johnnymk

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/30/te...html?th&emc=th

Comcast, one of the country’s largest Internet providers, said this week that it would place limits on customers’ broadband usage.

Beginning Oct. 1, Comcast will put a 250 gigabyte-a-month cap on residential users. The limit will not affect most users, at least not in the short-term, but is certain to create tension as some technologies gain traction.

A Comcast spokeswoman, Jennifer Khoury, said 250 gigabytes was about 100 times the typical usage; the average customer uses two to three gigabytes a month. Less than 1 percent of customers exceed the cap, she said.

Many Internet providers reserve the right to cancel the service of the most excessive users. The 250-gigabyte cap is Comcast’s way of specifying a longstanding policy of placing a limit on Internet consumption, and it comes after customer pushed for a definition of excessive use.

But on the Internet, consumer behavior does not stand still. As the technology company Cisco stated in a report last winter, “today’s ‘bandwidth hog’ is tomorrow’s average user.”

Some commentators were quick to characterize Comcast’s decision as having a chilling effect. Om Malik, the founder of the technology Web site GigaOm, called the cap “the end of the Internet as we know it.”

SLReports.com, a Web site about consumer broadband information, said it indicated “a significant shift in the U.S. broadband market that won’t be reversible.”

In recent months Comcast and other companies have considered clamping down on their most active subscribers, saying the limits were necessary to ensure fair access to the network for all.

Comcast’s cap does not amount to Internet metering, the charging of different prices for different broadband speeds or usage, but the change to Comcast’s policy does not rule out metering in the future.

In June, Time Warner Cable began a metering trial in one Texas city by offering various monthly plans and charging extra when consumers exceeded their bandwidth limit. AT&T has said that it is considering a similar pricing plan. The concept is not a foreign one; consumers already pay by usage for water and electricity. But broadband access has seemed unlimited, and any stifling of that is sure to concern some customers.

Until now, Comcast had not defined excessive use, but it had contacted customers who were using the heaviest amount of broadband and asked them to curb usage. Most do so willingly, the company said. The ones who do not curb their usage receive a second notice and risk having their accounts terminated.

Although the 250 gigabyte cap is now specified, users who exceed that amount will not have their access switched off immediately, nor will they be charged for excessive use. Instead, the customers may be contacted by Comcast and notified of the cap. The company did not say how 250 gigabytes was selected.

According to Comcast, a customer would have to download 62,500 songs or 125 standard-definition movies a month to exceed the caps. But high-definition video and video gaming require a higher amount of bandwidth. S. Derek Turner, the research director for the nonpartisan media policy group Free Press, said broadband caps could create a disincentive to view online video.

“As media companies put content online, consumers can bypass the cable companies and get their content directly from the Internet,” Mr. Turner said. “A 250 gigabyte cap may seem very high — and it is for today’s Internet use. But it’s essentially the equivalent of four hours of HD television a day.”

Critics have charged that Internet providers are trying to protect their cable TV and telephone businesses by stifling Internet access. Comcast says Fancast, its online video Web site, will count against the 250 gigabyte limit, but its digital voice service will not.

Comcast said there was no link between the caps, announced Thursday, and the Federal Communications Commission’s finding on Aug. 1 that the company was improperly inhibiting customers who used BitTorrent, a popular file-sharing program.

But Andrew Jay Schwartzman, the president of the Media Access Project, said the caps appeared to be a direct result of that finding. Mr. Schwartzman’s group represented Free Press in its complaint against Comcast about the file-sharing controls.

uncledaddy

Ok, I'm ignorant when it comes to technology. So if users are exceeding certain bandwiths than others can't access the network?

Looks like opening the door to start charging extra to me.

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mojo

basically they pipe a bunch of bandwidth into the neighborhood at once, and it's split between everyone in the area. usually it's not a problem, but sometimes you get a "bandwidth hog" that takes many times more bandwidth than the next person.

it seems like the amount of bandwidth that they're talking is like downloading over 5 high-bitrate movies a day for a month, or 2 full dvd rips of anything per day over that same period. normal usage might have you doing that for a day or two, but not a full month.

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Markel

I wonder if they are going to provide any way of checking how much bandwidth you've used? In the past, they have just told you "you've used too much so too bad for you". It has been obvious that they are metering customers' usage, and in the past they wouldn't provide that information to the customer.

One of my kids watches a lot of online content, and others do a lot of online gaming. I'd like to be able to know how much bandwidth has been used.

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Jeffbx

What a load of crap. Comcast should have done this years ago, and the only reason they didn't was because they were afraid of the marketing backlash & they thought they could just 'selectively' limit the usage by metering specific traffic. 99.9% of users don't even come close to using this amount of bandwidth, and those that do should be paying for a premium plan.

I'd much rather see the heavy users/abusers pay for what they use, instead of EVERYONE being limited in certain areas.

Plus the fact that when we DO get to the point where 250GB/mo is the norm, then Comcast will be forced to up the limit or lose customers. I really don't understand what took them so long to do this...

bachviet

If I am paying for "unlimited high speed internet", why should there be a cap?

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Airencracken

Pretty soon they'll charge for every HOUR you use the Internet


Oh wait...

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Jeffbx

IMHO, it shouldn't be unlimited, but that's Comcast's fault for using that term. I dunno about everyone else, but I think 250GM/mo is a pretty reasonable cap in exchange for avoiding selective throttling or lowering overall bandwidth. Personally I subscribe to Comcast because they're the fastest available in my area, not because it's an 'unlimited' plan. I doubt I ever go above a GB or 2 in a typical month.

If they were smart, they would be splitting into 2 (or more) plans - keep the current plan that everyone's on capped at 250GB/mo, and then also offer 500GB or truly unlimited for an extra charge. That way the people that really want it can still get it without impacting the overall service.

uncledaddy

Hmm, this may be irrelevant, but I have three computers and a notebook running off a router. I have Roadrunner from Time Warner and it seems when I stream CSI on CBS.com, or any other video it kicks the others off the net for a brief second.

Related? Am I a bandwith hog?

attgig

They should have a good interface for monitoring usage. I have no clue how much bandwidth online gaming actually uses up. I'm guessing not as much as a full movie, but you never know.
Also, vpn'ing into corporate networks... who really knows? They should have a monitor in place FIRST and allow users to see how much they're using for a month before putting this cap in, so that people can decide if they want to stick with comcast or go somewhere else that doesn't cap.
that pisses me off.

Also, I wonder if itunes/amazon/netflix, etc is b*tching about this considering that they all have online movie rentals.

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Jeffbx

Online gaming & corporate VPNs are both pretty low bandwidth apps. Even video streaming isn't that huge, unless you plan on leaving it on 24x7 at the highest quality. With 250GB/Mo you could download a full DVD quality movie every single day if you wanted to, and still have enough bandwidth left over for web surfing & checking your mail. And who in the heck downloads at DVD quality?

The only people that will really feel the impact of this are people who are downloading for the sake of downloading - the people on Bit Torrent or other peer-peer apps who are grabbing music & movies as fast as they can & leaving their servers open.

attgig

what is "pretty low bandwidth"?

I'm RDC'ed pretty often, and the way it refreshes, it almost seems like it's transferring jpgs at close to 15-30fps over the wire. I could be TOTALLY wrong about that, but that's just what it looks like to me. I figure that's like streaming video.

mcs328

http://lifehacker.com/5043545/are-yo...bandwidth-caps

Mentions a few tools to see how much bandwidth you're using. On a typical day I use 100megs just at home.

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Cubsfan

Which is really pretty low, right? That's only 3GB/month. So you could increase your usage almost 100 fold and still be ok.

Jeffbx

No, your computer is generating all of those graphics; it doesn't send any video over the wire. All is sends is player locations, server instructions, etc. A typical MMORPG like WOW will probably use about 5MB/hr, and a fast FPS like Unreal will bump it up to about 20MB/hr over a fast connection.

So even the worst gaming junkies can play 24x7 & still come in WAY below the 250GB limit.

zippyjuan

(I liked some of the language used in this report)
http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/38691/118/

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mojo

altho what comcast did to limit file sharing on the internet was misguided and short-sighted, it was in response to legal battles regarding copyright infringement- another path down an ugly road that would end up uncomfortably for many users.

or maybe mr cheung wants us to really think that comcast is really just plain evil

Kevster

Seeing Comcast do this is not surprising to me at all. In fact, we'll be seeing more and more providers come out with bandwidth caps and plans based on them in the coming months, with a big push next year. I hate to say this, but the all-you-can-eat bandwidth buffet is over and we'll have to join the rest of the world. For a good example of this, look at Plusnet in the UK. The key thing about this though is that they are very up-front about this. So far US and Canadian ISPs have generally sucked at the whole disclosure process because they're being super secret about it while testing/tweaking how they will deploy the new Deep Packet Inspection technologies that will allow them to effectively manage these usage policies in their broadband networks.

Comcast is going after the top .5% of their users with these caps, as they generate about 40-50% of their traffic (yes, they really do - I can't talk about how/where I have seen this information due to confidentiality agreements, but trust me on this). Most "power users" use less than 50GB a month, with about 80-85% of all users using less than 15GB per month (as of June 2008). Time Warner is evaluating caps in some test markets right now (namely Beaumont, TX), and other providers have been exploring how they will change their product offerings in the wake of ever-increasing bandwidth consumption per user (especially at busy times between 4PM and Midnight)

Streaming video is becoming much more of a bandwidth hog than P2P, especially on the downstream side from the internet to the subscriber, which is where all the bandwidth congestion problems are (upstream traffic is 1/5th that of downstream traffic, and typically 50-60% of upstream traffic is P2P). Also, HTTP traffic with embedded flash video, like YouTube or MySpace, is now about 25-30% of all downstream traffic. Thanks to Web 2.0, there's a lot more content to be downloaded than ever when you go to a website (it's not just [HTTP:TEXT] anymore kids - it's weighty flash & java apps now).

As for what kinds of throughput is being used up in the background, I was asked to look at just how much software/anti-virus/anti-malware updates could be in any given month, and you could easily reach 600MB-700MB (and possibly up to 1GB) depending on the number of applications and their update frequencies.

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Markel

Yeah, just look at the Comcast.net home page for an example.

attgig

Except that tool is worthless when you have four computers and a couple gaming rigs in your network all connected to the network and using up bandwidth.

360/ps3 gaming anyone?

attgig