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The Coming Internet Video Crash
snydeq writes "First, it was data caps on cellular, and now caps on wired broadband — welcome to the end of the rich Internet, writes Galen Gruman. 'People are still getting used to the notion that unlimited data plans are dead and gone for their smartphones. The option wasn't even offered for tablets. Now, we're beginning to see the eradication of the unlimited data plan in our broadband lines, such as cable and DSL connections. It's a dangerous trend that will threaten the budding Internet-based video business — whether from Netflix, Hulu, iTunes, Windows Store, or Google Play — then jeopardize Internet services of all sorts. It's a complex issue, and though the villains are obvious — the telecom carriers and cable providers — the solutions are not. The result will be a metered Internet that discourages use of the services so valuable for work and play.'"
It needs to be regulated like a public utility.
As providers try to cap their data plans, new market players will emerge and take over by offering unlimited plans that consumers want
Right?
My tablet and phone has unlimited data, so I don't really know what they person is talking about.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Commentators (including myself) have been predicting the end of the internet (as we know it) for almost two decades now -- but I (and all the others) have been proven wrong.
Yes, the demand for bandwidth is growing at a huge rate -- but so is the provisioning of that bandwidth.
If you live in a country like New Zealand (where I live) you get used to living with capped data plans -- they're just a part of life and, to be totally honest, it's never really been an issue for me -- despite the fact that I do a *lot* of online video, as you can tell by my Youtube Channel.
Sure, the arrival of IPTV will change the picture a little, as TV programming starts to make up an increasingly high percentage of the total traffic -- but hey, nothing's free and many people pay for cable so why not pay for IPTV in a way that includes the bandwidth you use as well? (as will soon be the case).
Uncapped internet? Never had it, never really needed it. I have 120GB a month and that's all I need -- perhaps because I don't like the kind of dross I find on TV anyway. Quality of content is *far* more important than the quality of the image.
It started with the old hourly charges from the old services like CompuServe and AOL, then "because of consumer demand" they went to Unlimited.
Notice this article talks about the "entertainment" side. Look at the Cloud side.
1. "Everyone use your software from the Cloud! It's nice and fluffy!"
2. "Let's cap bandwidth so that when you pull your data every 7 seconds you burn 4 megs, and then you will hit your cap and we can charge the fees."
If I was better at graphic design, I've wanted to make "chart news" with trends like these pointing in opposite directions in 2010 that becomes 2012's news when they collide.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
There are two solutions, both of which are obvious. The first, which is the solution the telecoms want to choose, is to charge content providers for providing content at reasonable speeds. This, of course, leads to a two-tier Internet, i.e. the big media conglomerates and the independent ghetto. The second is to pass laws that ban download limits for all wired service providers.
At this point, those are the only two options. Well, no, there's a third. We could build up a government-run infrastructure. But I'm not holding my breath.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
A market controlled by cartels or monopolies is not free, and is every bit as bad as a market controlled by a government.
I know you were being sarcastic. I am just adding to the thought.
National fiber optic network. Let the old telco's die with their old ways.
With so many people ditching Cable and Sat TV plans in favor of an Internet-Only household, and with the Cable Companies being the majority providers of Internet Access, of course we had to see this coming.
Vz and Comcast aren't going to sit idly by while their subscribers ditch the media services and keep only the delivery service, and spend their money at Netflix and other media services.
The question is, will it be considered anti-competitive for them to allow unlimited delivery of their own media over the pipe, while charging extra for media from their competitors? I certainly think that's anti-competitive, and where net neutrality needs to come into play. But, I doubt we'll see it happen, at least in the US.
Same here, my phone service is unlimited and uncapped. My ISP is also unlimited, unthrottled, and uncapped. Not everyone goes with the same 2-3 big carriers. And I have no major complaints with my service...
I'm in Australia. Internet access was once metered by the hour ($10 per hour dial-up) then prices fell to under a dollar an hour. Then I got ADSL in the very early 2000s with a whole gigabyte over a month, always-on. Then it increased to three per month. Then ten, fifteen, forty, then a jump to 200, and in 2012 I'm 'limited' to over a terabyte a month.
A fucking terabyte.
I can't stream that much video (even in good quality) and actually watch it in a month without quitting my job and family time and attaching myself to the couch with cheese & bacon balls and becoming an obese live-in hermit.
Oh, and the cost for those plans is a third it was when I was on 1GB quotas.
Yes, it came from an awful over-priced start, but the goods for cost is growing and keeps growing here.
Free market never really works well with critical infrastructure.
The market will fix this, or legislation will.
Bandwidth is cheap and it gets cheaper every year. Carriers make a lot of money on bandwidth resale even at the fairly small level (few gbits/sec feeds). Not many people are aware of HOW cheap it actually is though.
Most of the problem can stem from the fact municipalities were too short sighted, or unable legally, to run fiber infrastructure that could be leased to ISPs (egress). A modern fiber network has effectively unlimited bandwidth.. and then there's next year's kit coming.
A better question is what's going to happen to the content / cable providers in a gigabit unlimited environment.
..don't panic
Unlimited internet is unheard of over here. I pay $90 a month for 50GB of internet, and barely get 1MB/s even after rewiring my home. If I go over my 50GB, my speed is reduced to dial up until the start of a new month.
As some markets mature (some, not all) with few players remaining leaving an oligopoly, the agreed upon consensus is that there's bountiful profit in scarcity. So you artificially restrict a resource to improve profit. It's a win win for the providers. They sell less, and make even more profit because now you have competition for those resources and thus will pay more. More so if you're a monopoly for your area.
Life is not for the lazy.
