Yeah, but can their consumers?usmarine wrote:
oh pish posh. these companies get so many tax breaks and such. fuck they can prolly find a way to write off the expense anyway.Turquoise wrote:
I suppose you would care if you worked for a company affected by caps.
Last edited by Turquoise (2009-04-09 15:55:43)
no. but they are not being forced to watch hulu or download music. you have to drive on the roads. thats a necessity of modern life. there is a difference turq.Turquoise wrote:
Yeah, but can their consumers?
There's plenty of excuse. Welcome to a world where ISPs overextend, oversell and oversubscribe everything as part of their business model. Of all the common access topologies around, cable is by very far and very wide the most oversubscribed thing you can get your hands on, so this should not come as a surprise to anyone. ISPs have been getting away with oversubscribing on scales as absurd as 1:100 for years, and it is really coming back to bite them in their asses with the recent mainstream interest in online media. We're talking scenarios where they've been selling multi-megabit per second products to thousands of households on segments with total downstream throughput hovering around 50Mbps.Turquoise wrote:
Well, that logic might work for the U.K. because a lot of your networks need repair, but here, there's no excuse.TheEternalPessimist wrote:
No I just realise how hard it is to maintain a quality of service when your network is being overloaded by tossers.
Well, you don't have to live in a suburb either. You don't have to have a car. There is such a thing as public transportation.usmarine wrote:
no. but they are not being forced to watch hulu or download music. you have to drive on the roads. thats a necessity of modern life. there is a difference turq.Turquoise wrote:
Yeah, but can their consumers?
All the infrastructure here was either paid for with tax dollars or tax breaks with a few rare exceptions of retrofitting suburbs that are particularly profitable.mikkel wrote:
There's plenty of excuse. Welcome to a world where ISPs overextend, oversell and oversubscribe everything as part of their business model. Of all the common access topologies around, cable is by very far and very wide the most oversubscribed thing you can get your hands on, so this should not come as a surprise to anyone. ISPs have been getting away with oversubscribing on scales as absurd as 1:100 for years, and it is really coming back to bite them in their asses with the recent mainstream interest in online media. We're talking scenarios where they've been selling multi-megabit per second products to thousands of households on segments with total downstream throughput hovering around 50Mbps.
The catch-22 in this scenario is that the only way they can readjust their failing business models to fit the realities of today is by reassigning spectra from cable TV to cable Internet, and if they do that, they're making their own product less attractive compared to the competing online products that are causing capacity shortages in their networks. Cable companies need to realise that they can either operate quality cable TV products, or decent cable Internet products - not both. Abandoning either one would of course mean a major hit to their revenue sources, and massive equipment writeoffs, so instead of taking the hit for their poor decisions, they're doing what businesses in any other industry would do; making the consumers pay for it.
For most people, there's a very easy way to avoid subsidising these failures, and that's to get DSL or optical connectivity instead.
I know this. It does absolutely nothing to change the current state of affairs, and doesn't really address anything I said.Turquoise wrote:
All the infrastructure here was either paid for with tax dollars or tax breaks with a few rare exceptions of retrofitting suburbs that are particularly profitable.mikkel wrote:
There's plenty of excuse. Welcome to a world where ISPs overextend, oversell and oversubscribe everything as part of their business model. Of all the common access topologies around, cable is by very far and very wide the most oversubscribed thing you can get your hands on, so this should not come as a surprise to anyone. ISPs have been getting away with oversubscribing on scales as absurd as 1:100 for years, and it is really coming back to bite them in their asses with the recent mainstream interest in online media. We're talking scenarios where they've been selling multi-megabit per second products to thousands of households on segments with total downstream throughput hovering around 50Mbps.
The catch-22 in this scenario is that the only way they can readjust their failing business models to fit the realities of today is by reassigning spectra from cable TV to cable Internet, and if they do that, they're making their own product less attractive compared to the competing online products that are causing capacity shortages in their networks. Cable companies need to realise that they can either operate quality cable TV products, or decent cable Internet products - not both. Abandoning either one would of course mean a major hit to their revenue sources, and massive equipment writeoffs, so instead of taking the hit for their poor decisions, they're doing what businesses in any other industry would do; making the consumers pay for it.
For most people, there's a very easy way to avoid subsidising these failures, and that's to get DSL or optical connectivity instead.
It's not quite that easy. You don't just "purchase a new server" if you want more capacity. It's possible to increase capacity by upgrading hardware, but this is done at steep prices and very slowly, and it does nothing to address the underlying problem of overextending islands in HFC plants, and this is not something you just throw pocket change at to fix. It carries a price tag large enough for it to probably never be profitable for cable ISPs to do, as their business models rely on cost-per-customer calculations which would be thrown off radically if this was to change.Turquoise wrote:
The only thing that these companies have to put money into is repair of infrastructure and the purchasing of servers for output of cable internet and TV.
