[ale] WARNING - RANT Re: Comcast Caps Data at 250G/Month

[Pat Regan]

Robert Reese~ wrote:
> Oh, do I need to remind you that standard-def television consumes 
> about 4GB per hour per video device?  Anyone here want to add in the 
> GB/Hr rate for 1080P?  For just ONE television?

I assume you are speaking of digital SDTV.  If you are, I find the 4 GB
number terribly unlikely.  Thats a bitrate of nearly 10 megabit.  That's
about the max bitrate for a video DVD, and that would only give you
about an hour on a single layer disc.  I sure don't know of any cable or
satellite providers that are actually providing anywhere near DVD
quality digital SDTV channels.

And the number certainly isn't for one television.  All the digital
tuners in your neighborhood are just listening in to the same stream,
all the TVs aren't getting their own.

As for 1080p...  The max bitrate for a bluray disc is 48 megabits for
audio and video combined.  I am not sure what the usual bitrate for an
actual released movie is, though.

Wikipedia tells me that DOCSIS (cable modem protocol) can push 38
megabit downstream to your cable modem on a single analog channel.  I
believe there are something around 100 channels available to them, so if
we assume DOCSIS is similar in downstream speed to the protocol for
digital cable that gives them a little bit shy of 4 gigabits worth of
bandwidth to each node.  Everyone on a node has to share that 4 gigabit.

I'm not in your neighborhood, but up here they've been slowly
eliminating analog channels to make more room for digital channels.  Why
waste 38 megabit on one channel when you can a half dozen channels down
the same bandwidth?

Here's the part you should be upset about, no matter how you receive
your broadcasts.  It makes little difference what resolution the channel
you are watching is coming to you in.  I can send you 480p video encoded
at a higher bitrate than 1080p if I want to.

I don't know about you, but my HD channels seem to look worse and worse
every year.  If they only need 10 megabit for a decent 720p broadcast,
that really means they can shave off 1 megabit off of 9 channels and
they can add another for free.  Once they realize everyone thinks 9
megabit is good enough, they can repeat the process and add another
channel.  Comcast really seems to use a low bitrate for most of my 480p
channels up here.  The only thing they have going for them is that they
aren't fuzzy or wavy anymore :p.

Nowhere does it tell you what bitrate (quality) you're getting on any
channel.  They can also change it at any time.  I keep seeing ads for
Dish Network saying they are going to offer 1080p on demand, I believe.
 There is no way they will be pushing anywhere near bluray bitrates on
that.  They keep talking about using some sort of new technology they
call something like "turbo hd."  I am hoping they are using mpeg4 to
save bandwidth, but I have no idea if they actually are.

> The ISPs are effectively creating a toll to force you to pay them for
>  the privilege of not using their services.  Very Mafia-like 
> behaviour, and certainly anti-competitive, and possibly monopolistic.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
The only problem with what Comcast is doing is that they have been
calling their service "unlimited" when it really isn't.  Going forward,
it won't be a problem.  It isn't unlimited anymore.

If comcast feels they can't provide more than 250 GB per month to their
customers at their current prices they really have two choices.  They
can cut everyone's speed so that it is impossible or difficult to
overload their network, or they can keep the speeds high and cap you.

The caps aren't evil.  I can't say I agree with switching people to a
capped plan when they were sold an "unlimited" plan.  I'm sure the
contract allows for the change, but it still doesn't feel very friendly.

> Remember, only cable currently gives you the bandwidth and the 
> opportunity to do VOD; satellite companies don't have the hardware 
> yet to roll it out to the general populace in the quantities that we
>  are going to quickly become accustomed.

Dish Network commercials are claiming we can have 1080p on demand.  I
have a friend with an old dish network plan and I am pretty sure he gets
some sort of on demand.  Bandwidth doesn't limit the amount of content
that can be offered on demand, it limits the number of customers who can
be using it at one time.

> VOIP is not yet a big deal, but it really is just around the corner 
> to have the infamous Video Phone VOIP hit mainstream.

VOIP is terribly low bandwidth.  I remember testing some Grandstream
phones with Asterisk.  They used something less than 20 kilobits per
second max with the right codec and sounded great.  You'd need a lot of
phones to generate any significant bandwidth.