SaskTel has unlimited data on all plans for high-speed. Only problem is that its still over copper/fibre to the node, and they've only just begun rolling out fibre to the home in select areas now. Until you get switched to it, you can't get any higher than a certain speed tier without dropping their IPTV service from the bundle (however, their IPTV service is pretty good; its based off the same hardware as AT&T U-verse)
There was never any such thing as "an unlimited data plan".
There were plans that were misleadingly labelled as "unlimited", but what they really were, was plans where the ISP simply let people use up bandwidth in a first-come-first-served fashion. Whenever the demand reached or surpassed the infrastructures capacity, the de-facto limits of the hardware kicked in, regardless of what the sales droids had promised in the brochure.
For a company to offer a genuine "unlimited plan", the company would have to build up enough capacity to allow 100% of their unlimited-plan customers to use 100% of the bandwidth capacity of the wire running to their house, 24/7/365. The cost of such an infrastructure would be significantly larger than most people would be willing to pay for, especially since most people don't use or need anywhere near that much capacity.
So my feeling is that the demise of "unlimited plans" in the marketing is a good thing -- at least we're no longer trying to fool each other into believing bandwidth is infinite (as opposed to finite but cheap).
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Try to make this an election issue. Demand the ISPs are converted into common carriers and be made into dumb pipes.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
We've allowed last-mile internet to devolve into monopolies and duopolies. Same for cell carriers.
Would else could you expect?
Sad...the internet is American, dammit, and we have the worst internet in the first world!
expandfairuse.org
Few people use their cellphone for serious online use. Most of them use it because it is convenient and it is there. Most might be irritated if the cellular telcos put huge caps on it, but in the end no one is really that completely put off by it. Many people will be angry about it but will continue on their merry way paying for it. There is not huge amount of people that would be seriously inconvenienced by it, and certainly not the apocalyptic way it is worded.
Now caps on wired are not gonna be as tough as they make it out to be. The major Canadian telcos charge and arms and a leg for low bandwidth/cap internet, but the lower tier providers offer pretty much whatever they want. At the moment, I'am paying $70 (split amongst roommates) for 25 down/5 up and an unlimited cap. The price did increase earlier in the year by a few dollars as Bell tried to put the squeeze on my provider (TekSavvy)) but it is still infinitely better than any plan they offer. Now I know things are worse a little farther south for those United Statians but I have hope that the telecoms capping practise won't go on for absolutely that long. Eventually something in the country is going to reach a breaking point for the general public, and it just might be the internet that pokes the figurative bubble. I can't say much for other countries, but I've heard mixed reports of excellent/shitty internet from all over.
Somewhat accurate, but a little overblown it seems to me.
You know, my Dad told me his great-grandmother used to spit tobacco juice on bee stings, too. Who needs all that flashy modern medicine crap, anyway...
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
There are two providers where I live, ATT and Cable, both offer TV/Phone/Internet and pricing is pretty similar. If one were to give up unlimited data, the other would have to as well, otherwise there would be a huge loss of customers as they shift over to the other provider. I understand that this is specific to markets where there are multiple providers but the choice between unlimited from one provider and limited from another really isn't much of a choice.
People might have to talk to each other, or read books, or go outside. Or they might buy DVDs again.. if they are paying $200 a month for cable, they can already buy 10 DVDs a month. If they used redbox they could rent 5 dvds per day, and still have money left over.
Obviously, Google are trying to do something in the US, and here in England, Virgin Media and Sky are both doing relatively good stuff (Virgin pushing speeds, Sky offering a truly unlimited package - unfortunately neither does both).
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
Not for Sprint users! Dead and gone? What are you talking about?
There's no immediate end to the bandwidth explosion. This would all sort itself out given a bit more time and space. Yet not only do the consumers need to watch Batman XIII no less than five minutes from now, they also want to watch it Holographic HD. Stupid fucks. What else can you say? Another decade, the network will hardly even notice the imposition of people born yesterday zooming in expound upon the blade orientation that deposited a snick of razor burn astride the groomable peach-fuzz.
Meanwhile, the networks have engineered this stampede of stupid fucks to justify tilting the economic and political landscape on a semi-permanent basis.
Stupid fucks over the glossy cliff. Happens every time.
It's easy, really... Google just has to find a way to smack down the incumbent network providers (AT&T, Comcast, etc) so they can't stop municipalities from laying their own fiber municipal networks with an access point every mile or so, then empower citizens to take matters directly into their own hands and lay their own fiber bundles in trenches they dig with their own shovels (or hang their own fiber from a public support attached to the lowest rung of the city's utility poles) to get to those access points if their HOA drags its feet or tries to tie them into proprietary services). Few things will put the fear of God into any HOA than being told their homeowners have the inalienable right to string wires from poles and dig their own trenches if they don't hurry up and get their own acts together. Get my fiber to a 10-gig switch with direct connectivity into NAP of the Americas in downtown Miami, and AT&T and Comcast can both go straight to hell as far as I'm concerned.
You can't have a monopoly or a monopolistic cartel without government intervention. "Free market monopolies" are a misnomer, as the company that has provided such a high quality, low cost product that no-one can compete with them must continue to provide such quality, or risk new competition arising.
I see you failed to read all seven books of Adam Smith on what capitalism is, and are a servant of the Mercantilists that opposed Capitalism.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Simple as that. They are installing a network, getting it right and then will start building it out. It IS an unlimited model and it will put immense pressure on everybody else to change to that model. After all, that is the way REAL competition works.
