternative that bypasses their speed bump altogether.
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That's like saying an all-you-can-eat restaurant is unfair to the other restaurants.
Cloud-based services can cut revenue sharing deals with access network operators, which will then exempt certain services from bandwidth limits. This is already happening with IPTV. In the end, this will mean that if you don't use the major cloud-based services, potential users would essentially have to pay their ISPs for using your service.
If it were the truth, but it isn't. Plenty of other countries have caps. At least in the US the caps are usually not super low, so you can still do a reasonable bit of "cloud" type stuff and not hit them. Talk to the Australians, they have some pretty severe caps, enough they have to limits their regular Internet usage.
Caps are not a US thing. They are found in various places all around the world. They also aren't universal in the US. You can find non-capped Internet providers. Probably not in all areas, unfortunately, but they exist.
How big are data caps?
How big is the content you have?
Netflix should worry, iCloud... not really.
E.g. I have 20Gb of MP3 files.
Btw I wonder if it all goes through iCloud or if, for example, I have my Mac and iPhone on the same network it syncs locally.
how long until
I'm not a big fan of this new fangled cloud thingamajig. I like to keep my data local where there are no worries of lockouts on sunday mornings due to maintenance. no worries employees are pillaging through my personal photos or clandestine goverment agencies rummaging through my data, making a dossier of me to see if I'm a likely al-queda candidate or have terrorist tendencies.
That aside, The introduction of the iphone forced carriers to upgrade their services and offer better consumer experience. With the arrival of everything in the cloud, netflix, icoud etc. I only see providers as realizing they HAVE to upgrade their services and start providing more bandwidth and better customer experience. Whether the carriers and the old business model hats like it, everything is going digital or already has and they must adapt, adopt or die. I'm not worried. I won't be an adopter of this cloud thingy but I do see it as a great way to get providers off their collective ip asses and have our service improved.
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..these game-changing big forces that will alter our lives forever? ISPs will start only taking bitcoins for payment. Heck, this is another bitcoin slashvertisement isnt it?
Canada has some horrendous data caps from it's major ISPs. From the numbers I've heard, Americans have almost 10x the bandwidth allowance that most Canadians have. For online services (cloud, netflix, etc.), this is a major concern. While I'm looking forward to iCloud, I will be closely monitoring my bandwidth for the first little bit to make sure I don't go over and, if I do, I'll be figuring out what service I use needs to get cut and, quite frankly, I'd rather the ISPs just offer better service than forcing me to not use what's available...
The Internet should be like any other basic utility, with rates being regulated and networks being installed for everybody to have unrestricted accees to. People would pay on a per-use basis but ISPs would not be able to raise the rates as they please.
Bandwidth costs money, an ISP has to have caps which realistically keeps overall usage to a level which the ISP can sustain with a given number of customers. If they don't and are offering "unlimited data" then they are over-subscribing their lines, lying or both. They can also over-subscribe their lines by simply selling their service to more customers than they can manage.
Obviously it can then be "managed" by traffic management, blocking protocols such as p2p etc but no-one likes these measures (especially here). I don't like them and I pay for an ISP that manages their data capacity honestly with caps and you buy bandwidth. It costs more, but it's worth it for me and they keep stats that show the number of unerrored seconds and buy capacity to keep up rather than traffic manage.
There is no such thing as "unlimited data" - period.
...but I haven't hit it yet.
Apple et. al. will do with the carriers just what they did with the music licensing companies: pay them off. Consumers will need to be taught that an iPad with 4g connectivity is actually worth $1500 instead of $500, but they are a docile sort, ready to accept any script Jobs reads. The real danger is that the American consumer will not have the money when the time comes to pay up; but that's a non-start.
Given Apple's cash reserves couldn't it just buy every major carrier in the country? I'm sure it could buy ATT, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, et al, with the loose change in the couches at the Apple campus. :) Given Internet access is pretty much already a local monopoly with no competition what would it matter? At least with Apple in charge they would have an incentive to get rid of the caps.
They can cap USA alright. But the Cloud Computing is bigger in emerging markets. Comcast has a lot of work ahead of it.
Gently reply
In Canada, you're hard pressed to find an ISP that doesn't have a cap. It makes streaming movies, etc. a pain in the butt.
When we have enough storage space on the device, what's to be gained by constantly shuttling data backward and forward? And there's not just the cost to consider - if you lose your connection for whatever reason, the device is more or less a brick.
This guy doesn't seem convinced by the new Chromebook, that's for sure.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Capped data plans won't kill the cloud. Capping will only be a temporary inconvenience (until capping is gone through competition between carriers).
There are nice-to-have cloud syncs that use a lot of data (music, video, images) and need-to-have cloud syncs (mail, calendar, documents). The urgens syncs usually fit in a data plan. The 'leisure' syncs can be done whilst on wifi.
The real inconvenience will be data roaming charges (eg abroad) where they charge you an arm and a leg for everything :(
ISPs that are also content providers represent a dangerous conflict of interests. Comcast, Time Warner, etc all offer tv and MoD service so OF COURSE it's to their advantage to throttle competitors like NetFlix. One wonders if the cap on landline service will apply to content of their own.
The Internet is too important to be in the hands of monopolists as it is now. It is a public utility, a vital one, and should be treated and regulated as such.
Bandwidth capping is NOT the problem. There is a marginal cost curve associated with increased bandwidth use and it is only appropriate that this cost be reflected in the price we pay for our services. Without usage based fees, those who underutilize the service are subsidizing those who overutilize it (which I guess the latter would be highly overrepresented here at /.). The problem is lack of competition and effective regulation perpetuated by political overrepresentation of service providers. Please be willing to give up your internet subsidy and get in touch with your elected officials, friends, and family to let them know that their ISPs are screwed up and we could have faster, cheaper internet if we take back the reins.
I've been calling this one for a while now. Even if you push aside the fact that we're limited in total backbone throughput without large capital investments, people wanting to do more with the internet presents a profit opportunity to the businesses that are slated to lose out on the phenomenon. When people stop using directv and comcast cable television in favor of internet streaming tv and movies, those entities can convert bandwidth over from tv to data, which will help the congestion problem. Only thing is, they're going to charge you $75-100 a month for internet, just like you paid for internet+tv until now. It is a zero sum game. This stuff costs money and we're taking revenue away from businesses in a position to solve the capacity issue. I do think its funny that the wired and wireless providers have been advertising people being fully connected and doing everything online, along with streaming video. Yet when that starts to become a reality, they cap it and will no doubt soon offer higher tiered packages with more data at higher costs.
