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Comcast Predicts Usage Cap Within 5 Years
finalcutmonstar (1862890) writes "With net neutrality dying a slow painful death, it is no surprise that in an investor call yesterday Comcast executive VP(and Darth Vader impersonator) David Cohen predicts bandwidth caps within the next 5 years. The cap would start at 300 GB and cost the customer subscriber an extra 10 USD for 50 GB. But, Cohen stated that 'I would also predict that the vast majority of our customers would never be caught in the buying the additional buckets of usage, that we will always want to say the basic level of usage at a sufficiently high level that the vast majority of our customers are not implicated by the usage-based billing plan.'" Update: 05/15 13:58 GMT by T : Correction: Cohen is actually talking about data transferred, rather than stored (as headline originally had it), as reader MAXOMENOS points out.
Nice network you have there, it would be a shame if something happened to it...
Headline: "Comcast predicts storage cap"
Story in a nutshell: Comcast exec predicts bandwidth cap.
WTF?
Finding God in a Dog
I suspect this has less to do with prediction, and more to do with prescription. As in, they want to set up the expectations that will guide the perceptions of the public and of policymakers in regards to what is a "reasonable" amount of bandwidth to be consuming, in order to justify their ridiculous overage charges.
Its not so bad as long as you can keep the fear from your mind.
The cap would start at 300 GB and cost the customer subscriber an extra 10 USD for 50 GB.
And I bet that the cap would proceed to move down to 250 GB and so on. USA is the only country where internet access quality is actually moving in reverse.
Fuck you Comcast! I can blow through 300gb with fucking windows update!
"...except those markets where there is competition"
that is how long it takes with LTE on max speed to reach the cap.
Those who regulate their telephone sector strongly, and those who don't. The US is in the latter category, and the majority are going to suffer for it. All I can say is that I'm glad I'm not in the US. I feel for you guys.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
How long until we hear that?
Caps will definitely come. Not because they are "needed to help manage network congestion" or some other reason that the ISPs will trot out. They'll come for four simple reasons.
1) Video over the Internet threatens their own video services. Caps help make Internet video more expensive (via overage fees) and will help drive people away from Internet video.
2) Even if people use Internet video, the ISPs will get more money and they can never resist the smell of money.
3) The ISPs have monopolies (or near monopolies) in their service areas so they can do whatever they want and the public needs to take it.
4) They are big and powerful enough that they will make sure they have enough politicians "donated to" to prevent any government action against them.
Of course, they will keep on trotting out the "small group of users is slowing everyone's speeds down and caps will make them pay their fair share" line to justify the caps. The real cause of any slowdown will be because they take their profits and don't reinvest them into upgrading their networks. After all, why upgrade? It's not like there are any competitors to beat in the market or any government officials with backbone to pressure them into speeding up connections.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
If they get their merger, expect data caps in half that time, maybe within a year. Expect TW and ATT to follow suit.
Yeah, because that worked out so well for consumers in the mobile phone space...
Also, this isn't new. Suddenlink has been doing this for over a year for everyone in our region. A friend of mine constantly streams netflix because he has young kids and a stay at home wife. He uses 100% of his cap almost every month at the highest rate plans available. Without switching to a business contract for 10x the cost, he can't get a bigger cap.
This is my family's usage on Comcast over the last three full months:
Feb: 162 GB
Mar: 348 GB
Apr: 270 GB
We don't torrent or anything like that. We are normal users. A kid that games (lots of DLC for games these days). My wife and I watch some Netflix most evenings. I may watch a netcast (such as Tom Merrit and Brian Brushwood on CordKillers or one of TWiT.tv's shows) via youtube and a chromecast while on the treadmill. Normal usage. Already over the 300 GB proposed cap some months. However, I guess I honestly only care because of the monopoly position Comcast is in. I could get slow as molasses DSL from AT&T or medium speed from Comcast. There isn't another decent choice in most places. If there were some real competition, I wouldn't really mind if companies wanted to do a tiered deal where you got 200 GB "primetime", 300 GB "nights and weekends", 250 GB "off peak" (yeah, like they used to do with cell phone service) type plans with either higher tiers or pay extra (but reasonable) fees for overages. They would stay within reason if there were competition to contain pricing...
Comcast sent me an email late last year saying they would change my data usage agreement to the above.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
As they are charging me extra I can at least say I am happy they are not throttling my speeds and making the internet unusable for me.
