The new bandwidth pricing

[Watchdog]

Just courious with you all here being "internet users".

Will the bandwidth charges that many internet providers are coming out with in their new pricing services (at least here in the midwest) will they be a deterant to for consumers to use sites that have "video content" . For an example..

I wish to display on the upper corner of my site "video ads" in random from sponsored businesses...maybe that's not enough to be worried about?

[billbenson]

As network capacity becomes less expensive bandwidth costs have no reason to rise. A broader issue is if you have users that tend to open a lot of tabs in various instances of a browser, all the videos, audio, flash, thats going on in all of the tabs suck up cpu and memory resources slowing pc's down or potentially crash.

What you are describing sounds like little more than a Flash banner though. Just try to keep the file size down as much as possible and have the user select play if possible for what you are doing.

[vangogh]

I think it will depend on what the bandwidth limits are and how much the charge is for going over. I can tell you I don't like the pricing model and there's one company here that won't be getting my business because of it. I was prepared to switch from DSL to cable, but the cable company here imposes bandwidth limits. I think it's 250GB which is pretty big, but given it's not uncommon for me to upload and download many GB of content when building a web site I'm staying away from any bandwidth limits.

I understand ISPs are complaining about a small amount of people using most of the bandwidth, but I disagree with their solution to the problem. Something tells me the low end users won't be getting a price break for not using their share of bandwidth. Sounds mostly like ISPs coming up with a way to charge everyone more money.

I doubt it will stop people watching videos or using videos. The end result is many people will have to pay more to get online than they have been till now. And as the technology advances and more people are uploading/downloading videos we'll all have to pay more.

[billbenson]

I have never heard of ISP bandwidth limits?? I interpreted the question from the server side. The only time I've heard of this issue is if you tried to host a site from home using a broadband connection. Hackers, web designers, people on adult member sites, etc all may download large amounts of data and I've never seen a complaint about the ISP's limiting that until this post? I've done some downloads that take a weekend as well. Not recently but this is news to me.

[orion_joel]

You should try living in Australia, There is no such thing as unlimited DSL, or cable, even the ones advertised as unlimited, have a bandwidth limit at which point they decrease the speed of the service to barely dial up speeds.

Ever since DSL become available in Australia we have been living with metered downloads / uploads. Presently the limit we have is 15GB peak / 25GB off peak. This is just a reality of internet in Australia. Oh and excess usage charges can quickly add up to more then what your normal bill is depending on the service you have.

[vangogh]

Bill some ISPs have started metering bandwidth here. In my area the basic choices are Qwest for DSL and Comcast for cable. Comcast has start to impose the limits, though for the moment it's pretty high. I assume that's just to make it acceptable and in time that 250GB will become 100GB then 50Gb, etc.

[orion_joel]

Hmmm that would actually be the exact reverse of how they did it here in Australia, as mentioned in the previous message, Australia has relatively small limits. However they are gradually increasing the limits they offer as faster connection speeds are becoming available.

[vangogh]

I've seen some companies here start with very low limits and then increase the limit as the market demands. With Comcast I have a feeling they started the limit high enough where most people won't think it's much of a big deal. Once everyone accepts the limit I expect they'll be telling us how they still can't profit and they need to impose lower limits. Most people aren't going to come close to 250GB a month. I doubt I would either, but you never know.

It's just conjecture on my part, but it's the sense I get. I've been feeling like these bandwidth limits are a way to circumvent net neutrality. The telecoms want a tiered system, since they'll make more money. They don't seem to be making progress through the courts so I think these new bandwidth limits are and end around.

[billbenson]

The cable company where I am is Brighthouse. They offer internet service through RoadRunner as well as Comcast (I believe). I use RoadRunner through Brighthouse.

Verizon is the local telco. They have been running fiber in the ground all over this area. Dug up my yard about a year ago putting in fiber. Then they came by doing hard sells trying to get you to use them for all your services - tv, phone, internet.

I have no contract requirement with Brighthouse / Roadrunner. Verizon wanted a 2 year contract at first. Brighthouse started advertising heavily that they have no contract requirements. Verizon dropped their contract requirements to 1 year.

Point being, there is so much bandwidth flying around here with competition to boot, I don't see any evidence of throttling. I have 20Mbs and 2Mbs upload. I check it from time to time. I pay for a premium package, otherwise it would be 5Mbs. They tossed in the premium package for free because I have one of their VoIP phones.

The trend I see with my ISP is they are offering small business services. They are really targeting small business though, not one man shows such as myself.

Verizon is a landline telephone company. They have also plopped a bunch of money down to put in fiber so they can compete with Brighthouse. Real strong arm sales tactics. Nothing would surprise me with them.