The ISPs pay for bandwidth in a similar fashion, it's just the consumers who pay for all they can use. The problem is that they've been overselling capacity to pay for larger yachts for the CEO rather than investing in their infrastructure. And because most of the country is covered in monopolies and duopolies, and if you're especially lucky an oligopoly, there's little to no way of voting with your wallet. I'm with Qwest primarily because they don't cap their bandwidth, and apart from gaming they do a fine job. I just wish they would actually provide the bandwidth that I'm paying for.
Around here I could get Hughes, Clear, Comcast or a cellular based connection, and I think that's about it. All of the options I know of except for the neighbors and Qwest involve caps and in most cases also slower speeds than the pathetic 5mbps that Qwest offers.
A common metaphor for Cloud resources is treating them like a public utility. Its there and there when you need it. But in reality there isn't an infinite amount of power, water, or cloud resources either. Caps exist in these as either regulatory or systemic controls where one can never demand any amount they desire and certainly not "for free" either.
Will caps kill cloud computing? No more than power and water restrictions "kill" projects in the real world. People live and work with caps all the time often without realizing it.
That would only be fair if the ISPs themselves were paying per unit of transfer, which is not the case AFAIK.
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Companies are already used to paying for bandwidth with can act as an effective cap on the a amount of data you can use. It might just make companies better able to tie the cost of a project to its value. If you build out an internal network, servers. SAN etc you have a hard time nailing down managers to the cost of their projects. It is always a guessing game, oh I don't know a 4 socket server should do. Then it sits ideal for a year and then gets loaded up with a bunch of VMs or other services sitting on it. The original purchasing department doesn't want to accept the whole cost associated with the original project because the equipment is now being used for multiple things etc. With cloud services you can in theory break down the cost for each separate project because you see the disk usage, backups, download and upload rates etc to each virtual server and/or service. The question than becomes is your project worth the money we are spending in on, instead of a constant negotiation of what level of charge back each group pays for the SAN and switching etc.
But there is no fixed cost for moving data around.
What you are saying is more or less correct but your terminology is wrong. What you are describing is properly called a variable cost not a fixed cost. The equipment used to build and operate the network is largely comprised of fixed costs. It costs the phone company the same money whether they send one packet or one million packets. The costs associated to a specific packet would be variable costs and as you rightly point out, the direct variable costs are negligible. As equipment is used, the fixed costs get amortized over a large volume of data and in time become negligible on a per packet basis. This doesn't mean they become zero but they start large and become small asymptotically.
That said there IS a cost that you are not considering. IF there is insufficient bandwidth available to serve all requests, then there is an opportunity cost associated with the data packet. If your data can't get through because someone else is hogging the pipe, you as a customer will get pissed and possible switch services (if possible). Since we know that the telecom providers have a large but finite amount of bandwidth available, opportunity costs matter. Hence data caps. They cannot serve all possible requests until their network has the capacity to do so. If they allow unlimited usage and people actually do use it that way (and some do), the telecom incurs an opportunity cost in the form of being unable to serve some of their customers.
In THEORY data caps make economic sense. In REALITY, it's probably more greed by the telecoms than a real problem most of the time.
No, it won't kill the cloud. Nearly every Internet service here is capped in some way.
If the money from the caps were going to beef up the infrastructure, I don't think people would mind as much. Knowing that the caps are there because the company oversold capacity and that the money isn't going to remedy the situation is what makes it particularly maddening.
Customers like the cloud, they have decided that is where their movie, music, file store, and for same very strange reason their word processor and other applications needs to be. They are going to find an ISP that lets them suck as cloud as they can drink at this point even if they have to pay for it.
They heavy users will pay for a while, but the carriers are losing the war even if they win this battle short term. It will follow the same pattern as cellular voice just a decade ago. Remember when you never spoke to someone on their mobile when they were at home, or in their office. They'd answer and call you back, or not answer at all and dial you back from the land line. Conversations on mobiles were kept short.
Now people started to use more mobile time and start calling and complaining about overage charges. Carries ended up losing customers to whoever offered more minutes per dollar that week. People switch plans all the time. They did so until it got to the point that the administrative overhead made no sense for the providers. People used more and more voice and the plans started to accommodate that to keep the customers. These days (outside of prepaid situations) you can't get a mobile contract with fewer minutes of voice than are enough to cover as many hours waking hours as one reasonably keeps in month. In short for the vast majority of users voice is unlimited or close enough.
Data will do the same. They caps will end up so high you have to be in a tiny tiny minority and a somewhat unique situation to hit them. Like you have build a active/active fail-over cluster to keep your bittorent client running with five nines uptime.
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Actually Apple's iCloud may be another solution. It will not be streaming my music over the net, it will be synching music files between various devices. Comparably that requires far less data. A cloud that is merely used for file storage and synching may not be endangered.
If the caps start affecting more than the 5% of the users, companies will raise the them to accommodate the demand
Internet companies want to make sure that the majority of the users are happy. They will place caps on the top 2% of users because those users take away excessive bandwidth from the other 98% of its paying customers. They don't want the majority to complain about how slow their data connection is during peak hours and switch to another service.
ISP's used to cap internet by the hour during the 1990s. Customers preferred unlimited Internet plans so that is what ISP's gave them. 98% of the customers still think they have an "unlimited" plan and it is in the ISP's interest to keep it that way.
If these data caps start to affect the average a customer, then they will complain about that and switch to another service. Advertisements will focus on bandwidth caps instead of Internet speed like they currently do. ISP's who advertise that their services are "Could Ready" will gain more customers.
It is simple supply and demand.
I have Verizon FiOS. What are these data caps you people keep talking about?
Likely, what will happen is we'll see a new broadband war take place. This one won't be over who will give you the fastest connection, but rather, who's going to give you the most data for the least amount of money.
Right now, seriously, most of the complaints I see about data caps are coming from the big cable providers. I know Veizon will pump me 400gigs, or more, a month without even as much as complaining. Will Comcast, Cox or Time Warner do that?
I think the larger thing behind the data caps is to keep the pirates off the network. They know if they limit someone to say 100 gigs, and you've got a fast connection, you'll likely be spending most of your time waiting for that cap to roll over, meanwhile doingg EXACTLY what they and the big entertainment want...making sure you shell out for your stuff.
