@Home quietly initiates 128k upload cap

Ethan Butterfield writes "Looks like the days of wine and roses are over for @Home subscribers. A global 128k upload rate cap is @Home's solution to their chronic bandwidth problems. Man, I'm glad I have DSL. " Even 128k seems fast to me, but this article will definitely raise your eyebrows.

@home user groups.

All you @home subscribers, let's get on the newsgroups and start hollering about this. To me, this cap is totally unacceptable, whether or not I use a web/ftp server. What happened to "100 times faster than a modem"?? Indeed, if @home sees this as an acceptable alternative to actually upgrading their network, I will certainly find another type of service.
The newsgroups you can post to and get more information from are as follows:
athome.discussion-athomesvc
athome.discussion-gen eral
athome.users-general
I think that only @home subscribers have access to these groups.

Oversubscription

graph available [mediaone.net]

I just have to tell you right now why the real reason for these caps are. It has nothing to do with "bandwidth" problems. They've oversubscribed their userbase. I have a graph [mediaone.net] up on my website detailing this. If you want the scripts to generate it yourself, contact me. What disgusts me the most is that I was paying $40 a month when the service was *good* during prime time. Now I'm still paying $40 a month, but the service is completely unusuable during prime-time. Please contact your PUC (Public Utilities Commissioner), as well as the technically-savvy press. This is an outrage - they're delivering less, but charging the same rate. In any other industry, this would be outright fraud.



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Absolutely no surprise.

I've known all along that cable modem companies would have to start capping rates. Just join any major IRC server (dalnet, efnet) and look at a few of the channel topics and you'll see why. Warez junkies are going to ruin it for everyone.

And don't forget, you're getting EXACTLY what you pay for. I can't tell you how many times people have bragged to me about the high speed of their internet connection because they have a cable modem, and my attempting to tell them that its a solution that will turn around and bite them in the ass, falls on deaf ears.

Cable modem statistics and prices are based on the assumption that the average user won't use any more bandwidth than a regular modem user will. The average person "surfing the net" won't read his webpages any faster, they'll just load faster. Email won't increase by much, and sure those downloads will be faster, but your average modem user doesn't download that much. $40 a month, or whatever cable modem prices are going for, is more than enough to cover a large number of users.

Ok, so there will be a few users who use more than their share, this also isn't a problem. Every isp has the occasional dialup user who never disconnects and is literally tying up the line 24/7. However, there aren't enough of them that they cause busy signals for others, so they can safely be ignored, or at least worked into the average appropriately.

The big problem with cable modems is that the average user, to whom a 28.8 modem is more than
adaquate, has no reason to switch to cable. Therefore, cable has a skewed user base. They have a lot more bandwidth hungry users who are exploiting high bandwidth at low cost, and fewer
low bandwidth users to balance the load out.

This means that cable modem providers are going to spend more money on bandwidth than they will recieve from their users. Also, cable networks are optimized for downstream. Certainly, they can handle the bandwidth in both directions, but since they expect clients to be primarily in the business of downloading, they therefore provide more bandwidth on the downstream side. This is why they don't want servers, as servers, especially when something in demand is offered for download, will chew up a LOT of bandwidth very quickly.

So they cap the uploads. Complain if you want, but 128K is still pretty damn good for only $40 a month. And while they may not have capped the downstream yet, I wouldn't blink for too long, because it will come there eventually too. GTE has done it already.

So, you want a large number of IP addresses, you'll have to pay for it. If you want dedicated high bandwidth rates, go get a T1. Yes, it will cost you a lot more money, but its all yours. 1.544 mbps and NOBODY will tell you how much of it you can use, as you can use all of it. But you're going to pay for it.

-Restil

@home is for the home

Please remember that the bandwidth for a cable modem is shared among all of the users. Now when everyone on a block is using a shared resource, I'd like to think that we can all have a bit of respect for our fellow users. Let me put together a little analogy.

For example, lets say that you live out in the desert on a dirt road. There are about 50 or 60 other families who all live along the same road with you. This road is so bad that you have to leave an extra 20 minutes for your commute because of it. Fed up, you look into paving a section of the road, but it costs way too much for you to take on alone.

Now imagine that some big company comes to town and offers to pave the road for a small cost, split among all of the negihbors. Everyone chips in thier small monthly fee, and soon there is a pristine 2-lane strip of asphalt. You cut your commute in half and now you can get a boat and trailer for the weekends. Life is good.

Then your next door neighbor tears down his house, and tilts up a 500000sf Wal Mart national distribution center. Pretty soon trucks start clogging that little strip of road. Not to be outdone, the Flynts up the street build a mega-theme park. Cars line up for miles just to get in. The Waltons and the Flynts are still only chipping in a few bucks a month, but they are using most of the capacity of the road. Now your commute has expanded by 40 minutes each way, but your stuck.

OK, so how to fix the problem? Limit the number of axels on the residential road. Close the gates to the theme park. Then everyone can share the same strip of highway. It might be hard on their business to have these restrictions imposed. Yet, if they as a business customer want that much road, they should build their own. The same goes for the theme park. The same goes for the guy running Phil's Playhouse of Porn and Top 50 W4r3Z site next door off of his cable modem.

The cost of the bandwidth for cable is so low because it is shared among all of the users. If you want or need your own big pipe going out, you really should be paying for it rather than taking advantage of the guy next door. Just because you can sit in your living room with the blinds drawn and suckle on the teat of high bitrate bliss, does not mean that you should be the only one on your block with the privelage.

Its really easy to make the company the scapegoat in this situation. False advertising claims fly. Hey, its really not 50X faster than my old modem! No, that is a marketing come on phrased for a technically illiterate public. Sadly, people are starting to think that 56K is a brand of modem. Grandiose claims of peak speeds of 1.5megabits per second with a CIR of 10kbps does not make a catcy ad (but it does make a nice line in a service agreement.)

What it comes down to is that there is no such thing as a free lunch. Yes, there are good non-business uses for upstream bandwidth. However I would rather have some sort of limit to curb abusers, than have an unusable connection because of my neighbors. Yes the company can take steps to increase bandwidth. However those steps are costly, and those costs are either reflected in higher bills, or lower returns for investors. A little respect for the guy next door would go a long way in this case.