How Data Caps Kill Your Performance, Part 2 of 3

Part 2: Killing Network Performance

So, let’s take a look at what Time Warner is doing and compare it to some other offerings. First, Time Warner has four plans, at four speeds with four caps. While a TW spokesman has said that people will be able to mix-and-match data caps with bandwidth plans in Austin, we’ll use the Beaumont plan as an example.

Let’s make some quick assumptions. First, let’s assume that no user wants to go “over” their cap – that is, that whatever they’re paying now without a cap, is what they want to pay, and they don’t want to pay more. Second, let’s assume that TW’s prices do not change significantly. Third, let’s assume that Time Warner makes good on their promise to bring out a “100 GB” cap for the Austin market. Considering the rate changes in Beaumont, these are probably good assumptions to make. 

Time Warner Cable Vs. The 56.6k Modem. 

Time Warner advertises speeds of 1920kB/s, 1024kB/s, 640kB/s and 96kB/s respectively for it’s four tiers of bandwidth service.

However, remaining under the cap means that, on average, you only have an effective speed of 250bytes/sec under a 5 gig plan, 500bytes/sec under a 10 GB plan, 1.01kB/sec under a 20 gig plan, 2.02kB/sec under a 40 gig plan – the largest possible plan in Beaumont – and 5.06kB/sec under a theoretical 100GB plan.

5.06kB/s… versus an advertised 1920kB/s. Now would be the perfect time to point out that the top speed of a 56.6k modem is 7.08kB/sec.

Time Warner Cable Vs. “The Average U.K. Teen”

Now, you may argue with me that these are only averaged numbers, and that a 5.0kB/s might very well mean a burst of 50kB/s for one second, followed by 0kB/s for nine more.  Quite right. 

You may also suggest that “no one uses the Internet 24 hours a day,” and aside from 24 hour coffeeshops, work-in-shift development teams, roommates with day-shift and night-shift jobs, and professional networking bloggers, I would also agree with you. 

So, how much does the average Internet user actually use the Internet? I couldn’t find that after some weak Googling. However, I was able to find out that the average U.K. Teen uses the Internet for 31 hours a week . I like using that number as a base, because it seems adequately conservative when trying to measure the amount that any particular household – perhaps filled with more than one teen – will use the Internet.

But even averaging out the numbers over 31 hours a week, rather than over a full month, it’s still disappointing. The 56.6k modem still beats out the 5, 10, and 20 gigabyte plans at 1.47kB/s, 2.04kB/s, and 5.87kB/s. The 40 gig plan does not fare much better at 11.74kB/s – certainly beating out the modem, but not in any way being a speed you’d call “broadband.” The theoretical 100 GB cap results in 29.36kB/s average, which sounds good to a person just now getting off dial-up, but even the lowest Time Warner broadband speed is advertised at 96kB/s; the top tier, once again, is advertised at 1920kb/s.

Oh, remember one of the tricky things about using the “average” U.K. teen as the benchmark.  That means that about half of U.K. teens likely use more than 31 hours a week. 

Time Warner Cable vs. The Ghost of Internet Past

In fact, the speeds only start to become competitive if you use the Internet about 5.5 hours a week.

At 5.5 hours a week, you can get 66.20kB/s average without going over your 40GB cap, 165.49 for the theoretical 100GB cap. 20, 10, and 5 GB caps clock in at 33.10kB/s, 16.55kb/s, and 8.27kb/s respectively. None of these speeds are anywhere close to what we’ve become accustomed to from “broadband,” and none of these speeds are acceptable – the 5GB plan barely better than a 56.6k modem even at the highly reduced Internet usage of 5.5 hours a week.

You may ask yourself why I chose “5.5 hours a week,” specifically, as my benchmark. That’s because 5.5 hours a week is the amount the average American or Canadian spent on the Internet in 1996!

I think that that’s a particularly revealing number.  After all, in order to stay under the cap, many (if not most) people will have to use the Internet less.  But what these caps do is limit TWC customers to the habits of the Internet’s early days, before YouTube, Hulu, Netflix, Skype or Vonage. 

What data caps actually do is take us back more than a decade in our cultural and technological development of the Internet. It is an attempt by Time Warner to stuff the genie back in the bottle – to cripple the Internet as a possible competitor to the television (and cable telephone) business by causing us to curb our habits back to the “bad old days” of the 1990s… and, of course, to grab an awful lot of money from those of us who simply can’t bear living in the past. 

Any customer who finds any of these bandwidth plans “acceptable for what they do on the Internet” should, instead, look into much cheaper, less stressful dial-up Internet service.

The counterargument for charging for consumption.

You could ask the question: that if we pay for gasoline, electricity and water based on what we consume, why shouldn’t we charge for the Internet the same way?  But this is based on a logical fallacy. 

We already pay for what we consume on the Internet.  We pay for bandwidth.  A 728kbps connection from Time Warner costs $30, while a 15Mbps connection from Time Warner costs $60.  And this is fine because bandwidth, not data, is the limited resource. 

Allow me to explain for those in our audience (Hi, Mom!) not familiar with networking technology:  When you lay down a network “pipe,” that pipe can only send so many bits a second – this is called “bandwidth.” When everyone wants to use the pipe at once, “congestion” occurs and not everyone can get all the bandwidth that they want. 

So what most Internet companies do is charge you based on the amount of bandwidth you consume. They do this by putting you into one of a number of “tiers,” or “speeds.” If you’re willing to pay more for more bandwidth, then you get more bandwidth. This is how Time Warner – and practically every other broadband company in the United States – does things now. 

But data – data is not a limited resource. Unlike water, gasoline, electricity, there is literally an infinite amount of data over the Internet.

Grabbing data does not reduce the amount of data available to others – even though this is essentially the argument cable companies put forth when they try to blame “heavy users” for the need for data caps. What Time Warner is trying to do is create an artificial scarcity where none exists, and then charge for it.

The electric company, in essence, charges you, indirectly, for the limited resource of the coal, oil, uranium, etc, to fire the plant.  Even with wind power, you’re paying for the limited resource of wind that can be captured by windmills – wind may be limitless, but we can’t currently use 99.99% of it. We can only use the 00.01% that runs into the windmill. 

I didn’t see “Quantum of Solace,” but if this helps you to wrap your head around it, what Quantum was trying to do with the Bolivian water supply, Time Warner is trying to do with our “data supply.” (Why yes, data caps are a move worthy of a Bond villain.

Time Warner vs. Comcast

Comcast also has a 250 GB cap.  No one is thrilled about it, but it is certainly more reasonable than a 40 or 100 GB cap, by far. At 250GB, the effective performance hit is 73.41kb/s for the 31-hour user. This is still poor compared to uncapped services, but at least, at 250 GB, most people won’t have to worry about how much Internet they’re using.

That is another thing – when you go over your 250GB cap on Comcast, you either get a warning notice, or you get your service cut – the latter certainly annoying, but at least you can go to another service. When you go over your Time Warner cap, you’re being charged, GB by GB.

Because the caps are so low, it’s pretty clear that that is exactly what Time Warner intends to have happen – that is, the system designs to place you into overages.

And in this system, you pay for every bit. Every annoying video ad that you don’t want. Every zombie malware host probing your connection. Every pop-up ad. Even, dare I say it, every Rick-Roll.

We take a look at the costs that Time Warner customers will have to eat under the new plan in Part Three of this article.