[ale] WARNING - RANT Re: Comcast Caps Data at 250G/Month

[Robert Reese~]

> I agree the capping sucks and believe me I am not a comcast fan,
> but where do you store all this data you download, new drives every
> couple months?  250 gig worth of web pages will take you more than
> a month to read, so I'm assuming it's data downloads and maybe
> vpn/rdp/etc traffic.  So that's 8.3 Gigabytes a day or 350 megs an
> hour...  Seems pretty generous to me, though I understand that they
> advertised and sold you unlimited access.

<rant>
Services and products over the internet are just entering their infancy; it took until now to have the bandwidth at the average Joe User level to really make use of those services and products.  I posit that this is just a grab to suck at the teat of every service you'll use: VOIP, Internet Radio, every appliance hooked up to the net, Hi-Def VOD in three or more rooms (television programming will become a rare thing in the decade ahead), and so forth.  Oh, do I need to remind you that standard-def television consumes about 4GB per hour per video device?  Anyone here want to add in the GB/Hr rate for 1080P?  For just ONE television?  The ISPs are effectively creating a toll to force you to pay them for the privilege of not using their services.  Very Mafia-like behaviour, and certainly anti-competitive, and possibly monopolistic.

Remember, only cable currently gives you the bandwidth and the opportunity to do VOD; satellite companies don't have the hardware yet to roll it out to the general populace in the quantities that we are going to quickly become accustomed.  VOIP is not yet a big deal, but it really is just around the corner to have the infamous Video Phone VOIP hit mainstream.  FiOS will do it, obviously, but still suffers from the Last Mile syndrome, leaving cellular to start to compete.  Let's face it: who is possibly hated more than cable?  Cellular companies.  (And I hate Dish Network more than any cable or cell company).

Let's not forget 10+ Megapixel cameras that hold tens of Gigabytes of shots per birthday party and HD video cameras with a intravenous connection via wifi to your YouTube channel.  Speaking of YouTube, how many Gigabytes of HD YouTube, Facebook/MySpace (etc), music videos and such is a teenager going to suck down on a monthly basis?  How long does it take to suck down 350MB of HD YouTube video?  I think it's under an hour.  For all you spam-lovers out there, remember your spam will be charged against your craptastic 250GB/Mo. cap as is any attacks against your network and connection.  Might not seem like much, but for those power users that are running their own mail and/or web servers, that could be a detrimental amount of usage.  Don't forget system updates, security definitions and updates, application patches, updates and upgrades, and so forth.

That reminds me, I already have morons tacking on 5 or even 10 megabyte attachments to email (hint: email is not, and never will be, designed as a File Transfer system.... that's what FTP is for, LITERALLY!) as well as the ever-useless HTML email.  But with so many people switching to SaaS models for document handling, processing, and emails that bandwidth use goes through the roof with each and every email message you send and receive.  By the way, show of hands all those that hate the lazy web programmer that uses Flash for needless things as well as stupidly for necessary things like navigation?  I thought the late 90's were bad for MIDI files, animated GIFs, and the crass BLINK tag.  Those seem like to good ol' days compared to today's Flash-infected webpages.  What used to be a hundred or so KB per page, we are now inundated with megabytes or even tens of megabytes per page.  Thank you, flash-loving idiot web developers and advertisers.  (Special thanks to those Grand Marshall Morons that reign over the web divisions at the networks like Fox, ABC, and the rest.)  Developing for IE and ActiveX was the plague, and Flash requirement is nearing Apocalyptic proportions.

To re-ask your question, How fast can you churn through 250GB?  Very quickly... that isn't even 10GB per day!  I expect to hit that per hour before the next summer Olympics (being held in London, apparently).  Speaking of which, how much of those games are going to be available as streams and downloads?  My guess is all of it, all in HD.  I pity the poor sports lover that tries to download the all-you-can-eat Olympic coverage with a measly 250GB cap.  Doing the math using your numbers, my internet connection currently is capable of downloading 5,400MB per hour.  If the cap was 350MB per hour, my service is now rated at just 6.48% of what it is capable.  I have 12Mb/Sec but I'm only allowed to use that at capacity for 93 minutes and 20 seconds per day.  An hour-and-a-half to go through the equivalent of a single dual-layer DVD.  If my service was suddenly only 6.48% of what it was, I expect my bill to be 6.48% of what it was... in my case that would be under $6 per month.  Another comparison: my lowest cost per GB per month (average 30.42 days per month) at 12Mb/Sec (1.5MB/Sec) (coming out to just under 4TB per month) of is roughly $0.02.  (someone check my math... it's late after a week of 20-hour days).  Under the cap, the math is easier: $80/250GB = $0.32 per Gigabyte.

My suggestion?  Get Congress and the FTC/FCC to force IP-related technology as well as third-party services such as VOIP, Netflix, and whatever other form they appear in the future to be EXCLUDED from the cap; only non-SaaS and non-IP-related technology bits should be considered for capping.  Watch how quickly the ISPs attack that idea, since it directly impacts their hidden agenda of the grift.

By the way, the very same rant goes for METERING!
</rant>

Cheers,
Robert~