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 funchordsHelloPremium,MVM
join:2001-03-11
Yarmouth Port, MA
kudos:5 | reply to djrobx
Re: our competitive market said by djrobx:It's a lot better than the 20GB cap Time Warner is "testing" on their Standard customers in Beaumont. On one hand, Comcast has a new ad slogan opportunity ... "Well, we're not as bad as Time Warner" ...
on the other hand, Comcast never competes with Time Warner.
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Robb Topolski -= funchords.com =- Hillsboro, Oregon
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 RobIn Deo speramus, God Bless the USAPremium
join:2001-08-25
Kendall, FL
kudos:2 | said by funchords:said by djrobx:It's a lot better than the 20GB cap Time Warner is "testing" on their Standard customers in Beaumont. on the other hand, Comcast never competes with Time Warner. Right. They could have just made it 20GB and called it a day, instead they made it a reasonable 250GB. | |
| A lot higher than Cox's 60 GB cap on Premier Tier, although they RARELY enforce it.... | |
funchordsHelloPremium,MVM
join:2001-03-11
Yarmouth Port, MA
kudos:5 | reply to Rob
said by Rob:said by funchords:said by djrobx:It's a lot better than the 20GB cap Time Warner is "testing" on their Standard customers in Beaumont. on the other hand, Comcast never competes with Time Warner. Right. They could have just made it 20GB and called it a day, instead they made it a reasonable 250GB. At this point in the day, we only have Karl's insider's information to go on. We don't know if upload is included, nor if the cap will increase regularly.
But my gut so far tells me that today this DL Cap is somewhere in the neighborhood of "fair enough." The break-even point could be about 150-350 GB (such a wide range because much of the cost is in infrastructure).
I still don't think customers want caps -- so Comcast has disappointed today. But if they insist on having them, disclosing them is the right thing to do.
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Robb Topolski -= funchords.com =- Hillsboro, Oregon
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| reply to N10Cities
I'll trade my 5gb frontier cap for the 250 | |
RobIn Deo speramus, God Bless the USAPremium
join:2001-08-25
Kendall, FL
kudos:2 | reply to funchords
said by funchords:At this point in the day, we only have Karl's insider's information to go on. We don't know if upload is included, nor if the cap will increase regularly. But my gut so far tells me that today this DL Cap is somewhere in the neighborhood of "fair enough." The break-even point could be about 150-350 GB (such a wide range because much of the cost is in infrastructure). I still don't think customers want caps -- so Comcast has disappointed today. But if they insist on having them, disclosing them is the right thing to do. Can't have your cake and eat it too Robb. | |
| reply to funchords
Actually, you're being overly generous. TW's proposed cap is the same as Frontiers--5GB. | | |
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funchordsHelloPremium,MVM
join:2001-03-11
Yarmouth Port, MA
kudos:5
1 edit | reply to Rob
said by Rob:Can't have your cake and eat it too Robb. That's an old saying, but what does it mean?
I can watch unlimited OnDemand movies. That takes bandwidth. If everyone on my block did it, each choosing different movies, we could very well recreate similar cost-of-service (upgrade) situations on the non-HSI that Comcast faces on the HSI side.
So I can have my cake and eat it too, no? | |
| Actually, your comparison is flawed for a couple reasons.
1. The major costs for an ISP are not always the raw bandwidth of their network, but the interconnect fees and uplinks with the rest of the internet.
2. VOD content is stored on a VOD cluster at your local headend. Internet data is...well.. on the internet. VOD goes from the cluster straight to RF to be broadcast on a VOD RF video channel. Internet data is a lot more shared.
3. Depending on the way your local node is setup, if everybody on your block was watching VOD at the same time, you could get an error because there is not another Video channel to put the new content on.
Data services and video services on a cable plant work a lot differently. Even on the backbone side of their network, a cableco may have a 100gig fiber link connecting all the systems within their area, but that link carries all their traffic, from video, to phone, to internet...and even their internal network traffic. The video feeds are going to be sent multicast to the different headends, so you are looking at 1 feed per channel for every system. Phone does take much space on their network. Internet however you are looking at....in theory... 1 stream per customer. The internet traffic is going to obviously be taking up a lot more traffic as a whole on their network than any other catagory of traffic when you look at it.
