The truly nasty Imperial Japan was still better, than the USSR and the post-War Communist China.
Try telling that to one of the Allied POWs held and tortured by the Japanese. Try telling that to one of the millions of Chinese that were raped and killed by the Japanese. Try telling that to a Filipino, Singaporean, Korean or Vietnamese who watched as his country was occupied and his people enslaved.
Yes, I'd take Japanese militarism over Russian or Chinese any day...
Interesting opinion to hold, seeing as how we've never been at war with China or Russia. Neither one of them ever conducted a sneak attack on American forces whilst engaged in diplomatic negotiations. China was an important ally against Japan during WW2 and it was Russian involvement in the end of the war (not the nuclear bombings as commonly believed) that brought it to a quick conclusion without requiring an invasion of the home islands.
I think we need a counter-weight to China too, but the GP was advocating for a nuclear armed Japan. That is a really bad idea. Give Japan nuclear weapons and it will start a regional arms race between Japan, China, Korea and Russia. It would destabilize the Taiwan situation and force the United States to pick sides. Our other allies in the Pacific (Australia and New Zealand) would be completely opposed to it and it would probably place the ANZUS treaty in jeopardy. It's an all around bad idea with no saving graces.
Personally, I'm more hopeful that a more assertive Russia will balance out China somewhat. Russia has the population and the resources to back it up and an assertive Russia is not going to destabilize the entire Pacific region.
(By the way, China is as communist as the US is a free market...)
You may have a point there. But at the end of the day I can sit here on Slashdot and say pretty much anything I want about the United States, George W. Bush, Congress, our Allies, etc, etc, etc. At the end of the day I can practice whatever religion I want in the United States.
Try living in China and criticizing your Government or following Falun Gong and let me know how well it works out for you.
As a Comcast customer, the first thing I think will happen if the Government passes this is that Comcast will turn around and say that they need to raise my rates to expand their network to the capacity they need to support everyone running peer-to-peer apps
Yeah, cuz they are really hurting right now and clearly have no cash available for network upgrades.
it just means that it is too late to change anything
Wow. I'm glad that noneoftheseguys shared your pessimistic "nothing's gonna change" attitude.
Why don't you get some perspective on the situation instead of spouting off about how this is the end of Democracy? Yes, we've had a bad run the last few years. Yes, we have a fight ahead of us. But none of what's going on in the US or UK even comes remotely close to what's going on in Burma right now. Our brave leaders who are fighting for our rights aren't being assassinated by extremists. We aren't in the middle of a ongoing genocide.
None of this is meant to say that we shouldn't continue to be vigilant and oppose stuff like this. But seriously, get some perspective on the rest of the World before you start announcing the end of Democracy. Democracy won't die until people stop fighting for it.
It boggles my mind that so many slashdotters can't understand this simple point: a single P2P file transfer will use as much bandwidth as possible. Therefore, if P2P is causing congestion problems, throwing more bandwidth at the problem solves nothing.
It does if you throw more bandwidth at your network but don't pass that onto your end users. We already have connections upwards of 15 - 20Mbits available in some areas. If you add more bandwidth to the network itself and keep your userbase at the same levels they are at right now then it would solve the problem.
More like 60%. Nitrogen is another 30%. Not for us directly, but for our food supplies which we will grow in these alien soils. The other 10% is the various misc. materials.
I think you might find that Oxygen is a nice thing to have too;)
Would anyone notice if YouTube or ABC's streaming TV loaded a bit slower?
Yeah, they kinda would if they were watching it in real time and exhausted the buffer.
because it's obvious to the avg BT user that their download is being degraded.
I don't really care much about the download speed on my torrents. Most of the "gray area" torrents don't get blazing speeds anyway because they usually have unfavorable seeder/leecher ratios. The only time I've ever come close to pegging my downstream with a torrent is when downloading Linux distros. They tend to be very well seeded -- usually three or four times as many seeders as leechers, unless you jump into the swarm right after it's released.
..and you would be free to make that decision being fully informed about the service being offered. The problem I have with Comcast is that they are NOT disclosing their bandwidth limits, not that they are limiting them in the first place. That and their service sucks beyond this issue, but that's another matter.
I won't argue with you on the point that full disclosure would better then secret caps and shaping technology that they deny even using. But I still don't think a per-byte model is the way to go. Bandwidth isn't electricity or natural gas. It doesn't directly cost money for me to move a byte of data across the globe.
Whether or not the market will accept a tiered system is another argument that will be decided in the marketplace regardless of whether we agree with the fee per byte model or not.
A tiered system would be more fair then a per-byte system, but even at that you know they'll still oversubscribe the hell out of it. That's basically what this all boils down to. Had all of these services existed (bittorrent, ip-video, etc) when they were building their networks they probably would have used different oversubscription ratios and we wouldn't even be having this discussion.
At the end of the day bandwidth requirements are going to keep going up. They can whine about it all they want, but I don't have a whole lot of sympathy for companies that are making billions of dollars in profits with their Government granted monopolies. It's not that they can't afford to upgrade their networks -- it's that they don't want to. It's not a growth industry anymore, so where is the incentive?
Uhh, I don't know about Comcast, but I do know that Roadrunner is working on cutting out the middle man and building their own national backbone that peers with as many content providers as possible. So I don't think this argument holds as much water as you might think. I'd say that about half of the traceroutes that I do wind up on Level3 and the other half wind up going across tbone.rr.com. Most of the big bandwidth users (Netflix instant view and Youtube, among others) wind up on tbone.
Verizon Business (what became of UUNET/MCI when Verizon acquired them) are about tied with AT&T as the largest Tier 1 provider in the US. They resell their bandwidth to competitors at preposterous rates.
Verizon and AT&T aren't the only Tier 1 providers in the United States. Roadrunner does business with Level3. I don't know who Comcast uses but don't pretend that Verizon and AT&T have a monopoly on Tier 1.
If Comcast is evil Verizon is evilerr.
You'll brook no argument from me on Verizon being evil. That said, they are being less evil then the cable companies are with regards to consumer broadband. And I still have a strange sort of respect for them for standing up to RIAA way back when and refusing to name their customer.
You just don't get it do you? Let me spell it out for you:
As you probably recall, Time Warner is looking at setting up bandwidth caps. The highest tier that they are planning on offering is 40GB/mo. I'm guessing since that's the highest tier it will likely be priced higher then existing connections, though I have no evidence to prove this.
Netflix instant view uses around 2.2Mbit/s to stream at the highest quality offered, which is still sub-DVD quality. That works out to about 275,000 bytes per second. Or roughly 990 megabytes per hour of video. If all you did was use Netflix instant view then you'd have roughly 40 hours a month of allowed video watching before you exceeded your bandwidth cap. Toss in some internet radio (roughly 58 megabytes per hour for a 128kbit stream), surfing, youtube, etc, etc and you can see how quickly this becomes a problem. Now try and imagine a moderately sized family (Dad, Mom and 2.5 kids) where you have multiple people sharing the same internet connection.
Now run those calculations for HDTV. HDTV will require at least four times as much bandwidth. More if you want a better compression rate with less artifacts.
Sorry, but 40GB as the highest tier? You realize that you could almost attain that with an ISDN connection, right? Are the cablecos really trying to tell us that they don't have the ability to provide more bandwidth then a technology that's at least two decades old? This wouldn't have anything to do with a fear of competing video services, would it?
I was regularly blowing through close to 40GB before I discovered streaming video and not including torrent activity (legal or otherwise). Upgrade your fucking networks or FiOS is going to kick your ass.
Business class access comes with a guarantee of throughput, a guarantee of uptime (typically 4 nines, or 99.99% uptime) and a different level of service
Pffft, I've never seen a cable provider willing to provide a "4 nines" SLA or throughout guarantees for any of their commercial products. If you really care about having an SLA then you are going to wind up looking at some sort of leased line solution, or MAYBE DSL from a CLEC (I've never seen an ILEC DSL provider with an SLA either).
Otherwise, we wouldn't be paying $850 a month for 3mbit/3mbit service (two bonded T1s), when 6mbit service is only $50 for homes.
Most of the charges for my T-1 are mileage/loop charges, not port charges. The port charge on my T-1 here at the office is a whooping $50/mo. The of the expense is all loop charges that winds up going to the local phone company for the privilege of allowing me to lease those pairs.
And why is this a problem? There are many legitimate channels for downloading feature length movies. If the ISPs can't handle this load then they will eventually go out of business and be replaced by those that can.
You wouldn't be agreeable even if they sold you that service in that manner from the start?
No, I wouldn't. Because I think a per-byte model will destroy innovation on the internet. Besides which, I've made the argument in the past that it's not the bytes themselves that cost money -- it's the underlying capacity needed to transfer them. A 100mbits pipe costs the same whether or not you are using it.
Selling tiered service is one way to address that. I personally have DSL and they provide 6 levels of service from 256k up to a 15mb option.
I'd be all for tiered service if the prices were kept competitive.
Cable does have different issues implementing a tiered system
There's nothing stopping them from doing this. The only issue they have is the capacity of the shared last mile. But cable-modems already have provisions for 'capping' the amount of bandwidth that you can get.
Where do you think they'll get the money to buy and deploy new equipment?
Maybe from the hundreds of millions of dollars in profits that they are raking in?
C'mon, this "infrastructure costs money" argument is stupid. These companies aren't running at a loss any longer. They can afford to put some of that money into network maintenance/infrastructure improvements.
It's the same with the energy industry. Half of the arguments I've heard for gas prices being so high relate to a bottleneck with refining capacity. Yet, nobody is trying to build new refineries. It's not as though they can't afford to build them with the amount of profit they are hauling in.
Eh, whatever. They won't get away with it forever. Verizon has an interest in making FiOS as competitive as possible because they need a new bread-n-butter business to replace POTS. It's kind of ironic -- the cableco's thought they could kill the telcos by going after their POTS business. In a few years though, the cableco's video business is going to start hemmoraging customers to IP-TV and FiOS TV. If that isn't irony then I don't know what is.
Actually, no, it's not. Bytes don't cost money. The capacity to transfer them does.
The only "fair" solution IMHO would be to upgrade their network or reduce the transfer rates that they are selling. If the network can't handle the load of having 5.0/8.0/10.0 mbits of downstream for each customer then they should be looking at reducing those tiers instead of punishing people for using the product that they are paying for.
In the buffet the food itself has a fixed cost. Fruits, vegetables and meat all cost money.
In of themselves bytes don't cost a damn thing. It's the underlying capacity of the pipe itself that costs money. You can't solve your problem at the buffet by buying another stove because the food itself costs money.
I would make the argument that adding bandwidth to the last-mile of your network is a one time expense. Adding bandwidth to the edge is a recurring cost but even at that you are still paying for the capacity and not the bytes themselves.
Network upgrades raise costs. Yes, they are a necessary part of business, but they also cost.
Indeed. And in my experience in the ISP business (I previously worked for a WISP) we actually spent more money hooking up a new customer (labor, CPE equipment, support costs, etc) then we did on upgrading our internal network & edge connections.
That is covered under the "raise prices" option. Apparently you missed that part.
Then why can Verizon offer unlimited downloading/uploading on their DSL and FiOS products for about the same price as most cable offerings (cheaper in some cases)? I don't see them rushing to restrict what their customers can do.
Hell, the only time I've ever seen them even mention bandwidth as a bottleneck was when they were talking about the future possibility of being able to offer 100mbits connections. Some Verizon executive made a statement along the lines of "We can probably offer 100mbits connections but there's no way we could provide for everybody using them at the same time". You'll notice that he didn't say that was a problem with their existing configuration.
Uhh, yeah, the high cost of a T-1 has more to do with the fact that you are leasing the lines themselves from the local phone company and less to do with the cost of the bandwidth itself. My employer pays $483/mo for our T-1. $50 of that is the "internet port charge" and the remaining amount is all mileage charges for the leased pairs. The original idea behind DSL was that you wouldn't need a second dedicated pair for data -- you could use the existing pair that was already there for POTS service.
Incidentally, that $50 cost for the 1.5/1.5 internet connection is actually cheaper then my 8.0/512 cable connection at home.
The point is that it's easier to oversubscribe cable technology then it is to oversubscribe DSL. The bottleneck for DSL is the connection from the CO to the providers network core and from there the edge connections to the internet cloud. Cable has the exact same bottleneck plus the bottleneck of the nodes themselves.
In my area Roadrunner runs DOCSIS 1.1 and the standard package is 5.0/384. At 5.0mbits it takes less then eight users to completely saturate the downstream channel (38mbits). They can solve this problem by assigning more channels to HSI services and/or splitting the network into smaller nodes, but it seems that in the case of Comcast they've opted to restrict their customers instead of investing in the required upgrades.
Anyway, why is it that these arguments always have to degenerate into DSL vs. cable? Both are good solutions if they are properly implemented. Both can suck if they are implemented incorrectly or backed by shitty policies that restrict what their customers can do.
I find it funny that you're willfully ignoring the fact that a much larger majority consists of material that does infringe on copyrights.
I'm not "willfully ignoring" it, I just don't see how it changes anything. If Comcast can't handle a minority of their users running bittorrent then how are they going to handle internet video becoming mainstream?
One of the reasons that innovation on the internet has been so successful is that we've had a level playing field. The ISPs kept up with demand by investing in infrastructure upgrades and new technologies. What happens to that level playing field when the ISPs see no reason to invest in upgrades and instead opt to restrict the activity of their users? Is the internet still going to look like it does today in 20 years?
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Try telling that to one of the Allied POWs held and tortured by the Japanese. Try telling that to one of the millions of Chinese that were raped and killed by the Japanese. Try telling that to a Filipino, Singaporean, Korean or Vietnamese who watched as his country was occupied and his people enslaved.
Yes, I'd take Japanese militarism over Russian or Chinese any day...Interesting opinion to hold, seeing as how we've never been at war with China or Russia. Neither one of them ever conducted a sneak attack on American forces whilst engaged in diplomatic negotiations. China was an important ally against Japan during WW2 and it was Russian involvement in the end of the war (not the nuclear bombings as commonly believed) that brought it to a quick conclusion without requiring an invasion of the home islands.
I think we need a counter-weight to China too, but the GP was advocating for a nuclear armed Japan. That is a really bad idea. Give Japan nuclear weapons and it will start a regional arms race between Japan, China, Korea and Russia. It would destabilize the Taiwan situation and force the United States to pick sides. Our other allies in the Pacific (Australia and New Zealand) would be completely opposed to it and it would probably place the ANZUS treaty in jeopardy. It's an all around bad idea with no saving graces.
Personally, I'm more hopeful that a more assertive Russia will balance out China somewhat. Russia has the population and the resources to back it up and an assertive Russia is not going to destabilize the entire Pacific region.
You may have a point there. But at the end of the day I can sit here on Slashdot and say pretty much anything I want about the United States, George W. Bush, Congress, our Allies, etc, etc, etc. At the end of the day I can practice whatever religion I want in the United States.
Try living in China and criticizing your Government or following Falun Gong and let me know how well it works out for you.
That's a great idea! Let's encourage a reemergence of Japanese militarism! What could possibly go wrong.
Yeah, cuz they are really hurting right now and clearly have no cash available for network upgrades.
I wasn't aware that Comcast was a telco.
*woosh*
Wow. I'm glad that none of these guys shared your pessimistic "nothing's gonna change" attitude.
Why don't you get some perspective on the situation instead of spouting off about how this is the end of Democracy? Yes, we've had a bad run the last few years. Yes, we have a fight ahead of us. But none of what's going on in the US or UK even comes remotely close to what's going on in Burma right now. Our brave leaders who are fighting for our rights aren't being assassinated by extremists. We aren't in the middle of a ongoing genocide.
None of this is meant to say that we shouldn't continue to be vigilant and oppose stuff like this. But seriously, get some perspective on the rest of the World before you start announcing the end of Democracy. Democracy won't die until people stop fighting for it.
It does if you throw more bandwidth at your network but don't pass that onto your end users. We already have connections upwards of 15 - 20Mbits available in some areas. If you add more bandwidth to the network itself and keep your userbase at the same levels they are at right now then it would solve the problem.
I think you might find that Oxygen is a nice thing to have too ;)
Lucky you. That amount of money gets you a 5.0/768 here in Time Warner land for a business class account with a static IP. And no SLA.
Yeah, they kinda would if they were watching it in real time and exhausted the buffer.
because it's obvious to the avg BT user that their download is being degraded.I don't really care much about the download speed on my torrents. Most of the "gray area" torrents don't get blazing speeds anyway because they usually have unfavorable seeder/leecher ratios. The only time I've ever come close to pegging my downstream with a torrent is when downloading Linux distros. They tend to be very well seeded -- usually three or four times as many seeders as leechers, unless you jump into the swarm right after it's released.
..and you would be free to make that decision being fully informed about the service being offered. The problem I have with Comcast is that they are NOT disclosing their bandwidth limits, not that they are limiting them in the first place. That and their service sucks beyond this issue, but that's another matter.I won't argue with you on the point that full disclosure would better then secret caps and shaping technology that they deny even using. But I still don't think a per-byte model is the way to go. Bandwidth isn't electricity or natural gas. It doesn't directly cost money for me to move a byte of data across the globe.
Whether or not the market will accept a tiered system is another argument that will be decided in the marketplace regardless of whether we agree with the fee per byte model or not.A tiered system would be more fair then a per-byte system, but even at that you know they'll still oversubscribe the hell out of it. That's basically what this all boils down to. Had all of these services existed (bittorrent, ip-video, etc) when they were building their networks they probably would have used different oversubscription ratios and we wouldn't even be having this discussion.
At the end of the day bandwidth requirements are going to keep going up. They can whine about it all they want, but I don't have a whole lot of sympathy for companies that are making billions of dollars in profits with their Government granted monopolies. It's not that they can't afford to upgrade their networks -- it's that they don't want to. It's not a growth industry anymore, so where is the incentive?
Uhh, I don't know about Comcast, but I do know that Roadrunner is working on cutting out the middle man and building their own national backbone that peers with as many content providers as possible. So I don't think this argument holds as much water as you might think. I'd say that about half of the traceroutes that I do wind up on Level3 and the other half wind up going across tbone.rr.com. Most of the big bandwidth users (Netflix instant view and Youtube, among others) wind up on tbone.
Verizon Business (what became of UUNET/MCI when Verizon acquired them) are about tied with AT&T as the largest Tier 1 provider in the US. They resell their bandwidth to competitors at preposterous rates.Verizon and AT&T aren't the only Tier 1 providers in the United States. Roadrunner does business with Level3. I don't know who Comcast uses but don't pretend that Verizon and AT&T have a monopoly on Tier 1.
If Comcast is evil Verizon is evilerr.You'll brook no argument from me on Verizon being evil. That said, they are being less evil then the cable companies are with regards to consumer broadband. And I still have a strange sort of respect for them for standing up to RIAA way back when and refusing to name their customer.
You just don't get it do you? Let me spell it out for you:
As you probably recall, Time Warner is looking at setting up bandwidth caps. The highest tier that they are planning on offering is 40GB/mo. I'm guessing since that's the highest tier it will likely be priced higher then existing connections, though I have no evidence to prove this.
Netflix instant view uses around 2.2Mbit/s to stream at the highest quality offered, which is still sub-DVD quality. That works out to about 275,000 bytes per second. Or roughly 990 megabytes per hour of video. If all you did was use Netflix instant view then you'd have roughly 40 hours a month of allowed video watching before you exceeded your bandwidth cap. Toss in some internet radio (roughly 58 megabytes per hour for a 128kbit stream), surfing, youtube, etc, etc and you can see how quickly this becomes a problem. Now try and imagine a moderately sized family (Dad, Mom and 2.5 kids) where you have multiple people sharing the same internet connection.
Now run those calculations for HDTV. HDTV will require at least four times as much bandwidth. More if you want a better compression rate with less artifacts.
Sorry, but 40GB as the highest tier? You realize that you could almost attain that with an ISDN connection, right? Are the cablecos really trying to tell us that they don't have the ability to provide more bandwidth then a technology that's at least two decades old? This wouldn't have anything to do with a fear of competing video services, would it?
I was regularly blowing through close to 40GB before I discovered streaming video and not including torrent activity (legal or otherwise). Upgrade your fucking networks or FiOS is going to kick your ass.
Pffft, I've never seen a cable provider willing to provide a "4 nines" SLA or throughout guarantees for any of their commercial products. If you really care about having an SLA then you are going to wind up looking at some sort of leased line solution, or MAYBE DSL from a CLEC (I've never seen an ILEC DSL provider with an SLA either).
Otherwise, we wouldn't be paying $850 a month for 3mbit/3mbit service (two bonded T1s), when 6mbit service is only $50 for homes.Most of the charges for my T-1 are mileage/loop charges, not port charges. The port charge on my T-1 here at the office is a whooping $50/mo. The of the expense is all loop charges that winds up going to the local phone company for the privilege of allowing me to lease those pairs.
And why is this a problem? There are many legitimate channels for downloading feature length movies. If the ISPs can't handle this load then they will eventually go out of business and be replaced by those that can.
No, I wouldn't. Because I think a per-byte model will destroy innovation on the internet. Besides which, I've made the argument in the past that it's not the bytes themselves that cost money -- it's the underlying capacity needed to transfer them. A 100mbits pipe costs the same whether or not you are using it.
Selling tiered service is one way to address that. I personally have DSL and they provide 6 levels of service from 256k up to a 15mb option.I'd be all for tiered service if the prices were kept competitive.
Cable does have different issues implementing a tiered systemThere's nothing stopping them from doing this. The only issue they have is the capacity of the shared last mile. But cable-modems already have provisions for 'capping' the amount of bandwidth that you can get.
Maybe from the hundreds of millions of dollars in profits that they are raking in?
C'mon, this "infrastructure costs money" argument is stupid. These companies aren't running at a loss any longer. They can afford to put some of that money into network maintenance/infrastructure improvements.
It's the same with the energy industry. Half of the arguments I've heard for gas prices being so high relate to a bottleneck with refining capacity. Yet, nobody is trying to build new refineries. It's not as though they can't afford to build them with the amount of profit they are hauling in.
Eh, whatever. They won't get away with it forever. Verizon has an interest in making FiOS as competitive as possible because they need a new bread-n-butter business to replace POTS. It's kind of ironic -- the cableco's thought they could kill the telcos by going after their POTS business. In a few years though, the cableco's video business is going to start hemmoraging customers to IP-TV and FiOS TV. If that isn't irony then I don't know what is.
Actually, no, it's not. Bytes don't cost money. The capacity to transfer them does.
The only "fair" solution IMHO would be to upgrade their network or reduce the transfer rates that they are selling. If the network can't handle the load of having 5.0/8.0/10.0 mbits of downstream for each customer then they should be looking at reducing those tiers instead of punishing people for using the product that they are paying for.
Actually it's a really bad analogy.
In the buffet the food itself has a fixed cost. Fruits, vegetables and meat all cost money.
In of themselves bytes don't cost a damn thing. It's the underlying capacity of the pipe itself that costs money. You can't solve your problem at the buffet by buying another stove because the food itself costs money.
I would make the argument that adding bandwidth to the last-mile of your network is a one time expense. Adding bandwidth to the edge is a recurring cost but even at that you are still paying for the capacity and not the bytes themselves.
Indeed. And in my experience in the ISP business (I previously worked for a WISP) we actually spent more money hooking up a new customer (labor, CPE equipment, support costs, etc) then we did on upgrading our internal network & edge connections.
That is covered under the "raise prices" option. Apparently you missed that part.Then why can Verizon offer unlimited downloading/uploading on their DSL and FiOS products for about the same price as most cable offerings (cheaper in some cases)? I don't see them rushing to restrict what their customers can do.
Hell, the only time I've ever seen them even mention bandwidth as a bottleneck was when they were talking about the future possibility of being able to offer 100mbits connections. Some Verizon executive made a statement along the lines of "We can probably offer 100mbits connections but there's no way we could provide for everybody using them at the same time". You'll notice that he didn't say that was a problem with their existing configuration.
Oh, and not to reply to you twice, but:
Seems to be working fine for the T1/T3 systemUhh, yeah, the high cost of a T-1 has more to do with the fact that you are leasing the lines themselves from the local phone company and less to do with the cost of the bandwidth itself. My employer pays $483/mo for our T-1. $50 of that is the "internet port charge" and the remaining amount is all mileage charges for the leased pairs. The original idea behind DSL was that you wouldn't need a second dedicated pair for data -- you could use the existing pair that was already there for POTS service.
Incidentally, that $50 cost for the 1.5/1.5 internet connection is actually cheaper then my 8.0/512 cable connection at home.
And what happens when the other 95% of your users discover internet video? Or do you think that these services are going to remain obscure forever?
The point is that it's easier to oversubscribe cable technology then it is to oversubscribe DSL. The bottleneck for DSL is the connection from the CO to the providers network core and from there the edge connections to the internet cloud. Cable has the exact same bottleneck plus the bottleneck of the nodes themselves.
In my area Roadrunner runs DOCSIS 1.1 and the standard package is 5.0/384. At 5.0mbits it takes less then eight users to completely saturate the downstream channel (38mbits). They can solve this problem by assigning more channels to HSI services and/or splitting the network into smaller nodes, but it seems that in the case of Comcast they've opted to restrict their customers instead of investing in the required upgrades.
Anyway, why is it that these arguments always have to degenerate into DSL vs. cable? Both are good solutions if they are properly implemented. Both can suck if they are implemented incorrectly or backed by shitty policies that restrict what their customers can do.
I'm not "willfully ignoring" it, I just don't see how it changes anything. If Comcast can't handle a minority of their users running bittorrent then how are they going to handle internet video becoming mainstream?
One of the reasons that innovation on the internet has been so successful is that we've had a level playing field. The ISPs kept up with demand by investing in infrastructure upgrades and new technologies. What happens to that level playing field when the ISPs see no reason to invest in upgrades and instead opt to restrict the activity of their users? Is the internet still going to look like it does today in 20 years?