I know Verizon is "evil" and people call them an overpriced network....but when they're willing to send all the data I want at upwards of 40mbps...I kind of have to give in and go "ok, you got me"
So, again, what the hell are these data caps you people quit complaining about. It''s like texting, if you're paying too much, you're either too stupid to get the unlimited texting option or need to shop elsewhere for your IP connectivity. I did. I'm happy.
If you think about the way Apple is approaching a "cloud strategy" (ugh, but those are the words to use). they might be the only ones who have really thought about capping being a factor in cloud use.
Google wants to you edit documents online. Apple wants you to edit local copies that get synchronized and distributed. Apple's approach uses less bandwidth.
Other companies want you to stream music from the cloud; Apple provides a way for each device to download anything it wants from the cloud but then after that, use locally.
In general Apple's model is one of local use with the cloud acting as a master source (the "truth" as they said) with devices getting local copies to work on. The way they are supporting this for applications they could even easily be sending deltas and not whole documents (not sure if that is the case).
If you go to Apple development conferences they also emphasize repeatedly how careful you should be to reduce the amount of bandwidth you use - in large part to conserve battery life, but the side effect is again that the user will not run into any bandwidth caps as soon. So there is a developer awareness that bandwidth is a resource that should not be abused, encouraged from the top.
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Is how the title should spell (I wish...)
Capped data is a joke. It's a movement towards charging per-unit prices for a service that has no meaningful per-unit cost. Sure, it costs money to build a network, blah blah blah. But there is no fixed cost for moving data around...
You got that mixed up. The network infrastructure is a fixed cost, you seem to be thinking of variable costs. Fixed costs are those that largely occur regardless of consumption, variable costs are tied to consumption in a more direct way. There are also a type of fixed costs know as sunk costs, costs that are not recoverable in any significant way, and often a one time cost. The network infrastructure is a fixed and sunk cost. However another fixed cost that is ongoing is labor. Even after that infrastructure is paid for the labor costs will persist. It would also be realistic to consider that once the infrastructure is paid for it probably needs to be upgraded, so there is a new fixed and sunk cost.
... A Gbit switch costs about as much as a 100 Mbit switch did a few years back, and moves 100x as much data in a unit of time as the 100 Mbit one. It uses about the same amount of electricity, regardless of how much data is being moved. Where did that per-unit cost go? ...
Lets ignore the cost of the switch upgrade. Did labor costs go down? Does rent on the building that housed the equipment go down? Do the costs of power and air conditioning go down? Did the interest on the loans used to buy the equipment go down? Did the fees for those big data pipes coming into the building go down?
... Because of this, I figure it's only a matter of time before this whole "cap the user" nonsense goes away.
Bandwidth to your neighborhood is fixed. How do you allocate a finite shared resource? How do you prevent one person from hogging the bandwidth? Currently fees are used to allocate the resource, what is your alternative?
It will just take a little while for users to realize the folly of the thin client, especially when the servers they rely on are externally managed by various groups each having different ideas of "reliable" and "secure".
ISPs torturing their users won't last very long because of services like Steam, the upcoming new console generation, higher resolution videos on YouTube, Netflix, etc. That's just where we're headed and the users just want and enjoy it too much for it to let up. Unless ISPs give us all blu-ray burners, a bunch of blanks, and ways of saving streamed data, they can't really do a thing about it.
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Between Netflix, Pandora, Hulu and gaming... especially buying games I hit the Clear 4G cap. Even though they advertise "Unlimited 4G" service they throttle me down to about 20kbps after I use 6 gigabytes per month. Which you can easily go over by downloading 1 game from Steam. It's terrible...
When I called support to ask if they were throttling me they said I was "using an unreasonable amount of data". They didn't dance around the issue they said I was being unreasonable by using their so-called "unlimited" service. I guess I'm free to use up as much data as I can at whatever speed they want to give me.
I was mistaken when I thought I could use it at home and while on the road during my daily commute and trips out of town. I also got caught up in a 2 year contract. I signed up at Best Buy with a sales rep who explicitly told me there were no contracts and the brochure he handed me had no mention of one, he also wrote "no contract" on it, which is worth nothing. But when I tried to cancel they said I was on one.
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When netflix launched in canada they all *lowered* their caps.
While it may be that they are engaging in "anti-competitive bullshit", from a pure economic perspective lowering bandwidth caps is EXACTLY what I would expect the carriers to do IF there is a scarcity of bandwidth. The carrier has built enough infrastructure to carry a finite amount of traffic. Presumably their infrastructure was built to accommodate some number of users times some amount of bandwidth allocated per user. Some will use less and some will use more and the ones who use less basically subsidize those who use more. If the ones who use more use too much, there may not be enough bandwidth to serve the customers who use less. You can prevent this with a data cap that keeps those who use more from using all the bandwidth. It's a stopgap measure but it works and makes sense if there is a scarcity of bandwidth.
Enter netflix and now some new subset of the users are now using a lot more bandwidth while the infrastructure is the same. Unless you go to metered billing, there are only two ways to keep the balance between the heavier users and the lighter users from getting out of whack. You can build more infrastructure or you can lower the data cap. Lowering the data cap keeps the lighter users from getting screwed and has the advantage to the telecom that it doesn't require any capital expenditure. Obviously it makes things more expensive for some percentage of users.
I'm not saying lowering the data caps is a good thing and I'm certainly not defending the carriers. All I'm saying is that with netflix coming on the scene lowering the data caps is actually the economically rational thing to do IF (very big caveat here) there is an actual scarcity of bandwidth. If bandwidth isn't actually scarce, then our anti-trust regulators should be looking at this very closely.
I re-signed up with Comcast for 1.5mb/s at $19.95 for 6 mos. It's fast enough, and anytime I need to download a big DVD ISO (Fedora, CentOS, etc.), I just make a copy of the download I've already made at work bring it via USB.
My point is that in the 10 days I've had service, I've already used 46GB. I run my own router and it maintains per-day download information and it appears my peak days are 7GB/day, but more typical days are 4 or 5GB/day.
What do we do that generates this much bandwidth? Just watching NetFlix streaming and downloading videocasts (Linux Action Show, etc.). Kids, wife and I watch a few hours of shows/movie, kids go to bed, and then my wife and I watch shows/movie together for a few more hours many nights. We're actually watching more "TV" than I'd prefer, but I think that's due to not having "TV" for over a year, so I'd expect things to taper down, especially when school starts back up.