America's problem is that the American politicians, esp. neo-cons, have been pushing monopolies for all solutions. IOW, they love the communist model. Hell, just look at the all of the neo-cons pushing Constellation and now SLS, over what private space can do for a FRACTION of the money.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
It will simply give Google Fiber the opportunity come in and clean house. Welcome to the new world Telcos and Cable Carriers.
Around here 100 mbit optic fiber is the default internet connection that comes with your cable and you can access their TV channels from "the cloud", so every iPad is now a portable TV.
Thanks to the joys of "FON" (http://corp.fon.com), if you allow your wifi router to resell unused bandwidth, you can have free wifi anywhere in the country, so long as you stumble upon a FON link. And they're everywhere.
But apart from that, we do have flat-rate everything, including 3G, to the extent that some non-TV-watching people prefer to buy 3G access for their laptop instead of a normal internet connection.
People are willing to pay, so there will be someone willing to provide. Capitalism is quite wonderful that way.
I live in the deep south and have been lucky so far "Knock on wood"
we have 2 options for internet here in this tiny 1 redlight town. Comcast cable (low speeds since its tiny town), or ADSL2+ through ISP who is promising an upgrade to VDSL next year.
I would never use comcast ever, due to bandwidth caps which I go over all the time using my DUmeter app to calculate monthly useage.
but my landline provider is who i have adsl2+ which why upgraded to 2 years ago so I have 12 megabit down / 1 megabit up, with full unlimited package for 69.99/mo which is my landline phone + 12 megabit dsl connection.
Some months I'm usually around 250-300 gigs /month but last month I was 412g total up/down traffic for month.
so far the ISP doesn't care, there's no cap.
Of course shit could change anytime but I won't budge off local landline DSL since they keep promising to stay unlimited.
Corporations control the government! We need more government!
I have a simple proposal with simpler regulations: sell internet connectivity based on MINIMUM standards, not 'up to' or 'maximum' or 'capped'. The vendor MUST guarantee a minimum speed to the modem with 99% uptime. Any failure will be easy for all parties to monitor. Let competition and the market decide the pricing and speed packages, but let the end user be guaranteed of getting what they are paying for.
*** Don't be dull.***
So, in other words, we give the content cartels just enough rope, and they'll hang themselves for us? Cool.
Full Circle. We'll get there.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
I don't think you realize what the term 'oligopoly' means. It's blind luck that you're still unlimited, as it appears they just haven't gotten around to making limits in your area.
Y'see there wouldn't BE any huge loss of customers shifting, since that's how oligopolys work. They will collude together behind closed doors when to end unlimited bandwidth, and then when both stop it at approximately the same time, well... goodbye unlimited bandwidth, that's all there is to it.
So milk your bandwidth while you can, because it has a huge target painted on its back. It's only a matter of time before they take it down. Probably very little time. Honestly, I'd be surprised if there's any unlimited internet in North American 2 years from now.
You mean... like "The Good Old Days?" Swell! I'll just dust off my old UUCP manual! You know, back in the 90's, netnews accounted for several TERABYTES of data a week across MCI's pipe! This was back when a few hundred megabytes was large for a hard drive. Ah here it is... Whoo, that's a lot of dust... I had a bang path you know? True story. The first company I worked for shelled out for a uunet connection for a while. Back before the September that never ended. We built this network, the users, the techies. We built it and the corporations came in and made it a graphical web, sucking all the life force and money out of it. And now here we are again. Once they've drained it all dry, tied it all up in IP lawsuits and tossed its empty husk aside, perhaps we'll be the only ones left again. And the cycle will continue.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Around here all these are public utilities run by either the city or the province. (I'm in Canada.) And actually the old-school twisted-pair phone system is run by the province as well.
I think it would make perfect sense to run 'net access as a utility. It naturally lends itself to the utility pricing model as well--a flat amount per month just to get the connection and maintain the lines, then a reasonable fee per gigabyte.
I already have a low cap, for a high price and "high speed"... So this isn't anything new to me.
120GB cap, $67 per month just for the internet and 30Mbps Down / 2Mbps Up speed. There's just no competition here, it's between the big two and their reseller... (Bell and Videotron)
I just downloaded a 10.8GB beta version of the Rift expansion and then spent the evening watching Netflix. Where are these caps people talk about?
unlimited wireless broadband: (1mbit) 15euro/month
unlimited wireless broadband: (10mbit) 20euro/month
the joys of socialist austria
It costs big ISPs something like 3 cents per gigabyte.
The logical pricing model for an ISP is to treat it as a utility and charge a reasonable flat monthly cost for customer service and keeping the lines maintained (maybe $20 or $30) then a reasonable price (10-30 cents per gig?) for data throughput.
That way the bills reflect the true cost of the service, and there is minimal cross-subsidization.
The problem I have is with ISPs that want to charge $2/GB for a wired connection.
The interstate highway system in the US was built by the government to increase bandwidth on the highways. It made it much easier to get lots of cars and trucks across the country cheaply, and did in fact create a lot of jobs both for the highway workers as well as auto workers. Making the automobile an unalienable right seemed like a good idea in the 50's with 30 cent gas; now, maybe not so much.
The last 30 years or so have made it seem that we might have been better off going more slowly and letting the market decide if highways were better than rail or possibly other transport systems that never got to see the light of day due to unrealistically inexpensive highway travel. It's seems equally obvious at this point in time that more internet bandwidth is also an unalienable right. On the other hand, it's hard to say what unintended consequences might come from mandating perhaps unrealistically inexpensive bandwidth for communications.
