Comcast Not Counting Their Video Service Against Bandwidth Cap

tekgoblin writes something not quite worth rejoicing over. From the article: "Comcast Internet subscribers can rejoice. Comcast has recently announced that they will not be counting content streamed via their Comcast Xfinity App on the Xbox 360 against their bandwidth caps. Comcast claims that since the data is only traversing their internal Comcast network that it will not count towards your 250 GB limit a month." Comcast is claiming this does not violate net neutrality laws (and it very well may not); a number of folks are not very happy about it. I've always been perplexed by the large media interests of most U.S. last-mile providers.

Comments

Hosting providers to move on-net

[Anonymous Coward]

Netflix could simply run their service over Comcast's local network. Put a cache in every node.

Re:Hosting providers to move on-net

[tripleevenfall]

Netflix is really pissing me off, I'm switching to Qwikster.

Re:Hosting providers to move on-net

[firex726]

I think you misunderstood the concept here.

Comcast is saying they wont bill you for the data use for staying within their intranet basically.
Since you're going to one of THEIR servers, vs. someone else's.

Netflix cannot simply park a node on some Comcast fiber and get the same benefit, since it would not be going to a Comcast owned/operated server.
If I hosted a server from my own home (on Comcast) then if other Comcast subscribers connected to it, the BW usage would still count.

Re:Hosting providers to move on-net

[Anonymous Coward]

No, they said it's OK because it doesn't leave their network. That is true for any server attached directly to their network, whether it is operated by Comcast or not.

Re:Hosting providers to move on-net

[skids]

Easy out for Comcast there: a connection to a server owned by a separate entity would constitute a peering arrangement, with an associated SLA etc.

Now, for a small provider who's peering arrangments (or purchase if they cannot qualify as a peer) consititute a large chunk of their network expense (sometimes even more than half) exempting local network traffic from bandwidth caps is justifiable.

For Comcast -- well, I'd venture that running an entire distribuition system to millions of customers dwarfs the expense of peering. They are using an excuse that only applies to "small guys" to justify behavior which is aimed at squashing competition for their other services. They are only incidentally a bandwidth purchase aggregator, and should not be allowed to use this pretense.

Re:Hosting providers to move on-net

[networkBoy]

soooo
What if I set up a P2P mesh with others on my same segment of a comcast network.
That data should not count against caps either, right? I've not only not left their network, I've even stayed in the same segment. If I had comcast I would actually try to do this and since they would inevitably say I exceeded my BW limits I would then sue them. It'd be fun times.
-nB

Re:Hosting providers to move on-net

[Anonymous Coward]

> Easy out for Comcast there: a connection to a server owned by a separate entity would constitute a peering arrangement, with an associated SLA etc.

No. Hosts can't peer with routers, only routers can peer with routers. As long as the server doesn't act as a router you could not reasonably call a connection to it a peering arrangement.

Re:Hosting providers to move on-net

[s73v3r]

Yet, by their example, it shouldn't. The traffic doesn't leave the Comcast network, so it shouldn't be billed.

This is them trying to give their shitty service an unfair advantage. And I hope they get fucked hard for it.

Re:Hosting providers to move on-net

[BitZtream]

Which they already do to some extent, as does Apple, Microsoft and anyone that uses Akamai. I've seen the machines that sit in the local TimeWarner data center for local distributions of iTunes content.

This is the way it should be.

An old ISP, I can't remember which one, but one of the original/early internet providers, I want to say PSI? anyway, their policy was free peering to anyone, all you had to do was pay local loop charges, no bandwidth fees, but no transiting across their network to the Internet.

This to me is fair and pushes for proper network design. Distributed links to your peers to balance load and provide redundancy is the way the Internet is supposed to work, distributing the data distribution points also falls right into 'thats how the Internet is supposed to be"

Re:Hosting providers to move on-net

[viperidaenz]

You'd sue them for what? For doing exactly what they told you they would do and that you agreed to by using and paying for their service?

Re:Hosting providers to move on-net

[Nogami_Saeko]

So any data transfers (file sharing, etc) between customers within Comcast's internal network shouldn't count against bandwidth either?

Cool!

Re:Hosting providers to move on-net

[HapSlappy_2222]

Yours isn't the only post using this argument, but it's not a very good one.

You, and many others, seem to be referring to this situation: a node not owned by Comcast is sharing data across Comcast's network to a node that is also not owned by Comcast. By definition, the data stops residing on Comcast's owned network equipment at both ends of the connection (not in terms of network addressing, but in terms of hardware that Comcast owns and controls) constituting two third parties utilizing Comcast's network infrastructure. Unless you're willing to concede that by assigning your box an IP, Comcast owns it, I don't understand how you can say the end-nodes are physically part of Comcast's network, except in a uselessly semantic fashion.

None of these examples are analogous to the summarized example, which is: A node owned and controlled by Comcast is providing data (in this case, streaming content) across Comcast's network to a node outside their network; the data only leaves at one end of the connection, constituting a delivery from Comcast to the end-user.

Incidentally, I agree, in principle, that Comcast shouldn't have to charge a customer for the second type of bandwidth usage if they don't want to, especially if the customer is already paying for the streaming service (trust me, they are). That would be like forcing a burger joint to charge their walk-in customers rent, just like they charge the Redbox machine out front.

Whether this causes anti-trust or net neutrality etc. isn't a call I'm qualified to make, but the scenarios you and a few others have brought up just aren't analogous.

Re:Hosting providers to move on-net

[eldorel]

I'm not sure you thought this argument through completely.

If you bring you laptop into my office and plug into a network jack, you are now part of my network.
I (or my equipment) have assigned you an ip that is part of my network block, and you are now occupying space in that block.
As long as you have a locally addressed IP on my network, you are part of that network. Period.

In the above examples, the user is using an IP provided by comcast, and as such is part of comcast's network.
The bandwidth caps should only apply to traffic that incurs additional bandwidth charges.
According to comcast, Internal traffic ( within the netblock they control ) doesn't cost comcast anything extra. This is why they aren't applying their services to the Cap.
The same should apply to third parties who are willing to purchase space within the comcast network.

Re:Hosting providers to move on-net

[skids]

No. Hosts can't peer with routers, only routers can peer with routers.

You're mistaking technical terminology for business terminology. If it's not a peering relationship, one side has to be paying the other. So in that case, Comcast makes it unprofitable by charging the content provider for the "uplink." Same difference.

Re:Hosting providers to move on-net

[HapSlappy_2222]

The best car analogy I can think of: Let's say I'm running a shuttle service, where you pay me to drive you an allotted number of miles per month (bandwidth) in my car (network). Let's also say I run a sight-seeing service (streaming/television service), using the same car. When you ride in my car, you are, of course, a part of the overall system, occupying a space, which is obvious and literal, but you do NOT own the car, or even the piece your butt is occupying; it's still mine. You're paying me to use it.

Since I'm running a business and can set my own pricing however I think best, I can decide that the mileage used for the sight-seeing service should not be deducted from your shuttle service allotment, too; it is my right to charge however I want (in fact, I'm kind of a double-dipping dick if I charge you for both). On the other hand, if you want me to drive you to the supermarket, even if I was going there anyway for purposes of my own, I can fairly deduct the mileage from your allotment, because I'm still providing a service to you. Even if you make sure you ONLY go places I was going to go anyway (put your server directly on a Comcast node) you're still using my service, and should be paying me for that service. You absolutely do NOT own the piece of my car that you're occupying, and I definitely am NOT prohibited from charging you for my services just because it "doesn't cost me extra".

The entire argument changes when I'm the only one in the city who owns a car, and it's far too expensive for other companies to build their own cars (network infrastructure). At this point it's about forcing the single car owner (or the few owners, as the case may be, as with Comcast, Cox, CenturyLink, etc) to charge fair prices for use of the car to business people who ALSO run sight-seeing services in the interest of having a competitive market. When you factor in the inelasticity of something like internet access/bandwidth, it gets even more vital that there is a level playing field.

The users are not entitled to better deals out of the gate; competitors are just ensured they won't be screwed, which THEN tends to drive prices down as competition increases. See Ma Bell for an example of how this precedent was set years ago.

Re:Hosting providers to move on-net

[eldorel]

It appears that you are incorrectly assuming that ownership has bearing on traffic costs and routing overhead.

The simple fact is that the users are both already renting service and space on that network.
Traffic between two people on the same node never hits the gateway, and thus doesn't cause any additional overhead. (unless the provider is using hubs instead of switches at the node level, which would be rather ill advised.)

Once you cross from one node to another, a small amount of routing overhead is incurred, but no more than the comcast servers generate.

The only difference between a third party server hosted in comcast's network and comcast's servers running in the same network is the name of the owner.
This means that charging for traffic to the third party while not charging for traffic to the comcast server is preferential treatment, and this probably qualifies as a net neutrality violation.

That is the meat of the argument you are arguing against.

Now, you can try to argue that the network neutrality rules are unfair or cause undue harm to the isp, but the alternative is companies like comcast lowering the caps to the point that using any other service is prohibitive.
( imagine a 500MB cap for data transfer with $20/Mb overage charges, but comcast hosts a search engine, video/music streaming services, a voip telephone service, and an exclusive "Peering agreement" with facebook that don't apply to the caps. What would happen to smaller service providers that want to compete? )

Also, it's been established that indirect collusion is the standard for larger competing isps, so they would actually get away with this as long as they implemented it in small steps.
Afterall, "If Comcast is profiting from it, why shouldn't we?"

Re:Hosting providers to move on-net

[nahdude812]

It will take a year or two, but all metered ISP's will be adopting this concept that receiving some content costs you more than receiving other content, with perfectly "valid" technical reasons such as described (it's within our own network, it costs us less, and we pass that savings on to our customers, look how benevolent we are!).

Using Comcast as a generic metered ISP, and Netflix as a generic high-bandwidth content site: soon Comcast will let services like Netflix host a node within Comcast's network, for a price. That price will be like most hosted services, including flat monthly colocation costs, external bandwidth usage pricing, and so forth. Perfectly reasonable. Something tells me it'll also have a requirement for disclosure of customer demographics, and things like that.

Meanwhile home bandwidth allowances will be reduced while typical data usage patterns increase (see the established pattern in this regard with SMS and mobile telcos). So services like Netflix will have no choice but to locate a node on Comcast's network, or else Netflix's customers won't be able to afford to give up the bandwidth required to use the service. Prices will go up on those node hosting costs until $0.30 on the dollar paid to Netflix is going to Comcast for the privilege of not burning up the consumer's metered connection. Every other major ISP will be the same way. Customers of unmetered ISPs (only small guys at this point) won't pay a lower price to Netflix, by this point Comcast's terms of hosting will require that Netflix charge the same price to both Comcast and non-Comcast customers (so that their competitors can't advertise that you get a discount on Netflix for buying their service instead, also Netflix probably will pocket that extra anyway).

In the end, instead of Netflix having to pay to have their service unthrottled for Comcast customers (violation of neutrality laws), they'll have to pay to have their service be usable at all (not a violation of neutrality laws, just the only practical response to artificial limits created to produce this outcome). Neutrality laws need to state that no service may receive preferential treatment in terms of either quality of service, impact on the customer's bill, bandwidth allowances, or any other manner which would allow one service to be distinguished from another service in a positive manner. Anything at all short of that just creates a more convoluted path to a non-neutral network.

It's like how credit card companies prevent you from charging a surcharge for using credit cards. But you can have a cash discount. Same thing, different name.

Re:Hosting providers to move on-net

[HapSlappy_2222]

Actually, that's really not what I'm assuming; rather, I'm saying that traffic costs and routing overhead wouldn't matter to this argument at all in a normal, healthy market. What a company pays for it's infrastructure, overhead, traffic, etc has no bearing on the prices they set (other providing a minimum benchmark to cover fixed costs). In a fair market, they could charge themselves, their competitors, their partners or their customers whatever prices the market would bear, and truck along happily until a competitor offers better prices and/or better services, forcing them to innovate or die (yay healthy market!).

Don't get me wrong; Comcast should NOT be allowed to do this as things stand right now. I'm pointing out that this is an anti-competitive practice that should be legislated into oblivion to protect consumers from an oligopoly. The arguments of "it costs Comcast the same for my traffic as their own" is a solid and logical point, but it still doesn't force (or even give an incentive to) Comcast to set their prices that way; they NEED to be forced to do so. Otherwise, all they're doing is capitalizing on lower costs for themselves, which isn't an evil thing by default. Comcast can easily see which of their equipment is used, and which is not, and still set prices according to their whims, even though the traffic doesn't cost them more (which is apparently what they're doing right now). Net neutrality may already force this upon Comcast, but it doesn't sound like it, if Comcast is doing what they're doing without getting slapped. So, the laws (net neutrality, anti-competitive safeguards, etc) need to be modified to prohibit this practice in an oligopoly situation, and an avenue for a speedy bitch-slap should be put in place to stop any of the other sneaky shit they try to push through a loophole.

I think you're spot on with your preferential treatment argument, and thanks for succinctly bringing the meat to the fore, so to speak. It absolutely IS self-preferential treatment, but that's the way it normally works. Exploiting low costs to your company's advantage is one of the biggies in gaining a competitive edge. In a truly competitive market it happens all the time, and it's not a bad practice at all; it's a great way to compete on things like volume (large or small), marginal profits, shipping costs, etc. Hell, I do it at my print shop; there's no way in hell I'd charge myself the same price for a print that I do for my wholesale customers, who in turn get better rates than my retail buyers, even though the per-print cost to me is the exact same in all three scenarios. I'd bet the farm that most other firms tier their prices for their services in some some similar fashion.

The problem is that Comcast is NOT in a normal, broad, competitive market; there are only a few infrastructure owners who can set prices in all sorts of sneaky ways with no competitors willing or able to keep them in check. The big fuckers ALL do this (Comcast is just the front page firm of the day), and each time they try a new tactic that lowers the base ability of other firms to compete (like, increasing pipe usage costs for everybody except Comcast...) it should be legislated to hell for the "cartels" (Comcast et. al.) in the first place, not rolled out to all competitors (path of least resistance). They need to know that the rules for normal competition do not apply to them due to their control over the market, any more than they do for the phone company, cell towers, the gas company, the power company, the water company, or any other industry with an established infrastructure that makes it difficult (or impossible) to enter the market otherwise. At least, not until the entire infrastructure is state-owned (at which point they lose the competitive edge AND the ability to recoup from their initial investment; this would be BAD for the Comcasts of the world). This is the only way they'll stop abusing normal business practices from their position of power.

As for your example of Comca

Re:Hosting providers to move on-net

[eldorel]

Looks like we are actually on the same page then.

Thanks for the discussion.

Re:Hosting providers to move on-net

[hairyfeet]

I hate to break the news to ya but pretty much ALL the cablecos are doing this, they just don't talk about it. I use the cableco's VOIP? No cap, I use Vonage? counts against the cap. Same goes for movies, shows, hell anything. if I use what they want me to? Don't count. if i use what they don't? Counts.

I don't see how anyone can argue this isn't classic bundling and antitrust but considering our entire government is now as corrupt as any banana republic I doubt anybody will say or do shit. Actually i have a little more respect for the banana repubs, at least there the common man can bribe judges too, here its only megacorps.

UVerse?

[realityimpaired]

I'm pretty sure that's what the competition is called in the US... they don't count their video/vod streams against your monthly data cap either, do they?

