Put an end to Comcast Bandwidth Use(Usage) Capping!
I write this around Hertz's Birthday. My Birthday is coming up... the 7th of March. The only gift I ask is that you help spread the word. Share!
To all whom read this, you are free to copy in whole or part this entire message and share it with anyone, including your friends and family! Brief quote: For every injustice, there are a many (millions of) words that follow (either in favor of or against the injustice.)
Instead of words, we need action!
I fully agree with the expressed knowledge and truth of the network engineer " inuyasha6332 " in the following. Read the link:
http://openinternet.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Bandwidth-caps-should-be-illegal/17850-6017
and you will receive a complete overview of the issues concerning the topic of bandwidth usage and use caps: My sentiments are the same.
I appeal to anonymous to seek a means of protesting this outrageous limitation that has been placed on the every day home connection.
"Re: 250GB Cap questions
If we do, they [the rapists - ISPs] will keep on [raping their customers up the behind.]
Rape is an act committed in darkness. Normally the attacker hides him or her self and conceals his or her true identity. Just as before the act of rape, they give us a pill in our drinks offering "Unlimited" services and give us an STD, a bandwidth use/usage limitation while charging us for the act of being raped. Unfortunately we don't have a doctor that can treat this STD.
Comcast started rape when BitTorrent became a prevalent file transfer method. They got an STD from the Media Thugs at the RIAA and MPAA. This STD was like Herpes. They just had to keep scratching and scratching in order to block the Torrent packets from reaching their intended destination. They don't like it when they can't track you 0r what kinds of files you are sharing... . When they can't stalk you and watch what you are doing in private.
From a concerned Comcast customer:
To Comcast about Bandwidth (Throughput) Use (Usage) Capping
An insult to customer intelligence.
Though this issue is not local to Comcast, the idea that Comcast first implemented has infected AT&T's internet service as well. I prefer to call them AS&S but that's just my opinion. Limitations create a lack of trust in an established customer base. Why offer high bandwidth connections and limit the transfer? The way you guys advertise it is a 30 day all you can eat buffet. These technological measures were made under the assumption that people were using their internet for illicit activities. The company treats us as though we're guilty by default and thus restricts our sharing capacities. Now not all sharing is illegitimate. Netflix is a paid service. They had to dumb down i.e. add options to reduce quality their service for dumb ISPs that have caps on service. Recently while attempting to post this letter on their forums, I encountered a censorship of the word nazi and gestapo. Now that is NAZI AND GESTAPO to prevent such words as naughty or bad! It's time to file a class action lawsuit against Comcast and sue for the bandwidth caps and limitations while they advertise under the label Xfinity as in infinite. They also advertise unlimited internet. (They should be foreced to advertise 250GB (in big noticeable print) internet not unlimited for consumer protection.) They have disconnected untold amounts of people from the internet for violating their vile bandwidth cap twice in a year. Search Google for customers that got violated by the fine print in their contracts. This needs to be brought to the attention of any legal body that can conter these measures-- courts and mainstream media like a stop bandwidth cap day similar to Occupy Wall St movements. Many people live with children and other people that they need to share their internet connection with. Some houses don't have more than one cable outlet to provide services, so a Router/NAT Is used. It's time to get litigious against Comcast. Put an end to this absurdity. At the far end of this letter there is a transcript from another site about the $16 million dollar lawsuit for their throttling of P2P traffic. They got off easy. The reason is that maybe millions to tens if not hundreds of thousands of potential dollars in revenue and or innovation to programmers and Linux distributions were lost in the time that they disconnected BitTorrent users from such services. Internet is now a necessity in this generation with everything becoming digitized-- similar to electricity. Now electricity is metered due to the fact that it consumes natural resources. Routing and ISP technologies do not consume natural resources, but pretend to consume artificial resources creating artifical scarcity. I feel uncomfortable paying a flat fee for a metered service. To place a limit on communications is similar to violating the First Amendment in the United States.
Say no to Comcast Arbitration : http://consumerist.com/2011/10/cablevision-lets-you-say-no-to-arbitration.html
They have no right to market fast connections if the fast connections cannot be sustained with continual transfers. It is not only speed but amount of transfer that is valuable and worth paying $60 of a customer's hard earned cash. They depend upon our ignorance to be able to continue such insidious policies. When I inquired about their business service, they said I'd need to pay $200 for installation and the monthly fee would go up dramatically. Is not their current load balancing mechanism enough to deal with traffic issues and or concerns? In a country that started from a revolt on taxation, what has become of our people? How many people need to bitch before something changes. I read the site of their Customer Relations guy Rick Germano... He says they aim to get it right the first time, but they have been getting it wrong all the time when it comes to incredulous policies such as these.
We pay monthly and expect to get a full month;s of service at the current transfer rate. If you add small print that says otherwise, and tell us how or why 250GB is unacceptable, when people download from iTunes, play and update video games and software regularly, e4c. Each of these can be upwards of 30GB easy. 250 just doesn't cut it. Remove all bandwidth caps and your customers will be happier and more pleased to do business with you.
They just transferred the throttling that they got sued over and lost in court into caps.
Don't advertise unlimited service and offer unlimited actually means limited.
"Defendants have disseminated and [continue] to disseminate advertising that they know or should have reasonably [known] is false and misleading," the lawsuit stated. "This conduct includes, but is not limited to, promoting and advertising the fast speeds that apply to the service without limitation, when, in fact, defendants severely limit the speed of the service for certain applications."
In light of the FCC decision, Comcast has since changed its policy and imposed a 250GB cap for residential broadband customers.
Under the class action settlement, class members must file a claim by Aug. 14, 2010.
Proof of their advertising unlimited usage:
http://consumerist.com/2010/03/comcast-unlimited-usage-doesnt-mean-unlimited-usage.html
Until you remove the caps on your bandwidth, everyone should have to call your company CON-cast!
if somebody buys an internet connection called Xfinity, there should be no bandwidth caps or limitations. I asked about these matters when the install guy came, and he called his superior about this topic. Your sales "professionals" don't know anything about internet. You should offer training! They said that the cap was download only! Yet once I read your site, it said that it is for both streams combined. This is confusing and sketchy marketing. There are no one-size-fits-all sneakers. All of your residential plans include this ridiculous limitation. Your business grade service is relatively too expensive to install and maintain for people such as myself. I download updates to my operating system software and sometimes it can take hours. Other times I distribute my legitimate torrent files that can be up to 5GB In size... If people download GNU/Linux DVDs (an operating system alternative to windows) from a torrent, it is not only legal, but, free (as in food and freedom), and neighborly to share! If 50 people download the file, the bandwidth cap is reached immediately. If I get a notice from Comcast, I will immediately resort to going on websites such as rip-off report and make sure that the policy is exposed to the public in a much more clear fashion. It is a severe threat to terminate somebody's connection to the internet for a 'bandwidth infraction'. Why have that limit? Too hard to track and sell your user's connection and usage information to the government or third parties?
Your marketing schemes think the average computer user is dumb and that they don't understand what you are doing. I will highly publicize this and call up political representatives, the FCC, EFF and make it known that companies should make it blatantly clear what their limits are! You will never again be able to call it Xfinity! Verizon is right across the street and they have no bandwidth caps or limitations on their service and throughput. SOPA and PIPA protests were just the beginning to put an end to internet tyranny by corporations and governments. It is anticompetitive to offer unusual bandwidth caps in a generation of people that frequent media sites such as Youtube and other such bandwidth consuming franchises. Once your bandwidth throttling (of torrents and other data) was exposed to the public, the FCC took Comcast to court. Even though they lost, it does not mean that they will again if they attempt to impose net neutrality legislation from infractions such at bandwidth capping instead of throttling.