For usage I don't have Netflix and a good amount of the video I watch comes from the xfinity website and HBO Go which means content I am receiving and paying for from Comcast is getting included in my monthly total of bandwidth.
So that means I pay them for my internet connection, my content and then they charge me extra for the bandwidth because I actually use the services I purchased from them.
I guess I can look on the bright side and know they wont throttle their own content. I hope.
Competition in US broadband? HAHAHAHHAHAHAHA Don't make me laugh!
It's either a mandated monopoly or a cartel duopoly that mimic each other's every move.
You've got lots of people just getting Internet to download/watch TV rather than buying it via the cable company. They have to recoup that revenue somehow. It's either going to be data caps or they'll flip the model they currently have and charge $75 for Internet access and $25 for a full cable lineup. Then another $50 in regulatory 'fees' and other BS and you're back to where you started.
With the rise of Google Fiber and increasing usage via legitimate services such as Netflix online (not to mention what happens when 4K kicks in, arguably within 5 years?), HULU, and HD video conferencing, this prediction looks to be terribly off-base.
No, no. This is just some idiot CEO for an awful company completely misunderstanding the nature of his own business and making and horribly inaccurate and hamfisted prediction.
Then again, he probably makes 500 times what I make, so I guess he must be doing something right!
This is just an attempt to create artificial scarcity to drive up value.
Either give us an all you can eat model or give us a per MB model. Don't try to mix and match the two. I want 100% un-metered or 100% metered internet not some BS that rides the middle.
I predict in 5 years ill have a laundry list of null routes for various advertising providers and comcast hardware. I'll torrent every show and every song because to listen to them again on pandora will put me over my 'cap.' I'll have constructed a cantenna out of an array of garbage cans strapped to the roof of my house and have an army of ASIC hardware working round the clock to crack every WPA and WEP AP i see.
Oh, and I'll switch to dryline DSL and robocall every politician in my state asking for municipal high speed fiber. I and everyone youve ever infuriated with deep packet traffic shaping 'its comcastic' advertising blitzkreig will petition our government to bury you as we boycott your shit-tier service.
Good people go to bed earlier.
They just refuse to tell anyone what it is, or give you any warning that you have violated it before they disconnect you.
The thing that is most amusing about these people is that, out of one side of their mouths they whine about how they don't have the capacity to give everyone truly unlimited Internet like they advertise, but out of the other side they have as much as anyone is willing to pay for, with no limit.
It really is time to label Internet service as a public utility and place it under proper regulation.
When I canceled my Comcast subscription due to the cap, the person handling the call explicitly told me there was no legitimate reason for that kind of usage so I must be a pirate. When I tried to politely explain that my Netflix usage exceeded that, I was again told there was not legitimate reason for the kind of usage.
So true... and they'll ignore the obvious stuff like Netflix, Steam, and the other modern e-business models that have greatly increased our average monthly bandwidth. I'm in Canada and I got tired of paying Rogers (AT&T) $68 a month for a 120GB cap, only to habitually over-step that line (I'm a habitual line-stepper, as Charlie Murphy would say) and get charged up to $100 more - thankfully laws prevent them from charging any more than $100 extra per month, but that's still $168 in a month just for internet. I've recently switched to Acanac where I'm paying less than $50 for the same speeds with no cap. Hopefully US customers will be able to find smaller/independant ISPs that offer something similar... switching away from the big guys when they make stupid moves like this is the only way to ge the message across - vote with your dollar! Don't be shy to sign online petitions and send out emails to politians on the upcoming bill they have to vote on, too.
========
77 77 77 2e 6d 65 6c 76 69 6e 73 2e 63 6f 6d
Beautiful innovation that will be slowed if the FCC re-classifies the as telecommunications. /sarcasm
Comcast will probably sell this storage cap as an increase of customer choice.
I already have a 300GB cap with Comcast. I am in one of their 'test' markets. His numbers stated are the correct numbers. $10 for every additional 50GB..
I often upload and download a lot for work purposes and I have 5 people on many internet connected devices at home so we almost always go over.
The problem is we do not have any viable alternative in my area :(
Usage caps (not storage caps) have absolutely ZERO to do with net neutrality. First off, they're explicitly allowed under the rules that the FCC tried to put in place, that were recently shot down by the courts. Secondly, even if the FCC were to reclassify broadband under Title II (i.e. as a telecom service), as a lot of tech companies want them to, they'd STILL be allowed. Voice phone service, which has long been regulated on the same terms that many want the FCC to use for broadband, certainly allows for usage caps, always has.