I know that their competing services offered north of the border don't count... you'd blow through the monthly cap in less than a day if it did. So how is this any different? They're offering a VOD service and saying it doesn't count against your monthly cap.

Re:UVerse?

[Sir_Sri]

Long before they had VOD services here up north your plan always stipulated that traffic on rogers or bell networks didn't count against your bandwidth. That even applies to mobiles on rogers for sure (not sure about any of the others).

It was a hold over from the days of very expensive internet with modems etc and people didn't like the idea of having to pay more money to look at their bill or the like online. Now it has some other implications.

Oh and Rogers does have a 250 GB/month plan ($100/month) and 120 and 150 GB plans. Which are overall reasonable plans on capacity and speed, terrible on price, but well, that's the price we pay for living in a large country slightly larger than the US but with the population of california.

Re:UVerse?

[dkf]

Which are overall reasonable plans on capacity and speed, terrible on price, but well, that's the price we pay for living in a large country slightly larger than the US but with the population of california.

California has about 5 million more people than Canada; it's so large that it would count as a medium-sized European country (with a very strong economy too).

Re:UVerse?

[rtaylor]

Call to cancel your Rogers service (mean it, be familiar with Teksavvy or other alternatives) and you may find you get offered a 30% discount and elimination of the modem rental fee.

Re:UVerse?

[realityimpaired]

Oh and Rogers does have a 250 GB/month plan ($100/month) and 120 and 150 GB plans. Which are overall reasonable plans on capacity and speed, terrible on price, but well, that's the price we pay for living in a large country slightly larger than the US but with the population of california.

*shrugs* I pay $42/mo for 12meg service with a 300GB cap from TekSavvy... Rogers doesn't win the game there.

Also, the "population density" argument is a false argument... yes, the total population is only about 35 million in the 2nd largest country in the world, giving one of the lowest aggregate population densities in the world, but the bulk of the population in this country is within 100km of the US border. When you discount the huge tracts of largely unpopulated arctic and tundra, Canada's population density is actually about equal to the US.

Re:UVerse?

[Sponge Bath]

...they don't count their video/vod streams against your monthly data cap either, do they?

Correct. Step by step, major ISPs are transforming your internet connection into just another cable TV connection. Expect fees and restrictions to "outside" content to increase in an escalating war of combined telecom/content providers.

Re:UVerse?

[Anonymous Coward]

>I pay $42/mo for 12meg service with a 300GB cap from TekSavvy...

That service is now 18/0.5 thanks to Rogers also upgrading wholesaler at least a month ago.

Re:UVerse?

[MightyYar]

I think that was his point - Canada has approximately the same population as California (less, actually), but spread over a much larger area... thus telecommunications become more expensive.

In reality, though, the inhabited portion of Canada isn't all that big, and it is fairly densely populated. Something like 75% of Canadians live in a strip 100-miles wide on the US-Canadian border. That's about 1500 miles, so 150,000 square miles. Which happens to be almost exactly California's land area :)

Re:UVerse?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah it's definitely a common practice. Personally I know that Telstra (one of the major carriers in Australia) used to give 'unmetered' access to their GameArena network (premium game/voice services) - so if you were playing games hosted there or using Ventrilo it wouldn't count towards your monthly cap.

They may still do it but I switched to Internode a while back.

Re:UVerse?

[nitehawk214]

Which are overall reasonable plans on capacity and speed, terrible on price, but well, that's the price we pay for living in a large country slightly larger than the US but with the population of california.

California has about 5 million more people than Canada; it's so large that it would count as a medium-sized European country (with a very strong economy too).

And it's government is just as broke as a lot of medium sized European countries too.

Re:UVerse?

[rogueippacket]

Don't forget, the Loyalty and Retention teams actually get paid more if they "save" your account, even if it means giving you a deep discount. So don't be afraid to push them, either!

Re:UVerse?

[jellomizer]

The trick is that Comcast is, that their service uses their "Internal Network" to give a "Value Add" service to "Their Customers", So in theory you are not Using your Internet Access to access the content thus doesn't affect your bandwidth cap. Because you bandwidth cap is for data that leaves Comcast's "Internal Network".

The rules would change, if you could access the data outside the Comcast network.

Re:UVerse?

[Registered Coward v2]

I'm pretty sure that's what the competition is called in the US... they don't count their video/vod streams against your monthly data cap either, do they?

I know that their competing services offered north of the border don't count... you'd blow through the monthly cap in less than a day if it did. So how is this any different? They're offering a VOD service and saying it doesn't count against your monthly cap.

What we're seeing is the second shot in the war to monetize bandwidth. the bandwidth owners don't care so much about how much is used, IMHO, as to who makes the money of the bandwidth. Being dumb pipe is a low margin game relative to that content providers can make; so they want to ensure they get a cut of that revenue as well. Caps were first put in place to get people to used to the idea that content costs money - no they can move them to their "no cap" services and get them to subscribe to the appropriate Xfinity services. That's why they own content as well as pipes and fight attempts to provide low cost alternatives - they're not worried about losing internet access subscribers as much as losing subscribers to higher value services such as HBO if they can purchase that, without worrying about caps, directly from HBO.

Re:UVerse?

[Anonymous Coward]

And it's government is just as broke as a lot of medium sized European countries too.

At least Canada still has its AAA credit rating--unlike some very large North America countries. :)

Re:UVerse?

[KingMotley]

And how does it compare to the US when you discount the huge tracts of largely unpopulated deserts and sparsely populated farming land in the US?

Re:UVerse?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm pretty sure that's what the competition is called in the US

It's illegal. What they're basically doing is saying, "If you buy our Internet access and wish to use an Internet-based video service, it must be our service or we'll limit the amount of video you may watch."

Re:UVerse?

[NeutronCowboy]

Someone mod this guy up. This is exactly what this is all about. It is about the central core of network neutrality, it is about making sure that no one can ever threaten the business model of the incumbent telcos, and it is about turning the Internet into TV. And it is the entire reason behind the marriage of content and ISPs.

The Internet is dead. Long live TV.

I just hope Sonic.net can grow their network fast enough so that I can get more than a 1.5 Mbit connection from them.

Re:UVerse?

[CastrTroy]

Which is why these arguments about "look how big my country is" are so stupid. People living in Toronto or surrounding areas have no less reason to expect quality, well priced, telecommunications than those in any other place around the world. You can't expect telecom to be cheap if you live in Nunavut, but nothing is cheap up there. The one exception I can think about is cellular service. Where the usual method of selling is to give you free local calling wherever you are in the country. And they make a point of giving you coverage just about everywhere in the country. That is expensive. However, I'm happy to see that there are a couple new cellular providers that offer in-city service only, which is really cheap for both voice and data. The downside is that you have to pay fees as soon as you go outside the city, but some people do that so infrequently, and don't need their phone that much when they are out of town anyway, that it is well worth it.

Re:UVerse?

[realityimpaired]

And how does it compare to the US when you discount the huge tracts of largely unpopulated deserts and sparsely populated farming land in the US?

About the same. The population density in Toronto is about the same as the population density in Los Angeles or New York. NYC and LA are larger cities than TO, but when you look at the land area they cover, they're about the same. Cities don't magically become twice as densely populated when you cross the 49th, it's just that there's more cities in the US, and particularly, more megacities like NY, LA, or Chicago.

Re:UVerse?

[cpu6502]

Yep.

Comcast's move gives it an unfair competitive advantage against other streaming services (amazon, netflix, hulu) that are limited to ~250 GB per month. It's not just a violation of net neutrality but also a violation of Antitrust (antimonopoly) laws, and I figure it's only a matter of time until Comcast gets sued.

Re:UVerse?

[cpu6502]

California supposedly has the 3rd largest economy. BACK TO TOPIC:

Comcast's move gives it an unfair competitive advantage against other streaming services (amazon, netflix, hulu) that are limited to ~250 GB per month. It's not just a violation of net neutrality but also a violation of Antitrust (antimonopoly) laws, and I figure it's only a matter of time until Comcast gets sued.

Re:UVerse?

[arekin]

I think you misunderstand, they are giving you a service that is already provided to you without bandwidth cap via a box already in your home (your main cable box) without charging you for additional equipment charges for additional boxes. You cannot access VOD content without a video package, so they are simply providing an alternate means to view this content. If this was something that could ave been litigated then Amazon, Netflix, and Hulu would have done so years ago when on demand content became available.

Re:UVerse?

[compro01]

but well, that's the price we pay for living in a large country slightly larger than the US but with the population of california.

Uh huh. It's not like 16% of the country is in one city.

Or that half the population is in the top 10 cities.

We're far less spread out than blind division would indicate.

Re:UVerse?

[Sir_Sri]

If you look at the US they have the same thing though, 200 million people that ring the borders of the country about 100km deep and then the interior. Canada has a dense strip in the windsor to montreal corridor, and hooking up everyone else is a bugger of a problem, which is what lots of places face. It's the long tracts of emptyness that link up the one dense strip in ontario/quebec to the (kind of) dense bits in mannitoba, alberta and BC. Where we have density we're about the same as other places, it's that we have dense blobs splattered around which makes everything a bloody pain. And of course winter, and an anti competitive regulatory environment etc.

Also, the aforementioned 250 GB cap from rogers is a 50-75 megabit service, so who wins depends on what you want. They rate it at 50 Mb but I regularly get up around 72 (including right now in fact), but either way, 4x faster with a different cap is a fairly different service.

Re:UVerse?

[Anonymous Coward]

Long before they had VOD services here up north your plan always stipulated that traffic on rogers or bell networks didn't count against your bandwidth. That even applies to mobiles on rogers for sure (not sure about any of the others).

It was a hold over from the days of very expensive internet with modems etc and people didn't like the idea of having to pay more money to look at their bill or the like online. Now it has some other implications.

If you're talking about gigabytes/terabytes of backhaul data traffic, rather than voice, it's not a holdover, it's an artefact of peering arrangements.

The more dead USENET gets, the more poorly people try to reinvent it. While not designed for it, USENET ended up being a pretty effective edge caching service. If an ISP's customers are going to collectively download hundreds of terabytes of binary data a day, it's a lot more efficient for the ISP to draw down one terabyte of "everything" to a big cache, from which the ISP's subscribers can consume "locally".

Re:UVerse?

[Sir_Sri]

And less huge gaps between them. Canadas big cities are the 'greater Toronto area', Montreal, Vancouver and then a significant dropoff in size when you get to Calgary and Edmonton.

It's not that we don't have density, we do, it's just in very disconnected blobs and some of those blobs have nothing in between (especially as you move west)

Re:UVerse?

[Anonymous Coward]

Except I bet you that they would count the data if you were backing up to your buddies computer everynight and you both have comcast internet.

Re:UVerse?

[Sir_Sri]

If you want to connect toronto to anything else though that's where costs start to rise. The windsor to montreal corridor is pretty manageable, trying to connect to thunder bay, winnipeg or farther east/west is where things start to fall apart fast.

Having a 'toronto only' provider is as you say, one way around this. But I'm not in toronto, so that doesn't really do me any good.

The marginal cases do drive up costs too. If you only ever had to supply paris, London, etc with telecoms it wouldn't be so bad, but when you have to connect sudbury to toronto well, there aren't that many people in sudbury anymore, but that sort of thing, all the random little tendrils to the telecom network are what make it costly, especially if you separate out toronto to its own thing.

Re:UVerse?

[pixelpusher220]

The problem is that Comcast is using their monopoly of being the network provider to further their media business interests.

Other companies wanting to compete, ala Netflix, are at a significant disadvantage if their movies count against the cap but Comcast's don't.

It's a clear anti-trust issue unless Comcact allows Netflix movies to also not count against the cap.

Re:UVerse?

[networkBoy]

[offtopic, I know] We were fifth largest in the world for a long time, but have slid quite a bit in the last 5 years. Not sure where we are now with the Eurozone issues, but I think we're at 12th or so. Really sad thing is that our budget is nearly all legislated (something like ~70%), so all this bitching about balanced budgets is really the voters fault.
case in point:
1998, economy is on a meteoric rise because of the building dotcom bubble. Ballot measure passes that dictates a percentage of the revenues from income taxes will go to education. The catch? it's a ratchet, it can't go down, even if revenues do. So by 2000 revenues have peaked and now start crashing down, education budget stays at the high level, percentage of budget consumed starts growing to much larger percentages than "promised".
There are plenty of other laws passed by ballot measure that are similar, or dictate a fixed % or fixed $ amount.

This is what Heinlein warned us of when he said the people will vote for bread and circuses.
[/offtopic]

As to the Comcast issue, it is no different than AT&T's UVerse either. In fact, I think UVerse is more guilty.
Comcast started as a cable TV provider, and AFAIK it is still billing it's IPTV/DTV offerings as cable TV, separate from Internet connectivity. As long as they bill for video service as a feature add then I don't see it as so much of an issue.
I take more issue with bandwidth caps in general, or the costs of going over.
I have AT&T, I get 250 gog a month. If I go over it is $10/50 gig ($0.20/gig). My ISP charges me $4/TB on overages from my web server ($0.004/gig). They are gouging on bandwidth charges.
-nB

Re:UVerse?

[MightyYar]

Which is why these arguments about "look how big my country is" are so stupid.

I don't think they are stupid at all... the per-user costs do go up as the population density goes down, all other things being equal.

It also depends on your subsidy system. In the US, phone and electric service for rural users is subsidized by all other users. We do not do the same for internet or cable television. In other countries, rural users are subsidized with tax money or not at all. In the US, cable companies pay every individual municipality a franchise fee - but that isn't the case in much of the world. In some countries, telecommunications lines travel upon public or "free" rights of way, and in other countries the land has to be acquired privately. These will all change the telecommunications rates, and make it very very difficult to compare rates in different countries.

Re:UVerse?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow robbers(rogers) is totally ripping you guys off. 250GB is 62$/mo here in BC on Shaw. 90$ gets you 750GB and 110$ gets you 1TB.

Shaw doesn't offer VoD on their internet however, their VoD is entirely over the motorola cable boxes.

Telus on the other hand, I've had TelusTV and how TelusTV works was the TV streams are multicast (and completely murder third party routers like WRT54G), you initiate a join using your TV box, and if you were to initiate a join to the same multicast address while the TV box is tuned to it (like with VLC) you can watch the TV on your device if you set the buffer to about 10 seconds. All that was required is putting a regular fast ethernet or gigabit ethernet switch between the tv box and the supplied adsl modem so that the multicast would be relayed to all your equipment.

The reason the TelusTV data never counted for data was because if you subscribed to telusTV, they didn't count the data at all. They run off different ports at the DSLAM.

Re:UVerse?

[s73v3r]

If you want to connect toronto to anything else though that's where costs start to rise.

No more than any other similar sized city in the world.

Re:UVerse?

[s73v3r]

The trick is, I don't buy it, and think they're full of shit. By that measure, if Netflix has a caching server inside Comcast's network, then that traffic shouldn't count against a cap either.

Re:UVerse?

[Bucky24]

Sonic DSL still runs on AT&T lines (they resell it from AT&T), so if all you can get is 1.5 from them you'll have to hope they manage to port Fusion out to your local CO (and that you have access to it) if you're to get any better connection.

(Disclaimer: I work for one of Sonic's reselling partners. We resell from them what they resell from AT&T)

Re:UVerse?

[realityimpaired]

I don't think they are stupid at all... the per-user costs do go up as the population density goes down, all other things being equal.

