AT&T/Comcast Consider Aussie-Style Bandwidth Caps 512
LazySiow writes "Having looked at Australia's pioneering efforts in cappedband services,
AT&T Broadband and Comcast are considering applying download caps of their own. Since the two approved a merger proposal last week, they will be the largest broadband provider in the States, and will not only affect a large percentage of of users, it will set a large and potentially unstoppable precedent for caps all around the country."
Vote with your Dollar!!! (Score:5, Informative)
The day it is introduced, call your provider and let them know you will be canceling due to this restriction. Have new service with another company installed and cancel on the last day of your billing cycle!
Article Correction - 5 gigabytes NOT gigabits. (Score:5, Informative)
Decimals hacked off
5 gigs / 30 days = 166.66 megs a day.
166.66 megs a day / 24 hour = 6.94 megs an hour
6.94 megs an hour / 60 minutes = 115 kilobytes per minute
115 Kilobytes / 60 seconds = 1.91 kilobytes a second...
and 1.91 kilobytes * 8 = 15.28 kilobits a second.
Comcast Online - 1994 speed at 2002 prices.
AT&T BI (Score:5, Informative)
AT&T BI is a great ISP if you enjoy...
- 75% packet loss or more to servers in the same city as you.
- 300ms latency to servers in the same city as you.
- packet jitter so bad you could swear you really were SURFING the internet because the packets come in waves.
- not playing online games.
- your "always on" internet service being disconnected.
- paying 5x more for the same service that a 56k user gets.
- the worst customer support center EVER! One of the many outages took 2 weeks to fix, and thats because they didn't send anyone out until one and a half weeks after I called!
- having your ISP change the TOS on you every other day.
The one thing with ATTBI that has always worked correctly has been email... well, that is when I am connected.I will go back to dialup if I have to. Heck, its just $10 a month. Saving $40 a month and still getting roughly the same service... sounds like a wise move.
Re:I have ben capped since @home went away (Score:5, Informative)
capping your bandwidth is like having a speed limit on highways. most people don't have a problem with that. its when you start telling people how long a distance they can travel with their vehicles every month that they get pissed off.
two separate issues here.
Please please please usage based charging (Score:5, Informative)
* Legislation against spam
* Fewer stupid graphic heavy websites
* Smaller more efficient programs
* Greater use of zlib
Furthermore, it means I can:
* Stop subsidising college geeks trying to collect 40Gb of ripped music for the hell of it.
Now, at the _commercial_ level, it's a different story, and I'd hate to see the removal of peering arrangements and so on. But at consumer level, gee, let's just pay for what we use and not pay for what we don't. Is it really so hard?
Ideally, signup and connection to broadband should be trivially cheap, and then payment should be usage based. This opens broadband to poorer people, with amount of usage based on inclination and ability to pay. Currently, broadband is expensive to signup for, meaning its users are exclusively rich people who then think they should be able to host websites / download mp3's eternally as a basic human right. Feh.
Telstra is evil (Score:3, Informative)
Telstra [bigpond.com]'s most limited account is 300Mb limit per month at AU$54.95. Each additional Mb is charged at 15.9c per megabyte.
Some Australian ISPs charge for each additional megabtye over your limit, and others throttle your speed to something ridiculous (like 28.8kbps). I ordered the latter for my uncle when setting up his ADSL because many people are ignorant of their web usage (at least at first).
If a user on the 300Mb plan downloads 500Mb in their first month, they will pay
$54.95 + 200Mb * $0.159 = $54.95 + $31.80 = $86.75.
If you think that is bad, if a 3Gb user downloads 3.8Gb in their first month (like most teenagers I know), they're up for
$87.95 + 800Mb * $0.139 = $87.95 + $111.20 = $199.15.
I'm suprised no Aussies brought this up in the recent article Add-Ons Add Up [slashdot.org].
Independent resources for market research include Whirlpool [whirlpool.net.au] (Australian Broadband News) and Broadband Choice [broadbandchoice.com.au] for indexed summaries of all providers plans. Read them first! Please!
Re:On The Plus Side...... (Score:2, Informative)
Actually, Rogers capped the downstream rate at 1500kbits/sec, and the upstream rate at 190kbits a second, down from the old @Home setting on 3000kbit down, 400kbit up. This is just about half. Actually getting these speeds aren't really possible, Rogers doesn't have the infrastructure to support it.
Having said that, Rogers plans to introduce *byte* caps, where there is a monthly limit on the amount of data you transfer in January of 2003, with billing for overusage beginning in March. It'll probably mimic the Sympatico caps, for anyone who cares.
Not exactly... (Score:5, Informative)
Optus offers a slightly nicer system. Once you use up all your limit, they drop you down to a 28kbps connection, so you join the hundreds of thousands of dialup users in australia on sub-par connections. But at least you don't then pay for phone calls on top of this.
And while I'm complaining about cable networks, it seems that Telstra & Optus can now give each other CATV channels, to "aid competition". Which is really strange, since they were always competing with each other anyway. And the ironic twist is this: Telstra (our partially-government-owned telco, soon to be fully privatized) is charging more for the extra channels from Optus, while Optus is charging less for the Telstra channels. We would have switched to Optus many moons ago indeed, but for some reason, the government wouldn't allow one single unified cable network to be installed, but insisted that both companies install their own. But Optus, not having the backing of the government, decided to put their cable up in more populated areas, so of course, people who actually might use it (like us) miss out.
In conclusion, you really have to fight it! Most broadband users just sat there and did nothing about the cap, and now we're stuck with it. I've always envisioned the USA as a "mondo cheap bandwidth" place, and now that you're reduced to the garbage that we have to face every day...
Viva la bandwidth!
Aussie style ? It's normal in New Zealand too (Score:1, Informative)
Telecom provide two 'products' - jetstream, which is unlimited bandwidth (up to whatever you can get with DSL on your phone line), and jetstart, which is bandwidth capped at 128/128mbps (16 kilobytes per second)
With jetstream, you have to pay traffic charges, which has pissed a lot of people off when they have been stung by someone else's unsolicited inbound traffic, and had to pay for it. (Yes, you can rake up a big bill for your enemies who have jetstream by simply flood pinging them for a week)
Telecom NZ charges a monthly fixed fee for Jetstart (for the luxury of connecting your copper pair into a DSLAM at the exchange), plus your ISP charges a fee for routing your traffic.
On top of that, most ISPs in New Zealand that route DSL have their own traffic limit on how much you can use per month/billing period - eg, 5gb or 10gb. If you exceed that, most "fine" you by charging a hell of a lot per meg for every meg you exceed your limit by.
Re:Thankfully theres still -some- competition (Score:2, Informative)
Now, I rarely download MP3 and never DivX. But I have a web server (500 visit a day from 3614 players from a potential of 9000 french DAoC players), a mail server, and some DAV folders...
I never use more than 6 GB a month...
All that to say that the precedent is already set in others country and only the MP3 and DivX junky complain about it, the causual (and the not so causual) user have nothing to fear about this...
You fear oligopoly? well, in Europe we come from Monopoly of the national telecom and now we get oligopoly with telecom from other country 'invading' our country. And I can say that oligopoly is better than monopoly. It is near impossible to create a mom & pops ISP here in Europe...
Local Mirrors (Score:5, Informative)
I admin a system with a 5GB cap at work (1500kbps down) and so far this month we've transferred 715MB, between 10 of us.
Capping is fine , as long as there's a local mirror of something that I want, for free.
Eg. I'm with Telstra - they have a area for a lot of online games - they then have a file area for files required for games etc. All this (being on a local Telstra server) is free. Now
So, If they drop a SimTel (or whatever) mirror in locally and don't charge, then the only people who'll *really* suffer are the P2P crowd.
Yes , it limits other uses of the internet , such as video-on-demand etc... but the infrastructure still isn't there for everyone to have a cheap, guaranteed X Mbit pipe to their door.
WARNING! (Score:4, Informative)
It isn't all that bad with ADSL here... (Score:5, Informative)
Anyway, it isn't as bad as you make it out to be in your post. I live in Sydney and have iiNet ADSL [ii.net], which has 12GB caps on a 512/128 link for AU$80. They shape you to 72kbps once you hit the cap, and they have a heap of unmetered internal content, including a few 128kbps Shoutcast streams and free P2P within your state. It puts the value you get from Telstra/Optus to shame.
i-green [igreen.net] offer unlimited 256/64 for AU$80 too. Data caps aren't the end of the world - they just encourage competition in the market, and encourage ISPs to peer together to offer cheaper data to the customers.
As implemented in an Australian College (Score:2, Informative)
Our cost structure is driven entirely by our upstream providers, and since we're connecting students, we aim to break even on bandwidth costs, and pay for our infrastructure out of a $25 connection fee.