When you're a monopoly, or soon to be one, all your prophecies will come true. It's called "propheteering".
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
...there's really nothing to be done about it. Maybe cancel the subscription?
Comcast has already capped several markets at 300G with Atlanta being the latest. I got my first bill for usage over the 300G cap last month. I have already complained to the Georgia Trade Commission once on this and I plan to do it again. This is ridiculous given that my only other option is AT&T who can't even keep a DSL line functional at my house. There are supposed to be laws that prevent predatory companies fro taking advantage of the public, but in this case no one seems to care.
They tried billing per simultaneous IP address a long time ago; the response to that was network address translation (NAT) boxes. ISPs would see only one computer, made by Linksys, NETGEAR, D-Link, etc. In order to truly bill per device, they'd need to employ even deeper packet inspection than they already do, including things like requiring installation of its TLS MITM's root certificate or requiring use of Trusted Network Connect (which gives the ISP administrative rights to your PC and locks out home use of free software operating systems). This is why your "modest proposal" won't work.
enough for 4 episodes of Game of Thrones per month.
In two months, I'm moving to a new home that has both Comcast and FiOS available. At that point, my cable modem will go live in a cardboard box until I move again.
While I don't believe for a second that Verizon won't jump on the data cap bandwagon once everyone else is doing it, they haven't spent the last few years pushing data caps onto their customers.
You have not talked to a person, you talked to a robot. Okay, okay, a meat robot. Here whe have this too.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
Time to split their nostrils open with a boathook just like we did to the Bell system. We did it once, we should do it again.
I mean, that solved all our problems once and for all, right? That's when the internet started taking off for the public.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Slashdot has complained for years that ISPs sold "unlimited service" they physically couldn't provide.
Now actually acknowledging the facts and adding an extra tier for high-use customers is also unacceptable.
What do you people want?
comcast is clearly on crack if they think the public will allow them to have a data cap on internet. Google is quickly rolling out gigabit internet for the price of comcast's 25mbit internet... and guess what? they DONT have a cap. comcast is screwed if they dont get their act in gear. the only reason theyve managed to get this far is that they have a deal with so many places so that they have a monopoly
I am also for pricing based on data used. Why should someone who is using 10 GB pay the same as someone who uses 200 GB?
You would think that with the Time Warner Cable merger still under review, Comcast would be on their best behavior. Instead, they extort money out of content services, threaten to reduce innovation, and now announce that they anticipate capping customer data. If this merger is approved, it will be the last proof that we need that our government is riddled with corruption.
"I would also predict that the vast majority of our customers would never be caught in the buying the additional buckets of usage, that we will always want to say the basic level of usage at a sufficiently high level that the vast majority of our customers are not implicated by the usage-based billing plan."
"640k ought to be enough for anyone*"
"Let them eat cake"
*Looks like Gates never said that
XKCD:Xeric Knowledge Comically Dispen
I have no problem with this, as long as they don't put any other restrictions on me. Let me stream anything I want, host whatever I want, resell the data... whatever I want to do, as long as it's legal.
I pay for my water based on how much I use, same with electricity... I know we've all been spoiled by "unlimited" plans for so long but I really don't have any problem paying for what I'm using, as long as the prices are reasonable. (We'll see how that goes.)
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
To Comcast there's no difference whether it's Comcast or BitTorrent anyways. The least attractive customer to Comcast would be somebody who uses lots of bandwidth, and who buys bare Internet service without an expensive cable channel package. People who use a lot of Netflix, or Bittorrent, or both, fit that description.
If the model was shifted to paying for the data you use regardless of your line speed, at least it would be fair; You get what you pay for, no more, no less.
Charging by amount of data transmitted doesn't necessarily make it "fair". Sometimes it isn't the amount of data that matters but the speed at which you get it. I don't use a huge amount of data but when I dial into a VPN, latency and other speed issues matter. Data that doesn't arrive in a timely manner can be useless. Furthermore the cost of transmitting a unit of data is not a linear cost. The price for Comcast to transmit 10MB of data is not double what it costs to transmit 5MB of data to the same location. The variable cost component of the equation is quite small. The amount of data that would have to be transmitted to truly affect Comcast's cost of service is enormous.