Again, I don't see how this is relevant to what I posted. We all know that these corporations will do anything for profit.Turquoise wrote:
Verizon was given a large sum of money by the government for providing FIOS to a significant portion of the U.S. They pocketed most of this and delivered it to only a few test areas instead. Nothing else was required of them because of their connections in our government.
You're completely failing to understand the scope of investment needed to supply even adequate capacity in cable access topologies for larger service providers. It is anything but a "small investment."Turquoise wrote:
Oversubscribing is wonderful for these companies. Think about it. You've got a product to sell and you're selling so much of it that you've got to up the investment on the source. Their dilemma is not being willing to fork out a small investment to yield a massive amount of profit. The reason why they won't do it is because they don't have to. They can introduce bandwidth caps rather than making a small investment themselves.
No, they're implementing caps because their topologies cannot handle the throughput. There's no big conspiracy surrounding that.Turquoise wrote:
All they are doing with caps is making sure they can get something for nothing, which has become the American Dream/delusion.
Everybody wants a handout, and this time, it's the telecom sector.
I can only explain this in vague terms but a cable provider in a given market in a large city spent 15 to 20 million dollars on a server room and upgrading the fiber channel drives for cable delivery (doubling their HD capacity and allowing playback and pausing of live HD content for an entire city with over 500,000 people).mikkel wrote:
It's not quite that easy. You don't just "purchase a new server" if you want more capacity. It's possible to increase capacity by upgrading hardware, but this is done at steep prices and very slowly, and it does nothing to address the underlying problem of overextending islands in HFC plants, and this is not something you just throw pocket change at to fix. It carries a price tag large enough for it to probably never be profitable for cable ISPs to do, as their business models rely on cost-per-customer calculations which would be thrown off radically if this was to change.
What you are insisting is that the initial investment needed to reach far beyond the needs of the people it provides a service to outweighs $100 per user. Let's say you have a city of only 100,000 customers. That's $10 million dollars a month. That isn't enough to cover that expense?mikkel wrote:
You're completely failing to understand the scope of investment needed to supply even adequate capacity in cable access topologies for larger service providers. It is anything but a "small investment."
I know a certain engineer in a certain city that gets 12MBs down because he removed the limit on his account. It's not because the system can't handle it. It's because they don't want to give you something for free that they can make you pay out the ass for.mikkel wrote:
No, they're implementing caps because their topologies cannot handle the throughput. There's no big conspiracy surrounding that.
Last edited by Turquoise (2009-04-09 16:32:39)
You said caps would make online gaming impossible. That's the only thing I've disputed.Turquoise wrote:
The bandwidth consumption of online gaming is only part of the equation of the failure of bandwidth capping. I was not saying that everyone in the U.S. that does online gaming doesn't download movies, songs, software, and browse the web. All of that pulls from the same bandwidth cap and penalty system.Flecco wrote:
Hmm?
Source please?
What about EVE? WoW? WAR? C&C3?
Btw used to play CoD4 on a 30GB cap. Never got to 20GB in a month back then. I understand you're pissed about caps being introduced but seriously, it will not affect gaming. Downloading movies and such yes, but not gaming. Possibly gaming if you play 24 hours a day for the entire month. Turq, have they even released the pricing schemes? If capped costs less why should you care? Or are they capping your current service and charging you more to upgrade to uncapped?
Btw that pic is kinda ironic.
Imagine how much of a pain in the ass it would be if you wanted to download something off of Steam instead of going out and getting a physical copy. See how fast you'd hit your cap then?
It's also typical for HD movie trailers in 1080p to be 100s of MBs for a few minutes of video.
Basically, what's being pushed here is that ISPs are pushing higher prices on consumers for the use of infrastructure already paid for by taxes.
Remember what Enron did in California with fake power outages? ISPs did that in Australia to justify raising rates and placing bandwidth caps on its consumers.
Everyone knows that the U.K. government gave a lot of tax money to ISPs to improve infrastructure, but all they did was pocket it and raise rates while implementing caps.
These are the kind of companies we're dealing with. They will do whatever they can to make their shareholders happy. It doesn't matter to them how they get the money. They just do whatever increases profit. And they only implement these caps because too many people accept these policies.
These companies aren't losing money from heavy usage of the net. If they ever lose money, it's from speculation bubbles deflating.
