Quote :

"http://www.engadget.com/2011/03/13/atandt-will-cap-dsl-u-verse-internet-and-impose-overage-fees/"

Quote :

"Ladies and gentlemen, the days of unlimited broadband may be numbered in the United States -- AT&T will reportedly implement a 150GB monthly cap on DSL customers and a 250GB cap on subscribers to U-Verse high speed internet starting on May 2nd. AT&T will charge overage fees of $10 for every additional 50GB of data, with two grace periods to start out -- in other words, the third time you go over the cap, that's when you'll get charged. DSLReports says it has confirmation from AT&T spokesman Seth Bloom that these rates are legitimate, and that letters will go out to customers starting March 18th. How does AT&T defend the move? The company explains it will only impact two percent of consumers who use "a disproportionate amount of bandwidth," and poses the caps as an alternative to throttling transfer speeds. "

not really, i mean i know i personally never come near the limit but itll eventually affect me down the road i'm sure. i just don't want to end up like Britain. actually i would think gamers as a whole would revolt if that was a close possibility.

3/13/2011 6:35:50 PM

Seems reasonable now...

But when services like Netflix, HD YouTube, HULU, etc getting more popular, in another 5 years or so, it may become really easy to go over that limit.

3/13/2011 7:05:19 PM

Not if you subscribe to AT&T's video-on-demand offerings.

3/13/2011 7:38:00 PM

I think you can blow about a gig an hour on youtube. Multiply that times your roommates and a few lonely friday nights and you could reach that cap pretty easy. The Canadians were faced with a 20gig/month cap recently.

3/13/2011 8:45:24 PM

I guess I don't get a cap. I mean, you cut fuel consumption because there is a finite amount of fuels out there to be consumed. I did not think if we used too much internet, there was a chance we would run out of internet.

3/14/2011 12:56:59 AM

3/14/2011 1:16:15 AM

AT&T is worried that after you have downloaded the whole of the internet you won't need internet service anymore. A cap forces you to space out the internet over the entire year instead of getting it all in January and canceling your service the rest of the year.

For informational perposes: 14 hours of OnLive play (5mbps) will exhaust a 250gigabit cap, luckily GB usually means gigabyte. Fun fact: OnLive's initial launch was sponsored by AT&T.

3/14/2011 1:22:16 AM

i actually saved it all to a floppy. i'd make you a copy, but in school i was taught not to copy any floppies.

3/14/2011 8:33:04 AM

I would imagine as online services increase and the average users downloading increases, they'll have to increase the cap as well.

3/14/2011 8:46:05 AM

i'm glad i didn't go with u-verse.

3/14/2011 9:00:02 AM

Quote :

"I would imagine as online services increase and the average users downloading increases, they'll have to increase the cap as well. "

hahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahhahahahahhahaha

3/14/2011 9:06:06 AM

Time warner has considered doing this for a long time. About two years ago they ran a trial run of metered internet service in the Greensboro area. IIRC, the split was 40GB for 39.99, 100GB for 59.99 and Unlimited for 79.99

3/14/2011 9:23:18 AM

I'd still rather have capped U-verse than any TWC product.

3/14/2011 9:28:28 AM

Quote :

"i would think gamers as a whole would revolt if that was a close possibility"

game bandwidth usage is pretty insignificant compare to the rest of the traffic out there.

CDNs that are cached on the ISP's network (akamai, amazon, and others) are usually immune to the caps. Whats gonna continue to happen is we'll see edge caching become the norm. Eventually it will become so cheap that traditional rack/vps stuff goes away. If you want to host a website you pick a cloud vendor on throw your shit on there. They distribute it to their edge caches around the world.

So right now tdub is hosted on some company who gets is service through level3. Pretty much every major east coast ISP is peered with level3 so its not too bad for us to get to tdub. we go over our own ISPs network, they pass it off to level3, then it goes to tdub. If you're coming from the west coast there may be another network or two inbetween your isp and level3. In any case we're talking about more than 10 hops from where you are now to tdub and out of network travel from your own ISP. The way the costs work out is your ISP pays for its own infrastructure and then it peers with other ISPs to trade access to each others networks. This means additional cost at the peering point (usually big routers+fat pipes). Usually each side pays its own physical build out costs and the bandwidth is traded 1 for 1. (doesnt always work this way but its the best case so lets assume so). In addition to this build out cost, you also suffer the routing costs. Each hop adds latency and the possibility of bandwidth reducing congestion.

