Comcast Clamping down on Heavy Downloaders

news.yahoo.com/comcast-start-charging-he...358196--finance.html

That is messed up! In a house like mine with more than one person watching netflix/hulu, playing games, ect. We would pass that much in 2 weeks.

Edit: Glad I have TWC.

Maybe i'm missing something here, but who is the end provider of internet? I was always under the impression that we all make up the internet, and by us paying money to web hosting companies, they buy computers, hook them up to the internet, then when we type in that site's name, it goes to that Computer and we get the information. I also understand that there are companies that "hold" or manage all the site names to keep them all legal and prevent people from using the same ones. (such as you starting your own nike.com site...) But i still don't understand why/how comcast, verizon, and Time Warner... are able to charge to access this highway of information? Essentually we're just paying for them to dig a hole, put a cable in it, and hook it up to our house, and then ensure that someone doesn't cut it or it isn't damaged. So why should we pay more for faster internet, if the line is already run and it can handle unlimited amounts of data?

Same goes for Verizon not allowing unlimited data packages to be grandfathered in. With people being their own hot-spots, isn't that just adding to the speeds of the internet?

I assume all my above statements aren't absolutely true, so please feel free to correct anything i've stated incorrectly.

It's all a scam to be honest. These companies are holding on to old world thinking by keeping the progression of the web back. I bet the only reason to "cap" is because they want people to still have a Cable subscription and not go totally online with everything.

Could you guys imagine if HBO decided to offer their service for a monthly charge and just stream everything online? Big Cable would shit a brick because they know people want al a carte and the only way to get HBO is to get some insane tier planned.

Hell Al a Carte style has been in the talks for years and years and now with the internet and it's streaming capabilities it's back but under a different name.

It's all a dollars game with the FCC, CAble/SAT providers, Advertisers, TV and MPAA people and all their lobbyists.

What you have to understand on the net is the people are not really the net. The internet backbone started out as a way to link colleges and research businesses. That backbone is owned and has to be maintained. Level 3 is a backbone provider to IPS's. ISP's have to pay the backbone based on bandwidth used, so when they have people using more and more bandwidth the ISP's bill goes up, hence our bills go up. They are trying to keep the 1% of causing higher bills to all. Of course they keep raising shit for other reasons anyway though. But the internet will never be free because you have to pay for the people to maintain it, pay for equipment failures, pay for upgrades etc.

I guess i don't have a problem paying for the company to run wires to my house to hook them up to the backbone, but why should they be able to limit things? don't these colleges or backbone places make money from the websites that use them? It's like TV, don't they already make enough money from the advertisers, why do they have to charge money for me to watch commercials? I understand HBO (no commercials), but to have to pay for QVC or the home shopping network seems crazy to me.

I just didn't understand why with everything getting more effecient, they have to increase costs and limit things, shouldn't it be going the other way?

We all (and myself) included need to just take a step back and STOP paying for things that we DO NOT want.

You raise a great point. Why are we having to pay through the nose and watch all this commercial programming.

I know I will never open a Comcast account because they have been targeting and limiting people for YEARS.

If american stop paying for the crap services and switched or shut off thier services, these companies would begin to change their tune. Until then we are going to get less and less and they are going to add more to that bill each month.

Twodavez wrote: I guess i don't have a problem paying for the company to run wires to my house to hook them up to the backbone, but why should they be able to limit things? don't these colleges or backbone places make money from the websites that use them? It's like TV, don't they already make enough money from the advertisers, why do they have to charge money for me to watch commercials? I understand HBO (no commercials), but to have to pay for QVC or the home shopping network seems crazy to me.

I just didn't understand why with everything getting more effecient, they have to increase costs and limit things, shouldn't it be going the other way?

As Renegade noted, bandwidth costs money. With the large amount of people now using the Internet and services getting more and more bandwidth-intensive, prices will rise. As benevolent as you seem to think ISPs should be, they have to pay their bills just like the rest of us.

Its true that the bandwidth does cost money. However, lets not forget the fact that most companies over sell and under deliver their advertised amounts of bandwith, AND its not like when I buy a certain plan for internet service it's not like I'm using that full allocation for 5 or even 6 hours out of a full day.

