Comcast has decided to impose a 250GB/month limit on their customers. I have a lot of friends that use Comcast for their internet service provider and are likely to hit this limit, even counting fully legit data. Linux isos aren’t small. And I know that I do a lot of backups and whoisi testing that uses a decent amount of bandwidth. I’m sure I’m well past this limit. [ Note: I am a very happy Verizon FIOS user. ]
But the real story is about what this does to competitive video services. Want to get access to better, lower-cost video than Comcast cable service from somewhere like Amazon, Netflix or Hulu? Nope, welcome to the world of false scarcity. You will use their video service and you will like it.
Om calls this “the enemy of innovation” and he’s right. Part of the explosion of video, services and data via the web has come because of the growth and availability of broadband into people’s homes. What this says is “growth is fine as long as it doesn’t compete with our video offerings.”
I am reminded of the oldest story of this behaviour when AT&T didn’t want to support the Internet because they didn’t want competition to their proprietary long haul services. And rightfully so. It’s a good thing that AT&T didn’t win that battle, right?
Also, they list how many pieces of email you can send with a 250GB limit. (Huh? Seriously?) I wonder how many youtube videos or hulu videos that amounts to. Anyone know the avg size of one of those? That might make for a more interesting number.
A boo hoo hoo. Major Canadian ISPs have had a limit of 60 GB for months, if not years.
(‘Course, we also don’t have access to Hulu.)
It’s the idea of getting HD-quality programming via your net connection that makes that number real.
Comcast actually had a limit before, they were just being very coy about telling their customers what it was, and whether you were close to hitting it or not.
Meanwhile, ISPs in the rest of the world have always been telling their customers what they were actually paying for. I don’t like limits either, but at least it’s clear now. By the way, where I’m living we’ve got a lot of DSL and Cable providers. But they all have limits in the 1GB-60GB range. (I myself have a 40GB limit, and pay 0.25 euro cents / GB when I pass the limit). Recently, some of the smaller providers here have announced plans with “big” limits (160GB) or “Fair Use Policy” – unlimited, but we’re back in vague territory when it comes to defining what “Fair Use” is.
I’d be happy with a 250GB limit. You’re right about video delivery over IP, but it seems we (and telco’s) are just not ready for that yet.
I don’t see what’s fundamentally wrong with bandwidth limits or pay-per-GB charges. On the contrary, insisting that plans be “unlimited” means that people who use a little bandwidth are forced to subsidise the people who use a lot, which is manifestly unfair. If Netflix’s business model depends on those subsidies, then that’s just too bad.
Anyway, if Comcast really wants to clamp down on online movie watching, they made a mistake setting the limit at 250GB. That’s 10 HD movies or 50 DVDs per month … that’s going to affect very few people’s movie-watching habits, now or in the future.
It’s about 27 hours of MPEG-2 HD video over the course of a month.
“The end of the internet as we know it’, proclaims one of those links. Oh, boo hoo… how will people ever survive on just 250GB a month?
Oh wait… probably the same way as most of the world manages on 10-20GB, for far more money than you’re paying for $250. Not a lot of sympathy from this corner…
Rob: But no-one would use MPEG-2 for HD video. They’d use a much better codec like H.264 or Theora.
Yep, no sympathy from here either — in Australia, with the only _independant_ ISP left, $280 AUD gets you 100GB.
$50 with a major telco (the rest of the ISPs here) gets you 5GB.
As a test, I downloaded 10 YouTube Videos and did a size average — about 7.7M each, of course — that’s .flv — and roughly comparative to a 10 minute 8-player online game of Grand Theft Auto 4.
Pretty much all UK ISPs now have bandwidth limits of some sort since the widespread adoption of ADSL with > 2 MB download speeds. The the truely ‘unlimited’ plans typically have really low download speeds, or are insanely expensive, or both.
eg with my current ISP, a 8 MB line with a 300 GB monthly cap costs 20 GBP/month. A 8 MB line with unlimited bandwidth costs 160 GBP/month. Quite a difference!
Wow, that’s a huge pile of angry non-americans!
A very rough back-of-the-mental-envelope gives about 500 hours of Youtube. I may be off but not by a massive factor, I don’t think. So unless you spend just about your every waking hour watching Youtube (eek), I wouldn’t worry too much about a 250GB cap.