I can't think of any reason why cheap unlimited internet bandwidth might be counterproductive. On the other hand cheap unlimited travel seemed like a good idea 60 years ago before pollution and energy became the problems they are now. I think we should pay for the bits we use now at a realistic market rate that isn't skewed by mixing the price of content along with the price of bandwidth to make it seem cheaper.
I pay $119.95/month for 110GB with an overage of $10/GB!! Can you guess which monopoly runs this city??
Back in the dialup days an ISP could just get a few ISDN lines and a bunch of phone lines and modems and scale out. Since it used the phone system for the link between the subscriber and the ISP there were no "last mile" issues, that was already covered by the phone system.
Nowadays the speeds are much higher so you pretty much need a dedicated connection to each house--which basically means either the phone company or the cable company taking care of the physical wire.
Theoretically you *could* let them take care of the last mile and then branch off to a bunch of ISPs for upstream connectivity, but that adds complexity.
The real problem is that the US network infrastructure is so unbelievably behind the times. If the US government would just ignore the telecomm lobbyists for five goddamned minutes and spend some taxpayer money on fiber, we'd all have a hundred times the bandwidth, streaming video would be no problem, and the telecomms could go right back to charging obscene fees for doing very little.
This should pave the way for Google to provide the last mile of service and monitor EVERYTHING instead of just email, etc.
If you streamed 128kbps data 24/7 for a month, you're looking at roughly 41GB, which really isn't all that much. 720p H.264 video runs about a gigabyte an hour, so it adds up a lot quicker.
Good riddance. Maybe then we'll see some devs that care about efficiency again, and stop seeing pages shipping 10 megs of unminified javascript.
In the meantime though, the moment this happens -- adblock is going on /every/ computer in the house, and if I see anything that detects it, I will write a bypass that fakes it.
Next up: I'll be blocking commercials on all appliances and videos.
And when the ad market implodes because of metered bandwidth, another problem caused by corporate greed will die a messy, nasty death.
Cable companies -- your ad revenue is next. And to the phone companies... well... you never profited from it anyway.
And believe me, just wait for those of you that are injecting ads into pages. You think you had issues with copyright infringement before? Just wait until I press charges for fraud and theft when you artificially inflate my usage...
Whether I'm actually watching or just have it on as background noise, I consume about 40 hours per week minimum of media, mostly via Hulu and Netflix over my home broadband connection. That comes in at about twice the US national average for TV watching. On top of that, I'm an active online gamer and I work as a software developer (sometimes from home) for a cloud storage company (testing involves a lot of data flying back and forth). I go through about 100GB of bandwidth per month (so far I've maxed out at 120GB). As long as Comcast keeps its cap at the 250GB level I really don't see the average user going anywhere near that...
That being said, I would like to see mobile caps increasing (without an increase in price obviously). At the moment, I just use my phone for email, navigation and some news. If I had a more reasonable cap, I could see myself getting a 4G tablet and using it for Netflix and Skype with family abroad.
Nobody would have the balls to do that in my 100,000 person city because we have 4 ISPs that I know about, more likely 10. As far as physical lines, there's 1 coax and 1 telephone line owner so that's at least 2 truly separate ISPs. As soon as AT&T institutes a cap, everyone switches to Time Warner and vice versa. But if it was just AT&T, they're capping you.
The real kick in the pants is the costs for backbone internet are pennies a gig. It's the last mile that's really screwing the consumer. You'll notice Comcast doesn't sell "Internet" they sell Xfinity. I think the market can work, but I think it needs a little truth in advertising. If Comcast had to have a black box that said "Limited Internet Service - We reserve the right to limit/slow down any service for any reason" I think the consumer choice would be more clear.
Is there any other First World country that's having this problem, or is this crackdown on unlimited data only going to happen in the United States?
People aren't going to suddenly pay hundreds of dollars for this. Metered systems will go broke. Nice try though
We need a new technology that removes the need for telecoms and cable providers entirely. They should be this generations buggy whip manufacturers.
dsl and cable internet all suck. I went from $90(3mbit down, 768 up) a month which sucked in the afternoon got 500kbits and barely anything up. Than I got TWC 20Mbit, 768kbit up for $50 but drops to 1Mbit download in the afternoon around 1-3pm, I get home from work and i get shitty 1mbit even lower, how nice. Now I got fios 75Mbit with 35Mbit up and it never drops, no caps, but no tv, for $90. People need to start boycotting these companies ripping people off and just go with fios if it's in your neighborhood.
lots of places have capped plans, without crashing the on-line video industry. What a load of crap!
There was an unknown error in the submission.
.. in America.
Jonathanjk.com
Tell us all how a "free market" can remain "unmanipulated". The large company has the resources to do all those neat monopolistic things, as well as have their buddies run for office, or bribe the officials, or in some way manipulate the government that is supposed to referee the market as you say. In order to get to what you claim a free market should be we'd need to enstill values of fairness in every person (impossible) without getting that confused with entitlement (we all deserve the same regardless of what we do) which is also impossible. We need to stick to systems that acknowledge the realities of human behaviour, not try to live in some fantasy world. Granted, a real system needs to *try* to limit peoples bad behaviour (eliminate it is impossible), but you can't just bury your head in the sand. You say "It's pretty simple, really" but don't offer any system that can actually work other than your fantasy - which you also call a pipe-dream. So which is it?
it just shows what happens when you remove regulation from monopolies but don't (really) require competition
"It's a dangerous trend that will threaten the budding Internet-based video business â" whether from Netflix, Hulu, iTunes, Windows Store, or Google Play..."
That's exactly WHY they are doing this. Not because they can't handle the traffic, but because they have their own competing plans.
They're blocking the competition from their pipes. They don't want to be a utility, a dumb pipe, they want to be a content delivery system - THEIR content.
