Comcast’s Bandwidth Cap
Posted by voice | Filed under Rant
As you may have heard in recent days, Comcast has instituted a monthly bandwidth cap of 250GB/mo. My personal opinion about this is that we the Comcast Customers are going to get screwed over big time. Why so? Well, first off lets go over the cap itself, 250GB a month, a lot of people are saying “well, thats not bad, I never reach that so its A-OK with me”, CNET’s Peter Glaskowsky has even gone on to ridicule people who are against the idea of a cap by claiming those of us against it are simply crying that the sky is falling. Let think about this for a second, Comcast instittutes a bandwidth cap, they see that people are ok with it, so what does it tell them? “Oooh, we can get away with this!”, and after that you’ll see the cap begin to tighten, maybe to 200GB/mo on the claims that not enough people are hitting 250 so theres no need to set it that high, don’t put it past Comcast, they’ve pulled stunts before and I’m sure they’re itching to find a network management method that won’t get them in hot water with the FCC.
The way Comcast is spending money on improving their networks is to, you know,add Sandvine equipment to their network infrastructure, or, oh heres a good one, institute “peak time bandwidth throttling” where when the network is reaching max capacity at peak times of the day, like 5PM, they throttle the biggest bandwidth users. I’m not quite sure how that is improving the network, in my personal view its just making the network experience worse. I would side with Comcast if they were upgrading their network infrastructure with fiber optic lines instead of old copper lines, but appears that Comcast would rather keep the old, aging infrastructure and slap on bandwidth management techniques that, as said before, just degrade the network’s performance.
Then theres the not thinking ahead issue that people seem to be completely ignoring. Yes, at this point in time there aren’t that many internet applications that take up a whole chunk of bandwidth, but look whats on the horizion for gods sake! More and more applications are coming up that make use of the internet, VoIP clients, more and more multiplayer online games, more online data storage services are coming up, more streaming music, video services like Youtube and College humor, more movie rental services like Netflix has even started to provide movies as downloadable for view on your computer. But if you think that the current data consumption is going to stay this way, or go down, please look again. Yes, yes, I know that last one is a bit of a far stretch because given the proper video encoding you can condense a 1hr 30min movie into 700MB, but as Peter pointed out Netflix isn’t doing that, and now they’re offering HD movie downloads, theres no way in heck you’re going to get them down to 700MB, not without getting a very poor image quality!
Steam, the DRM’ed(boo, yet yay at the same time) online video game delivery service from Valve is now offering more games than just their in-house productions such as Half-Life and Counter Strike. How this affects bandwidth is, if you don’t know how Valve does this, with Half-Life based games you only need to download the core components once, after that the download sizes drop from 1.8GB to just about 500/600MB, very good bandwidth-concious thinking on Valve’s part. However, when they’re releasing games like Assassin’s Creed over steam, for download, which want a minimum 8GB of hard drive space, how much do you think you’re going to be pulling over your network? You can buy the game from a retail store, but we’re moving to a society where everything is being done over the internet nowadays and with more games taking up more space, since we’re reaching the terrabyte range, you can bet this is going to contribute to the Comcast cap issue.
Again, we’re shot back to the video issue. There was a post on a message board I used to frequent that asked a perfectly valid question, how many of you actually watch your TVs? The answer was very rarely, this is mostly due to TV shows being available on the web for your personal viewing. So lets think about this, you’re not watching movies constantly, but instead you’re watching tv. In the future though I’m sure we’re going to see services providing high-def tv shows and just generic videos online, but right now, thats not a big deal as most video content streaming sites don’t like to use high def videos, but this is because no ISP in the US can provide the content fast enough, this is due to the whole “we don’t need fiber” BS they love to feed us, don’t believe me? Look at Japan, fiber to every home, 100Mb/s to the home they can stream high quality videos, whats the max here in the good ol’ US, 17Mb? Laughable, lets put it that way. “But Japan is much smaller geographically”, that is why the network gods gave us repeaters, wonderful devices that take incoming signals that have weakened from travel over a line and then re-strengthens the signal before putting it down the line again.
So this bandwidth cap, in essence, is Comcast, and every other ISP’s that apply caps, answer to improving their network. Don’t put money into improving infrastructure, just keep the money for themselves and put limitations on the network as it is. We don’t get any major improvements in the quality of stuff we’re using, like crystal clear video streaming, because the internet as it is was not built to handle that kind of data flow, what we’re using now was primarily developed in the late 80′s, early 90′s, and was designed to carry simple text messages between systems, and small files, would you believe Windows 3.11 fit on 4 floppy disks? Developers have done their best to get work around these issues, Cisco, IETF, and other networking groups are constantly developing new network protocols to make better use of what we have now, and developers are always coming up with new and innovative ways to put more content in a smaller package, like the X264 video codec. We need a newer and better network, we can’t just keep crunching things down because theres going to become a point where we’ve compressed data as much as we can and keep it efficent, but ISPs are constantly ignoring this, and you see it in the form of usage restrictions and caps.
This is essentially why I am against bandwidth caps or restrictive devices like Sandvine, all they’re doing is trying to cover up the problem and claiming the network issues are caused by people who are downloading/uploading greedily. What did Comcast expect when they advertised Unlimited service? “Hmm, I could download this game, but nah, that would put too much strain on Comcast’s network.” No, no it does not work this way at all. It would be expensive to upgrade to a all fiber network, I will not lie on that aspect, but its a cost thats worth if you ask me, Comcast makes enough money to do it anyways, any money that does get to the network is basically to keep the current outdated network afloat.
If you want an phsyical expression of how I feel about this:
