Well in my experience CS:Source uses ~3Kbps each way for a 32-man server. If we assume (I don't play MMOs, so I don't know if this is accurate) that MMOs have similar traffic, then we end up with this:
6Kbps * 60 seconds per minute * 60 minutes per hour * 24 hours per day * 30 days per month = 15552000 Kb = 1944000 KB = 1898.44 MB = 1.85 GB
Even if MMOs use ten times that much traffic, I don't think MMO players have anything to worry about.
You're quite right. In a perfect world, where Comcast cared about its customers, they would spend that money improving their network. However they don't really care, they simply care about more profits. Network upgrades are expensive and are not always immediately profitable. It might look good on the long-term reports but it doesn't look good on the short-term reports.
It's fine to fantasize about a perfect world, but you have to remember that Comcast is in it for the money and really couldn't care less about their customers beyond keeping them. Monopolies are easy to maintain.
Yes. I have a bad habit of using the term "bandwidth" where I mean "data transfer". I don't know why... I'm trying to use the correct term, but it slips out wrong sometimes;)
Depends on how they go about it, and whether they change their pricing model. A switch to price per GB/month would be an excellent way to deal with it without raising the price beyond the average household's reach.
I think it's funny how different everyone's numbers are. I don't really want to scroll back up and list them all, but I've seen figures ranging between 70Kbps and 1.2Mbps... I must say I'm baffled.
I think it would be better if ISPs would do the following:
1) Offer a universal, fast speed. 2) Provide service based on price per monthly bandwidth. 3) Use the money to improve their networks so they can offer faster speeds to all their customers.
Step three is vital - faster speeds for everyone encourages increased usage, which causes people to go through their bandwidth faster, which leads them to pay more for bandwidth. It's win-win for the ISPs and their customers. ISPs get more money, we customers get faster connections and we don't have to subsidize heavy network users.
If I could get enough startup capital together, I'd start an ISP with this business model, but I have no idea how much I'd need. Feel free to use this model, guys;)
"Being able to" and "doing" are very different things. AT&T shows me my current cell phone usage on my online account, but it's a day behind (for minutes) and longer than that (for texts and data). It would be less profitable for Comcast to provide real-time bandwidth usage monitoring, at least it will be once they start charging for surplus usage.
What about the people who have signed up for automatic online payments (and, by extension, paperless billing)? I'd hope Comcast would at least send an e-mail with the change, if not a snail-mail envelope...
I don't think games use nearly as much bandwidth as you think they do. Take a look at the network traffic next time you're playing CS:Source. Turn on the netgraph ("net_graph 3" in the console). You'll see rates around 2-3kbps both inbound and outbound. That's much, much lower than the rate of usage you'd have to maintain to surpass Comcast's limit.
That's all fine and dandy, but I really doubt Comcast provides its customers with a way to find out how much bandwidth they have used, and the great majority of people don't have a way to track their usage themselves.
I don't mind data transfer limits, however it is not ok to impose an untrackable limit. At least my ISP has the decency to say "We have a limit but since we don't yet have a way for you to track it we're not enforcing it."
I get charged $0.01 per KB for data on my cell phone, one-tenth the rate you quote.
However, if you want to figure out how much they charge per KB for text messages (excluding overhead)... You can put 160 bytes in a text message, so 1KB is 6.4 messages. $0.20 per message * 6.4 messages = $1.28 per KB. (Someone want to check my math?) That's over a dollar per KB.
In my opinion, we should be demanding the same rates for text messaging that we're being charged for data. We'd be able to get 128 times as many texts for the same price. That would take AT&T's base 200 for $5 plan to 25600 for $5... a much better deal:D
I'm reminded of how text messaging works for cell phones. You get charged for both sending and receiving texts - and both the sender and reciever pay for the same text.
It is a poorly kept secret that you can send texts to phones through e-mail, and thus only the receiver pays for the text. If you wrote a program to sent a dozen spam messages per hour to a particular phone number, at $0.20 per message it could add up quite quickly (unless the target has unlimited messaging, of course). If you're looking for a way to make someone bleed money, that's one way to do it.
That seems quite similar to the possibility of forcing someone over their ISP-enforced bandwidth cap by spamming them with unwanted packets... and it could (would?) get far worse if ISPs start to charge automatically for excess traffic.
It could just as easily go the other way. If there is a customer backlash against Comcast for imposing limits, then ISPs won't be able to put limits for fear of losing customers, and ISPs will be forced to upgrade their networks to deal with both their heavy users and the increased use by normal users due to HD video and whatnot.
Maybe that's a flimsy argument and/or an improbably outcome. But don't talk about a snowball effect without explaining why the snowball couldn't go down the other side of the hill;)
I agree that having a limit is fair, as long as it is disclosed. This previously nondescript limit of Comcast's was one of the major reasons I chose iProvo (now Broadweave) for my ISP. iProvo told me "We have a X GB/month limit but since we have no way for our users to monitor their usage we will not be enforcing it." I don't remember what the limit was... but it hasn't mattered;)
What's interesting is that while most customers won't notice, some people do - but up until now, they have refused to admit they have a limit. When I was ISP shopping, I specifically asked what their limit was. The most definitive answer I was able to wrench out of the CSR was "if you use too much we'll call you."
