The flip side of the coin: caps and “protocol agnostic” throttling. All residential tiers will get a 250GB usage cap per month (even the $140 one), with anyone above that running the risk of being cut off service-wise for a year ont their second violation. Yes, 250GB is a lot, however it’s reachable by such things as online backup and HD video streaming by multiple people. The secourse: get a business class connection, which won’t be too expensive for a 12/2 tier, which I’ll in all likelihood be switching to when the new speeds hit.

Of course, this cap assumes Comcast will be kind enough to let you hit it; you’ll probably get throttled into oblivion (or, rather, deprioritized into seething anger) before then unless you’re running your connection at full tilt when nobody else is online. Basically, Comcast’s new system, which is technically “protocol agnostic” is in reality a huge slam for anything latency-sensitive (voice over IP, gaming, video streaming and even, to some extent, web surfing). Here’s the way it works:

1. Cable node is congested (whatever “congested” means I’m not sure…apparently the node I’m on becomes congested at night but worked just fine until the new system came online)
2. Customer uses more than 70% of their rated download or upload speed for 15 straight minutes (on higher-speed tiers in DOCSIS 3 territory this is hard to do, but here an HD video stream or an online backup will do the trick, not to mention anything P2P-related)
3. Comcast’s system deprioritizes customer’s traffic behind everyone else’s who hasn’t “broken the rules”, leading to huge spikes in latency and “jitter”, or variance in latency…which makes web surfing painful any any realtime activity unusable other than IM…more on this later
4. Customer drops to 50% or below usage of their connection over a 15 minute period
5. Comcast re-prioritizes customer’s traffic

I thought the system wasn’t going to be too horrible. After all, Comcast said that deprioritization would only mean that, if the data “bus” was full your packets might need to wait a few buses (each “bus” is 2 ms from the next one) before getting on the bandwidth bandwagon. Even 50 buses would only delay communication one-tenth of a second (this is actually quite big in terms of cable connectivity, but let’s ignore that for the moment).

The problem: Comcast’s “bit buses” appear to be running on RTD; I figured out my traffic was being deprioritized when web browsing became almost unusable and latency to the first hop of COmcast’s network skyrocketed to several hundred, or even a few THOUSAND, milliseconds. To put som eperspective to this madness, Comcast’s normal cable first-hop latency is somewhere between 5 and 15 ms, and Qwest interleaed (high-latency) DSL, which is standard fare in these parts, is around 45 ms. Cell phones on 3G have first-hop latencies of 80-120 ms. Satellite has first-hop latencies of between 500 and 1200 ms. So, when your traffic is deprioritized, your connection may well go right into the crapper. Granted, the conditions for throttling had been met on the upload side due to BitTorrent, but that the cable node was congested was news to me. Guess any activity on my part during any “peak” time does that to Comcast’s rather outdated coaxial cable network.

One more thing: upload and download are throttled separately, so theoretically you can have one way deprioritized and the other not. The problem is that internet communications are a two-way street in 99% of cases, even if you’re downloading web pages. You have to make a request for a server to give you a file, and you have to make a response to make sure that the server delivered the file correctly. Guess what happens when you get throttled on the upstream side (highly likely if you’re doing online backup, for example)? Those acknowledgments take a little closer to forever to go through the inter-pipes, and you end up with a connection that couldn’t even win in a midwinter race against gooey molasses.

So, anyway, Comcast will be out with higher speed tiers relatively soon, despite the relative lack of competition from Qwest on the front of decent internet speed. Maybe it’ll mean that people will be throttled less fequently, since heavier users will supposedly switch to DOCSIS 3 plans which will spread their usage over three cable channels instead of one, thus creating a bit more capacity…aside from the fact that three channels are better than one for said heavy users. Still, when Lafayette, Louisiana is running fiber right and left, even Comcast’s newest developments look downright pathetic. Qwest? No fiber plans anytime son, and their fastest speed tier is effectively 17 Mbps down, 700 kbps up, which Comcast pretty much matches right now on the business class side of things, no network upgrades required.

Not that I dislike upgrades…if Comcast’s nodes are congested here, by golly fix ‘em, by hook or (preferably not) by crook!