Exactly how "fair" is it to sell the service based on an arbitrarily capped speed (which they don't guarantee) AND cap your bandwidth (which they will not advertise)? Exactly how is that anything except for misrepresentation when they bury the limitations in the fine print?
When I canceled my Comcast subscription due to the cap, the person handling the call explicitly told me there was no legitimate reason for that kind of usage so I must be a pirate. When I tried to politely explain that my Netflix usage exceeded that, I was again told there was not legitimate reason for the kind of usage.
...which is exactly why you fired them. They didn't understand (or care about) the needs of their customer, lumping you, as an outlier, into a group of pirates. They didn't want your business.
I did the same thing with Cox Communications. They had an (unenforced) cap. I know that it was unenforced because I routinely exceeded the cap. Still, I routinely exceeded it with my regular use, which was a liability. I switched to a more expensive FiOS service because it was not only significantly faster, but it was also unmetered. Then again, I am fortunate enough to live in an area with competitive service. The funny thing is that the faster FiOS provided crappy service to intermediary backbone peers, degrading Netflix and YouTube service...so in my case, there simply wasn't enough competition.
-Turkey
It may sounds crazy, but it just seems like the lesser of 2 evils.
If the likes of Comcast had a vested interest in you using your connection as much as possible (imagine a world where there's no base monthly fee, at all...if you don't use it you pay $0, and then $0.001 per mb or something), yeah, there would be the occasional issue where someone would try to make you install software that sucks all your bandwidth and the kid who downloaded 50 movies without telling their parents...
But it still seems like those issues would be so much easier to handle and resolve than what we have to deal with. And then the big ISPs would have wet dreams about you watching Netflix 24/7 instead of nightmares.
The true cost to Comcast is busy hour bandwidth.
Everything else is nearly free to them.
The monthly bandwidth cap has little relation to their actual costs.
But a great relation to what the customer perceives he gets from the service.
In a competitive market, they would be charging something related to their costs.
They are charging what the market will bear.
And creatively using the frog frying principle to slowly ratchet up what this amount is.
Only an unregulated monopoly can get away with that.
Hint to Comcast's creative lawyers: a monthly busy hour cap would eliminate this argument.
The interesting question is what would be better for the user community.
We need a scheme that encourages investment, but at a utility company margins, and encourages innovation with net neutrality and b/w.
Judging by the broadband scene in the US, our score is need 4, got not so much.
The good news here is the issue is price, and who pays, not b/w available for some app.
Ham fisted common carrier regs might make it a discussion about no investment for b/w period.
This doesn't say that common carrier will result in bad regs, just that the FCC needs to be thoughtful in what they do.
Fortunately, the US has waited long enough for other parts of the world to experiment with regulatory schemes.
Using the Brit's model appears reasonable in theory.
How well does it work in practice?
Maybe they were trying to be polite in suggesting you get a life?
Mod parent up. Reposting to get past AC filter.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
It's not arbitrary; Everyone north of Tier 1 providers pay per gigabyte of data they transfer over Tier 1 backbones. T1 don't pay each other because they agree to transfer each other's data without charging ("Peering agreements"). Paying per gigabyte is how the internet actually works; The speed is limited only by the hardware.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
you forgot to divide by "number of people in household"
Besides Netflix, I have gigabytes of music, videos, and images I obtained legally (or produced myself). They didn't indicate whether the cap would include my uploads. I guess they'd consider backing those up to a cloud illegitimate usage.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
If you're moving work-related data to and from your home office, see if your employer will remunerate you for business-class Internet service at home. These typically have far more generous caps than service, or even no stated cap at all.
A friend of mine already got hit with this 300 GB limit more than a year ago. At the time, I think they're just targeting their top 1% customers. Now they're just targeting the rest.
This exactly. And one of them is 'stay at home' who likes running the TV while doing other things.
they'd need to employ even deeper packet inspection than they already do
Do you honestly think they're not ALREADY doing deep packet inspection?
I knew from the Sandvine stories that they do some level of DPI. I just didn't know how deep.
They already know how many and the type of devices on your home network.
How can they see what devices are behind a NAT, other than that particular operating systems access particular sets of operating system update servers?
So "the vast majority of our customers would never be caught" innovating anything new. All Internet innovation will stop where it is now. No one can introduce anything new that uses more bandwidth. The Internet can only be a consumption model, the new replacement for cable TV.
