Oh, competition, wouldn't it be nice to have you around.
Of course, given the massive up-front infrastructure investment, such competition is unlikely to materialize. What would be wonderful is if the government ran fiber to everyone's homes, and then let companies lease it from them. I wonder what the cost would be to last-mile a major city....
> What would be wonderful is if the government ran fiber to everyone's homes, and then let companies lease it from them.
http://www.utopianet.org/why-utopia -- sixteen cities in northern Utah have done exactly this. My dedicated fiber connection runs about $35 a month for 10 up/10 down, no caps that I'm aware of.
Of course, given the massive up-front infrastructure investment, such competition is unlikely to materialize.
I thought it was more that cities (I think it's at that level, anyway) tend to sell exclusive rights to do that so wired competition beyond 1 cableco + 1 phoneco is largely illegal?
What competition?
Here in US AT&T has also started capping their DSL at 150GB for regular DSL and 250GB for their U-Verse.
Competition only helps if there is lots of it, unfortunately we're in a duopoly market where even though theoretically there is competition, to get around anti-trust laws, they just follow each other so consumers are just screwed.
How did this kinda of article make its way to the front page? This kind of math makes no sense whatsoever, and the fact that Chris has probably never seen 13.125 down his pipe should have been an indicator that this was flawed logic.
Love to hate on Comcast, but I try to be intelligent about it.
I'm really tired so I'm not 100% sure it's exactly linear, but if the bandwidth is around half then you get twice as much usage. So instead of 5 hours it would be 10 hours, which I'm guessing is around 1.4% of the month.
It's a consumer plan, they're always absurdly oversubscribed. It doesn't make any sense to charge consumers for a leased line because even if they're listening to Pandora and watching Netflix like crazy they won't hit the (currently) high data cap.
If you don't want caps (either explicit or defacto) get a business plan from Comcast; It's quite afordable relative to other options that businesses would pay for. Of course it isn't anything different than what you're paying for right now, but they won't shut it off after you've uploaded the contents of a 1TB hard drive to a backup service.
I had 3 roommates at one point, and all 4 of us were subscribe to Netflix. It was VERY easy for us to hit the cap with everyone watching Netflix alone, let alone playing games or streaming music in the common areas.
After I moved out and got married, my wife and kid routinely have Netflix playing in the background as they sit at home during the day while I'm at work. When I go home, I usually have work to do at home as well, which only adds to the usage.
Using numbers found in the article, if you use Netflix on a daily basis for 3 hours a day watching HD content purely, it would park you at about 210GB of the 250GB cap according to Netflix themselves:
So yes, using Netflix and Pandora can easily put you over the cap.
EDIT (for clarity): This article talks about the quality settings in the account settings area, but if you adjust the settings to allow for highest resolution, it would still apply.
Deceptive marketing? Yes. Inflated prices? Yes. Lack of competition? Totally.
But using law to impose your "moral perspective" on a pricing structure is not a solution.
The problem is that there exists no plan with reasonably-priced, reasonably-fast non-capped internet access, while there is a demand for it.
This is a market failure caused by a lack of competition in the market.
We should seek out and advocate for solutions which increase competition in the consumer broadband marketplace and ignore foolish non-solutions like this.
"The problem is that there exists no plan with reasonably-priced,
reasonably-fast non-capped internet access, while there is a demand for it."
I believed the same thing until recently. HN User Aloisius let me know about Web Pass, which is unfortunately available only in buildings with 100 or more residence units, in this post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2711784
"symmetric 100 Mbps uncapped service in San Francisco for $33/month"
Having done this same calculation myself, this was part of the reason I moved to Business Class. That and that I actually wanted to start a business eventually.
I think the ratio should be something much higher, such as 80%, not 0.69%. That would give you 7.56 TB of available bandwidth of the maximum possible 9.45 TB, based on the 105Mbps speed listed. And that's only downstream.
The author's premise is wrong. I don't get faster connections because I want to download more data than I could on a slower connection. I get faster connections so that I don't have to wait as long for my downloads to complete.
