ISP Capping Is Becoming the New DRM 395
Crazzaper writes "There's a lot of controversy over ISP capping with Time Warner leading the charge. Tom's Hardware has an interesting article about how capping is the new form of DRM at the ISP level. The author draws some comparison to business practices by large cable operators and their efforts to protect cable TV programming. While this is understandable from the cable operator's perspective, the article points out how capping will affect popular services such as Steam for game content publishing and distribution, cloud-computing and online media services. Apparently this is also an effective way of going after casual piracy."
Re:Why Not Just Metered Service? (Score:2, Interesting)
The thing is this:
I've paid $40 a month for the last 9 years, and I've regularly consumed over ~70GB of data per month on TWC. Now, suddenly, there is not enough bandwidth to go around and they need to charge me extra $1 for any gigabytes over 40GB?
Clearly, when I was their consumer for the last 9 years, they could afford to sell me data at ~57 cents/gigabyte ($40/70gb). Not once... NOT ONCE did I ever have any complaints from TWC about my usage. Even on months that I spiked to 100+ GB (not very often, mind you).
So how do they all of a sudden consider that the "Pay for what you consume; Fair for everyone" rate is $1 per gigabyte.
It's completely arbitrary. It's not based on their network capacity. It's not based on usage stats. It's based on some out-of-touch beancounter trying to pull the fast one on its customers.
It's a good thing that I can take my business elsewhere. If they didn't have a monopoly, I'd be screwed.
Oh wait...
Re:Why Not Just Metered Service? (Score:4, Interesting)
"Rather than have these ridiculous, confiscatory rates for so-called "unlimited" service (which will still be capped under some other excuse)... why don't the ISP's just provide metered service?"
Because the ones most screwed up would be the grand moms of the word. They would be charged a hundred times more per kilobyte than the pirates. The scale wouldn't be linear. It would be something like:
1GB cap -> 10$
10 GB cap -> 20$
50 GB cap -> 40$
100 GB cap ->60$
500 GB cap ->100$
At that point the grand mum would realize that she is paying 10$ per GB while the guy next door is paying 0.2$ per GB. At that point two things would happen. First, she would realize that she is not getting a good deal, and second, she would arrive at a nice arrangement with the guy next door where for 5 bucks she gets to connect to his access point.
The lesson to learn from this is that a byte is a byte and if you try to make the pricing steps too high, it won't work.
Re:So who gets rationed? (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, my ISP sold me a 6Mb Down connection, the cost of which is charged by month. All day, every day of that month. So why should I not be able to fully utilize that 6Mb speed all day, every day of that month?
Their capacity issues are not my problem. I'm simply using what I have paid for. IF their network can't handle it, only sell 3Mb or 1Mb connections.
This sort of cap and overage shenanigans will not work in the future when EVERYTHING is online.Steam is a valid us of high transfers. So it Netflix, and OS upgrades.
Re:In Europe (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Why Not Just Metered Service? (Score:5, Interesting)
If all the customers are using their connection in such a way then that is the capacity that is being demanded and that is the capacity that the infrastructure needs to be able to handle. If it can't handle it, then the answer is simple; upgrade the network. Now that's an exaggeration, but the truth that no one at the ISPs wants to deal with is that raising price to encourage people to use less is not a long term solution. Eventually there is just going to be too much data being moved around and they'll have to expand their capacity. This is going to cost money and no one wants to spend it, especially when it's easier (in the short term at least, but they're shooting their own foot) to just charge more and change their business model to an arbitrarily priced metered service with hard caps.
You're never going to convince the private sector that investing in more capacity is a good business move. Business can't look that far into the future. They see an easy way to make more money and that's what they will go for despite the fact that it's completely irresponsible and shortsighted.
Re:So who gets rationed? (Score:5, Interesting)
ISPs need to fess up about exactly how much bandwidth each customer will get
Yes, they do.
I wish ISPs would be more transparent in their pricing policies, bandwidth and contention ratios, because then the people around here who want 8GB unlimited traffic for $10 a month would get the abrupt reality check they seem to need.
End around net neutrality? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: fixed amount of bandwidth (Score:5, Interesting)
Time Warner spent $150 million on network upgrades while receiving $4.1 Billion in revenue from their high speed data services. We're a long, long way off from getting our money's worth on services here in the states.
You know how you guys have to handle this right? (Score:3, Interesting)
Don't use their service. If you have to, get DSL or something.
