US bandwidth caps?

[Glenn Fricker]

Just curious how my American friends feel about this....

http://www.cracked.com/blog/the-secretly-horrifying-implications-atts-bandwidth-caps/


Interestingly enough, in Canada, the federal regulator tried to pull a fast one on the general public, by implementing a 20 gig cap & a $2 per gig overage fee. Kind of makes the American proposal seem quite tame in comparison.
(most major ISPs in Canada are owned by the same companies that own the cable & sattelite providers, as well as the major TV networks.)

Anyway, the consumer backlash in Canada was pretty impressive. Nearly 1/2 a million signatures on a petition (in a country of some 32 million people) inside of a week, plus a vow from the federal government to kill the action.

With companies like Netflix, Steam, & Skype changing the way how people live, it's easy to see how the big telecom companies are trying to get in on the action.


Discuss.

 

[AllanD]

Is there an actual reason to put this in place, or is it pure telephone company greed?

 

[Glenn Fricker]

One can make the argument that once the network is in place, it's in place & it doesn't matter how much or little data goes though. So yeah, I'm thinking 'greed.'

 

[Sloan]

I'm pretty sure the bandwidth has almost always been capped, we buy plans that offer a max speed anyway. Compared to most other countries, it's pretty damn lame.

 

[Russtopher]

It's not so much greed, there are costs associated with providing bandwidth to customers.

Very, very, very few customers would even come close to hitting AT&T's cap; it'd most likely be people who are sitting there torrenting DVDs 24x7 and potentially getting hit with DMCA complaints anyways.

A lot of larger carriers are either paying to bring in bandwidth from other backbones, or have some sort of peering agreement with backbones that say "we'll pass x amount of bandwidth to your network, and you can pass y amount to us, and as long as no one exceeds those limits then no one pays anything" and higher bandwidth use could cause those handoff agreements to bump up into billable territory. This is actually part of the excuse Comcast is using with Level 3 to try and shut down Netflix in favor of their streaming service - Comcast is saying that Netflix is causing Level 3 to hand over way too much traffic to Comcast, going well over what they agreed to take in exchange for passing their own traffic over to Level 3. So Comcast wants them to either fork over big bucks, or shut it (Netflix) down. Comcast is also trying to say that Level 3 is now a Content Delivery Network, rather than a backbone ISP, but that's really stretching it and everyone knows that.

I work for a regional ISP and we bring in bandwidth from multiple backbone carriers. A lot of our monthly payments to those carriers are based on traffic levels, so if our customers start using up a crazy amount of bandwidth, they end up paying us the same as always for their service and we're paying much larger bills to our upstreams who are being passed that customer traffic. Obviously it's not an apples to apples comparison with AT&T, but you get the drift.

 

[jipchen]

I have no limit but only get dsl 384 take that

But yeah it's pretty lame, they want even more money than they're already getting.. and they do nothing more for it. Seems fair to me, lol.
Just a matter of time until it's the same here (dsl via sattelite already has a bandwidth cap but that's actually logical).

 

[JeffTD]

What the fuck... I goddamn hate ATT so fucking much.

 

[ahjteam]

20 gig cap

i just checked that my computer has been up for 8 days and I've downloaded 18Gb in just that time. I'd guess 80-90% of that is from YouTube.

 

[arv_foh]

Very, very, very few customers would even come close to hitting AT&T's cap; it'd most likely be people who are sitting there torrenting DVDs 24x7 and potentially getting hit with DMCA complaints anyways.

I don't know how much bandwidth netflix uses to stream in HD but I'd imagine it would not be hard at all to hit that cap if you were watching instant movies and TV every night

 

[Russtopher]

At 150GB cap, you'd hit that by streaming 3 hours of HD Netflix every day. The "average" Netflix user watches around 11 hours every month.

For the record, I'm not in favor of caps, by any means. I once had a $400 credit card bill as a teen thanks to my brothers sitting on AOL non-stop for about 2 months So I know what a drag it is, and yes bandwidth costs are much less than they were even a few years ago. Just making the point that providers don't just give away bandwidth for free, like "oh hey all our pipes are in place, now we just sit back and profit and have no expenses".

 

[Notuern]

i just checked that my computer has been up for 8 days and I've downloaded 18Gb in just that time. I'd guess 80-90% of that is from YouTube.

Yeah, im using a mobile broadband at the moment(So i dont check youtube so i dont have to refill as often.), and i still land at about 4gb a week.. which is pretty insane considering that i dont youtube. :S

 

[Morgan C]

Welcome to Australia!

Just pray they don't add in what we have here, which is 'onpeak' and 'offpeak'. Your 150gb cap (I think I have the same) then becomes 100gb available between midnight and noon, and only 50gb between noon and midnight. And if you cap the onpeak, your internet slows to a crawl/you get charged $10/gb, and your offpeak data is gone.

 

[Sloan]

Welcome to Australia!

Just pray they don't add in what we have here, which is 'onpeak' and 'offpeak'. Your 150gb cap (I think I have the same) then becomes 100gb available between midnight and noon, and only 50gb between noon and midnight. And if you cap the onpeak, your internet slows to a crawl/you get charged $10/gb, and your offpeak data is gone.

hmmm, that sounds like satellite.
i had to use hughesnet satellite for a while and it was hell, the limit was 200mb within a 24hr period. if you exceeded that it would throttle you down to 5kb for 24hrs.:Shedevil:

 

[egan.]

The trick with this is that even if the cap doesn't move we are on the cusp of a big move to on demand video replacing traditional cable. Streaming media as stated above is a huge bandwidth hog. This is an anticipatory move to cash in on that switch.

I for one don't have cable but rather watch, netflix, hulu, and sports on ESPN3. I also make a the majority of my living editing audio and video with ftp delivery of much of the source material as well as delivery. As you can imagine this sort of cab is a big concern to me.

 

[Morgan C]

hmmm, that sounds like satellite.
i had to use hughesnet satellite for a while and it was hell, the limit was 200mb within a 24hr period. if you exceeded that it would throttle you down to 5kb for 24hrs.:Shedevil:

Right. Our cap is bigger but its for the whole month. Cap it and you're at 56k (which works out a lot slower being in Australia, plus on a wireless network) for the rest of the month.

 

[XnaySaturo]

For about 50$/month I'm getting 15mbps speeds (megaBITS, not megaBYTES, in case anyone gets confused, that's roughly 1.6Mb/sec top), and a download limit of something like 80gigs per month. They just increased the limit in recent months, it used to be 60. Prices for overages are fucking ridiculous. This is from the biggest internet provider in the province, and IMO the limit is way too low for the price.

 

[Loren Littlejohn]

Anyway, the consumer backlash in Canada was pretty impressive. Nearly 1/2 a million signatures on a petition (in a country of some 32 million people) inside of a week, plus a vow from the federal government to kill the action.

Americans refuse to give a shit about anything. This will happen, and we will bend over and take it gladly.

 

[DeclanWhite]

i get 35gb a month and i download at 150kb/s for 50$ in aus.. but i live in the middle of nowhere haha