These companies mostly use public rights of way (in the case of cable, fiber) and broadcast spectrum and municipal tower site regulations (cell), and they are licensed with a requirement to comply with the best needs of the community in order to get that use and its built-in virtual monopoly.
Municipalities can and do need to demand network neutrality from these companies or revoke their charter to operate in that municipality.
This space available.
I'm currently working on a presentation and better specification on this subject. Currently the website tlmc.fredan.se does not contain anything useful at this moment.
To give you something in the meantime so can TLMC cache the content (read: only static content!) from a content provider and also give the customers of that ISP the possibility to cache the content at their homes as well (if their ISP is participating in TLMC).
TLMC is transparent, which means that neither part don't have to do anything if they don't want to.
If the content provider don't want to participate but your ISP does, well nothing can't get cached at the ISP, so no joy there either.
If your ISP don't want to participate in this as well, sorry, you as a enduser has to load the content thru your ISP to the origin where the content servers.
The Last Mile Cache is build upon that the Content provider do what it is best on (sending large amount of static data) and the ISP do what it is best on, handling cache server located so close to end user as possible.
If both the content provider and the ISP do participate in this, you will be able to watch movies with better quality than what they can give you on a blu-ray disc today.
Where do people come up with this crap? Welcome to the rest of the world! Data isn't free to transmit. There are limited quantities of it. Being a scarce resource, it either has to be metred out, or you have to put up with large amounts of contention to an uncontrolled resource where there's no incentive to upgrade the capacity.
The rest of the world still uses data despite capacity caps that have been exponentially increasing over the years. The internet hasn't yet died in Australia where we've had capacity caps for as long as I've been on the interwebs last millenium. I rent broadband from a provider not associated with the national monopolist, at about 2/3 of the national monopolist price, and get a 150GB quota for it on their base level plan. Despite browsing all the pr0n I want, I don't come *near* that plan limit.
HTFU and deal with it, and start paying for what you actually use. Welcome to your free market.
"The result will be a metered Internet that discourages use of the services so valuable for work and play."
You'd think that should've already happened - afterall, whenever you use your computer, you're using metered electricity. Why haven't people already stopped using their computers?
Things work great here in the non-free market. Because companies are non-free in being able to rip you off when they have a larger stick.
100 Mbit/s real flatrates are seen as normal.
The USA can *easily* surpass that... If the people finally realize that they are a force to be reckoned with too... If they don't let the companies treat them like livestock. :P
Who knows... maybe you can even form some kind of organization to enforce rules for not being ripped off... You could call it something like “government”!
How will future toddlers watch Dora?
-badford
I've had a bandwidth cap since the middle of last decade. And it wasn't from a national ISP. One spanning two states, which meant it wasn't some podunk backwater operation, either.
"Rich" internet has been dead for some time. It wouldn't be bad if, like a public utility, usage was effectively unlimited with tiered rates. I don't mind if I pay more for bandwidth usage over 250 or whatever GB.
The problem is, every ISP cap I've seen has been a flat rate, "You hit this limit, we disconnect you and then have a nice talk," line of shit.
Meanwhile, prices increase while networks are not improved. So it isn't about the money - or rather, of course it is, but it has nothing to do with not having the money to be able to support ever-increasing Internet usage.
A couple weeks ago I woke up and found the Internet signal on my DSL modem was red, so i called up and was told I have downloaded more then the 250 gb I am allowed a month, so they turned off my internet, and I needed to upgrade my service. Well, I got hung up on after I told the worker what I thought about that. So I called back, and the person I talked to hadn't even heard of that, and was surprised it happened, and got my internet turned back on.
But it comes down to I have a 250gb limit each month on my DSL internet.
I was downloading about 1000gb a month. This is going to be hard, because IMO, 250 gb isn't very much. I am disabled, I don't work, I am on the internet all day. It's basicly my lifeline to the world. And it's seriously limited because of greedy corporations.
Be seeing you...
And I can do without it now.
Make no mistake the price for the lower end 3down 1 up is outrageous from COX and I have been thinking of cuttin the cord on the TV too.
I dont want to eat dog or cat food when I get old and the way it is going I will be lucky to afford that. They already increased the age I can collect social security one promise broken by our government now the want to cut the amount to as I am 50 and getting close this is when they screw me.
I cant believe people will vote to allow that I no longer have any faith in my fellow man. It is everyone for himself and my behavior from now on has to reflect that.
Or I will have no one to blame but myself for not being realistic about just how bad things have become.
So you are saying because it doesn't affect you it's not a problem?
Be seeing you...
Which services are valued for work? Capping internet usage will boost productivity, and simply reroute cash from the entertainment industry to something less trivial.
Entertainment is too accessible and such low quality that it's driving human evolution in the wrong direction.
The problem with telcos is that they provide the wires and the services on the wires and in some cases the services that use the services that use the wires.
If telcos were only allowed to provide wire access and ISPs were only allowed to provide data access then this would solve a lot of competition problems.
For DSL, this is almost how it works except that AT&T would not be allowed to offer DSL service to consumers.
For cable companies, this would mean Comcast would either only provide the cable connection (no TV or Internet content) or just the content with someone else providing the physical cable.
Sonic.net, one of the few remaining independent ISPs, annoys the rest of the industry by insisting that data caps are unnecessary. They offer service only in parts of northern California, but I've had them in Silicon Valley for a decade. In a few areas, they offer gigabit fiber to the home for $70 per month. And they throw in phone service. Their main offering is 20mb/s for $40/month, which they offer anywhere they can lease a copper pair from the telco. Outside of that range, they offer $6mb/s.