I felt real good last week because my company had the discussion of going with a fiber line through Time Warner. Me being the Network Administrator told our Time Warner sales rep that we would not be interested due to the fact that the company practicing bandwidth caps. Yeah I know our company would not experience the caps, but it's a loss of business for them, and it gets the message across.
Re:So who gets rationed? (Score:5, Interesting)
I completely believe there is fine print. Regardless, they sold it as "unlimited". Yes, 6M is a peak throughput, but there was no restrictions on WHEN nor HOW LONG I use that 6M peak throughput.
I'm actually ok with caps as long as they're sane. 5GB per month is not sane. 1 Steam game can put you over that quite easily. Caps simply will not be viable in a future where everything moves over the connection; esp when it's the same ISP moving IPTV.
Metered would be ok with me as well. It would be interesting to see what happened if metered billing became the norm. I wonder if AdBlock would become a norm, and if there would be a movement back to more thin looking websites to save the bandwidth for the actual data rather than the look n feel.
Re:So who gets rationed? (Score:3, Interesting)
And more to the point. If ATT tried putting a 5G cap on my DSL, I'd drop it in a heart beat. I can get my work done at Starbuck, McDonalds and any other place with free wifi for customers. Let THEM deal with the caps.
Biz class (Score:4, Interesting)
My advice would be to get business class while you can, WITH a contract.
About a year ago Brighthouse royally pissed me off with their slow roll out of SDV (switched digital video), and their horrendous HDTV offering. My solution was to get DirectTV and keep BH only for Internet. The problem was that unless you purchased their "all in one" package (cable, phone, Internet), you couldn't get their highest speed tier (20/5). I was told if I wanted just Internet, at that speed tier, that I would have to get business class and pay extra. This really miffed me at first, but now I see it was a blessing in disguise...
Bottom line, I ended up paying ~20/mo MORE for DirectTV + BH biz class, but I got much better TV service.
Now it looks like I am also going to see the benefit of having a contract. I am locked into a 3 year contract, but I am guaranteed that I am not going to be paying $150+ for unlimited bandwidth since that is included in the biz class contract (which they can't just arbitrarily change). As it stands, I pay $75/mo and that gets me 20/5 unlimited bandwidth, static IP, and NO restrictions on services (IE: no blocked ports).
Something to think about,
-- Brian
I honestly think my old ISP was fair with this (Score:3, Interesting)
They had a cap, but once you hit the cap you just had your speed reduced.
So up to X gb (I think it was 5, which is low, but it was a wireless service) you had the full 1.5 mbps speed. After that, they dropped you to 300k, or you could pay extra to increase your cap that month.
I think that you need a much larger cap on cable for it for fair (maybe 5-10g for the cheap, grandmother style connection, 50g for the $40 standard one) and just drop your speed to 1-2 mbps when you hit that so it's harder for you to keep going over. I think people would complain a lot less about bandwidth caps if they were softer caps like that - at least, living with it for a few months, it was worse than being uncapped, but it was entirely usable and bearable.
Re:Why Not Just Metered Service? (Score:2, Interesting)
This entire Slashdot topic feels surreal to me. Capped plans are the norm here (Australia). Is that really not how it works in America!? The hypothetical "this would never work" pricing scheme in the parent post is pretty much how it works.
The grandmother rarely ends up sharing the neighbours's access point because:
* Usually the usage difference between neighbours is not enough to make the saving worthwhile - and where there ARE very light users, they're not savvy or confident enough to initiate this.
* Neighbours don't usually know/trust each other enough to feel it worthwhile - what happens when her grandchild starts coming over every Sunday and burning through quota, or worse, doing something particularly illegal with the connection? Your agreement says you won't share your connection; if your neighbour uses it nefariously you're probably in trouble. I would not share my connection with a grandmother next door. The whole rationale is she doesn't have to pay much this way - which means it isn't worth the hassle or risk for the neighbour.
Btw the most common way of dealing with exceeding your cap is to throttle your bandwidth down to ancient (dialup) levels until next month's payment. The nastier ISPs instead charge you per MB for excess downloads - this leads to hefty bills.
Re:Killing the Goose... (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm in the area outside of Rochester, where TW plans to cap. Less than an hour from here is Buffalo where Verizon has laid out FiOS. Guess what? No capping in Buffalo.
So, you're correct: Competition cannot cure this, which is why a NY state legislator has rightly observed it as an abuse of monopoly.
