[Merged] NTL - New 1MB / 5GB Cap - should I subscribe @ 300k with NO CAP ?

[Salu]

I don't mind having a cap in principle. It's just that those that are imposing caps seem to impose caps that almost defeat the point of broadband.

A bit like having a helicopter but not being allowed to fly it above 100m or more than a mile. Or like having a porche with a petrol tank that only holds a pint of petrol. Or like having a TV that only allows you to change channel once every night.

The restrictions are silly.

The reason for restrictions I sort of understand. If there is a group of "abusers" that spend all day, every day downloading P2P music/warez and that has an effect on the provision of services to others then they should either pay a premium or be capped. The problem is the cap being so small. A 5GB cap can easily be used up. Downloading a couple of game demos would soon eat up a lot of your cap. The last thing you want to be doing it counting the pennies/watching the meter as you surf. It has a "bad" feel-good factor.

I went to a resturant the other day. It was a set price for a 3 course meal with a £2.50 charge for coffee/tea afterwards. I appreciate that not everyone would want coffee after a meal but it "felt" annoying. The cost of the coffee would be next to nothing.....couldn't they just include it in the price....or even add a £1 to the cost of the meal?

[Rone]

Very nicely put, there cant be too many who would disagree with that.

Tho i'm sure someone will, even if its only the Hoteliers and Restaurant Association.

[ian@huth]

Originally Posted by sheka

Interesting point to note is that with no traffic been generated to/from the Internet by my PC I would still manage to clock up 2.7GB of downloaded traffic a month.

With all the talk of caps and there more 'active' policing. Whether correct or not. I decided to investigate how much traffic I send/receive a period of time. Using tools such as MRTG/PRTG with the SNMP protocols I have managed to obtain traffic information from my SACM. This means I know exatcly how much traffic is coming in and going out from the 'cable side' of the SACM.

The observations are quite startling. They show that on average I receive 8192 bits a second. Not a great deal but if you do the maths:

8192 bits a second
8192 x 60 = 491520 bits a minute
491520 x 60 = 29491200 bits an hour (3MBytes)
29491200 x 24 = 707788800 bits a day (88MBytes)
707788800 x 31 = 21941452800 bits a month ( /8 to get 2742681600 Bytes or 2.742681600 GBytes)

Interesting that all the crud, viruses, network scanning, etc.....can amount to so much network traffic when as far as I am concerned by PC is doing nothing but polling the SACM for SNMP staistics.....

A lot depends at what level NTL measure your usage and what filters are used which could result in it being much less than your figures suggest.

[rdhw]

Originally Posted by sheka

I decided to investigate how much traffic I send/receive a period of time. Using tools such as MRTG/PRTG with the SNMP protocols I have managed to obtain traffic information from my SACM. This means I know exatcly how much traffic is coming in and going out from the 'cable side' of the SACM.

They show that on average I receive 8192 bits a second. (2.7 GBytes per month)

You need to distinguish between traffic received because it was addressed to you, and traffic received because it was broadcast or multicast, and received by everyone. In any scheme for volume based charging, only traffic addressed to you (or sent by you) would be accounted for.

[andrew_wallasey]

Originally Posted by Salu

I don't mind having a cap in principle. It's just that those that are imposing caps seem to impose caps that almost defeat the point of broadband.

A bit like having a helicopter but not being allowed to fly it above 100m or more than a mile. Or like having a porche with a petrol tank that only holds a pint of petrol. Or like having a TV that only allows you to change channel once every night.

The restrictions are silly.

The reason for restrictions I sort of understand. If there is a group of "abusers" that spend all day, every day downloading P2P music/warez and that has an effect on the provision of services to others then they should either pay a premium or be capped. The problem is the cap being so small. A 5GB cap can easily be used up. Downloading a couple of game demos would soon eat up a lot of your cap. The last thing you want to be doing it counting the pennies/watching the meter as you surf. It has a "bad" feel-good factor.

I went to a resturant the other day. It was a set price for a 3 course meal with a £2.50 charge for coffee/tea afterwards. I appreciate that not everyone would want coffee after a meal but it "felt" annoying. The cost of the coffee would be next to nothing.....couldn't they just include it in the price....or even add a £1 to the cost of the meal?

