Inaction, sloth, moral turpitude
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Net neutrality and bandwidth caps don't matter
THERE HAS BEEN a lot of talk lately over usage quotas on cable modems and how some are fair and others are not at all. The problem that most people don't get is that the numbers have nothing to do with the Internet, the entire argument is a diversion.
Cable companies are throwing the idea of usage quotas out now, starting absurdly low in order to get something in place. With tactics that would make Karl Rove proud, they are picking a fight over nothing to get their opponents to agree on a cap, any cap, without realizing the true goals.
The cable monopolies don't actually give a damn about how much data goes over their wires. They don't care if you are surfing to the local newspaper or sucking down leaks of awful Hollywood lowest common denominator films, it is irrelevant to them. Bandwidth costs are almost zero, and given how things are set up, there is no way a single person or even a small number can max out the bandwidth of a cable loop.
DSL providers and other related bandwidth merchants, most with less bandwidth per household have no problem with 'over usage', so why does cable? The caps cable companies are trying to impose don't make sense when you look at the technology involved and the bandwidths available, bandwidth usage isn't an issue at all.
If it isn't about bandwidth, then what are all these quotas about? Keeping the cable TV monopoly a monopoly. No, really, it is. The set up goes like this. Cable companies whine about bandwidth, then trial all sorts of silly anti-consumer and illegal measures like DPI to fire people up. Angry consumers respond and say that they will not tolerate those measures. Eventually, even paid for politicians will chime in around election season, and these 'alternate' measures will be shot down. DPI and packet classification will be effectively outlawed. That is OK though, they were straw men.
From there, cable companies will keep whining about bandwidth overuse, and the 'few' who 'abuse' the system. This is also a straw man, but they will claim usage quotas are necessary to keep the 'abusers' from hurting others, keep piracy down, keep their routers from melting, allowing them to make enough to pay for upgrades, or whatever is the current problem in the headlines. Think of it like The War on Communism/Drugs/Terror/Free Thought, the enemy is out there and undefinable, so don't question our motives.
After the problems of DPI and packet classification, the two sides meet in the 'middle', usage quotas. Then the fight becomes how big to make them, but the war is already lost. Evil organizations like Time Warner set the caps as low as 5GB/month while charging more than my 3G phone provider (T-Mobile FWIW) does for the same data transfer. Much more in fact.
On the high side, some like Comcast, entirely evil in new and less savory ways, set the limits at 250GB a month. They argue that even the most abusive downloader that likes Hollywood, Bollywood, and Norwegian films will have a hard time hitting those caps.
Let's be kind and look at a cap higher than anyone has proposed, 300GB/month. Assuming that a month has 30 days, that means 10GB a day, more than enough for anyone, right? How can anyone claim that they realistically need more than that? That is over 100KBps(10,000/24/60/60 = .116). Lets just call it 1 Megabit bandwidth usage, and say that if you use 1Mbps 24/7, you will barely avoid the cap.
1Mbps is peanuts, a somewhat modern cable loop can handle everyone on it using that bandwidth and have tons left over. That isn't enough to strain their routers anywhere but the oldest COs, and with DOCSIS 3.0 going up in many places, that load will be effectively zero for the cable companies. Bandwidth is not a problem, and the caps are a straw man.
Again, so why the fuss? Think about this, a Blu-Ray movie data stream can take up to 54Mbps. A decent 1080p picture can be done with half that, call it 25Mbps, and if you compress it to awfulness like the cable companies are so fond of doing, you can probably get away with 10Mbps before people drop your service for quality reasons.
For the sake of argument, I will be using 10Mbps as the floor for HD digital video in the future. See the problem with usage quotas now? If you have a piss-poor HD video playing, you will eat up your bandwidth cap in about 2.5 hours of TV watching a day. According to the latest numbers I can find, Nielsen says that Americans watch on average about 142.5 hours a month with teens shifting a lot of that online.
