Yes, 250GB is a lot, but it will no longer be unlimited. I guess I'm going to have to "foot net" some of the larger files from my local clients and go back to FedEx Overnight with some of my out-of-town clients.

Im on Cox cable.

They have been slowing down my connection to an utter crawl every month when I exceed the limit.

At least I know my limit is probably 75GB according to the article.

Getting 20M dwn/2.4 up

Seems to me if I had Comcast I would be going to great pains to find other service. The precedence that this sets is far greater than it may appear on the surface. This is about control over the future of the internet and a ploy to stifle the proverbial "little guy".

- Ray
Some of my stuff on Vimeo
www.undergroundplanet.com

This is about control over the future of the internet and a ploy to stifle the proverbial "little guy". And why do "they" want to do this?

I think a more likely, and less conspiratorial, explanation is that they want to make money. That's what business is all about.

In virtually every business I can think of, customers who use more product or service pay more. Of course they often get discounts so that they pay less per unit, but overall they pay more.

The idea that flat rate should extend to infinity is clearly an idea that cannot work.

The real question is which model will work the best. During the past ten years as we've seen the land grab in both cell service and Internet service, we've seen these flat rate models used as marketing tools in order to gain market share. However, in the long run, they are completely unsustainable and they are also without any historic precedent. Thus, over the coming decade, I expect that we will also see a return to some sort of limits and metering to long distance phone service. This isn't an evil or conspiratorial thing, but simply a recognition of the fact that any service of this type has a finite bandwidth and that once the entire country has chosen a service, the funds for adding capacity to meet burgeoning demands for bandwidth, such as what is required to support on-demand video, must come from somewhere.

If you don't like one plan, quit complaining and just simply find another. If it costs too much, then raise your prices. If you can't raise your prices, then use less. However, expecting that a private enterprise somehow is going to deliver something at a loss over an extended period of time just doesn't seem to me to be a rational expectation.

[edited for grammar]

don't know where you live but here they have different prices for different bandwidths.

but you're right: they got everybody hooked & then planned on raising prices to make up the loss. Simular to what cable TV & phone companies did to get people in.

But i'd also say it's to take out "the other guy". All phone service now is digital. They (cable company) don't want you to use their lines for another's phone service, they want you to use THEIR phone service. Now you'd pay twice to use "the other guy".

But hey, if comcast didn't want people to use their high bandwidth, why do they use a high-bandwidth flash page for advertising broadband, and advertise TV & radio through comcast's internet, and promote video e-mail?

John, you quote me and highlight "they" as if I'm using it in some broad conspiracy theorist type manner when in this case I used it directly in relation to Comcast. If you want to try to paint me as someone who's preaching against black helicopters that fine, inaccurate, but fine. Here's a quote from one article that aquick search on Google turned up that fairly succinctly sums up the "why":

"Many feel that Comcast, and other companies like it, should not be allowed to interfere with the delivery of their service. The Internet, it is argued, should remain a fully equal place; if Internet service providers are allowed to tamper with access here and there, then what’s to prevent them from signing a deal with, say, Amazon.com so that Amazon.com’s site loads faster than competing online retailers? If this happened, it would deal a serious blow to the notion that anyone can succeed by creating their own online business site.

However, others argue that companies like Comcast have every right to control how their service is provided. They are the ones providing the service, it is argued; therefore they can provide it in any way they see fit. (A potent counterpoint to this claim is the fact that many customers don’t have a choice between ISPs but have to go with whatever one is located in their neighborhood. In other words, if you don’t like Comcast’s business practices, you can’t jump to the competition if there is no competition.)"

http://www.aplus.net/blog/the-comcast-controversy.html

And for those who are interested this vid from Net Neutrality also give some good arguments:




Obviously you can feel free to agree or disagree, but I think there is an arguable case as to "why" they would want to.

And if your statement "If you don't like one plan, quit complaining and just simply find another." was targeted at me, I clearly said "if I had Comcast I would be going to great pains to find other service."

- Ray
Some of my stuff on Vimeo
www.undergroundplanet.com

As much as 250 GB is a lot right now, companies like Google and Adobe think there is future is net applications. Imagine if you were using Sony Vegas and it stopped working or slowed to a crawl because you reached the 250 GB or 75 GB limit.

Think of Apple, Sony, Microsoft, Netlfix, Amazon, etc who offer movie downloads. You pay for the movie and then are effectively paying for the transmission. Should the above pay Comcast for transmission or should you?

I think the next few years is going to be interesting in the way the net changes.

Sorry, I wasn't trying to target anyone in particular. I was just trying to make the obvious point that companies ought to be free to make whatever choices they want. If car companies choose to offer SUVs and people want to buy them, then have at it. Of course those companies are now having great difficulties because, in the long run, this was stupid and short-sighted and not what people want when the price of gas skyrockets and many of them start to develop a "green" consciousness.

Same thing with Internet and phones (which are quite similar in many ways). Bandwidth costs a lot of money to provide, especially when constructing and/or improving the local infrastructure.

In the case of cable, which has a shared "last mile," once the infrastructure is in place, I don't see how they can avoid having some sort of allocation scheme. Maybe I'm just being stupid, but as more Internet services -- most offered by sites other than the cable provider -- offer services which require HUGE bandwidth (such as Netflix movies on demand), the math just doesn't work out: people will be sucking more on the pipe than can be provided, and when that happens, bad things start to happen.

All internet connection services down here have always been limited. Initial offerings were like 5GB/month, now it's around the 25 to 50 GB / month mark. For most users what's more of an issue is connection speed.
What JM says is entirely true. The business model was unsustainable both financially and technically. Unlimited download is easy to offer when connection speeds limited your per month download anyway. This is what is changing and pushing carriers to change the rates.