However, I can easily see how elderly people or those stuck at home could easily exceed the 250GB/mo. cap that Comcast has. The 150GB/mo. that AT&T has is just setting the bar lower for the race to the bottom.
Mind you I only have a 1.5mb/s connection, and I know Comcast is hard capping it (bandwidth flow reports in my router prove this). I think folks paying for faster speeds are just getting ripped off, other than that fast burst. At the end of the month, they can't download any more than I can - they just reach their cap faster.
Here's the maths:
250gb/s / 1.5mb/s = 166,666sec = 2,777min = 46.29hr
150gb/s / 1.5mb/s = 100,000sec = 1,666min = 27.77hr
That's assuming max bandwidth during usage - but that's what NetFlix does. It finds out the best rate without having to stop and re-buffer, and streams at that rate (mind you, not the max rate, but the max sustainable rate that they have a encoding for).
So, in my opinion Comcast, AT&T, etc. should have to advertise these numbers: With Comcast you can only watch 46 hours of NetFlix per month (~1.5hr/day), and with AT&T DSL you can only watch 28 hours of NetFlix per month (just under an hour a day, so one episode of a show). Mind you that is if you do nothing else (like download videocasts at 150-250mb/show/day).
I got tired of hitting the bandwidth cap every month and worrying about being disconnected ever since a certain ****astic! provider sent me a warning letter that I was using too much bandwidth, but wouldn't tell me what limit I had gone over or what limit I had to keep it under. Only a vague threat that if it happened again within another year, they would disconnect me.
So, for two years, I had to be very careful on my network. See, I get all my entertainment and do all my work online. If your household watches two or three netflix movies a day on average and listens to streaming radio and podcasts and downloads high quality video podcasts on a regular basis, uses Steam, uses online backup services, uses VPN into work and other reasonable things, it consumes hundreds of gigabytes per month.
My frustration was that when I would call up and say "okay, so I need more bandwidth -- how do I get that? I have money waiting here to pay you for it" and their answer was "you can't - there are no other options that we provide".
But, recently, I moved across town and found that it's actually not difficult to get a business account with them. I'd looked into it previously, on my own, but it was hard to find the information and requirements. After they updated their site and things were very easy to understand, I called them up and had 22mbps down 10mbps up service installed within 24 hours for $100/mo. On top of that, while they certainly wouldn't allow me to use unlimited amounts of data, they have not complained when I have consistently used 1tb or even as much as 2tb a month.
If you ask me, it's worth the extra $35 to $40 to increase my potential use from 250gb to 1-2tb. Problem solved.
Data cap still don't make any sense. If you've hit your cap, but want to use the network at night when the pipes aren't running at full capacity, then there's something wrong going on.
Depends entirely on how high the data cap is. A properly calculated data cap will be so high that few users will ever run into it. You are only considering bandwidth that goes unused but you also have to consider bandwidth that is not available for use because the pipe is full.
IF there is a scarcity of bandwidth due to some users using a lot of bandwidth, the fact that they aren't causing that scarcity at all times is irrelevant. You quite rightly mention that bits that aren't used are gone forever. However bits that are needed at a given moment but not available are also gone forever. Someone had to wait. That is an opportunity cost which needs to be assigned somehow and the logical group of customers to pay for that opportunity cost is those who use the most data. If it is valuable to them they should be willing to pay some amount for it. Data caps are one way of doing this without discriminating between different types of traffic. Maybe not the best way but they are a rational way IF there is actual scarcity of bandwidth.
Deprioritization of traffic for people making bulk transfers is the proper way of handling things.
And how do you decide that Customer A's traffic is more important than Customer B's? You are basically arguing against network neutrality. You might be willing to wait for your data but not everyone is so considerate.
I try to stay within sight of the cutting edge of tech, but I will not buy a smartphone. I don't need the constant worry of staying under a cap, knowing that $/MB of going over is usurous.
How well would online businesses be doing if we were all still paying for our interned access by the minute?
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The idea of the internet being leveraged as a client/server system has been long in the making. It still isn't appropriate for large data transfers due to security and bandwidth considerations. I don't think this ideas time has come yet, despite big names trying to push it forward.
...is no.
Cloud services are still going to grow, the ISPs aren't lying when they say only 1% of their users break the caps, and those who do, know it. I'm on an unlimited Sprint plan and I have yet to see my usage go over 3GB and I'm streaming music every day, 20 days a week at work. (Using Pandora, DI, and Amazon Cloud)
I liked the old model of buy bandwidth, use it or not, but you should get what you pay for in terms of availability.
The problem is the reality of something made amusing in the Broadway show, The Producers. Bandwidth is unbelievably oversubscribed, and the only saviour to this has been diffuse destinations-- meaning that data comes from many places. Just use a script-halting plug in on your favorite browser to learn that a simple web page probably has a dozen or more different sources (and probably destinations, too).
The content farms (CDNs, iTunes, AppStores) suddenly need huge pipes because the constant demand for these sites are huge. They use load balancing to service clientele, sometimes hundreds of thousands of simultaneous streaming clients. If you're Comcast or Verizon, suddenly, you have a bottleneck. That bottleneck has to be assuaged or the congestion starts to become objectionable.
And gosh darn, you're not making hardly any money from that NetFlix and other streaming stuff, so it's in your best interests to charge in a tiered plan. Comcast in my area never used to have a cap. There was a nebulous artificial cap that was referenced, but now it's that 'law'. If you're a node or supernode on a p2p or torrent-ish network, then you're not following the hierarchical model, and many of these users raises the floor of quiescent activity through various daily demand cycles.
So metered data is their obvious solution, as we're not talking rocket scientists here, we're talking companies that want to be utility monopolies in your area-- now building content where they can if they're not outright buying it (hello, NBC).
In the bad old days, we just had data. Now we have data, but also stuff that requires comparatively clear pipes or protocols for isochronous data that have to work to prevent congestion and latency else the desired service becomes objectionable.
My method to fix this remains: let those that need QoS protocol support pay for that. For the rest of us, be it gamers, browser users on Facebook, or other largely aperiodic transaction users, pay less than those that need expensive and clear pipes.
Otherwise, each ISP will have to build infrastructure to the greatest possible denominator of usage profile, and that's not really practical-- ISPs have to make money somehow, monopolistic as they are. So what do you do? Let those that must be entertained or enjoy p2p network infrastructure pay for it. Downstream, ISPs are going to have to build huge networks anyway-- why not let evil telcos get rational funding for it?