So them to raise the prices up and up just because people are using more services like HULU and Netfilx during a few peak hours is gouging.

Myndmelt wrote: Its true that the bandwidth does cost money. However, lets not forget the fact that most companies over sell and under deliver their advertised amounts of bandwith, AND its not like when I buy a certain plan for internet service it's not like I'm using that full allocation for 5 or even 6 hours out of a full day.

So them to raise the prices up and up just because people are using more services like HULU and Netfilx during a few peak hours is gouging.

I don't disagree with you, but that is irrelevant to Twodavez' assertion that the Internet in general should be free.

With the technology we have and still using the old ipv4. Until IPv6 really gets implemented i don't see a cost of internet going down.

edit: With ipv6 every person in the world can be born with an IP assigned to there name.

Arxon wrote: With ipv6 every person in the world can be born with an IP assigned to there name.

I don't like this idea. I know its not a serious thought, but it still rubs me the wrong way. Otherwise this a is very interesting conversation, and I really hate my Comcast bill even if I do get service beyond the specs of my service plan.

Hasbeen wrote:

Arxon wrote: With ipv6 every person in the world can be born with an IP assigned to there name.

I don't like this idea. I know its not a serious thought, but it still rubs me the wrong way. Otherwise this a is very interesting conversation, and I really hate my Comcast bill even if I do get service beyond the specs of my service plan.

I want a tshirt with my IP address on it. Like those old ICQ tshirts.

Arxon wrote: With the technology we have and still using the old ipv4. Until IPv6 really gets implemented i don't see a cost of internet going down.

edit: With ipv6 every person in the world can be born with an IP assigned to there name.

What does IPv6 have to do with the cost of bandwidth? If anything it'd make the price go up, since legacy gear doesn't support it and many techs will require additional training to implement it. Not only that, it's not immediately necessary. If anything, most organizations will use IPv6 public addressing and still have IPv4 subnets NAT behind them for all their internal address ranges. Looking at things from the perspective of security and privacy, having internal workstations with IPv6 addresses that are routable on the public Internet is a nightmare.

I guess i don't understand enough about the internet to be involved in this conversation, so i appologize in advance for my comments, especially if they are inaccurate. But to me if more and more people are using the internet, wouldn't that lower the cost? It's like a bulk discount type of thing

It's not free to host a website and keep it on the market, so i guess i thought that cost would help difray the end user, after all if i can't get to their site, what's the point of you hosting it?

Thanks for letting me interject my $.02...

Twodavez wrote: I guess i don't understand enough about the internet to be involved in this conversation, so i appologize in advance for my comments, especially if they are inaccurate. But to me if more and more people are using the internet, wouldn't that lower the cost? It's like a bulk discount type of thing

It's not free to host a website and keep it on the market, so i guess i thought that cost would help difray the end user, after all if i can't get to their site, what's the point of you hosting it?

Thanks for letting me interject my $.02...

Supply and demand, my friend. It's basic economics.

I got an A in economics and it seems like the supply is greater than the demand in this instance. The reason i see it this way is that there are lots of new sites every day. In that situation the price would come down because there is more available that is wanted...

Plus isn't technology always getting more efficient? meaning we can access more informaiton with less data transfer? or is that just in my head?

Great discussion we have going here.

I'm a contractor for a GIANT American company, and my job is to design and implement networks for any one of their hundreds of locations around the world. What I can tell you is, Internet gear ain't cheap. We're mostly a Cisco shop and we have sites that require $250,000 worth of routers/switches/firewalls/wireless/IDS. So I say this to try and put the Internet into perspective. Imagine what costs an ISP has: thousands and thousands of miles of cabling, techs with vans, local POPs, backbone fiber rings, routers, switches, command centers, etc, and that doesn't even scratch the surface on wireless. I'm not defending high prices for Internet, especially when Americans pay some of the highest prices and get the slowest service around the world. ISPs are tying to keep the 5% of HEAVY users from impacting the other 95% of normal users. Sites like youtube, pandora, and netflix, they really only stream around 128kbps, so they don't impact bandwidth too much. It's the ppl who download gigs and gigs of torrents all day that piss the ISPs off.

That's my $.02