Bob.

john, isn't your unlimited believe in capitalism a bit naive? If i don't like it i should switch the provider. well i live in a huge city (NYC) and i have only 2 choice. Timewarner. Or Eartkink (through Timewarner).

Also i'm surprised that you and farss (seemingly smart individuals) believe in the corporate mumbo-jumbo ... "Oh no we are poor, the business model can't sustain itself, it has nothing to do with our greed, after all we are looking out for the small guy because, you know, we are a corporation." In our times, when we saw over and over huge corporations reaping people off to believe in their talk before an old-fashioned common sense is beyond my understanding.

I don't believe in corporate mumbo jumbo but I can do simple maths and I'm no captialist, quite the opposite.

Aside from that I have used data circuits with unlimited data. It's a meaningless metric unless you have a minimum contracted data rate and then you really start to pay, big time.
With my current cable connection I cannot physically exceed my download limit (50GB) per month running flat out 24/7 between here and the USA and believe me we've tried. So even IF my plan was unlimited it for me means nothing. If I could get a 10Mb/sec connection between here and the USA at an affordable price now that would mean something.

Bob.

jack uses 2 gigs bandwidth a month, jill uses 250 , both pay the same price,, sam uses 350 pays more,, jill has a good deal, jacks does nothing but email , and sam well he needs to get a life.
Ain't nothin wrong with it,, ya get what ya pay for.
capitalist and proud of it.

winrock, the funny thing is that right now we are Sams and pay flat rate. Trust me jsut because Jack does email dosen't mean his bill will go down. If anything it will stay the same while Jill's and Sam's will go up. You you are screwed no matter what because you get less for more money.

I've been out of touch with what's on offer in the USA for a long time however I doubt it's really changed that much. You can get more if you pay more. Of course they may offer more and not charge enough, last deal I was involved in was with MCI Worldcom. We got a $2M kickback as a thank you for signing a contract they thought would bring them $30M/PA. That didn't quite work out that way.

I guess they did a few too many of those kinds of deals and spent too much flying people like me around the country on junkets. Was nice while it lasted.

Bob.

john, isn't your unlimited believe in capitalism a bit naive? OK, what is the better -- and proven -- alternative?

I have to disagree with the speculation that we are running out of Internet bandwidth. The popularity of the live video feeds of the Olympics and their negligible impact on the net overall belies that. According to Reuters: "Almost 10 million viewers watched more than 6 million hours or more than 56 million online videos of its NBC's Olympics coverage as of Friday [8/22/08], 20 times as many as were accessed during the entire Athens 2004 Olympics, according to NBC." Did you notice any slowdown in your internet downloads?

Follow the money.

BitTorrent is the most often quoted bandwidth hog, but it is only the camel's nose in the tent because torrent traffic is an easily demonized target. Who is it complaining about the "problem" of video downloads causing congestion? The very providers who want you to *buy* the content from them rather than get it from other providers (Hulu, Netflix Online, etc). The only problem that Comcast has with this picture is that when I download a movie on Hulu, Comcast doesn't get a piece of the pie.

If I were to buy the same content from Comcast on Demand, suddenly there's no bandwidth problem?

Once the infrastructure is in place, the cost per bit is absurdly cheap. The notion that an "unlimited bandwidth" is an unsupportable business model ignores that data bandwidth is not a consumable property. If it were apples, oranges or gasoline, the unlimited model fails because there is a finite supply. The only resource that data consumes is time. Sure, if everyone on the pipe were to download a movie at the same time, everyone's data speed would be reduced, but all the bits would still get delivered.

I bought Cute FTP a while back, and recently Cute have set up a free upload/download service for owners which allows up to 10 emails per month with attachments no larger than 100MB.

After uploading, they send an email to your nominated recipient with a link to the download. The file stays there for 3 days and is then deleted. I've used it a fair bit, and it's good to know it doesn't affect my monthly quota from my server.

Additional transfers, storage, and features can be purchased.

Indeed I too doubt that the internet is about to go into meltdown anytime soon. Email though is a very different beast to things like VOIP.

Still don't see what the fuss is about, 250GB is a very high limit.

Bob.

Steve Mann, thanks.

Your post spelled the issue (non-issue) out perfectly.

Money.

Hey all you ought to try working in Ukraine right now I get 5 GB a month and they think that is a great deal. They also give 30 min of free time on my cell phone a month. They think I should be excited over that.

John, it's not necessary the system i have beef with as i accept that capitalism is simply a "screw the other guy way of doing things while you gain as much as possible for yourself." It's rather that so many people come in to defend the corporations and chose to belive their BS.

I mean the fact that MCain's VP wants to dril in Alaska but "responsibly"... Haven't she ever dealt with a corporation before? Doesn't she know that since their bottom line is profit they don't care about responsibility? Likewise here defending Comcast as if they were some poor struggling mother of five living from paycheck to paycheck just doesn't sit well with me.

>>...MCain's VP wants to dril in Alaska but "responsibly"... Haven't
>>she ever dealt with a corporation before?

From what I read, she dealt with oil corporations in Alaska by significantly jacking up their tax liability. Though she is supposed to be conservative, and I believe she is, the raising of corporate tax burdens is definitely not part of the conservative montra. She has also been holding Exxon's feet to the fire over the Exxon Valdez incident deal from some years ago.

I know we have a lot of people here in this forum from all over, so there are definitely going to be many different points of view.

I think the "all corporations are evil" mindset is not accurate, but I'll tell ya', if you read about all of the details that led to the Exxon Valdez oil spil years ago, I can certainly see how someone could come to that conclusion. Enron and Microsoft certainly do no thelp the corporate cause either.

Just my $0.02. Back to video... :)

P.S. Comcast is my ISP too. Should be interesting.