Future tdub would be edge cached on amazon or someone. Instead of tdub paying for a physical server and physical rack space they'd pay for cloud space. Tdub goes to the cloud and gets sent to a central hub. Then from there tdub is replicated to edge caches. These edge caches are located inside or near to local ISP's networks and data centers. So now that tdub is available on your ISP's network you get to it over 6 to 10 hops instead of 10+. Its all in network traffic which means its easier for your ISP to handle. It costs the ISP less because they dont need to maintain a huge peer point anymore. And most importantly, latency is much lower and bandwidth is much higher since the ISP doesnt have to send the traffic over other networks.

So hows this gonna go down? well you're seeing it right here. All these caps and such will become pretty standard but anything thats edge cached will be immune. Sites like tdub will be the hardest hit because for a while cloud hosting still wont be as cheap as current hosting so they'll be stuck in a single data center. Non cloud sites will be slower simply becaue they travel so much more network and the effective bandwidth is so much lower.

Eventually the big guys will lower the cost of cloud hosting that the tdubs of the world will be able to get there on the cheap. At that point there would be very little traffic going over long haul public internet. Mostly peer to peer stuff like pirating and games (and then only non-dedicated server games).

Short term losers: tdub, other small self hosted sites.
Long term losers: p2p filesharing

Short term winners: established cloud services (amazon) and anyone using them (hulu)
Long term winners: Consumers, content owners, ISPs

3/14/2011 10:41:08 AM

It used to be that only pirates would gobble up such huge amounts of data. AT&T is just trying to preempt the time when everyone uses buttloads of data because the available services that "normal" people use expand greatly.

I occasionally download youtube videos. Knowing the typical filesize that I encounter, I can safely say that I couldn't store all my youtube watching for a year on my hard disks, which total around 3 TB. That means that it's likely that I watch too much youtube for this thing.

Granted, I might just have to downgrade resolution if I'm keeping an eye on a ticking data meter. I don't think AT&T will have the courtesy to offer some kind of ticking data meter for their customers, although some software version of that would be the appropriate thing to do.

3/14/2011 10:46:52 AM

I'm sure that the routers they provide could easily serve as a home monitoring meter of bandwidth usage.

3/14/2011 11:03:38 AM

^ but how would that help them make money?

3/14/2011 11:06:18 AM

putting a bandwidth meter on the router probably isnt the best approach since its gonna be based on source and destinations. They'll have the report internally for their own billing so it would make the most sense to just expose that on their customer billing site.

3/14/2011 11:14:22 AM

Quote :

"putting a bandwidth meter on the router probably isnt the best approach since its gonna be based on source and destinations"

What? I thought this was like the #1 thing that people were trying to avoid with net neutrality.

3/14/2011 11:18:23 AM

network neutrality is a joke. network neutrality is why there are caps instead of proper network management in the first place. Edge caching has always been the future of the internet, and network neutrality has sped up the time table. If ISPs cant manage the traffic going between networks they're just going to build up their own private on-network content and let their peering points stagnate.

3/14/2011 11:21:50 AM

I suppose changing ISPs isn't a viable long term solution, making the safe assumption that all ISPs collude to make caps the new norm.

3/14/2011 12:09:28 PM

comcast has been "capped" at 250 gB since like 2008.

not that big of a deal.

[Edited on March 14, 2011 at 12:13 PM. Reason : e]

Quote :

"putting a bandwidth meter on the router probably isnt the best approach since its gonna be based on source and destinations. They'll have the report internally for their own billing so it would make the most sense to just expose that on their customer billing site."

comcast has a usage monitor if your account profile.

[Edited on March 14, 2011 at 12:24 PM. Reason : e]

3/14/2011 12:12:08 PM

Quote :

"network neutrality is a joke. network neutrality is why there are caps instead of proper network management in the first place"

F that. So the alternative to caps is to have the ISP throttle whatever traffic they find to be less important to the other traffic? Seriously? Do you really want that?

You buy a connection. If there's not enough bandwidth to go around, then you should be able to pay to use more of it, regardless of what you're doing. The type of your activity shouldn't matter to your ISP. Your life is your life, no one should be breathing down your neck judging the importance of your network traffic. Requiring you to pay for it proportionally to the market value of the network use is reasonable, this junk about selecting the right kind of traffic is not.

3/14/2011 1:17:17 PM

Proper management is protocol based not content based. The goal is to maintain service levels for time-sensitive materials (dns/rtp) and standard user traffic (http) while preventing non time-sensitive protocols (torrents) from destroying the network.

The impact would only be visible for the few highest users.


Caps are lame because it means up until the highest users hit the cap everyone suffers from their traffic.

3/14/2011 1:31:20 PM

how are the protocols of torrent distinguished from http?

3/14/2011 1:37:07 PM

bit torrent is its own protocol. there are two basic ways to figure out if something is bit torrent. you can A) read the packet and figure out what it is from data or B) identify it by its traffic pattern.