Until you can stop this, f-u and your caps. At least with postal spam, the sender is paying. Not me.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
We wont charge you if you get DVR service from us, but if you want to use Netflix ( who we also have bent over ), sorry for your luck as that comes out of your monthly 'base' allocation.
Expect the cap to slowly drop until everyone can expect overage charges as a a regular occurrence.
Losing net-neutrality was just the first step in the plan.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Canada here. We've had bandwidth caps for half a decade now or more. They just appeared without warning. An edit to the EULA you never read. For awhile it wasn't even advertised. The change in my original EULA wasn't even mailed to me, but updated on an obscure website I would never check. At first when you went over, they would just disconnect your service. No more internet. That is how I actually found out about the practice in the first place. They did it all under the auspices of "Piracy" and that they were protecting your interests because they had detected that potentially someone had commandeered your connection for nefarious purposes. I had a few very nasty conversations with the ISP at that point. However how it is pretty ubiquitous. All carriers have them, and they are largely all the same. Some independents still offer "unlimited" however but usually at slower speed.
I would be weary. This is how it works:
Step 1: Increase speed,
Step 2: set low caps,
Step 3: charge huge overage,
Step 4: PROFIT!!!
Comcast says 300GB, which is actually a good number. However the devil is in the details. All ISP offer different packages, 3-6, which have various speeds and caps associated with them. The lower packages are slower and have smaller caps, but are less expensive, while the higher end ones are faster and larger caps, but are expensive. I am not a ridiculous user, but I am a heavy user. A "normal" account ranges with caps from 20-80GB. I had an 80GB cap at one point, which I went over every now and then. However, if you do, you can basically double your bill. That account was about 50$, and some months I would pay 100$. Since I cancelled my cable TV and went all netflix, I decided to up my package to the 2nd fastest. That is 40MB DL and 275GB cap. I don't ever go over that, but it costs 80$ a month. The crazy part was my 80GB connection had a 16MB speed, which though unrealistic I know, if you use the values given, you could destroy your entire cap for the month in a few hours (then pay 10x per GB overage).
Anyway that is what you get to look forward to. It is coming. Basically unless you are a grandmother using it for email, all your bills are going to increase by about 50% for the same service. Enjoy!
Sure, that may sound like a reasonable low water mark for a cap now.
But in 5 years time when people are trying to stream in 4k they'll be laughing all the way down into their diving tank of money
Yea, that is nice, but you have a few problems with your example.
First, by the time this cap is in place, we will be at 4k streaming.
Second, many homes have more than one person. We have 5, the kids often watch something on the iPad, mom and dad are on the TV, etc.
Then the PS3 is downloading patches and updates in the background, as is the multiple Windows computers, and every month or so the iPads update as well.
Heck, our new Sony 3D TV has had three software updates itself in 6 months.
Then there is backups, I use two backup programs, Crashplan and Backblaze, to backup our family videos, pictures, and documents, it is about 6TB worth of data (2x of course)
Then there is steam, I have many, many games on Steam, and they have lots and lots of patches that auto update.
Then there is online play, SWTOR probably doesn't use tons and tons of bandwidth, but running for a few hours probably uses a decent amount, and they have patches to download every two weeks or so.
We easily use multiple terabytes of data in a month, and not a single byte of it is pirated.
Yep. Now, given that jythie didn't say how many people in the household, we have no information on how much gets used per person. Nor do we know if a given person is doing something else at the same time; my wife routinely streams shows while doing other stuff.
When I tried to politely explain that my Netflix usage exceeded that, I was again told there was not legitimate reason for the kind of usage.
From the perspective of Comcast that is probably "true". I feel your pain though. Nothing more frustrating that talking to an unthinking minion.
I've recently switched to Acanac where I'm paying less than $50 for the same speeds with no cap. Hopefully US customers will be able to find smaller/independant ISPs that offer something similar...
Not a chance. I have precisely 3 sets of wires coming into my house. Cable company, phone company and the power company which doesn't provide data services. I don't need land line phone services and the only internet provider capable of better than slow DSL speeds in my area is Comcast. Any "third party" would have to come across one of those sets of wires so I'm stuck dealing with the same companies at some level regardless of who actually sends me the bill.
Fortunately Comcast hasn't been evil to me (knock on wood). Expensive for their TV but I get 100Mbit internet for less than $100US per month. Their TV is outrageously expensive for what you get but I don't watch a huge amount of TV so I don't spend much on that.