[vangogh]

Bill I just did some quick searching and it seems like Brighthouse is a reseller of Time Warner Cable. Time Warner is apparently testing metered bandwidth in limited areas so the bandwidth limits may be coming your way depending on how the tests go.

From what I've seen many ISPs are testing the idea of metered bandwidth. They claim that a few use up the majority of the bandwidth and that they need to charge differently to keep their networks running smoothly. I'm of the opinion that it's all BS and this is just the latest way they want to implement a tiered pricing system in order to make more money without offering anything more than they currently do.

The internet is moving in the direction of video and other media and we're all going to be using more bandwidth in the future.

[Business Attorney]

Comcast apparently has implemented 250GB bandwidth caps, which it claims is "enough to send some 50 million e-mails, download 62,500 songs, or download 125 standard-definition movies. " There apparently is not a specific usage charge for exceeding the cap but "If a customer uses more than 250GB and is one of the top users of our service, he or she may be contacted by Comcast to notify them of excessive use."

According to several sources, effective November 1, new users signing up for AT&T’s High Speed Internet in Reno, NV, are subject a bandwidth cap ranging from 20 GB to 150 GB per month, depending on the plan.

If 250GB is enough for 125 standard-definition movies, then 20GB is only enough for 10 movies, or one every three days if you don't use the internet for anything else.

[vangogh]

Sounds similar to what I've been hearing. 250GB sounds like a lot of bandwidth, but depending on how you use the internet it's not that hard to reach that limit. Admittedly I use a lot of bandwidth for my business, but for an example of how easy it is to reach the limits I'll be moving a client's site from one host to another sometime during the next week. I'm not sure exactly how large the site is, but it's at least 500MB. To move the site I'll download everything to my computer and then upload everything to the new host. There's 1GB of bandwidth as part of a day's work.

If the limit is 250GB I probably won't hit that in a month, but when you see companies wanting to set 20GB limits it's easy to see how you'd reach that limit.

Another issue is how many people actually know how much bandwidth they use in a given month. I can probably tell you since it's my business to know, but I'd bet the average person has no idea. ISPs are going to need to set up tools to let you measure your bandwidth use. Naturally they'll be online and will use your bandwidth to check.

Think also of all the websites you visit that load slowly. That slow load time is a lot of bandwidth. Think of all the spam emails you get. Each one eats up a little bit of bandwidth as well.

[billbenson]

Interesting VG. While I might FTP a site with a lot of images or potentially video every once in a while, I really don't do a lot that uses a lot of bandwidth. I wonder if things like online gaming might be a major bandwidth hog depending on how much of the game is resident on the pc and how much on the web site?

[vangogh]

Most people probably won't run into the FTP issue that I might. It'll be more watching, downloading, and uploading videos and the like. A couple of things I just thought of. Imagine you purchase software online. Some software is pretty big. Think of all the Windows updates and how large some of those files are.

I'm not sure about online gaming. You would be interacting with the game the whole time you're playing and something is being transferred to and from the game server. It'll depend on the size of any files that are transferred. Something has to be going back and forth across the network.

You know I bet most people will see metered bandwidth and just think since they don't download movies it'll be no big deal. Most won't realize all the ways they use bandwidth. Most people still aren't going to reach 250Gb in a month, but who knows how long that limit will last. Most ISPs are offering a lower limit. And again as technology improves bandwidth use is only going to increase. ISPs should be working toward making their networks more efficient instead of charging more to some. If I'm not mistaken didn't taxpayers help them set up the infrastructure in the first place. Now they want to charge us more for the networks we already paid to build.

[orion_joel]

The best price i can find currently is about 100GB limit for $130, which they shape to 256k/256k. This is not to say that there may not be an option with a higher limit.

It just seems to be going the complete opposite direction in Australia to the US, the bandwidth limits are increasing gradually, rather then decreasing.

[vangogh]

I don't that it's going in any direction yet here in the U.S. I'm just speculating about the limits getting smaller. Metered bandwidth is only now starting and it's too soon to see any pattern yet. I've seen some companies raise the limits already.

Wow. $130 for an internet connection. That's a lot.

[orion_joel]

I mean they do have connections from as little as $20 however this is only giving you about 250MB yes Megabytes, download. I have Mobile broadband with a 5GB limit which i pay about $39 a month for, when you take into account the exchange rate it looks slightly better better from your point of view i would expect, however internet access i think it rather expensive in Australia.

[vangogh]

Oh that makes sense. Then again maybe that's what's coming out way as more and more companies start imposing the metered bandwidth limits.