Comcast throttling Bittorrent traffic

[spidey07]

Originally posted by: DrPizza
1. "McDonalds shouldn't put ketchup out where the customers can get it if they want to limit how much we can use. It isn't my fault that Joe paid the same amount for his french fries as I did, but he only uses a little ketchup. If they're going to put the ketchup out, it's my right to use a gallon of it on my french fries. I don't see how that's abusing the system. It's McDonald's fault for putting it out. I do what I want. Me me me me me me me."

2. You know what? If the ISP's would simply catch the people illegally downloading content, and boot them off once and for all, they would be able to offer much greater speeds for the rest of us. Boot off those 5% of users, raise prices 5% to compensate and offer even faster service to the rest of us. That would be wonderful. Heck, they wouldn't even need to raise rates 5% - the lower bandwidth useage would save some bucks too!

Analogies don't hold water on a business model that has been tried and true tested. There is no better mouse trap (well there may be, but as of 8/17/07 it doesn't exist). This is business and if one can build a better model, then so be it. That practice will prevail. Legality of content has no bearing, the price of resources is all that matters. Capital expenditure (one time) vs. operational expense (all the time). Supply/demand. If a provider can offer a better service for the majority of their customers they will do so. If a few whiners don't like it....they can go elsewhere for their services. Supply/demand. Free market. Live it, Love it.

At least as far as the most competitive market known, communications, is concerned.

 

[wetcat007]

Originally posted by: GuideBot

Originally posted by: spidey07

Originally posted by: eos

Originally posted by: spidey07
:thumbsup:

Smart move. They are eliminating the small percentage of people that use 90% of the networks capacity. This will enable better service to all customers.

Very smart.

Proof of the bolded comment?

I'm not allowed to release information. But in general on broadband residential services 5% of the users use 90% of the capacity and it's almost always P2P.

So? They're paying for a level of service, why can't they use it.

That's like charging someone for the use of a water hose, saying that the hose is 1" in diameter and always turned on --and then cutting them off for leaving the hose on all the time. Who cares if they use it or not? Why penalize someone for using the level of service that you've offered them in the first place?

lol ever hear of watering bans?

 

[VanTheMan]

I have a couple of roommates who use P2P frequently. When they have their clients running, even with ul/dl speeds limited by their software, Comcast almost immediately cripples my connection. They can have their clients limited to like 5-10kbps upload speed and we get less than 100k upload. Normally we have 600+ kbps upload and 8000 kbps+ download. I always thought the network was just congested until I started playing Battlefield 2 and noticed that my pings were ridiculous while they had P2P running.

 

[nweaver]

Originally posted by: Dean

Originally posted by: spidey07

Originally posted by: eos

Originally posted by: spidey07
:thumbsup:

Smart move. They are eliminating the small percentage of people that use 90% of the networks capacity. This will enable better service to all customers.

Very smart.

Proof of the bolded comment?

I'm not allowed to release information. But in general on broadband residential services 5% of the users use 90% of the capacity and it's almost always P2P.

If 5% of users are using up an ISP's entire network capacity, then that ISP has issues. Don't offer high bandwidth connections if you cannot support them.

I agree P2P is out of hand, but the company has a responsibility to have some redundancy.

not 90% of capacity, 90% of B/W (which is pretty much always oversold anyway)

 

[nweaver]

Originally posted by: jdoggg12

Originally posted by: jdoggg12
To those with qualms about 5% using 90%... what if everything that 5% was doing is legit/legal? Is it still unfair to the other 95%? They're both paying for the same service, some just choose to more fully use it.

Still waiting on an answer to this...

yes....

Lets see, as a business, I can keep 5 customer happy/paying, and have 95 complain about service, or I can throttle the 5 (and maybe loose them, oh no!) and keep 95 happy. It's not rocket science.

 

[Leros]

Originally posted by: nweaver

Originally posted by: jdoggg12

Originally posted by: jdoggg12
To those with qualms about 5% using 90%... what if everything that 5% was doing is legit/legal? Is it still unfair to the other 95%? They're both paying for the same service, some just choose to more fully use it.

Still waiting on an answer to this...

yes....

Lets see, as a business, I can keep 5 customer happy/paying, and have 95 complain about service, or I can throttle the 5 (and maybe loose them, oh no!) and keep 95 happy. It's not rocket science.