In ongoing coverage of Comcast’s capping and throttling of internet traffic (search this blog for “Comcast” for my previous righteous diatribes on the subject), the company is now softening their language in the face of massive backlash from the more vocal consumers, who might actually be affected by the capping and throttling.

The crux of what they said is twofold. One, that Comcast will rescind the cap if enough people complain. Two, that caps may rise when their new DOCSIS 3.0 system, which boasts significantly more capacity per cable system than the current 1.1 and 2.0 equipment, is deployed.

Personally, it looks like the former impetus will outdo the latter; the longer Comcast’s network managment practices are kept in the limelight, the more vulnerable the company is to competition, who have merely to say “No caps” to grab internet customers away. As such, if the media buzz continues long enough, Comcast has to placate everybody by raising, or eliminating, caps and network managment policies, replacing them with equipment upgrades at a higher rate than what they’re doing now. This is a good thing.

The latter promise could, or could not, be something that will actually happen. It is true that Comcast is already testing the new DOCSIS 3.0 technology, which increases last-mile capacity by a factor of three or more, in Minneapolis, MN, with more cities to come. The speeds attained by the equiment (50 megabits per second download, 5 megabits per second upload) are phenomenal, particularly compared with what’s available right now. However, the current price of that service is $150 per month, and there’s no mention that the service won’t be capped just like the slower variants Comcast is selling. As it stands right now, the test rollout is effectively giving you a high performance car on the Autobahn with a gas tank that’s half full…and the threat that, if you empty the tank, you lose the car.

Nonetheless, the additional capacity, which should be rolled out over all of Comcast’s footprint in the next year or two, would provide more bandwidth to the cable system, allowing more capacity to flow to subscribers at home. Whether Comcast actually passes on the capacity to customers in the form of higher caps and less invasive throttling practices is uncertain. They’ll certainly offer faster speeds (from their speed test website 12 Mbps, 22 Mbps and 50 Mbps seem likely tiers) but, in all honesty, most servers can barely deliver at 15 Mbps over the internet, and if there are caps higher speeds are a moot point to the power users that would take advantage of those tiers.

In any case, Comcast isn’t going to do anything about their policies, which will be set in motion in just a few days, unless people complain about it. And keep complaining, to the point that the average customer switches to something else for internet. As long as this retrograde motion of internet capability continues, there need to be people pointing out that it’s unacceptable. Only then will things change for the better.

You may have seen my article a bit ago about Comcast instituting a 250GB per month cap on residential internet access as of October 1st. That date is now drawing near: next Wednesday.

The company has also said that they will throttle heavy users to “above DSL speeds” and, as of today, we know exactly what that means. Simply put, when Comcast’s network management software detects congestion on a cable channel (70% of available bandwidth being used up…download congestion is distinct from upload congestion but treated the same way) they turn on quality of service measures for that internet channel.

If it detects that a user is using more than 70% of their provisioned bandwidth for fifteen minutes straight, that user’s internet traffic is placed at a lower priority than everyone else’s. When bandwidth usage dips below 50% of the advertised service level for a fifteen minute period, this Quality of Service (QoS) sanction is lifted.

The practical application of this system is as follows: Comcast’s current cable channels, using DOCSIS 2.0 technology, can hold 38 Mbps of download traffic and 30 Mbps of upload traffic. Each channel is divided among around 275 subscribers. Before you wonder how such massive oversubscription works at all without bringing everyone’s internet to a crawl, realize that not everyone is going to be using, or max’ing out the bandwidth on, their connection at the same time, generally speaking. On the other hand, such recent developments as high definition internet video have rendered this much oversubscription a tenuous model. Hence the need to manage traffic when either a lot of customers go online (during “peak hours”, after school and work) or when a significant minority of customers want to watch online video.

The results of the QoS (Quality of Service) change? If the network is really congested and you get reassigned, gaming and voice or video chat may well become untenable propositions. Downloads may also slow down by a good bit, until you get out of the “time out” window. To be fair, satellite providers have been doing this foolishness for years, with 24-hour cap windows instead of 15-minute ones, but on the other hand they haven’t placed restrictions like these in addition to outright caps. Belt and suspenders, anyone?