None of these have service caps. There is no caching. There is no censorship. The EFF approves of their privacy policy. They just deliver the bits.
The reason for this is simple - they don't sell cable TV. So they have no incentive to force people to sign up for "programming". (They do resell DirecTV as a sideline, but that comes in via a satellite dish, not over the Internet.)
Sonic's CEO says that, while per-user data consumption is going up, wholesale network connectivity rates are going down faster. So they're not worried about user data consumption.
My cable company (Optonline) offers unlimited, uncapped, unthrottled bandwidth. That doesn't mean that there aren't periods of contention, but it's not the ISP slowing down the service. We also switched to Republic Wireless, which offers unlimited, uncapped, unthrottled voice, text, and data (yes, even cellular data) for $19/month. They are still in beta, but we've been happy with the service. If your service providers aren't offering these services, switch. If you can't switch in your area, complain to your township, county, and state to bring in competitive services.
The thing is, real unlimited shifts the burden to you, and that's a responsibility that many people can't handle. It's like being on the LAN at the office; if someone is monopolizing the bandwidth, you know it. You (or the admins) will have a chat with them about playing nice. As long as everyone plays nice, you can get the bandwidth you need, when you need it. Throttling comes in when people refuse to play nice, and have to be forced.
Even back in the old landline telephone days when local calls were free, some people would leave the phone off the hook for days / weeks / months. Maximum call lengths had to be instituted as a result. Most people never hit the limit, and never even knew they existed. When people can't play nice, we can't have nice things.
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
It's awesome that the US even has unlimited data plans to lose. Aside from Sweden, I know of no place in Europe that has them.
Show me any other business that wouldn't jump at the opportunity of charging competitor's customers just for shopping at the competitor. The ISPs have simply found a way to do so.
Austria has unlimited data plans.
;-))
I have a SIM card from drei.at that you can use without a contract and recharge on a monthly basis. It comes at 15 EUR a month and gives you high speed HSDPA+ without a cap. Also, my regular internet comes wireless these days: I have an LTE contract at 49 EUR a month that gives me unlimited 100MBit down and 10MBit up. I live in central Vienna and I actually get the advertised speeds.
There you go Sweden, plus we have better weather and better food (and we don't extradite
UK has them - Three has mobile and several suppliers, notably Sky has unlimited landline
I got a quota of 20GB per month. I won't use music-services like Spotify. I don't even think about using VOD for rental movies. I don't buy music or e-books that I need to download. I don't buy any games on-line. I get RSS feeds so I don't have to view all the news-articles at sites. And, I disable Flash because I don't need it. So, there is a lot of companies missing much revenue because I got a limited broadband.
And, more people are getting this kind of broadband. I'm not alone. Not even close. On mobile platforms people must buy apps to do basic stuff. But, because of all the limitations they won't get much ad-revenue. If this trend continues, I think the net will see lost revenue. Even some of the big companies will bleed financially.
Ohh please.
I am from Germany and as far as I know every major provider has unlimited data plans. I currently pay 15Euro / month for unlimited data with high speed 500MB. If I'd pay more I'd get fully unlimited but I don't need that much.
I think the problem is that people are too selfish to use a shared medium. They have an "unlimited plan" so they want to run a torrent client on their cell phone.
The result is what we see now and that's why we can't have nice things.
Exactly.
This is how it was done in the Netherlands with respect to electricity providers (ISPs are also utility companies, methinks): split them into a nationalized government-owned high-voltage-grid company (TenneT) and competing customer-facing utility companies. Of course they hated this, and the lawsuits haven't finished yet (now at ECJ level), but it seems to have payed off hugely in favour of the inhabitants of the country. (ZOMG SOCIALISM!11one!).
Legal article (in Dutch): http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet_onafhankelijk_netbeheer.
It is important to remember that the government makes the laws and the corporations obey it (begrudgingly), otherwise this can't work. So no idea if it would be applicable in the USA where corporations are people.
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
Sky offer an unlimited service. My neighbour says its very fast and he has a £96 surcharge to prove it. There's a strong incentive to provide a fast "unlimited" service when you're charging unsophisticated clients per gigabyte.
The End of unlimited dsl plans ?
Not here, but maybe in the third world.
Most people in my own country of Canada haven't had unlimited data for years and everyone I know still has a NetFlix account.
Not that I LIKE not having unlimited data but it actually has not limited my internet use to any significant extent.
The right to offend is central to the right to free speech.
Finland — I didn't even see "limited" data plans last month when I shopped for a plan, it was all about how much bandwidth you can use.
My exception safety is -fno-exceptions.
Here in the Netherlands we had unlimited data, then one of the providers boasted that they have the equipment to classify all usage by deep packet inspection.
They kind of suggested that the plan was to introduce special pricing for some kinds of usage, e.g. using VoIP over internet instead of using the phone service offered by the provider.
Some privacy fanatics made a big fuss out of that looking into customer's data, and parlementary questions were asked if providers are allowed to do that.
As a result, a law was passed that prevents providers from doing that. It was widely hailed as one of the first "net neutrality" laws in operation.
The providers subtly retaliated. Unlimited data plans were gone. Now we all pay by the megabyte. No matter what data is being sent.
He is partially right: some of the biggest barriers to entry are put into place by government. It's called "rent seeking". Why does a city limit the number of taxis with medallion systems? Usually, because the established taxi companies want to avoid competition (and already own all of the medallions). Why does a hair stylist need a license to cut hair? There is no sensible reason, except that the established stylists (especially the chains) can afford the cost more easily than a new startup.
