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12/07/09
12/07/09
12/07/09
12/07/09
Meaning - Yahoo is probably not the only company with a chart of prices like this. It just so happens that Yahoo's chart got published here. I was sort of joking in my first comment.
12/07/09
I'm the commissioner in name only!
TwoHandTouch(myself)Football is runnin' the thing!
I swear!
12/07/09
12/07/09
12/07/09
12/07/09
Or am I confusing terms here?
12/07/09
12/07/09
12/05/09
The closest you get (if significant bandwidth 'hogging' is to even be observed) to a hog is like a *herd* of feral hogs, thousands strong. And one of the herd may be a hog one month and not the next. Some a chronic hogs, but they are still drops in the bucket. Go after one of them is like trying to swat a bee in a swarm chasing you (sorry for mixed metaphors).
The reality is that blaming the end user is a cheap shot, an easy target for providers who haven't scaled their service in proportion to their user base. And it's ironic, because their high speeds and constant access were the selling points, the opiates that got people addicted to the web in the first place. And now that people are addicted, they want to pretend it's not their fault for selling HSI 'high speed, always on, unlimited usage' and having people actually taking them up on that.
If there are local problems, it is the industry's shortcoming. Period. Comcast has more money than they know what to do with, for example. There is no reason they can't scale up burdened areas. The backbones aren't the bottleneck.
12/04/09
There are power users though, and they are becoming more common that the email-only light users aren't offsetting those others as much as they did before.
The simple truth is that this trend is scaring service providers, and instead of expanding to suit the growing needs of their users, they are merely delaying the inevitable by blaming them to prevent the cost necessary to do so.
12/04/09
12/04/09
12/04/09
What the ISP's are trying to do reap more profits without outlaying the costs of installing new and bigger pipes. I mean it's that simple, if the pipes are too crowded, build some more. Stop treating it like some finite resource.
12/04/09
12/04/09
Please PLEASE post me ONE LINK showing any MAJOR ISP, Comcast, Verizon, att, Time Warner, that did NOT spend over a BILLION DOLLARS the last 3 years EVERY year to upgrade high speed networks.
You can't do it. And if 4 to 12 BILLION dollars a YEAR to upgrade the internet isn't enough in your book, then by all means, feel free to start your OWN ISP and compete with them.
12/04/09
And from looking at their annual reports they are by no means hurting AT ALL even after outlaying tons of cash for new infastructure.
So either they're doing fine, or they're lying on their annual reports to the SEC.
12/04/09
It's weird, because ISPs treat bandwidth like a natural resource. They seem to want to convince us that it's in limited supply. They want us to believe that they bought x bytes of bandwidth and are giving it out to people one byte at a time, as if we're at some sort of expensive electron soup kitchen.
12/04/09
omg there's not enough internet!
12/04/09
12/04/09
It's limited in it's availability, but not in it's supply.
It's like a 4 lane highway. 1 company might be able to have trucks on all four lanes when it's empty, but if other companies are sending trucks, they all have to share the road. Bandwidth isn't represented by how much you have downloaded by the end of the month, but by the speed at which you are downloading at any given moment.
12/04/09
12/04/09
The "lanes" analogy breaks down when you realize that ISP's cap your bandwidth, limiting how many "trucks" you can send or receive at once.
The problem is that they built a two-lane road in a rural area, then they invited millions of people to live there without preparing for the land grab. Now it's a bustling metropolis and they don't want to widen the road, even though there is plenty of room to do so.
12/04/09
The "bandwidth hog" is the user who is *always* using as much bandwidth as he can get. Users on his regional backhaul will always see degraded service. They might not even know it's degraded, because they have no point of comparison. During peak hours, the hog is just one user maxing out his connection among many. For those users who use heavy bandwidth during off-peak hours, be it for telecommuting, online college courses, or just watching soap operas, the bandwidth hog is a tiny but omnipresent drain on their productivity and entertainment.
The reason the telcos haven't really tried to push their case against neutrality is that the bandwidth hogs are, so far, few and far between, and are usually savvy enough to disguise their usage. Most small ISPs never have to deal with a hog, and even the big national providers are unlikely to see more than one on a given trunk line. They know, though, that their promises to end-users aren't going to be realistic forever, and they'll have to figure out a way to balance that against the costs that a few users can impose.
12/04/09
Benoit, the idea of comparing a 50GB cap to a concept of 1.5% of advertised speed limits is completely silly--and if you are a telecom expert, you should know that is a rhetorical exercise that makes no sense. The whole point of IP is that it *isn't* circuit switched dedicated capacity. You want a dedicated line that is 100% of your IP bandwidth, it will cost you an arm and a leg. I don't think there are a lot of telcos or ISPs who are going to be volunteering to give you data when it seems your position is pre-ordained.
Do I think caps are appropriate to address "bandwidth hogs"? It is not, as others have noted, narrowly tailored as a solution, since you can move a lot of data without necessarily impacting others' experience, but it is probably the easiest proxy to apply. Find a better way for them to identify hogs...
I can tell you bandwidth hogs exist. My internet speed varys wildly throughout the day. That means other people are impacting my usage--my ISP isn't messing with my bandwidth for the hell of it. If IP is based on equality and trying to squeeze as many packets through the same pipe as possible, my experience is affected by someone engaged in data transfers that are "outside" of the norms. Most of that we live with, and most of that, I suspect, the ISPs don't really care about. But if it is really egregious...
And, to all the people saying "duh, I paid for X Mb/s, I should be able to use all of it." RYFC. That isn't what you paid for or contracted for. You paid for a connection that is *up to* that speed, and subject to other people's usage and other network factors. The *only* way an ISP could really sell you a 20 Mb/s guaranteed connection is to sell you a dedicated pipe. At $40/mo., that isn't what you bought.
12/04/09
12/04/09
There are already plans in place to throttle excessive users, and those plans, because they exclusively gauge total usage, rather than protocol or origin, are still acceptable to the FCC under its current neutrality policy.
I'm not sure what, exactly, Benoît is hoping to change with the data he's not going to get.
12/04/09
"Benoît Felten was found dead on his apartment, police suspect that the criminal used a telephone cable."