More and more, ISPs are introducing data caps as well as bandwidth restrictions. 10 or 15 or 25 GB a month sounds a lot but when you consider that something like LOTR Online and Runes of Magic are 8 GB+ after all patches, Command & Conquer 3 5 GB, etc. It means that there’s a significant cost to downloading which means that there’s a significant surcharge to buying something online. If a TechNet or MSDN subscriber wants to download the latest ISO of something from Microsoft, then it’s going to cost.
Something like 25GB is unreasonable, something like 250GB is not too bad (as long as they adjust it to keep up with the times of course).
From what I understand, the real problem is a very small percent of users - According to AT&T the top 2% use 20% of the total available bandwidth. Just a single one of the top users is equal to 19 ‘average’ households.
If they can set the cap low enough to discourage the top few percent, but high enough that your average joe (and you are probably your average joe unless you run torrents 24/7 and/or stream netflix every waking moment) never hits them then I think there won’t be a major problem. If they just set a super low cap out of laziness (or more likely as a money grab) then… things get interesting.
We saw what happened in a free market when ISP were on dial up. AOL used to charger per minute. As soon as enough competitors entered the arena it died out.
But broadband isn’t free. In fact is it full of conflicts of interest.
Comcast and ATT don’t wan’t you to watch movies from services like Netflix, as they want you to use their cable and U-Verse services to watch movies on demand.
I find it ridiculous that they cap it. If I pay for 6.0mbs than I should be able to download that every single minute if I choose.
It’s like if I went to Bally’s Health Club and they said, “It’s too busy at 5pm, so from now on only 10% of our customers can come in from 5pm - 7pm,”
This is going to hurt a lot, the problem is a free market will correct itself but until broadband is open wide for anyone to compete it won’t happen.
Tiers and all these other services should be regulated as long as there aren’t enough companies to force competition into stop collusion with each other.
If you look at places like Japan you will find their caps only effect upload not download and they have much stronger systems in place. Even China has passed DSL with fiber now. The same way cities were wired for cable we need a program to get cities wired for broadband and allow anyone with a broadband company to offer services over it.
“According to AT&T the top 2% use 20% of the total available bandwidth.”
Yep. So its hardly surprising models are finally coming to try and deal with that. They can set caps that 98% of the market doesnt care squat about and lose the customers that are a net loss to them at this stage.
So its more like losing 20 people from a Gym who are there 24/7 and taking up most of the machines. Neither the other clients or management are losing much sleep over it.
This part is a bit concerning, IMO. Ideally there will be enough players in the market that a crackdown on Netflix (or other streaming video providers) will die on the vine as customers run away from the offender, but the potential for unseemly practices (charging more for Netflix packets than some preferred video provider, for example) is certainly there.
As more and more TV’s come internet ready, and Netflix and other products come to market to offer video, and demand for clearer pictures get amped up, more and more people will be pushing those caps. Something along the way has to give.
Hopefully technology will overcome and the price for ever higher bandwidth will drop to a point where we can have truly unlimited access.
It’s a serious problem that won’t affect most people right now.
I’ve talked about this before but basically the ISPs are getting the best of both worlds right now. In most major cities cable service is a government regulated monopoly. Phone service is also a government regulated monopoly. So at best you will typically only have two realistic providers of broadband internet. At one point the telephone companies were required to “line share” and let you buy another company’s DSL service, but I believe that agreement expired about four years ago.
My water service is a regulated monopoly, so is my sewer, and so is my gas and electric. What that means is the rates they charge are regulated by a public service commission, those commissions base rate increases on analyzing the costs of doing business for the utility. Being a utility that enjoys a government “franchise” means you have a very consistent return on investment, because the PSC essentially guarantees you won’t lose money due to rising costs. However it also guarantees you will not be permitted to enjoy massive profit margins, they are going to let you have a profit margin but they won’t let it become too large.
With internet, such regulation does not exist yet. The ISPs love this because if PSCs were allowed to analyze the costs of providing broadband the final rates they approved would be more than an order of magnitude less than what the average internet subscriber pays. We’re talking most people probably paying 2-5 a month at most (realistically it would probably be done like water and sewer service is often done, around here there is a minimum monthly charge for both water and sewer regardless of usage, and the PSCs would probably approve that for an ISP.) Comcast and Time Warner aren’t interested in having that happen. But they still want to act as though the costs of providing x amount of bandwidth are vastly higher than they actually are.
The ISPs are trying to get “open market returns” on bandwidth but are doing so while enjoying a government granted monopoly. Some of the end runs they are trying is instituting data caps. Incidentally these data caps will cause your service to be shut off or slowed down if you stream a bunch of movies from Netflix. If you subscribe to the ISP-ran streaming video service, it won’t count against your bandwidth. So that’s a way to monetize bandwidth at a rate far above what any PSC would allow.
If it is allowed to happen we will essentially pay an artificially inflated price for services and it will hurt consumers. The big impetus isn’t solely a desire to maximize profit but also a desire to try and not suffer the loss of video and voice service. Once all video and all voice is streamed over the internet big telcos and cable companies feel like they need a good way to monetize bandwidth to continue existing as they have existed.
They’re not really monopolies, though. I can only get my water and electricity from one source, but I can get broadband internet access from several phone companies and the cable company.
Glad you can, those of us who cant have to suck it up. We have access to 1 cable provider, 1 internet provider - I am not close enough to a phone company whatever to get broadband, and I am certainly not fucking going to revert to dialup. mrAru can not telecommute on dialup, and his job partially includes telecommuting.
Yes, but it is a duopoly in most places. Further, in many DSL is becoming more and more irrelevant as an option, with disparity between DSL bandwidth and cable growing widely in most markets. In much of Comcast’s area they are now pushing 50 Mbps with their Xfinity service and the best DSL can offer in many of those areas is 5 Mbps.
It doesn’t actually have to be that way, I’ve heard that newer DSL technology combined with telephone companies pushing fiber closer to the consumer you can get 40 Mbps, but I’ve not seen any of those services even discussed as on the horizon in my area where it is truly cable or extremely poor DSL. That is apparently the best case scenario so far, too, at least in the United States–in reality the 40 Mbps DSL is only available close to the relay stations. Comcast’s Xfinity 50 Mbps service or Verizon’s FiOS have much greater reliability in providing 50 Mbps downstream.
I subscribe to MLB.TV. Their premium service streams at 1.2Mbps. If my math is correct, that’s about 13Gb for a single game. Figure about 25 games a month for a team and that’s around 325Gb and that’s if you watch only 1 team. Then there’s archived games and highlight clips and maybe you might watch more than one team.
So just a single service, that I paid good money for, could put me over the limit. That doesn’t even count the other stuff I use the internet for, and my daughter’s watching their youtube videos. I’m doomed.
Sure, but AIUI 99% of users have their usable bandwidth limited by their routers, wireless cards or PCs. So just like data caps, this will really only affect power users.