[oneplusone]

The idea that 2% of users using 20% of the bandwidth is hurting "normal" people is a PR move that is going to do great harm to future innovation. The way I see it those 2% of users are early adopters and a couple of years from now "normal people" will be using as much bandwidth as the current 2% does. Limiting bandwidth now hurts future innovation.

[bradleyland]

From a technical standpoint, that's not all that far-fetched. AT&T is delivering to the last mile. The fiber runs to the node, which feeds households over VDSL (copper pairs). Each node serves hundreds of households, so if you happen to be on a node with one of these people that are eating 20% of the total bandwidth passing through that node, you may see the impact on your connection. There's only so much pipe.

This moves the argument up the chain a little bit. Why did AT&T implement fiber-to-the-node after they were given billions upon billions of tax breaks and subsidies? Verizon implemented fiber-to-the-premisis in some markets at least.

[tptacek]

Isn't it a bit disingenuous to suppose that we don't know exactly what those 2% are doing?

[oneplusone]

Just because people are downloading a ton of illegal content right now doesn't mean 5 years from now the average person won't be downloading it legally. This is how progress is made.

[tptacek]

It's funny, that's exactly what people said about binaries on Usenet.

[adbge]

Are you suggesting that average bandwidth usage isn't going to increase?

[tptacek]

Caps will move, rates will move, usage will move, prices will move. I'm not sure what your point is. I'm saying (or, strongly implying) that virtually the only people who will be hit with this cap today are the ones using BitTorrent.

[oneplusone]

And websites like http://www.graboid.com repackaged usenet to make is accessible to the general population. Movie studios don't seem to mind since they have a DMCA process and most content never gets one.

[tptacek]

And Usenet died. But sure. Graboid. Whatever that is. Yay!

[sounddust]

Nowadays, a significant portion of those "bandwidth abusers" are people who are just watching movies and TV shows on Netflix. The use of Netflix instant streaming has grown tremendously over the past year, and for many people, it's become the exclusive source for non-live video content.

[tptacek]

To bust a 250GB cap with NetFlix, you have to watch 250 hours of exclusively HD content; 8 full hours a day, every day, nonstop.

[DrJokepu]

To be honest, in a family of four or larger, that's not entirely impossible to achieve as family members' individual usages add up.

[Bud]

You're also leaving out what the household might be doing with its Internet besides Netflix, and you are conveniently ignoring the 150GB cap on DSL service.

Why are you defending AT&T for lowering its level of service by an order of magnitude and imposing gigantic overage fees?

I did some quick math. I could go over this cap on my DSL line simply by using my connection at full speed for LESS than a tenth of a month; i.e., less than 2.4 hrs per day. Sorry, that's not acceptable on an "unlimited" link.

[prodigal_erik]

Thanks, I wasn't aware that their HD bandwidth requirements were as modest as 2.6-3.8 Mb/s, from both a more effective codec and limiting fidelity to 720p30 stereo.

http://blog.netflix.com/2008/11/encoding-for-streaming.html

[HelloBeautiful]

Do you really think AT&T execs care about future innovation?