| reply to Tweakbl
Re: It will get worse - ISP Perspective I run an ISP so I'm going to provide a bit of perspective that I hope will help.
Cable is a shared media. When you get cable Internet access, you've got a cable segment with between several hundred and several thousand subscribers sharing a fixed bandwidth.
Just a handful of users can, theoretically, tie up almost all of this bandwidth if there were no limits in place.
The cable companies have dual incentives for wanting to limit your usage. First, the lower the average bandwidth usage, the more customers they can support per segment, so there are the obvious economic issues.
The second issue, is that they don't want you to access free video content that competes with content they own and hope to sell to you.
So with cable modems you have those dual issues.
DSL on the other hand, every DSL circuit only has that subscribers usage. Now all these circuits are concentrated at the DSLAM, the device that terminates the telco end of the DSL circuit; but since that's in the central office, it's just a matter of having adequate aggregate bandwidth available and generally in the central office you're going to have multiple fiber loops so usually isn't going to be an issue.
From an ISP's perspective; (Eskimo North in my case), we're using telco loops and DSLAM to provide service to our customers, and while the contracts allow them to throttle or deny access in the case of abuse; I've yet to see it happen with any of the telco's we work with.
However, now that telco's are getting into Fiber to the end user, what they refer to as FIOS, they're wanting to place limits, and guess what else they're delivering via FIOS? Television programming. I don't think it's any coincidence that now that they're entering the programming side of things they all of the sudden have issues with bandwidth.
As far as bandwidth goes, 98% of the fiber laid is still dark, and multiplexing technology existed back in 1995 that allowed 1 TB/s on a single fiber and no doubt that's improved in the last 13 years, so in terms of actual transport I don't think that is the issue.
Another issue is peering. "The Internet" isn't a uniform network, it's a network of networks. Who pays for the connections between the networks is always a point of contention and the big players basically expect the smaller players to be customers of the big players rather than peers. This provides them with a defacto monopoly of sorts.
The cable companies really don't care for Peer-to-Peer networks because they are geared towards delivering content and have much better capability for delivering downstream data than upstream, the latter costs them more and for reasons I don't understand is less efficient.
On the downstream side, they can get around 27mb/s per 6 Mhz channel, but on the upstream side only about 10mb/s. I don't understand the protocol well enough to know the technical reasons for that, but obviously they're not going to like things that cost them more to provide.
Some large carriers play that game a lot more than others.
With respect to hosting, a lot of ISPs offer very minimal hosting with their access product. We do offer a full hosting product including the ability to run net applications, databases, scripting, etc, but in part it's because we've been doing it forever and use open sourced software such as Linux and Apache to provide it so it really doesn't cost us a lot if we have to add a server; whereas many of the larger companies use commercial software and they've got to pay additional license fees every time they add a server and thus have a lot more financial incentive to concentrate as many customers as possible.
Lastly, one other thing is forcing more ISP's to place caps, and that has to do with averages. Our average expense is based upon the average users usage. And if one in a thousand uses a lot more it's no big deal. But if other ISP's cap services, they can provide service at a lower price because they're costs are low. Taking only the customers that cost them very little to provide service is what is known in the industry as "gravy skimming", and it's what most of the big providers do.
So what happens to the high volume one-in-one-thousand heavy users they kick off? Well, they come to those of us that don't have caps, and now are heavy users end up being 1-in-10 instead of 1-in-1000, that drives the cost up, forces us to raise the rates. So then what happens? Our low usage users go to these big gravy skimmers and makes our ratio of heavy-to-light users even higher.
That is what is driving this move towards metered or capped service. So when you got to the "cheapest" provider which is capping or metering usage; know that is screwing unlimited access for everyone. |
