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

reply to Lazlow

Re: they have not boot me off yet

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