Proposed Internet Usage Limitations

[weemadando]

I live with it pretty easily now. I regularly exceed my allotment (60 gb split into 30peak/30off peak) and just buy another few gb to cover the last few days of the month.

[Spyder]

Try finding an affordable DSL plan for a 5 person flat full of students and heavy internet users and that's not going to result in spending the last week out of every month with 5 people sharing dialup speed. Besides the problems of ISPs often failing to accurately measure useage, there is also the problem that you get charged for everything that comes in and out, legitimate traffic or not.

[Stuart Mackey]

Precisely what is so outrageous about this? They offer a service and the costs of offering that service scale with usage, but their current billing plan totally disregards usage per customer. In effect, some customers get vastly more value for money than others.

In theory, the caps aren't an issue. While I'd like to be proven wrong, dollars to donuts the implementation will be just as bad as it is in New Zealand, where they make shit up about your internet usage or randomly drop you down to dialup for no apparent reason. You then spend hours on the phone to try to complain only to fail to ever reach an actual person.

Yeah, this could be done well, but why bother when they can make money off of you buy not doing so?

Bloody hell, what ISP were you with?

[Spyder]

Precisely what is so outrageous about this? They offer a service and the costs of offering that service scale with usage, but their current billing plan totally disregards usage per customer. In effect, some customers get vastly more value for money than others.

In theory, the caps aren't an issue. While I'd like to be proven wrong, dollars to donuts the implementation will be just as bad as it is in New Zealand, where they make shit up about your internet usage or randomly drop you down to dialup for no apparent reason. You then spend hours on the phone to try to complain only to fail to ever reach an actual person.

Yeah, this could be done well, but why bother when they can make money off of you buy not doing so?

Bloody hell, what ISP were you with?

IHUG

[Vendetta]

Here's a hint Vendetta, my Steam folder contains 41 gigs of games. If I have to format my computer for some reason I'm going to have to re-download that stuff. Likely what I'd do under my current system is hit download all, let it run for a day and come back once everything was done. You can easily pass 20 gigs in two days if you have large files to download.

And how often do you format your PC? Every two weeks?

I know someone who is a typical high bandwidth user. He recently downloaded every single Dreamcast game ever, just because he could.

[Stuart Mackey]

In theory, the caps aren't an issue. While I'd like to be proven wrong, dollars to donuts the implementation will be just as bad as it is in New Zealand, where they make shit up about your internet usage or randomly drop you down to dialup for no apparent reason. You then spend hours on the phone to try to complain only to fail to ever reach an actual person.

Yeah, this could be done well, but why bother when they can make money off of you buy not doing so?

Bloody hell, what ISP were you with?

IHUG

??Yeah? I have had reasonable service out of them..cost is a bit high for what they offer, but service has been ok since 99.

[Stark]

And how often do you format your PC? Every two weeks?

I know someone who is a typical high bandwidth user. He recently downloaded every single Dreamcast game ever, just because he could.

Usage expands to fill capacity. I know people in the US who just off-hand decide to download an 120gb collection of every Doctor Who episode available, even though they only intend to watch a dozen stories. Why? because it's more convienient, and without limits there's no reason or pressure to find more efficient methods.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

And how often do you format your PC? Every two weeks?

I know someone who is a typical high bandwidth user. He recently downloaded every single Dreamcast game ever, just because he could.

Usage expands to fill capacity. I know people in the US who just off-hand decide to download an 120gb collection of every Doctor Who episode available, even though they only intend to watch a dozen stories. Why? because it's more convienient, and without limits there's no reason or pressure to find more efficient methods.

My god, that's so fucking true. It even applies to other things like housework--the average hours a housewife puts into domestic chores has not changed since the 1930s. Machines give you more capacity to do work... So you find more work to do. Bandwidth gives you more capacity to download.... So you download until you've reached the limits of your capacity.

[Mr Bean]

And how often do you format your PC? Every two weeks?

No, but the point is under the scheme every time I do I'm either going to have to space out downloads over fourth months or fork over twenty dollars for games I already payed for.

Checking my router stats now, with no warz, no roms, no illegal downloads of any kind I have two computers on one connection(Room-mate and I) I had 59 gigs of traffic in May and I'm at 27 gigs for June.

