Jul 19 / Ozymandias

A Cloudy Future [Updated]

Comcast, Data Caps, Hard Questions for ISPs to Answer, Internet as a Right

[Thanks for visiting! There are five key posts to read around the Broadband ISP Data Cap issue. I’d suggest you read the first, the second, a wrap-up with tough questions for ISPs, an update with a complaint to the Attorney General, and then press coverage in that order. You are currently reading the tough questions for ISPs post. In addition, I highly recommend you read my responses (published by VentureBeat) to the evasive responses we received to my tough questions to ISPs. I believe they highlight inconsistencies and deliberate attempts at obfuscation, and may prove useful to press and officials interested in advancing the conversation.]

I thought I should do one last post on the topic of Comcast cutting off my internet after reviewing all of the press coverage. The problem is that much of the coverage is focusing a bit too much on the David vs. Goliath angle (which is understandable, since it’s an easy one to write.) But it’s not focusing on the key issue: should ISPs be able to limit or cut off your internet access for “overuse”?

We won’t get to the heart of this matter until people start asking the right questions. And so with that in mind I wanted to summarize the key issues. I’m also going to include a few questions that will make any broadband provider squirm – because, frankly, there aren’t good answers. It’s my hope that all of you (including the press and politicians) will use these questions as a bit of a crib sheet, and challenge broadband providers when they duck answering them. It’s time to let consumers, press, and politicians continue this debate. And as much as my experience here has put a face on this issue, it isn’t about me — so I will purposely be stepping back a bit to let the real issues take center stage.

So what is the key issue?

Data caps are arbitrary and harm consumers by stifling innovation and choice.

Depending on the broadband provider, a data cap might cause a consumer’s service to be throttled or perhaps be subject to surcharges for use over a certain limit. However, some ISPs actually cut service completely when a user exceeds their cap. As an example, let’s look at Comcast’s data cap (or “data cutoff.”)

Comcast has never adequately explained how cutting a user completely off serves any legitimate purpose. To quote a letter sent to the FCC by Public Knowledge:

In 2008, Comcast drew an explicit distinction between throttling designed to ease network congestion and data caps designed to punish “excessive” users. It is unclear why excessive data use that does not cause network congestion matters to Comcast. It is further unclear how Comcast determined that 250 GB was “excessive” in 2008, and why it has not revised that level in the years since.

In fact, Comcast appears to now be contradicting statements it made to the FCC in the past about its data cap. In 2008, Comcast went to some pains to draw a distinction between congestion management practices such as peak time throttling and “excessive use” policies like data caps:

“These congestion management practices [such as throttling] are independent of, and should not be confused with, our recent announcement that we will amend the ‘excessive use’ portion of our Acceptable Use Policy, effective October 1, 2008, to establish a specific monthly data usage threshold of 250 GB per account for all residential HIS customers. … That cap does not address the issue of network congestion, which results from traffic levels that vary from minute to minute.”

Yesterday, a Comcast spokesman exhibited just that confusion in defending Comcast’s actions by confidently stating “If someone’s behavior is such that it degrades the quality of service for others nearby – that’s what this threshold is meant to address.”

As Comcast recognized in 2008, but appears to have forgotten recently, data caps are a poor way to deal with network congestion. Uploading 250 GB of data between midnight and 6 am over the course of a month should not strain a network. However, it could trigger the cap.

We live in a world where new streaming solutions are beginning to encroach on existing television distribution businesses. Netflix, YouTube, and Hulu are all the tip of the iceberg in the “cut the cable” movement. To quote The Economist:

Regardless of providers’ public pronouncements, the root of the problem is internet video. Live streaming television, advertising-backed programmes from networks and Hulu, legal downloadable nuggets of episodes or complete movies (both paid and free), or pirated peer-to-peer files are all becoming alternatives to channel-based, real-time delivery of television over a wire to the home. Caps are a last-ditch effort to preserve a fusty model with artificial limits that resemble broadcast TV.

…

The use of caps allows providers to dish out bandwidth with one hand and take it away with the other. The companies have vastly increased the capacity of various copper, coaxial and fibre lines, but artificially separate out a portion—at least half and often much more—for video which a set-top box or a broadband modem spits out as an apparently distinct service. Cable firms simultaneously push out hundreds of digital channels, while telecoms firms rely on multiple digital streams from live broadcast or cable TV or on-demand pay-per-view. It is as though the water main were divided as it entered the home and a steady, modest stream was made available for showers and at the tap, while most of it was always at the ready for a coin-operated washing machine.

