@Home quietly initiates 128k upload cap

Ethan Butterfield writes "Looks like the days of wine and roses are over for @Home subscribers. A global 128k upload rate cap is @Home's solution to their chronic bandwidth problems. Man, I'm glad I have DSL. " Even 128k seems fast to me, but this article will definitely raise your eyebrows.

Comments

A Related Problem

[volsung]

I have Cox@Home, and the other day I was at work and decide to check the speed of my connection. I sent a 10 Meg file to my home computer (on the @Home network) at 70 kilobytes/sec. That's normal for the amount of traffic on Cox and at my employer. I then reversed the process, sending the file from my home computer to my work computer and got only 15 kilobytes/sec. I was rather miffed.

My question is: Can anyone shed some light on why this might be?

I have four possible theories:

1. Since my work computer is a Pentium III and my home computer is 486DX4-100, there is some sort of speed issue, like my 486 can receive data quickly, but hasn't got the horespower to send it out quickly. (This doesn't sound right, but its a possibility.)
2. Cox@Home has already rolled out a bandwidth cap in my area. While this is possible, I don't think the cap would be this low. (We're talking 1/4 the cap described in the article.)
3. My friend tells me that Cox regularly portscans computers on the network, and if they find FTP servers, they cap the bandwidth for that computer. I don't know if this is real, or if it is even possible. I do have an FTP server on my 486, but it is only for personal use.
4. The availible bandwidth coming out of the Cox network was very low due to other people filling it up with their high-volume FTP servers.

I don't know which of these possibilities is more accurate, so I would be interested in hearing the experiences of other Cox@Home users.

Re:A Related Problem

[tzanger]

dammit CmdrTaco fix the goddamn less than/greater than tags!!

Transmit speed on your cable modem is limited by design. The cable has a finate amount of bandwidth and any provider with half a brain would devote a much larger amount to download.

from talking to people in the know down at the local cable co., the modems all receive on a given "channel" (e.g. the bandwidth allocated to channel 50) and all transmit on the sub-lo part of the spectrum (less than 50MHz I believe) -- they cannot allocate more for sending from subscribers to the internet since the distribution amps are set up to amplify the sub-lo IN to the office and amplify everything else OUT to the subscribers.

Cable modems work in the exact same way that cable companies can backfeed a live broadcast back to the main system. They transmit locally into the same cable you use in your home, but in the sub-lo band. When it gets back to the office it gets upconverted to whatever channel YOU watch it on, mixed with the general distribution signal and transmitted out. They can't just add more reverse channels because that means redesigning the entire cable network.

@home user groups.

[dr_strang]

All you @home subscribers, let's get on the newsgroups and start hollering about this. To me, this cap is totally unacceptable, whether or not I use a web/ftp server. What happened to "100 times faster than a modem"?? Indeed, if @home sees this as an acceptable alternative to actually upgrading their network, I will certainly find another type of service.
The newsgroups you can post to and get more information from are as follows:
athome.discussion-athomesvc
athome.discussion-gen eral
athome.users-general
I think that only @home subscribers have access to these groups.

Re:@home user groups.

[Raist-]

Tried that. We had about 50 people screaming bloddy murder on the CGO@Home newsgroups. The people who work for CGO@Home have stoped reading/replying to messages about the cap. They don't care about their users. To them, about 3% of the users use their outgoing connection on a regular basis. They'd be happy to see us go.

As a matter of fact, the only people who knew about the CGO@Home cap was the people who read the cogeco.concerns news group. CGO wasn't even going to tell their users that a cap was in place.

Like I said before... I hate @Home.

Re:@home user groups.

[Signal 11]

Actually, since mediaone (now part of the roadrunner/@home network) has advertised their modem as "up to 50x faster than a regular modem"... I'll be raising hell with the Public Utilities Commissioner in my state.

Actually, maybe I'll sue them for false advertising, and intent to defraud.

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Re:@home user groups.

[Bailey]

Most of the @home users who are upset with this upload cap (like myself) are not as upset with the quality of service as we are with the lack of integrity of @home.

When I subscribed back in Dec-98, I was promised - via advertising, phone calls, emails, and from the technicians who came and installed the service - that I would receive 1MB upload speeds and 2MB downlooad speeds.

I asked about FTP/HTTP servers and the like, and they said they did not recommend this, due to security issues. They did not claim that this would violate the AUP. In fact, I read through the policy with the technicians, and the only thing that we could find relative to these servers, is that if you decide to run them, @home would not be responsible for the security issues involved.

The point is, if @home is only going to allow 128kb upload speeds, they need to make it perfectly clear to subscribers. I have no problem if they want to "downgrade" my service. But, they should inform me ahead of time, and I should not have to pay the same price for fewer services. Their marketing department needs some work.

