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For the past 7 months or so, its been known that my current ISP, Time Warner Cable, was investigating implementation of severe bandwidth caps on the internet services they provide. I’ve kept an eye on such news, as it would likely concern me greatly in the future were it to actually happen.

Here’s the numbers[1]:

“…tiers will range from $29.95 a month for relatively slow service at 768 kilobits per second and a 5-gigabyte monthly cap to $54.90 per month for fast downloads at 15 megabits per second and a 40-gigabyte cap.”

Those numbers are absurd, and they know it. What has interested me, though, is what my own usage was. Until lately, I had no method of measuring this. By extension, asking all subscribers to limit their internet usage to such low levels when they cannot meaningfully quantitate what their usage requirements are is a giant disservice to all subscribers.

Not quite a month ago I updated the firmware on my router, which runs DD-WRT. (Which reminds me, I need to update again to grab that DNS cache poisoning fix). This update included persistent metrics for bandwidth usage. In the span of 26 days, I have received 42.4GB and sent 24.85GB for a grand total of 67.25 GB. Extrapolated to a full 31 day month, I would have overshot the highest cap they mention with a solid 80.19GB, TWO TIMES their highest service level.

In this 26 days I have:

1. Used IRC.
2. Read RSS feeds.
3. Watched youtube videos.
4. Torrented a couple TV shows a week. This has dropped off toward the end of the month, as Doctor Who completed for the year and I finally got caught up on it.
5. Watched a couple TV shows on adultswim.com a week.
6. Purchased 5 albums from amazon.com.
7. Purchased 1 game and two expansion packs from Steam. This alone added 8GB to my total.
8. Browsed the web as usual.
9. Done the email thing.
10. Installed apps on my phone over wifi.
11. Infrequently used VPN for working from home.

I have not:

1. Downloaded any Linux ISOs. This is a common enough activity for me, though, and a 1:1 ratio of a DVD ISO torrent would nail 10GB on to the allowed cap. I did download the ELDK one time, though, so that would contribute 5GB to my total.
2. Updated my linux install(s) as often as I should. Currently 200MB of updates are ready to be installed on my Desktop. Patching all of my computers (3 at the moment) could easily chew through 2 or 3GB of downstream bandwidth.

An interesting data point: Over the course of three days in the month (after I bought that game from Steam), my usage dropped dramatically. I was booted into Windows, and spent all my computer time playing Civ4 with a bit of light web browsing. During this time, my daily usage was around 200MB, being comprised of SSH traffic to my server box (from myself and up to 3 other people), the usual amount of IRC traffic, AIM, and the occasional foray into web browsing. For most purposes I was NOT using the internet at all, but my bandwidth usage would have gone over the cap TWC allows for their $30 a month plan by 1GB if extrapolated to a 31 day month.

It is painfully obvious that the proposed caps are entirely inadequate for the needs of a technically-minded subscriber such as myself, and it seems that the tiers are comprised of ridiculous pairings of speed caps and total usage caps.  The $30 tier allows for 5GB usage with a rate limit that would allow for around 245GB, so you’re allowed to use 2% of its capability without being charged more. That’s about 15 hours in a 31 day month at max download speed, and a $270 ballpark maximum bill for service and bandwidth overage.  For the top tier it gets even weirder. The $55 teir cap is 40GB, and its capable of handling around 4.7TB at maximum usage. That’s a generous 0.8% usage capability without having to pay more money, or a solid 6 hours of pegging the modem. The ballpark maximum bill on this teir is a comical $4919.It would be cheaper at that point for them to just charge you for the bandwidth at $1 a GB and to hell with the 40GB ‘allowance’.

I can’t help but think that this is a move to keep TWC’s additional services, being cable TV and telephone service, competitive.  If this was not the case, and their problem was actually congestion, one would expect to see caps that are closer to being in line with bandwidth costs. $1/GB minus some margin for profit would mean that TWC would be hemorrhaging cash with their current ‘all you can eat’ plans now. They aren’t ($1.2B net earnings in 2007).  If you assume its to discourage use of the internet as replacements for traditional media and communications to protect their other sources of income, though. It makes more sense. Caps this low make internet media useless, and free-or-inexpensive 3rd party VOIP a costly choice. This will likely become a problem for TWC, though, as protectionist business measures are inferior to trying to innovate to maintain a bottom line. Screw the customer, and the customer will buy from someone who sees that screwing as an opportunity to make a dollar. Ask IBM about this.

The worst portion of this whole idea is that it asks non-technical people to measure something that they do not have the skills to quantify, under penalty of unexpected fees. This more than anything degrades the quality of the service provided by TWC, as it’s a return to the days of time-metered dial-up accounts, only substitute willful internet connection with bandwidth usage that the average subscriber does not and likely cannot understand. “Oh, windows tells me there’s a new security update! I don’t have the bandwidth left this month to download it, though, so I’ll just wait until next month.” Meanwhile, the unpatched but now known exploit is used to compromise their machine with some spam virus, making the internet suck more for everyone else and more importantly costing the subscriber additional money.

The only way you solve the patch download issue has rather large ramifications. Like emergency services, the ISP could not track OS patching traffic. Its pretty simple, just don’t count the bytes when they come from Microsoft, right? Well, no. This drives would drive the ISP into the arena of being a content-arbiter, as:

1. There are a number of operating systems by a number of vendors. Some ISPs try to claim they only support Windows or OSX. Support, however, is a far cry from ‘blessing’ MS and Apple update traffic and charging for Ubuntu, Suse, FreeBSD, and the functionally infinite number of OS vendors that exist. Right now using Linux on any ISP is both possible and easy. They just refuse to fix problems with your random choice of OS. This is a reasonable, though somewhat annoying, practice.  Blessing patch traffic on a functionally arbitrary basis is at least a violation of net neutrality (which the FCC has recently had favorable opinions on while slapping Comcast on the wrist), and at worst has the drippings of activity that would raise anti-trust concerns. (I’m the last person who asks the government for intervention into civil matters like this, but for all the negative government activity surrounding business regulation at least there’s the occasional possibly favorable outcome.)
2. Not all security patches are from OS vendors. In fact, it’s more common to get upstream patches from vendors on Windows than Linux, so this problem is already a giant issue when you ignore the geeks. Another, larger, functionally infinite set of sources for ‘blessed’ traffic.
3. Due to the two previous concerns, white-listing this activity is a difficult, perhaps unsolvable, problem without requiring massive investment into quantifying and ‘partnering’ with blessed vendors. Nobody wants this.
4. Content arbitration like this makes your service useless to the sort of user who will pay for $55 a month internet.

The other issue with having to measure traffic as the uninformed user is that they do not have enough understanding about what goes on with their computer that comprises the amount of bandwidth they use. They don’t understand how much traffic is sent from a machine doing odd things like synchronizing the system’s clock, checking for updates, doing DNS lookups, pinging their mail server to see if mail is there, keeping connections open with IM service providers, etc., let alone how to reduce bandwidth usage from active internet use. I can’t see it being a good idea to ask these (currently profitable) subscribers to take the time to monitor and adjust this activity when its constraints are unknown to them under penalty of a larger bill.

All of this means that if my ISP expands this practice, I will not subscribe to their service any longer. I can take my $550/year to a number of other telecoms, and I’m sure they’d be glad to have it.

This entry has gotten to be gigantic so I think I’ll cap it (:D) here, just in case someone reading this only has 5GB to play with a month in the future.

1: Quoted from the AP who quoted a TWC representative. The AP are idiots who are trying to scam fair use in citations, and thus I will not link back to them. I don’t care for their reporting or their incorrect view of copyright law. The facts, however, are useful.