American Cable Association Wants Bandwidth Caps

[Marcus Yam]

The American Cable Association said that, like it or not, metered bandwidth Internet pricing is coming, and will be a necessity.

American Cable Association Wants Bandwidth Caps : Read more

 

[kingnoobe]

Let'em. I'm sure verizon.. Is just sitting back laughing knowning their gonna make billions stealing all these cable companies customers. Right now while there is incentive for fios.. This would be a huge incentive for verizon to really push vioz everywhere even in high competition as it would own them in every way.

Effiecent.. Maybe not for cable.. Guess what cable is not the only high speed internet solution.. So sucks to be them.

 

[wormy]

they can say that they NEED to...but thats not good enough...i want to specifically know why they NEED to...I wanna see some numbers...I wanna see their costs and profit margins!!!

 

[The Schnoz]

I think the internet is the best way to deliver high res video. It's the current infastructure of the internet that makes it inefficient. Whether cable or satellite companies like it or not everything is going the way of the internet, and the internet is going the way of wireless broadband. Those that need fiber will use it, because landlines will always have the fastest bandwidth, but after the launch of LTE bandwidth will be fast enough to carry HD content wirelessly and that will be enough for the mainstream.

 

[NocturnalOne]

Companies can offer their products pretty much at whatever cost structure they want. It is indeed not reasonable for Joe-average to subsidize Marky-hacker who's got his pron torrents running day and night. You've got to pay to play.

Meanwhile competition will do it's thing. If it's possible to deliver more for less then someone will jump in. I left Comcast cable and went to ATT DSL because of quality issues. Bandwidth was fine but too many packet drops were killing my Vonage phone and VPN to work. Now I have less bandwidth but latency is lower and reliability is better.

People that don't have a choice are screwed but that's nothing new. ISPs can already adjust their pricing based on perceived lack of competition.

 

[Guest]

GG. Verizon is going to get all the customers now.

 

[joescalon]

The problem with them trying to say that this is a better business model is the fact that the internet speeds aren't increasing. It might have been 40 a month for 4 years but have they increased the speed at all? Kinda like there electricity model, you pay by the meter but you aren't limited to half your appliances. If any ISP is going to charge me by the meter, it better fast as hell. Since I pay 65 a month for only 10meg, and to me the speed is more important than the quantity since I don't download Blueray movies or something..

 

[matchboxmatt]

If 50% use less than 1GB a month, then what would be the point of charging that much of a user-base S10 less?

I don't believe those figures, and if they're real, they're on the verge of becoming outdated as online video content increases in popularity. The internet has become a necessary service for most of our generation. Abusing the rate of its growth would be holding everyone back.

 

[chaosgs]

I bet TWC paid them to say that.

 

[Guest]

Competition is great but everyone needs to remember that there are many cable companies in the US that have little or no competition in certain communities. Like in San Antonio and Austin, there AT&T and Time Warner and that's pretty much it. Unfortunately, both of those companies are experimenting with caps. So, while everyone can say competition will succeed in preventing price gouging and metered billing by the cable companies, it's just not true everywhere. Some people have little or no choice and those people are going to feel the pinch in their pocketbooks. Bandwidth caps and metered billing overall are completely unfair unless they're the same for everyone but cable companies won't cap in areas that have good competition (like FIOS).

 

[wormy]

they are doing this bc services like netflix and anyone else offering online video content...especially movies...is killing the cable companies on making money off their movie channels...so they are killing the company thats killing them by destroying their customers' available bandwidth

 

[formin]

corporate greed is insane

 

[Greatwalrus]

Oh, wouldn't they love to go by the crappy, false "heating bill" analogy. This is internet service, not heating.

If Comcast ever puts together a strict cap or consumption-based billing, I will find an alternative.

By the way, the statistics on bandwidth usage were 2 years ago - April 2007, a lot has changed since then, I would say, with increased bandwidth usage and storage size.

 

[Guest]

Wow their heating bill analogy is bad. You pay for the gas you use to heat the house. Cable company don't provide us with the contents on the internet, so how does this analogy work here. We are paying our ISP for the use of infrastructure for us to receive the internet content, not for the content themselves.