Those caps also have serious issues if you as I do and as a good third of all netconnects do, have someone else on your connection, it might be kids, it might be your brother or your landlord or what have you. But it again decrease the time it takes and the data required before you slam into the cap.

Again, if this money was being directed into infrastructure investments then I'd have less cause to complain, however as already noted at least here in American we already gave them tax money for that, and they turned right around and pocked it as profit.

These "usage" fees are the equivalent of your ISP coming to and asking "Hey Vendetta, do you mind if we screw you over for more money and provide no additional benefits?"
And you reply, "Why yes ISP I'd love you to"

Minus inflation, the idea is that things get less expensive not MORE expensive as time goes on. 56k connections can be had for 5$ or less(Or free), Cable connections have decrease from 60$-80$ to 26$-50$ range as more and more people adopt them.

Your not seeing the flip side of this, that being, the people who use less than one gig in a month cost the ISP almost nothing, that 40$ they receive each month is close to pure profit. If 90% of users don't really use their connection that month and 10% do(And 5% use alot) it means they have a huge group of users who are simply sending them money.

[houser2112]

Besides the problems of ISPs often failing to accurately measure useage, there is also the problem that you get charged for everything that comes in and out, legitimate traffic or not.

This brings up an interesting question. Currently, ads on websites are merely a nuisance. However, if you suffer under bandwidth caps that cost money to breach, tolerance for such would decrease rapidly, for me anyway.

[Twoyboy]

Besides the problems of ISPs often failing to accurately measure useage, there is also the problem that you get charged for everything that comes in and out, legitimate traffic or not.

I always thought every plan was like that, but no. My new plan doesn't include uploads in my cap. Sweet.

[Uraniun235]

Isn't the biggest issue not that it will discourage heavy users, but that it will discourage the development of applications which could create more heavy users? For example, what if NBC-Universal executives had a stroke and decided to create a website where paid subscribers could stream episodes of their shows in high definition? I think services like that would be neat to have.

Also I'm still really jealous of places like Sweden and Japan and South Korea where 100mb residential connections are (allegedly) available and affordable. I realize part of that is population density, but I'm pretty sure we have apartment complexes and urban centers in the US as well, so what's the difference?

[Mr Bean]

Fun story came over the line today in comparison to how other companies have been acting compared with the these three.


Hmm AT&T, Comcast and Time Warner are talking caps and slowed down speed?
What about Verizon?
Take us to ludicrous speed!

News Release

Verizon Extends Groundbreaking 50/20 Mbps FiOS Internet Service to Entire FiOS Footprint

Verizon President and COO Denny Strigl Announces Groundbreaking 50/20 and 20/20 Mbps FiOS Internet Services Will Be Available to More Than 10 Million Homes and Small Businesses

June 18, 2008

Media Contact:

Cliff Lee, 518-396-1095
Bobbi Henson, 972-718-2225

LAS VEGAS - Beginning next week, Verizon will make available to more than 10 million homes and businesses the nation's fastest consumer broadband connections, with download speeds up to 50 megabits per second (Mbps) and upload speeds up to 20 Mbps.

In remarks prepared for delivery today at the NXTcomm conference here, Verizon President and Chief Operating Officer Denny Strigl announced that the company is expanding its industry-leading FiOS Internet connections of 50/20, 20/20, 20/5 and 10/2 Mbps across all of Verizon's FiOS Internet service footprint in 16 states.

Only Verizon delivers ultra-high-speed broadband straight to customers' homes over the nation's most advanced fiber-optic network. Although the network already reaches 10 million homes and business, it will reach more than 18 million by 2010.

"The Verizon network is delivering broadband speeds that are unmatched by any competitor," Strigl said. "As our customers shoot and send their own photos and movies, work at home more often, and expand their home networks, they love the faster speeds FiOS delivers."


Verizon had already offered the 50/20 Mbps and 20/20 Mbps services in its FiOS markets in Connecticut, Florida, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York and Rhode Island. The company is now expanding those offerings to new Verizon FiOS customers in parts of California, Delaware, Indiana, Maryland, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, Virginia and Washington, replacing existing offerings of 30/15 Mbps and 15/15 Mbps services, respectively.

