Telcocracy: Should we fear all the telco bandwidth buzz?

Bits reports that Comcast is running a user blacklist, under which heavy bandwidth hogs may "find that all of their online activities may slow down at peak times: from downloading movies to checking e-mail."

The story adds that Comcast will not say who's on the blacklist, how you get on it in the first place, and how or whether you can get off. A well-publicized complaint of the telecommunications companies is that a small fraction of users -- say, 5% -- can account for 50% or more of the data flowing through their lines. Those are the people who download a lot of movies, music and software -- some or most of which is not licensed.

Ars Technica wrote a similar story Tuesday about Time Warner Cable's experimental program in Beaumont, Texas. Users there will get their bandwidth capped at 5 GB per month, with $1 for every gigabyte over that. Bandwidth caps are going to stop making sense very soon, explained Ryan Paul: "Services like the iTunes store and Netflix's new Roku offering are going to making digital video delivery highly accessible to everyone." In other words, once we all start downloading legal movies and playing video games online, it'll be hard to tell the pigs from the people...

Last weekend the Toronto Star had a story about Bell Canada Inc., which filed documents to the Canadian government detailing its practice of traffic "throttling" -- another way of saying the company chokes down the bandwidth allocations of heavy users. This absolutely non-neutral policy had, of course, been going on in secret and would not have been disclosed if not for an official complaint to the federal government by smaller Internet service providers that resell bandwidth from Bell.

So with this spike in shady, unilateral actions by companies around North America, suddenly iPower's grave predictions about a telecom conspiracy to commercialize the Internet and neuter net neutrality don't sound quite so loony.

UPDATE: Add this to the pile.

Curve adapted from an image by Dan Taylor

Comments

[James]

If you like the wide open internet, vote for Barac Obama - He is vowing to protect internet freedoms. John McCain does NOT support net neutrality. Cable companies see their cable subscriber businesses starting to fade (their business model is becoming obsolete). They want to tax the internet thus slowing down the migration from cable to the internet. Underhanded, but what do you expect from the cable industry.

[Jon Healey]

This doesn't really have anything to do with Net neutrality (but hats off for sneaking in an Obama endorsement anyway; now, McCain supporters need to step up to the plate!). Bandwidth caps are neutral, and traffic shaping can be neutral as well. The question isn't whether networks should be managed, it's how. Seems like a transparency requirement would be a good first step....

[David Richardson]

I wonder when the feds are going to regulate the advertising and sale of bandwidth.
Bandwidth is a communication comodity. You buy a loaf of bread, a gallon of gas, why is it that the ISP's can sell you "up to" whatever they say their speed is. "up to" is meaningless and lets then really make the speed whatever they want. I say make them say what they ARE going to provide and then stick with it.

David Richardson

[David Sarno]

@Jon: Thanks for the comment. We're probably using non-technical definitions of Net neutrality here, but from where I stand, according a preference to any category of content or service (and therefore de-prioritizing the rest) leads inexorably to the creation of a tiered Internet, where not all data is created equal. If the telcos are making secret decisions about which users and which content is 'good' (you pay less) and which is 'bad' (you pay more)-- that alone is a violation of the Internet's data-neutral paradigm.

[Erick]

It would have been nice if they had just slowed me down. But they abruptly shut me off one day and banned me for a year. FYI, 400 gigs is too much to download on Comcast.... but they don't have a transfer limit..........

[Fernando]

You know I use the internet for my business and I upload & download my clients videos. I don't see any reason why people should get capped on their internet service. Remember when ISPs wanted to tax Google for making profit off of internet users? Sounds like the same thing, only difference is that ISPs could tax companies like Google. And we're letting the ISPs tax us. For get I would be more than happy to switch ISPs and I think people should too. That way they atleast know that our opinion matters.

[Scott]

This has to do with TV and other video content being served up by companies other than cable providers. Once i can get the discovery channel (among other channels) through my PC, i really have no need for my 55.00 per month basic cable service from Comcast. This is all about saving their overly priced cable service revenue. After all cable is the only government authorized monopoly.