This quote says much:
'This is the same system we have in place today,' Comcast wrote in an amendment to its acceptable use policy. 'The only difference is that we will now provide a limit by which a customer may be contacted.'
They're not doing anything different now than they've been doing; they're simply telling us what that limit is. My guess is that, like you imply, they're doing it so that they can lower the limit in the future (or at least charge more for people who go over that limit).
You ignored half of what he said - the IP address you receive after rebooting your cable modem could very well be the IP address most recently held by another heavy P2P user - thus giving you all the traffic you were trying to avoid in the first place.
I tried to order my laptop without XP (since I had like six legal XP Pro licenses sitting around) but I didn't have any luck. The thick-accented Dell rep ("Michael" or somesuch, I'm sure) could not understand why I'd want to order a laptop with no OS, no matter how I explained it. I finally gave up... I guess I should have tried for a refund after the fact.
Ok, I looked it up. You're right about Amazon not turning a profit for a long while (though it was 8 years, not 10), however they've remained profitable since. By this I do not mean they've overcome their debts; I simply mean they're earning more than they are spending, which is the opposite of your claim.
Amazon was founded in 1994 [...] When the dot-com bubble burst, and many e-companies went out of business, Amazon persevered, and, finally, turned its first profit in the fourth quarter of 2002: U.S. $5 million, just 1 cent a share, on revenues of more than U.S. $1 billion, but the profit was symbolically important.
The company remains profitable: 2003 net income was U.S.$35.3 million, U.S.$588.50 million in 2004, U.S.$359 million in 2005, and U.S.$190 million in 2006 (including a U.S.$662 million charge for R&D in 2006), nevertheless, the firm's cumulative profits remain negative. As of September 2007, the accumulated deficit stood at U.S.$1.58 billion. Revenues increased thanks to product diversification and an international presence: US$3.9 billion in 2002, U.S.$5.3 billion in 2003, U.S.$6.9 billion in 2004, U.S.$8.5 billion in 2005, and U.S.$10.7 billion in 2006. On November 21, 2005, Amazon entered the S&P 500 index, replacing AT&T after it merged with SBC Communications.
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Well in my experience CS:Source uses ~3Kbps each way for a 32-man server. If we assume (I don't play MMOs, so I don't know if this is accurate) that MMOs have similar traffic, then we end up with this:
6Kbps * 60 seconds per minute * 60 minutes per hour * 24 hours per day * 30 days per month = 15552000 Kb = 1944000 KB = 1898.44 MB = 1.85 GB
Even if MMOs use ten times that much traffic, I don't think MMO players have anything to worry about.
You're quite right. In a perfect world, where Comcast cared about its customers, they would spend that money improving their network. However they don't really care, they simply care about more profits. Network upgrades are expensive and are not always immediately profitable. It might look good on the long-term reports but it doesn't look good on the short-term reports.
It's fine to fantasize about a perfect world, but you have to remember that Comcast is in it for the money and really couldn't care less about their customers beyond keeping them. Monopolies are easy to maintain.
Yes. I have a bad habit of using the term "bandwidth" where I mean "data transfer". I don't know why... I'm trying to use the correct term, but it slips out wrong sometimes ;)
Depends on how they go about it, and whether they change their pricing model. A switch to price per GB/month would be an excellent way to deal with it without raising the price beyond the average household's reach.
I think it's funny how different everyone's numbers are. I don't really want to scroll back up and list them all, but I've seen figures ranging between 70Kbps and 1.2Mbps... I must say I'm baffled.
I think it would be better if ISPs would do the following:
1) Offer a universal, fast speed.
2) Provide service based on price per monthly bandwidth.
3) Use the money to improve their networks so they can offer faster speeds to all their customers.
Step three is vital - faster speeds for everyone encourages increased usage, which causes people to go through their bandwidth faster, which leads them to pay more for bandwidth. It's win-win for the ISPs and their customers. ISPs get more money, we customers get faster connections and we don't have to subsidize heavy network users.
If I could get enough startup capital together, I'd start an ISP with this business model, but I have no idea how much I'd need. Feel free to use this model, guys ;)
"Being able to" and "doing" are very different things. AT&T shows me my current cell phone usage on my online account, but it's a day behind (for minutes) and longer than that (for texts and data). It would be less profitable for Comcast to provide real-time bandwidth usage monitoring, at least it will be once they start charging for surplus usage.
What about the people who have signed up for automatic online payments (and, by extension, paperless billing)? I'd hope Comcast would at least send an e-mail with the change, if not a snail-mail envelope...
I don't think games use nearly as much bandwidth as you think they do. Take a look at the network traffic next time you're playing CS:Source. Turn on the netgraph ("net_graph 3" in the console). You'll see rates around 2-3kbps both inbound and outbound. That's much, much lower than the rate of usage you'd have to maintain to surpass Comcast's limit.
That's all fine and dandy, but I really doubt Comcast provides its customers with a way to find out how much bandwidth they have used, and the great majority of people don't have a way to track their usage themselves.
