Tag bandwidth caps

‘Cause Your’re Going To Run Out Of Fingers And Toes Quick

By Brian Filed in Tech Tagged with bandwidth caps, Comcast, metered broadband September 2nd, 2008 @ 12:13 pm

I know this sounds hard to believe, but there WERE other bits of news over the weekend other than Sarah Palin and Hurricane Gustav.

Comcast very cleverly used these two media meltdowns to slip out their announcement that they will start capping customer Internet bandwidth usage beginning October 1. This came as no surprise whatsoever to anyone who follows the industry news and related blogs, it was just a formal announcement of something everyone had been waiting to hear for some time.

The cap will be 250 gigabytes downstream and upstream per month, roughly equivalent to filling three typical laptop hard drives to capacity. Comcast equates this to downloading 50,000 songs a month, or sending 40 million e-mails. In other words, the cap has been set high enough that the majority of average Internet users won’t have to worry about it, at least initially. This is, frankly, Comcast’s response to getting their hands slapped over throttling throughput to curb BitTorrent and other P2P traffic. They fully expect that the cap will only be an issue with the heavy-duty downloaders, who, it seems, they are sure are up to no good. If you read some of the comments in that link above, one valid counterargument is that the increasing popularity of streaming high-definition video will challenge that assumption relatively quickly.

Personally, I am not worried about getting anywhere close to 250 GB per month, even given some of my downloading habits, but I do think that Comcast has committed one big faux pas in the process. They didn’t make any provision for their customers to be able to monitor their own bandwidth usage. This article at Download.com offers some quick reviews and links for some free monitoring tools for Windows and Mac PCs, and I would recommend trying out a couple even if you’re completely sure that you’re not going to hit the cap — it’s useful to know how much you ARE using, because another likely development in broadband services will be the transition to a “metered” model where you pay for what you use. That particular concept is being tested right now in a couple of markets and may prove more popular with the cable companies AND with lower-usage consumers.

Comcastrated

By Brian Filed in Media Tagged with bandwidth caps, Comcast May 9th, 2008 @ 3:02 pm

DSL Reports broke the story earlier this week that Comcast is planning on testing using bandwidth caps and overage fees to try to rein in what they feel is a problem with P2P downloaders. The cap that they are apparently considering is 250GB/month, with a $1.50/GB fee for every gig over the limit. Dan Frommer at Silicon Alley Insider offers a very good explanation that puts a 250GB limit into perspective:

In practical terms, 250 gigabytes is:

- A LOT of Web usage. Your typical daily Web/email/IM usage is probably somewhere between 10-50 megabytes — maybe 100-200 if you’re watching some low-quality YouTube, or 300-500 if you’re watching a few hours of Hulu every day. So normal Web users won’t have any problems. (1000 megabytes = roughly 1 gigabyte.)

- A LOT of World of Warcraft. Downloading game patches uses a bunch of bandwidth once in a while, but normal game play tops out around 30-60 kilobytes/second, or maybe a 100-200 megabytes an hour run rate, according to one blog. Another user says normal usage is closer to 1-5 megabytes per hour. Continue to play until your eyes bleed.

- 2500-4000 MP3 albums, or 50,000 3-minute songs. Depending on quality/length, an MP3 album is somewhere between 60 and 100 megabytes. Amazon says its 3-minute MP3s are about 5 megabytes. There are only 43,200 minutes in a 30-day month, or enough time to listen to 14,400 3-minute songs. So you’ll be ok.

- 170-250 iTunes movie downloads. Digital movies in standard-def run between 1 and 1.5 gigabytes. “No Country For Old Men” is about 1.3 gigs, friend-o.

- 50-60 HD movie downloads. These run closer to 4-5 gigabytes each. So theoretically, this could be a problem, one day, for people who download more than 2 movies a day. Do you know any of those folks?

