As most of you know, Comcast, AT&T and other ISPs have been pressing the whole idea of tiered download caps. If you watch the news and believe the articles and videos, then you’re probably thinking that they are justified in their demands. I, on the other hand, being someone who is reasonably technically minded, know how these things work, and can see through to the greed and monopolistic thoughts driving the companies. I will try to explain this to you.
To start with, I’ll focus on infrastructure. When the Internet first gained massive popularity, you couldn’t even get the Internet in many places. Someone needed to bring the major lines close to the areas that didn’t have backbone internet piped to them. When they did this, they received huge amounts of money in the form of grants, from good old Uncle Sam. These grants were money received for improving the quality of life for the citizens in these Internet-deprived areas – and the providers do not need to pay this money back.
This is all fine and dandy, as it did serve its intended purpose. As the network grew, innovative products emerged, quickly saturating our modems and making content take ages to download. So they got more grants and made the pipes fatter.
Now the interesting thing about network hardware is that once it is in place, it doesn’t really cost very much in terms of throughput. It is like building a freeway – once the pavement is there, it handles cars and it doesn’t really cost much for how many cars traverse it, especially if they use quality materials. This debunks their complaints that the traffic generated is affecting them much compared to the amounts they charge.
Next, I’ll focus on the content delivery side. Everything you download is hosted on something called a “server,” which is called such because it “serves” the data you request for web-pages, programs, streams, and so-on. Anyone who operates a server knows that server hosts – the companies that have the computers that run these servers – charge the owner of the server for the amount of space they use for their files, plus per GB (gigabyte) for traffic that goes out of their server, whether it is web-pages, email, web-streams, etc. So every time you visit a page, view a video, or your computer checks for anti-virus or OS updates, the server owner pays the host. The server host also pays for their internet connection, usually by how many GB of data they upload, which they pass on to the consumer, the server owner. And they charge a little more than what they pay, because they want to make a profit. In this case, Netflix, a content provider, pays Level3 Communications, an ISP, for every movie you watch.
Now, I’ll focus on the consumer side, where most of us fit. Currently, customers pay for internet access in tiers – the faster your internet connection, the more you pay. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) charge you enough to make a fairly decent profit on top of the cost of maintaining the network, and upgrading it. If they didn’t, the shareholders of their stock would not be happy seeing their stock grow. Also, by controlling your connection speed, they control the total amount of data that you can download. If you can only download at a certain rate, then if you get that rate and factor in the time, they already have a set amount that you can theoretically download. If your ISP could not handle that traffic reasonably, then they would not offer such high speeds, because that would be self-defeating and hurt their reputation for the consumer, and in turn make stockholders very unhappy. If the ISPs were really at their limit, you would see massive slowdowns, and sites would time out or take ages to download – which in my experience is a very rare occurrence and usually is due to hardware failure – which is repaired quite quickly; or due to the customer's software - their browser, viruses, malware, poor system maintenance, etc.
So to tie all of this together, I’ll use Netflix. Netflix servers a LOT of movies (and you pay for them). They pay L3 Communications. You pay your ISP for your internet connection, probably one that can handle Netflix, so you can watch your favorite movies and TV episodes. No-one is losing money here.
Many ISPs are also TV service providers. For a good while now, TV and phone service has actually been streamed internally via the Internet, and converted to radio signals at a branch, and then it goes to your home through COAX, RJ11, etc. Now that many TV providers are also ISPs as well due to buy-outs/mergers, it makes more sense to just stream the Internet straight to the home, and let a box in the home convert it to TV format. So they are saving money.
Since most major ISPs are now also TV providers, they do not like Netflix (and similar services), as Netflix is their competitor. Generally Netflix is much more reasonably priced, and has the added benefit of not having advertisements pushed at you every 10 minutes. Considering how many people use Netflix, they are making a huge amount of money. Companies like Comcast, AT&T, Time Warner, and others would love to get a piece of Netflix’s pie, so they’ve started providing On-Demand services – but they’re generally still more expensive than Netflix. So Netflix continues to have more customers.
This does generate a good amount of traffic on the Internet as a whole, but at every point someone is paying for this. Netflix pays L3, you pay AT&T, and everyone is making money (except the end consumer who just pays). Comcast tried to charge Netflix for having traffic on Comcast’s network, but the government threw it out. So now AT&T, who also provides TV, is being sneaky about it. Instead of going after Netflix, who has the money to go to court with good lawyers and have it all dismissed, they are going after the consumer. They’re unrealistically saying that 2% use 20% of the bandwidth. If that were truly the case, there would be massive service interruptions for the other 98% -- which there haven’t been.
Now here is some interesting information, and I apologize in advance if it gets technical. AT&T is proposing a 150GB cap per household. The average connection speed for DSL/Cable is about 12Mb/s (Mega-bits per second, the standard for network speeds), which translates to about 1.5MB/s (Mega-Bytes per second, standard for storage space). Granted, you most definitely will not use 100% of your speed like this, but this bit is theoretical – if you were to use your internet connection at maximum capacity, you would reach your cap in this long:
• 1.5MB/s * 60 seconds => 90MB/m => 5.4GB/h
• 150GB / 5.4GB/h => 27.8 hours
Now generally you won’t be hitting your top speed all of the time, so this would be more of a total-use guide. Essentially you could download at top speed for 27.8 hours a month. Not too bad, until you factor in a few things.
Computers update software regularly (if configured properly), which can, during massive update periods or service pack releases, take over 200MB – per computer. Kids play games which require a good amount of data, generally consuming rates at or exceeding 35MB in an hour. Your family watches movies together – the typical movie is about 4-6GB compressed on DVD, but over a stream it is generally much more because it isn’t as highly compressed. Your wife and kid(s) both watch TV episodes, which are slightly smaller, until you count that there are many more episodes to watch.
Just let that all stew in your brain for a while, and you’ll quickly come to realize that capping our total download is not the way to go -- especially when you consider that the ISPs are already charging you for a total limit already. Also, I believe that they are implementing this strategy as an unfair restriction to services like YouTube, Netflix, and others like them, in an effort to force people into using their own paid services. This invites a monopolistic situation of unfair competition, which stifles innovation and productivity, restricts and/or eliminates jobs, and adds further complications to the already flagging American economy.
This also increases the threat to computers – and therefore the Internet as a whole, because many consumers will opt to not install important operating system (Windows, Linux, and Unix) and antivirus updates due to the costs.
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