Even if you break it down per customer or per account, You use more bandwith on their network with your HSI, even if you just check your email and BBR several times a day, than you do for your TV service. (Figure even a HD channel running at 19mbps, multicast across their video backbone to every system in the area, and then given a dedicated RF video channel.... if you divide that bandwith across the 100,000+ customers in just your area, it's virtually nothing.)
Now I'm not going to say I'm for or against caps. I haven't honestly paid enough attention to the debate to be able to make a decision... but from the big network management side of things, I can see a need to have some sort of management practice in place in order to be able to manage the network....or even just to plan capacity upgrades. Obviously you can't lay down and turn up new fiber overnight, so I can see an advantage to having some manageable numbers available to help with the planning of capacity upgrades. (and 250gb is definately better than the much smaller numbers other ISP's have given us... and it's better in my opinion to know the limit than for them to keep the numbers hidden.) | |
| reply to Dreadan
Yah, I was thinking of the Frontier cap ... | |
funchordsHelloPremium,MVM
join:2001-03-11
Yarmouth Port, MA
kudos:5 | reply to miscDude
You should be a member. We need informed people like you on this system. I could give you a "thumbs up" if you were a member. 
said by miscDude :
1. The major costs for an ISP are not always the raw bandwidth of their network, but the interconnect fees and uplinks with the rest of the internet.
2. VOD content is stored on a VOD cluster at your local headend. Internet data is...well.. on the internet. VOD goes from the cluster straight to RF to be broadcast on a VOD RF video channel. Internet data is a lot more shared.
3. Depending on the way your local node is setup, if everybody on your block was watching VOD at the same time, you could get an error because there is not another Video channel to put the new content on. #1 is true for the TV side as well. The content comes from somewhere, and although we might have to make one step down away from the 3rd-part aggregation point in order to make my comparison, there are one-time and ongoing costs for interconnecting these things even within the same metro area.
#2 -- to RF, really? It's not sent to my box digitally and converted into RF there?
#3 and this is really the rough comparison I'm making -- both systems are (roughly) similarly subject to usage saturation. But we're making "hogs" out of the users who don't watch Comcast video products.
All in all, I agree with the gist of your message, though.
Part of Network Management is not selling more than you can reasonably expect to deliver. By putting in a cap, Comcast is saying that it can only deliver X. Now, they could rearrange things and avoid naming a cap, but doing so would expose Comcast to some competitive truths it would rather customers not know -- such as DSL may not be as fast second-by-second, but overall the Tortoise beats the Hare.
--
Robb Topolski -= funchords.com =- Hillsboro, Oregon
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 djrobx
join:2000-05-31
Valencia, CA
 ·RoadRunner Cable
 ·AT&T U-Verse
 ·VOIPo
·PHONE POWER
| Cable VOD works by dynamically creating a QAM channel, typically unencrypted. You can sometimes find shows your neighbors are watching if you do a channel scan. Of course, if they pause the show to go to the bathroom, you're pausing too. | |
| reply to funchords
said by funchords:#2 -- to RF, really? It's not sent to my box digitally and converted into RF there? Yes, the only thing that can get to current generation digital set top boxes is RF over the coax.
VOD is just another channel on a QAM over RF. It will be combined with other channels, just as digital channel delivery occurs now over QAMs.
SDV is the same way, your set top box requests a channel and it is built on an IP Multicast network, but in the end, it is a channel riding on a QAM over RF to you.
Sometimes, depending on the cable company, if you have a TV that has a QAM tuner, and you auto-tune channels, you can pick up VOD streams that are currently playing while you were auto-tuning. If the cable company is not encrypting the feed to the cable box. | |
funchordsHelloPremium,MVM
join:2001-03-11
Yarmouth Port, MA
kudos:5 | No, I get that. I thought it was saying in #2 that the signal is sent as analog. (Mentally, I was interpreting the word RF as "analog signal.") | |
| reply to funchords
said by funchords:#1 is true for the TV side as well. The content comes from somewhere, and although we might have to make one step down away from the 3rd-part aggregation point in order to make my comparison, there are one-time and ongoing costs for interconnecting these things even within the same metro area. #2 -- to RF, really? It's not sent to my box digitally and converted into RF there? #3 and this is really the rough comparison I'm making -- both systems are (roughly) similarly subject to usage saturation. But we're making "hogs" out of the users who don't watch Comcast video products. #1 If you are refering to the costs for the content, that's where your TV rates go. Depending upon the size of the MSO, your interconnect fees (to get the content) could be handled at the system level, the region level, division, or corporate. It all depends where they stick the dish. The ongoing fees are the XX amount per subscriber fees that your tv rates go to pay.