So: If you download one HD movie a week, six standard-def movies a week, 5 albums a week, play a ton of WoW, and surf a lot of YouTube and Hulu, you’ll still struggle to use 100 gigabytes of bandwidth per month. We think you’ll also struggle to listen to all that music and watch all those movies. Also, you should get out more. It’s nice outside! Go for a walk.

In other words, 250GB/month is A LOT for your average user, and still pretty generous for all but the most hardcore downloader. Ars Technica suggests that Comcast is trying to get the FCC off its back about a variety of complaints by offering a much more transparent way of determining “bandwidth hogs”, since there have been many customer complaints about being abruptly shut off by Comcast without prior warning or disclosure of how much is “too much”.

Meanwhile, today at DSL Reports, “Karl”, the writer who broke the story on Tuesday, has a lengthy list of criticisms and concerns about the implications of this plan, including the eventual moving to billing customers for their Internet usage on a “per-byte” basis.

A Big Fat One-Way Pipe

By Brian Filed in Links, Media Tagged with 1Gbps cable modem, bandwidth caps, cable industry, Cablevision, Cisco, DOCSIS 3.0, network DVR, set-top boxes, Time Warner Cable, TiVo January 18th, 2008 @ 2:59 pm

Some assorted bits and pieces about the cable world to tie together for you:

All the various tech sites are reporting that Time Warner Cable is going to test-drive a “pay-per-bits” pricing scheme for Internet access. Not unlike your cellular service, you would pre-pay for a set amount of bandwidth usage per month and then pay a premium in the form of per-byte overage fees. But, as DSL Reports also informs us, TWC is likely to set the bandwidth cap pretty low during the trial period — perhaps as low as 5GB. On the face of it, that might sound like a lot to you, but to anyone who downloads media content from the Internet, 5 gigs is a pittance. A single movie might be 5GB.

Most reactions to this news are pretty unfavorable, but telco guru David Isenberg says he thinks this isn’t a bad idea at all as a stopgap measure to deal with bandwidth usage outstripping the existing network infrastructure. Making people pay will slow down some bandwidth hogs, and is probably a fairer way of dealing with the issue than abandoning net neutrality and establishing preferred-access tiers for providers.

Meanwhile, at the CES show Cisco announced a 1Gbps “concept” cable modem that would work under DOCSIS 3.0′s channel-bonding process (which otherwise caps out around 150Mbps). Since DOCSIS 3.0 isn’t even implemented yet (and probably won’t be for another year), this is a “sneak-peek” at something that might be four or five years down the road. Of course, if your cable service only lets you download 5GB a month, about the only thing a gigabit cable modem will do is let you use up your allotted bandwidth 25 times faster than you can right now, but maybe by the time this puppy starts shipping they’ll have beefed up the backbone a bit.

They will want to get going on that sooner rather than later, too. In 2006, cable provider Cablevision tested a “network DVR” service that let customers have some DVR features without having to have a set-top box, but the test was pulled due to a court order that said they were crossing over into broadcaster territory by “redistributing content”. Now, our friends at Comcast think they’ve found a way around that by limiting the functionality of the network DVR. Your TiVo, or even your cable company DVR set-top box can fast-forward and rewind through recorded programs as well as provide the time-shifting ability of recording a show and watching it whenever you want. Comcast’s test service will only let you jump back to the beginning of a program already in progress — no fast forwarding whatsoever (which means you can’t skip through the commercials), and, from the description Ars Technica provides I’d say that rewinding and recording aren’t going to be part of the feature set either. There are indeed times where it would be great to be able to jump back to the beginning of a program you just turned into (a feature you can’t do with TiVo or other hardware DVRs unless they’re already on that channel), but personally I can’t see why anyone would pay for that service instead of a full-featured DVR unless it is super-cheap. Unless, of course, the real goal of the cable companies is to defeat the DVR in the long term and make this sort of “crippled” service the only one you can have.

Tag bandwidth caps

‘Cause Your’re Going To Run Out Of Fingers And Toes Quick

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