Instead of using bandwidth notation, you should say clearly to customers, it's 15 megabits (not BYTES) a second not 15mbps. Your company sells in bits to create a wow factor, then you restrict use in bytes. This way the customer can understand what you are talking about. 1.875 megabytes per second. That is ridiculously fast for the every day user of the internet. This goes without saying that modern technological thresholds peak at about 100-1000MBps. Verizon is working hard to develop a platform in which residential users can get speeds of up to 100Mbps download. Also with cloud computing, home users are more inclined to run their own servers. I laud your company for the fact that there are no restrictions on which ports may be used after the Torrent issue was raised a long while ago. Listen to your customers and your business will fare well for longer times than other companies. Attempt to subjugate them to undue policies and silence them.. You lose them. It's true many are addicted to convenience and don't like the effort it might take to switch providers, but they may be displeased overall. Use Google to search for "Comcast bandwidth caps" and see for yourself the expressed opinions of your customer base! You will find more than just disgruntled customers, but an array of intellectuals and artists that oppose this bizarre limitation. The only ones not to oppose undue legislation are lawyers. They financially thrive off of conflict. Let us break the chains of ignorance and share freely and openly as ones who love our neighbors as ourselves.
Everything is subject to abuse. A knife can be used to cut food or murder the next door neighbor. Who cares if people make "illegal" copies of software? There are no lost revenues in software that is copied if the end user would not pay for the software to begin with. In fact it's good advertising. When people get to test software or listen to music, it makes them more inclined to purchase from the companies in the long run. I don't put invisible chains on anything I give to others in the real world, saying you can only use this piece of plywood to make a boat, but not a house. That plywood company would go right out of business. Your company does the same type of thing, except in a very sneaky way that is in the fine print of a signed contract. Copyright is outdated (currently restricting true lasting innovation and enlightenment for our human species as a whole) and intellectual ownership is a childish idea in a generation of vast fluid local and international communication. Let the media whore giants be ****ed and let the purchasers have the right to do with what they bought as they please.
Your company may esteem your residential customers of being of lower worth than businesses, but the truth is, every resident may be a business owner. Love all lest the king be concealed. Consider, Now the $720 a year that I am currently subscribed to paying your company each year may not amount to much. if your policies agitate even one potential customer with these undue business practices of concealing caps and limitations that you claim is so the service can be fast, he may speak to your current customers and potential customers and inform them of these unjust limitations and get 100-1000 people to choose to take their business elsewhere. Say for each of these 100 to 1000 people, 20 more become disinterested. Especially in the era of instantaneous social communication over platforms such as twitter and Facebook (news flys), you lose 2,000 to 20,000 potential customers at 60 dollars a month. This equates to $1,200,000 to $12,000,000 in lost potential revenue. Bad business practices endanger future sales, no matter how convenient your current service platform might be. I am blogging this entry right now. Fortunately if I am mailed a letter about excessive bandwidth use, I am entitled to get my money back. I will take it back and take my business elsewhere in the event I receive such a letter. I noticed that my router says
In the past 21 days, I haveused 400GB of data transfer to and from the internet. Why should people have to give an account to you for what kind of services they have used? This is a severe violation of customer privacy. The customer is always right when it comes to exposing ill intent in companies. To have to think about how much bandwidth you are using each month can keep a person paralyzed and paranoid, especially if they like to run an open wifi access point when their friends come over with their computers and download from iTunes, etc.
Sorry Jake, but you can't download the music you purchased onto your device! My _BANDWIDTH CAP_ is like a HANDI CAP that makes it so I can't do things without fear of corporate reprisal! It retards online movement and flow! That is what bandwidth caps are... Retarded! Instead of offering slow throttled internet, you have offered something akin to a month rental of a Ferrari that can go real fast but it can only go from New York to New Jersey with no return ticket. You can't ride for the sheer joy of riding. You have to be paranoid about having used it for a long distance. OH my the road nazis are going to notice that I went too far! The car looks beautiful and cool from the outside, until you notice the fine print in the contract and meet the road nazis at comcast that complain you used the car too much. If you were to turn off somebody's internet service (i.e. freeze the car while somebody is driving it) (instead of mailing them after they payed their monthly due) at the moment they crossed the cap, I am certain you would lose hundreds of thousands if not millions of customers overnight.
Instead of increasing your carrying capacities by buying new technologies to balance loads of data coming through, you choose to make people only use the internet less. Any good ISP knows that the more the product is used, the more the user will like the provider of the product. What comcast does is an evasion of innovation.
It costs you little to nothing to turn on some computers and routers, and let cables do the work for you while you rake in cash for the said bandwidth. Make it so the customers can make full use of expansive technologies and they will love you and your service!
(words these companies use for people such as you and I, _consumers_ and _users_ (much like a drug dealer might consider their customers to be)
Plan Blast 15mbps download and 5mbps upload
I calculated that if I used the full bandwidth of the connection constantly for 24 hours per 30 days the maximum transfer I can download for my current plan is 15mbps(1.875MBytes/s) x 60 seconds x 60 minutes x 24 hours x 30 days, a whopping 38,880,000,000,000 bits (4.86TB TeraBYTES!) of data-- . That The limitation is absurd! You are only giving me 1/19.44 the maximum amount of what is offered (if it weren't capped) for a month! And that is only for DOWNLOADS! I can sit here and calculate the uploads, but it would be time consuming.
A three strikes you're out policy is in place for this retarded bandwidth cap. If I make use of a connection that I pay for above a certain point, I get cut off from the Internet. This is truly a fool's errand. Either remove the cap or cease to call the service Xfinity (sounding like infinity)
After reading this, I hope you will take the aforesaid into deep consideration. It is a bad economic decision to limit anyone or anything in an artificial manner. People will buy other services. The FCC has at least opened the way for competitive cable and internet services-- that users may choose between providers. For this I am grateful!
Oh yes, the 'bandwidth usage meter' isn't even visible or accessible on the Comcast site under any heading including Home, Account & Bill, Users and Settings, Alerts, Help, etc. They don't make it clear to their customers about these matters because people might be less inclined to subscribe. i.e. Your son can't use the Xbox-- it takes too much bandwidth to update games and download music. I cannot find any email address to contact customer support on the website. It's hidden behind veils of javascript forums. They apparently don't want emails from their own customers or input from subscribers. I read on Rick Germano's (Head of Customer Relations) blog that Comcast spent $2 billion on customer relations. If they did that, why can't I find a customer support email address that I can make use of instead of some web form that might not work with my browser? If they can afford $2 billion in customer service, they can definitely serve internet without bandwidth caps.
While using their service, on Google, I click on links to contact Customer Support and on both of my computers it says “Connection Reset” I cannot find one email to contact customer support. I look all over the websites. To even access their business internet page, I encounter the same errors. 250GB is a retarded limit, simply put. When I read it isn't just downloads, it's both up and downstream bandwidth. The technician said it was DOWNLOAD ONLY. First, I ask the guy who sent the installation team and he didn't know anything about the services he was pushing. They're dumb sales men.. The people working for them probably get incentives to push stuff that people don't want or need upon new and current customers. I got this response while calling for a simple cable modem reset. You don't have phone service. They tried to push their other products onto me like a subservient minion. That isn't a company that cares for the customer. It's a company that cares about profit and screwing the people at the bottom of their sales pyramid. A pyramid is no better than it's foundation. The top is supported by the layers underneath. They should call their Xfinity residential plans Xfinity bandwidth Nazi plans. I have felt compelled to write this.
Reading through the internet, I found the following post:
“Comcast should not limit or cap bandwidth, as you have a bandwidth limit per account and it doesn't matter if there is one or 500 people using that line as you cannot exceed your ALLOWED bandwidth. Providing that the engineers did their job correctly and the company (ISP provider) hasn't oversold their system. If that is true then there would be no ill effect on others in your shared tree. The problem is they over sell what they are capable of providing and of course lie about the service you are supposed to have, then they turn it around that those **** downloaders are taking all of your service it's their fault for using what is provided to them, when in fact the ISP is not doing their job. This is normal standard business these days, they keep lying and we keep paying more. “
From : "http://www.eweek.com/c/a/IT-Management/Comcast-Settles-P2P-Class-Action-Lawsuit-895449/"
Quoting from
_Comcast Settles P2P Class Action Lawsuit_
Comcast's throttling, the suit claimed, significantly slowed or stopped his downloads.
