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Oh HEEEELLLLLL No!
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Ladies and gentlefen, I present to you Comcast, the first of many companies to introduce a monthly download bandwidth cap.
Read about it here: http://www.nytimes.com/20...hnology/30comcast.html?em 
... You guys don't have bandwidth caps over there?
What you have is probably a weekly cap. This is a monthly cap. And where they have that set right now seems pretty damn big, but the way technology is
progressing you can expect 250 Gigs a month to soon become mediocre. You gotta understand, this doesn't just count your downloads, but every bit of your down-stream bandwidth. All of your web surfing. All of your streaming video. All of your chats. All of your Skype calls. All webcam usage. EVERYTHING. One of the few things they don't count is your digital telephone and digital TV service and that's a whole different bag altogether.
Nope, monthly caps. I've got 25gig a month.
It was bound to happen Black. And if you've ever actually READ those EULA's, they have the right.
Sky, for a lot of US cable users, bandwidth has been a bit more like driving the Autobahn in germany... the only limit is what your connection can handle and how much traffic there is, with the exception of being close to town (Yes, there are speed limits in built up areas, analogy still apllies as this is equivalent to being routed through a particularly buzy router or a very popular site). Now the cable company is putting up speed limits. So of course those of us who are used to screaming as fast as we can are.. well. screaming about what we see as our gosh given right being taken away. However, the reason for the 'speed limit' being enforced is because there are now more and more cars on the road and the highway provider is trying to make allowances so that everyone is closer to equal in speed. Ergo, the speed freaks can whine all we want, but its just that... the whining of the privilaged with our Mazarattis being forced to go no faster than the guy with his Yugo. Hear that thunder rolling till it seems to split the sky? That's every ship in Grayson's Navy taking up the cry- NO QUARTER!!! -- "No Quarter", by Echo's Children 
Still 250 Gigs is a heapsload better then the connection deal I've got. Unlimited speed till the cap limit of 12gig a month is reached, then it's cut
down to not much better then dial-up. And I can use all a that limit in two weeks in a bad month. So I'd be happy for a 250gig cap, one way even. 
They are approaching the problem from the wrong end.
ISPs have oversold their networks. They are trying to handle more traffic than they were built for. They should be limiting people on how fast they can go, not how many miles they drive (to continue the autobahn analogy). If I got together with a couple of other people on my local network segment we could totally screw over everyone else on said network segment. Simply by trying to shove a lot of data through the pipes at the same time, and we could do this while we stayed well below the 250GB cap imposed. I (and my 2 housemates) could also pull down over 500GB a month and not cause the ISP any problems if we intelligently throttle our connections based on time of day. What should happen is that when the network gets congested, everyone is forced to slow down. Surprise, Surprise, this is already a basic feature of best-effort TCP routing. But the ISPs want to maintain a good user experience for the masses who simply are surfing web pages, and slow down the heavy users (mainly bittorrent and related apps that can tolerate delays[1]). Comcast attempted to do this in the US by issuing resetting for bittorrent connections it saw (also known as the wrong way to do things), and it is still getting dragged over the coals about it. They should have just dropped the packets of the heaviest users (ideally on a protocol aware basis) until the problem solves itself. The problem with this approach is that when a company that offers ip-telephony starts to drop packets in skype calls regulators take a very close look at what is going on. They would also need to change their eulas to state that this is the kind of service they offer. As a bit of math, 250GB per month works out to be 101KB/sec. [1]: Any program that downloads files over a period of time greater than 'the next five minutes' qualifies here. We are not dealing with instantaneous gratification. If the bittorrents I'm pulling down take 16 hours instead of 12 hours I really don't care. -Terry ----- "so listen up boy, or pornography starring your mother will be the second worst thing to happen to you today" TF2: Spy 
Sadly, this isn't news to me. When Comcast bought out Patriot Media (or at least bought the franchise in my area, I was never entirely clear which) a few
months back, I read the EULA that came with the announcement of the new service. The 250 Gig limit was already explicitly written in, along with that "X thousand songs, X movies" comparison. I thought about my usage levels and figured that -- compared to the alternative, which is their much-trumpeted and highly-illegal program blockage -- I could live with it. -- Bob --------- Then the horns kicked in... ...and my shoes began to squeak.