From a purely business/financial aspect the ISPs are doing what makes sense. However, it pisses me off to no end and I think... as much as I hate it... there needs to be some legislation made about openness and fairness of internet access.

 

[nweaver]

Originally posted by: GuideBot

Originally posted by: spidey07

Originally posted by: GuideBot
That's the problem, spidey07. Nobody's abusing anything.

Sure you are. You're using a burstable connection like a sustained one.

You can get a nice fat link to the intarweb at whatever speed you like. You can fill it all day long and run it to full capacity, all day, everyday.

But you'll have to pay for it.

What you're likely to see in the future is a 'power user' connection at a significantly higher price to help pay for the network.

Comcast tells me that I can have 8mbps for 60/month. I pay 60 per month and use 8mbps. I don't see what the problem is and I absolutely refuse to acknowledge otherwise. Yes, I know there's reasons behind it that are technical and I understand them all. I don't agree with it. I'm paying for a level of service that they don't want me to use but they want to charge me for it anyway.

If they don't want to offer a sustained service, I shouldn't be paying a sustained rate. Break out how much I'm paying per month into what I would be paying per-bit and charge me according to my usage, then? Hell no, comcast would lose money!

They want to charge me a sustained rate, then they're going to honor my sustained usage.

Period.

Price out a T1 (sustained pipe) and your comcast. you are NOT paying comcast for a sustained rate, that's what Spidey is saying.

 

[nweaver]

Originally posted by: child of wonder

Originally posted by: jersiq

Although I haven't peered over my vehicle warranty lately, I am sure there may be a couple of "fair use" clauses in there.

You're right. Bad example. We could instead call it a lifetime warranty.

Originally posted by: jersiq

Now we'll get back into the legality of P2P (boy I sure am arguing in circles tonight) Could someone please tell me what exactly they are legally sharing/downloading that uses the entire 8mbps bandwidth for a sustained period of time? Again this is P2P traffic we are talking about here, not serving apps or the like. If someone could point me to legitimate downloads in this arena, then I will rest my case. (I am not trying to be a smartass here, just genuinely curious)

I recently downloaded Ubuntu 7.04, RHEL4, CentOS 5, and Debian 4.0 and left them seeding for days.

I've also downloaded and shared independent, unpublished movies and music.

These are all 100% legal.

honestly, legal traffic probably accounts for well under 1% of BT traffic. If all folks did was download Linux distro's, ISP's wouldn't block/shape it.

BTW, I don't think RHEL is legal to BT.

 

[dug777]

I'm willing to bet GuideBot's life that way over 90% of P2P traffic is illegal, so i don't have the slightest problem with them doing this

 

[nweaver]

Originally posted by: Leros

Originally posted by: nweaver

Originally posted by: jdoggg12

Originally posted by: jdoggg12
To those with qualms about 5% using 90%... what if everything that 5% was doing is legit/legal? Is it still unfair to the other 95%? They're both paying for the same service, some just choose to more fully use it.

Still waiting on an answer to this...

yes....

Lets see, as a business, I can keep 5 customer happy/paying, and have 95 complain about service, or I can throttle the 5 (and maybe loose them, oh no!) and keep 95 happy. It's not rocket science.

From a purely business/financial aspect the ISPs are doing what makes sense. However, it pisses me off to no end and I think... as much as I hate it... there needs to be some legislation made about openness and fairness of internet access.

no, the last thing we need is more government. Buy hey, if you ask for it...if they are going to get involved, they are going to start hammering down on copyright infringement much much more. I guess that would solve the issue though....

 

[nweaver]

Originally posted by: dug777
I'm willing to bet GuideBot's life that way over 90% of P2P traffic is illegal, so i don't have the slightest problem with them doing this

I would bet it less then 1/10th of 1% tbh


and of that, most have an alternative download method.

 

[Leros]

Originally posted by: nweaver

Originally posted by: Leros

Originally posted by: nweaver

Originally posted by: jdoggg12

Originally posted by: jdoggg12
To those with qualms about 5% using 90%... what if everything that 5% was doing is legit/legal? Is it still unfair to the other 95%? They're both paying for the same service, some just choose to more fully use it.

Still waiting on an answer to this...

yes....

