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The Facts & Fiction of Bandwidth Caps
Posted by
kdawson
on Tue Sep 30, 2008 01:44 PM
from the consequences-we-at-least-hope-were-unintended dept.
from the consequences-we-at-least-hope-were-unintended dept.
wjamesau writes "What's the deal with broadband caps, like Comcast's 250GB/month data transfer limit, which goes into effect tomorrow? Om Malik at GigaOM has a whitepaper laying out the facts and fiction about Comcast's short-sightedness (which other carriers are mimicking), and how it will impact the future Internet: 'Given the growth trend due to consumers' changes in content consumption, today's power users are tomorrow's average users. By 2012, the bill for data access is projected to be around $215 per month.' Ouch." The white paper is embedded at the link using Scribd; for a PDF version you'll have to give up an email address.
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The projected costs are worthless. (Score:5, Insightful)
I have serious doubts as to their projected costs. This will have changed so radically in 4 years that these predictions are about as stable as gas predictions that far out.
On the other hand, they are somewhat correct about bandwidth usage becoming more common. My sister and mother both have Skype now and use it regularly, and many people are looking to set-top boxes for NetFlix's on-demand and other services like that. It won't be long now before heavy bandwidth usage forces the ISPs here to seriously consider bandwidth issues.
Luckily, I believe in the market and I think someone will lay the groundwork for serious bandwidth soon, instead of continuing to use copper for everything.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Luckily, I believe in the market and I think someone will lay the groundwork for serious bandwidth soon, instead of continuing to use copper for everything.
Me too. Except for one thing, the market doesn't exist. The cable companies has Congress in their pockets and the state legislatures, too. How can market forces work when many cable and broadband providers have legislated local monopolies? Or in some cases, get their boys in the legislatures to pass pro-industry regulation to "protect" the consumer which does nothing but get all the companies to follow the same rules that lines their pockets.
When we have real competition, then we'll have decent service.
Fir
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The cable companies has Congress in their pockets and the state legislatures, too. How can market forces work when many cable and broadband providers have legislated local monopolies?
Exactly! Except, those monopolies were granted to trick cable companies into investing the millions required to install that infrastructure. And those cable companies have in many cases already mostly upgraded the majority of the infrastructure to fiber (except the last mile. And now my local Telco has already run fiber to my house to compete with the local cable company, which has ramped up their service yet another notch to compete, and was well known for offering me tasty deals to abandon my DirecTV di
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
That might be the case if you are in Verizon territory, but the majority of the country is in AT&T or Qwest territory, and they have no FTTP plans.
This includes many major metropolitan areas, like Chicago.
Re:The projected costs are worthless. (Score:4, Insightful)
I should start this off saying I don't know much about computers in general, just an average user. I personally don't care much about capping because it doesn't seem to affect me. I don't know if my service is capped or not, but if it is, I've never had a problem with it, so I'm going to go with whoever is cheaper. If that is someone who caps, that's fine with me: it's not affecting me and I don't have the money to be making a statement about whether or not the internet should be metered, there are more important issues out there that I can't support financially.
I do realize however that my demands for bandwidth or data transfer have mushroomed up, as have everyone else's. I don't really see that stopping. When netflix does something involving downloads instead of shipping actual discs, I'm sure I'm not going to want to watch low-quality. I'm saying that I am going to keep wanting more data, as will the other average users. I don't know when I'm going to start needing 250 gb a month, but it doesn't seem impossible. I'm also confident that if your average user like me is constantly using up their alloted data transfer, we won't be quiet about it, and the capping isn't going to stay at that. But I won't be voting for politicians based on this issue until it becomes an issue for me. That's absurd with, you know, some of the stuff going on right now.
Parent
Re:The projected costs are worthless. (Score:4, Informative)
Just thought that I'd point out that netflix has been doing DVD-quality video streams for quite a while now... (and it's included in the price of your subscription!)
Parent
Re:The projected costs are worthless. (Score:4, Insightful)
Have you observed the prices of broadband dropping lately? I sure haven't, and you'd think that over time it would.
If the prices haven't been coming down, and they've been curtailing the amount of bandwidth you get ... it does seem like it won't get any better than it is now.
If this was anything resembling an open market where competition and other factors might change things, I might think you had a chance in hell of being right. However, the way the telecom industry in the US is structured, the 'market', as it applies here, is a complete myth.
The big telcos own all of the infrastructure, and have shockingly little incentive to make things better. No new player can come along and compete. I see absolutely nothing to believe that the market will sort things out.
Heck, increasingly I have very little faith in this so-called 'market' which everyone seems to think will magically correct imbalances over time -- there's just too many distorting factors, and people end up waiting around for the same players to do something different when nothing else has changed. And it's not just in the telco industry that the industry has managed to get some leverage against the notion of this guiding market.
Cheers
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I have observed the price per bit of broadband dropping recently. My comcast service has gone from 1mbit to 3mbit to 6mbit over the last 5 years with no change in price.
The introduction of the cap, of course, significantly complicates that computation.
Re:The projected costs are worthless. (Score:4, Interesting)
Same here. When I got my first DSL connection 2001 I was paying Verizon around $40/mo. for a 768/128 connection. Over the years, that went from 768/128 to 1500/384 to 3000/768 without any significant change in price. These days I pay around $60 for a 20000/5000 FIOS connection. The price of bandwidth has most definitely dropped.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I have observed the price per bit of broadband dropping recently. My comcast service has gone from 1mbit to 3mbit to 6mbit over the last 5 years with no change in price.
The introduction of the cap, of course, significantly complicates that computation.
Your service has gone from a 1mbit to 3mbit to 6mbit service. But what does that really mean? Quite likely, there is the qualifier 'Up to..' right before that mBit number. What that means, is that number means nothing.
They could offer up to 100mbits of se
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
No shit. "Up to 6mb/sec" means "you might get 6mb/sec for 1 second at 3:30 in the morning. MAYBE." The rest of the time you'll get less than 6mb/sec, which is what the up to means. I hate all the ads and commercials that do that. "You could save up to $1000 per month on your insurance! By the way, $1000 isn't a typical savings!" Yeah, or I could save nothing. What's the typical savings, that'd be a whole lot more relevant...
Re:The projected costs are worthless. (Score:5, Insightful)
I think bandwidth has gotten to the point where you can't measure your capacity by assuming you'll be consuming 100% of the bandwidth all the time. Take electricity... no one seems to be bothered by the fact that if everyone consumed even 50% of their capacity at the same time the system would die a flaming death. And very few people even think about consuming 100% of the electricity available to their home.
I really, really appreciate that I can get 20Mb down and 5Mb up whenever I need it, even if I don't transmit 250GB a month. It's dramatically better than having a 800kbps line that I can max out 100% of the time.
Parent
Re:The projected costs are worthless. (Score:5, Insightful)
Take electricity... no one seems to be bothered by the fact that if everyone consumed even 50% of their capacity at the same time the system would die a flaming death. And very few people even think about consuming 100% of the electricity available to their home.
However, there's also the fact that, in almost all cases, electricity is a metered resource, but in the US, broadband generally isn't. As in, if you're using that 50%, you're paying more than if you were using 25%. If it were unmetered and people could (theoretically) run at 100% capacity 24/7 without any increase in cost, I can assure you we'd have the same people complaining about similar changes here, regardless of the damage it would do to the infrastructure. "Oh, I can't run my array of arc welders constantly anymore with these oppressive 4GW/month electricity caps!" "NOW how is my Tesla coil going to work all day and all night? I need that protection!"
Granted, there is far less "damage" to be done with broadband (and I have a hard time believing that if the telcos/cablecos were actually upgrading their lines with all the money they rake in they can't support it), but if the electricity power-users got used to a (to them) unlimited resource and it suddenly changed to a metered one, the same problems would arise.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The electricity is supplied at a massively discounted rate, but it's still metered. The discount is because of the predictable nature of demand, both short term (a few days) and long term (10+ years). Also there's often associated generation built concurrently with the refinery/smelter etc.
Actually, if you have any links to an example of unmetered heavy industrial use I'd be very interested.
Cheers
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
And the point you miss... those aren't burst speeds; they are constant. You can run at 20Mb continuously all day long with no drop in speed, no indication you're approaching any limit, and no consequence of passing the limit. You won't know anything until you get the next bill or your connection is terminated. (How many 20k$ cell phone bills have we heard about over the last few years?) Nobody likes the DirectWay traffic shaping system, but that's exactly what is called for here. As I have said a thousa
Re:The projected costs are worthless. (Score:5, Funny)
Luckily, I believe in the market
I believe in the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, and Santa Clause. Where's my pony?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Not to mention that the summary talks about Comcast and then cites an estimated cost based on Time Warner's far more restrictive scheme (40GB cap plus $1 per GB). Talk about bait and switch.
As you correctly point out, capped providers regularly increase their caps in any case, so the projection is entirely worthless. My provider, Shaw, has had caps for a while. They are increased periodically. Most recently, for instance, the cap on the regular service was increased from 20GB to 50GB, and the cap on the pre
Re:The projected costs are worthless. (Score:4, Insightful)
Why? Why do you idiots always bring up VoIP when discussing bandwidth caps? How stupid can you possibly be?
Skype is so bandwidth-unintensive that you can run it over a modem. That's right, a regular old 56kbps down (but really 53, if your connection is perfect) 33.6kbps up dialup-through-the-phone-line funny screeches and tones modem. Its bandwidth use is absolutely trivial. It is not going to suddenly cause your sister and mother to hit a 250GB/month bandwidth cap. Get a clue!
Parent
We need a bigger internet (Score:5, Funny)
Re:We need a bigger internet (Score:5, Funny)
What were we talking about again?
Parent
Thank government restriction (Score:4, Insightful)
"Accept our high prices and shitty service! What else are you gonna use? Dial up? DSL? HA!"
Re:Thank government restriction (Score:5, Insightful)
You seem to think that the average, profit generating customer is the one who is affected by bandwidth caps and monopolistic behavior, but that simply isn't true. The only people that these limitations affect are the people who generate the least amount of profit for the ISPs. Imagine you own a business and you have a certain part of your customer base that actually costs you money to service, are you really going to worry about them leaving you for the competition?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
And, pray tell, who would have paid to lay out the cable, if there were no assurances that the owner of said cabl
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
With the huge capital outlay for infrastructure, there would be de facto monopoly, as there would be no way for a company to offset the capital expense with sales. The existant monopoly (the first entrant) would underprice sales to the point where the second entrant would be forced out of business.
$215/month? I could handle that (Score:3, Interesting)
I've been paying ~$180/month for 64k ISDN to my secret lair in the hills of California. On Monday, though, I get my T1, for $250/month! I think most people that use that much bandwidth may bitch about it, but they'll pay.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I've been paying ~$180/month for 64k ISDN to my secret lair in the hills of California. On Monday, though, I get my T1, for $250/month! I think most people that use that much bandwidth may bitch about it, but they'll pay.
64k ought to be enough for any secret lair!
Rates that high will force rerouting (Score:5, Insightful)
If they try to charge those kind of rates we will just route around them. We use the large ISPs because we find them the best bargsin. Jack up prices to that sort of level and there will be other options.
Get rates up enough and lots of alternatives get practical. Wide area wireless, new competitors like the power company using their universal right of way to lay fiber, etc. Kinda like everybody bitched and moaned at $50/barrel oil and didn't change much but as it kept going up we are talking serious about hybrids, biofuels, drilling in places that would have been political suicide to talk about, building nukes (Nukes! Who could have predicted the greens ever allowing that!), etc.
Get bandwidth expensive enough and we could just do local neighborhood p2p filesharing. Imagine a 10.0.0.0/8 wifi network covering a neighborhood and sharing the big popular downloads among themselves. Also would make the **AA goons job a lot harder.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Imagine a 10.0.0.0/8 wifi network covering a neighborhood and sharing the big popular downloads among themselves.
Great idea. Quick question: how will that wifi network connect to the Internet?
Re:Rates that high will force rerouting (Score:5, Interesting)
> Great idea. Quick question: how will that wifi network connect to the Internet?
Ok, work with me here. Imagine the bandwidth cap drops to 100GB/month. Hard drives are still cheap and huge and will be cheaper and even bigger by the time this problem ripens. 802.11n will also be commonplace by then. Ok, so everyone participating in a neighborhood net is expected to buy the current reflashable linky, at least 1TB of drive and a 10dbi omni antenna, The AP does all of your bittorrent action, something ASUS is selling now, a browser plugin offloads all .torrent links to the AP, you monitor your downloads on a webpage it provides and when it hits 100% you access the files via a samba share.
Ok, now put this AP on a 10/8 net and it can see the neighbors and your outbound net. It's torrent client has been modified to prefer local peers by a ratio close to the number of members. It also assists in torrents a neighbor is working even if you aren't interested in the file, at a lower priority on the pipe to the outside world. It does something else interesting, it only caches the blocks it downloaded, thus distributing a cache of those files amongst the peers and greatly increasing the effectiveness of the cache. If you later decide you want one of those files your client gets the rest almost exclusively from the local nodes.
Now imagine a future where video over the Internet was about to launch but the cable companies and telcos squashed it in favor of their video on demand pay per view crap. Get fifty neighbors together and together they have an aggregate bandwidth cap of 5TB. If everyone is watching a totally different set of shows it won't help much, but there will almost certainly be a fairly good overlap. When a new episode of moderately popular show X is available the dozen or so people who want it will be downloading it in parallel across their net links and swapping the blocks across a much faster 802.11n WWAN aided to a lessor extent by the 38 peers who aren't interested in that program. And cutting the hit on their bandwidth cap by that same factor of 12+ but offset by helping download stuff you didn't want to help somebody else. And if anybody else later decides they want to watch it before it times out of the caches their cost is zero. By having one smart host do almost all heavy downloading it can know the caps and adjust it's activity to avoid hitting them.
Parent
sure thing (Score:3, Funny)
for a PDF version you'll have to give up an email address.
ok, how does bill_gates@comcast.net sound?
250GB? Boo Hoo. (Score:3, Interesting)
We have had stupid caps up in Canada for at least a year now.
I am with Cogeco Ontario (Rogers Communications), for my cable internet, have been for years. I have a 60GB cap. They have 3 levels of service. Crap at 40GB. Normal at 60GB. Better than Normal at 80GB. They also implemented this cap pretty much without notice. So one day I had no cap, the next I did. I have even had my account disconnected due to going over cap (in fact it was the only way I found out I actually had one in the first place).
So don't cry about your 250GB a month cap please.
Ultimately unless the feds wake up and do something about these telecommunication giants taking advantage of markets and ripping consumers off not a bloody thing will happen. People are getting fed up, which will only become more apparent at time goes on. I would think it will only be a matter of years before the politicians start leveraging this for votes and then some sort of change will take place. However until then, it will be annoying, and we will all live in sucksville (at least if you stay in North America).
Bell can also stuff it as far as I am concerned. In Canada there is only Bell and Rogers, a duopoly, so there is not much choice. I hope the CRTC rips them all a new one and soon.
Remember cell phone minutes? (Score:5, Insightful)
Once upon a time, we had to pay dearly for a 60 minute-per-month cell phone contract, and some people paid even more dearly for 180 or even 300 minutes per month. Then competition stepped in, and one of the vendors started offering 500 minutes per-month for same prices as the competitors charged for 180 minutes. Now, it's hard to find a carrier that even offers less than about 500 minutes in the lowest price tier, and lots of people have 1500, and "unlimited" contracts are becoming common.
As soon as you are tempted to change internet carriers to avoid being charged for extra gigs, they will bump the gigs-per-month. IF there is competition in a metro area, the gigs-per-month in that area will increase rapidly.
But, if you live in a small town or rural area, you get screwed. That seems to be a constant.
They should implement peak hours (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:They should implement peak hours (Score:5, Insightful)
File sharers saturate their links 24/7. They are not the cause of prime-time congestion.
Parent
email address? (Score:4, Informative)
for a PDF version you'll have to give up an email address.
Fortunately, those [mailinator.com] aren't hard to come by.
Mabe trying ot cut the compitition out (Score:5, Interesting)
Peering (Score:4, Interesting)
Price is what is currently selling. Nobody cares about email servers, nntp retention (if it's even offered) etc etc - people are buying whatever's cheapest. Your ISP is a utility - in fact they care even less. Your water rate might be fixed, but your gas and electricity charge you on the basis of how much you use. Your ISP is generally accepted to provide 'internet' for a fixes price. A small sub-set of the market might care about the headline transfer rate, but it's an even smaller subset that care about the small print.
Basically we are so so so much the minority on these issues for even noticing they exist. More to the point we are the 'hogging consumers' - I can guarantee that you all download more than my mum.
The small print is going to get noticed soon, and it won't be my us - it'll be the people who signed up to netflix beacause of a mail-shot. It'll be the people that wonder why that 360 demo takes longer than it's supposed to.
So how will the market respond? Well there'll be new 'premium' packages that don't throttle for us - but 90% of punter would be happy if say a dozen sites were excluded from their caps based upon their popularity/kickbacks to the ISP.
Take Netflix or Amazon unboxed. Most end users have currently not heard of either of them - but in 5 years time they'll be watching media-less films on their TV. How will they decide which? Well their ISP will tell them.
The WiFi router most ISPS now offer pre-configged will have an HDMI socket on the back and a remote control. It will provide you movies from and the download due to peering will run at full whack.
Even if you're a 'low kbps' subscriber, your ADSL line will suddenly hum at 24Mb to get that movie onto your TV and that charge onto your bill asap. Market will then move subtlely - you'll be offered a slightly higher charge for, I dunno, 1 free film download a week. Then there'll be the premium unlimited rentals model - in summary your ISP will become your Cable TV provider.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Bandwidth caps are America protecting its poor infustructure. Were we in a backward place like Korea, Japan, or Singapore we would enjoy HUGE bandwidth and no limit for a reasonable monthly fee. The Duaopoly here is protecting its rusty wires and milking that much more out of them. we need fiber please, and not FIOS. Bring us real 21st century bandwidth here in the third (online) world..
Re:Article summary (Score:5, Informative)
There is actually a term for that, it's called a Cartel.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
"i live in the suburbs of L.A. but my broadband bills are still several times those of similarly dense population centers in other countries."
The cost a provider puts out there is distributed among all its customers so while comcast has high density areas it also has low density areas.
"but most Americans live in metropolitan areas or their surrounding suburbs."
But more than a fifth live in rural areas and of the 80ish percent that live in 'metro areas' 20% live in area with a population of less than 200,000
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
20% of Finland's population lives in the Helsinki Metro area, another 10% live in just three cities..
40% of the population in 4 metropolitan areas..
IN the US the top 4 metros NY (18 Million), LA (12 Million), Chicago (8 Million), and Dallas (5 Million) together contain just 15% in those ares who's mean distance apart is far greater than Finland..
Re:Finland, anyone? (Score:5, Insightful)
IN the US the top 4 metros NY (18 Million), LA (12 Million), Chicago (8 Million), and Dallas (5 Million) together contain just 15% in those ares who's mean distance apart is far greater than Finland..
Finland's population as a country is 5.3 million. So New York city has more than 3 times the population of Finland yet Finland has better broadband service? I know, Finland is a country not a city. But if you examine the cities you'll find the numbers still don't favor the US.
Going by your cited area in your post, Helsinki [wikipedia.org] has a population density of 3,060/km^2 while New York City [wikipedia.org] has a density of 10,482/km^2. A large US city with similar population density to Helsinki is Los Angeles [wikipedia.org] with 3,168/km^2. So Los Angeles has similar population density, yet 6 times more population (larger market) yet Finland still has better broadband? Furthermore New York City has more than 3 times the population density?
Why are more and more countries consistently beating the US in information technology infrastructure even in similarly populated areas? Clearly it isn't a population or density issue. I'd say a better answer is large corporations using monopolistic power and litigation to prevent smaller guys and even municipalities from improving or building their own infrastructure to compete in lucrative service areas.
Now I do get your general point. It is too hard for a single company (even a large one) to roll out nationwide high speed information infrastructure for a country the size of the US. I agree with that. But I don't see why the rules cannot be changed to allow smaller companies or municipalities from building their own infrastructure to provide for the needs of their local population whether it be a rural area out in the middle or nowhere or a high density area like New York.
Parent
So how come DL speeds in US cities still suck? (Score:5, Insightful)
Great. (Though I must admit your final sentence kinda lost me.) It sounds like you're saying that since Finland is more urbanized, they get better service. This still doesn't answer the question of why urban areas in the US still have crap service compared to other countries. The cost of wiring rural areas is a bit of a red herring, as rural areas often don't have very good service anyway (i.e. not a lot has been spent to wire them), and it would be much more cost effective and profitable to wire up the dense urban areas -- but these still lag the rest of the developed world by a sizable margin, in terms of median download speeds.
If you (or any other readers) are interested in download speed comparisons, have a look at the FA in the thread I linked to above -- or just click here [presscue.com] for the linky. :)
Yes, the US is big. But that is not the (only / main) reason costs remain notably high and download speeds depressingly low in the US. Another major factor in this equation is the fact that the US is relying on private enterprise to install the infrastructure -- the same private enterprise that actively obstructs any public-sector attempt to fill gaps left by incomplete corporate efforts, and that increasingly owns the content on the other end of the line. Decouple line ownership from line transmission, and decouple line transmission from content ownership, and *then* the US 'net might just catch up to the rest of the world, in terms of costs, transmission speeds, and traffic fairness. Until this comes to pass (and I sure won't hold my breath), the inherent conflicts of interest in such monopolistic cross-ownership will keep the US 'net market from being anywhere close to a "free" market, and any attempt at analyzing it as one is a waste of time.
Cheers,
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
"So, is your argument intended to suggest that the USA cannot improve its internet access?"
Nope, just pointing out the reality of the task. May here (some Americans and some not) believe laying fiber to improve service in the US is a simple matter when they don't get just how big and spread out this nation is (most Europeans cant wrap their mind around it either).
"You might not be able to reproduce internet access to the levels enjoyed by many other countries at the same cost, but you can improve it so that
Re:Article summary (Score:5, Informative)
People *are not* tied to a single provider. I can go with Comcast, Verizon, Road Runner, SprintPCS, and others.
That's rare. The reality for most people is you have one DSL provider and one cable provider.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
And Albany, Syracuse, Utica.... Get out much?
In Korea 50% of the population lives in *1* metro area, in Japan 14% live in and around Tokyo, and 25% of the population live in just three metro areas! with the average distance between metro areas being next to nothing.
Re:metered bandwidth (Score:5, Insightful)
Metering bandwidth raises a few questions about what should be transferred over the internet. If your paying per byte then all of those flash heavy advertisements are suddenly costing you money. you are then paying to be advertised to. who wants that? What happens when your computer gets a virus and starts to send out gigabytes of email spam? Who's liable for that? How about when windows decides to update its self with that sexy new 500MB patch? Or when WoW releases a new patch and you have to pay for the 800MB-1.5GB patch for that game?
Metering bandwidth now when the internet depends on having an unlimited connection would truly stifle growth of not just the internet, of all computer software.
When people have to think, gee do I pay for the bandwidth for this massive patch to my OS/Email Client/Office Suite/Game/Misc App, then everyone looses. Too many people would make their systems not update, and leave themselves vulnerable to attacks if given that sort of choice.
Carried to its logical extreme bandwidth metering can be pretty scary.
Parent
Re:Could someone explain (Score:4, Insightful)
They're talking price, not cost. The two have nothing to do with each other.
Parent