The Economist goes on to say that increasing speed on the internet portion, which would allow a consumer to use these new streaming services, is balanced by the provider by capping the volume of data that can be consumed. Put another way, if a consumer doesn’t monitor their usage, his or her internet access might be cut off or overage fees charged—both of which discourage use of these new streaming services.

Let’s pause and think about that water line analogy a bit more. Broadband providers typically install a single “pipe” to your house, and then split that pipe up into sections to handle services they sell you. One chunk is dedicated to the bandwidth necessary to deliver television; the other broadband. I can’t find numbers estimating how much bandwidth an hour of HD broadband television consumes. However, I have found that streaming a Netflix HD movie consumes somewhere from 1 to 1.5 GB of data an hour. That probably low for an HD cable television stream, but is still a useful conservative point to base some calculations from.

So here’s the rub. One pipe coming into the house is segmented into two different offerings with different rules and costs. If I download over 250 GB of data over my broadband connection (in Comcast’s case) I exceed their data cap limit and am cut off. On the other hand, if I turned on a broadband provider’s HD television station and left it on 24 hours a day for a month I would have consumed at least 720 GB of data (30 days x 24 x 1 GB/hour), or maybe even over a terabyte of data (at 1.5 GB/hour of data)— on precisely the same pipe. And I guarantee you I would not get a warning call or be cut off for “watching too much television” — just imagine the furor that would ensue if ISPs started doing that!

Beyond being arbitrary, data caps also harm consumers by stifling innovation and choice.

The internet continues to evolve in new and exciting ways that we can’t predict. It wasn’t that long ago that streaming video was more of a curiosity than a useful technology that we now use daily. Innovative cloud-based service offerings such as backup services (Carbonite, Mozy), video game playing (OnLive, Gaikai), streaming video (Netflix, Vudu), and streaming music (Amazon’s Cloud Player, Spotify) have all come into being in recent years and show significant customer demand. Yet all of these potential consumer choices are threatened by data caps.

Some might go away because consumers won’t find the offers as compelling as they might have previously. What’s the point of a cloud-based music service if you can’t play all of your music? Or why pay a company to back up all of your precious data to the cloud if you can’t reliably get it to the cloud in the first place? Heck, why buy Google’s Chromebook at all? Remember, it requires a net connection to set up and use to its greatest potential.

What’s even more worrisome is to imagine what other innovative services might never come into being. What’s the next OnLive, or Carbonite, or Dropbox? And what happens if the next one is in the mind of some college student who can’t get funding from a VC because the idea just doesn’t work within a data-capped world? To put it another way, how many VCs would turn away from an OnLive-like idea that was pitched to them today because of uncertainty around data caps?

This issue affects us all, and it’s my hope that people will rally and start asking the hard questions of their ISPs and politicians. I also hope that the press will look at some of these hard questions and demand answers… and just as importantly, ignore non-answers.

So with that in mind, here are some hard questions for ISPs around data caps. Cut and paste them in mails, or send them to your ISP directly. Print them out and include them with your cable bill. I guarantee you each will make them squirm.

Hard Questions for Broadband ISPs around Data Caps:

Is your bandwidth data cap designed to protect your television distribution business? If not, why do you insist on completely cutting off data instead of using other more consumer-friendly options such as charging for overages or slowing internet use?
What ISP-offered services are excluded from the cap? Specifically, are your voice telephony and video programming services excluded? If so, why doesn’t your data cap apply to data consumed when watching television or making a phone call?
How are your data caps set? What data informed that decision? Why do different ISPs have different data caps when using similar networks and distribution technology?
How are your data caps evaluated on an ongoing basis? What customer input do you seek? What are the conditions under which those caps could be raised and/or eliminated?
Do you practice selective enforcement of data caps? (Many ISP users report being over their supposed limits for months in a row without action.)

I would love to see each major ISP release a letter responding to the questions above, and engage in a meaningful debate with their customers and policy makers. But I doubt they will. At the end of the day, most broadband ISPs (especially those also in the business of distributing television) have no way to answer the above questions without being evasive and very obviously dodging the subject. But people will know… and over time, one hopes policies will change.

Thank you for reading — now go forth and question!

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1615278752 Jonathan Saunders

I’m just thinking/typing out loud here… I wonder if any change could be made if we were to all band together and call our ISPs tech support with these questions on the same day / same hour each month.