We have tiered charges, as part of an academic network, which look like this.
sites in
sites in
sites in
All other sites - 10 c (AU) per meg
In any case, our customers, I'll admit, are a fairly captive market as far as getting broadband access from their doom rooms go, however computer labs are run by a different division, and work quite differently. They have a 5meg per day quota, which accumulates over time, but is capped at 40 meg (and below at -20).
A lot of people have recently been asking for this system to be expanded to the dorms, although from what I gather, it's more because this access is 'free' rather than being billed, not out of preference for the cost model.
I would say, then, that we have a fairly good representation of how a system like this can work, and I would say on the whole it does so pretty well. We have a wide mix of users, from those who spend $100s per month, to people who don't even go through $25 in a year.
For a time last year, there was a hole in our billing system which was allowing people to get free web access through a proxy server on campus. People who discovered this, approached $400 a month before we found the problem (and luckily we had ways of tracking the usage, it just wasn't built into our standard billing process). Some of these people were rather displeased at having to pay back for the access, however it was all resolved without much trouble. What this proves, I suppose, is that the billing becomes a consideration for the residents, and they adjust their habits accordingly.
For an average user, however, people seem happy with the system. I can't imagine justifying a move to a flat fee structure, even if it were capped, because it would be impossible to sell to the vast majority here. I suppose that's the main moral, Average users aren't willing to subsidize the heavy users, and it's the average users who make up the majority.
There will always be some unhappy people when their loopholes are taken away, but these same people, in another area, are unhappy about subsidising others. Compulsory residents association fees, for example, most of which are spent on sport and alcohol, tend not to go over so well for those who don't participate, and hence don't get their money's worth. Of course, I could go on and on...free health care and so on and so on.
Anyway, I should put an end to this rambling...
The billing system we developed for all this is up for (open source) grabs if anyone wants to maintain it, since I'll be moving on, although it's very hacky and not exactly documented at all.
On the whole, I'd consider our experience positive, and I would personally look for a usage based system despite being a rather high end user myself. Basically, I figure there's always going to be someone with more time than me who I'll be subsidizing.
Somebody has to pay for it (Score:5, Informative)
As a DSL customer (or cable, for that matter) you are connected to a circuit of the speed that corresponds with your billing agreement. But, you might say, why can I only get 350kbs when I have a 768/128 circuit? Well, that's because there are several people that either think it's their God-given right to do P2P at full throttle on the upload, or sustain a constant 500kbs download 24 hours a day.
Everybody here on /. is smart enough to realize that cable and DSL are consumer products, and as such, the pricing model is not designed for 24/7 max upload and download. If you want 24/7 1.54/128, buy a T. That's only about $700 a month.
It's kinda like dialup; if you and a bunch of other customers are connected 24 hours a day for $19.95/month, but the phone line that you are connecting to costs the ISP $25.00/month, the ISP loses money.
High speed is similar. The _average_ download/upload is maybe 20kbs/8kbs. If enough people sustain for days (or weeks) 300kbs/128kbs, the network is gonna get thrashed, and the ISP will do one of three things - charge more, throttle bandwidth, or go out of business because enough of the customers bailed out due to slow download speeds, attributed to 5% of the customers using 50 or a hundred times the bandwidth of the "normal" customer. Or, if they are really gluttons for punishment, they'll order up more T's to handle the psycho bandwidth, then go out of business, because 5% of the customers thought that it was their God-given right to go full throttle 24/7.
To further belabor the point, I recall a really good analogy, and that is of electric power. If there were no power meter on the outside of your abode, and you thought it a cool idea to set up a Beowolf cluster of a thousand machines, all with monitors, you would be getting more power than your neighbor, but paying the same amount. But let's say PC's (with monitors) were $1.00 apiece, and lots of your neighbors could install clustering software in an hour. So, you and a few of your neighbors are each using 50KW, while the _average_ power usage is maybe 400W. Free lunch? For a while...until the power company figures out that they are losing a ton of money to the Beowolf gangs.
Hey, I have fairly sucky cable service. It drops off every couple of days, and the latency is so bad sometimes that I have to go to our office to do any work using vi!. (I can't get DSL from my employer...too far away from the DSLAM.) But still, as evil and sucky as the cable company is, there is only a finite amount of bandwidth available, and if they want to get more, of course they have to pay.