As for video phones...  No one wants them.  It would be very rare that I
want to actually see the person I'm on the phone with.  If we could,
we'd really only be able to talk.  Multitasking would be out the window,
 it'd be rude to rarely make eye contact :p.  I'm also pretty sure
nobody wants to see my ugly mug.

> FiOS will do it, obviously, but still suffers from the Last Mile 
> syndrome, leaving cellular to start to compete.  Let's face it: who 
> is possibly hated more than cable? Cellular companies.  (And I hate 
> Dish Network more than any cable or cell company).

FIOS has a speed edge on cable, but cable already has the last mile
covered nearly everywhere.

Cellular can't compete.  Not by a long shot.  I use EDGE all the time.
I get about 5KB/sec and pings of over 800ms.  I used a Verizon card for
a project about 2 years ago.  It could reach 10s of KB/sec but still had
a ping over 500ms.  That kind of ping is a killer.

Wikipedia tells me 3g HSPA is 14.4 mb down by 5.8 up.  That's less than
half of cable's DOCSIS standard.  Way more people have to share a single
cell tower than they do a cable node.  Wired always seems to be 10-100
times faster than wireless.

> Let's not forget 10+ Megapixel cameras that hold tens of Gigabytes of
>  shots per birthday party and HD video cameras with a intravenous 
> connection via wifi to your YouTube channel.  Speaking of YouTube, 
> how many Gigabytes of HD YouTube, Facebook/MySpace (etc), music 
> videos and such is a teenager going to suck down on a monthly basis?
>  How long does it take to suck down 350MB of HD YouTube video?  I 
> think it's under an hour.

I know I don't know much about youtube's future plans, but current video
is mostly horrendously low bitrates.  Something in the 350kb/sec range.
 That's 150 MB per hour.

> For all you spam-lovers out there, remember your spam will be charged
>  against your craptastic 250GB/Mo. cap as is any attacks against your
>  network and connection.

Just taking a quick check, my mail server seems to use about 500MB worth
of traffic each direction every week.  It isn't a huge mail server.  I
host about a half dozen domains and probably three times as many email
accounts.  There is about 12 gig of email stored up there right now if
that gives some kind of rough idea.  I bet the majority of that
bandwidth is all IMAP connections.

Spam is minor compared to the rest of the traffic a home user generates.

> Might not seem like much, but for those power users that are running 
> their own mail and/or web servers, that could be a detrimental amount
> of usage.

This is a bit unrelated, but I don't understand why people want to run
mail servers at home.  You can rent virtual servers that are plenty big
enough to do the job properly for less than 10 dollars per month.

> That reminds me, I already have morons tacking on 5 or even 10 
> megabyte attachments to email (hint: email is not, and never will be,
>  designed as a File Transfer system.... that's what FTP is for, 
> LITERALLY!) as well as the ever-useless HTML email.

How do you go about finding someone's FTP server so you can drop off a
file for them?  If I put the file on my own FTP server, how do I make
sure only the recipient is going to pick it up?  I understand that both
can be accomplished, but I'm already likely to have the recipient's
email address.

We aren't running mail servers with tiny disks anymore.  The only reason
I can think of to not want to send large emails is because they are
about 15% bigger because of the mime encoding.

> But with so many people switching to SaaS models for document 
> handling, processing, and emails that bandwidth use goes through the
>  roof with each and every email message you send and receive.

I have no real data here, but I can't imagine that synchronizing
documents that you are working on is going to require more bandwidth
than streaming video.  By comparison this is likely barely a blip on the
radar.

> By the way, show of hands all those that hate the lazy web programmer
>  that uses Flash for needless things as well as stupidly for
> necessary things like navigation?  I thought the late 90's were bad
> for MIDI files, animated GIFs, and the crass BLINK tag.  Those seem
> like to good ol' days compared to today's Flash-infected webpages.
> What used to be a hundred or so KB per page, we are now inundated
> with megabytes or even tens of megabytes per page.  Thank you, 
> flash-loving idiot web developers and advertisers.  (Special thanks 
> to those Grand M! arshall Morons that reign over the web divisions at
>  the networks like Fox, ABC, and the rest.)  Developing for IE and 
> ActiveX was the plague, and Flash requirement is nearing Apocalyptic
>  proportions.

