[ NNSquad ] Re: NYT: Differing views on Time Warner's Bandwidth Cap Experiment

[Barry Gold <bgold@matrix-consultants.com>]

Lauren Weinstein wrote:
> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/17/time-warner-download-too-much-and-you-might-pay-30-a-movie/?ref=technology

This is beyond stupid, and I hope TW gets smacked down by its customers 
if and when they try this.  See my earlier post on what customers want.

Item 1: No surprises.  A $30 surcharge on their bill is going to result 
in a very unhappy user.  I know what Time Warner is thinking: when the 
user sees a $30 surcharge on his cable bill, he'll buy a higher service 
tier and we make more money.  Well, it's a lot more likely that the user 
will
  a) Switch to satellite, DSL, or any other competitor he can find,
  b) Write his city councilman about turning the city into a hotspot 
(some small cities already are)
  c) write his congressman about regulating cable prices.

So the *best* likely scenario is that TW loses a customer.  Other 
possibilities include losing a whole city of customers, or being turned 
into a regulated utility like phone and electric service used to be (and 
natural gas still is).  That's a nice niche, you always make a 
guaranteed profit -- but your profits are pretty strictly limited.

I hope TW and Comcast wise up, because frankly I *like* the current 
(nearly) unregulated market.  But if they keep trying stunts like this, 
they will feel like Wile E. Coyote when the anvil falls on him.

I can hear Brett and others asking, so what _should_ we do when we have 
one customer who uses 100 times as much as our average.  Answer: 
graceful degradation.  Slow him down.  This can be done manually -- you 
notice that user X is using more than most, so you re-program his cable 
modem to a lower bit rate, and/or drop some of the packets destined for 
him.  Or you can just make it automatic - the system notices when a 
customer is using a large amount of bandwidth over a period of time, and 
takes steps.

And as I said elsewhere, I would favor allowing ISPs to modify the TCP 
headers to reduce the window, even though strictly speaking it's a 
violation of the protocol -- that header is supposed to be for 
communication between the end-points.  But until we get protocol stacks 
that actually _pay attention_ to Source Quench, I think this would be a 
good way to limit bandwidth consumption.