Lets see, as a business, I can keep 5 customer happy/paying, and have 95 complain about service, or I can throttle the 5 (and maybe loose them, oh no!) and keep 95 happy. It's not rocket science.

From a purely business/financial aspect the ISPs are doing what makes sense. However, it pisses me off to no end and I think... as much as I hate it... there needs to be some legislation made about openness and fairness of internet access.

no, the last thing we need is more government. Buy hey, if you ask for it...if they are going to get involved, they are going to start hammering down on copyright infringement much much more. I guess that would solve the issue though....

But ISPs are always going to say screw the 5% geek community that needs large bandwidth amounts. Capitalism is going to screw us geeks. The question is whether or not the average computer user will be using massive amounts of bandwidth in 10 years (IPTV, etc). If that is the case, we have nothing to worry about, but as of now we are going to get screwed more and more.

 

[silverpig]

Originally posted by: DrPizza
1. "McDonalds shouldn't put ketchup out where the customers can get it if they want to limit how much we can use. It isn't my fault that Joe paid the same amount for his french fries as I did, but he only uses a little ketchup. If they're going to put the ketchup out, it's my right to use a gallon of it on my french fries. I don't see how that's abusing the system. It's McDonald's fault for putting it out. I do what I want. Me me me me me me me."

2. You know what? If the ISP's would simply catch the people illegally downloading content, and boot them off once and for all, they would be able to offer much greater speeds for the rest of us. Boot off those 5% of users, raise prices 5% to compensate and offer even faster service to the rest of us. That would be wonderful. Heck, they wouldn't even need to raise rates 5% - the lower bandwidth useage would save some bucks too!

Actually it's more like:

1. McDonald's offers unlimited ketchup for its fries, but calculates that 50% of people use ketchup on 50% of their fries, and conclude that only 25% of their fries need ketchup. Thus, when someone comes along and wants to use the free ketchup on all of their fries, McDonald's decides that this is above and beyond what the average user uses, and cuts off ketchup services.

 

[nweaver]

Originally posted by: silverpig

Originally posted by: DrPizza
1. "McDonalds shouldn't put ketchup out where the customers can get it if they want to limit how much we can use. It isn't my fault that Joe paid the same amount for his french fries as I did, but he only uses a little ketchup. If they're going to put the ketchup out, it's my right to use a gallon of it on my french fries. I don't see how that's abusing the system. It's McDonald's fault for putting it out. I do what I want. Me me me me me me me."

2. You know what? If the ISP's would simply catch the people illegally downloading content, and boot them off once and for all, they would be able to offer much greater speeds for the rest of us. Boot off those 5% of users, raise prices 5% to compensate and offer even faster service to the rest of us. That would be wonderful. Heck, they wouldn't even need to raise rates 5% - the lower bandwidth useage would save some bucks too!

Actually it's more like:

1. McDonald's offers unlimited ketchup for its fries, but calculates that 50% of people use ketchup on 50% of their fries, and conclude that only 25% of their fries need ketchup. Thus, when someone comes along and wants to use the free ketchup on all of their fries, McDonald's decides that this is above and beyond what the average user uses, and cuts off ketchup services.

Look, the fry analogy is broken, it DOESN'T WORK. ISP's don't offer "unlimited bandwidth"

 

[nweaver]

Originally posted by: Leros

Originally posted by: nweaver

Originally posted by: Leros

Originally posted by: nweaver

Originally posted by: jdoggg12

Originally posted by: jdoggg12
To those with qualms about 5% using 90%... what if everything that 5% was doing is legit/legal? Is it still unfair to the other 95%? They're both paying for the same service, some just choose to more fully use it.

Still waiting on an answer to this...

yes....

Lets see, as a business, I can keep 5 customer happy/paying, and have 95 complain about service, or I can throttle the 5 (and maybe loose them, oh no!) and keep 95 happy. It's not rocket science.

From a purely business/financial aspect the ISPs are doing what makes sense. However, it pisses me off to no end and I think... as much as I hate it... there needs to be some legislation made about openness and fairness of internet access.

no, the last thing we need is more government. Buy hey, if you ask for it...if they are going to get involved, they are going to start hammering down on copyright infringement much much more. I guess that would solve the issue though....