Also the argument about your grandma subsidizing anyone whose using more network bandwidth doesn't make sense at all. If someone is paying for 5mb/s and using 5mb/s to dl something then how is he being subsidized by your grandma?

 

[Guest]

If there are that many people use less than 1GB a month, maybe they should not get any "high speed" internet. They can live off of 56k and/or going to the library.

I know in GA, at least, has the option of flat rate or adjust rate for heat. So do not go around and fool people, you big CEO.

This is just like going out for dinner. You want all you can eat or a set meal?

Smaller ISPs can make more money with this plan, and bigger ISPs, with TV cable service, can make more money, plus driving companies like Netflix out of business (cost to join Betflix plus paying for downloading movies).

 

[Sicundercover]

Either way its starting to look like they are going to do this and its going to suck hard. These guys want to find a way to bleed their customers and they will for a time. However my hope is that someone will come along and see how they can get the entire base by offering a sevrice the same as current.

Of course at that time the other ISP's will start crying, there will be law suits, and when their companies begin to fail because of bad business models they will start begging for Tax payer funded government bail outs.

This is problem #1 in modern business, "Get as much money as you can, as fast as you can"; this almost always leaves the company dead and many people unemployed.

 

[mediv42]

their argument would be far more believable if the grandmother who checks her email once a week (you know, the one they are protecting from the college students) didnt still have to pay $30 a month. Maybe $5

 

[rbarone69]

You have to remember the ISPs get bandwidth in bulk from the other carriers (Level3 etc...). Their purchasing power can pull down the per megabit prices considerably. The problem I have with this is the bandwidth costs are going down as technology grows. At a small data center I can purchase a 10Mbit committed 100Mbit burst for roughly $200 / month. Mind you, this is quality bandwidth peered with the major ISPs. Now this is a small amount of bandwidth purchase... I'm positive TWC, Comcast, Verizon would be able to get closer to the $2-5 per Mbit... (if someone knows different I would love to hear).

Let's do a little math on the 10Mbit commit and see what kind of charges I would incur.

10Mbit = ~1.1MByte /sec (effective)
66MB / minute
4GB / hour
95GB / day
2.851TB / month

My Cost: $200 for 2851GB
Their cost (I'll estimate $10 per MBit): $100


Ok... You tell me that this is complete BS... I understand there's a need to make margin on this, and there's a need to re-invest in tech, but there are simply better ways to control high bandwidth usage. I can bet that bandwidth is the lowest cost item for these companies. Highest cost items would be their employees, infrastructure and head equipment.

I would rather see the cable companies come out and say we'll give you 2MB of gauranteed bandwidth for $50, you can burst up to 10, but they may cut this back at most to 2MB during periods of high demand or if the user is using too much (> 95th percentile?). This would be reasonable with no supprise bills and allow good burst speeds for the movie watchers and downloaders.

 

[falchard]

90% of fiber-optic lines were paid for by the government. Most of the bandwidth these cable companies lay claim to was subsidized to them by the government, meaning we the consumer actually paid them to charge us for cable internet.

The thing thats insulting about the metered approach isn't really the tact. Its a logical approach when you charge 1~10 cents per gigabyte, but the rate they want to charge is too much. Also the reason for these bandwidth caps is that the cable companies are refusing to upgrade and build their fiber-optic network with the profits they generate to do just that. Only a handful are investing in that sort of technology.

 

[SAL-e]

[citation][nom]NocturnalOne[/nom]Companies can offer their products pretty much at whatever cost structure they want. It is indeed not reasonable for Joe-average to subsidize Marky-hacker who's got his pron torrents running day and night. You've got to pay to play.[/citation]
Light and cheaper plans are already available, but COX and TW are hiding those plans on their web sites. They will offer those plans only if the grandma ask for it and threatens to quit. So do not work for the cable propaganda. Grandma don't need 10Mbps download speed to read her e-mails. She will be just fine with 1.5Mbps or slower. All BS about the cap is about the Videos. They are very use to old practice to rip us for programs that we don't want. The crappy analogy about the heating bill is even more manipulative. The gas company provides the natural gas. The electrical company is producing the electricity. The GB that I receive or send over the Internet is produced by me or my friends: Pictures, Videos, etc. They don't have right to tax me for that. They provide the pipe and I will pay for the pipe. If someone want big pipe he will pay more.
The size of the Internet pipe is measured in Mbps not GB.