The problem is that the broadband market has got so stupidly competatively priced, it is not possible to continue to offer un-metered services like previously. It will not be long before all ISPs (ADSL and cable modem) have capped only service, BT have been talking about it for some time.

There is companies which are making litterally pennies each month per user because they are selling it so cheap. If they get users downloading 100s of GB each month it will force them to go out of business.

I agree with what you are saying in principal but in practice it is not sustainable to offer un-metered broadband. The main reason being those few selfish users to clock up 10-20gb of data as well as uploading huge amounts (p2p users). It is something stupid like 3% of an isps users account for 90% of data transfered.

[sheka]

Originally Posted by rdhw

You need to distinguish between traffic received because it was addressed to you, and traffic received because it was broadcast or multicast, and received by everyone. In any scheme for volume based charging, only traffic addressed to you (or sent by you) would be accounted for.

You do need to distinguish but isn't that easier said than done. That would mean that NTL 'monitoring equipment' would have to sit *in-line* of the data path for every user.

Say NTL can can do that (which they could but probably won't). How would they differentiate traffic. If someone sends me 1500 byte ping packets that my router drops. Would that count? Probably not. If a virus sends me stream upon stream of TCP SYN messages on port X would that count? They are addressed to my IP address? OK what if NTL say only 'conversations count' or established TCP sessions count as they know then that a device is talking to another device. What if I have BTs broadband telephone service (VoIP) that uses UDP and doesn't have the TCP 3 way handshake? or how about the next great application whatever that may be or the next virus that looks like a valid application.

NTL are probably going to use SNMP to gather interface statistics similar to what I have done already or netflow stats from the cisco UBRs. Netflow would allow NTL to see what IP application or ports are using the bandwidth as opposed to SNMP interface stats that only show how much bandwidth is in use and by whom. Connece the two sources together and you now know who is using all your bandwidth, how much they are using and what that usage comprises of.

Whether NTL can distinguish between 'intended traffic' and count it towards the traffic allowance and the 'un-intended' I don't know. We will all just have to wait and see.

[darren]

Originally Posted by Earwig

If you look at some of them they offer a choice of both "Capped" and "Uncapped" which at least gives you the choice.

If you are a heavy user (like myself) then I would opt for an uncapped service but pay a little extra.

This reminds me of when BT used to offer dialup internet with to pricing plans:

£11.75 for unlimited dialup a month
£4~ for 3 or 4 hours dialup a month
(You still had to pay for the phone call as well)

I wasn't long before I found out about Freeserve and moved immediately. I cannot believe we are going backwards.

I moved to broadband so I didn't have to clock watch all the time, now it feels I will have to start doing it again, like I have to do with my paid news server.

What is the point of having broadband and being able to download unlimited amounts of data (compared to dialup) if they then go and limit it.

I personally download new Linux builds fairly often, personally I think I will stick with my 750K connection and 'soft cap' until they force and upgrade then I shall go else where unless everyone else has followed suit.

I just wish broadband was still like it was when I joined, UNLIMITED.

It's very unlikely I would go over that limit, I don't download much or play online much any more. There is hardly any one in my area with broadband, so I don't think going a few MB's over the limit is really going to make them send me a letter (and also I wouldn't know better due to my age).

[Mauldor]

It all sounds simple to me, the Infratructure they have in place (CM and ADSL) is not suited to the task in hand, much like 56K modems had a limit on that the ISP required banks of modem thus made it cost more to provide the service and someone hogging a line 24/7 meant someone, sonwhere got a busy tone.

Its a pity there was not someway of managing the users in that heavy users all got bundled onto the same UBR, then all they would effect is each other. The problem we have is much like 56K modems, if enough people saturate the avil bandwidth, everybody else on that UBR Suffers with slow browsing, bad pings in game etc.

I think the percentage of people using P2P though is not as high as has been said, its easier to cram 500 people on one UBR (if thats possible) and pretend the bandwidth is scarce then providing a proper service and having 200 say on each UBR. The good thing is, if they do bring in a Hard Cap, it will free up the space for the people on each UBR as the people in the know will move on without even thinking about it. You got to remember that in the ADSL market, there is not just ONE providor to choose from - you have a braod choice in that respect.