It is a better option, but I still think it is a lesser of two evils. Emphasis on evil. Thing is that Sweno is right about the problem being tackled in a
sledge-hammer-for-a-fly manner, and I would be absolutely pissed if I went from pulling 300-400 kilobyte/second downloads to 100 instead (I was pulling those rates several years back). What really needs to happen is that they need to cut a little fat off their bottom line to put in new infrastructure where it's needed. As much money as they make, they should be able to afford it instead of cutting their customers like that. And I stick with my argument about how HD content is starting to progress on the Internet and how it can be adversely impacted by these bandwidth limitations. I don't think we'll see these kinds of problems here in Japan where fiber optic connections are the prefered broadband connection at about US$45/month and DSL lines (our fastest ones are their slowest) are the equivilant of dial-up. The Japanese definitely know how to handle bandwidth and Comcast should be taking notes.
The reason Comcast is in such trouble isn't because they were traffic shaping (though there has been a lot of noise about that in the past), it is because they were forging packets from both parties in the communication.
If Alice and Bob are communicating (via Bittorrent) Comcast would forge a connection reset packet that looked like it was from Alice and send it to Bob, and do the same thing from Bob to Alice. So both sides would think the connection has been closed. The problem with this (aside from the general WTF of it) is that it runs afoul of several wiretapping laws in the states. Hence litigation. The reason this isn't a open and shut issue is that ISPs haven't been prosecuted under these circumstances before, and the lawers need to convince the judges that: yes these laws do apply. On a slightly different tact: Several of the pundits that I listen to have pegged this as defensive measure against IPTV. Nowadays most people (in the states) are pulling down maybe 10-30 Gigs a month. But most people aren't watching 8 hours of TV quality video (let alone HD quality) video on their computer. An hour of HD programing from revision3 (one of my daily sources of video on the web) is about a Gig. 8 Gigs a day, 30 days a month, is 240Gigs. For one person, just for replacing their TV feed. But most households don't have one person, they have somewhere between 2-4. And so the other shoe drops, what happens when you go over? There are no plans in place that will allow you to pay more. The only option I have heard of is to buy a second line (ha!). Addressing Blackaeronaut's comment on cost: Japan is also one of the most densely populated countries there is. The cost per subscriber for DoCoMo to drag an OC48/OC96 line to an apartment complex is relatively cheap. The population densities in the States work against us, none of the last mile carriers want to lay fiber down. Because that would cut into their profits. I have only heard of a few building in NY and SF where the residents have gotten together and on a grass roots level purchased a business level OC12/OC24 from the local carrier. The cost of rewiring the building is not cheap, nor is the instillation of said line. But if everyone is on board, it can be done for cheaper than the standard DSL package per head. -Terry ----- "so listen up boy, or pornography starring your mother will be the second worst thing to happen to you today" TF2: Spy Quote: Japan is also one of the most densely populated countries there is. The cost per subscriber for DoCoMo to drag an OC48/OC96 line to an apartment complex isProfit, schmoffit. That's what the hell your profits are for! It's the stuff that comes after you've paid all the bills, fixed and or replaced whatever needed it, and taken your payrolls out. Developments like this are supposed to come out of your profit margin. Ye gods, big business needs to understand that when it comes to bandwidth, the "If you build it, they will come" mentality applies. And don't you dare say that you wouldn't want to have more bandwidth! As for grass roots... At one point in time while I was living in Richmond, VA, my roomies and I had ordered up the local Cable service package which included digital phone, TV and cable internet. Two days after we got it, the connection speed went to shit. A net-friend pointed me to DSLReports and we soon discovered that our problem was not isolated, but an incredibly wide-spread issue due to a massive consumption of bandwidth (all eyes immediately looked toward the college campuses that had recently just gotten hooked up and at the very onset of the Bit Torrent craze to boot). To make matters worse, this was just after a massive merger that made gave the local provider a monopoly over all cable internet in the greater Richmond area, and we'd already tried DSL but the infrastructure on our block, as it was for most of Richmond, dated back to the 1920's or earlier. This situation went on for so long that there were groups of people in our regional DSLR forum thinking seriously about ordering up a nice big fiber-optic line and divying it up throughout their neighborhoods, cost of laying cable be damned. Of course, once word got out about that, the local provider's new pipes came online. If Comcast continues down this road, they can expect to see grass roots bandwidth movements like those, even in surburbia. 