Yes, but the point is that you don't need wireline telephone/DSL service to an uninhabited island north of the 60th parallel. Canada has a *huge* land area, but most of that land area is uninhabited, and the actual population distribution is pretty much the same as any other country: clumps of population with empty space between. Sure the fiber run from Calgary to Edmonton is longer than the fiber run from New York City to Jersey City, but you don't need to provide service to most of that empty space. It costs more to run that inter-city fiber due to the longer haul, but the cost of inter-city fiber is a comparatively small portion of the overall cost of providing service (especially DSL service, where an individual DSLAM can service a maximum of 48 customers, and can cost upwards of $10,000 per unit, depending on the make/model in use -- usually closer to $2,000 per unit, and sometimes even less in rural areas where they only offer ADSL1 service). When you consider that a single inter-city fiber run can service half a million people or more and only needs to be installed once (much lower fail rate than DSLAMs), it's a comparatively small part of the cost.

And for *really* rural areas, where running fiber is not an option, they can still service the area using a satellite uplink. In fact, in some northern communities in Canada, that's exactly what they *are* doing.

The population density argument doesn't fly for landline services. For something like cellular service, absolutely. It makes perfect sense, because there *are* huge tracts of uninhabited land where they need to provide service... in some parts of the country there's 100km of wheat fields between settlements, but they still have to cover it in case somebody needs to call an ambulance or a tow truck. But for wireline services, it's a red herring.

Re:UVerse?

[CastrTroy]

I often wonder why some ISP, probably not Comcast, because of a conflict of interest, as shown in this article, but some other ISP, wouldn't try to strike up a deal with Netflix, Hulu, and others to get servers inside their networks. They could cache the most popular movies, offer much faster and more reliable streaming, and decrease their bandwidth costs outside their network. Netflix doesn't even host their own servers to begin with, they are on Amazon's cloud, so I don't see how it would matter much to them where the servers are located.

Re:UVerse?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep.

Comcast's move gives it an unfair competitive advantage against other streaming services (amazon, netflix, hulu) that are limited to ~250 GB per month. It's not just a violation of net neutrality but also a violation of Antitrust (antimonopoly) laws, and I figure it's only a matter of time until Comcast gets sued.

How so? I can stream it through my Xbox360 or I can click my TV controller, switch to cable input, turn on cable box power, hit menu and watch my VOD movie.
Either way the data is staying inside my Comcast/Xfinity network.

Netflix on the other hand connects outside the Xfinity network to Netflix servers so it's using internet bandwidth versus intranet bandwidth. So they have every right to cap you.

Btw, if you stream movies on 2 xbox's via netflix 5+ hours a day you still won't hit your 250gb cap. You'll clear maybe 120GB. I know because it's happening in my house right now...

Re:UVerse?

[Anonymous Coward]

However, it is still a violation of network neutrality regardless of whether it's currently illegal. Therefore, it SHOULD be illegal even if it isn't.

The only reason they can provide this service without it affecting your bandwidth cap is that they control the network. Netflix and Hulu among others will still hit the bandwidth cap giving Comcast an unfair advantage by using their network to further their monopoly.

Re:UVerse?

[KingMotley]

Not exactly, or not even close. The population density of Toronto is 3,972.4 people per km^2 (10,287 per mi^2), while New York City is 10,429.6/km^2 (26,402.9/mi^2). I wouldn't call those "about the same". In fact, that would make Toronto the 118th densest city in the US. Perhaps you were comparing Toronto in people per km^2, and NYC in people per mi^2?

Re:UVerse?

[Anonymous Coward]

Should it be illegal to transfer data between two customers on the same service without touching the cap, since it's all "internal network"? Because it sounds like that's what you are arguing, that *all* traffic, both inbound and outbound, be charged to the customer's cap. So if someone views a lot of streaming video, they should also then be prevented from retrieving email from their ISP's servers (and yes, people do still use ISP email) if they've hit their cap? All because of some vague "anti-trust" claims?

Re:UVerse?

[arekin]

Then by your terms they should require that all services they offer count towards your bandwidth cap. That episode of Battlestar Galactica on syfy, yeah we have to count that even though its part of the video service you pay for. Sorry man, doesn't work that way. Your on demand service is provided as part of your video package. Your Xbox is acting as a customer owned cable box, not as a streaming video service. Want a streaming video service, they have that, http://xfinitytv.comcast.net/ and guess what, it counts towards your data cap just like other services do.

Re:UVerse?

[bongey]

Actually UVerse does count their own video service against the service.
If you have UVerse with-out video the cap is 150GB with video it is 250 GB.
I had though the same thing but called multiple times. AT&T is a little smarter in the legal department.
Comcast is opening themselves to a lawsuit. By not counting their own video service, this would be anti-competitive/ anti-trust. Especially if they are the only Internet/cable provider in the area.

Re:UVerse?

[realityimpaired]

that's a bit odd.... not surprising, but odd.

Bell Canada's "FibeTV" service is essentially the same technology as UVerse. It's IPTV, with the IPTV traffic separated onto a 2nd VLAN from the Internet traffic over DSL, and doesn't count against your monthly cap. Their HD streams are encoded at 5.5mbit, which makes this a good thing: 3 HD streams at the same time = 16.5mbit/s of data use, times 1 hour = 59400 million bits. divide by 8 = 7.425GByte of data transferred. Multiply that 3h of TV watching by 30 days in a month, and you're at 222.75GB of data, just for watching what would be considered an "average" amount of TV in a month.

Unless ATT's using a stupidly low bitrate for their HD streams, then there's no way the average user could watch TV without going over the 250GB/mo cap.

Re:UVerse?

[bongey]

Yes I thought so too.The support pages for AT&T UVerse say it counts.
Still I think there is going to be lawsuit somewhere down the road.

Maybe they have special counter for their own traffic in Z mod 100 .

Re:UVerse?

[Sir_Sri]

Well in russia maybe.

Our telecoms infrastructure ends up being a tree, with a mainline for a couple of areas and then branches off to all the little dots of inhabited places. In the US and europe it's basically a bush or a grid, where those branches connect to other trunks. Each of those branches is fairly expensive, because it only services one area, for redundant service you actually need two branches to the same place rather than in other places where it's one from the north one from the south sort of thing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_100_largest_metropolitan_areas_in_Canada gives a great breakdown of our 'area' blobs. About half of the ontario cities form something approximating a reasonable line, which connects neatly to montreal, and could fairly logically extend to quebec city. Everything else is no where near. Sudbury, thunder bay,north bay etc. Once you get out of the windsor-montreal corridor (including ottawa, guelph peterborough and barrie which are sort of outliers but not really) it's a lot of randomly placed dots of 50-60k people here and there, and fairly lengthy connection westwards to thunder bay, winnipeg, regina, edmonton calgary etc.

We essentially have one loop that runs through ontario, with some major lines from toronto out to Alberta and BC, and everywhere else is basically latching onto those. The US has two major lines, one that runs more or less through the middle of the country and another further south that hits northern texas I think, so people in the north central and north west are kinda screwed but the northeast, - texas-californa is covered in layers.

the third of the country or so who live in southern ontario very much subsidize the telecom infrastructure to everywhere else (and up until recently, pretty much all of the other infrastructure too).

Re:UVerse?

[DinDaddy]

Without addressing whether it is equivalent, the way it is different is the U-verse service comes into your house through their gateway box and is fed to your U-verse DVR/tuner. The overall connection is roughly capable of 18Mbps (at my house anyway), and you then pay extra for some portion of that as your internet service (we opted for 6), with the remainder going towards their iptv and VOIP services.

This Comcast deal is not specific to their equipment, it is streaming through the third party Xbox, and therefore competing more directly with the other services on the Xbox like Netflix, Hulu etc. which arrive at your TV the same way. So Comcast is using the threat of increased cost to preferentially make their service more attractive.

Re:UVerse?

[gawbl]

I don't think so. I get lots of junk mail touting UVerse, and on my existing DSL they claim to deliver

one HD video
two lower-def videos
6Mb/s broadband

simultaneously.

IOW, the broadband throughput is kept separate from the video throughput. This is a farce; Uverse is all IP packets.

I've read elsewhere that modern DSL equipment on a short loop can handle approximately 20-25 Mb/s, but AT&T won't sell me that. The broadband component is capped to leave space for their video offerings.

Re:UVerse?

[nurb432]

It will also kill off p2p and the 'piracy issue' as if it costs more to download that movie then buy it or stream it on demand, who will get it off p2p?

I have always said its the only way to stop p2p, and that it will happen. Too bad it looks like i was right.

Re:UVerse?

[pixelpusher220]

on the same service

This the crux of the issue. They are not the same service. One is the ISP and one is content. Comcast is using their monopoly of the former to give an advantage to the latter.

Re:UVerse?

[Anonymous Coward]

i'd happily give sonic my money for real, non fucked up ports and throttling , 1.5Mbit

So, give them your money if you are reachable by them, so they can expand to where i am, so i can give my money and they can continue to expand and eventually drive every other company out of business (since people should value freedom more than bloated mbit numbers even if they only garantee 0.1%) so sonic can buy their assets and offer you 100mbit for real.

Re:UVerse?

[rtb61]

Let's just stop the how bug my country is argument right in it's tracks by pointing out the blinding obvious. My country is to big for broadband and to prove it we have none of the following many times of magnitude more expensive services, no public bitumen roads, no sewerage service, no storm water service, no water service and no mains power grid. WHAT, you have all these far, far more expensive services, than obviously you can afford the far, far cheaper fibre optic to the home service.

What comcast is offering is a content distribution monopoly, want to distribute your content on their network than you are going to have to pay them a, tah dah, "PUBLISHING" fee as a percentage of your income. Your game, your video, your music, not any bloody more, to distribute it on their network they are now demanding a percentage ownership of that content and demanding their cut for you to sell it.

Re:UVerse?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you misunderstand, they are giving you a service that is already provided to you without bandwidth cap via a box already in your home (your main cable box) without charging you for additional equipment charges for additional boxes. You cannot access VOD content without a video package, so they are simply providing an alternate means to view this content. If this was something that could ave been litigated then Amazon, Netflix, and Hulu would have done so years ago when on demand content became available.

Know how I know you're not a Comcast customer?

Because they DO charge you for the cable box and they will charge you extra for each additional box. They will give you a DTA converter (up to 3 of them) for free, but those do NOT provide VOD, nor do they provide HD channels. In fact, those little boxes do not even include all of the SD channels that you are paying for.

I am no longer a cable TV subscriber although I still have to use them for internet service.

Re:UVerse?

[cynyr]

now add 8-9 hours of google music, and some HQ youtube vids mixed in, and some e-mail, some skype video chat, etc etc etc and yep you can bump into that cap pretty easily.

WAN

[DigiShaman]

Cuts both ways? Does that mean I can FTP an unlimited amount of data to my neighbor that also has Comcast too? Where all part of one giant happy WAN, right?

Re:WAN

[nolife]

They have inconsistent acceptable use policies with data transfers or different definitions of public and local network bandwidth? I don't know, I am more confused now.

This is from http://customer.comcast.com/help-and-support/internet/common-questions-excessive-use/#excessive22 stating that the cap indeed still applies for XfinityTV.com which I would assume is on the Comcast local network just like the Xbox service. It was last updated Updated 3/9/2012.

Does the Comcast Usage Meter measure data that I consume from XfinityTV.com?

Yes. XfinityTV.com is an Internet web service from Comcast that you receive using your XFINITY Internet service. Comcast treats its affiliated services the same as it treats any unaffiliated services that you use your XFINITY Internet service to access. All data that travels over the public Internet on our high-speed Internet service (and all data that XFINITY Internet users send to one another using the service) is counted toward the monthly Data Usage Threshold, regardless of the source.

Re:WAN

[AngryDeuce]

You mean your Comcast ToS don't already preclude doing that on residential accounts? A friend of mine on Charter got hammered by them for running a media server off of his residential line (and allowing too many people access), they cut him off and told him to either lose the server or upgrade to a commercial account at twice the monthly cost. Didn't take long, either...

Either way, given that these corporations can force us to give up our right to sue, let alone anything else, I'm sure there are plenty of provisions within the Comcast ToS that specifically state you can't do anything they don't like, no matter what that is, from now until the end of time.

Re:WAN

[Z_A_Commando]

Since we don't know where XFinityTV.com is located, it's possible that the traffic is leaving the Comcast network at some point. As far as I am aware, you can't access the XFinity XBox app if you're not on the Comcast network. This is similar to ESPN3.com where the app is useless if your ISP doesn't pony up for access.

Re:WAN

[Anonymous Coward]

What about torrent peers that are on Comcast too? As long as our traffic doesn't traverse that core router they've designated as 'outside' it shouldn't count right?
Honestly it would have been easier for them if they didn't give a reason: "The Xfinity App doesn't count towards your monthly bandwidth. Conversation over. Next Question."

Re:WAN

[michael_cain]

The technical argument against that -- separate from what the terms-of-service agreement might say -- is that to push data to your neighbor requires that you use upstream bandwidth. Your cable modem does not transmit on the frequencies that your neighbor's modem listens to. Each packet will be transmitted from your modem to the head end, queued up, then sent downstream on a different carrier frequency. For various valid reasons, upstream is a much scarcer resource than downstream.

Re:WAN

[DigiShaman]

My understand is that the upstream is only more scarce because that's how the bandwidth is provisioned that way. It's not a technical limitation, but a business decision based on pairing agreements and other industry de-facto standards based entirely on momentum. Technically, cable modems could be reconfigured at the headend to provide a 50/50 symmetrical balance in both upload and download rates.

Re:WAN

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, it is a technical limitation. You could configure the head-end to allow 50/50 bandwidth, but then your download speed would be limited to the maximum upload speed attainable in hardware.

  DOCSIS has been hardware engineered to provide more download than upload. This is primarily because of the way the original cable networks were built (one-way transmission to the customer, even in the case of HFC networks).

The upstream channel essentially had to be stuffed into different frequencies, return amplifier paths built, etc. There's a whole lot of spectrum available to travel TO the customer, but not much to come BACK from the customer.

DOCSIS 2 and 3 have brought upstream limits higher and more closer to symmetrical, and certainly the upstream allowed by even DOCSIS2 is higher than even the download sold by most providers, so that part of your point still stands valid.

Re:WAN

[JohnnyBGod]

Actually, a Portuguese ISP (who was the market leader for broadband Internet) had exactly this policy almost ten years ago. There was a 2GB cap for international downloads, a 20 GB cap for national downloads, and transfers between its clients didn't count toward that. Of course, nowadays, data caps are pretty much extinct here (except for mobile), but some ISPs do throttle torrents.

Re:WAN

[BitZtream]

Thats incorrect for cable modem technology, due to various technical reasons the head end can send to you much faster than your modem can send back.

Technically you can be provisioned for 50/50 speeds on a cable modem, but you'd just be cutting yourself out of downstream speeds, not increasing upstream speeds. They could also do some balancing and actually get slightly higher upstream speeds at the cost of significant drops in download speeds, but cable modems typically terminate at a point where the user is going to be downloading orders of magnitude more than uploading, so trying to balance it is not what you really want anyway.

On a circuit like a T1 and up through the various large scale trunks that carry hundreds of gigabits/second the transmissions rates are generally symmetrical by technical requirement of the tech used and thats where your ISP is cheating by paying for less upstream than downstream. That T1 is ALWAYS signalling at a rate that carries the same amount of data both directions at the same time, where your cable modem truely does have different frequencies for carrying upstream versus downstream.