Perhaps we could also just keep asking to speak to someone higher up. Just keep asking ’til you can get as high up the chain as you can go. Imagine if all of us did this on the same day / same hour.

…a sort of day of protest, once a month, non-stop until we have been able to produce some change. Any disgruntled ISP tech support folk know when the worst day/time for something like this would be?

Charles Harper

We’d all spend a great deal of time on hold, but I like the idea.
Charles Harper

We’d all spend a great deal of time on hold, but I like the idea.

Angry Driver

Establishing a data usage cap to prevent degradation of other users’ service is like saying: This stretch of road has too much traffic during rush hour — so we’re passing a law that nobody is allowed to drive more than 1000 miles per month or their license will be revoked. It does nothing to address the problem — since “most people” don’t drive more than 1000 miles per month, the handful of drivers that have to reduce their driving because they are in danger of having their licenses revoked is going to make a negligible difference in the overall amount of traffic during rush hour. Meanwhile, those same drivers aren’t allowed to drive in the middle of the night when the road is completely empty and their driving would affect nobody. The road has already been built, and in the case of the cable “road” it costs the same amount to maintain it whether anyone uses it or not — so there’s no legitimate reason to stop people from using it in ways that don’t affect anybody else.

If the Comcasts of the world want to have data caps for whatever misguided reason they have, that’s their right as businesses. But saying it’s to protect other users is utter BS. Regardless of whether or not you believe that people have a right to broadband access, the regulators ought to be going after these businesses for blatantly lying to consumers.
Per-Ola

Andre,
Thanks for drumming up noise around this issue. Access to the “internet” is so important these days, for businesses, for innovation, for entertainment, and in many cases, for life (monitoring and security systems).

Will continue to follow how your “case” evolves and hope you get as much mileage as possible out of this. The ISPs need to hear from the masses, and that we are not satisfied when they start crunching down on services that were earlier provided as “unlimited”, all the while when raising prices across the board.

If technology cost was truly behind it, we should see access prices going down, since access/telecom technology related products tend to drop in price with as much as 20% annually. And with Comcast being such a large player in the residential access market, one can be sure they have negotiated both the best prices there are, as well as some very beneficial price erosion clauses with their suppliers.

In my mind, they should focus (or be mandated to focus) on expanding their network to new areas/regions, allowing more people access to internet services, instead of gobbling up content and thereby becoming even more of an oligarch than they already are.
Ross Anderson

An interesting approach to getting some details on the inside and outside of the home: http://projectbismark.net/ Its the University
of Napoli and Georgia Tech (my alma mater!) trying to get a better picture on data usage especially as it relates to the ISPs. Also, they are working on an open DD-WRT fork to support it
http://www.viodi.com Ken Pyle

Very well written and researched posts.

These are good questions. I have posted them along with some other questions and I am hoping my ISP readers respond.http://viodi.com/2011/07/20/hard-questions-for-isps/
Pingback: Hard Questions for ISPs | The Viodi View
http://twitter.com/CyberKnight1 Yakko Warner

I will say that, as a video gamer, the fear of hitting the bandwidth cap is one of the reasons I dismissed any interest in OnLive immediately (not the only reason, but it definitely factored in).

I speculated back in 2008 when Comcast first announced the cap but did not have a bandwidth monitor online (which they failed to provide for over a year), that just the fear of hitting a cap would be a huge deterrent to using online services. I wondered if their failure to put a meter up for so long was a calculated move to increase that fear — if you know you can get cut off for excessive use, but you can’t see what your use is, then you will be less likely to even try other services (especially services that compete with Comcast’s own, like Netflix) for fear that you might unknowingly trip the cap.
Richardsarna

I’d like to suggest an alternative solution. First, admit you have a problem. You are suffering from an addiction to the Internet. If you interact more with a user’s handle then you do with their face or voice or touch, they aren’t your friend. They are an anonymous aggregation of electrons. Secondly, seek a therapist. Your addiction shouldn’t preclude your neighbors from being able to exercise their relatively innocuous Internet usage. Thirdly, seek activity outside the house, outdoors. You live in the PAC NW, a gorgeous area. Stop dedicating your life to subvert typical avenues of commerce and trying to get out of buying goods and services, the least of which is music and media. You’re still young. Don’t cripple yourself with carpal tunnel. And lastly- the watchmen sucked.
Richardsarna

