Time Warner Caps Go from Ugly To Invisible > they have not boot me off yet

reply to Anonymous_

Re: they have not boot me off yet

Pandora

ISPs do not pay by the GB they pay by peak Mbps. So ANY amount of GB download during non peak hours costs the ISP absolutely nothing (0) extra. Both the transit costs and the hardware costs are solely determined by peak Mbps.

Downloading EXCLUSIVELY between 11pm and 8am a 5Mbps customer can download over 500GB a month without slowing down his neighbors or costing the ISP anything extra. This is why the monthly GB cap does not address the issues of ISP costs or congestion. There are methods to control peak hour congestion (costs). One of these is to use proticol agnostic throttling during peak hours, Comcast now uses this during peak hours. The reason cable companies are pushing caps so hard is to protect their video product from the huge competition that is rapidly growing on the internet.

reply to Lazlow
It would make sense for caps to be instituted to peak times only. Excessive downloading during peak hours either costs more for infrastructure (increased rates) or results in greater congestion (lower performance).

People who regularly use a lot of bandwidth during peak hours are harming their neighbors IMO.

The case I responded to was a poster who admitted to using torrents to download HD video programs. Generally this is copyrighted material downloaded illegally. The usage was very high. He tried to explain it by claiming he had a lot of PC's.

I have a lot more PC's on my LAN, probably more game consoles, and also currently 6 VOIP accounts and use far less than half his bandwidth. I was pointing out that his use is excessive, despite his justification.

My provider (Comcast) has provided a definition of excessive as 250GB per month, which I think is very fair.
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"People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use."

espaeth

That the majority of customers use their bandwidth during peak hours, I would agree with. However, if you talk to the majority of high bandwidth users(the so called "bandwidth hogs") they are specifically avoiding peak traffic hours. They do this for two main reasons. First with all the congestion during peak hours they really do not get much downloaded (GB/hr) during those hours. Second ISPs have (for years) watched who is causing the problem(congestion) during peak hours on the channel and tend to go after those people first. Essentially if you do not cause a problem for us(the ISP) we will leave you alone. So the monthly caps do not address the congestion issue.

As far as streaming goes: the majority (at least today) of high bandwidth users are also usually on the high end of tech savvy. Virtually all streaming video can be saved to disk(if you are skilled enough). So for the tech savvy there is no need to stream during peak hours. When the less tech savvy users (non "bandwidth hogs") start streaming they will be increasing the load on the channel. As pandora pointed out, they are still below the caps. This means that peak Mbps will go up significantly without breaking the caps and you still need to upgrade the system to handle the load. Again it is usually not the few(1%) "bandwidth hogs" which are downloading a lot during non peak hours that are causing the congestion. It is the majority (85%?) all downloading a little bit (relative) all at the same time (peak hours) that causes the congestion.

Again I would point you to TWC's 10K, they are spending $146 million (for HSI hardware, bandwidth, etc) for revenues from HSI of $4.2 BILLION.

As I said, bandwidth consumption when there is no contention has no cost. I agree with that. However, consumption during peak periods costs.

I'd be very supportive of a cap during peak times only.
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"People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use."

Pandora

There is a problem with using caps at all. When (and NOT if) enough people are streaming and you try to have set peak hours (for the cap), a large number of people will "discover" how to save to disk rather than live streaming. This will make peak hours become a moving target(4-10 this month, 10-2 next month, ect). This is why I think the only way out(other than just keeping up with system upgrades) is to use a congestion based, proticol agnostic, throttle (when the channel is congested everybody gets throttled back to their fair share). That way if there is congestion everybody gets throttled back and when there is not congestion you can run full steam. The risk with the throttle is that they will overuse it and not upgrade the system to keep up with traffic loads.

The other thing is to look at the numbers. The increased Mbps is NOT costing them all that much money (hardware or transit). Again, I will point to the 10K numbers, $146 million in costs(transit and hardware) for $4.2 BILLION in revenues. The costs of the extra Mbps is really a drop in the bucket. While labor is not included in those numbers, the increase in labor costs (excluding initial installation) will be minimal(the customer/labor ratio will remain essentially constant). It is a pretty safe bet that they will spend far more on PR expenses to recover from this mess, than the increase in labor would have been to manage the the extra equipment.

A congestion protocol is necessary when there is contention. At the same time, users who take 10 to 100 times more bandwidth than average are likely causing congestion.
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"People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use."

That is just it. Those heavy users are usually very tech savvy and understand how things work. So they limit (for the most part) their downloading to off peak hours, which causes zero (0) congestion.

I am not sure what you mean by:

"A congestion protocol is necessary when there is contention."

Whenever there is congestion, a network will have to manage it. The solution Comcast came up with to derate those who are hogging bandwidth is a good one.

The supposedly highest tech hundred plus gigabyte users are most likely young males downloading pirated content over torrents. Not exactly the cream of the crop IMO. If they way, a commercial account could be appropriate.
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"People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use."

I agree that Comcast's proticol agnostic throttle during peak hours is a great idea. It actually addresses the problem of congestion. The are also (unofficially) handling the cap in smart manner. Those that exceed the 250GB cap and are causing congestion problems are generally the ones being kick out. Those exceeding the 250GB cap but are not causing congestion problems are generally being ignored(in many cases those in this second group are download MUCH more than those in the first group).

You should also be careful about the male/female thing. The person that I know with the largest library(by a HUGE factor) is female and she is not alone. But yes, those that are tech savvy are more likely (particularly when young) to be involved in these kinds of activities. It is usually more about meeting the challenge (king of the hill, fastest, the first one there, etc) than the actual content. Since they are not a business and what they are doing is not costing the ISP anything extra, I do not think a commercial account is necessary.

reply to pandora