Current News |
Charging by the Byte to
Curb Internet Traffic
Saturday June 14, 11:35 pm ET
By BRIAN STELTER
Source:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/15/technology/15cable.html
Some people use the Internet simply to
check e-mail and look up phone numbers.
Others are online all day, downloading
big video and music files.
For years, both kinds of Web surfers
have paid the same price for access. But
now three of the country’s largest
Internet service providers are
threatening to clamp down on their most
active subscribers by placing monthly
limits on their online activity.
One of them, Time Warner Cable, began a
trial of “Internet metering” in one
Texas city early this month, asking
customers to select a monthly plan and
pay surcharges when they exceed their
bandwidth limit. The idea is that people
who use the network more heavily should
pay more, the way they do for water,
electricity, or, in many cases,
cellphone minutes.
That same week, Comcast said that it
would expand on a strategy it uses to
manage Internet traffic: slowing down
the connections of the heaviest users,
so-called bandwidth hogs, at peak times.
AT&T also said Thursday that limits on
heavy use were inevitable and that it
was considering pricing based on data
volume. “Based on current trends, total
bandwidth in the AT&T network will
increase by four times over the next
three years,” the company said in a
statement.
All three companies say that placing
caps on broadband use will ensure fair
access for all users.
Internet metering is a throwback to the
days of dial-up service, but at a time
when video and interactive games are
becoming popular, the experiments could
have huge implications for the future of
the Web.
Millions of people are moving online to
watch movies and television shows, play
multiplayer video games and talk over
videoconference with family and friends.
And media companies are trying to get
people to spend more time online: the
Disneys and NBCs of the world keep
adding television shows and movies to
their Web sites, giving consumers
convenient entertainment that soaks up a
lot of bandwidth.
Moreover, companies with physical
storefronts, like Blockbuster, are
moving toward digital delivery of
entertainment. And new distributors of
online content — think YouTube — are
relying on an open data spigot to make
their business plans work.
Critics of the bandwidth limits say that
metering and capping network use could
hold back the inevitable convergence of
television, computers and the Internet.
The Internet “is how we deliver our
shows,” said Jim Louderback, chief
executive of Revision3, a three-year-old
media company that runs what it calls a
television network on the Web. “If all
of a sudden our viewers are worried
about some sort of a broadband cap, they
may think twice about downloading or
watching our shows.”
Even if the caps are far above the
average users’ consumption, their mere
existence could cause users to reduce
their time online. Just ask people who
carefully monitor their monthly
allotments of cellphone minutes and text
messages.
“As soon as you put serious uncertainty
as to cost on the table, people’s
feeling of freedom to predict cost dries
up and so does innovation and trying new
applications,” Vint Cerf, the chief
Internet evangelist for Google who is
often called the “father of the
Internet,” said in an e-mail message.
But the companies imposing the caps say
that their actions are only fair. People
who use more network capacity should pay
more, Time Warner argues. And Comcast
says that people who use too much — like
those who engage in file-sharing —
should be forced to slow down.
Time Warner also frames the issue in
financial terms: the broadband
infrastructure needs to be improved, it
says, and maybe metering could pay for
the upgrades. So far its trial is
limited to new subscribers in Beaumont,
Tex., a city of roughly 110,000.
In that trial, new customers can buy
plans with a 5-gigabyte cap, a
20-gigabyte cap or a 40-gigabyte cap.
Prices for those plans range from $30 to
$50. Above the cap, customers pay $1 a
gigabyte. Plans with higher caps come
with faster service.
“Average customers are way below the
caps,” said Kevin Leddy, executive vice
president for advanced technology at
Time Warner Cable. “These caps give them
years’ worth of growth before they’d
ever pay any surcharges.”
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.
Even services like Skype and Vonage that
use the Internet to transmit phone calls
could help put users over the monthly
limits.
Time Warner would not reveal how many
gigabytes an average customer uses,
saying only that 95 percent of customers
use under 40 gigabytes each in a month.
That means that 5 percent of customers
use more than 50 percent of the
network’s overall capacity, the company
said, and many of those people are
assumed to be sharing copyrighted video
and music files illegally.
The Time Warner plan has the potential
to bring Internet use full circle, back
to the days when pay-as-you-go pricing
held back the Web’s popularity. In the
early days of dial-up access, America
Online and other providers offered
tiered pricing, in part because audio
and video were barely viable online.
Consumers feared going over their
allotted time and bristled at the idea
that access to cyberspace was billed by
the hour.
In 1996, when AOL started offering
unlimited access plans, Internet use
took off and the online world started
moving to the center of people’s daily
lives. Today most Internet packages
provide a seemingly unlimited amount of
capacity, at least from the consumer’s
perspective.
But like water and electricity, even
digital resources are finite. Last year
Comcast disclosed that it was
temporarily turning off the connections
of customers who used file-sharing
services like BitTorrent, arguing that
they were slowing things down for
everyone else. The people who got cut
off complained and asked how much
broadband use was too much; the company
did not have a ready answer.
Thus, like Time Warner, Comcast is
considering a form of Internet metering
that would apply to all online activity.
The goal, says Mitch Bowling, a senior
vice president at Comcast, is “ensuring
that a small number of users don’t
impact the experience for everyone
else.”
Last year Comcast was sued when it was
disclosed that the company had singled
out BitTorrent users.
In February, Comcast departed from that
approach and started collaborating with
the company that runs BitTorrent. Now it
has shifted to what it calls a “platform
agnostic” approach to managing its
network, meaning that it slows down the
connection of any customer who uses too
much bandwidth at congested times.
Mr. Bowling said that “typical Internet
usage” would not be affected. But on the
Internet, “typical” use is constantly
being redefined.
“The definitions of low and high usage
today are meaningless, because the
Internet’s going to grow, and nothing’s
going to stop that,” said Eric Klinker,
the chief technology officer of
BitTorrent.
As the technology company Cisco put it
in a recent report, “today’s ‘bandwidth
hog’ is tomorrow’s average user.”
One result of these experiments is a
tug-of-war between the Internet
providers and media companies, which are
monitoring the Time Warner experiment
with trepidation.
“We hate it,” said a senior executive at
a major media company, who requested
anonymity because his company, like all
broadcasters, must play nice with the
same cable operators that are imposing
the limits. Now that some television
shows are viewed millions of times
online, the executive said, any
impediment would hurt the advertising
model for online video streaming.
Mr. Leddy of Time Warner said that the
media companies’ fears were overblown.
If the company were to try to stop Web
video, “we would not succeed,” he said.
“We know how much capacity they’re going
to need in the future, and we know what
it’s going to cost. And today’s business
model doesn’t pay for it very well.”
|
|
|
|