"Defendants have disseminated and [continue] to disseminate advertising that they know or should have reasonably [known] is false and misleading," the lawsuit stated. "This conduct includes, but is not limited to, promoting and advertising the fast speeds that apply to the service without limitation, when, in fact, defendants severely limit the speed of the service for certain applications."
In light of the FCC decision, Comcast has since changed its policy and imposed a 250GB cap for residential broadband customers.
Under the class action settlement, class members must file a claim by Aug. 14, 2010.
Cable giant Comcast agrees to pay $16 million to make a 2007 class action lawsuit go away. The lawsuit claimed Comcast blocked or throttled peer-to-peer traffic in violation of Comcast's user's agreement, charges the FCC subsequently investigated. The FCC found the company in violation of its network neutrality principles.
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While not admitting to any wrongdoing, Comcast has preliminarily agreed to pay $16 million to settle a class action lawsuit that claims the cable giant blocked or throttled peer-to-peer traffic to its customers. The maximum payout to members of the class action suit is set at $16.
The proposed settlement stems from a November 2007 lawsuit filed by Jon Hart, a California Comcast subscriber who claimed Comcast slowed or cut off P2P file-sharing networks like BitTorrent and Gnutella in violation of Comcast's user's agreement. Hart's share of the proposed settlement is $2,500.
Several months after Hart's lawsuit, the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) began an investigation into similar complaints against Comcast and in August 2008 found Comcast guilty of network neutrality violations for throttling P2P traffic. The FCC also found that Comcast misled customers by not properly disclosing its P2P policy.
From http://www.frooglegeek.com/why-comcast-should-be-sued/590
I was reading a Google+ post from Chris Pirillo about how he was surprised there wasn’t a class action lawsuit against them yet. At first I chuckled to myself thinking that Comcast may be a terrible company, they surely aren’t doing anything illegal though. However after crunching some numbers I realized that Comcast is actually misleading customers when they are selling internet packages.
Here is my reply to Chris:
“Chris I feel like we could talk about Comcast for hours. Their data caps don’t make any sense at all because people want faster broadband because they need that extra speed because they are using their internet more.
At 105Mbps you are downloading 13.125 megabytes per second according to Google’s calculator.
1GB = 1024MB and with your 250GB cap that means you have 256,000MB to use per month before you reach the cap.
Now going back to what Comcast will let you download per second you take 256,000/13.125 and you come up with 19,504 and some change. That means you can download stuff at your maximum bandwidth for 19,504 seconds.
This turns out to be 325 minutes or 5 hours of downloading stuff. Feel free to double select my math.
So essentially you are paying $100+ for 5 hours of nonstop internet access per month. If you’d like to chat about this more let me know I’m here all day, and I actually think I’m going to write up an article about this for my blog.”
Did you catch that? The plan that Chris Pirillo has from Comcast which he pays for on a monthly basis only lets him have a total of 5 hours of internet usage where he is using his full connection. There are 720 hours in a 30 day month, which turns out to be 0.69% of a month.
How is this not illegal? From a moral standpoint and not a political standpoint this practice should be illegal.
And more::
Terrible response. Just awful.
People need to stop implying that a BUSINESS CLASS account is somehow a reasonable alternative for a RESIDENTAL user. If he were doing actual business things that were putting a large dent in his data, that might make sense. But as he said, "games, movies, bit of backup." Nothing out of the ordinary.
Sure, it is an OPTION, but the fact that residential users need a business class account (which also corresponds to a severe drop in speed as well. Business doesn't offer over 50mbps, IIRC) to do residential activities, is absurd.
The residential customers pay approximately the same price for the service that the business class receives.
Fortunately companies such as Google are close to marketing Gbps connections to the public for affordable prices, creating a new competitive atmosphere for companies such as Comcast and Verizon. Even FIOS and other no-capped services will soon be put to shame. As unified evil will always defeat dis-unified good, join with me to protest these absurdities!.Comcast got off easy ($16 million) for the lies about bandwidth throttling... Let's take them to court again and win.
In order to get litigious :
Visit http://www.comcast.com/arbitrationoptout/ to opt out of arbitration in order to sue with your own representation and be able to file a class action lawsuit.
By providing the information below, you are notifying Comcast of your decision to opt out of arbitration with Comcast as provided in the Comcast Agreement for Residential Services or the 2007 Arbitration notice. If you previously notified Comcast of your decision to opt out of arbitration you do not need to do so again. Start making a blazing buzz about it and get huffy for the good of all other Comcast residential users!
Comcast pays $150K to put end to Florida bandwidth cap probe
http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2008/09/comcast-pays-150k-to-put-end-to-florida-bandwidth-cap-probe.ars
They are doing the best they can to buy off anyone who will speak out about this. We have to make sure we don't sue for money... but a change of service and terms in contract, Good unlimited internet service is "priceless." They'll try to buy judges, etc. That's what the arbitration clause in your contract does, is give you a mock courtroom instead of the legal platform of the United States Government. We need to sue the living daylights out of them in a class-action lawsuit..
FOLLOWING FROM OPENINTERNET.GOV
READ inuyasha6332's posts. They are accurate and address all of the issues involved with this topic.
Reasonable Network Management »
Bandwidth caps should be
No bandwidth caps and no unreasonable price increases. ISP's cap bandwidth not to save money, but to increase profits by charging people more for additional bandwidth. My friend works for an ISP and it cost the ISP next to nothing to provide you with service especially if the network is well used. The money you pay is almost entirely profits for the ISP.
When an ISP caps bandwidth, it is a way to cause people to use their service much ,less for fear of going over the bandwidth cap. it also ceases most users from using online media services which makes them more likely to use the TV services provided by the ISP, for example, comcast put a bandwidth cap and since areas that they serve, there often the only broadband provider as well as cable tv provider, A user may be forced to give up netflix and hulu and many other forms of online content in favor of paying more for cable tv.
Other ISP's also secretly throttle bandwidth to reduce service quality for content that competes with their own services, so you think your 20mbit fiber connection is giving you a good connection but it turns out that you get good network performance for most content except content that competes with the company like voip (if you do a benchmark using apps like ixchariot to simulate certain types of network traffic between 2 systems with the same internet connection, for example 2 fios customers both with a 5mbit upload and you see that transferring dummy data gives around 4.8mbit/s but voip is being throttled to like 4KB/s until you encrypt it through a VPN then it is a problem.
ISP's need to treat content fairly and also not cap bandwidth . many ISP's are threatening bandwidth caps and this will destroy the internet is if it done on a large scale.
Tags: bandwidth caps
Submitted by inuyasha6332 2 years ago
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Joe Provo said:
If an ISP dropped their marketing garbage of "up to speed X" and charged you the rate it actually took to carry your traffic, would you still say this? Would you still agree if that rate was a monthly moving target? Oversubscription *is* the fundamental traffic model for packet-based networks, and it costs real money to pump in more capacity...
2 years ago
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inuyasha6332 said:
ISP's have no reason to do bandwidth caps because their own network bandwidth is not capped.
A isp pays for 1 super fast internet connection which is shared to millions of consumers.
If you research which ISP, your ISP uses, the prices are often very high for a connection capable of handling supplying bandwidth to consumers, often prices ranging up to $100 thousand dollars + to even a million dollars depending on how many pairs of connections you add to handle the consumers.
but if you have a few hundred thousand to a few million subscribers to your service and you charge each of them like $60 to $100 each month, you can easily cover your bandwidth cost.