To expound upon that, being able to receive more bits through the pipe will likely result in being more willing to download/stream will likely result in more downloads/streams, so just by being able to get things faster will you be more likely to get more things.
Your Internet usage is probably bursty, so you want bursty service; a 1% share of 100 Mbps is dramatically faster in practice than a T1. Someone is about to suggest that ISPs advertise minimum speeds instead of burst speed, but that doesn't serve the interest of most customers since perceived performance does correlate strongly with burst speed.
If you want to sue based on immoral business plans consider that T-Mobile recently doubled the cost of incoming text messages for prepaid customers. These are texts you can't control getting, yet when you do they charge you anyway. Incidentally, their highest mobile data plan includes 10Gb for $89.99. At the same rate as they charge for texts, that plan would cost $6.4Million. I honestly don't understand why congress hasn't demanded cell phone carriers include texts in the cost of plans.
Comcast's primary goal right now is to prevent a raising of the debt ceiling. Once this is done it will be much easier for the FCC to be eviscerated and destroyed -- or at the very least, maimed. With that pesky FCC out of the way, Comcast will then be free to take a deep breath and expand its belly, unrolling that flab of inefficiency even further, stifling and suffocating as many sources of potential innovation and competition as possible.
With no viable threats (as Comcast will be both the Gatekeeper and the traffic police), its ability to dictate who can drive in the fast lane and the slow lane and who is even allowed to drive on the road at all will spill over from the highways to the suburbs to the rural country roads.
I have no doubt that Comcast's lobbyists take every opportunity to push for "starve the beast"-style cuts to the FCC. But I sincerely doubt they think it remotely in their interest to see the US actually default.
Being able to squeeze more profit per subscriber loses its luster if another economic calamity causes home internet access to become a luxury again. They already see the danger that they may become a dumb pipe that only provides backhaul access for wireless cells. (see their wireless deals and partnerships)
If another economic snap forces people to choose between their home internet and their smartphones, guess who wins and guess who hemorrhages subscribers like a POTS provider? And they'll have a hell of a time convincing people to pick those plans back up, years later, if/as things recover. Even though home phone service has become dirt cheap with VoIP offerings, that hasn't brought back customers. If people cut Comcast and start to go wireless-data only, it'll be terribly hard to reverse.
To say nothing of Comcast's investments and stock price, which would tank (along with most everything else) in the crisis that would follow an actual default.
I live in Pasadena, CA, in the middle of LA county, one of the most populous in the USA and I have the following choices for maximal bandwidth:
AT&T DSL at 6Mbps/1.5Mbps for $40/mo
Charter Cable at 60Mbps/?Mbps for $100/mo
I think both plans have caps, though I've never hit them. Charter wouldn't tell me their upload speeds and demanded I give them my SSN so I went with ATT.
The United States does not care about its economic future. It cares about keeping the next quarter's profits up for the corrupt telecom cartel that's turned bribing local governments into a science.
[+] [-] ender7|14 years ago|reply
Of course, given the massive up-front infrastructure investment, such competition is unlikely to materialize. What would be wonderful is if the government ran fiber to everyone's homes, and then let companies lease it from them. I wonder what the cost would be to last-mile a major city....
[+] [-] lotharbot|14 years ago|reply
http://www.utopianet.org/why-utopia -- sixteen cities in northern Utah have done exactly this. My dedicated fiber connection runs about $35 a month for 10 up/10 down, no caps that I'm aware of.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/03/google-besto... -- Google is running fiber in Kansas City, KS. I'd assume they've run the numbers and can cost-effectively last-mile the whole city.
[+] [-] tbrownaw|14 years ago|reply
I thought it was more that cities (I think it's at that level, anyway) tend to sell exclusive rights to do that so wired competition beyond 1 cableco + 1 phoneco is largely illegal?
[+] [-] yumraj|14 years ago|reply
Competition only helps if there is lots of it, unfortunately we're in a duopoly market where even though theoretically there is competition, to get around anti-trust laws, they just follow each other so consumers are just screwed.
[+] [-] ams6110|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CGamesPlay|14 years ago|reply
Love to hate on Comcast, but I try to be intelligent about it.
