GIGA WHAT, GIGA WHO
People will have to learn to put bandwidth into context. It's easy for a regular person to understand how much something costs if they're being charged by the hour. Understanding the cost of a unit of data is more difficult. You can understand that 1000 megabytes equals 1 gigabyte -- but without context that means very little.
At the same time, how will we accurately measure data transfer throughout an entire household? A family with multiple PCs (and children) will be hard to track. The New York Times does a good job summarizing a few common bandwidth hogs:
I can guarantee that Hulu, NetFlix, XBox 360, PlayStation 3, and the iPhone (not yet but probably soon) will create numerous "overage" headaches for families in the not-so-distant future. It's a lot like when food was first labeled with calories because people will have to understand the inherent cost of downloading content. It will cost a few bucks to download an HD movie, but it will also cost you a quarter (up to a buck) to the cable company. According to Business Week in 1996, most of AOL's revenue came from "monthly and hourly fees it charges members--$9.95 for the first five hours and $2.95 for each hour after that." With Comcast's 12 Mb connection, you could potentially download 5GB in an hour. Let's say they charge you $50/month with a 250 GB cap -- that hour of downloading was just $1. You're doing a little better than AOL in 1996 -- but who knows how the overages will compare. Keep in mind that the average internet bill was probably much less than the $50 we pay for broadband now.Casual Internet users who merely send e-mail messages, check movie times and read the news are not likely to exceed the caps. But people who watch television shows on Hulu.com, rent movies on iTunes or play the multiplayer game Halo on Xbox may start to exceed the limits — and millions of people are already doing those things.
Streaming an hour of video on Hulu, which shows programs like “Saturday Night Live,” “Family Guy” and “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart,” consumes about 200 megabytes, or one-fifth of a gigabyte. A higher-quality hour of the same content bought through Apple’s iTunes store can use about 500 megabytes, or half a gigabyte.
A high-definition episode of “Survivor” on CBS.com can use up to a gigabyte, and a DVD-quality movie through Netflix’s new online service can eat up about five gigabytes. One Netflix download alone, in fact, could bring a user to the limit on the cheapest plan in Time Warner’s trial in Beaumont.
STILL C.A.P.
I'm sure many of you are saying, "I'm no internet pirate" or "I live by myself". You won't reach the cap... yet. Even so, the cap combined with Moore's Law means that you're paying the same amount for something of diminishing value.
Your previously "unlimited" service is now "limited". The proposed limit or cap means that downloading a certain amount will result in an overage (obviously, further explanation below). Even so, your "unlimited" service actually was limited by the max speed of your connection (10 mb/s for my Time Warner connection) and because the connection is shared with other households (your combined speeds have a set limit).
If you weren't peeved by the idea of a cap, consider the fact that bandwidth costs less and less every day. Taken from Wikipedia, here's an excerpt on Moore's Law:
You know the way you see that "capacity ticker" before you log into GMail? You know how it's always going up? The cable companies aren't making any promises and don't expect them to adapt quickly. Even if less than 1% of users go over 250 GB of data transfer a month, who is to say that won't be normal in the near future? I bet there are a lot of households that use over 100 GB/month. Those people realistically have a chance of surpassing a 250 GB cap within the next year or two.Network capacity According to Gerry/Gerald Butters,[19][20] the former head of Lucent's Optical Networking Group at Bell Labs, there is another version, called Butter's Law of Photonics,[21] a formulation which deliberately parallels Moore's law. Butter's law[22] says that the amount of data coming out of an optical fiber is doubling every nine months. Thus, the cost of transmitting a bit over an optical network decreases by half every nine months. The availability of wavelength-division multiplexing (sometimes called "WDM") increased the capacity that could be placed on a single fiber by as much as a factor of 100. Optical networking and DWDM is rapidly bringing down the cost of networking, and further progress seems assured. As a result, the wholesale price of data traffic collapsed in the dot-com bubble. Nielsen's Law says that the bandwidth available to users increases by 50% annually.[23]
I think it's realistic to say that at least 5-10% of people will go over that limit (they might not surpass the limit EVERY month) in the near future. I think that number could be as high as 15%. The point is that the cable companies won't adapt to future usage. In any case, the cap will surely affect more than "less than 1% of users" in a year or two -- not quite as harmless as it sounds. I'm a seasoned internet user and downloader and I really couldn't tell you exactly how much I download. I'd guess between 100-150 GB, but it really does vary.
GOLD DIGGERS
Another problem with the cap is that it's indirectly anti-competitive. Back when AOL was pay-per-hour, it still had free areas. Time Warner and Comcast could do something very similar. Time Warner could offer CNN news clips without counting the download to the cap. At the same time, the cap will also encourage users to use DVR or On Demand since there is no added cost of these services. That also means that content creators will still have to find ways to get onto DVR/On Demand. It would be a lot harder to binge-watch a season of Lost or 24 if it eliminates 10-20% of your monthly download allotment. Translated into dollars, that's an extra $5 to $10 in "cost-to-download". That means it will be extremely difficult to achieve success comparable to broadcast/cable television... without also being on broadcast or cable television.
GUILTY CONSCIENCE
Exceeding the cap will have consequences beyond simple overage charges. Per Download.com, Comcast reserves the right to suspend your account for a year if you go over the cap twice in a six month period. What if there are no other high speed internet options in your area? What if you're locked into a one year contract? I think that's absurd. There are a million arguments against this move.
Time Warner and Comcast would both like to claim that this policy is designed to curb piracy. However, I would imagine that this will actually have the opposite effect. Pirates have always been experts at side-stepping connection and bandwidth issues. They used to split files so they could fit on floppy disks and so dropping your connection wouldn't cost you hours of wasted time. Pirates popularized file compression like ZIP & RAR and adopted compressed video formats like MPEG4 and DIVX/XVID. The same people conceived P2P file-sharing. Do you really think that ABC is going to figure out the best way to get you Lost before they do? Pirates will most likely optimize video for these caps over time. Hulu might be the new hotness -- but it still doesn't edge mininova or ThePirateBay by much in the traffic department.
Hulu, mininova, and ThePirateBay all have similar levels of traffic
What's the best way to avoid the cap? The simple answer: don't use the internet. That's actually not right. The best way to sidestep the cap is to avoid using YOUR internet. Back when AOL was charged per-hour, kids were phishing like it was going out of style. Now, they won't even have to phish. The same "less than 1%" that does all of the downloading will just figure out a way to hack everybody's wireless. Wonderful, isn't it? At least the first time you surpass the cap, you can just say "I think I was hacked" and avoid paying for it.
HATE IT OR LOVE IT
What are the solutions? There probably aren't many that make sense for both consumers and ISP's. There might be a way to wrap bandwidth cost into the cost of content, but you could only hit the big boys (media companies) with that one. Given their aversion to innovation, they'd prefer to let the ISP's play bad guy here. In my opinion, a lot of the solutions may already be here. The remaining potential solutions (that I can think of) go back to roots in piracy. This climate will create a host of new opportunities for file sharing and video compression. It also may force us to go back to the drawing board. Maybe people will create "download stations" that will quickly write DVDs or fill USB memory sticks. Because right now, the fastest way to transfer 8 GB to a consumer... is to overnight them a DVD. Fortunately, the US Postal Service's rates won't screw "less than 1%" of their customers.