I’d like to suggest an alternative solution. First, admit you have a problem. You are suffering from an addiction to the Internet. If you interact more with a user’s handle then you do with their face or voice or touch, they aren’t your friend. They are an anonymous aggregation of electrons. Secondly, seek a therapist. Your addiction shouldn’t preclude your neighbors from being able to exercise their relatively innocuous Internet usage. Thirdly, seek activity outside the house, outdoors. You live in the PAC NW, a gorgeous area. Stop dedicating your life to subvert typical avenues of commerce and trying to get out of buying goods and services, the least of which is music and media. You’re still young. Don’t cripple yourself with carpal tunnel. And lastly- the watchmen sucked.

http://ozymandias.com/ Ozymandias

Actually, I’m afraid you’re pretty much wrong on all points.

Love the PNW, am out daily biking or running, especially in the Arboretum. Am quite the subscriber and purchaser of goods and services, as you’d see if you’d have read my second post on the subject. And finally, my handle is from the classic Shelley poem – look it up, you might enjoy it.
http://vesselhead.com Rebecca Dias

I know Andre personally and just threw him down a class 4 river in a raft. Also, he throws pretty great parties. I think you misunderstand who he is and you missed the point of his article.

Charlie Digiglio

Here’s a question: why is it legal for cable companies to monopolize markets? Maybe it’s only in my area (D/FW) but why is it that cable companies can’t have competition in the same market? How is that not monopolization? The town I live in is serviced by Charter. Charter doesn’t even offer internet services in my town of 20,000 people. Why? And would they, if they had competition from Comcast, Time Warner, etc., in the area? Why am I forced to use DSL only? I think this affects the bandwidth cap issue, too… bring in healthy competition to an area, and maybe the market will do something about the bandwidth cap. “Comcast capping you at 250gb? Here at Time Warner, our cap is 500gb!” Something along those lines. It’s either that, or regulation, because I do believe that internet access needs to be treated like phone, electricity, and water access… we have evolved as a society to rely on these services.

John Milner

I neither agree nor disagree with your assertions, but just as an informative post…

Many of these companies have lobbied Congress (successfully) because they argued (with some validity) that they require a monopoly to have incentive to maintain the physical infrastructure required to deliver these services. Congress (or other governing body) can set a standard by which all cable/internet providers must adhere their equipment and technology – at which point there would be no differences in competition since the service should be identical.
If internet is to be treated as a utility – think of your other utilities – more often than not, your water, gas and electricity providers have monopolies over their respective services, due in large part to the enormous cost incurred as a result of maintaining these networks.

Pingback: Who will pick up paying customer that Comcast dropped because of high data usage? | VentureBeat
Justin

Don’t call me an expert, because I may be wrong in some people’s eyes…BUT:

I do see the reason for capping bandwidth, but definitely not the way Comcast is doing it. Yes, there are people who take way more than they need, instead of going for a second helping; and there needs to be an effective but beneficial solution to that problem.

My idea of a better solution is to set a cap, for example 200GB, or what have you. And lets say you pay $60.00 a month for 30mb down 3 up for example, and that $60.00 includes the first 200GB. An “average” user is not going to exceed that limit in a month. BUT, if they do, the will have to pay a fee every time they hit that cap, lets say $30. Basically they have options; keep paying the fee, or find a higher package that wont cost as much as the monthly bill, plus the fee. Or potentially become a business class user. But don’t cut them off, because not only are you losing money every month they are banned, but you also are going to lose those customers for life. I would personally not go back to an ISP that dictated to me that I can only have as much public data as THEY want me to have, and thereby shutting me off because of that fact. I would go somewhere else.

This whole 250 GB cap is becoming the new trend for ISPs very quickly. AT&T recently introduced one for DSL subscribers that is 150GB. In my opinion, its plain old garbage. And as data sizes increase, that cap will decrease. Our data and cloud services are expanding by the month in today’s world.

http://vesselhead.com Rebecca Dias

Justin, some users are simply more advanced than others today. I think what is important to understand here is that our bandwidth needs are going to progressively increase. Think of the internet usage you had in the 80s, 90s, 2000, and now.

These caps are going to massively hinder innovation. Like the UK, bandwidth should be seen as a utility, a requirement for education, entertainment, and business.

The barrier to entry to build a network the size of comcast etc. is simply too large to assume that new companies could step in. The caps hinder innovation. Andre’s point is that companies like Carbonite, Netflix, etc can not exist/evolve with network caps. Comcast has a conflict of interest. They don’t want to lose their cable business to other competitive solutions. The caps are not necessary and should be illegal.