If you watched all of this online, at crappy quality, that would be about 5x the 300GB/month cap. Let me say that again, average TV watching at a quality so low it is noticable will consume 5x more than a usage cap more generous than any proposed. If you have a second TV in your house, it just gets worse, and add normal net usage on top of that......
Basically, the cable internet usage quotas have nothing to do with the internet, they are all about protecting the cable companies TV business. With any quotas in place, it is basically impossible to watch TV in an 'average' way over the internet. You can't even get half of average at barely acceptable quality.
It totally locks content providers out of selling to the consumers. Most people only watch 2-3 cable channels regularly, wouldn't you rather pay $5 per channel/month than $59+++ for digital cable stocked full of 731 channels that you really don't care about? Ultimate Fighting fans probably will never watch Oprah, and Fox News aficionados will be unlikely to watch CNN, but if you want one, you have to get that and pay for 72 others too.
Cable companies price things so 'must have' channels are in different packages forcing you to buy more crap than you want, with emphasis on crap. With the coming of the internet, consumers can go directly to the content providers they actually care about directly. This cuts cable out of the loop totally.
Obviously that won't be allowed to happen as long as cable has a monopoly over the pipes as they do in most areas. If they outright ban the consumer to content route, government will do unpalatable things to them, like making them compete or treat consumers fairly. So what do you do if you are a greedy uncaring monopoly that abuses consumers for fun, I mean profit?
Well, you put quotas in place with credible sounding but totally disingenuous reasons for doing so. It helps if you pick a few fight over things you know won't fly first to set the stage. DPI and packet classification were distractions, kind of like Burger King putting a triple Whopper on the menu simple so people think the double is less objectionable. People pick the middle, which is what Burger King really wanted, they don't expect any sane person to buy a triple.
Cable set things up perfectly. They tried techniques so foul that people would loudly object, and then a settlement would be reached on the Double Whopper, aka usage caps. The myopic masses and clueless regulators would eventually 'settle' on a cap that is so far above what any normal human could want that it is almost unreachable through internet use.
In the mean time, the cable monopolies are laughing all the way to the bank. They just insured their monopoly in the face of a new medium, and did so in plain sight with the blessing of their enemies and their regulators.
The content providers are once again enslaved to the cable monopoly, and they lose as well. Consumers are denied choice, and they lose too. Meanwhile, cable execs fret over the color choices for their new Mercedes S-Class, bonus season is coming up.
That is why bandwidth caps are the hot topic, it has nothing to do with the net at all. It is also why you don't see phone companies, wireless companies, or any other bandwidth provider trying to impose them, they have no TV monopoly to protect. They might occasionally chime in just for negotiating leverage later, but it is not a real concern.
Meanwhile, consumers lose, content providers lose, the net loses, emerging technologies are stifled, and regulators pat themselves on the back for a job well done. If you are a cable exec, you can find the S-Class colour choices here. µ
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expose them oligarches
This sums it up pretty well, listen to the TWC rep : were not doing that NOW, i cant tell you how you can measure your consumption. but hes perfectly willing to sell the paranoid old guy who's afraid of going over his limit three internet accounts at a single residence.
skip forward to the 8 min mark
Direct download: The_5_GIG_Rally.mp3
http://www.nypostoplobotomy.com/
There is some sense in the article.
BUT, anyone knew that in France, where internet became a very competitive market
(many company) price is quite nice and price were something like voip, hdtv, 20mbps internet for 30euros/month, for DSL and cable.
I guess those who say p2p is hard to handle are right but really, it aint such a big %.
I think the problem is ... population density. you see, these price in france are for Paris, a high-density region where installation are much more efficient and profitable.
It is not the case in most of the US. save a few big city.
I know cause it's the same problem here in canada:
a few big company, slice the pie between themselves. They each take a town and ask whatever they what as price. You don't have a choice, unless you move to another place, hoping for better price...
and I think charlie is right about tv.
it's their gimmick. But younger people don't give a **** about TV, and in what 20, 30, 40 years? much less? internet or tv will have fusion into each other.