But ISPs are always going to say screw the 5% geek community that needs large bandwidth amounts. Capitalism is going to screw us geeks. The question is whether or not the average computer user will be using massive amounts of bandwidth in 10 years (IPTV, etc). If that is the case, we have nothing to worry about, but as of now we are going to get screwed more and more.

business' are going to say screw the 5% that we lose money on. In fact, I would say it's not geeks, but more nerds (yes, there is a difference). I don't use much bandwidth at home at all. At work, we fill a 155Mb/s pipe every couple of days. That' 155 isn't a bunch of cable modems, we pay a little more then that for our guaranteed b/w. Think of this like your neighbor. "Well, our connection sucks, and comcast just raised our rates again, all so our nerdy neighbor can get his hentia faster while the rest of the block can barely surf the web".

Look at it this way. How would you like it if you had to pay an "average" tank of gas, regardless of what you drive. So if you drive a bike, you pay $45. You drive a large pick up, $45. The cars that are under that are not going to stop, and the guys with $80 gas bills will, so you can barely get in if you need to. Now, if that gas station installed special nozzeles so it took all day to fill the large truck, but your small car could get in and out very quickly, would that be bad (for most people)? No, the trucks would go elsewhere, the number of customers would go up, and costs would come down. Screwing the 5% that COST you money instead of MAKING you money just makes sense.

 

[Banzai042]

If it weren't for the fact that the various ISPs stole $200 Billion from us and that countries in Europe and Asia have no problem offering higher speed connections to consumers under the same conditions (mass number of people using torrents) without any form of throttling, I might be sympathetic. However the fact of the matter is that the telecoms were given billions to build a whole new infrastructure, and they didn't deliver. It's only now that we're seeing what the law said we would have back in 2000 (FIOS). Also, if it's really that expensive to allow users unrestricted access to the 'net then why can companies in Europe and Asia offer higher speeds with no throttling? Do they have some magic technology that makes it cheaper for them? It's very very obviously not population density, or we'd have the same speeds offered in major metro areas (NYC, Chicago, LA) for the same prices, so what is it? If ISPs can't provide enough bandwidth now what do they expect will happen when HD becomes more prevalent on the net. Sooner or later they're going to need to increase capacity, maybe they should start doing that instead of bitching about not having enough capacity while giving CEOs/Presidents million-dollar bonuses.

 

[Hacp]

Originally posted by: nweaver

Originally posted by: Leros

Originally posted by: nweaver

Originally posted by: Leros

Originally posted by: nweaver

Originally posted by: jdoggg12

Originally posted by: jdoggg12
To those with qualms about 5% using 90%... what if everything that 5% was doing is legit/legal? Is it still unfair to the other 95%? They're both paying for the same service, some just choose to more fully use it.

Still waiting on an answer to this...

yes....

Lets see, as a business, I can keep 5 customer happy/paying, and have 95 complain about service, or I can throttle the 5 (and maybe loose them, oh no!) and keep 95 happy. It's not rocket science.

From a purely business/financial aspect the ISPs are doing what makes sense. However, it pisses me off to no end and I think... as much as I hate it... there needs to be some legislation made about openness and fairness of internet access.

no, the last thing we need is more government. Buy hey, if you ask for it...if they are going to get involved, they are going to start hammering down on copyright infringement much much more. I guess that would solve the issue though....

But ISPs are always going to say screw the 5% geek community that needs large bandwidth amounts. Capitalism is going to screw us geeks. The question is whether or not the average computer user will be using massive amounts of bandwidth in 10 years (IPTV, etc). If that is the case, we have nothing to worry about, but as of now we are going to get screwed more and more.

business' are going to say screw the 5% that we lose money on. In fact, I would say it's not geeks, but more nerds (yes, there is a difference). I don't use much bandwidth at home at all. At work, we fill a 155Mb/s pipe every couple of days. That' 155 isn't a bunch of cable modems, we pay a little more then that for our guaranteed b/w. Think of this like your neighbor. "Well, our connection sucks, and comcast just raised our rates again, all so our nerdy neighbor can get his hentia faster while the rest of the block can barely surf the web".