Sometimes government regulation is useful. Yes, there are natural monopolies, and it is the government's job to keep them under control However, in far too many cases, government regulations are bought and paid for, specifically to raise barriers to entry by startups.
From another point of view, this could be described as encouraging people to get off the computer and DO SOMETHING! Go to a coffee shop, gym, park, movie, dance with real members of your preferred sex. It's a wonderful world out there to explore.
Mike
To me, the biggest problem with metered network service is that it is billed by how much data the customer receives instead of how much be transmits. This is backwards because it allows a spammer or obnoxious advertiser to transmit a huge video advertisement to the customer AND make that customer PAY for the privilege of suffering through the advertisement!
If, instead, the transmitter was billed for what he ships, then it is up to him to decide if it is worth it for him to pay to send a several megabyte video ad to thousands or millions of people and/or come to some reciprocal agreement with customers to pay for the data sent. Sites like You-Tube, would, of course, need to become pay-per-view sites, but that's what they will be anyway on a metered internet if we're paying for all of the bytes we receive. Sure, the billing system may be complex, but c'mon... look at what we can already do! Don't tell me it cannot be done. And I'd be surprised if some creative genius (quite possibly one of /.'s readers <smile>) will find a way to do it relatively easily.
Yes let us regulate it as an utility.... But you will STILL pay per usage. No utilities I know of are pay flat for finite resource (and make no mistake, bandwidth use electricity and is finite). Electricity ? gas ? Water ? Landlines ? All those are not flat , but pay per usage. Mobile phone sometimes make you part of a flat fee, but usually they arrange it so that the flat fee is more expansive than paying for comms , exept a few rare case of people phoning a lot. Heck even initially you had to connect and pay per usage (the good old modem days). The intermediate period of growth and flat rate weas an anomaly. Now what we need is competition to make sure the pay per usage does not shaft user, but pay per usage *IS* the normal wy to handle utilities stuff in limited availibility.
Romania.
It does have and will probably always have unlimited data plans. For mobile devices there are speed caps once you go over a certain threshold, but that's it. The difference between subscriptions is basically the threshold size (6 GB, 20 GB, 100 GB, etc).
For regular broadband (CAT5, fiber optics and so on) there's no threshold and probably there won't be any, because ISPs here are in direct competition. There's no location I know of in Bucharest where you can't choose between at least 3 different ISPs. There are offers for new subscriptions, e.g. 6 months for 50% price or 3 free months, etc.
RDS (my ISP) offered me a free as in beer 3G dongle which allows unlimited traffic with no monthly threshold. I have downloaded a few ISOs through 3G when their regular line was down a few weeks ago at about 4 Mb/s sustained throughput.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Content providers have a vested interest in unlimited service. Let them team up and bid on bandwidth as a group. Right now there's no competition because there's a form of quiet capping where rather than increasing service to steal away customers from those with caps all the others bring in caps to cut costs and increase profits. It's the opposite of what capitalism should be. The idea that it's prohibitively expensive is a lie because other countries do it. The difference is greed. If capping results in 5% more profits then who cares about the customers they cap and take the attitude of 'what are you going to do about it"!
Same old crap. Bandwidth hogs need to pay for what they use. If your local "monopoly" ISP was going to start charging exorbitant rates any time now, they would have done so years ago. But they haven't. People count on ham-fisted regulation from dinosaurs like the FCC hoping that they can get all the internet they could possibly want -and more- for $20 a month. Won't happen. Grow up.
Germany has them as well for landline, it's actually the standard option
for mobile, most german providers will slow you down to GPRS speed after a certain amount of data consumed per month (anywhere between 100MB and 30GB depending on the contract)
As competition from that (or other) sources increases, data companies will start to lose customers until they lower their charges. Isn't that how competition is meant to work?
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
"capitalists left to their own devices would rather collude than compete" -- Adam Smith
Anyone still remember the days of GEnie or compuserve when you were almost afraid to login to check mail due to your 'hard' cap? Depending on how much spam you got, you might get billed and have no time left over for fun.
Opening up to unlimited was the biggest boost to the internet there was since opening it to commercial use. While i don't see a 'crash' coming, i do see a slow collapse to where its a shadow of its current self.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Doesn't undo the damage, and could make it worse and move to a total pay-per-use. You don't have unlimited water or power do you? No, you pay for every electron that flows thru your house.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I dont find much information on the webpage, so I will ask you directly. How different is your proposal from Akamai (or equivalents)?
This article is Apple FanBoi myopic. You want unlimited data? Go to walmart and buy a family mobile plan. They'll support any GSM phone, but TMobile works best. It's about $54/mo for all you can eat talk, text and data.
because unless they allow anyone to dig up the roads
That's exactly the solution. When a given part of town is due to be resurfaced, let every utility who has paid the permit fee lay its conduit. Natural monopoly is a myth.
The usage of electricity is a poor example because generator capacity is set by peak need. If you could "average out the need" over a given period of time consistently
I thought that's exactly what photovoltaic and photothermal solar power did: extend the capacity at peak air conditioning times.
WISPA's search lists 0 WISPs that serve my ZIP code (46808).
Uncapped internet? Never had it, never really needed it. I have 120GB a month and that's all I need
How would you deal with 5 GB/mo, which is typical in areas that happen not to have a cable operator?
How many people are going to want to go back for a master's degree just to get I2 access? It's like Facebook before the fourth quarter of 2006: the cost of getting an e-mail address matching *@*.edu just wasn't worth it.
the problem is they are using almost all of it to send you 799 TV channels you aren't watching while you are tuned to the 800th.