Re:WAN

[Anonymous Coward]

XfinityTV.com does use the public internet and it's available to all internet users even if they don't give Comcast a dime. (The best stuff is behind a paywall, but anything you can watch on hulu or cbs.com for free you can watch on XfinityTV.com for free.)

Internal Network, eh?

[jijacob]

So if I set up a couple friends with ftp servers within comcast's network, and use over 250GB between them, I won't get charged?

Re:Internal Network, eh?

[CastrTroy]

This is what I was thinking too. And not just a couple of friends, but anybody else in the city. You could get quite a network set up.

Re:Internal Network, eh?

[fast turtle]

only problem is, you'd be in violation of the TOS against servers with FTP, Telnet, Rsync or any other file transfer protocol because one system must act as a server

Re:Internal Network, eh?

[Joe Snipe]

Take it a step further. They surely use cache proxies to serve up repeatedly requested content, so I'm exempt from the cap when I look at popular websites correct? And even if they did decide to do this, then it would be like you were being punished for looking at something unique.

Re:Internal Network, eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

By that vague definition, it's a violation to use the file-transfer function in an IM client or host a networked game that transfers assets when players join your map.

Re:Internal Network, eh?

[CastrTroy]

Create a protocol that runs over UDP. There can't be any server because there is no connection. Just a bunch of UDP packets going back and forth. You'd have to rebuild some of the TCP/IP features built on top of UDP such as retransmission and using something similar to TCP windowing so you can figure out the transmission speed.

Re:Internal Network, eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

So bittorrent locally...nobody is acting as a dedicated server

Re:Internal Network, eh?

[shentino]

With the standard "we reserve the right to terminate your service at any time we damn well please" clauses in most EULA/TOS documents, the real terms are "you are our guests and we can kick you out whenever we feel like it" and thus are actually very common.

Technically they could yank your service for having purple hair.

Doesn't violate network neutrality?

[TheRaven64]

This is the core issue of network neutrality! A network provider should be a neutral network provider, it should not prioritise one vendor's service over another vendor's equivalent service. Network operators being content providers at all is a violation of network neutrality in its purest form. Imposing limits on other services' traffic but not on their own is a blatant violation by even the loosest definition.

Re:Doesn't violate network neutrality?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is actually the first I've heard people complaining about this from a network neutrality perspective. In Australia, where bandwidth caps are the norm and exceptions are extremely rare, a lot of the nicer ISPs (e.g. Internode) offer unmetered content on their own network to add value to their service- Internode's big thing was offering a huge mirror of open source and other popular software, gaming servers etc.

I'm not sure how much that applies now since to my knowledge the content isn't unmetered on the ADSL2+ plans and regular ADSL is becoming rapidly outdated, but still, for a while this was quite cool.

Re:Doesn't violate network neutrality?

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe the point is that they are not violating the administration's definition of net neutrality. Their definition is so twisted by lobbyists that it doesn't adequately describe the concept of net neutrality proper.

Re:Doesn't violate network neutrality?

[tepples]

In Australia, where bandwidth caps are the norm and exceptions are extremely rare, a lot of the nicer ISPs (e.g. Internode) offer unmetered content on their own network to add value to their service

I'm guessing the problem is that only major incumbent media companies (e.g. Disney, Fox, Paramount, Sony, and Warner), not aggregators of independent video productions (e.g. YouTube, Vimeo, and Dailymotion), can get works onto the unmetered Xfinity On Demand application.

Re:Doesn't violate network neutrality?

[subreality]

Things are different in Aus. You don't have very good connectivity off the island so it's a big advantage for the ISP to encourage you to get files domestically.

In the US the weakest link is the last mile; transit between ISPs is dirt cheap. I think it's pretty clear that they're doing it as an abuse of their near-monopoly, and not as a result of their costs.

Re:Doesn't violate network neutrality?

[Anonymous Coward]

Flicking through the articles quickly...

So the've released an app for xbox that lets you watch movies on demand. Like, watch a stored file. I don't know what systems you have in the usa, but in australia there has been a sales point (or service, whichever way you want to view it) for ISPs to have mirror repositories, game servers and files for their customers to download. Not only is it much faster, many providers started to provide this information outside your normal limits, citing the same reason - it's free because it's on their own network. It's like connecting your neighbor to your wirless for a fee, and then giving him credentials to a server on the same network, logging & charging him for the traffic going out of that network. The only cost is your power for your servers that run anyway. However;

Imposing limits on other services' traffic but not on their own is a blatant violation by even the loosest definition.

I saw nothing saying they were shapeing other vendors/services (recently).

Re:Doesn't violate network neutrality?

[surgen]

This is the core issue of network neutrality! A network provider should be a neutral network provider, it should not prioritise one vendor's service over another vendor's equivalent service

Yup, this really is the core of the issue. Now, its easy to understand why this exception they've given themselves seems to make sense, the problem is what it implies. A popular 'worst case' is that service providers can't just buy bandwidth and sling to all consumers limited only by the bandwidth they buy and the network path to the consumer. Now, with comcast pulling this, it will eventually be rightly called out as anti-compeptive, they will go to whatever authority calls them out hat-in-hand and say they just can't afford to pull all that data from an outside network, but offer to allow content providers unlimited access to their customers if the other provider does the legwork to get the traffic on comcast's "internal" network, now to "remain competitive" the Netflixs of the world have to start eating more and more costs as they rework their locations and their choice of upstream provider to conform with every consumer ISP whos customers they want to serve to get around artificial roadblocks erected by the ISP.

Re:Doesn't violate network neutrality?

[RivenAleem]

Well, the way I see it is this.

If they treated all content equally, then if you were watching streamed video on the Comcast system it would consume your 250gig cap. By making this content 'free' it allows you to consume more content from other networks. So, it can be argued that making a bandwidth expensive service not count towards your cap you are actually helping the other networks.

Of course, if you had no cap whatsoever, then there would be perfect neutrality all around.

I suppose your argument can be differently phrased: By making their own content not count towards a cap, then consumers will be more likely to use the Comcast service than another, and that is clearly not neutral. But how is this different to my mobile phone provider giving me free calls to people who are subscribers to the same mobile company? Is there no obligation for them to be neutral also?

Personally I haven't thought too much on this as for me net neutrality was always about speed and not allowances, since both my mobile and landline connections are unlimited (fair use applies) and I've never given consideration to download caps.

Would you complain about unfairness of net neutrality if, by the very nature of hosting the video within their network, the streaming speed (buffering not withstanding) was faster? Would you expect they deliberately slow down the delivery of the content to be fairer to that hosted by a competitor?

Like you say, perhaps ISPs shouldn't be allowed to host their own content at all in the first place. But at what point does providing customers with superior service become an abuse of net neutrality?

Re:Doesn't violate network neutrality?

[SuricouRaven]

That, and it gives them another incentive to provide poor service. So long as they keep their caps low enough, it'll be impossible for customers to effectively use any media service other than their own.

Re:Doesn't violate network neutrality?

[fast turtle]

A Bandwidth cap is not a network neutrality issue. It's just a cap on how much bandwidth you can use. In this case, they've properly stated that internal bandwidth usage does not count against your cap, which is for external bandwidth

Re:Doesn't violate network neutrality?

[MobyDisk]

There is another example of this problem in Australia:
Australian ISPs also offer a local cache for iTunes downloads. The idea was established by the Australian government because iTunes downloads were eating into their undersea cables. (There was a Slashdot article on this a year or two ago, but I can't find it now.) The problem with this is that the Australian government just skewed the market by aiding one individual corporation over its competitors. So iTunes downloads are now faster than Amazon downloads or others. If the government wanted to do this to conserve bandwidth, they needed to offer a cache that was available for any company.
This Comcast issue is similar. I thought that when Comcast bought NBC there was a promise that they would not do anything to inhibit access to NBC material elsewhere. I guess they figure this doesn't count.

Re:Doesn't violate network neutrality?

[TheRaven64]

It wouldn't be a network neutrality issue if they offered connection to their network to other content providers with the same terms that they offer to their in-house content provider. The problem comes when they are the only ones able to get this special privilege.

Re:Doesn't violate network neutrality?

[Anonymous Coward]

A Bandwidth cap is not a network neutrality issue. It's just a cap on how much bandwidth you can use.

Right ... just like a poll tax was not a racial discrimination issue. It was just an additional fee you pay to vote in electrions.

The intent and the effect are what has to determine these questions. When the network owner imposing less stringent conditions on the use of selectly-blessed IP traffic and more limiting conditions on the use of competitor's IP traffic the effect is an unbalanced playing field (aka non-neutral network) and because the network owner directly profits from this result it is reasonable to infer that this was their intent.

In the U.S., these questions are relevant to Cable co. network providers and not relevant to mobile network providers simply because the mobile network providers do not have a monopoly whereas there are many places across the U.S. where the Cable co. network providers still have Government-granted monopolies.

Re:Doesn't violate network neutrality?

[ILongForDarkness]

I don't get comcast here but isn't their VOD service just a DVRless solution to see things that are already included in your cable package? Couldn't you argue that giving free bandwidth to access it is just a way to not penalize people for the way they chose to access the content they already paid for? Saying watching a video through the cable on your TV is okay but watch a video that goes through the cable and into the router is not.

The cable company where I live counts bandwidth for their streaming site against your quota. Which I think is silly since I can watch the same thing on my TV for free. (and going over quota even with the top end package is $0.50/GB), it would suck for most people even worse because a mid tier package gets about 70GB a month quota and it is $1/GB over. Streaming content that would be nothing since parents and the kids could be watching two different things at the same time gobbling up ~2GB in a couple hours easy.

Re:Doesn't violate network neutrality?

[laptop006]

That's almost entirely false. (ISP network engineer in Australia here)

The major cable leaving Australia for the last decade has been Southern Cross (there's more now) and the Australian government have no significant interest in it (the NZ government on the other hand does by way of cable system part owner Telecom NZ).

iTunes downloads (at least some of them) are cached by Akamai, and traditionally most medium to large ISPs hosted Akamai caches inside their network (at $JOB[-1] Akamai was ~30% and Google was ~15% of all bandwidth used for a regional education network).

It truly isn't any different for any other CDN, some host inside Australia and peer with local networks (IIRC Limelite do this), some only host in Asia (eg Amazon), and some (eg Steam) install machines inside ISPs for their customers.

Re:Doesn't violate network neutrality?

[game kid]

Ah, but Comcast was careful here. They said "Comcast is committed to an open Internet and has pledged to abide by the FCC's Open Internet rules -- and our policies with respect to XfinityTV and the Xbox 360 fully comply with those rules and our commitments."

In short, they said they are "committed to an open Internet" and complying with the FCC's (weak) rules, neither of which (if they are even doing either) would imply actual net neutrality.

Re:Doesn't violate network neutrality?

[KingMotley]

And when was the last time they changed that 250GB cap? Considering users eat twice the bandwidth every 18 months, how long will it take before that 250GB cap feels like a 5GB cap? I will save you the trouble, it's approximately 8 years. Ask again in 8 years how great of an idea it was to let this happen.

Re:Doesn't violate network neutrality?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's true but seems to make them ripe for antitrust probing as seem recall that they were trying to use the but have no streaming video service argument either for the cap or their anti net neutrality campaign. I don't recall which ATM.

Re:Doesn't violate network neutrality?

[cpu6502]

Comcast's move gives it an unfair competitive advantage against other streaming services (amazon, netflix, hulu) that are limited to ~250 GB per month. It's not just a violation of net neutrality but also a violation of Antitrust (antimonopoly) laws, and I figure it's only a matter of time until Comcast gets sued.

Re:Doesn't violate network neutrality?

[MobyDisk]

Okay, thanks. That's good to know. I redoubled my effort to find the Slashdot discussion and I couldn't find it. Perhaps I am wrong and it was a hypothetical situation.

Is there a way to search all your old comments? My best effort so far has been to use Google to search for:
username usernumber keywords site:slashdot.org

Re:Doesn't violate network neutrality?

[RivenAleem]

Why would I care? I have no cap. I really think you should ask yourself why you are paying for a service with limitations. In 8 years my 'cap' sill still be the same as my current 'cap' which is limited by the bandwidth and how much I can consider consuming.

My ISP have never complained yet about streamed netflix, or sky online. Perhaps you should switch provider to avoid a cap. And if you have no provider which offers it, I suggest you write to your government/trading standards about the cartel in operation preventing its introduction.

Re:Doesn't violate network neutrality?

[Bob the Super Hamste]

I would accept that if all bandwidth usage that stays on their network didn't count, but highly doubt that. Let's assume that my neighbor and I both have Comcast as our ISP and we decide for shits and giggles to pipe output from /dev/urandom on out machines across the network to each other continuously. I doubt that traffic wouldn't count towards the cap.

Re:Doesn't violate network neutrality?

[s73v3r]

So, it can be argued that making a bandwidth expensive service not count towards your cap you are actually helping the other networks.

That's a pretty shitty argument. A movie is available on Netflix, Amazon, and Comcast on Demand. Knowing that only one of these isn't going to affect your data cap, which one are you most likely to go with?

Re:Doesn't violate network neutrality?

[s73v3r]

But at what point does providing customers with superior service become an abuse of net neutrality?

When their "superior service" is only achieved by degrading the quality of competing services. Which is exactly what's happening here.

Re:Doesn't violate network neutrality?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the core issue of network neutrality! A network provider should be a neutral network provider, it should not prioritise one vendor's service over another vendor's equivalent service. Network operators being content providers at all is a violation of network neutrality in its purest form. Imposing limits on other services' traffic but not on their own is a blatant violation by even the loosest definition.

Wrong, all wrong.

Network neutrality is about allowing traffic to transit your network without prejudice. If you purchase a dedicated circuit from your ISP, for example, they shouldn't mess around with the data you are putting through it at all. Internet traffic which passes through their network from one ISP to another should also be treated completely equally. That ISP up in Canada was breaking this 'rule' by tampering with traffic that lower-tier businesses were trying to pass through their network.

But it's never been about forcing a company to do anything with it's own internal traffic. You didn't purchase equal access to their network infrastructure, or dedicated circuit, you purchased internet access and the localized content is just a bonus for you.
If we're going to go with your definitions, then a connection to your next door neighbor should route all the way to the edge of their network and back, instead of just skipping right over. And that would just be plain stupid all around.

What you and most others are really thinking about when you talk about a network neutrality violation is what we call an Unfair Business Practice. I don't see them doing anything (right now) which violates network neutrality, since this is purely a billing and accounting matter, but giving this advantage to Xbox customers might very well be considered Unfair, as could the practice of providing both content and connection.

Re:Doesn't violate network neutrality?

[s73v3r]

And who gets to use that "internal bandwidth"? Oh yeah, just Comcast.

This IS a net neutrality issue, as Comcast is intentionally degrading the quality of the competition to drive people to their service.

Re:Doesn't violate network neutrality?

[s73v3r]

The problem is, by not counting that bandwidth, they are incentivizing people to use and pay for their service, rather than the competition. Giving them an unfair advantage.

Re:Doesn't violate network neutrality?

[BitZtream]

So put a server in their data center. TimeWarner allows just that, which is why Akamai is in pretty much every data center in the world of any size, its cheaper for EVERYONE to distribute the load with caching servers. You pay for the minor cost of colo provided by TWC (and the prices I heard were lower than the colo company used by my workplace) and your customers get good speeds to your data and TWC doesn't have to pay for massive amounts of external bandwidth to deal with the itunes explosion, or netflix. Likewise, Netflix doesn't have to pay for that bandwidth to individual clients EITHER, so they win AS WELL.