Imagine a household with four teenagers, mom and dad (I know, science fiction, right?) that are all streaming content concurrently. One tenth of a GigE might do it if they all stream. Now add up 100 houses in the same subdivision or half of a city square mile. You can start to see how the bandwidth needs climb geometrically, and where the bottlenecks start to occur. Something has to give. The ideal world: in 1980, we deployed 100% fiber to the home and we don't have this problem. But we didn't, and we won't, because we're evilly fragmented and consumers through community governments have become the natural enemy of the utility-turned-monopoly telcos.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Both of our local ISPs recently implemented a bandwidth cap (75GB/mo for one and 50GB/mo for the other). Of course, they both offer TV and on-demand video, and one even admitted that they enacted the cap to shove Netflix and Amazon.com streaming out of their competitive space, and to reduce p2p file sharing (which they actively try to block anyway).
I think they have a point here. For example, the PS3 has a load of services which are in the cloud, such as film rental and downloads as well as game downloads. A HD film or some games seem to be around 7GB to download, but my ISP caps at 20GB per month with £5 for an extra 5GB over that limit (£1 per GB, grrr!!). So basically these PS3 services have to be used with care, otherwise the cost of renting a film is suddenly a lot more than you pay at the Playstation Store.
The really stupid thing is that the ISP doesn't count usage between midnight and 8am, but the PS3 can't be set to schedule downloads in these 'off hours' unless you subscribe to Playstation Plus for an extra £40 a year.
As a result I don't use the Playstation Store for much, and well, haven't used it at all since they lost all the credit card details anyway!
-- Mike
It may kill unlimited HD video downloads and put a crimp into companies that use that as their business model.
Just about everything else is not affected by these "caps" because the data volume is so tiny in comparison to video downloads.
There is another solution. Let Google do its shit. Google is really unhappy when people can't use the tubes. They start to do crazy things like building their own network, OSes, and the like. It isn't altruistic. They want you searching for stuff and seeing advertisements, and to do that, you need to be using the tubes, preferable as much as humanly possible. It just so happens that what they want lines up pretty well with what most people want. They also have more money than god.
I think there is a non-zero chance you will see them try and do something to try and resolve the bandwidth issue. They already made a decent, if failed, attempt with the wireless spectrum. Here is hoping. Google can plug its tubes into me any time. Er, um... ok. I'm done.
XCode (and all other Apple software updates) are going to delta updates very shortly.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Because according to my friend that is what they are rolling out, your Windows Updates will be local thanks to WSUS and since Linux doesn't have a "one size fits all" repo and with Apple there are more iPads and iPhones than Macs so the cableco doesn't even think about them.
Your "friend" is either an idiot or deeply entrenched in a religious devotion to Microsoft.
There's no reason any Apple update cannot be cached locally if desired by an ISP - Apple already uses CDN's to distribute them, and I am pretty sure larger ISP's (and probably smaller) also cache these things.
Linux updates are similar, there's not exactly a one-size-fits all but there are common repos that people uses that again, could easily be locally cached... but the demand would be low enough it wouldn't matter, and it would be just the same as other data use for the ISP.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I see a lot of prancing around the issue with "Oh, how can we make it fair for the delightful businesses that provide us this service", and that is not what we should be focusing on at all. Fuck em. Telcoms are no longer serving their purpose - they were given the keys to the kingdom to provide connectivity and they've had to be broken up, monopolized again, and basically done everything possible to line their pockets. They whine about cost of doing what they're paid to do while they receive subsidy after subsidy of taxpayer money "BAWWWW We want to take your tax money, roll out only where is profitable, and restrict your bandwidth because we'd much rather enjoy your money in other ways, instead of doing what you're paying us to do".
After seeing Hitler's awesome autobahn, the USA founded the Interstate program because certain members of our government knew that patchwork roads, with varying degrees of tolls and maintenance were holding our nation back. It enabled the rise to prominence of American manufacturing when you didn't have to worry about sending trucks full of heavy steel over some bumpy dirt road to get through Kansas. We deserve the same kind of information infrastructure and the only way that can happen is by taking it OUT of for-profit hands and making all the infrastructure in the nation owned by We The People.
Every single nation that has those high internet speeds so coveted by the rest of the developed world is doing this, in some form or another. This is also one of those times when a little "EVIL SOCIALISM BWA HA HA HA" actually increases competition and openness in the market. Imagine how many GSM-type providers we could have in this country if we forced ATT to share "their" towers, bought with our subsidy? How many customer-focused ISPs could there be if you didn't have to run your own fiber? Even politicians speak about our information infrastructure's importance, so lets start policies that ensure its dominance. We need to be rolling out "The best' service across the nation, as with Interstates, not just where it is deemed most profitable for greedy telcos. Cut out the bloody middleman who's bleeding both the gov't and individual subscribers dry to fill his own pockets! I don't want to have to rely on Google and Microsoft's "generosity" to fight for an uncapped, uncensored Internet and universal infrastructure - this is just prolonging the problem of corpocracy. We need a fundamental shift and universal change.
There is no 'XCode update'.
What I am saying is that soon Xcode updates will be real updates and not full installs.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
What I don't get about being able to charge for exceeding caps on your internet usage is how the companies can get away with charging twice for the same service.
If I access a website, the company who owns the website pays a fee for the data that is transmitted to me. I get that they have to pay for it. When I view their website (having no control over how much crap they try to shove down the pipe) why do I have to pay for the exact same data as well?
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
Blah, blah, blah...
Does the USPS regulate content? Yes, they have some rather strict laws and decent enforcement mechanisms to prevent fraud and to keep porn out of the hands of minors. Just about anything else is open season.
Applied to the Internet, that would be just about fuckin' paradise.
Please, go Galt and leave us civilized people free of your Randian nonsense.
/. -- the Free Republic of technology.
a Couch in every router. That would be happy.
/. -- the Free Republic of technology.
Really, the problem isn't so much the caps as we are letting the ISPs not count the traffic for the other services they offer as part of their cap.
Do you really think companies like comcast would be so gung ho to enforce caps if we made them count their traffic for the digital tv and phone services as part of the user's internet quota...
The 2 major types of high-capacity residential internet providers are cablecos and telcos. Cablecos sell cable TV, and own some of the pay-TV channels. Major telcos also own some pay-TV channels and have their own cable-TV equivalant services over IPTV...