Look at it this way. How would you like it if you had to pay an "average" tank of gas, regardless of what you drive. So if you drive a bike, you pay $45. You drive a large pick up, $45. The cars that are under that are not going to stop, and the guys with $80 gas bills will, so you can barely get in if you need to. Now, if that gas station installed special nozzeles so it took all day to fill the large truck, but your small car could get in and out very quickly, would that be bad (for most people)? No, the trucks would go elsewhere, the number of customers would go up, and costs would come down. Screwing the 5% that COST you money instead of MAKING you money just makes sense.

No, the companies will pad their wallets with the extra money. Cable companies make billions of dollars in profits by oversubscribing customers and ignoring infrastructure improvements.

 

[shortylickens]

Originally posted by: DonVito
I use Comcast and haven't noticed this at all.

Thats funny, I use Comcast and I cant run ANY file sharing programs.
No Torrent apps of any kind, no DC++. Nothing.

I just assumed they had a policy of blocking such things and never thought much about it.

I may have to chat with a customer service rep.

 

[nweaver]

Originally posted by: Hacp

Originally posted by: nweaver

Originally posted by: Leros

Originally posted by: nweaver

Originally posted by: Leros

Originally posted by: nweaver

Originally posted by: jdoggg12

Originally posted by: jdoggg12
To those with qualms about 5% using 90%... what if everything that 5% was doing is legit/legal? Is it still unfair to the other 95%? They're both paying for the same service, some just choose to more fully use it.

Still waiting on an answer to this...

yes....

Lets see, as a business, I can keep 5 customer happy/paying, and have 95 complain about service, or I can throttle the 5 (and maybe loose them, oh no!) and keep 95 happy. It's not rocket science.

From a purely business/financial aspect the ISPs are doing what makes sense. However, it pisses me off to no end and I think... as much as I hate it... there needs to be some legislation made about openness and fairness of internet access.

no, the last thing we need is more government. Buy hey, if you ask for it...if they are going to get involved, they are going to start hammering down on copyright infringement much much more. I guess that would solve the issue though....

But ISPs are always going to say screw the 5% geek community that needs large bandwidth amounts. Capitalism is going to screw us geeks. The question is whether or not the average computer user will be using massive amounts of bandwidth in 10 years (IPTV, etc). If that is the case, we have nothing to worry about, but as of now we are going to get screwed more and more.

business' are going to say screw the 5% that we lose money on. In fact, I would say it's not geeks, but more nerds (yes, there is a difference). I don't use much bandwidth at home at all. At work, we fill a 155Mb/s pipe every couple of days. That' 155 isn't a bunch of cable modems, we pay a little more then that for our guaranteed b/w. Think of this like your neighbor. "Well, our connection sucks, and comcast just raised our rates again, all so our nerdy neighbor can get his hentia faster while the rest of the block can barely surf the web".

Look at it this way. How would you like it if you had to pay an "average" tank of gas, regardless of what you drive. So if you drive a bike, you pay $45. You drive a large pick up, $45. The cars that are under that are not going to stop, and the guys with $80 gas bills will, so you can barely get in if you need to. Now, if that gas station installed special nozzeles so it took all day to fill the large truck, but your small car could get in and out very quickly, would that be bad (for most people)? No, the trucks would go elsewhere, the number of customers would go up, and costs would come down. Screwing the 5% that COST you money instead of MAKING you money just makes sense.

No, the companies will pad their wallets with the extra money. Cable companies make billions of dollars in profits by oversubscribing customers and ignoring infrastructure improvements.

I promise that if you run torrents, they are not padding their wallet, they are LOSING money.

Comcast is a public company, they have obligation to provide service and make money. Blocking torrents helps BOTH of those goals, allowing torrents can hinder BOTH of those goals. Are you saying that in Comcast's position, you would allow torrents, in spite of driving much or your consumer base away (multiple subs get crappy web surfing speeds so that one user can download gigs of likely illegal data).

 

[child of wonder]

Originally posted by: nweaver

Originally posted by: child of wonder

Originally posted by: jersiq

Although I haven't peered over my vehicle warranty lately, I am sure there may be a couple of "fair use" clauses in there.

You're right. Bad example. We could instead call it a lifetime warranty.