Sorry, I’m with the “what’s the big deal?” camp. You really can’t expect ISPs to provide utterly unlimited bandwidth to everyone for $30/month. It doesn’t work. 250GB is really not a bad cap for a consumer line. I pay CAN$38 for a 100GB limit and I really don’t ever get anywhere near hitting that, even though I’ll watch online video occasionally, mlb.tv, and download quite a lot of Japanese TV (often in HD, even). I don’t think you’re going to start a consumer revolution over 250GB, but good luck. :)
I’m a miro, transmission, and skype user, and if Cox does this, I’ll probably be pissed.
..but then, I’m probably also not anywhere near this limit, I really don’t know.
As for Youtube: an average movie from there – low quality, not H264, which most of those are – is averaging 2MB/minute.
That means you can watch 80.000 music video clips a month. Or 4.000 GUADEC talks.
> Wow, that’s a huge pile of angry non-americans!
I’m french and I totally agree with you. I would totally hate going back after having unlimited speed (everybody gets the best they can get out of ADSL2+ depending of the distance to the DSLAM, so I think the maximum is 28Mbps) and unlimited bandwidth.
And that’s for 30 EUR (including television and unlimited free phone to most destinations – Europe, US, Canada, China, etc.).
And we have native IPv6, television streamed as RTP to your computer, etc (but that’s just bonuses :)
I pay the equivalent of $40 a month for 30GB, and extra GB on top are $3 each. That’s with Plus Net (http://www.plus.net).
I want to know which ISP Daniel Berrange is with! :-)
Gerv
Wow I can’t believe it… not the 250GB limit. But that so many people are saying but wait that’s just normal you should try our expensive low bandwidth offering.
I’m in South Africa paying about $130 for a 10GB cap. Sure I could vaguely agree with the ‘if you want more then you can pay’ or the ‘low bandwidth users are subsidising’, etc. But I prefer the macro view of things. Like hey our cellphone industry touted about 100,000 users and we’re seen as a luxury only for the rich industry. Now they’ve got the population of 50 million almost covered. So these caps, driven by poor telco policy and lack of deregulation mean that Internet is for the rich, Web2.0 is great to talk about but not so great to use, call centres are located elsewhere, etc.
You see there are things that affect you in the macro sense even when in the US. We now will no longer be able to point and say uncapped is normal if the capping continues.
Personally I don’t think I’d know how to use 250GB!
There is no such thing as unlimited, because you are speed capped anyway, so you can calculate how much you can down/up load with your connection.
I am paying 35€ for an “unlimited” Fair-use service, but still complaining about 250GB sounds like “its worse than before so I complain even thought I never downloaded 250GB/month before”. Actually very few people will hit this limit.
250gig is an enormous amount of data for a home user. Attempting to measure it in “You Tube videos” is silly. You could probably watch You Tube videos 24/7 and stay within that cap.
Quick calculations suggest you could download ~525 hours of reasonable quality divx video (over 22 continuous days of viewing).
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I must agree that at the moment, a 250GiB limit is nothing to worry about. However, 250GiB basicly means you have a constant 100kiB line, compared to the 20MiB lines that are sold these days, that’s nothing. And in DVD’s, you can download 53 of them a month, in Blu-ray disk’s, it’s just 10 of them.
The problem with bandwidth caps is not really the limit, more that most ISP’s do not increase it enough over time. While the need for bandwidth grows faster. Most ISP’s tend to go for more profit instead of better service. Trough healthy competition could take care of that. I’ve always found it striking that in countries with little competition on internet connections have bandwidth caps. Also. you can claim that letting small users pay for the heavy use of others is not totally true. Simply maintaining the network cost a lot, independent from how much the network is used. Also, measuring bandwidth in the first place (especially deep packet inspection) is not only difficult, but also costly. Not to mention completely useless with a fair use policy.
However, if you allow a bandwidth cap, all high bandwidth users will move to competing ISP’s, effectively driving up there bandwidth cost, and force them to start bandwidth measurement and caps as well.
I don’t think it’s ‘that’s a huge pile of angry non-americans’ any more that it is ‘the rest of us, would like to welcome you, the americans — to needing to put up with what the rest of the world deals with on a daily basis’ or, consumerism.
