So, I’m an Atlanta-area Comcast customer (not by choice, it’s the only game in town at present) and so I have a 300 GB data cap for my Internet services. I also have an HD set-top bx for cable television.
And what I’m wondering is, why is my Internet data capped at 300 GB when my set-top box is sending HD data to my TV set 24/7? Doesn’t the set-top box transmit WAAAAY more than 300 GB in a month? If so, why is it not capped?
I suspect, in short, that Comcast is doing the data caps strictly for the bucks, but I don’t KNOW that so I was thinking someone here might know what’s going on. It could be that the streaming HD is an analog signal and therefore cheaper in bandwidth, but I don’t KNOW that, either. And I was thinking someone here might know.
Your set-top box isn’t “sending” any data (at least not any of significant size). It does receive data, though. Your cable provider may be broadcasting video all the time, and that data is not counted against your cap, but any on-demand video is counted. So the normal channels (including digital channels) are not considered “data,” but things like Netflix are.
One difference is that the television channels and On Demand content being sent to your set-top box is coming from Comcast, while the stuff you’re downloading using your Internet services is coming from outside Comcast. There is a real cost to the ISP to retrieve content on the internet and deliver it to you.
OK, it receives data and then somehow or other transmits it to my TV set. Just as my cable modem receives data and then transmits it to my computer. I’m talking about the fact that Comcast thinks anything over 300 Gigs received requires extra expense in the case of Internet traffic, but has NO problem transmitting WAY more than that over the cable box for no extra charge, if I understand the way things work correctly.
I strongly suspect the rationale for the Internet data cap is bullshit, but I don’t know. Maybe the set top box can sense whether or not the TV set it’s hooked up to is turned on or not and then does not transmit data. But to my knowledge, information only flows one way with most TV sets, and that’s from the cable box to the TV. I could be wrong about that. If the cable box can sense whether the TV set is turned on or off and stop receiving data when the TV is off, that would reduce amount of data required greatly. But I don’t believe that is the case.
What I believe is that Comcast wants more money and data caps are a convenient excuse. But could be wrong about that.
You need to distinguish between broadcast and Internet.
“Normal” cable TV is paid for by your monthly fee for the package you subscribe to.
Internet data is metered, and that’s where your cap comes in.
Well, the way I always understood cable service providers to work is that content producers like ESPN, HBO, Starz, the SyFy Channel etc. charge the cable service providers for their product and the cable service providers package the content and sell it to viewers. I don’t think it all originates in Comcast. I also have trouble believing that cable programming content providers would be less expensive than internet traffic suppliers. But I could be wrong about that, I don’t know how much Comcast has to pay to get on an Internet backbone line. I had always had the impression that it was pretty cheap, overall … the big expense for both cable and internet is getting that last mile of wire to the consumer, I’ve heard. And that was done decades ago.
Sure, I distinguish. I am charged separately for cable television and internet. I pay a monthly fee for cable TV service that is much higher than my Internet service, but that’s only because my wife is hooked on premium channels and wants them all. There are some packages where the cost of Internet service and the cost of cable TV service is about the same. But the amount of data delivered to the one is much greater than the amount of data delivered to the other.
(I did some rough math, based on the fact that a DVD holding five gigs of data will hold a two hour HD movie. So if the set top box is transmitting 24/7 as I believe it is, that’s 12X5 gigs a day, or 60 gigs, times 30 days a month is 1,800 gigs a month, which is six times the 300 gig bandwidth cap for Internet data. So if you are paying $50 for 300 Gigs a month worth of Internet, you should be paying $300 a month for your cable teleivision, to keep prices even.)
It comes down to the fundamentally different operation of broadcast and Internet (as brought up by beowulff), and the resulting incremental cost to the provider as each new customer is added.
[ul]
[li]For broadcast cable, the bitstreams sent to each customer’s cable box are largely the same – with different subsets applying, according to the packages paid for – so the overall bandwidth is amortized over all of the customers. Your “1800 gigs per month” are not unique to you.[/li][li]With Internet, each customer is being sent a unique bitstream. Your online devices send requests for content that needs to be provided just to you; even if you and your neighbors are both watching the same online video, you started watching at different times so the bitstream is not the same. So, your “300 gigs per month” are unique to you.[/li][/ul]
Hence, a GB delivered over the Internet costs the provider more per user than a GB delivered via broadcast.
The providers will of course still gouge you at every opportunity, but at least there is a technical rationale behind the different ways of charging for broadcast and Internet data.
It’s still a scam. De facto, internet providers have the same position as a utility. In most markets, there are at most 2 competitors, and they collude. Given that the service they provide is now almost as essential as power or water, as internet services are just as important as having a phone used to be, it needs to be regulated as such.
One obvious regulation is to prevent them from charging significantly more than it actually costs to deliver a good or service. This type of regulation has existed for decades for electricity and other providers, they have to go to a state board, show their receipts and costs, and the board decides what they are allowed to charge. About 10% to 15% profit is allowed.
If such regulation existed for internet services, they’d go to that board, probably show that it costs mere pennies per gigabyte, if that, and get laughed out of the boardroom if they tried to charge the fees they currently charge.
This setup also encourages them to spend money to make the service more reliable (because the 10-15% profit is a percentage of their costs, so they make more profits if their costs are higher) and to make it faster (same reason). The downside is it encourages them to overspend, making the service literally gold-plated and more reliable than it needs to be. This is how telephones were like during the AT&T days.
I’m no fan of broadband service providers, but this is pure fantasy. The variable costs of providing the service may be this cheap, but the fixed costs to build up the service in the first place are massive.
And much like when we expanded electricity across the country the government subsidized the expansion, companies like Comcast are receiving government subsidies to expand coverage to poorer areas. They continue to be unregulated and make huge profits off their monopolies.
I think Antonius Block already covered it, and to restate it a different way, digital cable is broadcast while Internet bandwidth is point-to-point, so the load is cumulative for all users. The sensitivity to load is especially acute in the “last mile” – the local distribution infrastructure, and also in real dollars that the ISP has to pay to their backbone providers. A good way to see this is that when a very hot news story breaks, a website like CNN.com may be hard to reach and their video streams may be spotty or inoperative, but the broadcast channel is completely unaffected. During the initial events of 9/11, news outlet websites were all but completely unreachable, and though server load was a big issue, cumulative bandwidth was often also a factor.
That said, the typical cable ISP bandwidth caps and the charges for overages are usually a scam to the point of being outright thievery.
I’ve explained my feelings about data caps to the Comcast people I’ve talked to, but I haven’t complained or hassled them because I see no point in hassling a low-level customer service agent over policies that they have no control over.
You’re the one fantasizing. Power company doesn’t get to charge you $10 per kilowatt hour because the generators and lines were really expensive, they get to charge a fee or surcharge that over decades will pay for large capital purchases like these. They don’t get to charge a huge amount upfront so they make their money back instantly and then keep charging that amount forever.
Why do you have to pay for cell-phone calls while you can receive radio for free? Try calculating all the data transmitted by radio-stations and compare it to the data used by the cell phone, and you get almost as irrelevant a comparison as the one you’re making.
There are of course pure business decisions involved here as well, for instance the need to compete with satellite or terrestrial broadcasting, but pumping the same stream of content to all your users is fundamentally simpler than supplying them with the ability to request any content they like from any part of the Internet at any time.