And capitalism without competition isn't nice. it made comcast.
will be to
I just wasted my time reading that crap I want a refund on my time!
This article hit it right on the nose. I'm tired of TV with low bitrates, commercials with louder audio than the program and pop-over advertising.
If there were truly competition via the Internet, I could find the provider that provided high quality video and sound with normalized commercial volume and no pop-over advertising.
If you listen to Comcast's recent earnings report, you will notice that even though they have been aggressively upgrading their network to DOCSIS 3.0, their high speed internet costs have actually gone down by double-digits. That's how crazy cheap these upgrades are. DOCSIS 3.0 is like one of the best bangs for the buck ever.
Additionally, you will also learn that Comcast's HSI is one of their most profitable business lines from a margin perspective.
These types of facts are similar for most other cable providers too.
So this talk about the intense need for capping is pure garbage, especially when the caps are too low, like less than the reasonable 250 GB Comcast cap. I wish it was higher, but I can at least live with it that high.
I truly believe these capping efforts are primarily moves to protect their video business, as laid out in this excellent article. Article well-done!
You can rely on Charlie to expose the issues,but NOT the solutions-maybe,Charlie is a problem?
A lot of'lagging' issues are not down to network infrastructure,but PC hardware,or software.
One frequently encounters 'server' lag,or issues down to firewalls & anti-cheating software when playing online games.
There are people who use pc hardware that has bandwidth limitations & this can cause bottlenecks between client & server.
Again,a lot of UK telephone line infrastructure is Victorian in design & not suitable for current high speed/bandwidth hungry data transmission,it was created for voice only.
Telephone 'bellwires' are often a major cause of 'signal-noise' interference,causing 'packet loss' amongst other things.
I've lost count of the number of Punbuster kicks,due to high 'Ping' et'c,but a solution that I have found & which appears to have increased my line speed,is the use of a BT I-Plate,that filters out,the unwanted noise,giving me a more stable connection.
My speed increased from 1.1mbs-7.0mbs.
This alone doesn't solve the mismatch between upload & download data rates,which is also a problem when playing online games.
However,increased line speed is only limited by the line 'quality' & copper is not ideal,especially as it acts like an aerial in attracting interference.optical is the route to follow,until more advanced networks are created.
Oh the short and sweet... Time Warner Cable recoded 4 Billion in profits in 2007 and spent 180 Million on infrastructural. This is all about money and nothing else. Look at what they were bickering with Viacom approximately $0.26 per customer for the cable companies most popular channels.
They have habitually tried to stop competition lobbied for taxes on competing technologies (satellite and others). They would not have even converted to fiber optic if the government hadn't forced it on them. They see a tide of competition and they are trying to stop it out before it takes hold. They see an entertainment explosion about to happen they can not control. They are scared but they are also connected. Instead of embracing the new technologies they have done all they can to stifle it, hold it back or even kill it off entirely.
Proof: Google HB1252/SB1004 it is a NC bill although the title is Level Playing Field/Cities/Service Providers Act it does the exact opposite to prevent local competition.
One of the things wrong with US Business Model is they want everything to stay the same and don't adapt well to a changing world. They will even create laws to maintain the status qua, at the expense of advancement. There is a reason there are not that many blacksmiths anymore....
What they Fear--- "WiMAX" coming soon!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transfer_rate
Instead of using the binary multiples, transfer rates in kbps are given as SI multiples (10^3 bits per second). So metrics is correct.
What we need is company's like Hulu and YouTube and any other internet video site to start fighting the caps.
I noticed watching www.cnn.com in HD was eating up serious bandwidth, if you watched that 4h/day you would blow by any cap imposed.
Charlie makes a convincing argument in is usual stormtrooper style. This is the kind of article for which I'm reading The Inquirer.