* ATT in the US has Uverse
* Verizon in the US has Fios
* Bell Canada has Fibe
There isn't the major congestion they'd like you to believe. It's just that they're scared shitless of competition. If you want to get a movie channel on a cableco/telco, you have to get "basic service", and then some higher tier, and then subscribe to the movie channel. You're easily talking $50 to $80 per month. Meanwhile, Netflix is a fraction of that cost.
In Canada, the major networks provide delayed video streams of most of their shows. I assume that it's the same in the US. If not for ridiculous caps, many cableco/telco customers will "cut the cord" for their TV subscriptions, and watch only what they want over internet, rather than paying for 500 chanells, most of which are crap.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
Data usage caps here in Australia are one of the two primary reasons I don't use the cloud for data storage. The other reason is my poor upload speed.
You guys realize that AT&T, Verizon have to power to shape technology, innovation, and basically how humankind communications progresses. This is similar to Best friking Buy being able to shape hardware innovation to what they want produced and developed. Think I'm being radical ? Well think about it. I'll leave it at that for you to do your own research.
"Computers are a lot like Air Conditioners" "They both work great until you start opening Windows"
I think we're only talking about 4G broadband caps, aren't we? My home ISP does not cap, but my cell phone provider does. Which providers are doing the capping?
"Crude and slow, clansman. Your attack was no better than that of a clumsy child."
Behind all the tech talk, the basic fact is that the bandwidth guzzlers are the media files, Audio, Video and images. And these are always increasing thanks to better hardware (capturing devices). What is going to tilt the scales back to equilibrium is the technology to compresses these files to more manageable sizes. It makes no difference if you are on the cloud or not. This data has to be transmitted. The compression technology presently used has not seen a proportional change vis a vis the input files - say a HD video file. If a HD movie of 90 minutes duration was say 50 MB instead of 5 GB, where is the question of a bandwidth cap. This is exactly what is happening at chazz studios.
The truth is that the traffic is increasing much much faster than the capacity is.
Now *usage* cap are UTTER BULLSHIT and are meant to punish early adopter of bandwidth hungry application (a lot of whicha re fully elgal today, like youtube) and get more subscriber that way. They simply do not want toa dmit that their network is absolutely not ready.
I'm confused, they're utter bullshit for doing exactly what the providers intend? The truth is, the providers cannot control what other content producers come up with - ideas are being invented faster than the capacity to transit them can be placed. You would prefer that the providers let people transfer as much as they want and damn the quality of service effect that has? Screw that, I don't want my usage of the network crushed to a crawl because of some dick torrenting the whole series of "Two and a Half Men" or whatever. Ultimately, it sounds like you're advocating providers billing content producers for their usage of the network - because how else can the providers engage in wholesale infrastructure updates without ultimately making the users pay for it?
(As a side note, most providers quite often admit their network isn't up to the task being put before it. Any ISP that tries on an unlimited connection in my country ends up admitting that pretty fast).
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
Yes, the network is NOT the computer. Neither is the cloud.
The COMPUTER is the computer
The network is the network. The cloud ... well, its 'cloudy' definition seems to be: "always-on network connectivity to remote services"
Computational elements at the end of a network, or in a network path, are just remote services for an end-user's device.
Try using email WITHOUT a 'native' client (e.g. an IPad ,IPhone, email app) -- these cache authentication credentials, hold recently downloaded emails, allow you to compose and spell check regardless of network connectivity, provide fully functional copy/paste functionality.
That's why the IPad's email client is not Safari, and why most companies prefer Outlook to GMail's enterprise offering, and why Google developed Gears.
One part of the article is extremely hard to fathom:
"For some reason, the rationale behind wired-line caps (cable modems, DSL) is harder to fathom than cellular ones. It just doesn’t seem like a few more megabytes should cost Comcast anything; it’s just bits flowing."
Is it really? Wont' carriers need to upgrade their network infrastructure when everyone's streaming HD video?
As per usual, Canada is following along with the bad ideas... caps are in place for most ISPs here.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
i guess i'd be fine with tiering so long as it is by either by data amount OR by speed. double-tiering leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
...
Google has put in their network. Not a big deal. Right? Well, Google will likely partner with several other companies, notably, Amazon and Netflix to build out these networks. I would not be surprised to see Apple join up with them. Basically, we are going to see a new drive for Fiber to the homes. Comcast, TimeWarner, Qwest/Century Link, ATT, etc are about to meet real competition.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
"The tubes" or "a series of tubes"?
Make SELinux enforcing again!
The reason I'm not even considering cloud technology at my company is that we have a 1000 Mbps connection from computer to server right now and an offsite cloud would be 2 Mbps and we just upgraded to that upload speed 2 weeks ago. It's only 10Mbps down too. So forget the usage cap of the cloud, I need my data faster from it in the first place before it's even remotely useable! I think if a company can afford a 100Mbps symmetrical internet connection or something, they have enough money to own their servers instead of going with some cloud solution. I hear it's mostly small IT dept-less companies (and buzzword and trend crazy bosses at medium to large companies).
You spend 35 hours per week watching movies? That's not healthy.
It's OK - he only watches HD porn, so it's healthy and quite exhausting.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Ive been surfing online more than three hours today, yet I never found any interesting article like yours. It is pretty worth enough for me. In my opinion, if all webmasters and bloggers made good content as you did, the net will be much more useful than ever before. Gucci Satchel Bags cheap Gucci handbags
This whole Cloud thing is never going to really work. As the topic hints at, the bandwidth just isn't there. The problem is that storage and CPU power have scaled much faster than network bandwidth.
This means that there is plenty of CPU power in the cloud, and a fair amount of storage space, but it's too expensive to get large amounts of data transported to and from the cloud. So only if you have CPU intensive problems, is the cloud a real solution. There's not much that falls into that category, certainly not on the consumer end of the spectrum.
I found that it gets nicely expressed in the Ahmdahl number (ratio between the number of operations and the amount of I/O of your problem). Stuff with a number like 0.01 is very good for the cloud. Most stuff lives around 0.1, my problems live close to 1.0.
So it's good for making weather simulations, it's not so good for storing your photos or documents.