I laugh at your puny complaints. Up here in the Yukon, Northwestel has a monopoly, and they know it. If I choose the most expensive package at $239.95/month I
get 30 Gigabytes a month free, with overages costing $0.01/MB. Max download speed is 4 mbps (which it will never ever be). -- If you become a monster to put down a monster you've still got a monster running around at the end of the day and have as such not really solved the whole monster problem at all. 
There's an article on The Register today that looks at this from the other side of the question:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/09/02/bennett_fcc/]Why the US faces broadband price hikes -- Rob Kelk "Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of the same sovereign, servants of the same law." - Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012
Jesus H. Christ, save us from the morons in our government!
Okay, so the FCC is passing farked up rulings that is forcing ISPs to adopt management policies that we find rather detestable. What are our options? There's the obvious "write your senator and representative" route, but we all know that probably won't be terribly effective. As I see it, there's only one real solution. Companies like Comcast need to increase their bandwidth capacity, but there's no need to eat the cost completely. They can set aside a service tier that is explicitly for the customers that use PtP and block it completely on the other tiers. The PtP tier gets premium bandwidthin exchange for a higher service fee, say about 20% more than the standard service tier. This extra cash goes into increasing the bandwidth of the networks so as to support the new tier. Of course, with that being a mere 1% of the users that's not going to be a heck of a lot of extra money for expansion. Too bad, like I said before they can afford to take a little fat off their bottom lines - it's what it's there for. Additional bandwidth can be realocated from the standard service tiers - it's not like the casual downloaders and web surfers are gonna miss a megabit or two when, on average, current service provides what? Eight megabits? On that note, Comcast should be providing a low-end tier for the really casual users. You know, the people who just wanted a somewhat faster and more convenient connection than dial-up. For these people a single megabit is pure bliss. I know that there are service providers that do tiered service like this, just not without packet discrimination on the slower tiers, so it's not like it would be something impossible to implement. Thoughts? Quote:As I see it, there's only one real solution. Companies like Comcast need to increase their bandwidth capacity, Yes, which is a problem. Backbone capacity is growing faster than network traffic, but comcast's and most other ISPs have oversold the last mile capacity by a hughe amount and there is no competition to change that. Comcast can't get in the business of allowing some traffic an not allowing others, it's hard to do and they will lose their common carrier status, meaning they would be liable for millions or even billions of dollars. The problem is peak utilization, so the obvious solution would be to throttle bandwith during peak times, much like electricity cost is scaled by time, at noon electricity is ten times as expensive as it is at 5 am. The worst Comcast did in my opinion was lie about what they where doing. That was completely unacceptable, if they hadn't lied I wouldn't have been happy with what they where doing but I wouldn't be anywhere near as angry. E: "Did they... did they just endorse the combination of the JSDF and US Army by showing them as two lesbian lolicons moving in together and holding hands and talking about how 'intimate' they were?" B: "Have you forgotten so soon? They're phasing out Don't Ask, Don't Tell."
Yes, Comcast lied. There's nothing we can really do about that now, is there?
The question is, what can we do about the clusterfuck that the FCC has made of this debacle? Quote:Jesus H. Christ, save us from the morons in our government! Indeed. The article does make a pretty compelling argument for allowing them to throttle back P2P connections, and IMO it makes sense. Nobody expects a multi-gig download to be fast. So long as they are allowing a reasonable speed and aren't blocking connections completely, I wouldn't have a problem with it. -- Sucrose Octanitrate. Proof positive that with sufficient motivation, you can make anything explode. |
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