When I selected the companies that provide bandwidth to verizon and comcast and other companies like this none of them cap your bandwidth. they simply offer you a set network speed eg, OC-48 - OC-255 connection with unlimited bandwidth
the problem with these ISP's is that they oversell their service. If you take this to a small scale, for example suppose you are starting your own ISP and you buy your self a 100mbit connection for about $300 a month, then you get 20 people to sign up for your service and you offer each 5mbit/s upload and download for $ 30 per month. you will now be getting $600 a month from your customers
but suppose 20 more people wanted to sign up. you can add an extra 100mbit line and charge them $30 a month but no because you are a evil ISP ceo and your solution is to add them to the current 100mbit line and you are now selling bandwidth you don't have. the good thing for you about this is when you sell bandwidth that you don't have, you get 100% profit from it.
so now you have 40 people on your 100mbit connection and each of them are paying $30 a month for a 5mbit connection
but then they notice something, in the afternoon, their internet is very slow because there is not enough bandwidth to go around. A not so evil isp will fix this by adding a extra line or at least a extra 50mbit connection but this will cost them more money
the evil current ISP's will simply throttle traffic so your customers are paying for a 5mbit connection but there only able to use 1mbit of it for web browsing and downloading but can use all 5mbit/s of the bandwidth when sending unencrypted PDF files directly to another IP address.
(this is what ISP's today do, they throttle bandwidth intensive traffic and leave low bandwidth traffic alone. this allows them to sell you a high speed connection but offer you like 10% of the speed you are paying for all of the things you normally do on line and only allow your full bandwidth when doing something like sending a email or something else that doesn't need that speed)
So now you are throttling and because this now freed up some bandwidth, you add 40 more customers to your service. Now customers are again complaining about having dialup speeds on their 5mbit connection. so your solution now because you are a evil ISP ceo, you start bandwidth caps now all customers are limited to 5GB of bandwidth per month and this us upload and download combined and since a TCP connection is a 3 way handshake connection, you cant send or recieve data with out sending, TCP connections must send ACK SYN FIN RST packets to maintain a connection
you download a 100MB file and you use about 120MB of bandwidth
because of this bandwidth cap, your subscribers will be too scared to stream tv shows and movies online so they now use their connection for selecting email and reading news articles and stuff for school work.
this has now freed up more bandwidth and you can add more customers.
This is what ISP's do just on a larger scale in order to maximize profits.
if they design their network around not overselling then they will only make like 40-50% profit (when googling, on a very large scale like with comcast or verizon, it only cost them about 2-3 dollars a month to provide you with a 50mbit connection because of how large their network is and the bandwidth packages that take out)
ISP's love to oversell because it is more profitable.
think of it like owning a pizza shop that charges $10 for a large pizza, but you only have 1 large pizza available in your shot and 5 people order the large pizza. so what you do, you take $10 from each of them and offer them a thin slice of pizza instead of the entire pizza. so for the production cost of 1 pizza, you get 5 purchases, the first initial purchase of the pizza gives you a 60% profit and the 4 additional purchases are 100% profit
this is what a ISP does to increase profit.
they do this because there is generally little to no competition, in most parts of the country, it is like this you either get comcast or dialup or you move somewhere else and it is either verizon or dialup or you move somewhere else and it is either time warner or dialup
for almost everyone, dialup is not enough so it is not a option, so the ISP in your area has nothing to compete with so they have no reason to offer you good service.
Where I live, I have verizon DSL, I had the 3mbit package and I used to get about 300-500kbit/s down and 90kbit/s up until time warner became available and a week later I got 2.75mbit/s down and 720kbit/s up (time warner was offering 5mbit/s but cost more than twice as much)
Poor government control has allowed ISP's for the most part to be very anti-competitive and this hurts the consumers.
2 years ago
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unsubscribe said:
If an ISP did not cap bandwidth it could not guarantee to a customer a minimum bandwidth. Why harm those consumers?
2 years ago
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inuyasha6332 said:
If a ISP is in a position where they can oversell then they will, when you sell bandwidth that you do have. you only make a *under* 100% profit
but if you sell bandwidth that you don't have (oversell and compensate by throttling and capping) you get 100% profit because you are selling something that that you don't have.
2 years ago
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inuyasha6332 said:
@Dwight
suppose you live in an apartment building where each apartment is identical and rend is $1600 a month. and suppose you stay in the apartment 20 hours a day while your neighbor stays in the house 1 hour a day, should your neighbor pay less rent?
Suppose your rent is $1600 a month and then the owner of the building comes up to you and says that you have to pay $2400 a month because you are using your apartment 20 hours a day while other people in the building only use their apartment for 1 hour a day. would you find that fair?
if they promise unlimited bandwidth then thats what it is unlimited.
it shouldn't matter how much you use.
I bet you would be pissed if if you rented a apartment and you got a rent increase and also a cap on how many hours you can be in your apartment each day because you are using your apartment "too much"
how would you feel if you bought windows 7 ultimate for $300 and a month later microsoft sent you a bill for $100 and also did something to make windows only run for 5 hours a day because the average user of the software is only using their computer 5 hours a day and you are suing your PC 12 hours a day?
if they offer you a 5mbit connection then that is your 5 mbit/s and what you do with it or how much you use it is up to you. The only valid reason a ISP can possible claim you are sing your internet too much is if you buy a mbit connection from them and you do something to get 20mbit/s out of your ISP while paying for the 5mbit package.
If you buy a 2000 square foot house you can use as much of the 2000 square foot as you want, the person or company that you bought the house from cant complain that you are using the house too much.
you buy a connection speed and thats your bandwidth, you use it as much as you want.
2 years ago
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inuyasha6332 said:
@Joe Provo
the 100mbit thing was a example, I was taking this to a small scale to better explain
for example in a economics textbook, when explaining a banks balance sheet, they always use $100
what bank do you know that only has $100
they just use it because it is small scale and easier to grasp
I was explaining how a ISP oversells their service.
they can oversell because theres no government regulation that prevents them from doing it, a ISP is a business of making money and if overselling is profitable then they will do it.
2 years ago
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Joe Provo said:
@inuyasha6332
You are still wildly incorrect in your simplification. In all but the single-point networks, there is not single link [and that would be a very badly run network]. The costs come in at the complexity. There are many links of different distances and costs, all loaded to different desgrees as the traffic ebbs and flows. You cannot provision 1:1 end user bandwidth to all possible points. IP doesn't expect that - TCP windowing and backoff exists to manage congestion. That is the environment in which large amounts of money were sunk into infrastructure.
When greedy-algorithm applications come along to unfairly just try and use every bit they could, folks pancicked and reacted, with unfortunately short-sighted approaches. The ones with money also planned to build for more.
I have been there, designing and building ISP networks from 1994-2007. No *Internet* company (maybe old bell-heads in NJ) seriously *wants* to spend very expensive staff time messing around with throttling and capping, more accountants and lawyers. That *eats* profits. The all-you-can-eat providers will have to give it up, offer a few tiers they can manage and get over it.
You and a lot of other folks will be disappointed when your demands for legislation bring about
- more middleboxes [to ensure 'fairness']
- a telco-like, pricey and non-elastic point-to-point last mile [to ensure your bandwidth demands]
- tiered service more expensive than you pay now for less [to cover the cost of existing service and overbuild of capacity just in case Dwight moves in where his mother used to live]
- if you're fortunate, you'll have a burstable service available [but with monthly variation in costs reflecting the variation in delivering service, much as you get with gasoline or oil]
For the most part, people here want to vent and that's ok. Just be careful what you wish for...
2 years ago
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inuyasha6332 said:
For me I just don't want a loophole filled law to be used, it needs to cover beyond a doubt that it wants to protect the consumer from, if they cease ISP's from throttling, then many would cap bandwidth because both will get the desired result.
While I understand how complex a ISP's network is, it still doesn't add up to their prices and the service they provide.