The mid-tier connection speed in those markets for new customers is being increased from 15/2 Mbps to 20/5 Mbps, and the basic service tier is being increased from 5/2 Mbps to 10/2 Mbps. Existing FiOS Internet customers who are interested in the new speed options can call Verizon for information about the new plans.


Strigl said in his remarks, "The appetite for bandwidth shows no signs of slowing down. Neither will we. We've already had successful trials of the 100-megabit home, which will be a reality faster than anybody thinks."

Verizon's 50/20 FiOS Internet connection is the fastest available to U.S. consumers, and the company's 20/20 symmetrical service is the first of its kind commercially available to U.S. consumers on a mass scale. Pioneering a new category of broadband for the American consumer, Verizon's symmetrical FiOS provides the ultra-fast, two-way speeds crucial for such burgeoning online activities as video conferencing, social networking and super-fast uploading of electronic photo albums or home videos, as well as multi-player gaming and online work collaboration.

At 50 Mbps, downloading a 5 GB (gigabyte) file, such as a 112-minute, high-definition movie purchased online, takes approximately 13.3 minutes, while a 50 MB (megabyte), or 60-minute, Web video takes 8 seconds, and a 5 MB MP3 music file takes less than eight-tenths of a second.

Using a 20 Mbps upstream broadband connection, a consumer could upload a 250 megabyte (MB) file of 200 photos in about 90 seconds, instead of the roughly 47 minutes it takes over a 768 kilobit-per-second (Kbps) upstream connection. A 500 MB file, such as 400 digital photos or a medical imaging data file, can be uploaded in less than four minutes, compared with about 90 minutes over a 768 Kbps connection. A 3 gigabyte (GB) file, such as a one-hour family video shot with a high-definition video camera, can be uploaded in around 20 minutes, compared with more than nine hours with 768 Kbps upstream.

FiOS Internet 50/20 Mbps service is available in New York and Virginia for $89.95 and elsewhere for $139.95 a month with an annual service plan. The 20/20 Mbps FiOS Internet service is available in all FiOS markets for $64.99 a month with an annual service plan. FiOS Internet service is also available as part of a discounted bundle of multiple Verizon services. More information is available at www.verizon.com/fios or by calling 888-GET-FiOS (888-438-3467).

Makes your local market offering look like shit doesn't it?
Compare and constrast, much slower nearly as expensive speeds.... and they want to place a cap on it, meanwhile Verizon in what areas it can(Remember the great Fiber-optic initiative that got shut down by congress at the behest of lobbyists?) is offering far greater speeds at not that much addition cost. And openly boasting of how much you can download with such speeds.

That is what it's supposed to look like, companies doing that thing called "competition" against each other offering new and better alternatives. Sure it's not avaiable across the US because the two times we tried to get Fiber across the country we lost out thanks to lobbyists strangling the bill before it got out of committee. But look at what we could have, nothing says Time Warner or Comcast or anyone else can invest themselves in offering newer and better services rather than doing what they do now...

Which is milk what they have for all it's worth until it runs into the ground.

[General Zod]

Sadly, Verizon FIOS isn't available in my neighborhood or I'd hit that shit faster than a junkie getting his next fix of meth.

[Yogi]

Sadly, Verizon FIOS isn't available in my neighborhood or I'd hit that shit faster than a junkie getting his next fix of meth.

I think this is the root of the problem right here. If we could choose ISPs easily, we would go with the company that's offering unlimited high speed, OR we could pick the limited bandwith one if we don't use a lot. The fact that we have limited options in choosing an ISP is what's causing so much greif.

[phongn]

I have 20/5 FiOS, actually

[The Yosemite Bear]

I keep getting emails from Speed Matters lobby group on this...

nothing new to me either.

[Edi]

I'm going to necro this thread to ask a question: How does the system work in the US? You get as much bandwidth as you can suck up for the price, or is there a speed limit?

The way it works here is that you have a speed cap on your connection, but the cap never changes. So you get e.g. 4 Mbps downstream, 1 Mbps upstream and that service level is guaranteed. If some site or service gets hit with excessive demand, then traffic flow is affected by that, but you general connection speed is not. These connections all have fixed price. Your speed limit determines how much you can download and operators must provide that.