I hereby propose an inititave to P2P developers: default upload is not full-throttle. THAT is what is making P2P the black-sheep of ISP's. Something like a dialog box that spells it out for the user. "At what percentage do you wish to upload? If you choose 100%, Your ISP might not think you're very nice.
Re:Vote with your Dollar!!! (Score:3, Informative)
Here (New Zealand) all broadband ISPs have data caps (eg. 10Gb free per month and 10c/Mb after), but many only apply this limit to international traffic, and offer free national traffic.
This means that the ISP is fast for international traffic because it isn't full of people leeching warez from america, and fast for national traffic because there is a lot of national broadband infrastructure.
It also means that I download my stuff from people in the same country --- and let those who do have unlimited access for whatever reason (eg. works at a big ISP) do all the importing, and then several people download it from this person's web server, and then everybody else can grab it from the national P2P network [p2p.net.nz], which is not subject to throttling [idg.net.nz] like the international networks.
Since ISPs introduced these caps, my P2P usage (and that of many others) has increased. The ISPs save money and provide better service too, the only losers are the vampires who continuously download without giving anything back.
Upwards and onwards!
I imagine ISPs in the USA may offer similar free-for-this-state traffic, and cap inter-state and international traffic..?
Australia (Score:3, Informative)
Telstra caps thier retail broadband at a certain limit, and then starts charging.
Optus also caps their retail broadband and then throtles the speed to 40-56k once the customer goes over, but does not charge more.
For retail customers optus's system is better because they know exactly how much they have to pay. I had one customer who paid AU$700 ($400US) for his internet because he did not understand how much 300mb was.
Business is another matter all together.
Sympatico changing to 10 Gbyte (Score:4, Informative)
$30.00 (Canadian) maximum extra charge/month on anything over 10Gbytes upload or download.
To be fair to Sympatico, their servers tend to be always available.
Re:ISP's need to think. (Score:2, Informative)
I live in a "ruralish" surburban area, in a development with 27 houses. Comcast is the only option available, not counting dial-up. Until DSL's last-mile problems are resolved, that is how it is going to stay. Although, even if I *did* have DSL, Verizon would be the provider, so I'd lose either way. Hell, I even tried to get a frational T1 from XO, but live too far away from a major city.
I would love to establish a community ISP. However, the costs, expertise and constant attention that it would require are prohibitive. To say nothing of having to convince my neighbors to join in on the fun - for the same $50 per household that they are paying now. That is also assuming that each house participated, which is not likely.
I'm eager to find an alternative or viable solution. However, walking away from the service (as has been suggested previously) is not an option. Over the last 9 years, the Internet has become an essential tool in my life, both personally and professionally. I use it more than the telephone and it is certainly more important to me than television (of which I literally watch about 1 hour a week - no...seriously.). Whining to my congressman also won't work as this is a legitimate business decision - something that Comcast (or any provider) is certainly entitled to do. And I do not see this as a result of their monopoly. Any other company is more than welcome to lay down some fiber to my house. The cable company is the only one that has actually gone ahead and done it. They deserve the exclusivity of their service. Not to venture off-topic, but I have never understood how a utility company, such as the power or telephone company, can finance and install the infrastructure for their service, and then be forced to allow other companies to use that same infrastructure. But that's a discussion for another thread, I suppose.
So, short of just "sucking it up" or "taking it" (depending on which way you're facing, I guess), what are the options?
Re:Vote with your Dollar!!! (Score:5, Informative)
Get real, I own a very small ISP, and there is next to no money to be made in that buisness. There is NO SUCH thing as free bandwidth! It costs me lots of money to buy my bandwidth. My customers pay me for thier usage, and I keep tabs on how much is used and when. Otherwise I would have one or two users killing the service for everyone else.
Now, a coop might be able to do such a thing if you have close proximity and can use wireless for distribution. But it requires that someone be responsible for the incoming line, and to deal with things, like DNS servers, email servers, IP allocation, or NATing and firewalling, etc. If you have a tight knit group of geeks, who do not quibble about usage and such, and you all can get along, you are set.
Nice idea in theory, but back to reality for the majority of people out there... In practice there are many more variables/problems/issues to deal with when running a coop or an small buisness. There is liability, accouting, infrastructure, capitalization, to name a few. The sad truth is that the Cable providers will charge as much as they can to skim the cream off the top of the customer base. Those with few other options are not going to start a Coop, or thier own ISP just to get unlimited bandwidth, it is too har and time consuming. The economics are not there...