Comcast considering heavy usage surcharges

May 24 21:37 UTC 2002

http://www.freep.com/money/tech/comc24_20020524.htm

Comcast and AT&T's cable division (which are about to merge) say they're
probably going to start charging heavy users extra fees, in the future. 
AT&T's chairman notes that on their network 30% of the capacity is consumed
by only 1% of the subscribers.

I don't find this surprising, in fact I think it's pretty much inevitable. 
But it'll be interesting to see how it plays out.  It could be a bit of a PR
problem for Comcast if their competators don't quickly follow suit, but I
suspect they're eager to try this, too, and just don't want to be the first.

response 2 of 49:

May 25 06:30 UTC 2002

I believe it is being sued by one person for collecting information.
I don't recall that suit claims COMCAST actually sold the collected
information.  

response 4 of 49:

May 25 16:13 UTC 2002

        Knew it.

response 6 of 49:

May 26 15:51 UTC 2002

Comcast promised never to send me any more junk mail and a piece of it arrived
yesterday.  I doubt they are competent enough to store and retrieve info.

response 8 of 49:

May 26 22:47 UTC 2002

When heavy ISP users mostly used modems, there was the possibility that a user
could hog enough modem time that the cost of the ISP's phone line would be
more than the user was paying for the account, but it wouldn't have been much
more.  Some ISPs tried to charge heavy users extra, while others either
decided it was too much trouble to keep track of, or that they got better
sales by advertising unlimited use.  Some tried to have it both ways,
advertising unlimited use, and then making up excuses to go after heavy users
anyway.

The situation is a bit different with high speed connections.  There are no
longer modems to tie up, but the bandwidth is still expensive.  Available
bandwidth is great enough that the difference between a normal user and a 
user pushing multiple megabits of MP3s 24 hours a day is probably far more
significant than the difference between a half hour a day modem user and a
24 hour a day modem user.  For a modem-based ISP, if your modem pool fills
up all you have to do is add more modems and phone lines, a relatively minor
expense.  If a group of users manages to saturate a neighborhood's cable modem
infrastructure, does that require infrastructure upgrades out in the
neighborhood?  I don't know how scalable the current cable modem technology
is, so I'm not sure of the answer to that question.

In addition, ISPs a few years ago were mostly trying to increase market share,
assuming they'd figure out the financial part of it once they'd won the market
share battle.  Now ISPs are generally feeling a tremendous pressure to make
a profit -- no more money from investors seems to be forthcoming, so if they
run out of money they're gone.  If it costs them more to deal with these heavy
users, they presumably have a choice between raising the rates for the heavy
users a lot, or raising the rates for everybody, making the light users
subsidize the heavy users.

response 10 of 49:

May 28 02:46 UTC 2002

If a high speed internet provider wishes to sell X bit-per-second service to
Y customers, the amount of upstream bandwidth that is needed is X * Y bits
per second. Not some fraction of that in the hope that their customers aren't
going to take full advantage of it. Design for the Worst Case.

response 12 of 49:

May 28 15:26 UTC 2002

Or our road system.  Can you imagine what it would look like if we
assumed every single person would try to drive to, say, Meijer
simultaneously?

No one designs that way because it's inefficient and makes service
unacceptably expensive.  (That's why 'business' service is so expensive
-- they're assuming you *will* use all that bandwidth.)  Not even the
phone company designs that way.  If every single person in Ann Arbor
picked up their phone simultaneously and tried to make a call, not all
of them would get through.

response 14 of 49:

May 28 19:40 UTC 2002

That's one of the irritating things about lack of competition with many 
services these days.  <sigh>

response 16 of 49:

May 29 04:08 UTC 2002

Re #12:  Except with the huge bandwidth of optical fiber, we
really *can* let everyone on the Net, at full DSL or cable
speeds, at the same time.  We have more than enough fiber in
the ground.  The problem is the fiber is mostly dark.

The way to get this fiber lit is to stop companies like Comcrap
from artificially constraining the demand for bandwidth.

response 18 of 49:

May 29 13:17 UTC 2002

You may have noticed this already, but the bottleneck usually isn't your
Comcast bandwidth cap.  It's out farther -- probably Comcast's Internet
connection.  If they spend a lot of money (and raise your rates) to upgrade
it, it would just push that bottleneck out farther, probably to some
overloaded backbone in Chicago.  (That's usually where the bottleneck for my
DSL downloads is.)

response 20 of 49:

May 29 17:13 UTC 2002

Hmmm...Valerie and I share the net connection and spend a lot of time 
on the net, between work and this and that.  But I expect that we 
wouldn't count as a "heavy user".  Most of the time we are just typing 
stuff.  Hardly any MP3 or porn downloads.  Whether usage fees would bug 
me depends an awful lot on the fee structure.

response 22 of 49:

May 29 22:26 UTC 2002

My impression is that Internet backbone congestion is getting pretty rare at
this point, although I don't know about Ameritech's and Comcast's
infrastructure specifically.  For my PacBell DSL circuit, the bottleneck is
pretty definitely the 1.5Mb/s DSL circuit.  If you're having bottlenecks
elsewhere, reaching a variety of sites, it sounds like somebody's
oversubscribing things more than they should.

response 24 of 49:

May 30 18:02 UTC 2002

I can't speak for my employer here, so I probably need to stop discussing
this.