As already said by a few - most if not all ADSL providors offer both a LITE package and a normal package - only the LITE one has the CAP in place. I would like someone who keeps saying ADSL will have caps soon to show me a ISP that has a CAP across there entire range please as NTL do... to my mind only NTL place a CAP on the entire package range - which is a tad short sighted in my eyes.

[Chrysalis]

Originally Posted by andrew_wallasey

The problem is that the broadband market has got so stupidly competatively priced, it is not possible to continue to offer un-metered services like previously. It will not be long before all ISPs (ADSL and cable modem) have capped only service, BT have been talking about it for some time.

There is companies which are making litterally pennies each month per user because they are selling it so cheap. If they get users downloading 100s of GB each month it will force them to go out of business.

I agree with what you are saying in principal but in practice it is not sustainable to offer un-metered broadband. The main reason being those few selfish users to clock up 10-20gb of data as well as uploading huge amounts (p2p users). It is something stupid like 3% of an isps users account for 90% of data transfered.

20gig isn't high usage, for a 1mbit+ connection, I sense NTL are starting to be arrogant like BT and feel invincible so they can treat customers how they want, but their reputation already isnt great and word gets around.

Also I dont like anyone who uses a modest amount been called a warez user, I use 30-60 gig a month usually, NTL are effectively telling me they can no longer provide what I want.

[Rone]

An interesting point was made on the news media last night, really late on.
The Film industry is looking at making DVD movies, downloadable over the net, you pay to d\load, [as is done with music] and burn it yourself, and they get a share of the market they are missing out on. I'm not going to start an argument on the price of music or dvds or software etc etc.
But it seems as speeds all over are getting to a point where all this is made possible, it might not happen.
We all want cheaper stuff, so it seems due to caps or bandwidth restrictions its going to come unstuck before it gets a chance.
I really dont know why speeds are being increased, ok so you can stream a bit of video faster, but web browsings almost as good at 300k as at 1.5.
If the system cannot cope, its hardly worth the new possibilities it should be opening up.

Originally Posted by Chrysalis

I use 30-60 gig a month usually, NTL are effectively telling me they can no longer provide what I want.

They are not telling you that at all. You are obviously forgetting that it has been said, that you do not have to pay the administration fee (£25) to have the new speeds with the usage restrictions attached and you can stay as you are. If you are talking about the old capping debate, we already know ntl do not strictly enforce the 1GB limit so you really do not have an issue if you still want what you have now.

[ian@huth]

Originally Posted by Rone

I really dont know why speeds are being increased, ok so you can stream a bit of video faster, but web browsings almost as good at 300k as at 1.5.

Speeds can be doubled to enable the user to get a download twice as fast rather than get twice as much.

Originally Posted by Chrysalis

20gig isn't high usage, for a 1mbit+ connection

That's a bit like saying 5,000 miles per month isn't high mileage for a Formulae 1 car. Think about it.

Originally Posted by Mick

They are not telling you that at all. You are obviously forgetting that it has been said, that you do not have to pay the administration fee (£25) to have the new speeds with the usage restrictions attached and you can stay as you are. If you are talking about the old capping debate, we already know ntl do not strictly enforce the 1GB limit so you really do not have an issue if you still want what you have now.

It is unclear that the existing soft cap will remain when the new speeds are introduced. I doubt that it will.

[th'engineer]

Just an observation if you dont like the idea of a cap get another subscriber the last thing that NTL want is bandwidth hogs .

Spoiling other customers enjoyment if you dont like it there are plenty of other ISPs without a CAP .

Its so easy these days you just phone up cancel NTL and get ADSL.

[Chrysalis]

not easy at all, I think a good proportion of ntl's customer base is probably for reasons such as no ADSL in area,landlord restrictions, too lazy to have phone line changed.

I also thing the soft limit wont remain for long, so my problem still remains.

Rone is right that web browsing on a 3mbit connection is not much different then on a 750kbit connection, so whats the point of a 3mbit connection? its useful for those who do downloading. Some ISP's namely wannadoo BT and NTL are trying the hardsell of high speed low cap to fool people that they spending their money wisely for super fast browsing.