#2 As others already pointed out, It's sent via QAM digitally, but QAM works different from DOCSIS for your data.
#3 The big differences "last mile" between your VOD and data is the way the system reacts. With VOD if the capacity is maxed you just get an error that basically says "No available resources" (channels) when trying to set up the actual video session. Beyond that, what other people are watching on their VOD stream isn't going to effect your VOD stream's performance. The actual QAM can't/won't let any streams be created to max it's available output bandwidth. In theory, it's also a bit easier to add capacity on the RF side because you could throw an extra QAM anyplace you have the available bandwitdth on the plant.
With a cable modem, things work differently. First off, pretty much everybody is talking at the same time. Your 2 places to control the speed are at the modem itself (what it's provisioned/capped at), and at the CMTS node equiptment. Unlike a video stream with will take the available bandwidth and basically reserve X amount of bandwith for the stream and is the only thing broadcasting on that frequency, with a cable modem you have many different devices broadcasting basically sharing the big pipe. What your neighbor is doing, can actually effect your performance. (say your neighbor uncaps his cable modem so it no longer has the speed governor that the provisioning caps are there for). It's actually possible in theory to bring everybody's feed to a standstill if you have too many devices trying to talk at once or have a couple uncapped modems just shotgunning out data without respect for the "rules of the road" and sharing the connection. (I believe modems may use a time-sharing mechanism like settop boxes do to help avoid overtalk..but I'm not certain). On top of that, it's not as easy to add capacity. Cable-modems' tuners don't have the frequency range that a video settop box has. this limits the available RF space you can stick the downstream. their transmitters are also limited in their frequency range. So this means to just plug in additional capacity, you may have to do a lot of shuffling of services on the RF...and that becomes a pain in the ass when you factor in FCC rules on notification. The other, more widely used route is to do a node split. Basically, you split the areas on the plant being fed by the CMTS at the node so you can basically create a new node. This requires physical work because you need the new equiptment for the node, plus you need to do some rewireing work to basically cut the existing node in half RF wise so you don't end up with cross-talk and end up breaking everything.
Once nice thing with DOCSIS 3 coming up is the fact that thru the channel bonding it makes it easier to enlarge the pipe. Everybody looks at it as a way to increase their upload/download speeds, but if you think about the way everybody shares the existing pipe, If you enlarge that pipe but keep the existing speed caps, you are still going to get an effective speed increase during those peak times. Even though it probably won't happened because of marketting, currently during peak times EVERYBODY may slow down a bit..or a lot... if you increase the size of the pipe, more data can get thru allowing everybody to stay at their top speeds even during those peak times.
Think of it like highway traffic. We've all been in situations where they close a lane or something and traffic slows dramatically for everybody. We may have quick bursts up to a high speed, but we can't average anywhere near the speed limit. Then suddenly a lane opens back up, and the traffic spreads out and increases speed. Even if we aren't going above the speed limit like we may do during those off-peak times on the road, we are going much closer to the speedlimit and ultimately are averaging a higher speed than we were before just because there is more capacity.
Make sense? | |
patcat88
join:2002-04-05
Jamaica, NY
kudos:1 | reply to funchords
said by funchords:I can watch unlimited OnDemand movies. That takes bandwidth. If everyone on my block did it, each choosing different movies, we could very well recreate similar cost-of-service (upgrade) situations on the non-HSI that Comcast faces on the HSI side. So I can have my cake and eat it too, no? OnDemand is circuit switched, not packet switched. When your box errors out, thats a synonym for "all circuits are busy". I haven't seen cable companies ever care that VOD was not working 75% of the time. | |
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