[+] [-] DrHankPym|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] samlevine|14 years ago|reply
If you don't want caps (either explicit or defacto) get a business plan from Comcast; It's quite afordable relative to other options that businesses would pay for. Of course it isn't anything different than what you're paying for right now, but they won't shut it off after you've uploaded the contents of a 1TB hard drive to a backup service.
[+] [-] jarrettcoggin|14 years ago|reply
I had 3 roommates at one point, and all 4 of us were subscribe to Netflix. It was VERY easy for us to hit the cap with everyone watching Netflix alone, let alone playing games or streaming music in the common areas.
After I moved out and got married, my wife and kid routinely have Netflix playing in the background as they sit at home during the day while I'm at work. When I go home, I usually have work to do at home as well, which only adds to the usage.
Using numbers found in the article, if you use Netflix on a daily basis for 3 hours a day watching HD content purely, it would park you at about 210GB of the 250GB cap according to Netflix themselves:
http://blog.netflix.com/2011/03/netflix-lowers-data-usage-by...
So yes, using Netflix and Pandora can easily put you over the cap.
EDIT (for clarity): This article talks about the quality settings in the account settings area, but if you adjust the settings to allow for highest resolution, it would still apply.
[+] [-] jtwb|14 years ago|reply
But using law to impose your "moral perspective" on a pricing structure is not a solution.
The problem is that there exists no plan with reasonably-priced, reasonably-fast non-capped internet access, while there is a demand for it.
This is a market failure caused by a lack of competition in the market.
We should seek out and advocate for solutions which increase competition in the consumer broadband marketplace and ignore foolish non-solutions like this.
[+] [-] fourk|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jarrettcoggin|14 years ago|reply
I think the ratio should be something much higher, such as 80%, not 0.69%. That would give you 7.56 TB of available bandwidth of the maximum possible 9.45 TB, based on the 105Mbps speed listed. And that's only downstream.
[+] [-] ams6110|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wmf|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tzs|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sukuriant|14 years ago|reply
To expound upon that, being able to receive more bits through the pipe will likely result in being more willing to download/stream will likely result in more downloads/streams, so just by being able to get things faster will you be more likely to get more things.
[+] [-] wmf|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] daimyoyo|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shawnee_|14 years ago|reply
With no viable threats (as Comcast will be both the Gatekeeper and the traffic police), its ability to dictate who can drive in the fast lane and the slow lane and who is even allowed to drive on the road at all will spill over from the highways to the suburbs to the rural country roads.
http://techdailydose.nationaljournal.com/2011/07/white-house...
[+] [-] roc|14 years ago|reply
Being able to squeeze more profit per subscriber loses its luster if another economic calamity causes home internet access to become a luxury again. They already see the danger that they may become a dumb pipe that only provides backhaul access for wireless cells. (see their wireless deals and partnerships)
If another economic snap forces people to choose between their home internet and their smartphones, guess who wins and guess who hemorrhages subscribers like a POTS provider? And they'll have a hell of a time convincing people to pick those plans back up, years later, if/as things recover. Even though home phone service has become dirt cheap with VoIP offerings, that hasn't brought back customers. If people cut Comcast and start to go wireless-data only, it'll be terribly hard to reverse.
To say nothing of Comcast's investments and stock price, which would tank (along with most everything else) in the crisis that would follow an actual default.
[+] [-] CoryMathews|14 years ago|reply
Is South Texas just that far behind the normal Internet speeds?
[+] [-] silentOpen|14 years ago|reply
AT&T DSL at 6Mbps/1.5Mbps for $40/mo Charter Cable at 60Mbps/?Mbps for $100/mo
I think both plans have caps, though I've never hit them. Charter wouldn't tell me their upload speeds and demanded I give them my SSN so I went with ATT.
The United States does not care about its economic future. It cares about keeping the next quarter's profits up for the corrupt telecom cartel that's turned bribing local governments into a science.
[+] [-] losethos|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] tastynachos|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] pavel_lishin|14 years ago|reply