This is not such a bad thing

[Hobbex]

I'm sorry to take the side of the big bad corporation in this issue, but I definitely don't agree with all the whining.

You can't have your cake and eat it too people, if you super cheap flat rate broadband, you just can't expect that they will let you run a 100 channel shoutcast server off it as well.

Yeah, it has its disadvantages if you want to send large files around or remote heavy x applications, but for all other purposes this is enough for home usage, well enough in fact.

I know that several Cable Modem and ADSL services here in Sweden have taken it one step further in combating the server problem and put every user behind an ip masquerading firewall instead (goodbye ICQ, goodbye DCC, goodbye Telnetting/SSHing to the home machine, goodbye any kind of server what so ever). If that is the option, I know what I would choose (if I wasn't stuck on a stupid minute metered ISDN that is)...

Re:This is not such a bad thing

[scrytch]

> They do occasional port scans, and then tell violators to turn off service or get their service terminated


Better be a really fast scan. I have most services turned off already as a matter of security (I use fetchmail to get my mail from my ISP). What I do have on those ports are boobytraps that firewall off the scanner. If I could get it to just refuse the connection as if it weren't listening, I'd love to do that but have no idea how.

War is Peace

[sjames]

Less is More, and 128kbps is "orders of magnitude" greater than 28.8kbps. since when is *4 an order of magnitude?

At 128kbps, the service certainly isn't what it could be (though it's better than what I've got). I fail to see how capping upstream rates constitutes scaling the network up to meet demands. If they lie like that to their own staff, what does that say about what they tell the customer?

Re:War is Peace

[sjames]

Not really. One is not plural, so it is not technically true. Even without the cap, it would just qualify.

And your interpretation of the phrase is the most generous (to them) of several. Many would consider an order of magnitude faster to be 288kbps (2.88 * 10^1 vs 2.88 * 10^2 ), and this to be PLURAL orders, it would need to be at least 2.88Mbps which is untrue even without the cap.

Re:War is Peace

[sjames]

I understand why they capped the network, and that they probably had to do it to meet demand with their current infrastructure. However, that is NOT expanding your network to meet demand. That is capping demand to avoid expanding your network.

As far as it goes, some sort of fair allocation scheme is certainly needed on any public network. I think the parts many object to is the way they want to dodge the questions, and the misleading information in the document. That and the use of a simple minded congestion control and the underprovision of bandwidth in the first place.

Re:MediaOne Express - what you might not know

[scrytch]

There's no need to have anyone surfing channels looking for abusers. You just meter the connection. Exceed X amount transferred in Y days and have your bandwidth throttled by a factor of Z. Totally automatic. Coldly fair.

Oversubscription

[Signal 11]

graph available

I just have to tell you right now why the real reason for these caps are. It has nothing to do with "bandwidth" problems. They've oversubscribed their userbase. I have a graph up on my website detailing this. If you want the scripts to generate it yourself, contact me. What disgusts me the most is that I was paying $40 a month when the service was *good* during prime time. Now I'm still paying $40 a month, but the service is completely unusuable during prime-time. Please contact your PUC (Public Utilities Commissioner), as well as the technically-savvy press. This is an outrage - they're delivering less, but charging the same rate. In any other industry, this would be outright fraud.



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Re:Oversubscription

[Signal 11]

Sorry, bad link, this one will work better.



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Not free

[Skyshadow]

Yeah, but upgrades are expensive, and I'm not willing to pay the extra costs. Never forget that any upgrades get passed directly on to the subscribers.

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Absolutely no surprise.

[Restil]

I've known all along that cable modem companies would have to start capping rates. Just join any major IRC server (dalnet, efnet) and look at a few of the channel topics and you'll see why. Warez junkies are going to ruin it for everyone.

And don't forget, you're getting EXACTLY what you pay for. I can't tell you how many times people have bragged to me about the high speed of their internet connection because they have a cable modem, and my attempting to tell them that its a solution that will turn around and bite them in the ass, falls on deaf ears.

Cable modem statistics and prices are based on the assumption that the average user won't use any more bandwidth than a regular modem user will. The average person "surfing the net" won't read his webpages any faster, they'll just load faster. Email won't increase by much, and sure those downloads will be faster, but your average modem user doesn't download that much. $40 a month, or whatever cable modem prices are going for, is more than enough to cover a large number of users.

Ok, so there will be a few users who use more than their share, this also isn't a problem. Every isp has the occasional dialup user who never disconnects and is literally tying up the line 24/7. However, there aren't enough of them that they cause busy signals for others, so they can safely be ignored, or at least worked into the average appropriately.