The math works out this way: if you’re on the lower-tier connection (you’re on it if you have a regular bundle, or if you’re paying less than $60 for internet outside of your promotional period) your 15-minute limit, when the cable system is using more than 26.6 Mbps down or 21 Mbps up of traffic on your channel, is 472.5 MB for downloads, or just 78.75 MB for uploads. These may seem like large numbers, but a half-hour HD video show or a large application download can take out the download limit in under ten minutes (helped along by Comcast’s PowerBoost technology) and a video upload or even some photos will put you in the penalty box, though uploads have a much harder time being saturated at the cable system level than the more oversubscribed downloads. To get out of the QoS downgrade, you’d have to keep your traffic under 3 Mbps down or under 500 kbps up for 15 minutes, for a total transfer in that period of 337.5 MB or 56.25 MB uploaded. If you’re on the premium tier of service around here, your limit is 5.6 Mbps down, 1.4 Mbps up. Thresholds by those calculations run around 630 MB down (not quite enough for a Linux CD image, let alone a DVD image) and 157.5 MB uploaded (pick another time to upload your photos from that geology expedition you went on). To get back to normal, your thresholds are 450 MB downloaded and 112.5 MB uploaded in 15 minutes.

You’re reading this right: in congested time periods Comcast will go out of their way to penalize you for using the advertised speed of your connection for any extended period of time. Of course it’s convenient for them because they don’t have to mess with putting in new infrastructure, but it’s highly annoying, to say the least, for people who have paid good money for their internet, only to be capped and throttled (lesser of two evils, pick any two).

Of course, this throttling will be network-neutral…at least that’s what Comcst has to do to keep from getting into hot water with the FCC again…but on the other hand Comcast never seems to have a problem giving people all the cable TV they could possibly desire, provided you pay for it. Just goes to show that the current cable architecture wasn’t really made for internet, and Comcast isn’t willing…at all…to even try to put a solution to this problem.

One more thing: these network management processes won’t work all the time, especially in areas where plenty of people are streaming video online. A few dozen video streamers running at a megabit or two per second would fly under the radar for Comcast’s network management but still bring the cable node to the point of complete congestion. Or, taken from another angle, I could download a CD image at full speed, thus for whatever reason puting Comcast’s cable system beyond the “congested” threshold. I’m then knocked down a QoS level, so I can’t even do low-bandwidth stuff like VoIP reliably when the neighbors decide to start streaming HD video.

Fortunately, at the moment it looks as though generally my cable system isn’t reaching the congestion threshold, but during the daytime it gets close…and when it crosses below 11.4 Mbps of free bandwidth, effective soon, network management will make me that much less inclined to keep Comcast as my internet service. The problem? The alternatives: none at the speed Comcast is offering.

First off, you may have realized by now that high speed internet around here isn’t very competitive. Qwest has lower-end access starting at $40; Comcast has higher-end access starting at $55. That’s pretty much end-of-story. If there was true competition you could probably get free installation from Comcast for high-speed internet. As it stands, it is $49 for the installation, $3 a month (or around $60 out-of-pocket) for the modem, $40-$100 for a wireless router in addition to the monthly fees.

Second, if Comcast wants to have a set overage for people, why not go whole-hog and bill by the bit utility-style? Oh, I forgot, they aren’t regulated. If they did, a $20 service fee plus maybe ten cents per gigabyte would be standard fare, and I wouldn’t complain a bit. Speeds would be capped only by network congestion and technical impedance and the world would be a happy place. That isn’t happening yet. Neither is "committed-rate billing" where you are actually guaranteed X speed on your internet connection, at MINIMUM, for a specific price, with no bandwidth caps. Instead, Comcast and Qwest give you "up to" speeds which on Qwest can never be reached and on Comcast can usually be reached or exceeded, but are not by any stretch of the imagination guaranteed. But seriously, why does Comcast have to both limit my data transfer ability by speed AND by amount transferred? It’s the analog to setting a speed limit AND limiting how many miles you go on the road to 55 mph and 3,800 miles per month. Sure, most people won’t travel that much in a month, but heavy commuters, who spend forty-five minutes each way on the road, might bump up against the limit. Or, heaven forbid, you actually take a road trip!