Solution:Neighbour Wireless Networks & Layered (Score:4, Interesting)
Once solution is to have all the broadband customers install/use wireless routers that can interconnect as many as possible to a geo-local area ( your local neighbourhood ) virtual private network that shares the bandwidth load for bulk content distribution across multiple customer to ISP connections. If N users wish to fetch the same content, each person only need to download 1/N of the content, using neighbourhood network to swap the different parts. Think of it as a neighbourhood bittorrent.
This could be set up/managed as a web service, with the client P2N2P ( Peer to Neighbourhood to Peer ) software running on each users computer ( or running as a proxy service on the wireless routers ), via managed a multi platform subscription aggregation client such as Miro 2.0 Open internet TV [getmiro.com].
The service could operate like this:
1) Via a website or web2.0 interface, people create content "channels" which are a list of URIs ( HTTP/FTP/TORRENT) of content with descriptions, just like podcasts.
2) The service would then fetch the content, on demand and store the content temporarily on its host/distribution site. The host service would do sharing via torrent, so uploading is not done by the Neighbourhood Peers.
3) The service would hold the content and distribute it to P2N2P clients so that the content can be recombined via a local Neighbourhood VPNs.
4) Each piece of content itself be encrypted at the URI source, so the service need not hold the keys, to deal with any concerns over end use privacy issues.
5) The subscription aggregation client could incorporate and distribute advertising as a means of paying for hosting the service.
I can't wait for the work-from-home effect (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Killing the Goose... (Score:3, Interesting)
I saw a great quote here on slashdot about this a few days ago, though I fear I'm not going to do it justice. It was from an Australian ISP, but along the same lines, where they said something like: "We'd be delighted if our highest-usage customers all went to our competition."
And why wouldn't they? If you run a business and everybody is paying (say) $50, if you could skim the 1% who's downloading 200 gigs a month off and give them to a competitor and be left with customers who use 20, that's not bad for you. I don't know enough about their numbers to know if that 1% is actually using more than they pay for in terms of cost to provide the service--though I doubt it--but it frees up a lot of your pipes, doesn't make you invest as heavily into infrastructure, and ultimately could allow you to undercut that competition you just basically sabotaged.
Granted, it's somewhat short-sighted. This Intermajig is only going to get bigger, and those infrastructure projects are all going to be necessary at some point -- they're just trying to turn back the tide with a spoon. Unfortunately US business is always most concerned with their short-term bottom lines, so it makes perfect sense to them. From their perspective, they ramp up the prices for those "high-end users" and either make more money from them (woohoo!) or lose them to the competition (woohoo!).
The bottom line is whether it's smart or dumb, many major ISPs just don't want these customers right now. Not at the prices they currently enjoy.
Re:Better Than DPI (Score:2, Interesting)
4. Upgrade the infrastructure to support the increasing bandwidth usage of your average user and charge everyone slightly more for this new faster service?
I seem to remember initially getting 8mbit was a lot more than sticking with the old 56k, but now it's costing less for 16mbit "unlimited".
Is there any real reason they can't just upgrade the tubes again and charge more for it, surely if they allowed everyone a max of 100mbit and charged a lot for it, it would eventually cover the upgrade cost?
Re:So who gets rationed? (Score:3, Interesting)
That's not a bad idea... Unfortunately, most of the Starbucks I've been in QoS each user's connection to about 512K down, so good luck doing big dowloads or watching IP TV from there... Occasionally I've found better, but rarely. If we abused it too much, and Starbucks started eating charges I'm sure they'd impose daily caps on each MAC address, or impose their own throttling.
I just signed up for AT&T DSL at a house I'm moving into Wednesday. Even including the dryline costs, it was $10 a month cheaper than TWCs offerd rate ($17 cheaper including TWC's upcharge for not having cable). I'm getting 6dn/512up. TWCs equivolent is 7dn/384up, which actually, is not as fast, and has higher contention rates since most people wrongly think DSL can't do those speeds and thus don't have DSL. TWC indicated they could change that rate, the amount of bandwidth I receive, or impose caps at any time without notice.
Anyway, as part of signing up, I had the AT&T account rep add a notation to my account that; while a continuing subscriber no bandwidth caps or use costs would ever be assessed to my account, and further that this was for "unlimited" internet for upload and dowload for non-commercial purposes (including that I MAY work from home over that connection). I also ensured that should the available bandwidth increase at the same price, or should i wish to drop to a lower or different plan option, that the act of doing so would not change the condition that I am a "continuing" subscriber. They guaranteed me that they would not impose caps on my account, even if they impose ones on new subscribers. Basically, unless something miraculous happens, they just guaranteed I'll be a subscriber for life. I also made sure this statement would still be in effect should i switch from DSL to uVerse when available (I'm told 6 months tops).
