SubscribeOne of the usual excuses given to promote the need for usage caps on residential broadband accounts is the person on the network who has fired up their peer-to-peer sharing application (usually torrent software) and has left the thing running 24/7 for the entire month. This person is inevitably held up as an example in the pro-cap community as someone who is “abusing the network” by downloading terabytes worth of data “that no person could reasonably use in a month.”
There have been some interesting reports on the impact of peer-to-peer applications on broadband in the last two weeks (“20% Drop in p2p on AT&T Backbone Other video, like YouTube and Hulu, twice as high” – DSL Prime, 8/1/2008). Ask a torrent fan what they enjoy getting the most from using such applications and it usually turns out to be television shows. With the advent of more… authorized methods of accessing favorite programs, including Hulu, Joost, iTunes, and the network websites themselves, people can get near instant gratification without waiting hours, if not days, for a coveted episode to finally arrive over some BitTorrent site.
Is there something missing from the usual equation offered by cap advocates that “excessive/abusive use” + “limited bandwidth” = a usage cap to “better manage network traffic?”
Also, is there a place in the discussion for bandwidth providers to better dialogue with their customers, educating them about the impact of running certain file sharing peer-to-peer software on a continuous basis, not only on network traffic, but also potentially slowing down the connection for everyone else in the house? How many parents have only the most limited knowledge about the software their kids are running? And if it’s the head of the household running the software, do they even know how much bandwidth such tools could consume if left running continuously.
Do you think people would respond to a voluntary request by providers to not run such software unattended for hour after hour, day after day? Would a customer be more inclined to reduce usage knowing that a voluntary reduction could mean not having to place caps on every customer? What are your feelings about such a proposal? Would it be effective? Or do you dismiss the peer to peer traffic argument entirely?
Part of the purpose of Stop the Cap! is to offer some potential new ideas with providers genuinely interested in traffic management and not simply imposing caps as a way to increase revenue. Your comments and advocacy for or against this idea are welcome. Just hit the Comments button under the article headline and share your views. Providers do read Stop the Cap! and many are genuinely interested in reading your views.
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I’ll chime in here. I’m using frontiernet so I’ll use their 5GB cap as a reference.
I’ve got several problems with a cap. First, the 5GB frontier cap is way to small. Last week I bought and downloaded a video game and expansion totaling 18GB. The week before I rented a single movie from iTunes that was over 1GB. My wife an I have been talking about using the Netflix streaming service at about 1GB an hour. Based on the way we watch TV shows though Netflix now, if we moved to streaming them we would use around 20 GB a month.
Second, there are no tools in place to monitor my usage. With my electricity I can run outside and look at my meter to get a sense of instantaneous usage, I can check it every few days and get a sense of how fast I’m chewing up power, and I can look at my bill and see my historical usage a year back. There are no tools in place to do any of this. So how is a user supposed to know how the cap is going to effect them. I know only becasue I know how to track and calculate this.
Third, this is basically changing how the service is billed. The services that come into my home are billed in a couple of ways. Cable and network up until the cap are a single fee for all you can eat. Water, Gas and Electricity and phone are metered with a monthly connection fee and a well known charge per unit. Cell phone plans are in the middle, a plan comes with a bunch of time, often enough to clearly cover nomal usage and a well known charge per time over that.
A hard cap is a fourth way of billing that doesn’t really exist now.
If this instead ends up like a cellphone plan where there is a monthly fee for connectivity with a lot of minutes included plus known additional (high) charges it could be acceptable. But Frontier doesn’t appear to be leaning that way. There is no clear indication of what happens after the cap is exceeded, no indication of the cost of units are using up the included units, and no plans with different base options. Plus, the cap is not a reasonable limit. A quick look at AT&T cell phone plans shows plans from 450 minutes to 1350 minutes to unlimited minutes as options. Huge amounts of available time. It’s expensive to go over time, but you can always move to a bigger plan.
How to solve the problem form their point of view. I don’t know. I can tell you what I would accept.
All you can eat like now, is preferred. If they move to anything else they need to implement tools so that we can monitor our own usage and they need those tools available months ahead of time so people start getting experience with what their actual usage is.
If the prices were right I would accept an metered plan like electricity where I’m charged some fee for being on the net, say $10, plus a known small fee per GB, say $0.20 or $0.25 per GB.
I would consider a cell phone style plan with a tiers of GB limits. But only if there were good tools for monitoring consumption and there were ways to jump up and down plans based on actual usage and an unlimited plan at the top of the list.
@ rreay
From what i have heared and been told. It would be around $1 – $2 per GB when a person goes over the CAP