Also, what’s with the “business class” baloney? A business cable connection generally costs more money for less speed than a residential connection (though sometimes you get more speed as well) so Comcast might stop pestering you about bandwidth usage. It also provides an excuse for them to say “you’re putting ads on your blog, which you’re editing over our connection; you need to upgrade to our twice-as-expensive business service”. Make a real distinction between the service levels quality-wise (definite, but higher, caps maybe, or the ability to host servers that a residential connection doesn’t have, or a static IP address) and maybe people will pay for business-class features. But, on the other hand, some businesses, whose data needs aren’t great, could probably survive on a residential connection. I’m serious when I say that I alone probably use more bandwidth per month than everyone on my former high school’s network, combined. Then again, I’m also paying more for my internet than they are for their slower business DSL connection. Though their connection…wait for it…isn’t capped!

Another solution to this dilemma of caps: run another wire, get another account. The problem is whether Comcast will even do that. Also, around here a business class connection can be had for $90 a month, less than the price of two residential connections on the lower tier. Plus, my apartment has a single cable jack, and I don’t think Comcast would be willing to put in another one without charging me an arm and a leg.

Also, what’s this I hear about Comcast not providing a bandwidth meter to their customers? I have a theory about that: they slapped the 250GB cap on service just to give people a high number, but didn’t actually change anything in their infrastructure. What they probably do is look for congested cable loops and then hone in per-user to see who is causing the problem. A 250GB user would average about 768k in downloads and uploads 24/7 so they could probably spot that person relatively easily and deal with them however they pleased. So you could get away with high bandwidth usage for awhile, until Comcast sees you. On the other hand, one warning and you’re barred from Comcast for a year. About that bandwidth meter, there are a few things you can do about the problem of Comcast not providing one. If you have a common wireless router, you can “flash” it relatively easily to the DD-WRT firmware (available at www.dd-wrt.com), which includes a bandwidth meter. If you don’t want to give up special router functionality (I just got a new router that I can hook up a hard disk to with the stock firmware, but can’t without much effort when using DD-WRT), you’ll need to download a utility onto your computer such as NetMeter. On the Mac, there is a built-in bandwidth meter, but it doesn’t discriminate between on- and off-network usage. I’m still looking for an option that’ll monitor everything correctly. Hopefully, Comcast will come out with one due to the uproar about them not doing so. Heck, most ISPs that are smaller than Comcast who limit traffic at least have a way you can check on it! Though I must say that the meter-less cap will have an impact on customers; they’ll be so afraid of the cap that they won’t use their internet connection as much as they are now, even with the reassurance that “average users” who are checking e-mail and a few websites each day only use 2-3 GB of data per month. Alarmism is good for network congestion, unfortunately.

Another thing: if Comcast makes the misstep of allowing some internet-based services (note that I said internet-based. More on that in a second) to skirt around their cap, they’ve just violated Net Neutrality principles, something that they just got in a bit of hot water about from the US government. That also means that, around here at least, you’re looking at between 20 and 25 cents per gigabyte, for EVERY gigabyte of data sent or received over the connection. In comparison, datacenter internet goes for as little as $5 per megabit, and that megabit over one month translates to 324 gigabytes each way. Educational networks cost even less per megabit. When everything is calculated out, Comcast’s internet costs 16 times per gigabyte what those data center network ports cost. That’s ridiculous.

One last item: when I was talking about on- and off-network bandwidth, I was mainly referencing Comcast’s "Digital Voice" service. While I detest the fact that the service runs around $40 per month, it does have a few advantages. First, traffic never leaves Comcast’s network, something that can’t be said of my own VoIP provider (which is one-thirtieth the cost, MagicJack). Second, you get battery backup for the service. But it is this first point that is important: by staying on-network, Comcast has a halfway-legiitimate reason not to charge for that traffic. Then again, VoIP isn’t exactly a traffic hog: 3500 minutes of talking is less than 4.75 GB of traffic. Still, it’s something to think about; more and more traffic may well make its way closer to network centers to get around caps, though as this becomes the case net neutrality is compromised in a big way, making the internet a series of fractured communities. In the immortal words of captioned kitties everywhere: DO NOT WANT.

In conclusion, Comcast’s cap is backwards now, and will become even more backwards when HD video over the internet becomes mainstream (it’s just getting started right now, and 125 hours of content would sink the cap on my connection without a second thought). Of course, it could be argued that Comcast is really only protecting their interests in cable TV, but that would seem even less nice, wouldn’t it? Please, please let the cap go away. Or at least give me a data transfer measurement tool.