3/14/2011 2:20:31 PM

Quote :

"Proper management is protocol based not content based. The goal is to maintain service levels for time-sensitive materials (dns/rtp) and standard user traffic (http) while preventing non time-sensitive protocols (torrents) from destroying the network. The impact would only be visible for the few highest users. Caps are lame because it means up until the highest users hit the cap everyone suffers from their traffic. "

I have a better idea. Instead of putting band aids on the root of the problem (lack of bandwidth) by either limiting data transfer through either discouraging use (monthly caps) or throttling certain traffic.

How about they spend some of that money that they rape off of us and actually expand the amount of bandwidth they can handle?

The problem is that for the past 6 or so years the amount of services on the Internet have expanded greatly. It used to be that torrent traffic was huge. But as more and more people buy into Netflix, use Hulu and as more and more people upload HD videos to Youtube, the amount of traffic is going to greatly increase. You can't deny it. Using bittorrents as a scape goat is nothing more than political bullshit fed to us by the ISPs.

Fact is, they want a way to handle the bandwidth demand without spending money. They put their heads together and came up with bandwidth caps. It would allow them to increase their profit margin without having to spend money. You're delusional if you think otherwise.

ISPs have been cutting corners for years. I've heard stories about DSL companies putting too many houses on a line, to the point that it drastically slows people's Internet down. Ever have an issue on the weekday at about 3:30 PM the Internet gets real slow? It's all the fucking kids rushing home on the street hopping on the Internet, playing their video games and other random bullshit. My grandparents suffer from this. Their street expanded in homes, the ISP was glad to take on the extra customers, but they didn't want to take on the extra cost of having those customers. Sorry, that's not how you run a sustainable business.

ISPs can keep using the justification of the increased demands in network usage. The fact of the matter is they want to keep their subscribers and not increase their bandwidth with the increased network usage of their subscribers. They're trying to have their cake and eat it too, and we're letting them.

3/14/2011 8:11:59 PM

Hulu is edge cached on most networks which would make it immune to caps.

Netflix decided in their retardation to do their own CDN and not edge cache it. Level3 oversold their network and their access to other networks so now netflix is getting owned by their shortsightedness and greed.

Theres plenty of bandwidth inside ISP networks and they have no problem bulking up their own networks, but they dont want to pay for new hardware to access other people's networks when they can just have the content come to them. Edge caching is better for everyone and the more it gets popular the more you'll see stuff like docsis 3 and ftth spread.

Peering is pretty much dead.

3/14/2011 8:36:45 PM

sounds like a classic case of a business trying to put the cat back in to the bag.

3/14/2011 8:44:14 PM

Quote :

"Peering is pretty much dead."

I think you're well-informed on the topic, but I don't see how this follows from other things you've said. Are you just saying that ppl don't torrent much, or that it's not significant?

And how does streaming factor into the equation? I mean, torrents were good in an age where we didn't have much bandwidth, it was very conservative because you could always pick up a piece and continue. Now, I watch a playlist on youtube and it just goes autoplays until I stop it. The streaming sites out there are comparatively reckless with bandwidth and have a greater time sensitivity.

3/14/2011 11:10:38 PM

torrents dont factor in because they're primarily piracy related and ISPs dont care about that traffic. They would be happy to see it gone from the network.

Streaming is what im talking about re: edge caching. The idea is that instead of hulu or netflix placing their content far away from you on the other side of the internet (meaning you traverse multiple networks to get there) they store it in edge caches local to you. Mostly in your ISP's own data centers. The result is better access for the consumer.

Think of it this way. Lets say you're this smiley and this is hulu . Other smilies will be other networks. You want to get as much bandwidth between you an hulu so you can stream HD content. In the traditional internets it would be like this

-----------------------

Data has to travel over hulu's isp and an intermediary to get to your isp and then eventually to you.

This means hulu pays their isp and your isp pays the intermediary. Utimately, you pay both those costs in the form of your internet bill and your hulu subscription (or ads). And through all of this theres really not much in the way of guaranteed service. Hulu has no real control over what happens between you and their content. If they want to get some guaranteed service between you and them they have to talk to all 3 ISPs and get them to work together. Since everyone else who wants to use hulu is probably on other networks than yours, they'd need to talk to all of them too. In the end its not practical.

