Limited Bandwidth
by Paul McGoldrick
When an ISP offers customers "Unlimited Bandwidth" for the hosting of their web pages we all know that is not what they actually mean. Bandwidth costs money, although those costs reduce daily, and any user who really clogs up an ISP's bandwidth will be told to either cut the material or just go away. Some ISPs don't mind as long as they only have a few users who are occupying 50 Gbyte and the remainder basically only have a family front page.
But what of the bandwidth you are using to download from the web over your dial-up, DSL or cable modem? Dial-up customers are probably never a problem because they simply cannot suck up bandwidth, but it is increasingly being reported that other users are being threatened with a cut-off in their service if they don't "behave" and restrict their usage.
While most of us complain loudly about spam and the time wasting effects it has on our lives the real bandwidth clog on e-mail servers does not represent the biggest problem for the ISPs. Their system bandwidth is being gobbled up by downloads of music, other peer-to-peer applications and streaming materials.
The worst affected, of course, are the cable companies. Those of us in the trade do not use cable modems because we understand perfectly well that with a single spigot at the head-end, and a multiplying base of users out there, there are only so many ways to divide the available, already limited, bandwidth. The same is true of the satellite services: keep dividing the bandwidth by adding users and service will always go spiraling down.
At least with DSL your bandwidth is really limited only by your reach from the CO and the type of modem or service level that you buy. The data coming to the switch is probably being pumped to your Telco at an OC-something rate.
So what constitutes a level of Internet use that will trigger a warning from your ISP? Nobody is saying at companies like Comcast, who have been issuing threatening letters and suspending services of what they themselves say is about 1% of their broadband customers. The company's terms of service say that users cannot represent an "unusually large burden" on the network -- at the sole discretion of Comcast, of course. To justify its position the company says that the 1% of warned customers collectively use 28% of the bandwidth available, and that 6% of their customers use 78% of the capacity.
So far, unlike broadband use in the UK, Australia and Canada, DSL has escaped any cap of bandwidth by the Telcos themselves because it is not their system burden, it's the ISPs' burden. The situation is different in other countries because the Telco is probably the ISP as well.
Earlier this year Cisco announced a number of new products for the cable industry to help them detect the heavy users -- which presumably explains Comcast's timing -- but at the rollout it was clear that Cisco expected the companies to use the tools to charge the heavy users more, or cut back the amount of bandwidth available to that group of identified hogs. The IOS (Internetwork Operating System) also allows the user to identify the type of application that the heavy user is working with so that some peer-to-peer applications could actually be blocked. Since then a couple of similar products have rolled out from other vendors.
Comcast was pre-shadowed with its threats by Cox Communications, who earlier in 2003 started imposing bandwidth caps on subscribers with an effective limit of 2 Gbyte per day per connection. This is obviously bad business because competing services, like DSL, can point to bandwidth caps in their marketing efforts.
But even worse for business is the cheek of a group of ISP managers who actually post their ranting about how they treat their customers. How about this for a message, which followed a discussion about playing games with ports to confuse the customers and how to limit p2p traffic:
"My clients are younger and much more adept at changing with the times. Power users have special requirements. My solution is to reason with the offenders and if that doesn't work, make them crawl for a while. They will get the picture. I have the ability to do it on a port to port basis though since each customer has his/her own port on a managed switch, so I can knock them down that way."
So much for the customer always being right. Remember, unlimited bandwidth
is like a free lunch. If you're really hungry get an explanation of what
you can really use for your web site and for your downloads.