A couple of weeks back I got a notice from my Internet service provider that I was using too much bandwidth and would have to curb my Internet usage or lose my account. My ISP is one of many who have imposed bandwidth caps (limits on how much data one can download). Comcast imposed one last fall (250GB) which was excoriated in the tech blogs.
Be happy, oh ye oppressed of Comcast. My cap is a paltry 100GB.
To get a sense of how ridiculous that is, on my 10mbps connection, I can use the full speed of my connection for just over 50 minutes per day during the month. Less than an hour. Split that between Amy and I, and you’ve got about 26 or 27 minutes per day for each of us.
But we’re just surfing the web, though, which uses virtually no bandwidth, right? Well, no. We stream movies from Netflix and Hulu. We download music. I play games online (a huge bandwidth hog). I download game demos. I blog. I can easily blow through 100gb in two weeks if I’m not paying attention. And why should I pay attention? When I purchased the service, it touted its being “unlimited.” Pshaw.
As bandwidth needs increased, providers ought to have come up with more bandwidth. Comcast took a lot of heat for limiting people to 250GB. I suspect they would have had a lower cap if they could have gotten away with it. Alas, my own provider is a nothing little Reading-area company. Our local phone company provides DSL without such a cap, but at half the speed. I’m considering switching despite that.
Then I came across this article today:
A report out today from Nielsen shows why Internet Service Providers and telecommunications equipment vendors are increasingly demonizing video. It consumes a lot of bandwidth, and could compete with an ISP’s existing video businesses, but the worst part is that it’s rapidly becoming more popular to the average consumer.
Duh. I could have told them that. They hardly had to pay for a report. Where have these guys been the last few years?
Two things are driving these trends: Better access to content in the form of PC-to-TV hardware and services like Hulu, NetFlix and iTunes HD downloads, and faster connection speeds that make downloading movies in HD possible.
These guys are rocket scientists, I tell you. The real explosion has been since 2005, and can be attributed (mostly) to a single source: the Xbox (and a year later, the PS3). These consoles were built to download and stream video directly from the Internet. Microsoft and Sony saw something that the cable companies and media companies didn’t: that consumers hate the current methods of transmitting video. Consumers want large amounts of content on demand. Cable’s attempts at providing it have mostly fallen flat.
Why the caps, then? Because a lot of the ISPs (including my own) provide their own video on demand because they are also cable companies. They’re using their leverage with bandwidth caps to keep people sucking down video through cable, even though that’s not what people want. And as most cable systems are single-provider (ie., you only have one company to choose from, with no competition) there is no free market to correct the cable companies’ attempts at keeping their faltering business model intact.
Since DSL is almost always a lesser choice (DSL technology is inherently less capable than cable, and always will be - again, for technical reasons), phone companies don’t themselves provide a significant market threat. The real solution is to break cable monopolies and offer new bandwidth solutions. Cable is pretty much tapped out in terms of the bandwidth it can support (theoretically it can support 30mbps, but everything I’ve seen so far seems to indicate that 15 is about the realistic limit for existing cable infrastructure). In other words, the long term solution is to switch from copper to fibre optic and convert the current cable system from the current model to one based on TCP/IP (ie., the Internet).