If everybody were watching an individual unicast VOD stream instead of a "channel", then 800 TVs turned on in a neighborhood would use just as much bandwidth. How many subscribers are in a particular "neighborhood" (or whatever they call it in DOCSIS)?
or perhaps just move to a better location
Which might make the commute to and from one's job unreasonably long if it happens to be located near the worse location due to zoning laws.
With so many people ditching Cable and Sat TV plans in favor of an Internet-Only household
Let me guess: You're talking about households with no sports fans. The leagues' online streaming services tend to black out any game that's shown on traditional cable. A lot of traditional cable channels' web sites have begun using "authentication" as well: viewers have to log in using a username and password provided by the participating cable or satellite TV provider.
With zoning laws as they are, with people being fined just for operating a victory garden, how can one grow food without living out in the middle of nowhere?
If you streamed 128kbps data 24/7 for a month, you're looking at roughly 41GB, which really isn't all that much.
A typical U.S. data plan capped at 3 GB/mo would allow streaming less than two hours a day at that rate. If your daily round-trip commute is longer than that, or you want to do something else with your phone while away from open Wi-Fi, tough droppings.
Geeks actually might be more likely to think, "Streaming music this way is wasteful and inefficient"
What's the less wasteful and more efficient way to shuffle a large selection of non-payola music in a vehicle? Buy every song on a streaming station's playlist?
Where are these caps people talk about?
Largely in rural areas and small towns unserved by a cable television provider. They typically have to rely on satellite ISPs such as WildBlue and Hughesnet, whose plans tend to come with a single digit GB/mo cap.
You can't have a monopoly or a monopolistic cartel without government intervention
Why is that? What stops a business in a free (and unfettered) market from gaining an advantage over the competition, and then using anti-competitive business practices to buy up and / or drive all their competition out of business?
Some of the anti-competitive practices that businesses have used in the past:
1) Sending employees over to the competition to steal proprietary information and / or sabotage them.
2) Pay hoodlums to beat-up the competitions owners / employees / customers.
3) Burn down the competition's buildings, manufacturing plants, retail outlets.
4) Pay people to spread rumors pertaining to the competition's product's safety, lifespan, composition.
5) Pay people to spread rumors about the competition's owners, employees, and backers. (Ohh, they're Jews / *iggers / kike's / hippies....)
6) Use advertising and news outlets to spread disinformation about their competitors.
7) Place fraudulent advertisement to promote fake prices / sales / cash-back / rebates in the name of their competition.
8) Make fraudulent claims about the product in their competition's name.
9) Just flat out kill the competition.
10) Use an advantage of excess money to sell their product below the cost of manufacture, forcing less liquid / less monied competition out of business.
11) Convince the competition's suppliers to break their contracts.
12) Make fake businesses to supply the competition with non-existent raw materials.
13) Pose as their competition and make false claims / take false orders / deliver faulty materials.
14) Buy the loyalty of the competition's employees and use them to sabotage their business.
15) Poison / adulterate / sabotage competitor's products.
16) Convince or pay distributors and retailers to loose the competitions orders.
17) Pay distributors / retailers to redirect the competition's orders to themselves.
18) Pay people to bring fraudulent lawsuits against their competitors.
19) Pay off Judges / Juries / expert witnesses in the lawsuits.
20) Pay corrupt officials (an interesting concept in a "free and unfettered market") to re-zone the retail and manufacturing locations of the competition.
21) Piracy A: Stop the competition's delivery trucks, take their product, then sell it as your own.
22) Piracy A: Break into the competition's warehouses, steal their product, sell it as your own.
22) Piracy B: Make shoddy products and sell it in the competition's name.
Just when I think I can't think of more, I do. So I'll stop here.
See, there are laws that prevent all of that, some call it regulation.
Without those laws, there is noting but personal morality to prevent them. And we're all abundantly aware that there are always people who, when left to their own devices, show a distinct lack of morals.
Do you remember an experiment in de-regulation, called "Prohibition"? All sorts of mom-and-pop businesses pop'd up all over the place. Then a few people decided to organize and push their competitors out of business.
In fact we have a similar experiment going on called "The war on Drugs". Like marijuana, cocaine, meth, etc... Yet they are all available to anyone with sufficient desire, without regulation to prevent adulteration, monitor purity, or even guarantee ingredients. Making their purchase a crap-shoot, in which you may get shot.
THINK! It's patriotic
Yep. US only problem. Don't care.
aaaaaaa
Perhaps, in some years, people will organize themselves in towns and create community-made non-profit ISP's. this already exists in some places...
aaaaaaa
Personally, I just use Spotify.
I thought Spotify was only for people who've joined Facebook, and I've read that in some cases, Facebook requires a new user to scan and e-mail a copy of a state-issued ID. Is it worth it to join Facebook just to use Spotify?
it's different in that the cache server are placed at the ISP, with the possibility for the user to have an own cache server at their home.
I will try to update the site during the next week with more information of how an setup with TLMC will work.
Sounds interesting, I will keep an eye out. Thanks for posting it out here.
Exactly, the Tragedy of the Mercantilists who think they are Capitalists but aren't.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Maybe this will encourage more reading of books.
That is all.
Lameness filter.
With the first link, the chain is forged.
Its cheapest plan, at about $40, will carry a 300 GB limit, while the most expensive plan, about $200, comes with 600 GB. Anyone who exceeds the limit on any plan can pay $10 for each additional data bucket of 50 GB.
So... I could get the $40 plan and get up to 1.1TB of data (16 * 50GB + 300GB) for $200 OR I could pay the $200/month and get 600GB. Hm. Someone didn't think that all the way through did they?