RogerWilco the Adventurous Janitor
Everyone wants faster and faster speeds, yet they also expect unlimited monthly bandwidth, and THAT is what is causing the cellular providers to start putting monthly bandwidth caps on their networks. The solution SHOULD be fairly simple in theory, don't give people the maximum speed that the equipment and communication protocol allows, and go to a tiered approach. Unlimited data at 2 megabit, but then go to a 5GB cap for 4 megabit OR there would be a higher price for the 4 megabit speed. If people want a 7 megabit connection and still want unlimited data, then they should pay more for it.
Cable and DSL providers have offered tiered data plans for a while, where if you want faster connection speeds, you need to pay more per month, so really, it is the fault of the cellular providers for increasing speeds for users without going to this sort of tiered approach. Most of my data usage comes from WiFi, but when I am on the road, I would rather have unlimited 2G speeds than a 2GB/month cap at 3G or 4G speeds.
The reasoning behind this sort of setup is fairly straight forward, where there IS a limited amount of bandwidth going to all nodes on the network, so in order to keep any node from getting saturated/overloaded, you have to make sure that people do not use too much data at any one time. People will complain if an area "seems slow" at normal 3G speeds compared to other areas, so in order to provide a consistent experience across the entire network, people should be kept to a reasonable speed that will not overload the network at any given node. So, expect that 2mbps would be the standard speed for EVERYONE, and those who want faster should pay extra, or accept that they have a limited amount that they can download each month.
The problem is that cellular providers have never done the work to set up this sort of thing, so it is "everyone gets the fastest speeds", and now they are placing limits on people. If you can run out of bandwidth in one hour of continual use at 4G speeds, I'd much rather get unlimited at 2GB speeds and avoid paying more on my already high bill.
The point is that now heavy bandwidth users are not a minority who demand extra high levels of service, they are the majority. Streaming video is massive and accounts for more bandwidth than P2P by most estimates. It is the average Joe watching all those YouTube videos and ISPs are reluctant to say "sorry no Netflix/iPlayer on our service".
The old "our caps only affect the top 5% of users" excuse no longer holds up. Plus ISPs like to sell their service as "unlimited", which the Advertising Standards Authority has ruled actually means "limited". iPlayer is going to start warning customers when they are on an ISP that can't cope with it, and I imagine other commercial services will follow.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
You see this as a one-dimension problem, and I'm trying to relay that there are at least two: it's not the size of downloads, it's the strain of QoS that is the problem. Torrents don't have much of an effect on QoS. But Hulu does. Listen to people swear when a Youtube video buffers up. That's the whole point: QoS places an enormous isochronous load on CDNs and end-point infrastructure. Tax it.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
On one hand, I want people to have control over their data, so this is good news.
On the other hand, I want people to have unlimited Internet connections, so this is bad news.
I have both these things myself, but even the richest man would be unhappy if the world was empty...
I was trying to agree with you, that is why I used the word "bandwidth". The problem is that at any given moment there is only so much available to the ISP and to smaller blocks of customers on the same network segments. ISPs react to this by setting caps in the hopes of discouraging people from doing large downloads or watching too many videos. Rather than targeting specific people at specific times they go for an overall reduction.
Where I don't agree is your argument to target QoS dependent services directly. While there is some argument for prioritising certain types of real-time traffic video is buffered, so really it is the same kind of "bulk" traffic as web pages. Most customers rate their ISP by how quickly web sites load, how well videos play, so for an ISP delivering this kind of bulk traffic in a timely fashion is very important. It is, in fact, the main type of content that flows through an ISPs pipes, and a lot of effort goes into page load times these days. Targeting it would be targeting the average user, i.e. making the internet in general more expensive.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I don't always agree with David. Heh, he and I even squabbled when I gave him a bad review of his review on my blog. But he's dead on right here. iPhone and Android people can definitely come together here. This is an issue that bridges ALL fanboy boundaries. You'd think we could finally speak with 1 voice on net neutrality as it pertains to wireless, since unlike a cable line we all own the spectrum as a public commons.
I8-D
Short Term, BW capping is wrong. That's why when I bought an Android phone I went with an uncapped provider (Sprint).
Long term, all providers should plan their networks better and throttle all content (or enable fair QoS based traffic shaping). This isn't new technology.. nor is it anti-neutrality. It's simple good network design planning (or lack thereof).
Tweeks
The caps are both reactive and a way for ISPs to deal with capital outlays, as you imply.
Data that's timed together is the toughest. Think of it like the way that FedEx or postal services have timing gradation in their pricing schedules. You want it overnight by 10am-- I mean you want all of those packets lined up in an uncongested row with less than 45ms latency between them, with no more than 1 in 200 packets missing? Fine. Pay for it. That's my argument.
Datacomm in its early form had little vision for isochronous media an QoS didn't even start to appear as a concern until about 20 years ago. That type of media was broadcast through the air, or delivered through analog coaxial cable-based distribution system pioneered by people not in the US where the Internet was being developed: for DATA.
These days, data can comprise of a myriad different types of consumables. But the one that taxes the living crap out of the DATA infrastructure are QoS apps and those that raise the noise floor like torrents, Skype, and other p2p applications. Except for Skype, and other apps needing respect for isochronicity in one from or another, none of the apps or the users of them, care one whit about a little latency, jitter, rerouting here and there. It doesn't diminish the quality of the experience. Aperiodicity is fine. Not in media transfers, especially fatuous codex relationships with big living zillion colors. Click-outs are fewer these days because the least common denominator speed level and sense of expectation has met the test of better broadband, at least in the US. When I travel to the EU or SE Asia, the net can be finger-snapping fast compared to the dullard DSL we have here. Yet no one says, ok, buddy, you have a slow connection so you're forbidden this type of media download-- but it's ok if it's time-shifted or stored for later consumption.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Would for profit roads be better for our economy then our present system?
That is actually a good question. Suppose you did pay to use roads per mile, that would impact all sorts of decisions. It would probably lead to much improved transportation efficiency in terms of car pooling; it might change delivery strategies for mail and other items. Many of this nations roads are if poor condition. Most of that is because tax monies that are supposed to maintain them, gas taxes primarily, get diverted elsewhere. Essentially people want other services more and don't want to pay the direct taxes needed to support the road system being maintained to anything more than a barely adequate level.
I heard an economist the other day on the radio argue that the added fuel costs, added ware and tare on motor vehicles, and increased number of accidents as people focus on avoiding holes and other things rather than other traffic cost a great more in total dollars than fixing the roads would.