The vast majority of ISPs in this country do not offer any (or very little) TV service at all.
You must not live in the US because Comcast, Charter, Time/Warner, Cox, AT&T and Verizon all offer TV service and they are by a huge margin the largest ISPs. The top 10 ISPs account for somewhere around 75% of the market. Comcast alone has somewhere north of 20% of the market by themselves.
One could make a case that its not a correct way of billing or charging. Since cable costs and maintenance is not fact related to gigabytes sent on that cable. Data doesn't really wear out the cable.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
Because their speed would be limited before it got anywhere close.
Greed is the root of all evil.
I have unlimited 15Mbs here in the EU. I burn through about 500Gbyte a month. About half that is work related stuff. The other half is everything else. We don't watch a lot of streaming services compared to some. So yea 300Gb is not really a lot for a *single* household.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
You should have explained that you usage was normal for people who didn't spend all of their time downloading kiddie porn. Non-kiddie porn data can be much higher than what the Comcast employee was downloading.
Disclosure: I'm a certified cost accountant.
Everyone north of Tier 1 providers pay per gigabyte of data they transfer over Tier 1 backbones.
The cost per gigabyte of data is a relatively small percent of the cost incurred by companies like Comcast. Comcast's gross margins are somewhere around 70% and the cost per gigabyte would properly be accounted for under Cost of Goods Sold (also called Cost of Revenue - second line on the income statement under Revenue). Comcast's net margins are around 10% which means that the cost of moving data cannot account for more than around 30% of their expenses even if every penny of COGS was used to pay for data - which it definitely is not. In reality the real number as a percent of their total expense is probably somewhere around 10-15% at most. It's not trivial but it is a small percentage of what they actually pay out each period.
Paying per gigabyte is how the internet actually works;
I assure you that the cost per gigabyte is only a relatively minor portion of the costs involved and realistically it's not the biggest one. Don't confuse revenue models with cost models. Most of the actual cost of the internet (far in excess of 50%) is in hardware, maintenance, electricity, sales and overhead. All of these are fixed costs, unaffected by your data usage. Don't take my word for it, look on their financial statements yourself.
One could make a case that its not a correct way of billing or charging
It's an ok way to bill as long as you don't confuse the revenue model with the cost model. Most of the costs of the telecom/cable providers are fixed costs including hardware, maintenance, sales, overhead, electricity, etc. They will have to pay these each month even if they don't send a single byte of data. These fixed costs have to be allocated to each customer in some fashion and one way to do it is to charge a pro-rata per-byte rate that is high enough to cover the variable + fixed costs. It doesn't do a good job of allocating costs streams to revenue streams but it's arguably not worse than many other revenue models.
It's actually a nearly impossible exercise to allocate precisely the amount of fixed costs attributable to each customer. How much electricity at headquarters should be allocated to each customer for instance? Anyone who tells you the answer is straightforward doesn't understand cost accounting.
This assumes that there's actually competition.
Thus my third paragraph where I mention 'threaten these guys with competition that suddenly it's profitable to offer 100X the service at the same price'
I'm down with encouraging competition in this field. Hell, do the old thing where they're not allowed to merge if it eliminates competition. Regulate the heck out of them if it's not possible/practical to have multiple companies offering it. IE if they're the only player in an area they're not allowed to charge more for less service than an equivalent area that DOES have competition.
I don't read AC A human right
Tier 1s charge based on 95th percentile of your mbits of bandwidth. It doesn't matter if you transfer 100GB or 100TB, you bill will be the same of your 95th percentile is the same.
Democracy sucks when one party is insane. Nothing remotely good can last for more than a decade or so. And we don't even have remotely good at this time. Image how much worse it will be.
Democracy has nothing to do with it, in fact, one could argue that it has less and less to do with our daily lives ever since the dollar got the full power to influence elections at all levels. Dollars have infinite mobility and can overwhelm most opposition. Both parties are corrupt now, just that one makes lip service to non-corporate citizens.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
> we will always want to say the basic level of usage at a sufficiently high level that the vast majority of our
> customers are not implicated by the usage-based billing plan.'"
Divide and conqor. As long as most users are unaffected, they wont give a flying fuck what you do to the rest..... since the high bandwith people cost them the most, they are more than happy to lose those customers to another service.
Someone pointed this out to me after I started badmouthing ziplink (I am pretty sure I only just dated myself to other old fogies here) after they told me there was a cap on the "unlimited" service I had signed up for.....i left their service after that..... never really thinking that...its exactly what they wanted.... they didn't want people who used the service they offered, they wanted to have their cake and eat it too....and I let them by leaving like they wanted.
I should have stuck to my guns and told them to go get a fucking dictionary and look up two words "unlimited" and "fraud".
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
asks European paying $25 for 250/20 Mbit cable with no artificial limits.
http://antyweb.pl/wp-content/u...
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
The enormous investments needed for regular broadcasters to convert to HD (and yes even now it's a mess with 720p/1080i/1080p) I don't see them going to 4K and 8K anytime soon. Streaming on the Internet is relatively speaking cheap.
These guys see its coming. Just like as the Copyright MAFIAA saw it coming in the 1990s (leading to WIPO & WTO-TRIPs). They see it coming and they want in on where the money is. Cable is going down, Internet streaming is going up.
Strangely enough, in some parts of Canada usage caps were the standard (because there was no other alternative than dial-up). With fibre being available from the Telcos as an alternative, there is now competition, and caps are gone, or can be bought off for unlimited for a reasonable amount like $10/mo, or are only applicable in certain configurations.
When the copyright term is "forever minus a day", live every day like it's the last.
My estimates say just my netflix traffic alone would exceed that limit in one month and I work 54 hours every week and nobody else lives with me. So...that's bullshit.
in AK, GCI - the broadband provider, has caps and I've gotten a 250gb cap - since I telecommute, I couldn't risk being slowed down but our Internet essentially comes in via underwater cable from Seattle
Actually, I usually only hit 60% of it even downloading 1-2gb a day of stuff like linux distros, tv torrents, and so forth - but it's a pain when your pc crashes and you blow 20% of your bandwidth redownloading your games
it would burn someone hosting 50TB of ripped mp3's on torrents - but meh
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ah honey, we're all resplendent - Bill Mallonee
From the call:
David Cohen - Comcast Corporation - EVP:
"we are not sure we know what paid prioritization or what a fast lane is...I think a fast lane sounds bad. But since we don't know what it is, or what the definitions of it are, it's a little bit hard to be able to react to it...I believe that whatever it is, a fast lane, paid prioritization, whatever you want to call it, has been completely legal for 15 or 20 years....Our offer is to comply with the 2010 FCC Open Internet Order, which did not prohibit paid prioritization."
"there is nothing in Title II that provides authority for saying that all services have to be treated the same. In fact the whole history of Title II has been that telecom carriers regulated under Title II are absolutely allowed to provide different levels of service for different amounts of money. Think about Bell's providing different level of service to businesses versus residences."
"There is the last mile market where we as an ISP deliver content to our customers and charge customers for that content and they access the Internet by going through Comcast as an ISP. And there is what I'd call a first mile market, which is the way in which the Internet at large, the Internet Edge providers, content providers, get their content onto our network to be able to be consumed by our consumers."
"The open Internet debate is about that first market. It's about the last mile market and it's about treating, making sure that consumers have an open and unfettered access to all of the content on the Internet, that there is no blocking, there is no discrimination in the way in which they get access to that content. The old extreme example, when a consumer types into her browser www.barnesandnoble.com, she should not be directed to Amazon because we have a deal with Amazon that says we will direct any book-related search to your site. That was the original extreme example of how we as ISPs could disrupt the Internet and could violate a principle of net neutrality.
And in this day and age it would relate to a consumer being able to get advertised speeds and excess whatever content the consumer wanted through those advertised speeds. The interconnection market is a completely different market and it functions in a different way. It is a market that it would argue is intensely competitive."
"I think the ISP market is competitive but the interconnection market is intensely competitive. There are dozens of very large players in that space who are selling transit services. The competition is so intense in that market that the pricing in the interconnection market has dropped 99% in the last 15 years."
"And so among the dozens of large players here, Comcast alone has 40 companies with which we have settlement-free peering. That is we don't pay them anything, they don't pay us anything because our traffic is roughly in balance. And there was a time when Netflix was using Akamai, Level 3 then Cogent and their traffic was in balance with our traffic."
"So there was no way in that model for us to collect anything without completely disrupting the business model and structure of the interconnection market, which I think would be a mistake to do. So I think that the right way to do this is to use usage-based billing and do it on the last mile and to do it in a fair and non-discriminatory fashion. And I think that is the way you can deliver the equity proposition that heavier users pay more and lighter users pay less."
"Reed's argument that he should have free transit, and it is a Cogent argument as well, that there should be free transit is just a cost shifting argument. That's an argument there is cost for transit providers, content delivery, networks, other transit providers to connect to our network. There is a cost to that.
And if Netflix doesn't bear its share of those costs to connect to the network then we have no choice but to raise prices for everyone else. Even though Netflix is responsible for one-third of the traffic on the Internet at peak times, tha
Kill all their executives.
I have to admit that I see his point. Residential bandwidth pricing is based on the concept of oversubscription. I run a small local ISP and have seen sustainable oversubscription numbers move from around 75:1 ten years ago to somewhere around 12:1 today and am using 8:1 to plan deployments for the next 2-3 years. Equipment and transit costs have come way down, which have allowed us to keep pricing relatively stable while increasing package speeds, but as we approach 1:1 usage, there is no way to make the model work without passing on full bandwidth costs, core costs, and last mile costs to the end user. Around 3% of our subs end up costing us more in bandwidth usage then they pay us for service which is supportable for now, but as that percentage grows with increased full time streaming, we will either need to raise prices across the board, or start charging based on actual usage. What would be ideal, IMHO, is 95th percentile billing, i.e 10mbps on a 100mbps circuit with 95th percentile billing above 10mbps, but the vast majority of users just wouldn't get it.
Corrected headline: Comcast predicts usage cap within 5 years
Story in a nutshell: Comcast exec PROMISES bandwith cap within 5 years.
When a vested interest "predicts" something, you can be sure they're working hard to get there.
Maybe GF = Geek Friend?
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
The foxes guarding the henhouse predict a chicken shortage next week.
An internal system operation returned the error "The operation completed successfully.".
Here in Sweden we pay up to $8000 for a fiber connection to a house, there are lots of appartments that get it a lot cheaper though (for free).
"Price per gigabyte" is maybe a better way to put it. It's not relating to the cost of provoding the service, it's just how they charge out you accessing the service.
The cost of actually transmitting the data to the people you pay your bill to is a tiny percentage of that bill. 80-95% of your bill is for things other than the actual cost of transmission. The important thing to understand is the concept of tax incidence - namely, at the end of the day who is really paying for this stuff. For a stupidly simple example, if Level 3 raises their rates on Comcast, Comcast is going to pass that cost on to you and me. It doesn't really matter what Level 3 does because that is effectively a transfer payment. It's like when you buy a car, you really are buying a product that several hundred companies had a hand in making but how they divide up your car payment among themselves really isn't the important thing.
The backhaul providers only charge on a per-GB basis because their actual costs are mostly fixed and charging per-GB is a back of the envelope way of correlating resources required with usage. Think of it kind of like using a gas tax to pay for road maintenance. You can't assign the costs with much accuracy so you use a proxy for usage. It's pretty crude but it works well enough. It's the sort of problem that keeps cost accountants employed. :-)
In the southeast region we are already subject to this draconian policy ... it's ridiculous that they sell you a 100+Mbps internet connection and then
set a bandwidth cap on the connection that, at full speed, can be consumed in a matter of hours.
We have already been capped at 300gb and are being charged the rate $10/50gb etc. Which is happening every month for us.
'because the internet is already so big we can't make it bigger - we gotta cap it!' funny how corporate asshats always want caps on everything but their fucking pay
kspacey join amnesty international www.amnesty.org
Cox sends out a nastygram when you hit 250 GB. Yet they keep raising the speed. Maybe they should start advertising "New! Higher speed! Hit your monthly download limit in only 8 hours!"
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
I work at a university that has 3 100 GB/sec ports and 40 GB/sec campuswide.
You could go through 300 GB in ... wait for it ... either 3 seconds or 9 seconds.
Why does Comcast hate America so?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
1) Shouldn't we expect, there will be enough growth in bandwidth, that the cap could be 30.000 in 5 years?
2) Do they expect, the content will be that small in 5 years, that 300 gb is enough? 4K streaming anyone?
The biggest reason that you don't have a HUGE CUM LOAD is that you jack off too much. If you cut back of your fapping, you'll find you unleash a much bigger torrent of sticky white baby batter... The boys you fuck in the park would prefer it if you had a bigger cum load.
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