So then some smart folks came along (akamai) and they were like: hmmm, we can probably put this content closer to consumers and get rid of all that extra travel time. So they came up with this:

------ ( ) ----

Akamai pays your ISP to put akamai caching nodes in your ISPs network. In return your ISP guarantees a level of service directly to you. Akamai does this with every ISP they can in every region they can. They then sell their edge caching network to hulu and others. Hulu submits their content to akamai and akamai distributes it to cache nodes. Bandwidth costs for akamai are low because they only need to send it across the internet once (instead of having users access it across the internet every time). Hulu doesn't need to worry about service level agreements with each ISP because akamai takes care of that part. So now hulu can worry about providing content (which is their business) and not about running their own network. Akamai worries about their cache network (and not about physical infrastructure). And your ISP worries about its own physical network and your access to it (and not about other networks.

In the end you get better service and lower costs. I used hulu and akamai because thats how it actually goes down today. If you're going to hulu and you're ISP is one of the major guys, you're accessing it on an akamai cache in your ISPs own datacenter. That costs your ISP way less and is immune to the caps (through agreement with akamai). Some have taken this even further and advertise hulu as their own product (thats what xfinity is).

Netflix is a whole other beast. They decided they didn't want to pay for edge caching (because it is still expensive). Level 3 pitched them that level3 could offer netflix the same level of network access as edge caching (a flat out lie) for a lower price (also a lie). Level 3 is fucking notorious for overselling their network and it bit them in the ass with comcast a while back. They ended up paying for it, but they're still making $$$. Netflix got pissed when they realized level3 lied to them and tried to blame it on comcast (which was wrong). I made some long posts about that particular story on tech talk if you want some details.

So netflix is really in a bad spot. It wasted all this $$$ building its own content delivery network on level3. It has all these servers and datacenters that it uses and its gonna start getting owned by caps. What you're probably gonna see is they're gonna go back to edge caching or maybe cut some deals to do direct peering to some of the major ISPs (bypassing level3).

Youtube is a different story. Youtube is google. Google's entire business model is to steal other people's content and inject google ads into that content. Google is an advertiser first and a technology company last. You need to understand that above all else when thinking about google. Youtube is a total money sink. It costs shitloads to host that content and shitloads in bandwidth to stream it. They used to be running it at a loss and i would guess they still are. The only thing keeping it afloat is the fact that they dont pay for their content. WIth something like hulu, the people who own hulu own the content. They can put it out there and know people want to watch it. That means they can sell big $$ ads or get people to subscribe. That covers the cost of edge caching and leaves room for profit.

Youtube on the other hand, hates edge caching. Its all cost for them and no benefit. Edge caching doesnt help them sell ads. Have you ever watched something on youtube and the pre-load bar is just a tiny tiny bit away from the seek button? Well their goal is to show the video just long enough for you to see an ad and then make you give up because of buffering and close it so they dont have to pay for that bandwidth.

Any time you see google arguing that they shouldn't have to pay for bandwidth know that they are trying to pawn the costs of their own bandwidth off on you.

That said they do do some edge caching and they also peer directly with consumer ISPs. So once edge caching becomes the norm they'll be right there even if it does cost them a little more than they want.

tl;dr: Edge caching is fantastic for streaming since it results in more reliable, faster, higher bandwidth service. Edge caching + caps will primarily hurt smaller sites like tdub in the short term, but once edge caching becomes the norm they'll get in the cloud as well. Long term the biggest losers will be content pirates who use p2p stuff like bit torrent. What will probably happen is out of network stuff (p2p) will move from caps and flat rates, to pay-per-use. So torrenters will pay for the bandwidth they use. A fair compromise i think. Long term winners are content owners, consumers, and network owners.



[Edited on March 15, 2011 at 12:06 AM. Reason : a]

3/14/2011 11:59:13 PM

Great... and I was starting to like Uverse ... bunch of scumbags

3/16/2011 10:31:35 PM

Not to be contradictory, but this cap seems fairly reasonable given what I know.

3/16/2011 11:13:49 PM

^^^ Correct me if I'm wrong, but this bandwidth cap doesn't differentiate between level3 and edge. So while all of what you've said may be well and true, it seems irrelevant to what the ISPs are doing.

Level3 or Edge, it's going to be taken out of the cap.

My whole issue is that I don't want this to be like Australia. Unless things have changed in the past 5 years, Australians have really small bandwidth caps. From a few years ago, they routinely had caps of 10-30 GB/month. It didn't matter where the content came from. Some people described some "unlimited" plans, in which they had unlimited downloading at night and if the files downloaded came from the ISPs servers (sounds like they were describing edge), it didn't take out of their cap. But people had to pay out of the ass for that service.

I guess my point is that ISPs are obviously going to push edge to save them money. But from what I've seen in other countries, these cost savings from ISPs never translated into savings for the consumer. Instead, they continued to impose tighter caps and higher costs.

[Edited on March 16, 2011 at 11:26 PM. Reason : .]

3/16/2011 11:25:52 PM