We won't vote to raise our taxes though, its easier to pay these costs in drips and drabs and never realize what they add up to. I don't know where he got his numbers, I suspect instinctively he was correct however.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
I mean you want all of those packets lined up in an uncongested row with less than 45ms latency between them, with no more than 1 in 200 packets missing? Fine. Pay for it. That's my argument.
Sure, and my argument is basically that most users want that and so most ISPs feel obliged to try and provide it. Rather than taxing it as an exceptional demand on the service it should (and is) considered a normal part of it.
There is actually a third option for ISPs - blame the website. A few ISPs in the UK have been caught doing that. They throttle bandwidth to iPlayer and YouTube so they don't work properly any more but make sure that when you do speed tests on those sites everything looks normal. Most of them have had to admit it now, with BT openly preventing users from using iPlayer on anything but the lowest quality in the evenings. The BBC for their part plan to bring in a traffic light scoring system for ISPs to rate compatibility with iPlayer.
My ISP, Virgin, throttles and caps like mad. It doesn't help them that much, YouTube and iPlayer are still broken. In fact their policy makes things worse in some ways. Their caps only apply during 10AM-3PM and 4PM-9PM, so all the heavy downloaders configure their P2P clients to pause during those times and kick back in at 9PM on the dot. Sure enough at 9PM there is a massive lag spike and anything interactive or requiring timely delivery of packets grinds to a halt.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
There are any number of ISP evils; I've seen them do devilish things to data, everything from deep-packet inspection to aperiodic protocol throttling. What if you could plan, rather than expect everything to fall in line? Queue up a movie for playing later tonight. Listen to music - instead of on-demand like Pandora - from your local cache? *VASTLY* fewer demands on infrastructure take place with just a bit of planning.
Instead, designs have to be done for peak loads, and with smartphones, on-demand media (and lots of it possibly *per end node/address*, vast amounts of infrastructure must be put into place.
It's like the plumbing conundrum of the unbelievable load that occurs when everyone flushes at once. Space thing out, queue things up, and the infrastructure is small, because the duty-cycle of transaction is small in engineering terms. Go for the max possible and pipes explode, or expectations are unfulfilled.
I'm NOT a fan of telcos and ISPs. Rather, I understand that their infrastructure faces genuine design issues based on their historical build-out and their capital and regulatory hurdles. Tax those in a hurry. You want first class seats? Pay for them. The rest of us can get by in coach. It's a historical issue that's not easily assuaged, this analog-is-now-digital data. Someone clever might come along and find a better way to mesh things, but not without a massive retrofit, and a costly one.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
I see your point, I just think that we should be trying to push technology forward and make things better for everyone. Arguably watching video online isn't high on the priority list, but a lot of people do enjoy doing it and it has created a lot of new business opportunities in our economy.
IMHO it is better to upgrade out way out rather than trying to cut back. Bandwidth isn't like oil where there is a finite supply and getting more becomes progressively harder, or like water where there are considerable on-going costs for treatment and delivery. We have ducts to put extra cables in, although often you don't have to because you can get more bandwidth simply by upgrading the equipment at either end (fibre optic is a prime example).
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
There are other implications, depending on jurisdiction. Internationally, there are the theories of right-of-way purchase, easement leasing/lets, jurisdictional taxes and other impositions.
FTTH is a wonderful idea, but bottlenecks upstream unless there's a diversity of destinations or unbelievably fast routing, CDN tuning, and so forth.
In the US, there are 43 state public utility regulatory agencies to deal with, then the Feds. Oil is a finite resource, and its price bears no resemblence to supply-- it's a charade and propaganda machine.
Yes, there is dark fiber, but the cost of pulling new cable or fiber through a conduit is roughly the same cost of a totally new run in many places. That's one cost. The next cost are major interconnects, routers, CDN stacks, and so forth.
In an altruistic and ideal world, bandwidth is cheap and there are many providers to choose from. In reality, utilities are supposed to act as a conduit while providing commodity-cost infrastructure. The balance has tipped in favor of the ISPs/telcos and perverts the initial meaning of utility, how its assets are disbursed, by whom, and for how much. Lobbying efforts now mean that the ISPs/telcos get their way, because we desperately need them, as much in a way as basic electricity itself. 'Twould be lovely if we could get one rate that did what we wanted with high quality at a reasonable cost.
A small fraction of users, however, are disproportionate consumers of packets, or need special delivery handling options for those packets. Rather than build their needs into the baseline cost of what we all pay, I say: make them pay.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
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And yet every data cap we've seen is pathetically low.
No argument from me on that. Experience tells us that they are not likely to be implemented appropriately. For reasons I detail below, data caps are never a friendly policy.
If their pipes are clogged, then you throttle traffic from the people that have used the most data in the last time epoch (for whatever time duration you choose - one hour, one day, one week, one month).
Your solution is a perfectly sane and reasonable means of traffic management but you haven't addressed the economic problem of opportunity cost for the carrier. You are thinking of it only from the customer perspective. Whether you throttle traffic or not, there is a cost to someone being forced to wait. If the carrier doesn't provision enough services, quality of service will be impacted negatively and customers will (when possible) seek out competing services. However provisioning more services costs very significant amounts of capital. The carrier doesn't actually want customers that use huge amounts of bandwidth. They would rather these heavy use customers go away. Most businesses have customers like this - a small percentage of your revenue but a huge percentage of your headaches. Data caps are one way to, ahem... encourage, these customers to take their business elsewhere.
Bear in mind that I'm not remotely arguing that data caps are desirable or good policy for consumers, merely that they aren't actually without reason. Honestly they are *exactly* the response I would expect from the carrier. Raising rates on a few problem customers is a LOT cheaper solution than building infrastructure. I guarantee you the telecoms have done the cost/benefit analysis and the results speak for themselves.
It has nothing to do with network neutrality.
Sure it does. There is the supply side of network neutrality (affecting content providers) but there is also the demand side affecting consumers. We're talking about the demand side here. Any time a carrier shapes traffic they are necessarily choosing to prioritize one customer's data over another customer's data. The only difference is the party affected. By your logic we since Google sends the most data, we should throttle data from Google if there is saturation of the pipe. The logic is the same but you have to consider both the sender AND the receiver of any data.
I saw that for iOS, but where did you see they were doing it for Xcode?
I literally *can't* say where I recently heard an Apple representative say this in front of thousands of developers.
Although actually it's implied from combining the public knowledge that Apple announced App Store updates are gong to deltas, with the fact that XCode is in the App Store.
I also can't say it will be free instead of $5 going forward...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley