Bandwidth Caps May Be Critical Error For Broadband Companies

Technical Writing Geek writes "An Ars Technica article argues that after many years of stagnation, the US broadband landscape is finally 'primed for change'. Companies like Time Warner that decide to cap bandwidth risk being relegated to a 'broadband ghetto. Alternatives to the standard cable modem vs. DSL conundrum will come from technologies like WiMax and (eventually) the 'white space' broadband that might be offered by whoever wins the 700mhz auction. 'All of that is to say that cable and DSL won't always be the only games in town. If wireless solutions are able to deliver on their promises of high speeds with no usage limits, capped cable broadband service like Time Warner has planned is likely to be unattractive, to say the least. Instead of developing plans designed to discourage consumers from feeding at the bandwidth trough, cable companies would be better served in the long run by making investments in new technologies like DOCSIS 3.0 and the kind of infrastructure improvements necessary to meet bandwidth demands.'"

FP?

[dosius (230542)]

Yeah but in these days of corporatocracy, who wants to actually provide better service to their consumers (since it's the shareholders, not the consumers, who they see as their customers), instead of just jacking up the prices and LOWERING service?

-uso.

Re:

[by Anonymous Coward]

You know, you could have just put "Fr1$t P0st!!1" in the body of your message, instead of bothering to come up with something that looked vaguely like actual content.

Re:

[pod (1103)]

Au contraire.

The execs see lots of upside when the stock goes up, and lots of downside (and pressure from senior leadership and stock holders) when the stock falls. The stock price and happy share holders are utmost in many executive's minds.

Re:FP?

[riseoftheindividual (1214958)]

The current situation in corporate America is that management serves shareholders, not customers. Customers are secondary to shareholder needs. This has led to an outbreak of executive leadership that focuses no more than 2 quarters out. This is one of the reasons why US companies aren't as competitive globally as they used to be. Not the workforce, the management. The management goals aren't for strong long term corporate heatlh(which is what serving customers leads to), but rather, making sure they hit the numbers for the current quarter(the customers and customer service be damned).

This isn't true everywhere obviously, and where it is true it's in various degrees. This thinking has become commonplace and leads to decisions that will hurt the company down the line. But since they aren't focusing on anything beyond 2 quarters, they just don't see it.

Re:FP?

[riseoftheindividual (1214958)]

Profit making enterprises whether public corporations or private businesses are created for the benfit of their owners not customers.

Say what? If your business is not created to benefit your customers, you don't have a business. It's really that simple. Nobody is going to hand you money to benefit yourself. Try it, go ahead. Start a company called "in it for me Inc." and try to convince people to give you money without benefiting them in return. It doesn't work.

Honestly, I don't think you understood the point of my post. I wasn't decrying or acting as if it's news that businesses are in business to make money... I was decrying that it seems rampant in corporate america today to look only a few quarters out in planning business, due to an extreme focus on the shareholders. It's as if these idiots forgot that there is no business without their customers. There is no benefiting yourself in business if you are not benefiting your customers. That this principle of decay often plays out over years, as a company more and more gets focused on quarterly numbers, means that it won't really be taken into consideration by executives focused on quarterly profits, versus building a solid long term business. This also is a contributing factor to the growing corporate scandals and accounting fraud, but that's another topic.

They seem more than willing, to squeeze out some extra dollars of this quarter in profit at the cost of stepping on the toes of their customers. They do this, without looking at what the long term ramifications of such actions will prove to be, more and more having the attitude "we'll deal with it when it comes, for now the quarters numbers must go up". Cable ISPs have one main competitor now, but if/when wireless heats up and becomes more common place, they will end up with several. Will the customers they squeezed some extra dollars out of now due to the caps remember this when the new competition comes to town? Will the new competition be able to trumpet the benefit of not having similar caps as a benefit to customers?

Seems pretty likely to me. But I'm looking further out than a quarter or two, so that's why I can see it coming. The cable companies don't seem to be and if they are, they seem to be writing off all the customers this will annoy and the friends and people those customers have sway over.

Re:FP?

[Anonymous Psychopath (18031)]

Great post, and I agree with all points except for "Managers of corporations often talk about customer satisfaction..."

More precisely, managers of corporations often talk about customer retention, of which satisfaction is one component. At the end of the day, managers would rather have 500 customers who continue to do business with them, for whatever reason, than 400 extremely satisfied customers. They go hand-in-hand, but aren't the same thing.

it's not the bandwidth caps stupid,

[Scudsucker (17617)]

it's the lack of competition. Your consumer typically has the choice of either cable internet or DSL, or just one of the above. The FCC change in allowing telecos to lease their lines for more than bulk rates was a big part of this.

I know cable companies are supposed to be evil

[Shivetya (243324)]

but its a mighty big assumption that if they offered tiered pricing and didn't see a significant increase in their churn rate that the other guys won't also jump on the bandwagon. Hell people act as if wireless will be the holy grail of internet connectivity convienently forgetting that it is the holy grail for PHONE companies. Getting people to pay for their minutes was probably the biggest cash cow they came up with in a long time with ring tones coming right behind.

Sorry, if Time Warner puts this out a

Uh Huh

[MightyMartian (840721)]

Yeah, because we all know that the backbones have unlimited bandwidth...

Re:

[Surt (22457)]

Mod parent up past the max. This is the only response such a stupid article deserves. Bandwidth doesn't magically exist free for wireless providers.

Re:Uh Huh

[ultranova (717540)]

Mod parent up past the max. This is the only response such a stupid article deserves. Bandwidth doesn't magically exist free for wireless providers.

Actually, you are wrong. It does. After all, nothing stops two neighboring wireless networks from exchanging packets directly, without going through the backbone, or relaying each others packets towards third parties. Naturally this is slower in the latency sense than going through the backbone, but that doesn't really matter for BitTorrent, streaming media, or other high bandwidth consumers.

At some point we need to get rid of this silly notation of Internet Service Providers and simply let any device act as a wireless router for any other, forming a worldwide mesh. Then again, this would be a nightmare for the control freaks who want to keep exact logs of who does what online, so it might take some time to happen.

Re:

[Surt (22457)]

But then you don't have a 'wireless provider', you have a wireless mesh. Each node becomes a provider, and now in addition to still having the limited bandwidth between nodes, you have to deal with routing (chokes, failure, tampering, unreachability), security/privacy, etc. This is a bad idea in many many dimensions, which is why it hasn't caught on in spite of widespread availability.

Re:

[patrikor_007 (1094491)]

Easier said than done. Such a decentralized scheme wouldn't lend itself very well to hierarchical addressing and routing. How would all those millions of devices decide how to route packets?

Re:

[trainman (6872)]

Yeah, because we all know that the backbones have unlimited bandwidth...

Exactly. As I said in a reply to the previous article on this topic, bandwidth caps have been successfully implemented for years in Canada, and it brings a nice clarity to the product rather than receiving a letter claiming you've surpassed some mysterious "limit."

The key is ensuring the caps and packages are reasonable. I had a plan that allowed me 30GB/month. About a year ago I decided to pay $5 more a month to double my speed (to

Re:

[Eivind (15695)]

Offcourse they don't, but one huge trunk tends to be several orders of magnitude cheaper than the thousands of thin end-subscriber-lines that feeds into it.

What do you figure cost more, wiring up 50.000 dwellings in the municipality of Stavanger with 1mbps or more to a central point, or linking Stavanger to Bergen (next larger city, 150km away) with a single high-capacity fibre-line sufficient to deal with it all?

Keep in mind that the needed capacity will NOT be 50.000 * 1mbps, (50Gbps) not even close, that

Re:

[peragrin (659227)]

Your logic is what has gotten us into this mess to begin with. ISP's don't have enough overall bandwidth for the number of users they are supporting.

The promise everyone can get this much at this speed but in order to deliver it they either have to increase their bandwidth, or throttle a percentage of the connections. If you don't plan for giving 50.000 people 1mbps connections then when you have 50.000 people trying to use their connection to download the latest TV show your screwed.

think farther ahead t

Re:

[p0tat03 (985078)]

Well yes, that and speed of switching. Your computer is not physically connected with a single fibre to the other end, there are MANY switches in the way which add latency and impose speed limitations. A *lot* has to be done to increase the capacity of our infrastructure.

Don't worry, it'll get "better"

[MBCook (132727)]

Don't worry, it'll get "better". My big worry with something like this is that specific services I use will cause me to go over. Netflix watching, TiVo downloading shows, Apple TV (if I had one), etc.

Which means that they'll probably start adding exceptions. Soon your plan will be:

10 GB per month, except stuff coming from Netflix, TiVo, or Apple... you get 200 GB there. Our site(s) are unmetered, watch our ads all you want. Also, you can add any site you want to the list of exceptions for only $5 per month, but we don't have to honor that.

Re:

[MBCook (132727)]

Ooh. I just thought of a solution to this problem. They're not talking about capping uploads, right? I'll just use that bandwidth. We'll use my newly invented HLPoIP, or High-Low-Protocol-over-IP. Here is how it works.

1. Initiate connection as usual
2. When it is time to download, you tell me how big the file is
3. I send you 64 KB of data.
4. You tell me if my guess (taken as a 64k digit binary number) is high or low
   1. If I'm right, we move on to the next block of data
   2. If I'm wrong, I alter my guess based on randomne

Re:Don't worry, it'll get "better"

[Sneftel (15416)]

Hey, let's improve on that a little! We can throw out the randomness and just do deterministic binary search. The advantage of this is, you never have to send your 64k to the server! Since the server already knows what 64k number you were going to send (since it's deterministic), it can just base its answers on that, sending a stream of highs and lows, each taking one bit.

Hmm, some more specifics. The first guess is, of course, halfway through the range, and a "high" answer means "your guess was equal to or greater than the number I was thinking of". A "low" answer means "your guess was less than the number I was thinking of".

Looking good! Let's try it with a sample four bit number... say, 0110. So the server knows that your first guess will be 1000, so it sends a "low". Your next guess will be half that, 0100, which is too high, so it sends a "high". So your next guess will be 0110 (halfway between 1000 and 0100); the server responds "high" because that's equal to or greater than. Finally, your guess will be 0111, and the server sends a "low", thereby reducing the range to the only possible number, 0110. So it sends four bits: low, high, high, low. Encoding a low as 0 and a high as 1, we get... 0110

Whoopsy.

Your introduction to Information Theory has begun. :-)

Re:

[sconeu (64226)]

You misunderstand Net Neutrality.

The Net Neutrality issue is:

AT&T/Yahoo: Oh, you want to use Google Video? Gee, what a shame, Google hasn't paid us to prioritize packets, even though it's you, not them who's using our bandwidth. But since Google hasn't paid extortion, you get to watch that video at 19.2Kbps. On the other hand, if you use our Wonderful AT&T partner(tm) (insert company name here), you get it at 3Mbps.

They know most of us are boned

[techpawn (969834)]

Like the RIAA and Oil companies this is the last gasp of a company that can't adapt to the changing market demand with anything that won't screw the customer. Also like the above mentioned you have little choice in the immediate, all the options being talked about are down the road ideas. So, they're going to bend the customer over and get what more money they can before they die a painful death.

Which is more profitable? Innovation or screwing the customer?

Oligopolistic pricing

[pigiron (104729)]

With the choice of high speed providers for most people being limited to 2 or 3 at best, we will see an oligopolistic pricing model much like that in cellular service where all providers passively collude in a price structure that maintains high profits.

There are other providers

[davidwr (791652)]

Most people in cities have a choice of at least 6 ways to connect to the Internet:

* dialup, slow
* DSL, relatively cheap
* cable modem, a bit more than DSL but a better bargain
* wireless through cell phone, expensive for what you get
* satellite, expensive for what you get and long latencies, may require phone uplink
* T1 and other business-grade, dedicated-bandwidth solutions, very expensive compared to DSL or Cable

Now, if you want faster than dialup, don't need mobility, and don't need dedicated bandwidth, DS

totally naive

[Quadraginta (902985)]

Fact is, most users want a fairly modest average bandwidth, with rare bouts of high-bandwidth usage. It's only the few rare addicts and power users that want a big pipe open to their PC all the time. That's why cable has succeeded as well as it has so far -- because the basic bandwidth-sharing paradigm works for most customers, who usually just write e-mail and every two weeks or so download some MP3s from iTunes or watch a video preview of some movie. The fact that jacking the price up for the average-bandwidth power users might drive some of them away (to surely more expensive options) is not going to be a bad business decision for the cable companies, any more than it's a bad business decision for an HMO to drive its sickest patients to other insurers.

The other thing most people want is for their Internet connection to be dirt cheap. Hence the pressure on cable companies from their customers has not been towards higher and higher average capacity, but towards reliability and cheapness. My cable connection costs the same in nominal dollars now, in 2007, as it did the first day I got it, in 1997. That means its real price has fallen steeply. But the bandwidth hasn't budged. If anything, it's worse. That's not because the cable company is stupid, contra this naive article, but because those have been the priorities of my neighbors signing up for the service. The fact that the cable company has made a huge pile of money operating as they have is the surest evidence that they know what they're doing, business-wise.

Will that change in the future? Will people start wanting to stream HD movies over the Internet? Got me. Maybe. But the demand for enormous bandwidth has been predicted to be Right Around The Corner(TM) every year for the last 12 years in my experience. That wouldn't inspire me to invest my retirement funds in any big pipe to every desktop tech.

Re:totally naive

[div_2n (525075)]

the demand for enormous bandwidth has been predicted to be Right Around The Corner(TM) every year for the last 12 years in my experience

I think that if Bittorrent has taught us anything, it's that when content is available (either legal or otherwise) that people want, they WILL saturate their pipe to get it as soon as they can.

I sincerely think that this is a chicken and egg scenario where the demand _would_ be there if the content owners would get over themselves and work with tech companies to meld content and technology in an inexpensive and unrestricted manner.

The past decade has proven so many lessons that organizations like the MPAA and the RIAA are either unable or unwilling to learn. Sadly for them, in trying to be a damn in the path of the river, they are quickly becoming a bump in the road slowly being pound level to the pavement.

The saddest part of all is that we could all be enjoying inexpensive access to music and video content legally _right now_ with those organizations profiting instead of this stalemate we're in where we can last forever while those relying on profit cannot.

There's your corner and while I can't possibly predict how long it will take for us to get around that corner, rest assured that we will and then you will see demand skyrocket.

Re:

[spotter (5662)]

Eh. I don't know what your experience is, but since 2001, my cable modem w/ time warner has been about $42.

However, in that time, the downstream bandwidth cap went from 5Mbps to 7Mbps to 10Mbps (albiet upstream only went from 384Kbps to 512)

However, $42 dollars in 2001, is only about $36-$37 today, that's not a steep fall. (per http://www.measuringworth.com/uscompare/ [measuringworth.com])

So I would say the average NY'er experience have been the exact opposite of yours (more bandwidth, while prices haven't fallen (in "real" do

Transfer Cap, not bandwidth cap, right?

[corsec67 (627446)]

Even going with the horrible misdefinition of "bandwidth" to mean "throughput", that isn't what this article is talking about. All high-speed connections have a throughput limit, and that certainly isn't measured in gigabytes (yet, for almost all people). It is more often in the megabits/second range, or kilobits/second for the unlucky.

This article is talking about a transfer cap, or a limit on the number of bits that can be sent in a month. 15GiB [wikipedia.org] a month doesn't have anything to do with the throughput. For example a 28.8Kbits/second modem sending for a solid month can send over 5 Gibibytes of data.

I'm not optimistic.

[MaWeiTao (908546)]

That would be nice, but the lack of real competition in television and movie phones doesn't make me particularly optimistic. The mobile phone carriers all charge virtually identical prices. Satellite and cable companies nickel and dime for every little thing.

The problem is that consumers just accept this. They'll complain, but they keep right on paying these companies. So if consumers accept this bandwidth cap all providers will start doing it.

With this general trend to charge people for every little thing how can they not do it? I guess I'm just a pessimist.

Wishful thinking

[wiredlogic (135348)]

The power of DOCSIS 3 is not that consumers will be able to utilize all their bandwidth for downloading from the internet at large. Rather, it will be used internally by the cable companies for HD video on demand.

In the DSL arena there is ADSL2+ and VDSL which have lower absolute bandwith but that bandwidth isn't shared with your neighbors as is the case with cable so the end result is a wash aside from the distance issues with DSL.

On the wireless side of things, there is no way any service can compete with the hardwired services on speed. At some point the wireless systems have to connect to the hardwired network and that is the point where the bandwidth will be severely restricted. The telcos will treat these new providers the way they do the current CLECs.

Usage fees but not caps

[Jah-Wren Ryel (80510)]

Caps would be a very poor business decision for all the reasons mentioned in the summary and more.

However metered billing on some sort of sliding scale (the more you use, the less each byte costs because the fixed costs of supporting a customer don't vary by bandwidth consumed) has the potential to be better for both the customers and the ISPs.

When ISPs charge by the byte their business interest becomes aligned with their clients' interests - the more bandwidth the clients use, the more money the ISP makes and thus the more money they can afford to invest in infrastructure which means even greater amounts of even cheaper bandwidth becomes available due to economies of scale, technology improvements, etc.

I know there are plenty of cynics out there (I am one too) who think that the ISPs would just use metered billing as a way to gouge customers rather than improve service and reduce costs - they do tend to be monopolies after all. But I don't see the current situation being sustainable (which is one reason things like network neutrality are so hot right now, with fixed pricing the only way for the ISP to make more money per customer is via tricky back-door schemes that conflict, rather than align with their customers' interests).

Already an error but not apparently too costly yet

[Average (648)]

The quite independent cable company in this town has always had caps. 10 GB a month on the mid-range $40+ (even more if you don't want video) plan. No cutoff, but warning and overage of $2 a GB (but you can buy add'l GBs at $1 in advance).

I don't typically go over 10 GB. But, I absolutely *hate* worrying about what I've used. So, I live, just fine, on my 2.5/512 DSL line for $25 or so. I'm not even sure why it bothers me. I have no problem with PAYG cellphones.

Lots of people grumble about the caps. But, the cable company is doing just fine. Most people never hit the cap. Those who do are torn between the much-much-faster cable and the hands-off DSL. If they want cable (I'm in the deep minority who would rather have a rooftop antenna than pay $675 a year for TV that still has ads), they'll probably get a cable modem.

It's not about bandwidth from the headend to the home. They can shape that, price that, and build that out. It's about fiefdoms and petty accountants. People who won't sign off on intra-Tier 2 peering agreements because they can't make a buck on it.

How Much Is "Enough"?

[nick_davison (217681)]

Instead of developing plans designed to discourage consumers from feeding at the bandwidth trough, cable companies would be better served in the long run by making investments in new technologies like DOCSIS 3.0 and the kind of infrastructure improvements necessary to meet bandwidth demands.

When my connection could manage text, I sucked down all the text I could get. When my connection could manage images, I sucked down all the images I could get. When my connection could manage audio... OK, I'm one of the few that still buys audio. When my connection could manage 320x240 video, I sucked down all I could get of that too. Now I'm downloading HD movie trailers and full CD at a time OS images and game demos.

If the content were available, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be stopping at 1920x1080 HD video. Monitors can already handle 2560x1600 fairly commonly and all we're waiting for is someone to come up with a way to put multi-angle video in a single steam.

What's been the limiting factor throughout? Bandwidth availability. As soon as it's available (or just becoming available), someone releases their next great idea that just hadn't taken off so far because the files were too slow to download.

Cable companies can release 100mbps lines... They can up to 1gbps, 10gbp, 100gbps... And we'll come up with cool ways to use them.

That's not to imply they shouldn't invest in new technologies and keep moving forward... but "just give people more" isn't a real solution either. That more will never be enough and you'll be back in the same position.

Realizing I'm going to be mocked as the "the intertubes are a series of roads" guy... It does have a lot of parallels to the road construction argument.

To many people, most even, the answer's simple: If there's congestion, build more and bigger roads.

The thing is, all the research demonstrates that people will drive up to a given pain threshold. You reduce the amount of pain they feel... they drive more until they're back up to it. You spend a whole load of money, destroy the environment, and everyone complains just as much about how sucky traffic is.

Of course, refuse to build more roads and you very quickly get voted out of office by angry commuters who "know" the system far better than any researchers with their numbers ever could. On the internets, we call them discussion boards.

What is really the problem with per MB charges?

[Realistic_Dragon (655151)]

I have been on mixed line + per-MB charges since I moved to cellular broadband and my costs have gone _down_ not up. This is compared to fixed line DSL!

In a commercial environment the best way to make sure that you aren't being screwed is that the cost model reflects the services provided. E.g. if you have the services of line+bandwidth then paying something for the line and something for the bandwidth:

* Increases the incentive for the line to always be working and fast.
* Decreases the pressure to keep bit torrent queued up 25 hours a day to 'get your money's worth'.

Any sort of unlimited bandwidth plan encourages a sort of game where supplier and customer repeatedly try and screw each other over by abusing the wording of the T&Cs. So, if you manage to arrange a contract where cost and incentive are equally shared it's much harder for everyone to end up unhappy.

After all price = cost + markup. If the markup isn't acceptable then expect something to give - businesses that run at a loss can't survive for long.

As someone who has used Wireless...

[Penguinisto (415985)]

I spent four years on Sprint Broadband [sprintbroadband.com] a somewhat decent time ago... the neighborhood I lived in didn't have Cable Internet at the time, and Qwest recoiled in horror when I mentioned my neighborhood phone circuit was using the (then incompatible) "Integrated Pair Gain" tech. So, I wound up with Wireless.

The pluses:

• unmetered bandwidth
• I got my own sideband slice, so my speeds were constant (1Mbps up and down)
• $55.00 USD per month, constant. No contract extensions were tacked on when I later added a static IP
• lag was present enough to hamper game play in an FPS (my antenna was 33 miles away from the tower), but still fairly usable
• when cable finally did arrive, everyone else whined about speeds bogging down at certain times of the day, while I never suffered any of that
• Sprint stopped taking on new customers when things got full (IOW, they couldn't quite 'oversell the modems' as easily as a typical ISP could)

The minuses:

• lag in FPS gaming. It was still playable, but tended to grate at times
• rainstorms would degrade things a LOT (fortunately, at that time I lived in Utah, where rain was a rare thing). Sometimes an appalling mass of packets would drop during a thunderstorm, occasionally breaking connections
• I had a 4 meter tall antenna mast on the roof with a somewhat ugly square antenna package parked atop it
• the initial cost was $300 USD for equipment and installation

Overall though, I'd say I was very satisfied. I experienced exactly one outage the whole time, IIRC... and it was back up in less than an hour. I'm in Oregon now, so it would be kind of impractical to use it here (it tends to rain a lot), but if they can overcome the limitations that I saw as late as 2005, then more power to 'em. It was one of the most pleasant experiences overall that I ever had with any ISP. Plus, I had the exquisite pleasure of telling a Qwest sales droid to fuck off when they finally did get DSL into the neighborhood three years later (really... 256Kpbs DSL, when I already had 1Mbps both ways? Pfft! whatever...)

/P

A little perspective...

[Gybrwe666 (1007849)]

You know, never fails to amaze me how people are not looking at the larger picture of "services" offered by any provider, but especially by the cable companies. FTR, I used to work in business broadband sales for a major cable player, so I've seen the industry from just after the days where cable modems got installed until the dot-com boom from the inside.

The cable companies, as we speak, are caught in a precarious situation. Several factors came into play at the same time, which has limited their ability to make huge improvements, but, if they're lucky, they might come out on top.

So history: when cable modems first arrived on the scene, in the early-to-mid 90's, the technology was largely unproven and had tremendous issues, both technically and from a service delivery perspective. Much like the early days of DSL, the cable companies were essentially forced to re-wire infrastructure that had been in place for over a decade, sometimes up to 2 decades. Because of the technical issues, many cable executives didn't see the cost-benefit ratio of rewiring tens of thousands of miles of cities to be able to provide the service.

Plus, if you know anything about cost, doing so was a multi-million dollar effort, cumulatively probably costing in the billions.

However, with the advent of the dot-com boom and other highly profitable interactive services, the cable company PHB's finally got the picture and started rewiring and running fiber for the new cable plants.

Unfortunately, this was between 95-98, just before the internet boom really got underway, and well before DSL put any pressure on them.

As such, they did a reasonable job of getting the major metropolitan areas wired for a more modern infrastructure.

However, they failed in one major respect: they didn't have a crystal ball, and most, if not all, the cable companies put in the minimum infrastructure to support digital services. They didn't, however, put in overcapacity.

Now, if you swing forward 4-7 years, its pretty obvious that the cost-differential of putting in FTTP (or at least overcapacity of fiber to the neighborhood) would have been the smart thing to do. But at the time, wth DSL being crap, and no other real competition, they missed the boat. This wasn't maliciouos. They just did what they thought would be adequate.

Now, look at cable services today. On most cable infrastructure, the highest percentage of bandwidth (out of the 1000mhz available on the plant) goes to analog TV. Those 30-50 channels take up nearly have the space, each analog channel taking 6mhz of bandwidth.

This log-gain, low-profit bandwidth hog is the biggest impediment to modern services as they reside on the existing cable facilities.

And now there's another problem in the works: how to handle changes in Digital Broadcasting, DOCSIS 3, and PacketCable services, especially with HD programming getting more and more relevant.

While DOCSIS 3 has been out for over a year now, from the insiders I know its still a bit spotty on the internal side, and since many of the operators use Cisco (who fought DOCSIS 3 tooth and nail to get their own standard), they'd love to do it but are still unsure of quality. Not only that, but at least one smaller cable operator where I know the CIO is truly looking at how to deliver everything over PacketCable (TV, Phone, Data, etc.) rather than just make the leap to DOCSIS 3.

These aren't inconsequential issues, as the decisions made now will have some serious impact on the structure of Cable services for a long time.

And finally, when you add in the cost of maintaining hundreds of thousands of miles of fiber and copper plant, along with the huge increases in programming costs to the cable companies, along with the not-insiginificant support and CPE equipment costs of moving to Digital services, DOCSIS 3, or other advanced services, its not much wonder why the cable companies are moving a bit slowly. An error in judgement now could be fatally costly over the lon

Bandwidth isn't free, you idiots

[realmolo (574068)]

See, you may be paying $50/month for an "unlimited" connection at 6 megabits/second. But guess what? 6 megabits of bandwidth costs your ISP *at least* twice that. If they aren't in a major metropolitan area, it can cost *50* times that.

Bandwidth is expensive. That's why ALL bandwidth is "shared" and "oversubscribed". There simply isn't any way to provide everyone with gobs and gobs of dedicated bandwidth. That's not how it works.

So, don't blame the cable or DSL providers. Blame the huge telcos that keep the price of bandwidth artificially high.

Re:

[evilviper (135110)]

See, you may be paying $50/month for an "unlimited" connection at 6 megabits/second. But guess what? 6 megabits of bandwidth costs your ISP *at least* twice that.

It was ENTIRELY their decision to advertise a 6mbps "unlimited" service. If they expect users to stay under some amount of data transfer every month, they should advertise as such.

Many, many years ago... my cable modem service was advertised as 386kbps. Yet if you were a light user, for any given week, the modem speed would double, until you sta

Already available

[delirium of disorder (701392)]

I live in a rural (slowly becoming suburban) new development that doesn't have any PSTN (Phone)lines nor cable installed yet. Fortunately, my local ISP [foxvalley.net] offers a wireless solution. It works well, although unfortunately it's based on proprietary Motorola technology [wikipedia.org]. For around $60 a month I get 4Mbit down and 1Mbit up. I have a static IP, and they let my run my web/ssh server from home. I have no formal bandwidth cap, although I was told that if I exceeded 75Gigs a month they might want to talk about upgrading to a more expensive business class connection. The ISP will sell you up to 6Mbit (symmetric) connection per antenna/subscription.

I hope cable companies will make better ...

[porky_pig_jr (129948)]

in the long run. Many years ago I worked for BBN and our group was experimenting with the first ever cable modems, that become a "Roadrunner" (still have a t-shirt). At the same time we were looking at DSL (ADSL). Both technologies had their share of problems. In case of cable modem the major issue was the fact that the bandwidth is shared among what's called "Neighborhood Area Network" (NAN), so so protocol had to be in place to insure fair share of bandwidth (as well as user's satisfaction in general). I think at that time that protocol was not the part of DOCSYS, so different vendors had their own protocols (i'm not sure if anything like that is a part of DOCSYS 3.0, or it still leaves the room for competetive advantage). But that was only one showstopper with cable modems. With ADSL things were much worse. Highly sensitive to noise on a line, distance, anything you can think of. Just read about DSL and you'll see why. The best results we had with 'rate-adaptive' modems, those that vary the rate depending on line conditions, so connection was stable, but the throughput was - BLAH. So I remember saying that seems from technical perspective cable modem technology should be more stable vs DSL. Then someone else, more experienced in business of communications that myself said: you may be right, but the cable companies are going to screw it anyway because they have no experience with broadband communications, whereas phone companies do. The guy was right, at least for a while. I still hope cable companies will take advantage of better technology/media they have in place.

(PS. My brother switched from Verizon DSL to COMCAST data over cable a few months ago. He told me the throughput is much better and the connection is stable. He got the whole enchalada from COMCAST: cable, internet connectivity, and voice. Voice is the worst part of the package. He even changed his greetings on answering machine to: "Hello! If you can't get through within the next 30 minutes, call 1-800-COMCAST and complain!")

Ars Technica, sloppy

[Yath (6378)]

What a rubbish article.

It isn't a "bandwidth cap". It isn't even about bandwidth. It's about usage (at least they used the term "usage" in the title).

It isn't a "usage cap". It's tiered pricing. Your basic subscription covers a certain amount, and then you pay more. A "cap" would mean you got cut off, which you aren't.

And it isn't even the end of the world! People who use more resources pay more. Sounds pretty efficient. Now you may quibble that the specific prices they set are high due to low competition, and that's one area where Ars may have a point. But god you have to wade through a lot of crap to get there.

Advertisers Will Never Allow It

[jesdynf (42915)]

The day I pay per byte is the day I install AdBlock. There's no contest. There's no way around it. If I pay for the ads -- or even if I pay for the DNS requests to resolve the ads -- I don't request the ads.

They can't whitelist every ad server in Creation, and if I pay for even one ad, that's one ad too many. Not happening. I'll even block Google's scripts. And I'll do the same for every member of my family.

The 'broadband' providers could save some money...

[rickb928 (945187)]

...if they stopped sending me 12 fracking pieces of junk mail every month. Each.

I changed from Qwest to Cox for broadband, and ditched my Qwest landline. Since then I get not only the regular mail pieces begging me to take Qwest VOIP, or just POTS, or ANYTHING, PLEASE!

And I get Cox mail, both asking me to buy what I ALREADY HAVE, and of course to buy what I gave up from Qwest.

Seriously, they could cut their costs list a little with smarter mailing lists.

As if.

In this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics!

[brassman (112558)]

"If wireless solutions are able to deliver on their promises of high speeds with no usage limits,"

Excuse me? NO usage limits? At all? Even if you envision the wireless solution as a peer-to-peer cloud rather than a fix for the last mile issue, 'no usage limit' sounds unrealistic.

Assume that everyone who comes to the cloud brings excess capacity to the party. Assume that the cloud is given free rein to use the spectrum currently being wasted (IMHO) on broadcast TV and radio. Is even that going to be enough to sate everyone's demand for rich media?

When (not if) the cloud needs to connect to a backbone, there is certainly going to be a limit there.

If we're talking about service at a price that a mere mortal can afford I expect there will be limits, and they will be set low enough to pinch.

This is not so bad people...

[Deviant (1501)]

I am an American who has been living in Australia the last few years. All Cable/DSL services here have usage caps and you pay for faster speeds / more downloads. When I first moved here the idea of the usage caps pissed me off but I have warmed to them. I pay ~US$60/month for 8 megabit down and 384 kbit up DSL with a static IP. I get 24 gigabytes per month and any downloads I do from 1am to 8am are counted at half so it is really more like 30 to me most months. They have a usage meter website that is updated about once per hour and is quite accurate telling me how I am using. If I go over I pay $4/gigabyte.

This is great for a number of reasons. Firstly, everybody has a motivation to do their non-essential torrents etc overnight which improves gaming/voip performance during the day and peak evening hours. Secondly, I have an agreement with my provider where I get such and such amount of data at such and such speed and we are both on the same page - I will never get an email saying to use less and hassling me like I received from Adelphia (now Time Warner I believe) before I left. It doesn't serve as a huge deterrent but it is enough to ensure that you don't waste a precious resource (bandwidth) as readily. If you bought electricity, water, or natural gas on an "unlimited" basis don't you think that would lead to waste as well?

I think that the current "unlimited" system does a disservice to many on a shared-bandwidth medium like cable as well. A few teenagers on a street who saturate their connections 24/7 downloading things like the entirely of the Simpsons etc they may never actually watch make the rest of the neighboorhood slow for things like telecommuting and voip that are much more essential and time-critical. There is no reason/incentive for them to stop or to try to do their larger torrents overnight etc. It is also the shadyness of what the limit really is on the "unlimited" service questions. All in all we can argue about where the pricing and the cap are set but I think the idea is sound and reasonable. They will always let you do what you want but you may have to pay more for a service where you can download 100GB/month than granny pays to do 1-2% of that - as you should.

Re:

[amuro98 (461673)]

What free market? The cable and phone companies have divided the country into their own small kingdoms, where only 1 may exist. If both my DSL and cable provider decide to be jerks and charge $100/mo for dial-up type performance, there's not a whole lot anyone can do, other than go offline. Permanently.

As the article says, wimax may be an alternative...eventually.

The free market isn't always so "free"

[randomaxe (673239)]

"Letting the free market decide" won't leave me with a lot of options in the near term. Where I live, the options for broadband service are basically Time Warner (cable) and AT&T (DSL). I currently use Time Warner, and if they start capping bandwidth, voting with my dollar means switching to AT&T... which is like voting "yes" to content filtering.

So, currently, I have a choice between supporting one of two evils, or having no broadband service whatsoever. Awesome.

Re:It's about time!

[KublaiKhan (522918)]

Costs a lot less to toss up a couple of towers than it does to negotiate rights of way, dig trenches or erect poles, maintain a fleet of trucks and techs to go from residence to residence making connections, et al.

Re:

[KublaiKhan (522918)]

Use the cell tower model and piggyback on existing structures and existing infrastructure. Rent conduit/pole space from the telco to string a bit of fiber--expensive, sure, but a lot less costly than trying to run thousands of last-mile connections. It's not that it won't be expensive--it'll still cost a lot, but there will be significant savings over the traditional wired model.

Re:

[MightyYar (622222)]

I know I shouldn't reply to a troll - it only encourages them. But this one demonstrates what an awesome thing MLK, Jr. did and how far we've come.

The civil rights movement had to deal with millions of people with the same attitude as our Anonymous racist here, and yet it prevailed. While at one time you could be a US Senator and publicly espouse the same sentiment as CmdrIdiot here, now the racists number far fewer and can only safely spew their venom from behind a mask of anonymity. Frankly it is amazing