Caps, what's the business reason?

Blaster99

Supposedly when I'm buying a broadband connection, I'm buying a contended service. So I'm sharing my bits per second with 20 other people or whatever the case may be. My performance will vary accordingly. The reason these broadband connections are relatively cheap is because they're contended, the same bandwidth is sold multiple times over. Everyone agrees so far.

So where do the caps fit in? It's not as if the uncontended pipe that the ISP has bought has a cap on it, does it? They usually buy units of 1Mpbs from somewhere and that's that. So having a cap doesn't save the ISP any money, as they still share out the same bandwidth with the same contention. A lot of ISP's don't charge for overusage, so that's clearly not the primary reason for the cap either.

So it's presumably a marketing exercise where high-usage users are forced to buy higher margin products. But ultimately those higher margin products have a higher spec where you tend to pay relative to the speed or the contention ratio as opposed to the cap.

I suspect I'm missing something somewhere.

MrPinK

Blaster99 wrote:

It's not as if the uncontended pipe that the ISP has bought has a cap on it, does it?

It's not completely uncontended though. That pipe has to be shared between all your customers. If you have no cap you will have, on average, more people trying to download at any given time, so you need a bigger pipe to accommodate them. By restricting the amount they can download you're less likely to have as many people downloading at the same time, so you don't have to buy as much bandwidth.

As a general principal, I'm not entirely opposed to caps. There definitely should be the option to get an uncapped connection, but I do think heavy users should have to pay more than light users.

SkepticOne

Blaster99 wrote:

Supposedly when I'm buying a broadband connection, I'm buying a contended service. So I'm sharing my bits per second with 20 other people or whatever the case may be. My performance will vary accordingly. The reason these broadband connections are relatively cheap is because they're contended, the same bandwidth is sold multiple times over. Everyone agrees so far.

This is true. But if a significant number of people are downloading stuff continuously, then the performance will be significantly reduced. If, for example, one in every 48 (on a 48:1 ratio) people is a continuous downloader then, for everyone else, a 512k connection effectively becomes a 256k max connection.

These other people will then complain that they never get the full speed that they are paying for.

I'm on an 'uncapped' system and I'm considering writing to the ISP to introduce some sort of a cap in order to improve speeds at peak time.

Mutant_Fruit

Why would you want to introduce caps to increase speeds at peak times?

Why not introduce temporary throttling on the biggest bandwidth users during the peak hours. That way you still get uncapped connections, but with fast speeds even during peak hours (unless you're getting throttled ). Thats the model that would work best imo.

SkepticOne

Mutant_Fruit wrote:

Why would you want to introduce caps to increase speeds at peak times?

Why not introduce temporary throttling on the biggest bandwidth users during the peak hours. That way you still get uncapped connections, but with fast speeds even during peak hours (unless you're getting throttled ). Thats the model that would work best imo.

Yes, caps are a rather crude means of regulating bandwidth use.

What I would do is gradually lower the priority of packets based on prior activity over a period of time for the user in question. This would allow flexibility for heavier downloaders while not impacting the more 'bursty' uses of the internet for which speed is important.

If you're downloading something over several hours, you can tolerate lowered priority for brief periods as people download emails, etc or browse the web.