Let's also not forget that some cable providers (eg: Warner, Videotron here in Canada) are also content providers. It's also in their interest to look like they are throwing sand in the P2P machinery.
As a user of Netflix I do watch a number of things from their digital catalog, and as it grows the more I watch. Not surprisingly many newer shows come in HD and my connection is capable to handle it making my goal of skipping bluray doable. Now, once I get a cap I'm screwed.
Regardless of latency, piracy or any other excuse I do see the sense in Charlie's argument and if you think five years ahead it's perfectly logical, if a digital provider gives me what I want why should I pay $50 for the 3 shows I regularly watch?
Besides, if bandwidth and noise were the real issues here they would transmit _all_ their channels digitally (as some companies do in Europe).
I agree with Charlie on this one.
You don't seem to have any clue how bandwidth is allocated/payed for, do you Charlie?
What matters is not the monthly traffic after all but the amount of load a cable network has at a given MOMENT. The cable companies are troubled because at rush hours their networks usually overflow from these P2P transfers.
The problem originates from the practice the cable operators have for their bandwith distribution. They buy a gbit of guaranteed bandwidth from other telcos then resell it to hundreds of clients with the presumption that about a quarter of them will reach their limit simultaneously. (They also tend to build their networks around the same principe.) And this is where the P2P gets their calculations wrong and what the cap is ment to help. Everything this cap stands for is about their bussiness and profits, not because of any real limits, nor it is for our convinience.
@Shawn - there is a technology called QoS ;)
@metrics - 1KB = 1024 bytes not 1000.
Cable companies, like most other consumer broadband, rely on their product being shared by the consumer. Margins for them (again in the consumer market) are really quite small and users who consume stupid amounts of bandwidth invariably end up costing the company money instead of earning them it.
I have an idea. Re-introduce metered broadband where you pay for what you use. It's the fairest method for everyone.
Corrupt telecoms oligopolies should never be a surprise. Sadly in Canada they have massive influence in government. Having subverted the both the CRTC and industry Canada nothing stands in their way.
When the ISP Teksavvy started eating their lunch they simply turned to illegal tactics. They have so much influence that even though the laws were on the books no one had the guts to enforce them.
We complain about it here:
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r22335659-Having-Fun-with-Numbers-at-2AM-the-70Million-question
250Gb and 10mbps....
It's a pipe dream for us in South Africa. Our bandwith costs are enormous and this is the best thing. We must survive on a 3Gb cap and a "trial" 4mb line! I wish I was so furtuate tohave a 250Gb cap and a 10Mb line.
Never assume malice when mere stupidity will do.
The big reason ISPs fret about bandwidth is because it's not engineers running the show, but business people. This is probably a good thing. However, the business people demand information in a format that is simple to look at. They don't want to hear about bouncing busy hour statistics, simultaneous sessions, or anything like that, they want a single number to sum up everything.
Usually this becomes something like $/MB, so they can plug it into their spreadsheets and get a number for projected costs and revenue. They look and see the denominator increasing, and their models say OMGWEHAVETOSTOPTHIS!!!!!
An engineer can explain why an increase in total data transmitted does not really drive costs (or degrade user experience), but in the end the question will be "So, uh, how many $/MB is that?"
Eventually some company will figure this out and undercut the rest, but until then we're stuck.
Good thing there are only about 2 hours a week of TV that is bearable.
cap at 1TB now and nobody will give a shit but in a few years Google Life will be sucking that much down in a day and the consumer will be paying usage by the bit
ps I hate comcast (and yet still have them as 16/4Mbps backup of my six residential multimode fiber lines)
Very good article. You should post articles like these for once.
@Ken: I get upset when those that are supposedly doing journalism go out of their way to “villainify” a company using flawed logic and distorted facts and get people in an uproar without actually stating the actual facts. There is enough distorted media in this world(and lately on this site) with everybody pushing an agenda and the only time it stops I when somebody stands up and calls them out on it. The issue with this cap has more to do with those who feel their “right” is being taken away to download anything and everything they can find off the internet (legal or not). Only Google has that right and they pay for it!!!