Network management needs to be transparent which means, if I am paying for a 5mbit connection, then no matter what I do on the connection, I will have the full 5mbits of my connection to use on the task that I want to do.
they can manage all they want the customer just wants to get what they paid for. if they get a certain connection speed then they want that speed available for everything (with respect to some endpoints may not have enough connection speed t supply you with the speed you want. if I have a 5mbit connection then I want to be able to hit that speed with anything. I don't want to have to use a VPN to get better speeds because a ISP decided that bandwidth intensive tasks should not be allowed to reach the speeds I am paying for.
I mainly manage networks for small businesses and it is generally simple for me to setup QOS. While it can be much more complex for a ISP, at the end of the day all it takes is the order from a higher up and the networking team will do the QOS and other necessary bandwidth management needed to meet the demand of their boss.
The purpose of all of the dirty tricks the ISP's are doing is to avoid upgrading their equipment and getting a faster connection to share because like you said, it cost money.
you can make more money selling a 1 tv to 50 people than selling 1 TV to 1 person. (i know it is impossible to do this because it is a physical item and would be but it is done all the time with ISP's and internet traffic)
there many cost to running a network and it is cheaper to do bandwidth management and throttling especially if your current equipment already allows for bandwidth management and your staff is on a salary which means you pay them a fixed price a year even if you only work them 1 day a year or 365 days.
If the FCC is not detailed enough in their rules, ISP's will just find ways around the rules in order to screw the customer and increase profits.
2 years ago
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aaron.m.karp said:
I have mixed feelings about making bandwidth caps . I support it for the potential anti-competitive motives, and feel that caps must be more than sufficient to support use that is within all but the top statistical outliers. However, if reasonable caps were , there would be people transferring three to four terabytes of data per month on my tier. That is like streaming 45 good quality HD (7mbps at 45 minutes) TV shows per day if my math is right.
I am a moderate to heavy user who also replaces TV with streaming NetFlix, VPN into my network when not at home both to surf and transfer large files back and forth. I think the most I have ever used is 70GB in a month. While I must admit I was pretty upset when Comcast went to a 250GB cap, I cannot argue that if there is fair overage charging it is in anti-competitive territory, yet. At a certain usage, I do agree people should be paying more to support the infrastructure.
I don't know about other people, but I have no illusion that my ISP has capacity on their end to support everyone using their advertised speeds at the same time. If I can reasonably expect to achieve my advertised speeds when I make requests of the network, regardless of the application and communication endpoints, I have no problem with that fact.
2 years ago
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inuyasha6332 said:
the problem with that is you are comparing other peoples usage based on your own usage.
when this is done from a social standpoint it is called ethnocentrism.
If they provide you with a 10mbit connection then you should be able to use the full 10mbit/s as much as you want.
if someone is using a few TB a month (which can be impossible for most ISP's since the speeds they offer would not allow you to download or upload that much within a month and if a ISP provides a connection with offers a speed that allows it then they should design their network to allow large transfers. It is like moving from a 1000 square foot home to a 2000 square foot home and getting kicked out because you decided to use 2000 square foot of space, it will be seen as wrong, same as with internet. if a company sells you some space (eg 5mbit/s) then you should be able to use all 5mbit/s for the month. PS why don't these companies charge you extra or cap you when you watch too much HDTV, HDTV uses 20mbit/s constantly thats because it is a service that they are providing, but suppose a site like hulu or even better stage6 (sadly shut down) which offered 720p and 1080p video streaming of many tv shows, well the companies like comcast wont be very happy because customers may cease their tv service or go for a cheaper package of channels because the media site is offering the content at a good quality and little to no commercials. 2 simple solutions to this is to 1, throttle the connection so even though the user has a fast connection, the streaming media will run too slowly to be useful to the consumer so they will go back to watching cable tv, another solution for after the FCC fines you for throttling like is to put a bandwidth cap so now that theres a set cap you will be less likely to more freely use the internet.)
if there is a group of people using like 3TB a month and you feel there using too much and should pay more, whell theres a group or people out there that only use 100-200MB a month and feel your 70GB is too much.
You cant sell something and then take it away if it is used "too much". how would you feel if you bought a samsung LCD tv and the company came and took your tv away because you were using it 18 hours a day while most other people only used it 6 hours a day. (I bet you would bring your case to the media to express the outrage)
there is no such thing as too much when you are being sold something everyone on earth has a different meaning of too much, also if you are being sold something theres no way to use too much, the most you can use is all of what you were sold. if you but a 2000 square foot house you expect to be able to use as much or as little of it as you want.
2 years ago
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casnyder said:
While I definitely want to preserve net neutrality in the sense of the internet being content neutral, I recognize that providing bandwidth is the major cost an ISP has, and therefore it may be necessary to bill proportional to bandwidth useage. I live in a rural location where satellite service is the only high-speed internet option available, and it costs me $60/month to get 200MB bandwidth per day. If my ISP couldn't cap my daily bandwidth, they'd have to put up a dozen more satellites to handle unlimited bandwidth for their existing customers, so the cost of an account would have to go up at least tenfold, so most of us would have to drop our high-speed service and go back to dial-up.
I get very annoyed with the internet culture that is uming unlimited bandwidth is available to everyone - the number of webpages that automatically stream high-resolution content to you the moment you stray onto them w/ no opt out option is wasting my precious bandwidth, and is the height of rudeness.
2 years ago
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inuyasha6332 said:
Your ISP is more than able to provide you with unlimited, keep in mind that a bandwidth cap has nothing do do with network load.
200MB just means that you can only use 200MB per day but it doesn't change the fact that everyone can be online at the same time using their 200MB share. You will still get network congestion. the main purpose of the cap is to cease you from using anything that will actually benefit from a broadband connection. It is basically another form of censorship. because they give you a 200MB cap the odds or you steaming media or playing a online game are much lower because you only have 200MB of bandwidth which is upload+ download which means about 160-170MB of pure downloading (which rarely ever happens unless you only use your connection to select your email)
It is like when a car company comes out with a new car that can go 160MPH, (horse power sells) but when are you ever going to be able to go at that speed. caps put out by the government on the roads will prevent you from ever doing anything that will allow you to use the full speed of your car. same with the internet. a bandwidth cap allows a ISP to effectively censor your internet by keeping you from doing things like streaming media or anything else bandwidth intensive. They use the bandwidth cap because if they outright blocked you from every media streaming website and also wrote up a L7 filter to block all flash content, the ISP would be sued by all of their customers, so their solution is to do it indirectly.
this allows a ISP to advertise to you a speed that you will not get to properly use, because it will push you over your cap extremely quickly.
Just like in cars (horse power sells) with internet (speed sells). If you want to oversell your internet connection a bandwidth cap will prevent almost all customers from using anything that the modern internet has to offer which means they will mostly use their internet connection for basic use, which means intermittent burst of low bandwidth usage instead of a constant use of high speed bandwidth that would happen from streaming media.
When a ISP oversells their service, they count on not everyone using the internet at the same time, but there is 1 problem, during peak hours, the connection will still slow (my friend on optimum online gets about 15mbit/s in the early morning and under 1mbit in the afternoon) thats because even though not everyone is using the connection, there is still enough to slow the network to a crawl.
A way to fix a network congestion problem like this is to put a bandwidth cap so even though it will be peak hours, people will be too scared to use the Internet the way they want and will be forced to use it for basic stuff.
(PS modern cars for example a nissan 350z can hit 150MPH which is it's advertised top speed (speed sells) but it you drive the car even at 130-140MPH for more than a few minutes, the engine will overheat. which means it is not designed to run at that speed)
2 years ago
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lysacor said:
Inuyasha, though I agree with your net neutrality stance, I disagree with your mis-statement of facts.
ISPs are subject to the peering agreements with other service providers and backbone networks. They do not have unlimited bandwidth, and networking equipment of any kind has a finite amount of resources available to handle the calculation of routes and packet-switching. Though this does not excuse ISPs from limiting network traffic based on the source of the content. I agree with a limited amount of management to prevent high usage users from overwhelming the network, but I do not agree in applying that same limitation on users who do not create that problem on the network.