The big problem with cable modems is that the average user, to whom a 28.8 modem is more than
adaquate, has no reason to switch to cable. Therefore, cable has a skewed user base. They have a lot more bandwidth hungry users who are exploiting high bandwidth at low cost, and fewer
low bandwidth users to balance the load out.

This means that cable modem providers are going to spend more money on bandwidth than they will recieve from their users. Also, cable networks are optimized for downstream. Certainly, they can handle the bandwidth in both directions, but since they expect clients to be primarily in the business of downloading, they therefore provide more bandwidth on the downstream side. This is why they don't want servers, as servers, especially when something in demand is offered for download, will chew up a LOT of bandwidth very quickly.

So they cap the uploads. Complain if you want, but 128K is still pretty damn good for only $40 a month. And while they may not have capped the downstream yet, I wouldn't blink for too long, because it will come there eventually too. GTE has done it already.

So, you want a large number of IP addresses, you'll have to pay for it. If you want dedicated high bandwidth rates, go get a T1. Yes, it will cost you a lot more money, but its all yours. 1.544 mbps and NOBODY will tell you how much of it you can use, as you can use all of it. But you're going to pay for it.

-Restil

Re:Absolutely no surprise.

[Fizgig]

Hmmm, according to this line of reasoning, @Home might actually be BETTER off if they let AOL onto the network. You know over 99% of AOL users don't know what a server is, let alone how to run one.

Re:MediaOne

[Jburkholder]

Just curious, what part of the Country is this?

I was one of the first to jump on Mediaone Express service when it rolled out here in the Chicago suburbs last fall. It was excellent - I loved it and I never even had to *think* bout how long something was going to take to upload/download, or did I have any trouble finding fast game servers.

Now, almost a year later, it is still a very good service, but I have seen some deterioration as more users are added. I see some slowdowns on Saturday nights, the e-mail and news servers are usually much slower than before, and we get short outages from time to time.

Overall, I agree that MediaOne has been a good ISP - I'm just wondering what happens when AT&T/TCI/@Home takes over here?

@home is for the home

[Bald Wookie]

Please remember that the bandwidth for a cable modem is shared among all of the users. Now when everyone on a block is using a shared resource, I'd like to think that we can all have a bit of respect for our fellow users. Let me put together a little analogy.

For example, lets say that you live out in the desert on a dirt road. There are about 50 or 60 other families who all live along the same road with you. This road is so bad that you have to leave an extra 20 minutes for your commute because of it. Fed up, you look into paving a section of the road, but it costs way too much for you to take on alone.

Now imagine that some big company comes to town and offers to pave the road for a small cost, split among all of the negihbors. Everyone chips in thier small monthly fee, and soon there is a pristine 2-lane strip of asphalt. You cut your commute in half and now you can get a boat and trailer for the weekends. Life is good.

Then your next door neighbor tears down his house, and tilts up a 500000sf Wal Mart national distribution center. Pretty soon trucks start clogging that little strip of road. Not to be outdone, the Flynts up the street build a mega-theme park. Cars line up for miles just to get in. The Waltons and the Flynts are still only chipping in a few bucks a month, but they are using most of the capacity of the road. Now your commute has expanded by 40 minutes each way, but your stuck.

OK, so how to fix the problem? Limit the number of axels on the residential road. Close the gates to the theme park. Then everyone can share the same strip of highway. It might be hard on their business to have these restrictions imposed. Yet, if they as a business customer want that much road, they should build their own. The same goes for the theme park. The same goes for the guy running Phil's Playhouse of Porn and Top 50 W4r3Z site next door off of his cable modem.

The cost of the bandwidth for cable is so low because it is shared among all of the users. If you want or need your own big pipe going out, you really should be paying for it rather than taking advantage of the guy next door. Just because you can sit in your living room with the blinds drawn and suckle on the teat of high bitrate bliss, does not mean that you should be the only one on your block with the privelage.

Its really easy to make the company the scapegoat in this situation. False advertising claims fly. Hey, its really not 50X faster than my old modem! No, that is a marketing come on phrased for a technically illiterate public. Sadly, people are starting to think that 56K is a brand of modem. Grandiose claims of peak speeds of 1.5megabits per second with a CIR of 10kbps does not make a catcy ad (but it does make a nice line in a service agreement.)

What it comes down to is that there is no such thing as a free lunch. Yes, there are good non-business uses for upstream bandwidth. However I would rather have some sort of limit to curb abusers, than have an unusable connection because of my neighbors. Yes the company can take steps to increase bandwidth. However those steps are costly, and those costs are either reflected in higher bills, or lower returns for investors. A little respect for the guy next door would go a long way in this case.