Its really just proper network design, sorry if you guys don't like the reality of it but it DOES cost more for Comcast to send you out of their datacenter than it does to stay inside it.

If they are reasonable about letting people directly connect to the local loop at their own expense, I don't have a problem with it, everyone wins actually.

Re:Doesn't violate network neutrality?

[Solandri]

Just prohibit service providers from offering content. And prohibit content providers from offering service. Problem solved.

Re:Doesn't violate network neutrality?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would I care? I have no cap. I really think you should ask yourself why you are paying for a service with limitations.

Local monopolies. It's that obvious?

Re:Doesn't violate network neutrality?

[KingMotley]

Not sure why you even bothered to read this article at all since it's specifically about comcast. Do you get comcast out there in britland? No?

Hmm.. Why don't you write your government and ask them why you have to pay for TV. We don't. Unlimited TV for free, as many TVs as we want to have.

Re:Doesn't violate network neutrality?

[ILongForDarkness]

Do you get access to VOD if you don't have cable service with them? If not then they've already paid for cable service though so they've already chosen to have access to the content. That is were it works were I live the phone company or cable company also offers TV service. If you have TV service you get access to the VOD service. Since they give you discounts for "bundling" services most people only deal with one provider for both services anyways.

It kind of becomes one product with bundling to my thinking. When I bought my house I had to chose who to go with. The phone company only had 16Mbps internet in my area. The cable company had 50 (now it has been upgraded to 75) and twice the quota. That sold both services to me since the combined bill was about $20 cheaper than if I'd split the service between the two providers.

Re:Doesn't violate network neutrality?

[silas_moeckel]

Funny thing is we already have something quite like this it's called Teir 1 Peering. There are these buildings where oddly enough companies go to exchange data with each other., each side eats the cost of getting there. Often you can get a shared port to start and move to direct peering as the traffic grows.

Comcast does not want anything let that they do not want to pay for bandwidth rather they want everybody to pay to access there customers, unfortunately there customers having already paid for that services do not want this. Many big source networks are more than happy to peer with anybody they send even a modest amount of traffic to. Comcast has traditionally avoided installing a nationwide network and has used others to move there traffic for them (they like to bundle up small area's and serve them from a single providers 10ge) you can see this when your traversing cogent or level 3 going comcast to comcast across the nation.

This argument gets even better when it's AT&T who is a tier 1 network and pays nobody else for bandwidth ever. Of course internal they have divided up AT&T's main network with AT&T DSL/FIOS offerings to show that they spend so much money on paper to the parent company so they can excuse jacking up DSL/FIOS rates.

Re:Doesn't violate network neutrality?

[Anonymous Coward]

To get access to Comcast VOD you have to pay extra for their cable box. If you don't, you don't get VOD (and you don't get HD and you don't even get all of the SD channels).

Re:Doesn't violate network neutrality?

[Genom]

I really think you should ask yourself why you are paying for a service with limitations.

In many areas of the US, there's very little choice when it comes to broadband 'net access. A single provider has a "local monopoly". In my case, that's Comcast. Unless you're lucky enough to have had Verizon lay fiber to your area before they halted their rollout, there just isn't another high-speed option available.

And all of them are capped. =(

IP Insanity

[Aladrin]

Why do we get so crazy when data is sent over IP rather than another way? If they had done this with their cable lines and not used TCP/IP, nobody would bat an eye. In fact, that's how content was always served in the past. When they decide to cut costs and use the newer, better infrastructure for the old stuff, people freak out.

A company serving their own service over their own lines is nothing to freak out about.

I will agree that if they were doing this with other companies' data, it would be worrisome. But not their own.

Re:IP Insanity

[SilentChasm]

The problem is the reason for the bandwidth caps to begin with was that the last mile was the weak link (cable being shared, your heavy usage affected your neighbors, thus the cap to get you to limit yourself). Now they want to put data from their service over that same link, causing the same congestion problems but not counting it towards the cap. This limits the spread of competing services that might use enough bandwidth to hit the cap.

Either congestion on the last mile is a problem requiring caps or it isn't. It shouldn't matter what's in the data packets or where they're from.

Re:IP Insanity

[jythie]

This has been a good example of slippery slope.. they used that excuse at first and now that people have gotten used to the caps (or at minimal are not fighting them as hard) they change the reason in order to start using them the way they were intended.. cutting out competition.

Re:IP Insanity

[rogueippacket]

Technically, Ethernet/IP is not a broadcast technology. So historically, all your service provider had to do was provision a chunk of cable bandwidth to broadcast several hundred channels to several thousand users, and then carve out a little bit extra for IP data. Now that they are all moving to IP and HDTV, there is no way to provision enough bandwidth to broadcast (or multicast) everything, even on a 10GigE transport.
In short, there is a technological limitation at play - but it is not an excuse for service providers to throw around puny data caps. They should continue to invest in their infrastructure instead of trying to inflate the actual cost of a Gigabyte by 10 000% to make a quick buck.

Re:IP Insanity

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not the only way it happens. I have a business package and get priority over all my neighbors. In addition to that, I'm also the first connection from the main run. I can make my whole subdivision crawl. It's great for me but not for my neighbors. I just don't want them to find out it's me :)

Did I mention I run an FTP for an open source project on it.

Re:IP Insanity

[javakah]

There are a couple of problems.

Cable companies used to simply be mechanisms to get content created by other companies to users, and they did so through the TV.

As time progressed, the cable companies also began providing Internet access over the cable lines.

The cable companies also changed from simply being mechanisms for transferring the content that others have created, to owning some of those content creating companies as well.

New companies sprung up (such as Netflix) which realized that they could serve content through the internet, and serve it to more devices than just TVs.

This tends to drag on the profitability of Cable TV if people start feeling they have a better costing, reasonable alternative, so customers started dropping cable. Meanwhile, content creating companies not owned by the Cable companies were given a new outlet for distribution, not having to rely essentially on their competitors (the Cable companies) for distribution, possibly at unfair terms.

So around the time that the Netflix user base was really exploding, the Cable companies started putting caps on their Internet service, along with creating their own clones of the services provided by other websites that were now serving up content.

The problem now is that the cable companies seem to be unfairly using the arm of their company that provides internet access in order to artificially help it's Cable TV and content creation arms. By keeping the caps artificially low, they keep people from being able to use the Internet to get their content, pushing people towards their Cable TV. Now, by allowing their own sites to not count towards the cap, they are telling people that they can go back to getting content from the Internet again, but only if it's provided by them.

This is compounded by cable companies being granted local monopolies, so many people don't have a choice than to use these Companies that are trying to limit what content they can receive.

Imagine Walmart buying out USPS/UPS/FedEx. People have to go through Walmart to get anything sent to them. Now imagine Walmart saying that you are now limited to receiving 3 packages per month. This would be terrible for Amazon, a competitor in getting a good number of things to customers. This is now the equivalent of Walmart saying, "You are limited to 3 packages per month, but any packages you receive from us won't count, so order from us!". This has a chilling effect then beyond simply winding up costing customers more. A student is studying WWII. They want to read Mein Kampf. Walmart doesn't like it, so doesn't sell it. They've killed Amazon. You can't get it.

TL;DR- So the issue is that because the Cable companies are controlling several parts of the entertainment business, this is monopolistic behavior that will cost customers more and limit customer options.

Re:IP Insanity

[laptop006]

Ethernet most certainly is a broadcast technology, and it and IP have supported multicast for many years (IP multicast across several networks is very common on research networks).

As for bandwidth, assuming 20Mbit streams (fairly standard BluRay, broadcast in some parts of the world approaches it as well) you can fit 500 channels on 10G. In practice as you only have to send out what at least one client has requested you can have more channels then can be streamed, cable companies do this already with Switched Digital Video.

Re:IP Insanity

[autocannon]

I think you're much closer to being right than many paranoid people here would like to believe.

What is Comcast really doing here that's so evil? Discriminating against PS3 and Wii because they don't also have apps like this? This is not net neutrality. This is just another way for Comcast to get their service to more users in the household in more friendly ways. Now you can plunk a tv down in any room of the house and through the xbox get access to Comcast's onDemand titles. All without having to go PAY comcast more to rent one of their boxes.

Look, I like to get more for what I pay. I pay Comcast far more than I'd like every month. This just gives me another way to get at that content without paying them more. Key word here is pay. If you're not already paying for Comcast, then you're not losing anything. It's not affecting neutrality at all.

Re:IP Insanity

[cpu6502]

Comcast's move to "uncap" its own video business gives it an unfair competitive advantage against other streaming services (amazon, netflix, hulu) that are limited to ~250 GB per month. It discourages me from buying those products and buying Comcast's product instead (because it's unlimited).

So it violates net neutrality. AND it is also a violation of Antitrust (antimonopoly) laws, and I figure it's only a matter of time until Comcast gets sued by these companies & by State general attornies.

BTW cable tv isn't any ordinary business. It's striclty regulated due to its monopoly status. For example the FCC has "must carry" which requires them to provide all the local channels (otherwise they might opt not to). And the CSPAN channels. Local governments also add other requirements, such as carriage of the state legislature's sessions and community channels (to air high school sports and such).

Re:IP Insanity

[Aladrin]

That's a download of a bluray disc every day of the month. I don't think anyone streams in anything near that quality. But I'm sure your argument wasn't just the number.

Is Comcast offering things through this service that they do not offer through their regular cable service? It's just their on-demand shows. The only difference is that it goes over IP to an XBox, instead of digital cable to a cable box.

As it stands, nobody else can offer their services through Comcast's digital cable lines, and there are no laws that would make them.

Why does it matter that this exact same service is now offered via a different protocol? The service doesn't ever touch the internet.

This is akin to AOL's special features back in the day. You could get to the internet through their service, but they had other non-internet offerings at the same time. Nobody argued that that was unethical or violated the spirit of the internet or anything like that. (The term 'net neutrality' hadn't been coined yet.) How is this any different?

Re:IP Insanity

[s73v3r]

A company serving their own service over their own lines is nothing to freak out about.

It is when they're giving themselves an unfair advantage over other competitors to that service.

Re:IP Insanity

[s73v3r]

What if I think Comcast's service is complete and absolute shit? What if I'd rather have Amazon, or Netflix? Now, because I would like someone else, I have arbitrary restrictions placed on me (bandwidth caps). That is an additional cost imposed on all of the competitors, that is not imposed on Comcast.

Re:IP Insanity

[BitZtream]

So if I can go to the local walmart and buy something for $10, or I can go to Amazon and by it for $9, plus $6.95 shipping, its walmart's fault?

Re:IP Insanity

[arekin]

Saddly comcasts boxes are addressable, so its really no different. The same bandwidth is used on their hybrid fiber network, the only difference is that you own the equipment (just like if you owned a tivo). I'm so completely confused why people insist on it counting towards their data cap for a service you are already paying comcast for. Really people, keep bitching so that comcast will add it to your data cap and then you can bitch about being charged twice for something you already pay for.

Re:IP Insanity

[arekin]

Nice story, way wrong on assumptions though, ISPs didn't impose data caps to prevent users from using netflix. As a matter of fact netflix users are not routinely blowing there caps. The less than 1% that are blowing data caps are people who are hosting bots, people who have there whole neighborhood stealing their unprotected network, people who are seeding multiple torrents 24/7, or people who are hosting web servers (which is against your terms of service as a residential customer. So guess what, if the cable companies imposing data caps to stop netflix, they did it way wrong.

Re:IP Insanity

[arekin]

http://xfinitytv.comcast.net/ You are wrong, it is imposed on Comcast's actual streaming site.

Re:IP Insanity

[Anonymous Coward]

Re:Walmart: This is more like Walmart buying UPS and saying you can get order shipped free via UPS. Orders shipped via USPS or FedEx will have shipping charges.

Re:IP Insanity

[autocannon]

Which do you hate, the internet access or the cable tv? Or both? If you just get internet, then you're still in the same exact boat today that you were in yesterday. There's a cap, and whatever you do doesn't change it. If you have both cable and internet, well guess what you just got another method to enjoy the cable tv that's being piped into your house without having to utilize the metered internet service. It uses the same protocols, but doesn't actually use the internet.

In my situation, I'm paying for both the internet and the tv. Since this gives me another option for getting that tv that I'm paying for without actually screwing with the internet service I'm also paying for, I'm happy.

In an ideal world caps wouldn't exist. It sucks they do. This is a way for Comcast to give added value to their system over competitors. Kinda like offering the Xfinity tv streaming service over the web to subscribers wherever they're at, and not just through their cable boxes.

Re:IP Insanity

[zeroduck]

I've been over the cap for the past three months and haven't heard anything from them. My area also has AT&T U-Verse and WOW. Related?

(I would switch to WOW on principle alone. They offer a comparable level of service and seem to be much less evil, but they don't serve my apartment building.)

Re:IP Insanity

[javakah]

They initially did try to make the caps really low:
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/mar2009/tc20090331_726397.htm

Traffic from Netflix has surpassed traffic from piracy:
http://consumerist.com/2011/05/study-shows-netflix-surpasses-piracy-in-online-traffic.html

After initial public reaction to really low caps, the cable companies did raise the caps to what are currently reasonable rates. But they've also shown no sign of changing those caps. As the quality of the video improves in coming years, it's also going to take up more and more bandwidth. So the higher caps got the public off their back for now, and isn't hurting Netflix at the moment, but it's pretty obvious how this will play out in a few years time.

Re:IP Insanity

[s73v3r]

No, you're just making excuses for them, and why they should be able to pull this shit. If you're happy with their service, then you can pay for it. Don't force the rest of us to subsidize it for you.

So a company ...

[nhat11]

Is biased towards themselves? That's news!

Disney, Fox, Paramount, Sony, and Warner

[tepples]

They are doing it with other companies' data: the other five incumbent movie studios'. Or will only NBCUniversal-owned works be available over this service?

Large media interests.

[Anonymous Coward]

I've always been perplexed by the large media interests of most U.S. last-mile providers.

It's simple: last-mile is a high-cost, low-profit industry. The only firms willing to go to the trouble are the content providers, and only so they can push their crap.

Bullshit

[MCSEBear]

Is the data for this video delivered over TCP/IP? Then you can't claim it should be immune to the data cap any other data delivered to the customer over TCP/IP would be subject to.

Do they really think people are stupid enough to think that just because their servers for this data are on their own network, that this shouldn't be subject to the same rules as any other IP traffic? Either make everyone's video services immune to your data cap or none at all.

Re:Bullshit

[BitZtream]

Did you seriously just imply they aren't allowed to use their own network for their own advantage?

WTF is wrong with you. You don't get to tell them how they run their business, period. Neither does the government. The government on the other hand says 'if you want a local monopoly, we're going to have some say in some things', but that doesn't translate to some random slashdotter getting to decide what happens on their network. They aren't stripped of all ability to have competing services that take advantage of the infrastructure they laid at some cost to themselves (yes, I know they got plenty of tax breaks for doing so, but they still made some investments).

Its amazing that only on slashdot can someone say something so asinine that I actually end up defending some of the most greedy organizations on the planet.

Re:Bullshit

[arekin]

Ummmm doesn't all of u-verses set top boxes work through their gateway. If so then you're saying they should all be adding to a u-verse customers bandwidth cap to just watch them or they are breaking net neutrality? Yeah, doesn't work that way...

Data is only traversing their network...