For what it’s worth, I don’t know one 2.4 children ‘average’ household in Australia, New Zealand or the Eire that would even know what to do with 250GB a month, but I do know that a hell of a lot of them shell out each month for Cable or Satellite TV — somewhat independantly of their net access.
… and with the PS3, XBox360 and other ‘media streaming’ devices (ie. those that the technicially challenged can build or acquire) lagging behind in their support of most formats from the web anyway, if they’re not using it for TV, not finding pr0n 24/7 and not using fifteen gaming consoles at once — what would they need it for?
It just sounds like american’s are experiencing the ‘we built the links, everyone came, now we profit’ mentality that shareholder concerned Telco’s/ISPs the world over are driven by, that’s all.
Why do people think non-heavy users are subsidizing heavy users? Non-heavy users care about–and pay for–speed. They’ll pay what it costs to get youtube to stream without pauses, to get pages to load faster, and be happy. And since the speed bottlenecks are still in the last mile, heavy users won’t be affecting light users (except with cable), so the light users couldn’t get the speed they get for less money anyway.
Myself, I’m happy with Sovernet: 2Mb down / 256 Kb up for $37/month with no cap. I wish I could get Burlington Telecom (3Mb/3Mb for $33 through municipal data lines, yay local government!) but I live one town away.
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For my minor thesis at uni, I collected 811 YouTube videos (.flv files) in a regular pattern for a week, using the “new videos” feed they publish (I can get you the statistics of how I got them if you’re interested, but leaving that out for now). Their total size is 4.08 GB, which boils down to about 5.15MB a video, on average. The largest is 25MB, the smallest 1kb. According to google that makes for 49693 YouTube videos a month. These are the “normal” quality ones, though. The high-quality ones that they started with a few months ago now will undoubtedly use (much) more bandwidth.
The point that is grossly overlooked is that Comcast sells their service based on several tiers of MEGABITS PER SECOND. You can buy a 5mbps plan, or upgrade to 12 or 16 mbps plans.
They don’t market that you can only use #mbps X seconds per month. So if they sell me a plan for 16mbps without adequately disclosing limits, they are practicing a bait and switch technique. Lure the customer in with an attractive marketing offer, then sell them something they did not expect.
Also, they do not provide any good metering, management, or QOS tools. It doesn’t matter what the limit is, whether it’s a fair and reasonable limit, if they impose limits on households (and in mine I have 7 machines in use for the family), then they need to provide useful tools for the ordinary consumer.
As a network engineer, I know how to effectively manage my household bandwidth use, and my kids are throttled so they don’t impact my Vonage service, and Vonage is set on my router as high priority traffic with QOS settings.
We use hulu, joost, amazon VOD, slingbox, PS3 online, gametap, and are certainly on the high end of capacity usage (and this cap would actually not even impact me TODAY). But I use Verizon FIOS and only purchased a 2/5 plan. Even with all those services and up to seven concurrent users, 2/5 is enough for me, my wife, and kids.
BUT, Comcast’s marketing will fool the average consumer. Go ahead Comcast, and sell a product with bandwidth limits, but don’t market something entirely different.
Comcast Sues FCC For Right To Limit Bandwidth Hogs
Michael Learmonth | September 4, 2008 6:20 PM
Comcast (CMCSA) is challenging an FCC ruling that blocked the company from slowing down Web traffic from peer-to-peer fille sharing applications such as BitTorrent.
The FCC voted 3-2 in early August that treating certain types of Web traffic differently violated its “net neutrality” principles, which state that all Internet traffic should be treated equally.
Comcast says while it will comply, it is still appealing the order “to protect our legal rights and to challenge the basis on which the [FCC] found that Comcast violated federal policy in the absence of pre-existing legally enforceable standards,” EVP David L. Cohen said, in a statement.
FCC chairman Kevin Martin told Bloomberg he’s “disappointed” by the challenge, and that “it was important for the commission to continue to protect consumers’ unfettered access to the Internet.”
Even before the FCC’s ruling, Comcast announced a different strategy to keep the most prolific consumers of bandwidth from overburdening their network: It will slow down users based on how much bandwidth they’re using — not based on what software they’re using. And as of Oct. 1, the company will impose a cap of 250 gigabytes a month for residential customers, a move that could affect about 1% of Comcast’s 14.1 million broadband subscribers.