 

[Dyseman]

Polka gave that example of his heating bill in Pittsburgh, where he would love to pay the same flat rate all year-round for heating, but instead must pay more during the winter months.

Well no Crap! Using Natural Gas, Propane and even Electricity requires fuel, resources etc. So yeah, it will go UP in the winter.

Internet is on a friggin' network of ping ponging signals. I can understand if their Electric company charges more because electricity went up, we should help cover the electric bill.

But why cap? There's no need to cap. A cable hub, server, etc, probably uses the same energy whether they are Idle or running full tilt. So whether I just check mail 1 month and watch Netflix on Xbox360, use vonage phone and play MMORPGs for a month shouldn't even make them blink. If they want to limit us, limit us by Mbps, not by how much we transfer! Hell, how much Bandwidth is eaten from the CableModem sitting ilde w/o a computer even turned on just staying active to the network? What if you watched everything you did to Try not to hit the cap, but Pop-ups, Block Ads, hell, even Windows, Anti-virus and other stuff self updating and self checking for updates eating away GB's you don't even know. Yeah, they won't even eat 1MB, but in a month's time all updaters that can be run on a machine adds up. Multi computer home? wow! Myself 2 computers. Wife 2 computers. 2 kids with computers and school wireless notebooks. Wow. So I'll get to cancel Netflix, Gold Membership on XBox. 4 EQ2 Accounts. Vonage Telephone and just go Cell. Screw sending the family our pictures and baby's first words.

Makes me want to go back to Dial up on principle (Just a hell of a lot faster).

Look up Greed in Dictionary... A.C.A.

Need a new Internet Transit system!

 

[talys]

Okay, I'll bite.

So riddle me this Mr. Cable Executive: Why can you get practically unlimited bandwidth for much faster speeds in Korea?

A) The stats all lie: Koreans don't really use the Internet.

B) Korean bytes are smaller than American bytes so they tramsit faster on the Intertubes.

C) American cable companies are greedy pigs like Big Oil, and see profit they COULD make if they all colluded in a pricing scheme based on maximum revenue rather than one cost and capacity.

 

[Guest]

I feel that one reason the cable companies are putting a cap on their bandwith is to persuade the customer to purchase their streaming video from the cable company, which doesn't count as bandwith, rather than purchasing streamed video from Nextflix, etc, which would be seen as bandwith.

 

[ag3nt smith]

Let them do it. I'd like to see them survive more than a year losing half if not most of their user base, and when they need a bailout, ill be waiting with the red tape. I already own a home server and its plenty fast; I could open up my own ISP on my server, charge people for 20MB/s down at 20 bucks - no cap either.

Get your act together big-cable! Quick sucking meat!

 

[ravenware]

[citation][nom]NocturnalOne[/nom]Companies can offer their products pretty much at whatever cost structure they want. It is indeed not reasonable for Joe-average to subsidize Marky-hacker who's got his pron torrents running day and night. You've got to pay to play.Meanwhile competition will do it's thing. If it's possible to deliver more for less then someone will jump in. I left Comcast cable and went to ATT DSL because of quality issues. Bandwidth was fine but too many packet drops were killing my Vonage phone and VPN to work. Now I have less bandwidth but latency is lower and reliability is better.People that don't have a choice are screwed but that's nothing new. ISPs can already adjust their pricing based on perceived lack of competition.[/citation]

I am sorry but said companies have the burden of proof to show that one user using 4-40GB of bandwidth per month is costing them more than the user that uses ~1GB per month. And there are low speed services available in several areas for 15-20 a month that are more than adequate for "reading email".

So if the the cable consortium an prove that their service metering would cost Joe pinch penny less money and conversely mega users some how cost the companies more money to provide service on the EXACT same lines then maybe I can see their point. Until they do provide proof to consumers (and the Federal Govmnt) I say, a pox on them!