Technology Liberation Front - Latest Comments in Comcast to move to bandwidth cap / metering solution?

Re: Comcast to move to bandwidth cap / metering solution?

digitalshaman — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 16:46:14 -0000

bandwidth is not oil ... if you do not use it ... you lose it ... period !!!

tim wu and his awkward (to be kind) comparison ignores the bills paid by users who get far less than even so-called "quality of service" guarantees - which are nether quality (in any objective sense) or services (they can be denied under best efforts or worse, simple contract language) ... even the googles of the world do not offer network neutrality over ad placement ... so what is the real issue?

we all pay for electricity - on demand. a network, like a grid MUST include the access points & computation fed into said network by the users themselves.

we do not generally feed the electricity grid - actually some folks do ... but the notion that a telecom // isp should get a pass on opening the kimono and letting the actuarial light in is simply ludicrous.

the cost to provide wired landline service is about 2 cents per month.

telecoms is simply an immense billing, customer "service" and marketing/lobbying cabal - true competition would force transparency to define bandwidth in terms akin to kilowatts for electric power or BTUs in gas ... anything less is bad public policy for all Americans.

solutions which cannot introduce double entry accounting for enabling true measurable, objective competition over bandwidth resources is a riddle wrapped in greed.

if you don't use the bandwidth - it is gone ... time you see is really money ...

Re: Comcast to move to bandwidth cap / metering solution?

eee_eff — Sun, 11 May 2008 18:20:40 -0000

@ Ryan
enigma, the chances of Comcast being fined AND that money going to Bittorrent users are one in a million, if that. I suspect they won’t be fined but if they are the users won’t see a penny. If anything costs will simply be passed on to the customer.

Perhaps you are right, but in my world justice is worth pursuing. It cannot be achieved always, but if we forget about it, society will eventually become disoriented.

If Comcast implements this system I will go out of my way to use 249.99GB each month. I already monitor my consumption using Tomato, a 3rd party Linux firmware on my excellent Linksys WRT54GL router. I stay under 180GB a month now because I don’t want to incur Comcast’s wrath and rumor has it the invisi-cap is as low as 150GB on some nodes although I doubt that’s the case with my node.

I am on AT&T, and I'd do the same thing. It is a way to transfer money from bad guys, like Comcast and AT&T to good guys like Canonical, Gentoo or Fedora.

@Carme

I’m not taking sides on whether any form of regulation is the right answer. What I am saying is that transparency, while always good, does nothing to solve this specific problem.

It does in two ways:

First, in a situation where there exists a competitive market user can, to paraphrase Trotsky, "vote with their feet"

Second, even in the case where there does not exist a competitive market, the exposure of certain types of behavior leads to risk of regulation.

Re: Comcast to move to bandwidth cap / metering solution?

Carme — Fri, 09 May 2008 18:28:18 -0000

Net neutrality and fairness are indeed vague concepts and open to interpretation, which is a good reason to avoid them. However, the real, immediate problem that the "net neutrality" proponents are trying to solve right now isn't vague at all and is easy to define: ISPs intending to give preferential treatment to data traffic according to commercial agreements. This specific issue has nothing to do with bandwidth management.

I'm not taking sides on whether any form of regulation is the right answer. What I am saying is that transparency, while always good, does nothing to solve this specific problem. On the contrary, the recent comments by Virgin Media CEO Neil Berkett (about relegating the traffic of those without commercial agreements to the "Internet bus lane") show that ISPs see this policy as legitimate and are willing to be transparent about it.

Re: Comcast to move to bandwidth cap / metering solution?

Adam Thierer — Fri, 09 May 2008 09:17:30 -0000

David Sohn of CDT comments on this issue in an essay on the CDT PolicyBeta Blog: "Nothing Wrong with Higher Charges for High Volume Users." He notes:

As for consumer acceptance, it may be that nobody wants to have the sense that “the meter is running” with every second spent online. But it should be easily possible to design pricing plans in which only a tiny percentage of users has to worry about surcharges or volume caps. This week’s report about the plan Comcast may be considering offers a case in point. According to the article, only the top 0.1% of all subscribers would hit the usage cap and owe surcharges. For everyone else, the service would feel the same way it does today — essentially unlimited.

Of course, the service today isn’t entirely unlimited. Most carriers have vague restrictions against excessive usage, which they reportedly sometimes enforce. Now, maybe making the bandwidth limitations clear and explicit would change the way some consumers feel about their broadband service. But letting them know that their bandwidth allotment isn’t infinite wouldn’t be a bad thing. Today, users have no reason to inquire about the bandwidth usage of applications they use, much less to steer clear of ones that are inefficient bandwidth guzzlers. Encouraging users to place some value on bandwidth efficiency, the same way they may with energy efficiency, could help address congestion issues in a way that doesn’t raise a whole host of Internet neutrality concerns.

Carme... I believe Sohn's last line above serves as a pretty good answer to you question.

Re: Comcast to move to bandwidth cap / metering solution?

Richard Bennett — Thu, 08 May 2008 18:39:18 -0000

Nobody can define "net neutrality" with sufficient precision to draft a sensible law, Carme. The efforts we've seen deal with prioritization, on the mistaken premise that everybody's equal on the Internet. In fact, the speed of any service on the Internet depends on the amount of bandwidth the service purchases (or appropriates, in the case of P2P), the distance between client and server (in hops, space, and time), the CPU power the server, and the traffic on shared links. These are already exaggerated by smart companies like Google and Akamai who know how to game the system. So what the phone companies proposed to do 3 years ago (and still haven't done) was to level the playing field for companies that don't have Google-sized budgets for distributed server farms by caching content in multiple locations within their privately-owned networks, for a fee of course.

