We mentioned previously that Comcast was moving towards capping its residential customers at 250GB a month of Internet data. We also mentioned, repeatedly, that bandwidth caps really don’t solve the problems of network congestion or of poor latency, but if you’re going to go for a data cap, 250GB/mo seems a reasonably fair rate. Silicon Alley Insider has a rundown of exactly what 250GB means, and it actually is quite a lot of data. It misses the point, but at least it is a lot of data.
The big complaint now seems to be that Comcast has provided no way to inform the user of exactly how much of that 250GB limit they are using.
This has two major implications.
First, it encourages people who would otherwise be using the Internet normally to use it more conservatively. I don’t want to abuse the term “chilling effect,” but if your choices were to watch a movie via NetFlix’s online streaming service or ordering it on cable Pay-Per-View, you may have plenty of data to watch it, but if you don’t know how close you are to your cap, or how much a particular application consumes, you’re less likely to use the Internet. It may be a psychological block but it decreases the value of the Internet applications you use, and thus, decreases the value of the Internet connection that you lease. It also decreases the value of the “cognitive surplus,” as we’ve mentioned.
The second is simply that you can’t manage what you can’t measure – it’s as true on the residential level as it is for the largest corporate networks. Silicon Alley Insider’s numbers are, as far as we can tell, accurate, but a tech-savvy family of four could easily go over that limit, and it could be difficult to tell exactly who or what is responsible for data consumption. Dad’s teleconferencing, Mom’s downloading a Linux distro, Junior is watching a documentary on a topic for school via NetFlix, the little miss is live vodcasting, and the dog is downloading a torrent of the entire “Lassie” series. (Point is: without network visibility, everything gets blamed on the dog.)
Not providing a running tally of data “consumed” means that there’s no way to determine what actions and activities drain the most bandwidth – Was it the movie you watched last night or the marathon game session next morning? Has a neighbor been using your (unsecured or inadequately secured) wireless connection, or have you been hosting malware? How much bandwidth does playing World of Warcraft take, and how does that compare to watching YouTube, and how does THAT compare to other services like Blip.TV and Vimeo? How does a person know whether or not they’re coming close to the limit?
The MacObserver has a few tips for monitoring bandwidth consumption on a Macintosh, and there are applications that we’ve used to track bandwidth consumption on a single PC, but right now it seems that the best bet for tracking the consumption of multiple PCs to the Internet is to install a firmware like Tomato onto your home router and monitor it from there.
No comments yet.