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably true, but services like Akamai also exist to ensure that the "data" only traverses their network as well, but it has the ability to serve a larger number of providers. The Content Delivery networks were designed to explicitly prevent their needing to be a bunch of hops required on the network. As it stands Content Network Delivery providers work because it is in the ISPs best interest to work with them as they want to minimize the traffic leaving their network. If this is allowed to continue then it will be in Comcast's best interest NOT to work with these Content Network Delivery partners so that their content is faster. This is terrible.

Don't Cap, Peer or Colocate

[MarcQuadra]

I've been saying this all along. The answer for these companies is not to cap or throttle, it's to behave like a good citizen on the internet and either peer with or colocate the data customers want.

Now imagine if Google, Apple, Amazon, and Netflix could host a few boxes inside the Comcast network. Everyone wins. Unfortunately, that's just not how higher-ups in most organizations think.

Re:Don't Cap, Peer or Colocate

[Anonymous Coward]

Bandwidth caps help keep the series of tubes that make up the internet clear so when someone sends a email it doesn't get stuck behind someone's pirated movie or files.
Without the caps the internet would be total anarchy and slow as molasses.

Re:Don't Cap, Peer or Colocate

[forand]

I think there is one group missing from your "everyone wins" statement, mainly the companions that provide both cable and internet access. Such companies, Comcast being one, do not want its users to stop paying for cable AND internet. By allowing competing video services such as those you listed into their internal networks thereby reducing the network congestion they are letting their paying customers gain access to content they provide but are not being paid for.

That is I use Comcast as my ISP (no other choice) but not cable. I pay for Netflix, Amazon Prime, and watch lots of stuff on Hulu and PBS.com. I pay about 20 a month for my service. My colleagues watch about the same amount of TV I do but get a "deal" with Comcast where they get Cable, Internet and Phone for 100/month. They also pay for Netflix and Amazon Prime. So from Comcasts point of view I am not worth as much as a customer. By placing these caps they are trying to make customers like myself pay for cable so they can watch content online because if Comcast cannot figure out how to make people like me pay them more they are looking at significant drop in revenue when my colleagues realize that 100/month for what Comcast offers isn't worth it and switch to a data only solution.

Data caps have nothing to do with relieving network congestion nor passing costs to those who are driving those costs. Network congestion is about usage at peak usage times, not about total bits passing through a router over the course of a month. If Comcast's network is volume limited then they have oversold their network and should reduce the maximum bandwidth a user has access to or improve their network. The costs of having a non-volume-limited network in place for the peak volume are not driven by the person who downloads videos off peak hours but by the hordes of customers doing every type of thing all at once. Thus the costs are not linked to the total amount of data downloaded in a month but to the bandwidth you are using at peak usage hours.

Caps are just a way for content middle men to protect their profit margins. Selling internet service alone is not as profitable as selling cable and internet.

Re:Don't Cap, Peer or Colocate

[chuckinator]

That's not how peering works. You don't host boxes inside someone's network. You host BGP routers in the same carrier hotel as the other company and traverse those links to get into their network instead of paying for metered access through a leased line of some sort.

Re:Don't Cap, Peer or Colocate

[Above]

Several of the CDN's, most notably Akamai try really hard to locate boxes inside of networks like Comcast so there is no peering or transit link to traverse. Often they in fact pay for the right to be inside the network, on the grounds that it increases performance.

I don't know how many, if any, CDN's are inside of Comcast's network and possibly _paying_ for the privilege to do so. However if Comcast wants to make the case that Internal traffic shouldn't count against caps with their own services I see no reason why it cap should count against these collocated CDN's as well.

Net Neutrality is about being _fair_. It seems to me if someone is locating stuff in the same basic (network) location as Comcast, and maybe even paying to do so, but their traffic is capped differently that's not fair.

Re:Don't Cap, Peer or Colocate

[k6mfw]

That is I use Comcast as my ISP (no other choice) but not cable. I pay for Netflix, Amazon Prime, and watch lots of stuff on Hulu and PBS.com. I pay about 20 a month for my service.

That is very interesting, I knew nothing of data only service, is this listed in the fine print? I have cable but don't want to pay them more for internet (will cost $180/month for both) since I hate Comcast I'm reluctant to give them more money. OTA tv sucks except for PBS and difficult to get in my part of town. Heck, even most of CATV sucks. But with data only, maybe I can have fun with this new slashdot TV.

250GB

[Anonymous Coward]

Gawd, I can't even vaguely imagine using 250GB in one month... Canada's caps are typically on the 60-ish range, if you're lucky or 90-ish range if you pay a significant chunk of money. 250GB would be nirvana!

Oh, and to claim that doesn't violate net neutrality shows a complete lack of understanding of what net neutrality is. It's a poster child example of a violation of net neutrality.

Re:250GB

[AikonMGB]

Try again; I get a 300 GiB/mo cap at 24vMbps/1^Mbps for ~$50/mo. Get a better service provider (read: get off the incumbents).

Re:250GB

[Ken D]

That's what I thought too.
Then since we got a Roku and Netflix for Christmas, our monthly data usage has steadily climbed up from 10GB to 125GB. If our data usage continues to climb we will be at the limit in a few months and we have done nothing except basically replace cable TV with internet TV.

Re:250GB

[Yvan256]

My cap is 35GiB, speed is 5Mbps/768kbps for ~30$/month.

Get a better service provider, you say? There's none!

Re:250GB

[Anonymous Coward]

Try Primus (at least until whatever new insane billing requirements will be imposed by Bell...Primus leases bandwidth from Bell). About $90/month for unlimited data and home phone with long distance, caller ID, voicemail, etc.

Re:250GB

[Ingenium13]

I live in a house with 4 other heavy use roommates. We have the medium tier of Comcast Business Class (ie no bandwidth caps). We broke 1TB transferred last month...

Re:250GB

[AikonMGB]

Depends on your area, obviously, but there are definitely third party Internet providers out there. I'm on Teksavvy myself; never looked back after switching away from Rogers.

Re:250GB

[danomac]

I'm on one of the two main providers here, on the middle plan at 15/1 (~$50/month.) My cap is 250 GB. They must've increased it on me, as I remember it being 125 GB when I signed up...

Re:250GB

[GiMP]

I've transferred 220GB in the past month, evenly split between upload and download. No, I am not using P2P networks. This is just standard usage.

That said, I do have a Netflix account... but I haven't used it this month. I work from home, do lots of SSH and a few minutes a day of VoIP. My wife uses Skype video extensively on the weekends. I use VNC and other remote console stuff on occassion, but not frequently. I have a number of computers that download updates from the internet, including a Windows desktop with Steam (those downloads can be big). I've probably downloaded and/or streamed about 5 hours of television from iTunes.

I'll bump it up significantly before the month is over as I intend to download a number of things from Microsoft Technet...

Re:250GB

[Anonymous Coward]

"Nothing except basically replace cable TV with internet TV"

That's exactly what the service providers want to stop you from doing.

Re:250GB

[FoxDude0486]

I never bothered to think about it. But after I got my business account and kept track a bit, realized I was going over 1TB a month. Without having to worry about caps, I found I was more charitable when it came to opening up torrents for sharing numerous Linux distributions.

Re:250GB

[Yvan256]

Postal code G9X 2N3. Try to search if you want, but there's no third party provider in this area.

Re:250GB

[omnichad]

I had a 150GB cap with AT&T, and it was really easy to get 140GB. That's counting Netflix AND bittorrent for TV, since we got poor antenna reception there (we had to download local shows over the Internet because it usually wouldn't record).

Since moving to an area with better reception and less time for Netflix, I average 50-80 GB per month. And here I have a 250GB cap with cable.

Re:250GB

[Anonymous Coward]

No way. There is no fucking way that you completely described your network useage and exceed 220gb/mo. I can torrent 20hr of HDTV, 20GB of ebooks, several multi-DVD games, netflix, skype, and still never come close to 200GB. I did 170 one time... I think I downloaded Star Trek TNG and all 007 movies that month...

Re:250GB

[AikonMGB]

Fair enough, but I'd hardly say that La Tuque's third-party Internet infrastructure is representative of Canada "as a whole".

Re:250GB

[doesnothingwell]

250GB This is better than what ATT is providing me now that I've been capped at 150GB on ADSL. I only average 30GB but I'm considering going to the limit to make a point, albeit a small one. I don't like being bullied into a Uperverse plan. The prices go up and the services go down, and the stockholders cry MORE!

Re:250GB

[BitZtream]

So the money you are no longer paying the cable company for bandwidth dedicated to providing you television, are you now paying it to them for your increased bandwidth usage? Did you think that the load on their network would magically be less if you switched to IP? It is in fact just the opposite. One stream per channel goes to EVERYONE, rather than your IP based solutions which basically result in a unique stream for each user.

Even if they wanted too, they couldn't provide EVERYONE with the ability to use netflix as the system is now. You'd need OC-192's to my street alone.

Re:250GB

[Ken D]

No, Comcast provides 250G at my current cost.
I'm fairly close to cancel cable TV entirely (I've shifted to a less expensive package) because we do not watch it.

Comcast precipitated our whole migration by re-jiggering their offerings and they telling us we needed to spend $40 more a month on a package we don't want in order to keep the other packages we were already getting. Already unhappy with how little there was to watch when I could sit down and watch, I decided to drop a package instead and use my savings to pay for Netflix plus have money left over to buy DVDs or downloads at Amazon. Add in Amazon Prime to help with the Xmas shopping and we now have enough streaming content queued up to watch that no one ever complains that there is nothing on, at a lower monthly cost.

The cable box almost never gets turned on now. Comcast On-Demand is not available because it's not "included" in our package, so even if we wanted to PPV from Comcast we CANNOT. They deserve to have their business melt.

Re:250GB

[agm]

Indeed. Caps in New Zealand are typically in the 15Gb to 45Gb range, unless you want to start throwing aroung some big dollars. The price per additional Gb tends to be around NZ$1 (probably about 80 cents US). Speed (for me at least) is about 15Mb/s down, 1.5Mb/s up.

The 3G iPad plan from a major network provider here is 250Mb for $20, which I consider to be an absolute rip off. Still, worth paying if you need it.

Re:250GB

[Yvan256]

It may not be representative of Canada as a whole, but at least it does show that even small towns in the middle of nowhere still get broadband.

I'm on the 2Mbps plan (I dropped the 5Mbps plan a few months ago, typo in my original post) but the provider does offer 2, 5, 8 and I think 10 or 12Mbps depending on your location. Of course, prices go up pretty fast, but even the biggest plan is probably capped around 80-100GiB anyway.

SDV, bandwidth, etc...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm no expert but this is all about bandwidth, right? With the way modern cable works it probably costs them /less/ bandwidth to stream highly compressed video to an Xbox with faster decoding hardware than deliver normal video content to one of their own set top boxes... Video on your TV is bandwidth to them now more than ever. The pipe is not always full, you are asking them to send you content regardless of whats decoding it...

Re:SDV, bandwidth, etc...

[SuricouRaven]

Cable TV is sent via broadcast (Or multicast in IP packets, dependings where you are, not sure what Comcast does) - very efficient indeed. You can't do that for VoD though, at least not without major network redesign work and equipment replacement.

This is surprising, how ?

[mbone]

These companies see themselves as gatekeepers, not service providers. In other words, they think that they will make money from their ability to control what you do or see, not by providing you with the ability to do something. Getting them to realize that their business model has, in fact, changed and that they now are, in fact, service providers is going to be a long and messy project.

Re:This is surprising, how ?

[guspasho]

It's surprising because they keep promising they won't do stuff like this, and that we don't need Net Neutrality because the free market will magically prevent stuff like this from happening. It just proves they are lying.

Re:This is surprising, how ?

[nine-times]

I've thought for a long time that we should at least consider a simple law/regulation that says the following: The same company is forbidden from being an Internet/Infrastructure provider as well as being a content/service provider.

So if Comcast wants to run a network to your house and provide internet access, then great, but they can't also sell TV services, TV internet services, VoIP, etc. They also cannot own NBC or any other content owners/distributors. They can only provide infrastructure, and their dealings must be open-- any deal they make with one company must be available to all. Comcast can't make a special deal with Netflix to give them additional access or cheaper access to their subscribers without making the terms public and offering the same deal to everyone.

If, on the other hand, they want to own/distribute content, they cannot act as an ISP.

Making a regulation like this would remove so many perverse incentives.

Space Merchants

[Anonymous Coward]

Read the classic scifi for an introduction to the concept of "spherical trusts". And remember media isn't about delivering content, it's about delivering eyeballs.

Saturation to Tata

[tepples]

Either congestion on the last mile is a problem requiring caps or it isn't.

The congestion isn't on the last mile to nearly the extent that it used to be. As of about fifteen months ago at least, Comcast was regularly saturating its upstream link to Tata.

Re:Saturation to Tata

[gr8_phk]

Then they should upgrade the link.

Re:What's this? TheRaven64 RUNNING?? lol... apk

[Chase Husky]

Hosts files are terrible.

If only Theodore Roosevelt were alive.

[Anonymous Coward]

He'd destroy companies like Apple & Comcast.

A very key detail the summary is missing ...

[tgd]

You have to be a Comcast *TV* provider to use those services. If you stream HBOGO over your Comcast internet connection, when you get TV via FIOS, you pay for that bandwidth, because you're not a Comcast TV customer.

This isn't a net neutrality case, this is a case of Comcast delivering content from your *TV* service to you via IP instead of QAM.

I'd actually be pissed off if they weren't doing this, because it would mean it was free to watch on-demand using their cable boxes, but not my devices.

Re:A very key detail the summary is missing ...

[Anonymous Coward]

It is a net neutrality case. The point is data caps is to alleviate network congestion. You're just congesting the network by using Comcast's service. On top of that, they are placing their service in a better position than competing services. Amazon? Counts against the cap. Netflix? Counts against the cap. Hulu? Counts against the cap. Youtube? Counts against the cap. My personal web site? You guessed it. It's tiered service. The next step is something like this: http://cache.gizmodo.com/assets/images/4/2012/01/4ca269e9e3d344371533f7ce1c272477.jpg

Re:A very key detail the summary is missing ...

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the problem though.

The pricing model for your cable TV is a flat rate depending on the channels you want.

The pricing model for your internet connection (from the same people that provide your cable) is by the GB. Excluding a service you offer from that pricing model just because its your content puts favoritism and an unfair advantage to your service over others on that same connection.

The problem is that Comcast wants to sell you a limited internet connection based on data, but is now saying... its limited based on data but... not when its our data *hint* *hint*.

Your thinking that its the same pipes and the same service (on demand provided by Comcast), but maybe the problem is that the On Demand for cable was limited by what provider you were with before and now that we have other On Demand providers able to offer over competitor lines that the content/LSP companies are looking for ways to stifle that jumped up competition instead of competing without their vertical integrated advantage.

Re:A very key detail the summary is missing ...

[arekin]

No, Comcasts network traffic is the same whether you watch on demand on your TV or your Xbox. Ultimately what you are looking at on the customer end of things. do you want to pay them for a DCT or pay less for a DTA and use your Xbox for on demand. Customer owned equipment is cheaper for comcast to maintain, so it benefits them and you save money, so its cheaper for you. They provide the on demand to you either way with your service. People seem to think this is a streaming service in the traditional sense and its not. http://xfinitytv.comcast.net/ is a streaming service, and it counts towards your data cap as well.

Re:A very key detail the summary is missing ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly so. As an occasional xfinity app user it had already occurred to me to worry that when I watch a show via on-demand on my DVR it's "free" but via the xfinity app it's eating into my data cap. Nice to have that cleared up.