ISPs have every right to defend their network from external attacks, and to do very limited regulation of traffic flow entering and exiting their network. But to selectively pick and choose what can travel where because it competes with one of their products, or because the content isn't sourced from a preferred network, that is not acceptible.
2 years ago
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inuyasha6332 said:
I am not against a ISP protecting their network but I am against them doing dirty tricks to increase profits by degrading everyone's service instead of upgrading their network.
all ISP's generally have some legit network management for example if your PS is actively doing a non cease DOS attack on someone else, the ISP can contact you and tell you to cease or risk getting the service ceaseped to throttled
I know that theres a finite amount of resources and thats the reason behind my post, the resources are finite and instead of using a small fraction of their profits once in a while to upgrade and increase the available resources, they choose to pocket it instead and screw the customer over to compensate for the companies greed.
I am not against reasonable network management. I am against network management thats designed to compensate for a companies greed. Often, a ISP's solution to network congestion is to throttle and cap because they decided to add more users than the network could properly handle (and refusing to use the extra money to upgrade the network)
ISP's seem to expect to make 1 initial investment in equipment and expect it to handle anything thats thrown at it 15 years later.
Upgrading a network is expensive, every dollar you spend upgrading it is a dollar less you make in profits this year.
throttling and capping is the same as stealing (especially throttling)it is a way to give customers less than what they are paying for and also indirectly censor the internet by making many things that the company wants to prevent use of, unfeasible for the customer
for example suppose the government was a FSP (made it up for flight service provider :) ) for the US and the government didn't want people flying airplanes, if they wanted to indirectly cease airplane usage they will just put a flight cap "you are not allowed to fly any higher than 100FT from ground level (try flying a 747 across the US while under 100FT from the ground)
this is what most of the network management of ISP's are, while there is some legitimate network management, most of it is to indirectly control content by doing network management practices that make many things unfeasible for the customer. Net neutrality can cease a them from discriminating traffic but the current net neutrality wont cease ISP's from indirectly controlling selected traffic through the use of bandwidth caps and other practices (which is what many of them are planning )
2 years ago
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Joe Provo said:
"Your ISP is more than able to provide you with unlimited, keep in mind that a bandwidth cap has nothing do do with network load."
This demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of what the service is. No doubt thanks to the marketing-lies -- most all the "problems" are IMNSHO really the arena of the FTC not the FCC. Get more honest advertising and less BS new-user trial deals that old-users in the know or who scream a lot can kite for continual reduced rates.
2 years ago
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Joe Provo said:
"I am not against a ISP protecting their network but I am against them doing dirty tricks to increase profits by degrading everyone's service instead of upgrading their network."
Then you must be happy with tha large cable company rolling out DOCSIS 3.0 all over their network? Or does that somehow not count?
"I know that theres a finite amount of resources and thats the reason behind my post, the resources are finite and instead of using a small fraction of their profits once in a while to upgrade and increase the available resources, they choose to pocket it instead and screw the customer over to compensate for the companies greed."
Data?
"I am not against reasonable network management. I am against network management thats designed to compensate for a companies greed. Often, a ISP's solution to network congestion is to throttle and cap because they decided to add more users than the network could properly handle (and refusing to use the extra money to upgrade the network)"
Data?
"ISP's seem to expect to make 1 initial investment in equipment and expect it to handle anything thats thrown at it 15 years later."
Actually, the "long" window used in some old-think networks is 5 years for capital investment lifetime. More flexible networks operate at about 3 years refresh cycle. Not even the clical bellheads at att operate on a 15 year cycle, so once again I say "Data"? Mine comes form bing actually involved in building networks, not making up junk.
"Upgrading a network is expensive, every dollar you spend upgrading it is a dollar less you make in profits this year."
Operations & maintenance are huge costs; ongoing support, maintenance, install move/add/change are all continual pains in the budget. Upgrades are annual spikes in the ongoing burn.
"Indirectly censor" is a load of hooey.
"this is what most of the network management of ISP's are, while there is some legitimate network management, most of it is to indirectly control content by doing network management practices that make many things unfeasible for the customer."
Data?
2 years ago
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shawnlandden said:
Bandwidth can be managed in a fair and reasonable way. The Internet must be free of cell phone style "overage".
Instead there should be two speeds, there should be a bandwidth bucket, with a reasonable limit: Comcast set it at 250GB, and if in the last month (rolling--or other time period) the consumer has used that much total bandwidth the customer speed should can be slowed to a lower speed until that customer is below the rolling soft cap.
If the the provider only has bandwidth problems then the provider can give "free" bandwidth during non-peak hours even when the user is above the rolling limit.
This is fair, this respects both sides, and it does not create the $1000 bills that dominate cell phone company profits.
I strongly support Congress's Broadband Facts (like Nutrition Facts) labeling for Internet access.
2 years ago
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lysacor said:
Indirectly censor is not any load of hooey when it comes to the ISPs' capability to control internet content flow over their networks.
They have control over what protocols can leave the edge of their network like protocols such as DNS. For the general public who might not know what this is, summarized it is essentially the phone book to the internet provided by an ISP, or third party. It translates names like "yahoo.com" to 123.123.123.123 (IP address, not a valid one for yahoo I might add). If they can intercept DNS traffic (which Charter, Comcast, and Time Warner Cable all do now) then they can control what name resolves to what IP, and conceivably redirect traffic to sites they wish you to see. Also they could intentionally "poison" some names in their systems, preventing you from seeing what you want at all, this can easily be done, and is commonly done in business networks (changing your DNS server in your TCP/IP settings won't necessarily byp this interception depending on how it is implemented).
4chan.org was victim to this on ATT's network a few months back, ATT actively blocked all connections to one server that 4chan.org used due to perceived attacks against their network. Even though there were extenuating circumstances because of which ATT did it, it proves without a doubt that Internet Service Providers have FULL capability to block any site they choose, redirect it to a "more favorable" content provider, or slow a site to their users until it is completely unusable (packet shaping, which is another commonly implemented traffic manipulation method).
Before you start calling hooey on censorship on the internet, you need to understand how it can be done first.
2 years ago
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inuyasha6332 said:
@ Joe Provo
much of the data is from experience with different isp's
there also many articles
1 of pretty much thousands of articles covering the event
http://torrentfreak.com/comcast-throttles-bittorrent-traffic-seeding-impossible/
comcast throttled P2P traffic.
you were still able to download torrents and seed and do anything else, but through dirty networking tricks (aka throttling) they were able to make most torrenting and other P2P tasks unfeasible.
like in my example of limiting frying to 100 feet from ground level. if you own a airport you can fly 747's all you want but you wont because it would be unfeasible to fly one at 100ft
a isp can throttle your connection in a way where things that are bandwidth intensive and need the connection speed that you are paying for, get a almost unusable speed (and also delay packets and cause a higher ping so it is not only slow, it is laggy and prone to dropped connections) while things that don't need all of the bandwidth have full access to it
example if I owned a ISP and was evil like the people who run comcast, at&t, verizon, time warner and many others
and I am overselling my service (since selling bandwidth that I don't have means 100% profit. and everything is going great for me, the money is rolling in but then a site like hulu comes along and so many customers use it that since the service is oversold, theres not enough bandwidth to go around and things are slow. the fcc wont let me block hulu so the next best thing, I will write L7 filter for flash content then throttle it to around 128kbit/s, problem solved, the customers can access hulu all they want but streaming will be unfeasible for them. indirect censorship.
when you indirectly censor the internet, you are basically finding something you don't like then degrading the quality of the thing you don't like to a point where it us useless or almost useless.
one of my friends has satellite internet (one of the lowest raged ISP's but it is either that or dialup (i'm sure you can find it on broadband reports :)) it is nearly impossible to stream media because of a 300MB bandwidth cap per day, streaming is also throttled to make sure you don't even try. during afternoon he gets dialup speeds due to network congestion and at late night he gets close to the 2mbit speed
when watching a video on hulu, it only uses 1-1.3Mbit/s of bandwidth, but for him it is unwatchable because the connection only makes it's way up to around 200-300kbit/s and doesn't want to go higher, it will buffer but a few seconds of video+ a few minutes of buffering after every few seconds is not watchable, he can run a speed test while it is going and the speed test will still be good. (torrents also don't work properly. even if I do a private torrent when my system is both the seeder and tracker, and I send directly to him, it is like sending to someone on a dialup connection. he doesn't stream tv shows online and can only use services like rapid share or megaupload for p2p needs. the ISP was successfully able to indirectly censor the internet
PS windows xp and vista and windows 7 have a built in VPN server that allows 1 client at a time. if my friend connects to me through a VPN, he gets the full speed of his connection for streaming and anything else (my upload is a little faster than his download)
indirect censorship is common for ISP's because there isn't enough government control to cease it.
a ISP can control what you do online simply by adding a bandwidth cap, but other than that there countless ways they can indirectly censor your internet with out actually blocking the content.
net neutrality must keep all data treated equally and it must also prevent ISP's from capping bandwidth as an alternative to their traffic discrimination.