I don't mind data transfer limits, however it is not ok to impose an untrackable limit. At least my ISP has the decency to say "We have a limit but since we don't yet have a way for you to track it we're not enforcing it."
Ah, but they don't advertise X kbps - they advertise up to X kbps.
(I guess that merits a -1 Redundant, since I posted that up a few threads, but oh well. It's still true.)
I get charged $0.01 per KB for data on my cell phone, one-tenth the rate you quote.
However, if you want to figure out how much they charge per KB for text messages (excluding overhead)... You can put 160 bytes in a text message, so 1KB is 6.4 messages. $0.20 per message * 6.4 messages = $1.28 per KB. (Someone want to check my math?) That's over a dollar per KB.
In my opinion, we should be demanding the same rates for text messaging that we're being charged for data. We'd be able to get 128 times as many texts for the same price. That would take AT&T's base 200 for $5 plan to 25600 for $5... a much better deal :D
I'm reminded of how text messaging works for cell phones. You get charged for both sending and receiving texts - and both the sender and reciever pay for the same text.
It is a poorly kept secret that you can send texts to phones through e-mail, and thus only the receiver pays for the text. If you wrote a program to sent a dozen spam messages per hour to a particular phone number, at $0.20 per message it could add up quite quickly (unless the target has unlimited messaging, of course). If you're looking for a way to make someone bleed money, that's one way to do it.
That seems quite similar to the possibility of forcing someone over their ISP-enforced bandwidth cap by spamming them with unwanted packets... and it could (would?) get far worse if ISPs start to charge automatically for excess traffic.
But they never advertised $bytes_per_sec. They advertised "Up to $bytes_per_sec".
It could just as easily go the other way. If there is a customer backlash against Comcast for imposing limits, then ISPs won't be able to put limits for fear of losing customers, and ISPs will be forced to upgrade their networks to deal with both their heavy users and the increased use by normal users due to HD video and whatnot.
Maybe that's a flimsy argument and/or an improbably outcome. But don't talk about a snowball effect without explaining why the snowball couldn't go down the other side of the hill ;)
I agree that having a limit is fair, as long as it is disclosed. This previously nondescript limit of Comcast's was one of the major reasons I chose iProvo (now Broadweave) for my ISP. iProvo told me "We have a X GB/month limit but since we have no way for our users to monitor their usage we will not be enforcing it." I don't remember what the limit was... but it hasn't mattered ;)
What's interesting is that while most customers won't notice, some people do - but up until now, they have refused to admit they have a limit. When I was ISP shopping, I specifically asked what their limit was. The most definitive answer I was able to wrench out of the CSR was "if you use too much we'll call you."
This quote says much:
'This is the same system we have in place today,' Comcast wrote in an amendment to its acceptable use policy. 'The only difference is that we will now provide a limit by which a customer may be contacted.'
They're not doing anything different now than they've been doing; they're simply telling us what that limit is. My guess is that, like you imply, they're doing it so that they can lower the limit in the future (or at least charge more for people who go over that limit).
You ignored half of what he said - the IP address you receive after rebooting your cable modem could very well be the IP address most recently held by another heavy P2P user - thus giving you all the traffic you were trying to avoid in the first place.
OP put words in Microsoft's mouth, when in fact it was Lenovo who said "Sure but keep your mouth shut".
I second that. I love my W580i.
It wasn't any cheaper at the time.
Replace "Microsoft" with "Lenovo" and your summary of the summary is correct.
I tried to order my laptop without XP (since I had like six legal XP Pro licenses sitting around) but I didn't have any luck. The thick-accented Dell rep ("Michael" or somesuch, I'm sure) could not understand why I'd want to order a laptop with no OS, no matter how I explained it. I finally gave up... I guess I should have tried for a refund after the fact.
Ok, I looked it up. You're right about Amazon not turning a profit for a long while (though it was 8 years, not 10), however they've remained profitable since. By this I do not mean they've overcome their debts; I simply mean they're earning more than they are spending, which is the opposite of your claim.
Saith Wikipedia:
Amazon was founded in 1994 [...] When the dot-com bubble burst, and many e-companies went out of business, Amazon persevered, and, finally, turned its first profit in the fourth quarter of 2002: U.S. $5 million, just 1 cent a share, on revenues of more than U.S. $1 billion, but the profit was symbolically important.
The company remains profitable: 2003 net income was U.S.$35.3 million, U.S.$588.50 million in 2004, U.S.$359 million in 2005, and U.S.$190 million in 2006 (including a U.S.$662 million charge for R&D in 2006), nevertheless, the firm's cumulative profits remain negative. As of September 2007, the accumulated deficit stood at U.S.$1.58 billion. Revenues increased thanks to product diversification and an international presence: US$3.9 billion in 2002, U.S.$5.3 billion in 2003, U.S.$6.9 billion in 2004, U.S.$8.5 billion in 2005, and U.S.$10.7 billion in 2006. On November 21, 2005, Amazon entered the S&P 500 index, replacing AT&T after it merged with SBC Communications.