I can explain this in very specific terms, because I design the layer 3 topologies in cable plants as part of my job, and I know precisely how much ISPs oversubscribe, and precisely how they're hitting throughput limits in their current designs because of overextension that fit the bill when the average consumer checked emails every now and then, but not when the average consumer watches online HD content every now and then.Turquoise wrote:
I can only explain this in vague terms but a cable provider in a given market in a large city spent 15 to 20 million dollars on a server room and upgrading the fiber channel drives for cable delivery (doubling their HD capacity and allowing playback and pausing of live HD content for an entire city with over 500,000 people).mikkel wrote:
It's not quite that easy. You don't just "purchase a new server" if you want more capacity. It's possible to increase capacity by upgrading hardware, but this is done at steep prices and very slowly, and it does nothing to address the underlying problem of overextending islands in HFC plants, and this is not something you just throw pocket change at to fix. It carries a price tag large enough for it to probably never be profitable for cable ISPs to do, as their business models rely on cost-per-customer calculations which would be thrown off radically if this was to change.
They still haven't run into bandwidth issues. Digital cable uses a compression that is proprietary in the cable set top boxes across America.
mikkel wrote:
You're completely failing to understand the scope of investment needed to supply even adequate capacity in cable access topologies for larger service providers. It is anything but a "small investment."
I'm having a very difficult time parsing that example, but no matter how you look at it, you're oversimplifying something that is not that simple.Turquoise wrote:
What you are insisting is that the initial investment needed to reach far beyond the needs of the people it provides a service to outweighs $100 per user. Let's say you have a city of only 100,000 customers. That's $10 million dollars a month. That isn't enough to cover that expense?
Think of how many customers TWC has across the country. You're acting like they are giving it away for free.
You're not understanding the scope of this problem at all if you think that one guy removing the caps on his connection in one city is proof of how networks can handle current and projected loads. Capacity caps are preemptive and preventative responses to current and projected loads on networks, and these responses are very much needed.Turquoise wrote:
I know a certain engineer in a certain city that gets 12MBs down because he removed the limit on his account. It's not because the system can't handle it. It's because they don't want to give you something for free that they can make you pay out the ass for.mikkel wrote:
No, they're implementing caps because their topologies cannot handle the throughput. There's no big conspiracy surrounding that.
no uTurquoise wrote:
Team Fortress 2 is one of the most basic games you can play online. It uses very little bandwidth compared to more advanced games.Flecco wrote:
Cap is low because we don't pay for a higher one. It's not mandatory. We could get unlimited if we wanted. We don't need it so we don't pay extra.
I play TF2 which uses afaik about 25KBps (each TF2 server requires 25KBps connection per player to be able to run properly) a second and is one of the most data heavy network games out there. Between us my Dad, little bro and I can rack up a pretty big tally of hours a month for gaming time. You said you'd have to kiss online gaming goodbye. I pointed out you are incorrect and that caps don't affect it much unless you are torrenting things/downloading data heavy shit/spend your entire month streaming video about 18 hours a day. Thanks and have a nice day.
Thanks and have a nice day yourself, internet tough guy.
http://api.ning.com/files/CN3s74alOU6l3 … ughGuy.jpg
Do not bitch and moan to an Australian about download caps.
Spark wrote:
Do not bitch and moan to an Australian about download caps.
Only those of us who cbf paying for larger plans. It seems telecos avoid giving residential internet users unlimited as much as possible though.Turquoise wrote:
I must concede to your points, mikkel.
Also, my apologies go out to our Australian friends. You indeed have caps much lower than ours.
Got 52GB here. Bust it once, but that was ages ago.Flecco wrote:
Only those of us who cbf paying for larger plans. It seems telecos avoid giving residential internet users unlimited as much as possible though.Turquoise wrote:
I must concede to your points, mikkel.
Also, my apologies go out to our Australian friends. You indeed have caps much lower than ours.
I've seen one that offers a 100GB plan.
They aren't cheap, though. And our net is slow.Flecco wrote:
Only those of us who cbf paying for larger plans. It seems telecos avoid giving residential internet users unlimited as much as possible though.Turquoise wrote:
I must concede to your points, mikkel.
Also, my apologies go out to our Australian friends. You indeed have caps much lower than ours.
I've seen one that offers a 100GB plan.
Last edited by Mitch (2009-04-10 21:41:36)
Gaming isn't crap compared to streaming media, especially in hd formats.Pubic wrote:
I game, and never reach 10GB
Just head over to Japan.. $20 for no cap and speeds @ 100 down. I believe some of those Scandinavian countries are like that also. Admittedly we've got much larger infrastructure, but you're kidding yourself if you think it cost anywhere near what they charge in the states. Normally I wouldn't care. But this is being distinctly anti-competitive. They are just begging to have more (monopolistic style) regulations.Turquoise wrote:
I must concede to your points, mikkel.
Also, my apologies go out to our Australian friends. You indeed have caps much lower than ours.