You are also not tied to a specific operator, because operators are required to lease connections to rivals without gouging so that consumers can have choice. Operating in somebody else's network obviously has a lesser profit margin and you must rely on their techs to fix stuff up (big penalties or sabotaging a lease rival's connections by stretching out repairs etc), but this has resulted in a working system. The regulatory framework is obviously very strict to enforce it all.

Is it different in the US?

[Pu-239]

Well, my service with Cox advertises "unlimited" for 50/month, but there's a 40GB soft cap on downloads a month, though I haven't recieved any letters (I'm fairly a light user when it comes to downloads though). I'm pretty fortunate to have FiOS also available, so cable prices have lowered to prevent defections. That also makes it unlikely caps will be implemented by either in the area.


Bandwidth isn't guaranteed, if others on the network suck down bandwidth excessively it impacts performance negatively unless you're paying for business or something.

AFAIK, leasing connections only applies to phone lines/DSL

Phong probably has a more accurate picture.

[phongn]

I'm going to necro this thread to ask a question: How does the system work in the US? You get as much bandwidth as you can suck up for the price, or is there a speed limit?

It depends on who your ISP is and where you are. Some ISPs pretty much let you do whatever you want, others impose bandwidth restrictions once you've downloaded a certain amount. However, those ISP sometimes don't quite want to mention just what that limit is. Also remember that policy decisions tend not to be on the national level in the US but on a regional basis.

Three examples:

• Comcast has an undefined monthly bandwidth-use limit in some regions; exceed it and your available bandwidth-rate becomes heavily throttled.
• Time Warner is experimenting with defined bandwidth-use limits per month, with additional data (priced-per-gigabyte) costing extra
• Verizon - so far - doesn't really care what you do.

Furthermore, some ISPs (most notoriously, Comcast in specific regions) have deployed deep packet inspection technologies to throttle certain classes of traffic, such as BitTorrent. Unfortunately, said DPI systems can interfere with encrypted traffic such as VPNs.

The way it works here is that you have a speed cap on your connection, but the cap never changes. So you get e.g. 4 Mbps downstream, 1 Mbps upstream and that service level is guaranteed. If some site or service gets hit with excessive demand, then traffic flow is affected by that, but you general connection speed is not. These connections all have fixed price. Your speed limit determines how much you can download and operators must provide that.

The speed advertised by US ISPs always refers to the so-called "last-mile" connection. This speed is not guaranteed for residential service; business-class services typically have a service-level agreement (SLA) specifying acceptable downtime amounts and bandwidth levels.

You are also not tied to a specific operator, because operators are required to lease connections to rivals without gouging so that consumers can have choice. Operating in somebody else's network obviously has a lesser profit margin and you must rely on their techs to fix stuff up (big penalties or sabotaging a lease rival's connections by stretching out repairs etc), but this has resulted in a working system. The regulatory framework is obviously very strict to enforce it all.

Under the Telecommunications Act of 1996 (Telecom Act), incumbent local exchange carriers (ILECs) were required to lease network elements (including switching and the local loop) at regulated cost to the new competitors (competitive LECs, or CLECs). Lawsuits were promptly started and in 2004 this was partially overturned: ILECs no longer have the requirement to lease everything (in particular, switching equipment). It should also be noted that this requirement of Unbundled Network Element (UNE) does not apply to cable or fibre: it only applies to traditional copper-loop telephony equipment.

There are competitive DSL ISPs (that is, competing with an ILEC's DSL service) in many areas of the US, but they are not particularly price-competitive.

Cable companies have never been required to share their systems. For that matter, I'm not even sure if its feasible to do so under the traditional hybrid-fibre coax architecture. That said, there are competitive cable companies but they pretty much have to build out their own network from scratch in any new markets or buy an existing one.

The history of fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) in the US is a long and tortured one. In the Telecom Act, the ILECs were granted significant subsidies to roll out FTTH access across the US. For whatever reason, this didn't exactly happen (most probably due to cost of a major fibre rollout in the US). It has only been recently that anything of the sort has been launched in the US on an affordable basis. Verizon is the most notable of any such deployment, ramping up and spending billions on FTTH. AT&T is also doing so to a more limited extent, concentrating mostly on FTT-node (FTTN) with an ADSL2 terminal run to reduce costs; that said, there are some true AT&T FTTH deployments now.