@Mat: So it’s alright for the Telco/Wireless companies to impose caps but not the cable companies? Verizon Wireless has a 5GB/m cap, T-Mobile has 1GB/m cap (recently upped to 5GB/m due to release of Google phones), Qwest has an unofficial 250GB/m cap for DSL. Verizon FIOS is currently the only one without a cap but at $140/m and limited availability in most markets, I think it is only a matter of time.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t like seeing monopolies eliminate choice from the consumer but when you look at the business model at hand, they are carrying a large burden of the internet traffic on their networks and required to compete price wise with companies that only handle a small fraction of the data at lower bandwidth/latency. If they are not given a proper way to handle those who abuse their networks then I see them doing some options which are much worse than a simple bandwidth cap.
They are going to spend more money to find ways to REMOVE users who abuse their network. I am afraid we could see Net Neutrality become impacted because they are going to section out those who exceed bandwidth and those who receive packets by a specific type. The fact they have already done this several times should be a good indicator that something needs to change soon. Once that information is obtained, it would be easy to pass that along to RIAA/MPAA or any other watchdog outfit looking for infringement and once identified, company can legally terminate due to user violation of TOS.
Most of the people who have a problem with caps are those who typically are abusing the network by downloading more than anyone else by a significant amount. P2P accounts for almost 90% of Comcast’s bandwidth. Honestly, who downloads 250GB/m of LEGAL content?
Any chance that we get the units right THIS century?
kbit/s 1000 bits per second, lower case "k"
kB/s 1000 bytes per second
Mbit/s 1000000 bits per second
MB/s 1000000 bytes per second
Gbit/s 1000000000 bits per second
GB/s 1000000000 bytes per second
--
b 1 barn (cross section)
K 1 kelvin (temperature)
Charlie, I have expressed the same opinion here at The Inquirer a few times before. And I suggested the solution, too, namely to split the industry into the MAFIAA and true telecommunications companies, whereby the latter are only in charge of providing the cable to customers, while the formers then have to sell their TV progran on top of that. Of course that will not happen, because the law makers love the telcos (including the current cable companies), like the drug cartels love the snow man.
@Mat you have a point about upgrades if latency is not the issue. Even if my original 'out of thin air' estimate is true at 50Tb demand from each content provider it will no longer even be a limit within 5 or 6 years at a steady rate of progress so theoretically Cable companies could start at 5Mb for everyone this year and step them up 1Mb per year without any issues.
*Chess and Lobbyists
You're wrong.
Charlie is dead on about this. All it takes is a simple slip up of legislation and it opens an entire door for cable companies. You need to realize that money talks, and cable companies are pushing for as much power as they can now that they have quite a bit more competition.
I suggest you read up on how the cable companies have been pushing too far, and backing off for a different approach for several years now. They've been saving their money for lobbiests and promoting technical garb to old politicians that have no idea what it's about. Not to mention, they throw in a couple other factors in small print that nobody realizes until it's too late and already passed. This isn't just blowing smoke, and if you trust a cable company any more than you do a politician, you've got issues.
It's not just about bandwidth. The pipes are there, all it takes is a bit more money and it's scaleable. They're always raising prices and technology is always coming down. You PAY for (X) amount of bandwidth, and if everyone can't use it to that potential, it is a breach of contract. SO, they change their contract... and you trust that? If what they were looking for is a simple bandwidth regulation, all they would need to do is upgrade (like they have), and keep everyone at 6mb. Instead, they up the speed and put a cap on it. How do you feel about that? It's just the tip of the iceberg.
In the meantime, while people are complaining about bandwidth caps and Cable control, you have the Cable companies talking to legislators, saying "Well, if we had our laws passed.. we wouldn't need to do all of this." Either way, they get what they want. They're playing a massive game of chest with some of the most ignorant people in the government.
