If you love your Roku or other internet streams

You need to be paying attention to the moves being made to put caps on bandwith usage. These caps will affect you sooner than later and you will soon be paying just as much as you were for the cable you thought you cut.

http://gizmodo.com/5075831/att-monthly-bandwidth-caps-are-here

AT&T's bandwidth caps for its high speed internet customers are here. They're conducting a "market trial" in Reno that started on Nov. 1, where users get between 20GB and 150GB a month, depending on their speed tier. Unlike Time Warner's trial in Beamont, where caps were only applied to new customers, existing customers will also be capped, though they'll get the roomier 150GB cap. If you bust the cap, AT&T will charge an extra dollar per gigabyte.

so far nothing has happened, I have Verizon.

However if the others get away with what they are trying to do it wont take Verizon long to join in.

this is regular ISPS doing this now. This is a new phenomena in the US, not for cell phone data but for regular internet connections.

I cant find any evidence however you get charged by cox if you go over and the higher tier service you pay for you not only get more speed but more bandwidth as well. I dont have as big problem with that as you are paying for the faster speed and getting more bandwidth to use with it and there is no apparent penalty if you go over than perhaps a sternly worded letter.

http://ww2.cox.com//aboutus/policies/limitations.cox?campcode=classicpop_policy-limitations_0609

Comcast as well does not charge you if you go over the limit as of yet they call you and make you aware of it and try to help you find out how you are hitting that cap. They like AT&T however have a flat cap. That I have a problem with. If if you pay for a faster speed you should get increased bandwith.

http://customer.comcast.com/Pages/FAQViewer.aspx?seoid=Frequently-Asked-Questions-about-Excessive-Use#approach

With a 25 meg connection you could use your full capacity for a little less than an hour a day and hit 250 gigs.

Admittedly the vast majority of users wont come anywhere near those caps yet but with the increase of flash advertisements and social feeds and streaming video it wont be long till more and more people will start hitting those caps.

As long as these companies are not playing the gotcha game with anyone who goes over I dont have as big a problem with it as I do with AT&Ts announced plan. But with bandwidth becoming ever cheaper to come by it strikes me as appalling to continue to increase the costs for the end user. Not to mention when they are selling you a package that advertises a speed of 25meg and yet you aren't really allowed to use that speed it seems a lot more like some carnival slight of hand.

IMO, terminating your serive for a year is a far more serious consequence than charging for overage, especially if you're a telecommuter with no other broadband options.

From reports I've read, Comcast isn't very "helpful". In fact, they typically don't notify you until mid-way through the 2nd month, making it near impossible to avoid termination.

So yes, AT&T is the first wired provider to charge for overages, but caps aren't new.

Another point I have a problem with: that the cap applies to peak as well as off-peak. If you're sucking down bandwith at a time when no one else is consuming it, what's the big deal? It's not like the provider can store excess bandwidth and use it later. You either consume it in the moment, or it's gone.

When AT&T was broken up becuase it was using monopoly methods.

are right on point.

regular drives are way cheaper than SS drives and are just as easy to ship with much larger capacities.

The point is a good one though that it now would cost less to transfer the same amount of data through the mail than it would across the net for people with bandwith caps.

It's still cheaper to fill them, ship them and then throw those expensive drives AWAY..

Than it is to download the same files via the internet... With a bandwidth cap.

I just think the difference would be even more glaring with regular drives. Most folks I dont think have a clue what an SSD is.

The whole point in streaming is that you have an instant viewing of the film or other material you want to view.

It's not proposed as a serious means of distributing information, the piece is designed to show just how badly we are getting ripped off on bandwidth by the ISP's.

The wholesale cost of bandwidth the service providers is plummeting and yet at the same time they are *increasing* the price the consumer must pay for the same bandwidth.

I thought that my internet provider just provided me access to an infinite bandwidth. How does this work?

I'm serious. I'm a bit older and don't really understand the internet.

Please don't be offended by my questions.