As I've said before... (Score:4, Interesting)
We should just run cat5 to all of our neighbors' houses, and sidestep the ISPs, doing the same for the internet that F/OSS has done for operating systems. Yes, someone has to have a good (ie, pricey) internet connection, but I'm willing to bet that a feed large enough for your block could be had for less than each individual connection is currently costing.
Doing it with wireless N routers instead would eliminate the cabling requirements, as well... admittedly, it increases the lag, but if the ISP suddenly starts losing customers a few blocks at a time, maybe the rates will drop on the lower-latency existing infrastructure.
Of course there are issues with this idea, but nothing is perfect. If you find this to be an untenable plan, come up with a better one (and share it with us).
Take the power away from the monopoly, and we start to see more/better competition in the marketplace.
The fucked up parts (Score:1, Interesting)
Here are the parts that really get me:
a) Telcos are so secretive with their data that nobody has a reliable broadband penetration map of the USA. They figure if competitors know more about their network, they would have to actually compete with eachother.
b) Telcos claim that Grandma, who only uses 5MB/month, is subsidizing netflix users and bittorrent users. They claim to fix this problem by capping standard connections and offering higher caps for higher prices. But for every $150/mo uncapped connection they sell, they ought to be able to sell three Grandma 100MB capped connections for $5/mo. Everyone knows they won't do this.
c) Even if they adjust prices down for capped connections, their claim that it is for consumers' benefit is obviously bogus. If so, where's tiered cable TV service? If I want just discovery, comedy central, and CNN - where do I go?
d) The bleeding obvious conflict of interest: video content is way better to consume over IP than it is with a TV. So the only way to kill online video content delivery and keep their lucrative (non-tiered!) cable TV customers is to break IP video.
I hope these things are as fucking obvious to the FCC as they are to me...
Re:So who gets rationed? (Score:2, Interesting)
Yes, and the users who do nothing but surf and email (the majority) will enjoy paying $1/month for the tiny bandwidth they use.
If the ISPs used a metered system that reflected their actual costs, the 1% of users that use large amounts of bandwidth would quit and the remainder of users would be paying a tiny fraction of what they pay now.
Face it, the real reason they're cranking up the prices is because their cable tv business is in jeopardy.
Re:So who gets rationed? (Score:2, Interesting)
I've got Verizon FiOS in Baltimore (were WiMAX is available...with no cap!) and the funny thing is that I've got 10/2mpbs service as part of Verizon's version of a triple play! I pay $130 a month for TV, 10/2mbps connections and phone while its $150 a month for 10/1mpbs for Time Warner! I feel very sorry for people who don't have access to Verizon. With the number of people who are switching to such great offers it is amazing that other companies are adapting the less-profitable throttling/capping models.
I had Comcast--who was 1st in the throttling department--and there is no comparison on the quality of the service and the quality of the company offering those services. I don't know why companies like Time Warner and Comcast believe they "own" the Internet just because they offer a gateway to it?
Re:So who gets rationed? (Score:3, Interesting)
There's a fixed amount of bandwidth available, and you have to decide who gets it.
Not really, no. Technology marches on and in the world of networking it keeps taking the form of endpoint hardware that allows the very same cables to carry orders of magnitude more bandwidth. It is now possible to put 128 channels of 10Gbps each on one fiber. Yes, over a Terrabit per second in aggregate on one pair out of 24 in a longhaul cable.
Upstream bandwidth for an ISP the size of the major cable companies costs under 4 cents per GB.
BTW, the reason they sell broadband in terms of max transfer rate but cap it in terms of bytes transferred is so the marketing weasels have enough gray area to fudge the numbers to their heart's content.
WISP Throttling (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:So who gets rationed? (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm a heavy Internet user and hate caps and have a 10Mbit feed to my house and even I'm not that oblivious.
The feed you pay for is a "peak speed" of 6Mbit first off, not a guaranteed speed. Secondly, your actual usage is probably discussed in the fine print near where it tells you not to spam and harass other users.
Re:In Europe (Score:3, Interesting)
I know! We can take your provider and connect a series of switches, each of us getting a drop where we can add a router and add our machines behind that router.
We can make a network...and interconnected network of computers.
I'm going to call it...Ted!
Don't laugh... This is starting to happen. A WiFi mesh darknet is not hard if you have proximity. And it makes piracy cheap, easy, and safe.