As a (non-overweight) American who actually used to eat a triple whopper for lunch a couple times a week, I can tell you that it's quite possible and people do buy them...
As for the cable argument, huh. I had never thought of that, I figured it was to avoid them having to actually upgrade their routers. I suspect it's probably a mix of the two along with Shawn's main point (minus the angry wailing) of latency/lag issues, in reality.
yes yes the straw men
yes yes the politics
but this is NOT the problem.
cable co's do NOT deliver the content they offer well at all. see its been shown that voice/vid/EVERYTHING is nothing but packets - udp/tcp/w/e
herein lies the problem. look at how much bandwidth channels are taken up by NOISE
this noise is your usual tv chans. if they cut off the tv, made it a browser based streamtuner they would have 0 problems.
as you say they dont want to give up tv subscriptions; however to survive they will have to. btw - 90% of home's could be changed to 27mbit syncronous on the tw/adelphia/comcast net by a simple config file. their testing 100mbit plus atm for their private beta guyz/galz.
See Shawn. See Shawn FUD. FUD Shawn FUD!
See Tavi. See Tavi swallow. Swallow Tavi swallow!
I think Charlie is as usual more right than wrong on this one, of course he doesn't get paid to sell overpriced access or overpriced networking gear...
@Shawn good informative post. I wasn't aware of latency being the issue.
How do you get away with writing this crap Charlie? You once again show us that you can write pages full of distorted half-truth and skewed information but still fail to prove your point or show that you have any true understanding of the real problem.
Had you taken an ounce of effort to learn about the infrastructure and focus on the true underlying problem, you would have found that it has nothing to do with bandwidth at all but rather latency of the entire system. With more technologies like VOIP, Online Gaming, P2P, VOD, Video Messaging, Live/streaming HD growing in demand, the latency of the system is not able to deliver the content fast enough as the user base grows. The biggest impact on their system (of the above) is the P2P traffic because it is not burstable (as opposed to an FTP download) and the requests are coming/going everywhere which hinders any switch/network optimization (as opposed to VOIP, Online Gaming, VOD and streaming HD content which all can be pattern optimized). It plays a huge double whammy to the network and hurts the overall latency of the system. They are trying to find a way to DISCOURAGE users from using P2P. They got slapped for manipulating P2P packets so now they have introduced bandwidth caps to financially discourage users from downloading every movie and TV show from Bit Torrent.
Force enough packets onto the network to introduce 250ms or more of latency and now you have users complaining of too much lag in their games, dropped VOIP quality and HD channels which show blocking. That is the real reason the cable companies are doing this.
For more information about latency and network performance metrics, go to: http://www.cisco.com/web/about/security/intelligence/network_performance_metrics.html
Damn Charlie, for someone who hates you so much for your anti-nvidia views - you really hit this one on the head! I've already hit my quota from comcast a few months ago, a simple call to their tech support solved my problem, but I don't want to have to do this every month! Not only do I watch streaming video, but I also run some services as well as use bit torrent. 250GB/month really isn't that hard to reach. Now if only you can do such a good job on your next nV article :-P
Oops, sorry Kef, that should have been at Tavi, my page must have been folded wrong...
Isn't this the problem that P2P already solves???
By the way, where have the Inqsters been hiding since Friday, and more importantly, why?
Charlie didn't mention nVidia so no one wants to comment?
Attaboy!
There is a current technical bandwidth limit at the provider side. To replace cable companies the content providers would need to each support about 5-10 million simulataneous HD video connections for popular shows. If you take into account competing providers each with similar numbers of connections there may be bottlenecks for a general purpose internet trying to support 20-40 million HD video connections (or more) over long distances (by quick estimates that is 200-400Tb bandwidth and I believe current technology limits bandwidth to the single and double digit Tb range from any single area). There are ways to get around this if you optimize/distribute parts of the delivery but expecting an unmodified internet to support this probably requires an increase in backbone bandwidth technology.