I agree with enigma (this must be the first time) on this: "One suggestion, instead of mandating net-neutrality itself, mandate full disclosure and complete transparency of the rules, with sufficient penalties so no company would think of diverging from their stated policies."

This is exactly what several of us have said to the FCC and anybody else who would listen. We can't define "neutrality" in a meaningful and enforceable way, but we can certainly define truth in advertising. But the black telephone lobby opposes this, and won't settle for anything less than neutrality regulations that even they can't define.

Re: Comcast to move to bandwidth cap / metering solution?

Carme — Thu, 08 May 2008 18:09:48 -0000

I didn't get the part about "potentially head-off burdensome Net neutrality regulations..."
As I understand it this regulation is proposed because ISPs said explicitly they plan to increase revenue by charging websites for accessing their customers. They'd want to do this regardless of how they charge their customers or manage their bandwidth.
Can you be more specific as to how this new Comcast plan solves the same problem the proposed regulation tries to solve (or more generally the problem of "Net neutrality")?

Re: Comcast to move to bandwidth cap / metering solution?

Ryan Radia — Thu, 08 May 2008 13:21:33 -0000

MikeT, I disagree that Comcast's 250GB limit is too high. Much of the cost of each user isn't per-byte transit but the fixed cost of connecting each home to the node and maintaining the last-mile infrastructure. Of course, a heavy user might necessitate that Comcast add node capacity, which is not cheap, but transit is quite cheap. Comcast already charges just $42.95 a month for 6mbps down, 384kbps up, and $52.95 for 16mbps down, 1mbps up. For 250GB that's an incredibly reasonable price. Compare Comcast to Cox or Time Warner or any Canadian ISP and you will see how generous Comcast's limits are.

Chances are the telcos will eat this up, though. "Comcast may be faster, but we have no overages!" is what Verizon and AT&T ought to advertise. Nobody gets kicked off FiOS or U-Verse even if they pull down a terabyte because the network topology is much less vulnerable to bandwidth hogs.

I do applaud Comcast's transparency but it is unfortunate that a 250GB cap might be imposed on many users for whom the "invisi-cap" is currently more like 500GB. Since Comcast's invisi-caps are currently based on your node, your cap depends on your neighbors' consumption habits. Then again, since it’s now impossible to really know what the cap is, a hard number will be very useful.

What grinds my gears is the $1.50 per GB over 250GB. That is way too high. Amazon S3 which admittedly doesn't have last-mile costs still charges just 20 cents per GB. Comcast could easily still make a profit by charging $1.00 or less per GB. I suspect Comcast knows people using this much are pulling in IP video (iTunes HD movies, Xbox 360 Marketplace) and they would rather users subscribe to Comcast’s sort-of-HD television service.

enigma, the chances of Comcast being fined AND that money going to Bittorrent users are one in a million, if that. I suspect they won't be fined but if they are the users won't see a penny. If anything costs will simply be passed on to the customer.

If Comcast implements this system I will go out of my way to use 249.99GB each month. I already monitor my consumption using Tomato, a 3rd party Linux firmware on my excellent Linksys WRT54GL router. I stay under 180GB a month now because I don't want to incur Comcast's wrath and rumor has it the invisi-cap is as low as 150GB on some nodes although I doubt that's the case with my node.

Re: Comcast to move to bandwidth cap / metering solution?

eee_eff — Wed, 07 May 2008 22:57:47 -0000

This is infinitely better than the war on bit-torrent comcast had waged. Also, much better that they have clearly listed what their rules are, instead of lying about it like Comcast used to.

I use bit-torrent to redistribute linux distros, and I upload about 0.6 gig/per day, so I'd still be fine. It's quite easy to adjust your bandwidth limit in K-torrent, for example.

But I disagree that legislation to enforce net neutrality is not required; it may yet be. It is clear though that the real threat of legislation keeps companies like Comcast on their toes.

One suggestion, instead of mandating net-neutrality itself, mandate full disclosure and complete transparency of the rules, with sufficient penalties so no company would think of diverging from their stated policies.

On a side note, is there an news about Comcast being persued for their deceptive practices? I would sure love to see them lose a million or two in a class action suit, and have to redistribute that money to bit-torrent users.

Re: Comcast to move to bandwidth cap / metering solution?

Adam Thierer — Wed, 07 May 2008 22:27:36 -0000

Mike... That's a fair point, but many other folks fear that Comcast will start the metering too low right off the bat, which could encounter a great deal of resistance given many people's distaste for metered pricing. So, I suspect that, at least initially, Comcast would want to make it abundantly clear that they were just trying to capture the biggest of the bandwidth hogs with this system. So that would explain the very generous 250gb threshold.

Of course, they could always ratchet the cap down later and change the metering scheme to be more along the lines that you suggest, i.e., with a lower cap but with the overage charge not being as significant if you go over that cap.

Regardless, I think multiple experiments along these lines by multiple carriers would be really great. But when carriers opt for this model, they will really need to engage in some good education efforts to explain to consumers how they benefit. Many people will cry foul about it even though it would never impact them, except in a good way by potentially alleviating some network congestion.

Re: Comcast to move to bandwidth cap / metering solution?

MikeT — Wed, 07 May 2008 21:53:50 -0000

250GB is quite generous, but it would probably work out better for their users to start out at something like 25GB for $20, with each additional GB going for an additional $0.25. Right now, most people will never come close to needing 250GB a month, and are just subsidizing the bigger bandwidth consumers at those rates.