Of course, now that the xfinity app has started injecting commercials into the show streams I'll be using the app much less anyway.

They Have a Point

[Anonymous Coward]

Full disclosure: I was fired by Comcast (don't worry, it's common and employers in the know don't hold it against you) and I dislike the company with every fiber of my being. I use Fios and everyone I know at Comcast would tell you Fios is technically better.

That said, this is just shifting normal TV watching on their system to a different medium. It makes some sense to not count against the overall count.

I don't buy the argument totally. It seems to violate the spirit of net neutrality if not the letter of the rule.

Slippery slope

[Taibhsear]

Part of the problem here is they've effectively cordoned off the other services. There's us and them. Now all they have to do is squeeze them out with increasingly smaller bandwidth caps so that you'll use more Comcast controlled services to not go over your cap (and likely justify it with their inability to handle the traffic volume instead of actually upgrading their damned equipment which we paid for years ago, which they just pocketed the money for instead.) or they'll just start charging for anything non-comcraptastic. This is why it's a net neutrality problem.

Net Neutrality is a Ruse

[Lorien_the_first_one]

I think the point is abundantly clear in the following article:

http://readersupportednews.org/pm-section/186-186/4184-net-neutrality-is-a-ruse

Designate Comcast as a common carrier and watch how fast they split their business between content and carriage. For as long as Comcast is connected to a public network carrying data from other networks to their customers, they are a common carrier, no matter what the FCC says. If Comcast wants to remain a private network, they can cut their connection to the Internet and provide their own content to their users.

Re:Others here disagree w/ U (40++:1 ratio)... apk

[Chase Husky]

The fact that you can't spot thinly veiled raillery is adorable. Have a great day!

Why now?

[bluestar]

I am Jack's complete lack of surprise. This is exactly what everyone here was warning about when the whole Net Neutrality "controversy" started. I just wonder why Comcast thought now was the right time to do it.

Re:Why now?

[Bob the Super Hamste]

It hasn't been in the news cycle for a while and most people aren't paying attention as the biggest news headlines are ObamaCare at the Supreme court and shooting of the 17 year old in Flordia.

Torrents?

[otis wildflower]

So, does this include torrents that don't route outside of Comcast's network? Presumably a good proportion of P2P need not cross their perimeter, I wonder if support for such "preferred" netranges can be added to P2P clients..

Re:Torrents?

[BitZtream]

I'm fairly certain someone already does this sort of thing in their P2P setup, for exactly that reason. Assuming the same general type of node (say all cable modems) then the closer they are, the quicker they SHOULD be to work with, so even without 'free local access' its STILL in the P2P apps best interest to try to use the closest connections possible.

This violates the FCC deal

[MobyDisk]

Part of the deal to purchase NBC Universal required that Comcast offer equal access to NBC content over other networks. But making it free bandwidth for your customers, but not for other customers, seems to violate the intent of that requirement while perhaps adhering to the letter of it.

*This* is why you cannot have one company as the service provider and the content provider.

Prior to the merger, the justice department released a Competitive Impact Statement which is concerned with Comcast not allowing access to NBC (and others) content. But it did not consider the possibility of Comcast offering special benefits to the content for their subscribers. Now that I think about it, nothing stops Comcast from offering content cheaper, faster, better quality, in 3D, etc.

Comcast's web site has the regulatory approval document which explains their limitations. It doesn't seem to specifically say they can't do this, but it looks like other people figured they couldn't do this. This blog entry from Mediapost says that the ruling:

Does not disadvantage rival online video distribution through its broadband Internet access services and/or set-top boxes. Does not enter into agreements to unreasonably restrict online distribution of its own video programming or programming of other providers.

So I think most people believed that this was illegal.

Re:This violates the FCC deal

[maccodemonkey]

I'm not sure it does. All they're basically doing is delivering their same cable content over IP instead. It's just as locked down as their existing content.

This isn't a public facing service that Comcast is giving an advantage to on their own network. It's a port of their cable box software for accessing pay per view content.

Rivals are completely free to do the exact same thing with NBC content on their networks. So it doesn't violate the agreement at all.

Re:This violates the FCC deal

[Rockoon]

But making it free bandwidth for your customers

I wouldnt call a monthly service charge "free bandwidth."

Re:This violates the FCC deal

[BitZtream]

Doesn't violate it at all.

Netflix isn't a network, CBS and HBO are, both of which comcast is going to stream to you for free just like all the other broadcast networks.

Just because you provide video doesn't make you a broadcast network, unless you think blockbuster stores are the same as your local TV station.

Everyone except Comcast

[Fred Ferrigno]

Comcast doesn't want to compete with the likes of Google, Apple, Amazon, and Netflix on an equal footing. Owning the network is the one advantage they have. If Xfinity was just one of several options, no one would pick it. You go with it because that's what the cable company offers and you go with the cable company because of where you live.

Re:Everyone except Comcast

[Anonymous Coward]

If Xfinity was just one of several options, no one would pick it. You go with it because that's what the cable company offers and you go with the cable company because of where you live.

Right. In Philadelphia, Comcast's home city, we have a choice of Verizon FiOS or Comcast Xfinity. The only people I know that have Xfinity are those that can't get FiOS, even amongst the laypeople. I don't want to ®&! on Comcast, they might have excellent service, I haven't used them recently enough to comment. I know many of their employees, they're good people and smart. They're actually driving some things in the technology industry, such as IPv6 adoption. Their drive and motivation is rare to see from a company of their size. Alternatively, I distinctly dislike the customer service at Verizon, while much preferring the quality of (internet) service and the fact that they're uncapped and unthrottled.

However, that said, Comcast's rates are reportedly higher (I'm not certain), the data rates are lower, and they're capped. If they were serious about local competition in their "home" market, then they would have to lift both the data rates and eliminate the data cap. They'd probably have to lower the price, too. To be honest, I'm not sure if they are that serious about it. I suspect they'd rather snag the unsuspecting customers that use little data and let Verizon take the data hogs like myself.

get a non-profit ISP!

[Herve5]

Here in France we have FDN, the ten-years-old "French Data Network" association, which among others proposes ADSL links with just the maximum available throughput they get to your home (typ. 18Mb/s) for €29/month (roughly $39).
Of course they don't add fancy services around this -it's a pure internet line, with one fixed IP, full stop...
But they are also intensely engaged into net neutrality, etc.
These recent years they have started "swarming" into more regional ISPs while none exists yet in my region (so I'm attached to the national level)
You don't really need a lot to start this -only motivated people, some of them with plenty of time...
site in french: http://www.fdn.fr/

Um... So what about those caps

[Anonymous Coward]

So, let me get this strait. Caps are needed to solve network congestion because we don't have enough bandwidth right? The "pipes" are full. So why does their service magically not count against caps?

This may not be a net neutrality issue but this is textbook anti-competitive practices. Unless of course they can prove there service magically doesn't use bandwidth. Then again if they use magic in actual press release I'll have to call them Apple.

Re:Um... So what about those caps

[ledow]

Because what matters is NOT your bandwidth to Comcast but THEIR bandwidth to the outside world. The more people using a Comcast connection to access NON-Comcast services, the more it costs them, because they need more external access and peering, which is "expensive".

What you do on your own network and (in theory) between two Comcast customers costs them virtually nothing. The capacity is already there.

More interesting - if they don't count this Comcast service, why do they count internal traffic (Comcast->Comcast subscribers) and can, say, Google get a box put into their network to cache Google requests and get "not counted" towards their subscriber's limits?

Re:Um... So what about those caps

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you high?

The last mile HAS ALWAYS been where the cablecos complain the congestion lies. Have you seen the cost of tier 1 access these days? It's so cheap that it may as well be unmetered. This has nothing to do with network congestion, and everything to do with stifling competition. The capacity on their network and between subscribers is what costs the MOST.

Duh.

Re:Um... So what about those caps

[Anonymous Coward]

If they feel the need to cap internet because so much bandwidth is being used, how can they justify allowing their own video service to be used unlimitedly? Doesn't that admit that bandwidth isn't a problem.

Re:Um... So what about those caps

[Anonymous Coward]

This is false. Bandwidth caps are not associated with cost. Bandwidth capacity is a point in time limitation not a limitation over time. These bottle necks are naturally handled by the limitations of hardware.

The fact that they allow this traffic without a cap, proves that caps are a complete scam.

It's a feature not a bug

[brainzach]

Comcast is giving the customer more value for their money and people are complaining about net neutrality. Would it be better if Comcast counted it's own content against the cap?

Comcast is a cable company that provides television service which people pay extra for anyways, so it isn't free. The only difference is that you are distributing the content to PCs and tablets instead of a television set.

I don't see how anyone would argue that it should count against your bandwidth cap when you already pay for the TV service.

Re:It's a feature not a bug

[jedidiah]

> Comcast is giving the customer more value for their money

No they aren't. They are engaging in an obvious and blatant form of monopoly abuse. They are exploiting the natural monopoly part of their business to unfairly benefit the content delivery aspect of their business against rivals.

These rivals are well established first movers that rightfully deserve the "spoils" of innovating and providing new products.

Continued tolerance of these blatant monopoly activities will only drive the best companies out of the market while decreasing quality and increasing prices.

The ultimate result is in fact "less value for their money".

Re:It's a feature not a bug

[brainzach]

Abuse of monopoly power would be to lower the cap or start limiting third party websites, which Comcast isn't doing.

How is what Comcast doing any different than the cable TV that you paid for? The content is exactly the same just the means of distribution is a little different to make it more convenient to watch.

Re:It's a feature not a bug

[Anonymous Coward]

The content is exactly the same just the means of distribution is a little different to compete against Internet competition

There changed that for you. They are abusing their monopoly. You pay for Hulu+ and Netflix as well, but now if you purchase Comcasts service you get additional network benefits because they own the last mile.
IMO, in practice this will probably not hurt competitors. Comcast knows this, which makes it a brilliant move. Comcast is just testing the water. Setting the president for them to capitalize on their monopoly + growing content portfolio.

Re:It's a feature not a bug

[king neckbeard]

If Comcast can do this, the networks clearly aren't congested, and thus the caps are just abuse of the monopoly.

Where does this end?

[MacBrave]

Would this be akin to having General Electric owning your electric company then saying that they won't charge you for the electricity used to power G.E. branded toasters and dishwashers (hello "smart grid")? Of course non-G.E. branded appliances would be charged as normal, or at a higher rate.

Re:Where does this end?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bingo. Conflict of Interest, pure and simple. And I've no idea why litigation hasn't been brought up already.

This goes beyond net neutrality, this goes back to the monopolies of old (Ma Bell, anyone?) strong-arming themselves into better position from which to bend the customer over a barrel.

Re:Where does this end?

[BitZtream]

No, because they didn't say 'GE branded toasters', they said 'the brands of toasters we already give you at our coal planets, we're now going to let you get them also from the local nuclear plant at no additional charge if you'd like'

They are still giving you access to the competition. It isn't JUST for NBC content, its also for ABC, CBS, all the other crap that you already get when you subscribe to cable television, now instead of having to watch it with a tuner card like an HDHomeRun Prime that converts it to IP datagrams, you can just get the fucking datagrams without the having to buy a HDHR Prime. They content itself is not changing, just the delivery method.

Its like UPS allowing you to switch to next day air from second day ground because they happen to have spare capacity on the aerial network rather than the ground network. Still the same package being delivered from the same source you wanted it from, its just now they fly it in instead of truck it in.

Comcast already broadcasts VoD

[Anonymous Coward]

Cable TV is sent via broadcast (Or multicast in IP packets, dependings where you are, not sure what Comcast does) - very efficient indeed. You can't do that for VoD though, at least not without major network redesign work and equipment replacement.

Not only can you sent VoD via broadcast, cable companies including Comcast have been doing it for years. When they do/did this they refer to such broadcast VoD as "Pay Per View (PPV)". In today's environment with FCC-mandated CableCard tuners they broadcast the VoD on a reserved ATSC channel and send updated authorization programming to your CableCard to allow you to tune to and decode that channel for the duration of the broadcast. Prior to universal adoption of the CableCards they would broadcast the VoD/PPV on a set of reserved ATSC channels ala frequency-hopping and send periodic signals to your cableco box telling it when to switch to which channel. Back in those days, if you had the patience and curiosity, you could actually watch your neighbor fast-forward, re-wind etc their VoD in real-time by using your own HDTV's ATSC tuner to find a channel their VoD was on.

Re:Comcast already broadcasts VoD

[jaymemaurice]

I think he means IPTV VoD where the subscriber can stop and "rewind" where the buffer is streamed.

That said, in a large network with a large number of set top boxes which can recieve and store a buffer, such a VoD stream could be broken into multicasted chunks to be re-assembled by the set top box... sort of like how Rembo and other certain other IT desktop/PC image distribution systems work.

That all said, Comcast should be allowed to provide their IPTV service without the cap... they can use technology like Multicast and plan and control their own service. If they have too many VoD sessions, they can limit the available content or do other things which will make the service still work. Utilizing multicast, the impact of IPTV is much less on their edge network.

You demonstrate why NN should not be supported

[SuperKendall]

A network provider should be a neutral network provider

Agree 100%.

However there is nothing about this that breaks neutrality, which is all about them not LIMITING other services. You seem to think it is but all it's doing is allowing access to some content they offer at reduced cost - where is the "limit" on other people?

It's simply the case that content they can store on the same network costs them nothing to transmit, and so you get it for free. It's simply passing along a cost reduction.

It boggles my mind how network neutrality supporters cannot understand this, from so many angles. You cannot understand how this does not violate network neutrality. Nor can you understand you any NN regulations even being considered would in no way address this "problem" which is not even a problem!!! Instead you support a stupid regulation which doesn't actually solve any of the problems you are imagining. It's inherently a stupid argument I think to claim that you should force a company to charge equally for something right next to you vs three networks away. It makes no sense in the real world and could not be sustained.

Re:You demonstrate why NN should not be supported

[KingMotley]

Well considering that comcast instituted their 250GB caps Oct 1, 2008, and it has not changed since, and the amount of traffic that users consume doubles every 18 months, what was once a reasonable cap is now effectively 1/4th that amount. I suspect that comcast will continue to either not increase their cap, or increase it at a much slower rate than consumers increase their traffic, and you quickly begin to see this effectively the same thing as raising the cost of external content in relation to their own.

Re:You demonstrate why NN should not be supported

[Kielistic]

The limit on other people is not being able to offer the same advantage. Very simple.

You are getting boondoggled by them using positive words. If they limit everyone and then allow themselves not to be limited they are still limiting everyone else. They just use weasle words to make it less obvious.

Re:You demonstrate why NN should not be supported

[s73v3r]

No, this is breaking neutrality. They are intentionally degrading the quality of competing services by making them more expensive to use. The "limit" is once you hit your bandwidth cap.

It's simply the case that content they can store on the same network costs them nothing to transmit, and so you get it for free. It's simply passing along a cost reduction.

Then they should be forced to offer the same convenience to Netflix, Amazon, and anyone else that wishes to do so.

It boggles my mind how network neutrality supporters cannot understand this, from so many angles.

It boggles my mind that you see a company giving themselves an unfair advantage over competitors, and you're perfectly fine with it.

You cannot understand how this does not violate network neutrality.

Because it DOES violate Network Neutrality.

It's inherently a stupid argument I think to claim that you should force a company to charge equally for something right next to you vs three networks away.