2 years ago
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gordon said:
Bandwidth is finite. Certainly different pipes carry different volumes, but overloading is possible. Two options exist throttling and overage charges (like extra minute charges). People pay for bandwidth and throughput that they can afford, or need for their business. If they use more throughput than they've paid for, they're detracting from that which others have paid for. FAPs address throughput overuse. And if customers pay for overage, they quickly find out if on their own team someone is overusing, or if a virus has taken over.
Bandwidth management, just like management of other resources, is a way of life. If you think about it, not even the air we breathe is free -- we pay lots of taxes to ensure it's clean and those who foul it pay in various ways. Bandwidth will grow, and its management will evolve, but get used to living green -- manage your own bandwidth usage.
2 years ago
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inuyasha6332 said:
legal bandwidth capping would be speed like how it normally is
you pay for a 10mbit internet connection and you get 10mbit/s
thats how it should be
bandwidth caps in terms of transfer per month wont (in basis science) to cease a network from being overloaded
if your network can only handle 100mbit/s of traffic and you have 20 customers and each are being offered 10mbit/s connections, then there wont be enough bandwidth to give each customer 10mbit/s, adding a 5GB/s month bandwidth transfer cap wont fix that as if all of them try to use their connection, the network will be overloaded, the only true solution is to upgrade the network to handle all 20
(and yes i know a ISP is larger than the network I am describing but the statement stays the same, capping a users total bandwidth usage per month wont fix network congestion)
a total bandwidth cap controls how much data you can send/ receive per month, but it doesn't control when you can use that bandwidth
(simplified) if a ISP only had 100mbit of network speed to offer and it offered 20 customers with a 10mbit connection, even if they put a 5GB per month bandwidth cap, it wouldn't change the fact that the network would become overloaded if more than 10 of the 20 customers tried to use their connection at the same time.
in non scientific, the bandwidth cap can work because with a low transfer cap, users will not do things that will make use of their connection speed because doing it will push them to or over their cap ly quickly.
(referring back to my old argument of indirectly censoring the use of airplanes) if a law was ped that made it to ban the use of airplanes, then someone who has control over these matters will not be able to p a law that says no one is allowed to fly a airplane, but a loophole in the system will be a altitude cap, "airplanes are not allowed to fly higher than 100FT off the ground"
they never said you cant fly one, you just cant go higher than 100ft. In tern this makes it unfeasible to fly a plane because you wouldn't get very far before crashing, thus you wont see airports flying people around in 747's even though theres no law that said they couldn't
this is what many ISP's are planning to do.
there too greedy to upgrade their network to handle their customers (they have no problem adding more customers but when it comes to upgrading the network to provide the additional customers with what they are paying for, then it is a problem because there greedy and the law currently allows them to get away with this kind of greed)
2 years ago
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unsubscribe said:
We do need better labeling.
Law suits, fraud criminal charges, and benchmarks by consumer groups will bring these about. But the strongest force will be competition, if we can get government at all level to allow it.
2 years ago
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gordon said:
The conversation here is based on consumer plans. Business plans that have a committed information rate (CIR), where a *minimum speed* is guaranteed, and the up-to is permitted, are doable because the ISP manages the network to permit only as many customers as can fit within the overall pipe given their various CIRs.
Consumers at first don't know CIRs exist, but when they find out how much it costs to provide, they grumble about their consumer plan, but feel any speed should be free, and so won't pay to get a guaranteed speed.
2 years ago
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Glen D White said:
IF YOU ARE DISABLED THEN YOU MAY NEED TO DO THIS!
2 years ago
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frank said:
On top of that ..
- I need my water to be 'all I can consume' at one price.
- My gas service needs to be unmetered.
- My power needs to be unmetered.
The meterd billing of resources in our economy is destroying productivity!
2 years ago
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inuyasha6332 said:
things like water and gas and power cant really be unlimited because they are a limited resource that will run out.
while with internet it is more like a bridge, the bridge is a unlimited resource but it can only handle so many people or cars on it at any one time. (ignoring toll bridges) should you pay more taxes because compared to everyone in your neighborhood, you drive across the bridge more than they do?
while data can be measured, it is hard to qualtify. a bandwidth cap of like 250GB in comcast case will do nothing to prevent network congestion because it does nothing about the problem of there being too many people on at the same time
think of it this way. suppose you have to cross a bridge to get to work, and there constantly too many cars on the road because like you, there many other people also looking to get to work. the only way to fix this traffic congestion is to either; 1, build more bridges so theres enough bridges to handle all of the people getting to work, or ; 2, restrict which times people are allowed to use the bridge (eg, your neighborhood gets use of the bridge on the weekends and the next neighborhood gets use on monday and so on)
the ISP method to this bridge analogy would be in comcast situation, you cant be on the bridge longer than 250 hours
well most people don't spend that much time on it anyway and it wont cease the traffic problem because they will still be using the bridge at the same time when the bridge cant handle all of them using it at the same time.
bandwidth caps do nothing to prevent congestion because the cause of congestion is too many people on at the same time.
ISP's already deal with congestion by offering speed caps, where you can but a 10mbit connection or a 20mbit connection and so on, the problem is that when more people sign up for the service and there isn't enough speed to provide them all with the connection speed they pay for, that cant just tell everyone that we are downgrading you from a 10mbit package, to a 5mbit because your neighbor decided to sign up for internet service.
ISP's simply want to be greedy and increase profits by not upgrading their hardware to handle all of the customers that are paying them for internet
and at the moment, another use of the bandwidth cap is to prevent future use.
imagine if ISP's capped bandwidth back in the early days of internet, they could say that you are only allowed 10MB per month, on those days, people would be like, who would need to transfer 10MB of data.
today we are like, why if this song smaller than 10MB?
what we see as a lot now will be too small im probably the next 1-3 years and if ISP's already oversold their service because and and put bandwidth caps so people will not be able to use future equipment that will make use of their connection.
in a few years all those people who were suckered into buying a 20 or 30mbit connection so to select their email, will be using their connections to stream HD video and other bandwidth intensive content.
what the ISP's were doing was overselling because not everyone was using their full speed, when they sat that many people only use a little bit of bandwidth thats because many people only use the computers once in a while and most of their bandwidth usage is selecting email or downloading windows updates. Imagine if this happened to you, you bought a house and the company that sold you the house sat that you are not using all of the space in the house, so now they decided to take advantage of that by secretly using like half of the space in your house to sell space to another family, it is 1 2000 square foot home and both families were sold a 2000 square foot home in the same place. 2 objects cant occupy the same space so when the families are ready to use their full 2000 square foot space, guess what, there wont be enough space for them to sue the space that they paid for. real estate companies cant get away with this is real life because if is too physical and easy to see, but they get away with it on the internet because it is harder to visualize data.