[Gouranga]

I for one will CANCEL my cable, digital phone, and internet access the day TW shoves this crap into Charlotte. I will NEVER do business with them again eiither. Considering all the flash ads, ad images, ad text and crap we are fed translate into data, and we cannot block them, does that mean we can now expect payment from any ad which comes across, our browser for the bandwidth they waste?
I will now totally abstain from any use of TW streamed media or from any sites owned by TW. It is total crap! I also use my internet for VPN access to my job, and my clients. As well as MSDN downloads. I will move in a heartbeat to a competitor (there are a ton) and TW will lose the cable and phone account from me as well. That is the only thing they understand in the end.

[Eyes open]

This is typical big business. They started out by offering "unlimited use always on internet" of course secretly it had a limit and it was not always up and running, but we still paid. Now there saying "yeah we have high speed always on internet, but you can't use it because we can't really provide that service.". Lies. Now they say " 5% are using up all the bandwidth because of alleged Illegal activity". It's a service, if they are paying for it, then they can use it."

Do we make felons use less gas because they might commit a crime using a vehicle? Do these same Felons have to pay more for a car because they once where considered criminals? this is a slippery slope if you ask me. Big internet didn't like that fact people where actually using their services so they brought out the "CRIME" card.

I know these businesses are in the game to make money, but the truth of the matter is their own "Unlimited access" advertising got them into this mess. I've read the fine point on my access and it never stated I couldn't use P2P for legitimate services or download movies from Netflix. I haven't even touched on my phone service/home security/home'to'office connectivity running through my internet. The fact is we are leaning on our internet services more and more and they can't handle it. The result, they make us pay more understandable but be upfront don't pull the proverbial wool over our eyes and cry "Crime made us do it!".

Bottom line; Do not offer infinite usage/bandwidth if you plan on selling only finite plans. Typical bait and switch.

[Mark Castle]

The only option consumers have is to immediately cancel service with whoever tries to pull this stuff. Competition will kick in and the market will self regulate. There will always be someone that will offer unlimited bandwidth.

[batjam]

The telcos should charge for their product and nothing else. The problem is they are misnaming their product as "speed delivered" when, in fact their product is "packets delivered".

Under that model, like water and electricity, is pay by the actual quantity consumed.

This is the model we need to shift to but I don't want this to be an excuse to charge more. If I pay $79/mo now, I'd expect to pay less now that the hogs have to pull their weight.

I'd expect to pay a 5 to 10 dollar maintenance fee so that if I go on a trip for a month my bill would be 5 or 10 dollars.

If I only do light text browsing all month I might pay $20 but if I go nuts and download 100 movies and 1000 songs and audio books and podcasts to the tune of 100 gig I should expect to pay maybe $80.

The browser would have a meter at the top of the screen which was a running tally of your gigs downloaded and the dollar amount you owe. The ISP would have providing the highest possible speed as a priority so as to encourage more use and more income.

The problem with this is soley and only with botnets. We have to solve the security problem as everyone will be paying for the priveledge of having their machine zombied.

[Gouranga]

Unfortunately, many areas the cable companies have a monopoly on service. So this will have to be settled by folks suing the crap out of Time Warner. These companies could have managed this in a much better way. For one they can offer client tools to monitor your bandwidth usage and allow you to see what you have used. Another thing, what about the dude whose anti-virus fails (which is a product TW gives you for free) and the resulting infection has you computer shooting out and collecting gigs of data in a day? That is not a far fetched scenario.
As usual they do not work with customers, they make claims of this phantom list of abusers and NEVER contact them to work something out. They do not put anything in their contracts about it. They just suddenly announce they have been hurting all this time and big mean phantom abusers are doing it. Given how much I use my web for work, I cannot handle the uncertainty from them, so I would drop them in a heartbeat cause I have 4 or 5 options here. 30 miles away though they have TW or they have Dial-up.
Allowing TW to force these limitations on these people is ridiculous. I will be contacting my senator on this. I would suggest anyone who does not like this concept do the same and get them talking now. Maybe if these companies get a taste of the fight they will be having, you will see them change their strategy and work with customers instead of abusing them.