Originally posted by: jersiq

Now we'll get back into the legality of P2P (boy I sure am arguing in circles tonight) Could someone please tell me what exactly they are legally sharing/downloading that uses the entire 8mbps bandwidth for a sustained period of time? Again this is P2P traffic we are talking about here, not serving apps or the like. If someone could point me to legitimate downloads in this arena, then I will rest my case. (I am not trying to be a smartass here, just genuinely curious)

I recently downloaded Ubuntu 7.04, RHEL4, CentOS 5, and Debian 4.0 and left them seeding for days.

I've also downloaded and shared independent, unpublished movies and music.

These are all 100% legal.

honestly, legal traffic probably accounts for well under 1% of BT traffic. If all folks did was download Linux distro's, ISP's wouldn't block/shape it.

BTW, I don't think RHEL is legal to BT.

RHEL was downloaded from RHN. You're right, not BT. My mistake.

 

[nweaver]

Originally posted by: Hacp

Originally posted by: nweaver

Originally posted by: Leros

Originally posted by: nweaver

Originally posted by: Leros

Originally posted by: nweaver

Originally posted by: jdoggg12

Originally posted by: jdoggg12
To those with qualms about 5% using 90%... what if everything that 5% was doing is legit/legal? Is it still unfair to the other 95%? They're both paying for the same service, some just choose to more fully use it.

Still waiting on an answer to this...

yes....

Lets see, as a business, I can keep 5 customer happy/paying, and have 95 complain about service, or I can throttle the 5 (and maybe loose them, oh no!) and keep 95 happy. It's not rocket science.

From a purely business/financial aspect the ISPs are doing what makes sense. However, it pisses me off to no end and I think... as much as I hate it... there needs to be some legislation made about openness and fairness of internet access.

no, the last thing we need is more government. Buy hey, if you ask for it...if they are going to get involved, they are going to start hammering down on copyright infringement much much more. I guess that would solve the issue though....

But ISPs are always going to say screw the 5% geek community that needs large bandwidth amounts. Capitalism is going to screw us geeks. The question is whether or not the average computer user will be using massive amounts of bandwidth in 10 years (IPTV, etc). If that is the case, we have nothing to worry about, but as of now we are going to get screwed more and more.

business' are going to say screw the 5% that we lose money on. In fact, I would say it's not geeks, but more nerds (yes, there is a difference). I don't use much bandwidth at home at all. At work, we fill a 155Mb/s pipe every couple of days. That' 155 isn't a bunch of cable modems, we pay a little more then that for our guaranteed b/w. Think of this like your neighbor. "Well, our connection sucks, and comcast just raised our rates again, all so our nerdy neighbor can get his hentia faster while the rest of the block can barely surf the web".

Look at it this way. How would you like it if you had to pay an "average" tank of gas, regardless of what you drive. So if you drive a bike, you pay $45. You drive a large pick up, $45. The cars that are under that are not going to stop, and the guys with $80 gas bills will, so you can barely get in if you need to. Now, if that gas station installed special nozzeles so it took all day to fill the large truck, but your small car could get in and out very quickly, would that be bad (for most people)? No, the trucks would go elsewhere, the number of customers would go up, and costs would come down. Screwing the 5% that COST you money instead of MAKING you money just makes sense.

No, the companies will pad their wallets with the extra money. Cable companies make billions of dollars in profits by oversubscribing customers and ignoring infrastructure improvements.

OMG, I just relized CISCO IS SCREWING ME!!1!

They sold me a switch, and oversubscribed the backplane, so they must be screwing me. If I have 2 10GB ports, and 24 1000Mb/s ports, then I want a 44Gb/s backplane...oh, and it offers to stack, so my stack needs to be able to handle 44*6 Gb/s, or else they are screwing me by oversubscribing.

Oh wait, oversubscribing is a COMMON PRACTICE that doesn't affect 95% of a companies customers.

 

[Chaotic42]

Originally posted by: GuideBot
So? They're paying for a level of service, why can't they use it.

That's like charging someone for the use of a water hose, saying that the hose is 1" in diameter and always turned on --and then cutting them off for leaving the hose on all the time. Who cares if they use it or not? Why penalize someone for using the level of service that you've offered them in the first place?

I don't know, but I have a good feeling that they oversell internet service. Let's say that Charter has 5000 customers in my city connected to their local backbone, each with 3Mbps service. If everyone was maxing that out, they'd be dealing with 15Gbps of demand just for downloads. That sounds unlikely, and 5000 people per backbone seems very low. My guess is that they assume that most people will just use little bursts of internet activity here and there.

Maybe they can throttle from say 8am-10pm? Of course, we really just need to overhaul our telecommunications infrastructure in America, but that seems unlikely.

 

[dmcowen674]

Originally posted by: Chaotic42

Originally posted by: GuideBot
So? They're paying for a level of service, why can't they use it.

That's like charging someone for the use of a water hose, saying that the hose is 1" in diameter and always turned on --and then cutting them off for leaving the hose on all the time. Who cares if they use it or not? Why penalize someone for using the level of service that you've offered them in the first place?

I don't know, but I have a good feeling that they oversell internet service. Let's say that Charter has 5000 customers in my city connected to their local backbone, each with 3Mbps service. If everyone was maxing that out, they'd be dealing with 15Gbps of demand just for downloads. That sounds unlikely, and 5000 people per backbone seems very low. My guess is that they assume that most people will just use little bursts of internet activity here and there.

Maybe they can throttle from say 8am-10pm? Of course, we really just need to overhaul our telecommunications infrastructure in America, but that seems unlikely.

How dare Americans actually use the Internet they are paying for.

 

[Dean]

As much as I hate to say it, ISP's should cap users at something reasonable, to like 100GB per month, then throttle them down substantially (for everything) if they go over, but not charge them for the remainder of the month.

100GB, while still robust enough to give power users enough room to play, will prevent the worst leaches from crippling network data flow. It will also help control costs, which eventually get passed on to the customer. Most 10M or 15M customers will spread out their usage through the month to avoid that cap.

With that said, I probably use up about 40-50GB a month, so call me biased! I do think however that is the most fair way for everyone.

 

[Leros]

Originally posted by: nweaver

Originally posted by: Leros

Originally posted by: nweaver

Originally posted by: Leros

Originally posted by: nweaver

Originally posted by: jdoggg12

Originally posted by: jdoggg12
To those with qualms about 5% using 90%... what if everything that 5% was doing is legit/legal? Is it still unfair to the other 95%? They're both paying for the same service, some just choose to more fully use it.

Still waiting on an answer to this...

yes....

Lets see, as a business, I can keep 5 customer happy/paying, and have 95 complain about service, or I can throttle the 5 (and maybe loose them, oh no!) and keep 95 happy. It's not rocket science.

From a purely business/financial aspect the ISPs are doing what makes sense. However, it pisses me off to no end and I think... as much as I hate it... there needs to be some legislation made about openness and fairness of internet access.

no, the last thing we need is more government. Buy hey, if you ask for it...if they are going to get involved, they are going to start hammering down on copyright infringement much much more. I guess that would solve the issue though....

But ISPs are always going to say screw the 5% geek community that needs large bandwidth amounts. Capitalism is going to screw us geeks. The question is whether or not the average computer user will be using massive amounts of bandwidth in 10 years (IPTV, etc). If that is the case, we have nothing to worry about, but as of now we are going to get screwed more and more.

business' are going to say screw the 5% that we lose money on. In fact, I would say it's not geeks, but more nerds (yes, there is a difference). I don't use much bandwidth at home at all. At work, we fill a 155Mb/s pipe every couple of days. That' 155 isn't a bunch of cable modems, we pay a little more then that for our guaranteed b/w. Think of this like your neighbor. "Well, our connection sucks, and comcast just raised our rates again, all so our nerdy neighbor can get his hentia faster while the rest of the block can barely surf the web".

Look at it this way. How would you like it if you had to pay an "average" tank of gas, regardless of what you drive. So if you drive a bike, you pay $45. You drive a large pick up, $45. The cars that are under that are not going to stop, and the guys with $80 gas bills will, so you can barely get in if you need to. Now, if that gas station installed special nozzeles so it took all day to fill the large truck, but your small car could get in and out very quickly, would that be bad (for most people)? No, the trucks would go elsewhere, the number of customers would go up, and costs would come down. Screwing the 5% that COST you money instead of MAKING you money just makes sense.

The point for me is that when I signed up I was getting XMbps transfer rates and unlimited bandwidth. I'm sure that giant contact that nobody reads says they can block whatever traffic they feel like, but that doesn't feel right to me. As far as I'm concerned, I should be able to max out my connection 24/7 using whatever protocols I feel like.