2 years ago
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1603932472 said:
You cannot make caps on bandwidth . This has nothing to do with net neutrality. The principle of neutrality is that all data is treated the same without regard to its type, source or destination.
Bandwidth limits are inherent in the physical capabilities of the technology and it is impossible to place a legal requirement of "unlimited" on something that is technically impossible of providing "unlimited"
This would be akin to a law demanding your electric utility must provide you as much power as you want even if the current would melt the wires to your house and blow up the transformer on the pole and leave your neighbors in the dark as well.
You can only push so much data through a pipe until it has reached its capacity and a law cannot suddenly make more data flow through.
Your dial up cannot suddenly be required to equal broadband because the system is limited in bandwidth by technology. All systems have limits and they are all shared by others at the same time.
It is a necessity of network management to allocate resources to avoid collapse of all data and part of that management includes controls on bandwidth.
As long as what bandwidth you are entitled to is not controlling what you access then it is still neutral.
1 year ago
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inuyasha6332 said:
you misunderstood the use of bandwidth is this posting. While there is a limit in speed (I am not questioning the speed, I am questioning the bandwidth in terms of how much you are allowed to transfer before they decide that you have transferred enough. A bandwidth limit in those terms are purely artificial. The current network hardware has a limit if speed that it can provide but it does not have a true limit in how much it can transfer.
The controlling of how much can be transfered allows ISP's to indirectly go against net nutrality. For example, for new AT&T customers getting a iphone, the bandwidth cap makes it unfeasible to do certain tasks for fear of you going over your bandwidth limit within a few moments.
For example, the government cant ban the current forms of transportation, but they can control the airspace. If the government wanted to cease you from flying planes, they could simply put a airspace limit of you can only travel 250 miles per month (kinda like comcast 250GB bandwidth limit)
and if that was not enough, they could limit all planes to a altitude of 30 feet (they can fly no higher)(try getting a plane form point A to point B if you cant fly higher than 30 feet). They can still fly so so nothing is being blocked but with the limits, it has become unfeasible to fly. and this is the loophole that ISP's use to get around net nutrality.
If they only want you to email friends and family and going on a few small websites then they can simply lower your bandwidth cap to like 100MB a month. You can still do anything you want but nearly all other forms of traffic will put you over that limit within minutes and even then it wont be enough bandwidth to get anything done even if you decide to do the bandwidth intensive task.
With the internet, speed is a limitation but Traffic transferred is not.
1 year ago
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1603932472 said:
Bandwidth usage/caps are related but I am not speaking about caps on speed. That is a variable based on line quality, network traffic etc. and can vary from day to day and even hour to hour.
Total bandwidth is impacted by the total traffic. A given path is finite. True the faster the network the more data in a given period of time it can handle but any network can only transmit "x" number of bits per second which does place a finite limit on the total capacity in terms of how much that pipe can transfer over any given period of time.
While it is also true that a "large file" can take more time than smaller files they are still broken unto the same packet sizes for transmission.
Any broadband connection is by its nature sharing the total capacity of that connection such as in cable internet distribution, the total of everyone's data can reach the saturation point that is the maximum capability of that branch of the network. You can't push more into a full pipe. Speed gets slower to accommodate the additional burden and it is slower for everyone who shares that network.
This is particular true with both satellite and cell based Internet access due to the finite limitations of the radio spectrum. Fiber and copper also have finite limits in their capacity to carry data separate from the actual speed. ( pressure vs volume if you compare it to a water line )
Most ISP's employ a written "fair use" doctrine into their contracts to preserve the right to limit your "volume" of data in order to maintain equal access to all users at the same time and to try to prevent "bottle necks" in the networks. This has been standard for a decade at least but I don't know of anyone using a land based network who has ever been impacted.
I work and manage web sites and a remote server and use a standard cable broadband from Comcast. There is a "bandwidth" limit but even with my main computer plus four others including one used to watch Netflix over the Internet I still have not come close to the limit.
I am a firm supporter of Net Neutrality but realize that the technical limits can require some limits on individual consumption just to prevent "brown outs" from over loads. The key is to prevent any such limits based on the nature of the content.
1 year ago
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inuyasha6332 said:
That limit is network congestion and has nothing to do with how much data can be transferred.
For example, even with a 100MB bandwidth cap, if everyone was to use their 100MB at the same time, the network will either collapse or slow to a crawl.
Also giving the current trend of the internet, bandwidth requirements increase as time goes on A 250GB bandwidth cam may be usable now for many people but in 5 years it may be a real problem even for basic users.
If the ISP network in your area can handle 200gbit/s then it can handle it all the time. If you were to offer 1gbit connections to 300 users and give them a 100MB bandwidth cap, the network will slow to a crawl or not function at all if all 300 users were to download at 1gbit/s for 100MB at the same time. In this situation the most it will do is prevent users from doing things that will actually take advantage of a 1gbit/s connection because anything that will really benefit from it will most likely require more than 100MB to be useful.
1 year ago
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onlybyforce said:
If you use more data it should be to charge you more for it? This isn't the way electricity or gas is sold, this is not how my long distance bill works.
Even ISPs often have to pay for bandwidth used to other companies based on actual usage.
I mean, I don't want bandwidth caps on my service, but should it actually be ?? I don't think so.
ISP are still public, for profit companies. If people do not want traffic management or bandwidth caps, then they can just include it in their expensive monthly bill as costs rise but I think having a choice should be legal.
If I had the choice between an unlimited data plan for $300 a month, and a 2TB plan for $45 a month, I'd pick the $45 plan and so would almost everyone else, but you would seek to make it to even entertain the idea?
I'm going to call my gas company and demand an unlimited usage plan with them and see how much money they quote me for it.
1 year ago
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inuyasha6332 said:
things like gas are limited supplies and they are tangible. Data does not apply to this.
Write 1TB of data to your drive and tell me if the drive becomes heavier. If you set a computer to do it, it can produce data indefinitely.
Based on the physical properties of a network, they are not limited by how much data can be sent or received, they are more limited by how fast they can send and receive.
You can start an ISP and limit everyone to a bandwidth of 1KB of data. you will still get network congestion if everyone tried to download 1KB of data at the same time, the network may even hang or fail to transfer any data at all.
1 year ago
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puzzledpurfact said:
Problem is with caps set at 5G. I live in a community that has old copper, ATT country. Here we can no longer use dialup. ATT broadband runs at speed of dialup. What I used to get unlimited for 9.95 now costs $60 for 5G data.
There are 2 adults & 2 kids in family 5G not enough and is very expensive for low income community. Unless there is a lower cost alternative I must say that this is a good idea. ATT has profited all these years on their old lines which were most likely run with public funds. Not long ago major carriers all had unlimited plans. They sold these products now they got you time to set hook. If nothing else lower cost or raise the cap. We are not creating a neutral web if price is out of reach for low income families. Verizon has a 10G plan for $199 this is outrageous! yes I do believe we need to look at price for data delivered especially since stimulus is paying for end of line and rural towers.
Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2008 - Amends the Communications Act of 1934 to declare that it is U.S. policy to:
(1) maintain the freedom to use broadband telecommunications networks, including the Internet, without unreasonable interference from or discrimination by network operators;
(2) enable the United States to preserve its global leadership in online commerce and technological innovation;
(3) promote the open and interconnected nature of broadband networks that enable consumers to reach, and service providers to offer, content, applications, and services of their choosing; and
(4) guard against unreasonable discriminatory favoritism for, or degradation of, content by network operators based upon its source, ownership, or destination on the Internet. Requires the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to commence a proceeding on broadband services and consumer rights, including assessing whether broadband network providers:
(1) refrain from unreasonably interfering with the ability of consumers to access, use, send, receive, or offer content, applications, or services of their choice, and attach or connect their choice of devices; and
(2) add charges for quality of service to certain Internet applications and service providers
posted by [lion[ox[man[eagle] @ 10:11 PM
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