All of this is certainly orders of magnitude less bandwidth than
streaming video.

> To re-ask your question, How fast can you churn through 250GB?  Very
>  quickly... that isn't even 10GB per day!  I expect to hit that per 
> hour before the next summer Olympics (being held in London, 
> apparently).

We can all math out how fast your CAN chew through 250GB.  The better
question would be something more like "How fast *WILL I* churn through
250GB?"  The answer will be very different for everyone.  Fortunately
for 99% of their customers, that answer is greater than a month.

There are two things about the Comcast cap that surprise me.  The cap is
the same for all speed tiers and there is no way to pay for more.

> Speaking of which, how much of those games are going to be available
> as streams and downloads?  My guess is all of it, all in HD.  I pity
> the poor sports lover that tries to download the all-you-can-eat
> Olympic coverage with a measly 250GB cap.

I would be very surprised to see much streaming HD video in 4 years
time.  If we're lucky the bitrates will be up over 1 megabit for the
average video stream by then.  That isn't enough for a good looking 720p
h.264 video.  They may be able to pull it off if there are proxy-like
servers very local to everyone.

The question would ask you is why you would think the 250GB cap will
still be the same in 4 years time?  As more customers start to approach
the cap they will have to move it.

> Doing the math using your numbers, my internet connection currently
> is capable of downloading 5,400MB per hour.  If the cap was 350MB per
> hour, my service is now rated at just 6.48% of what it is capable.  I
> have 12Mb/Sec but I'm only allowed to use that at capacity for 93
> minutes and 20 seconds per day.  An hour-and-a-half to go through the
>  equivalent of a single dual-layer DVD.  If my service was suddenly 
> only 6.48% of what it was, I expect my bill to be 6.48% of what it 
> was... in my case that would be under $6 per month.  An! other 
> comparison: my lowest cost per GB per month (average 30.42 days per 
> month) at 12Mb/Sec (1.5MB/Sec) (coming out to just under 4TB per 
> month) of is roughly $0.02.  (someone check my math... it's late 
> after a week of 20-hour days).  Under the cap, the math is easier: 
> $80/250GB = $0.32 per Gigabyte.

Network connections aren't sold this way.  If you want to break it down
as far as you are you really need to do it in a way more comparable to
business class leased lines.

If you get yourself a T1 or T3 there are two major parts to the monthly
bill.  You pay for the line and you pay for the data.  The cost of the
line goes up with the distance.  I have no idea what the ratio of cost
for the line vs the bandwidth should be on a cable modem, though :).

> My suggestion?  Get Congress and the FTC/FCC to force IP-related 
> technology as well as third-party services such as VOIP, Netflix, and
>  whatever other form they appear in the future to be EXCLUDED from 
> the cap; only non-SaaS and non-IP-related technology bits should be 
> considered for capping.  Watch how quickly the ISPs attack that idea,
>  since it directly impacts their hidden agenda of the grift.

Please no.  Why do we need laws for this?  The ISP advertises a service
and when you sign up there is a contract.  If the advertisement doesn't
match the contract, there is a problem.  If you don't like the terms of
the contract, you shouldn't sign it.

In your example, who pays for this free netflix traffic?  Is it now
Netflix's cost?  If it is, that means that if I am under my 250GB cap
and I sign up for Netflix that means I am either paying for some of your
bandwidth or you have to be charged more.

I don't think I understand the problem.  You have to pay for your
connection and bandwidth whether you are a content provider or content
consumer.  I think you're inadvertently touching on the old net
neutrality argument.  In your "third party services" case, the third
parties will be charged twice for their bandwidth.

> By the way, the very same rant goes for METERING! </rant>

I have no problem with metered bandwidth.  Sometimes I get a better deal
metered, sometimes unmetered.  It depends what I am hosting.  I assume
you mean metering on home consumer connections?

If so, the 250GB cap of which you speak is exactly that, a metered
connection.

> Cheers, Robert~
> 

Pat

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