EDIT: Cleaned this up a bit.

[Edi]

Thanks. So in essence it looks very much like our market in many respects and the differences seem to be more on the contract terms, consumer protection legislation and market regulation side.

[phongn]

Thanks. So in essence it looks very much like our market in many respects and the differences seem to be more on the contract terms, consumer protection legislation and market regulation side.

It should also be noted that plain-old-telephone-service (POTS) is heavily regulated in the US with the express intent of making sure virtually every house in the entire country (even in remote rural areas) can get telephone service. Traditionally, increased business and long-distance rates paid for this; towards the end of the 1990s greatly increased competition and the advent of VOIP bridges - especially international ones - dramatically reduced rates. Nowadays, people in unsubsidized regions pay into the Universal Service Fund to ensure access for all .

ILECs are also required to be the "last-resort" provider of telephony and offer incredibly subsidized rates for basic-phone service if requested. As you might imagine, they aren't very happy about this. Part of the push for new fiber services is that these lines are not regulated POTS loops but virtually unregulated data links.

[Shinova]

That Verizon offer looks awesome.... except Japan already has 100+mbit connections and they're struggling so much under overwhelming p2p traffic that pretty much every ISP tries to fight against filesharers, and recently there's been a ruling or something allowing them to disconnect identified p2p users.

Like what's been said about people who just download huge amounts of data just cause they can, they'lll find some way to fill up that bandwidth.

[Edi]

Thanks. So in essence it looks very much like our market in many respects and the differences seem to be more on the contract terms, consumer protection legislation and market regulation side.

It should also be noted that plain-old-telephone-service (POTS) is heavily regulated in the US with the express intent of making sure virtually every house in the entire country (even in remote rural areas) can get telephone service. Traditionally, increased business and long-distance rates paid for this; towards the end of the 1990s greatly increased competition and the advent of VOIP bridges - especially international ones - dramatically reduced rates. Nowadays, people in unsubsidized regions pay into the Universal Service Fund to ensure access for all .

ILECs are also required to be the "last-resort" provider of telephony and offer incredibly subsidized rates for basic-phone service if requested. As you might imagine, they aren't very happy about this. Part of the push for new fiber services is that these lines are not regulated POTS loops but virtually unregulated data links.

Hmm, that makes things somewhat clearer and also highlights the crucial difference in our markets. All of our services are regulated very much like POTS wrt access, so it is not possible to just dump users or gouge them. Anyone tries, the government steps on them. We're having POTS dismantled in rural areas and replaced with wireless technologies that serve the same purpose in the next few years, but the service will still be there.

[phongn]

Hmm, that makes things somewhat clearer and also highlights the crucial difference in our markets. All of our services are regulated very much like POTS wrt access, so it is not possible to just dump users or gouge them. Anyone tries, the government steps on them. We're having POTS dismantled in rural areas and replaced with wireless technologies that serve the same purpose in the next few years, but the service will still be there.

One big issue is that of the US federal system - there's a huge mishmash of regulations at the city, county, state and federal levels and the locals get rather pissed when the state or federal government wrests away power. For example, in exchange for franchise rights, counties can insist on various perks like public-access channels, local news and random other stuff. This means that the cable companies have to negotiate on a county-by-county (or worse!) basis; all the big cable and telecom companies are trying to get this stuff approved at the state level now.

Federal legislation happens slowly as well and in the US there has been a general deregulatory movement since the Reagan Era. This especially applies to telecom, beginning with the breakup of the Bell System in 1984 (which divested the 22 regional "local" service companies from the long-distance company, which became AT&T). Those 22 companies formed into 7 "regional Bell operating companies" - RBOCs - and have since massively consolidated into three: AT&T, Qwest and Verizon. Ironically, one of these RBOCs - Verizon - now owns the company primarily responsible for challenging the Bell System: MCI. AT&T would find itself purchased by one of it's "Baby Bells," - SBC (who then took the classic name)