Comcast Claims They'll Stop BitTorrent Throttling > What good is DOCSIS 3.0 if there are inivisible caps?

What good is DOCSIS 3.0 if there are inivisible caps?

It's all marketing. They don't actually want anybody to use it!

.... other than for delivering their own content.

reply to bngdup
Caps don't put a bandwidth speed limit like pipe size does.
A cap, if we are using highways as an analogy is like telling someone they can only travel up to 100 miles in a day. So if we increase the pipe size/speed, and in analogy increase the speed limit, commuters can get to their destinations faster, but they still might not be able to go to far away destinations.

Bah. just think of it in terms of a longer term power boost. You can download faster, but you can't download a whole lot more on the average.

Because, if you can reach your 100 Gig cap in 1 day, well then you can get all that much content in 1 day rather than 1 month.

A 50 mbps would be necessary for something like clicking on the web browser and streaming a HD movie with minimal latency. It doesn't mean that the user will be able to watch 100 more movies (because of the overall caps), but it means that the user won't have to wait 20 minutes to buffer the stream.

To some people, the internet isn't a continuous download crunch. I guess you do not understand this, as you do not download things for instant gratification (how could you? you seem to be downloading more content than you can even consume at once). But there is definitely reason to increase bandwidth, yet keep caps where they are. And many people will see benefits to the bandwidth increase.

I'm not saying that bandwidth increases will be more beneficial to you. Nor am I trying to say that your use of the internet is wrong or anything. I'm just trying to point out that there will definitely be benefits for higher caps, just benefits that you, personally may not understand or be able to realize (benefit from) for your internet needs.

reply to bngdup

Yes I am aware of the flaws in the Highway Analogy.

My point remains the same. You say that you need 50Mbps to Stream an HD movie and Browse the web. I understand that but whether you are streaming that HD movie or legally downloading it doesn't matter to the router waiting to cap your ass.

Wow, I can now stream my Movie in HD clearly....for 30 minutes until you hit the bandwidth cap.

My point is that there are plenty of people who had no issues with 8Mbps down, that was plenty for them. The only problem was the cap. Now offering 50Mbps is not going to be that much different unless the caps are equally raised. So they'll hit their cap quicker....of course they will. That does little to alleviate the issue with the caps unless these customers are going get connections faster than 8 Mbps to their VPN's, File servers, game servers, whatever. Yes they can pack more down the pipe locally, but so long as its capped upstream it doesnt make that much of a difference.

First off, streaming video isn't going to be able to require 50mbps over the Internet until 100GigE interfaces become commonplace on backbones. (ie, not anytime soon)

Second, just because you have faster speeds doesn't necessarily mean you'll be downloading more content. In most cases people download what they download today plus a small amount more; the big benefit they just get the potential to download it a heck of a lot faster. There's only so much large content being generated that is worthwhile to fetch. In most cases to significantly ratchet up your usage you have to work on downloading insane amounts of crap.

I'd have to have a real P2P or Videophile fanatic confirm this -- but it seems to me that when I started looking into this P2P stuff a couple of years ago, that a popular file size for a full-length DIVX/AVI movie was about 700 MB. I have a sense now that 700 MB is on the way out and 1.4 GB seems to be rising a lot faster as the popular size.

The movies aren't any longer today than 2 years ago, they're just using better(?) resolution (or perhaps the HD dimensions are causing this?). Again, not my strength. I don't have the attention span for movies.
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Robb Topolski -= funchords.com =- Hillsboro, Oregon
FCC Public Hearing on the Future of the Internet - Thursday, April 17th - Stanford Univ., Calif.