Canadian Broadband → Why Data Caps Suck

I think everyone in Canada should watch this.

»www.youtube.com/watch?fe ··· G4c4Go#!

hmmm not a bad video. pretty easy to understand and get most points across.

great video!

Milnoc didn't do it? I'm shocked.

Now that I watched it, I was wondering if the author? was going to get around to the real story... the same people creating, broadcasting and distributing the content, don't want you using it.

It was very very good, lays it out in a way that a moron could understand.

Excellent video!

/me sends to Bell/Rogers/CRTC

Caps wouldn't be bad if they were stupid low. 500gb is enough for typical user.

Although the correlation between usage and bandwidth is not quite 1:1, pushing roughly double as much data through a network that is approaching its peak capacity during a given period of interest (ex.: peak hours) does mean having to roughly double the infrastructure. Both peak-hours usage and peak-hours bandwidth are increasing much faster than equipment $/Gbps is decreasing.

While none of it justifies charging over $0.20/GB for usage, there still is a kernel of truth for carriers to worry about how fast peak-hour data is growing because at current rates (60%/year peak usage growth vs 25%/year $/Gbps equipment cost reduction), it may genuinely become both economically and technologically impossible to keep up with demand.

As far as encouraging subscribers to select slower speeds goes, that seems pretty silly since most ISPs have plenty of spare capacity for people to use higher speeds during off-peak hours and likely most of it for a good chunk of peak-hours as well. The only real problem here is people's expectations of dedicated-like performance all day, every day. Wanting to maintain this illusion of dedicated-like service due to customer complaints means ISPs do have to considerably over-build compared to what the average/typical load may dictate. In HK and other exceptionally well-connected cities, it isn't uncommon for an ISP to bring 1-2Gbps to a large MDU complex and then distribute it to 1000+ nearby subscribers at 100-1000Mbps speeds, which means 1-2Mbps provisioning per subscriber but this still yields 30-70Mbps actual speeds most of the time since few subscribers sharing that link are ever active at the same time.

People keep painting oversubscription as the most evil thing ever but it is what makes cheap broadband possible since it would be mathematically/physically impossible to build a non-blocking network of significant scale anyhow - you quickly end up wasting most ports on your very expensive switches/router on interconnect rather than providing actual service to customers. Ex.: if you want to build a 32-ports non-blocking switch out of a bunch of 16-ports switches, you need 6 switches. The equivalent of four whole switches get consumed in interconnects just to double capacity. The fundamental principle of non-blocking networking simply does not scale well beyond a single system... 6X the complexity/cost/space/power for 2X the capacity.

Why doesn't someone produce a video on the Sheeple/Lemmings that subscribe to Bell, Rogers, Telus in the first place and suffer with high-prices, throttling, bandwidth caps, etc.?

No, seriously, if people start switching to the "resellers", many of these issues will disappear as the big guys will scramble to keep or reclaim their client base.

Personally, since I switched my tv, internet, home phone, cell phone over to companies other than Bell, Rogers, Telus, I don't really care what they do. They can double their prices and half their caps for all I care.

They are stupid. Yes they make tons of money on suckers who do not care what they use but most people are scared and will just stop once they reach the limit.

But what I have noticed is that Cogeco at least I know of has been upping their bandwidth at least but at a joke rate of 10 GB really per year I have noticed. A lot of the newer games these days are 20 GB. I am paying $50 per month for internet and if I were to download a game like that the would be 1/4 of my month bandwidth.