Then why can't Netflix get the same benefit, and put their content in the same place?

Re:You demonstrate why NN should not be supported

[zzsmirkzz]

However there is nothing about this that breaks neutrality, which is all about them not LIMITING other services.

They are limiting other services by enforcing a bandwidth cap on them (a limit) while excluding their own (comparable) service from this cap. Since they are in control of the cap they could, effectively, force all of their users to use their service over any competitors simply by reducing the cap to a low enough limit. It becomes a "you can get unlimited video from us but only 10-20hrs worth from them".

Re:You demonstrate why NN should not be supported

[BitZtream]

Really? There are a LOT of Akamai servers sitting in Comcast data centers that get the EXACT SAME treatment now.

Perhaps, before assuming you should ask if you can put a server in their data center to reduce traffic requirements and see what their response is.

Re:You demonstrate why NN should not be supported

[Rockoon]

However there is nothing about this that breaks neutrality, which is all about them not LIMITING other services

I agree completely.

A little thought experiment here...

Suppose an ISP offered a flat $1/GB internet access for 10mbit service. No monthly service charge. I think a lot of slashdotters (not me) would sign up for this sort of package in a heartbeat because they would end up paying a lot less for service than they do now.

Now suppose a competing ISP in the area offered the same service, but exempted bandwidth used retrieving email from their own email servers.

My argument is that this "our-email-is-free" exemption is not a network neutrality violation, and I think most slashdotters would agree.

So what is different here with comcast? Well, instead of charging a per-GB fee they (and their competitors) have a monthly service charge, and that we are talking about video instead of email.

So I doint think the core issue is that this is a neutrality violation.. as I dont believe it is. I think the core issue is that comcast may be violating anti-trust laws because they own a significant such a large portion of video content.

Aussie ISPs have been doing similar for ages

[davidwr]

Sort of.

A few years ago, a friend in Australia said that content that was hosted "locally" (my words, not his) wasn't charged as much or at all, but "non-local" content was expensive.

I'm not sure if "local" meant "hosted on his ISP's network" or "hosted on-continent."

Now, to be fair, at the time, it really did cost at least his ISP a lot of money to handle traffic going to or from the undersea cable or over satellite. Things may be different now.

To level the playing field

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps Comcast should allow Netflix etal to connect to the Comcast 'Private IP' network without cost.

If the Comcast video service has only one head end, then Netflix should only have to connect at that site.
Bandwidth and QOS should be comparable to what is provided to Comcast's video service.

That won't fix the problem for a new startup operating on a showstring,
      but it will fix it for slightly more established outfits.

Comcast seems to be forcing internet service to become a common carrier operation
    with the video separated inside Comcast by an accounting firewall.

I don't care

[CubicleZombie]

The first month I hit the cap (whatever it is) through normal home use, I'm cancelling the service outright. I've never had much sympathy for file sharing, but when they try to force me to give up Netflix/Hulu/Whatever and subscribe to HBO, I'm out.

Anyone know if Comcast has plans with higher caps?

[barlevg]

Before this month, I definitely fell into the category of the 99% of users they claim never even get close to the 250GB limit, but this month, I'm already at 230 GB (I know what the spike in traffic is from, and, shockingly, it's not torrenting, not video streaming, and nothing illegal). My plan right now is to change the way I do things with regards to this service, but if Comcast offers a higher tier plan with a larger cap, I'd definitely consider uprgading to it.

Not necessarily a Net Neutrality issue

[Bumbles]

Assuming the following is true and that the content on the xbox app is a subset of the VOD service offered on the cable tv service, this should not have anything to do with network neutrality. It is simply turning an xbox into a second cable box for VOD.

" Q: Does a customer need to have a Comcast cable box connected to the TV, along with the Xbox 360?
        A: No, but the customer does need to have a cable box or CableCARD-enabled retail device connected to at least one TV in the house. This means, for example, an XFINITY Digital customer could access XFINITY On Demand content from the Xbox 360 in their rec room, as long as they have a cable box or retail CableCARD device in another room of the house, such as the living room. This is the first time that customers will be able to watch Comcastâ(TM)s On Demand service via a gaming console." (Emphasis mine).

If the xbox app offers items that are not on Comcast's On Demand service, then people may have a right to complain. If the xbox app only offers a subset of the on demand service, then this is a second cable box and only useful on a tv in your home that is not already hooked up to the cable tv service.

One would have to look into the service to verify whether the documentation from Comcast is correct.

Looking at this way wrong...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok guys, alot of you are looking at this like its a separate service and "OMG HOW DO I BYPASS DATA CAPS." Comcast is offering the service as a means for a customer to view on demand content without charging you for another box, of course they are not going to add that to your data cap. In my area you have to pay $9.95 extra a month for a second on demand box, but they will give you a couple DTA's for free, so if I want to use a DTA on my bedroom TV where my Xbox is, I can and I can still access my on demand content on my TV. My brother could also use the xbox app on his TV instead of eating up our data cap watching it on his iPad. This is a really good thing for costs, and provides content as if I was paying 20 dollars more for service. I've already swapped out my 2 extra boxes and picked up HBO on promo for 10 bucks a month for Game of Thrones, and will be spending my next two days off catching up so that I'm ready for the new season this weekend

Re:Anyone know if Comcast has plans with higher ca

[Anonymous Coward]

You have to switch to business class... No caps there, and WAY better customer service

Re:Anyone know if Comcast has plans with higher ca

[Anonymous Coward]

Business plans are uncapped.

Re:Still trying to hide this by moddown TheRaven64

[AlamedaStone]

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2751915&cid=39495327

Risking my karma to tell you that none of the people discussing this topic care. Please take your petty, off-topic vendetta elsewhere.

AS

I don't see why it should count.

[YesIAmAScript]

You should have separate caps for traffic that goes out through the ISPs backhaul and traffic that doesn't. Because the former costs them more (transit charges) than the latter. And the latter may have no cap at all if that's feasible.

I also think that large ISPs like Comcast should be required to give other services who want to evade the backhaul cap the ability to colocate in the ISP data centers.

The big data companies (like streaming video) would then move into ISP data centers and reduce the load on the internet backbone routes.

Re:I don't see why it should count.

[BitZtream]

I'd like for you to show me a Comcast data center that doesn't have an Akamai colo in it for the very reasons you state.

Comcast already allows colocation for a small (very reasonable) fee as it DOES cost SOMETHING for the power, rack space and network ports.

In fact pretty much any medium to large sized ISP does this because its good for both parties.

The only difference here is that they are doing for themselves what they already do for others, and slashdotters who know nothing about how large ISPs ACTUALLY work think they see this major conspiracy to force NBC down your throat.

I'm not denying the conspiracy, just that this particular move has anything at all to do with it.

can you get the service without comcast?

[j2.718ff]

Is this video service available to people with internet connections who are not comcast customers? If not, then it is a comcast-only thing, and they can charge as they please. But if this service is available to people outside of comcast's network, then it becomes a question of net neutrality.

Perfect example

[J'raxis]

And thus we have a perfect example of how network neutrality is nothing more than government interference in (natural) free markets, and going to cost consumers more in the long run.

I can move gigabytes of data across my LAN at no cost other than the electricity it takes to run it and the nominal equipment costs. But to pull data in from an upstream network, I need to pay the upstream network provider for access at whatever rate they charge, most likely based on the bandwidth I use. Service A costs me next to nothing, service B costs me money directly, so naturally I might want to charge more for B than I do for A. Perhaps I can even give A away for free or offer a very substantial discount since it costs me little to nothing.

But now the government is going to tell me this pricing scheme is "discriminatory." How dare I charge customers more for services that cost me more money!?

So now I either have to figure out some scheme to distribute the cost of the B across A equally, to make it appear "fair," and hope that I get the subsidization formula right so it doesn't end up costing me money to provide B and A together... or I just charge people as much for A as I do for B in order to ensure it doesn't cost me.

Congratulations, consumers, your idiotic laws just cost you money. But at least it's "fair"!

Re:Perfect example

[king neckbeard]

Networks are natural monopolies, which means that applying free market rhetoric to it is idiotic. The caps are abuse of that monopoly, and are an effective way to squelch competition in certain markets.

Re:Anyone know if Comcast has plans with higher ca

[Tyler Eaves]

So, out of curiosity, what IS burning all of those GB?

Sort of okay with this.

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't necessarily see anything wrong with what they are doing from a technical perspective.

As someone who works for an ISP, sometimes we will drop off a separate connection for VoIP services, or chop up the bandwidth on a Link to split it into private/public segments for a private WAN, etc.

I believe an ISP should have the ability to offer ON-NET services that are prioritized off of OFF-NET services, if nothing else than for the reason that getting too zealous about Net Neutrality makes something as simple as QoS for VoIP provided by the same provider as the pipe illegal!

It would really sort of suck to have to give a customer two separate ethernet handoffs, two separate IP addresses (public and private), and have the customer set up a router to access different services on the public vs private networks.

It would be BLOCKING or throttling down access to sites such as Netflix or throttling them down that I would consider to be in violation of Net Neutrality.

Where it gets slippery is partnering with content providers to get ACCESS to this QoS'd service.

unfair

[CimmerianX]

I called this many months ago when those caps went in.

This is simply a move to squash other online video providers. Those provider's streams count against your monthly cap, but comcast's video/tv services do not. That is an unfair market advantage IMHO.

Re:unfair

[arekin]

Comcast on demand on your xbox or cablebox = not a streaming service http://xfinitytv.comcast.net/ = streaming service Guess what, comcasts streaming service, yeah it uses your bandwidth cap.

Huh?

[ThatsNotPudding]

California has about 5 million more people than Canada; it's so large that it would count as a medium-sized European country (with a very strong economy too).

Given that they have massive deficits, budget cuts at every turn, and a once-eviable school system is now in ruins, you have a very strange definition of 'strong economy'.

Re:Anyone know if Comcast has plans with higher ca

[barlevg]

a game server

Re:TheRaven64 pot calling a kettle black by ac now

[Monchanger]

Dude, you're in public. Chill the hell out and quit being an ass. Nobody cares about your crush on that other guy.

America is screwed

[Cigarra]

Yep, you guys are owned by corporations, the system is f***ed up beyond repair. Just move out to some other place and live happily.

Nothing new here

[viperidaenz]

ISP's have been doing this in New Zealand for many years now. They kind of had to, since a few years ago the average plan had a 10GB cap. Its around 40GB now. With excess charges at $1-$10/GB

TV nuetrality?

[LostCluster]

If I have to have Comcast to watch Comcast Sports Net and the new NBC Sports Network, and DirecTV in order to watch Fox Sports Net... just how do I chose?

Monopoly or Net Neutrality?

[mk1004]

If Comcast doesn't count even one TV show/movie that it provides through its service, but does count the data for the same show if provided by a competing service, then that seems like a monopoly issue. Net neutrality issues might be used to argue against the practice, but it's more likely (IMO) a monopoly issue and should be dealt with on that basis.

bittorrent

[shentino]

So this means I can use bittorrent and peer with my neighbors without being charged for the data, right?

Re:Anyone know if Comcast has plans with higher ca

[BitZtream]

Downloading porn to view it later is not streaming video nor is it illegal in most places.

Orwell was right

[Anonymous Coward]

"Network neutrality is the idea is that a maximally useful public information network aspires to treat all content, sites, and platforms equally."
    -Columbia Law Professor

"...some are more equal than others."
    -George Orwell, Animal Farm

Only win-win for big business oligarchy.

[Anonymous Coward]

Now imagine if Google, Apple, Amazon, and Netflix could host a few boxes inside the Comcast network. Everyone wins.

Except for start-ups, sites owned by individuals, non-profits, and anyone else who can't afford the special "fast lane" process. This just turns it into a shared Big Boys' Club. I mean, did you think Google, Apple, Amazon, and Netflix would be allowed to do this for free? Hell, getting them to pay for using "the ISP's bandwidth" (that you and I apparently aren't paying enough for) was half of what started the government paying attention to this nonsense in the first place!

This was forseen...

[Anonymous Coward]

http://techoped.com/2009/01/21/the-real-meaning-of-comcast-generosity/

wrote about this exact topic, Comcast using its monopolistic power as an ISP to give it an anti-competitive advantage as a content provider.

As i predicted

[nurb432]

I told people this would happen the very day they announced 'caps'.

Goal is to reduce the Internet down to just email, and steer you into getting all your 'content' from them, or fear getting hit with huge bills next month for overage.

Anyone here remember the bad old days of GEnie and Compuserve? Same story there... From what i remember, at least with AOL, if you were out of time that month, yo u just got disconnected, not billed at several times the normal cost.

bandwidth over time is a scam

[Anonymous Coward]

Net neutrality doesn't apply. Comcast is selling bandwidth caps to content providers not real bandwidth. Real bandwidth( as applicable to NN) is single point in time bandwidth.

Point in time bandwidth is limited by what you pay for..for cable its shared bandwidth. So if you and your neighbors are all watching videos on the Xbox your bandwidth is shared among you. Telling you that after x amount of data in a month you have to stop using some data but can keep using other....is selling nothing for pure profit.

All bandwidth caps are a complete scam and them removing caps for some content proves it.

It is the as if telling someone they can only drive down the road 300 times a month, everyone is still going to sit in traffic at rush hour.

TheRaven64 got blown away here, badly

[Anonymous Coward]

http://mobile.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2734503&cid=39497061 on hosts files, point by point, where apk tore him apart, days later (and using ac replies and nobody is stupid enough to not realize it was TheRaven64 'defending himself' and rather poorly I must add), after TheRaven64 was challenged to disprove apk's points on hosts files and failed. All that, after TheRaven64 tried picking on apk here starting it up http://mobile.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2734503&cid=39406223 only to be annihilated for it publicly here on /. - it is obvious you're also TheRaven64 doing yet more of the same and failing as usual this time doing ur ac replies trying to defend that fool (you, TheRaven64).

TheRaven64 brought it on himself

[Anonymous Coward]

Seems U care - TheRaven64 got smoked badly here http://mobile.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2734503&cid=39497061 and yes, on hosts files, point by point, where apk tore him apart after TheRaven64 trolled him about hosts files starting the entire thing.

Then, days later, TheRaven64 tried vainly defending himself as you can see above (and using ac replies too from TheRaven64)

Please - and nobody is stupid enough to not realize it was TheRaven64 'defending himself' there albeit using ac replies to do it and failing on every 'point' he tried to make and was horribly erroneous in it!

TheRaven64 tried picking on apk here starting it up http://mobile.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2734503&cid=39406223 only to be annihilated for it publicly here on /. in the 1st link above... publicly.

All that, after TheRaven64 was challenged to disprove apk's points on hosts files and failed. TheRaven64 brought it on himself.

Seems U care: Who're U trying 2 bullshit?

[Anonymous Coward]

See how "well" TheRaven64 did in the end here on this entire fiasco -> http://mobile.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2734503&cid=39497061 and yes, on hosts files, point by point, where apk tore him apart after TheRaven64 trolled him about hosts files starting the entire thing.

Then, days later, TheRaven64 tried vainly defending himself as you can see above (and using ac replies too - and nobody is stupid enough to not realize it was TheRaven64 'defending himself' and rather poorly I must add)

TheRaven64 tried picking on apk here starting it up http://mobile.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2734503&cid=39406223 only to be annihilated for it publicly here on /. in the 1st link above... publicly.

All that, after TheRaven64 was challenged to disprove apk's points on hosts files and failed. TheRaven64 brought it on himself.