:evilgrin:

Bandwidth refers to the amount of information you can push or pull over a given connection in a certain amount of time, the more bandwidth the faster the information flows (a bigger tube, if you will).

For instance, DU is more frugal with bandwidth than a great many other sites around the web, if you have ever noticed that DU loads faster than a lot of other sites it's because DU is mostly text based, which doesn't take a lot of bandwidth, not like pictures and video do.

As a counterexample you can use Yahoo, it's very heavy on graphics and pictures which require a lot of information to be sent to your computer, hence it's a lot slower to load than DU when you click on it.

Due to technological advancements bandwidth (the ability to pass information) is increasing rapidly and the costs at the wholesale level are also dropping rapidly.

But while wholesale prices on bandwidth are dropping, retail prices in the USA are actually rising. To show what should really be happening, Lithuania just doubled their internet bandwidth to every customer in the country at *zero* price increase..

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/05/07/974014/-Why-Does-America-Hate-Free-Market-Capitalism

Got it. Very clear. Thanks.

I will try to answer as well as I am able.

Bandwidth basically refers to the amount of data that can pass through the media(read cables,wires,etc) it passes through.

The internet is really a big spiderweb of cabling no different in a lot of ways from your average home theater system. information passes from one device to another through the cables conecting them. different types of cables can carry different amounts of data similar to different size pipes being able to carry different volumes of water.

the tricky part really is that its all interconnected. How to explain it ....

Sort of like our highway system in some parts at certain times of the day like rush hour,traffic goes way up and you get congestion while at the same time other parts of the road are free of trafic or have very little traffic.However the internet is different in that the signals travel at or near light speed and the intersections are smart. The intersections on the internet are designed to take the path of least resistance if you will so if trafic is encountered in theory the interesction will automatically try to route you around it.

There are basically tiers to the internet, with different intersections along the way. We start at your computer which these days typically has a network card capable of transferring data at speeds of up to 1000 Mbps . This connects to an ethernet cable that typically can transfer data at speeds up to 10 Gbps.

Now you start to actually hit the internet where you get slowed way down.

The next thing you hit is the connection to your house which starts with the modem which come in many different flavors all supporting different speeds, but your modem is told by your ISP how fast it is allowed to go. The speed your modem is allowed to go by your ISP is determined by the capacity that your provider has built into their network. This varies by provider. Now the fastest you could possibly go at this point in your internet journey would be 159.252 Gbit/s (this would require your isp to basically run fiber optic cable directly from your house to the final tier that is called the backbone.

This of course is sort of confusing because when I say speed it isnt really speed its capacity. the actual speed that the data travels is relatively consistent regardless of your stated bandwith speed.
all data on the internet actually travels pretty close to the speed of light.

And that sort of brings us to the backbones. The backbones are basically the main communication lines of the world and are mostly at this point made up of bundles of the fiber optic cables that run at 159.252 capacity or bandwith per fiber. a bundle of these fiber optic lines are called a trunk. Delta Telecom, has recently developed a very efficient trunk line with possible speeds of to 1.6 terabits per second! thats just an insane amount of data.

So to try to finally answer your question how is bandwith created. Basically its created by adding higher capacity cabling closer and closer to your doorstep.

Currently there are several companies working on brining single fibers to your door.

Its all very confusing to try to wrap your head around and I am not sure I have helped much with my attempt at an explanation but as a mea culpa I will offer some links that might help you understand it all better if you really want to.

A good start is understanding the "backbones" as that is ultimately where bandwith caps are really reached. Even then its not so clear cut as if one backbone gets busy traffic will automatically take another route to help alleviate that traffic.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_backbone

For info on all the different speeds or capacities different mediums provide
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_device_bandwidths

Hope I helped some though I fear I likely only confused you more.

The bottom line though is No one company is responsible for the traffic on the internet they all rely on each other to route the traffic that comes through the portion they control to the correct destination.

I take it that an individual DSL customer cannot lay the cable independently but has to go through a DSL provider. Am I wrong?