Jratliff92

That’s why they need to make these caps larger, as innovation comes along. And most heavy usage research companies should be on some sort of business solution to start with. If I did R&D I would have at least 250Mbps of combined fiber. Then if Comcast would be smart, they would stay with the times, and increase these caps. Kind of like what Yahoo and Gmail are doing with mail storage. When I first used webmail I had 100mb of storage on Yahoo. Now I have over 7.5 GB with Gmail.

Anonymous

That’s true, caps hinder innovation. Innovation drive up bandwidth demand. Bandwidth demand require more network costs (upgrades, technical support, more upgrades, etc.). If no limits to demand then no limits to costs. There is a very thin line between making profit and making losses. Those who did not feel it went banckrupt around Y2K. Remains only those who learned to control costs vs revenues. Not so many. Look for competition ?
    Btw, if all in your familiy agree to watch together one TV channel at a time you may spend on only one TV set. In this case your TV broadcast one channel to everyone in the room. If everyone want a freedom to watch what they want when they want then you have to spend on TV set for each family member and ensure they are in different rooms. This is unicast.
    The ISP television distribution business (linear TV, because) is a broadcast, therefor occupies as you said “1 to 1.5 GB an hour” for ALL users, whether 1 or 1 mln is watching. It generates one unit of cost. VoD (Netflix, Hulu, etc) is unicast it require ”1 to 1.5 GB an hour” for each user.
    Caps are not very good tool to regulate the demand, they are arbitrary, they intend to stimulate the fear, they, most probably, do not reflect the cost, they only intent is to create fear with the hope this will have some effect on medium term capital demand. To really reflect the cost they must be in a form of $ per MB, but to go for it one need a courage. Would they have it they wouldn’t be so much dependant on that ”television distribution business” and “voice telephony” which they use today to subsidize that unlimited bandwidth demand increase and which (subsidy) is not sufficient anymore. That is, the revenue per GB is failing faster than cost per same GB and even if today the difference is pozitive, it will not remain such for long time.
   If you win this buttle for unlimited, and you most probably will, you may end up with divestiture of “television distribution business” and “voice telephony” with they failing revenues, and bill per MB.
   You believe Internet is a “right”. You believe the state must enforce this right. But you also believe a little regulation here and there from state will solve the problem and this might be a problem. The known solution which worked to ensure your rights to affordable travel was state built interstate roads, isn’t it?
Pingback: Are we going to be bandwidth hogs or cloud computing patrons? A three-way debate | VentureBeat
Pingback: Are we going to be bandwidth hogs or cloud computing patrons? A three-way debate
http://twitter.com/ratskrad Mike

CenturyLink became my isp yesterday because of it buying Qwest. I live in Heber Utah and I do consider myself a power user when it comes to the internet and my use of it. So yesterday when my wife got home from work she logged into our router and got a message that we use the internet too much as in an excessive use warning and it gave her a link to our new masters EUA. I will admit to having eleven different devices in our house that can stream online content. We do a lot of Direct tv vod which is all downloaded from the net and my son plays COD every night and I even download many gigs of music most days all legal as in Grateful Dead and Dead family members and quite a few other bands who allow the taping and free sharing of their music. So nowhere does it say how much is excessive use other then it is up to their discretion and that they are all about no caps etc but as I have found out that is a flat out lie. I gather from reading the EUA that they want me to up to a business package to continue to use their service at my current rate. I knew nothing good would come from this take over and am looking at my options which there is pretty much only one and that is comcast but with them I know where they stand with their 250 gigs a month but does anyone know if there is a printed or stated amount for CenturyLink.

So here we are at a crossroads pertaining to the use of the internet as we have all of these choices but now the isp’s are going to limit how we use these choices and one day we are going to find that the internet is not the Wild West but East Berlin before the wall came down, and then again we might already be there.

http://ozymandias.com/ Ozymandias

You might find additional information in CenturyLink’s responses in this article: http://venturebeat.com/2011/09/07/are-we-going-to-be-bandwidth-hogs-or-cloud-computing-patrons-a-three-way-debate/

Pingback: The Day Comcast’s Data Cap Policy Killed my Internet for 1 Year [Updated] | Ozymandias
Pingback: Follow up: The Day After Comcast’s Data Cap Policy Killed my Internet [Updated] | Ozymandias

A Cloudy Future [Updated]

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