Showing posts with label bandwidth cap. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bandwidth cap. Show all posts

Capping the Net: AT&T T-Mobile deal spells bandwidth caps, captive users, and rising costs

  April 11, 2011    

IMHO: If the AT&T purchase of T-Mobile goes through we will see a new era of rising prices for bandwidth, the expansion of bandwidth caps and captive users. I have been saying for some time that the future of the 'net is looking bleak, at least from the point of view of the average user.

The days of cheap and seemingly limitless bandwidth are coming to an end. Maybe not tomorrow, or even this year, but the writing is on the wall and it says you will have to pay a lot more for bandwidth, and you will pay by the gigabyte. No more all you can eat for X dollars per month. Try 5 gigabytes for $50 and $50 a gigabyte for overage. No rollovers, no exceptions, unless you opt for the platinum plan, a mortgage payment priced top tier of connectivity affordable only to the few.

The golden age of surfing without thinking about the bandwidth you are burning, the salad days of unlimited movie watching over the web, through your Xbox and onto your HD flat screen? It's about to end. Get ready to sit around the hearth and reminisce about the good old days of unlimited data plans and all the online gaming you could eat.

Melodramatic? Only time will tell. Set a reminder to check back here in 12 months (I use the calendar on my iPhone). But before you bet against these dire prognostications, checkout Stop the Cap, a great website that I've been watching for some years now. The have a wealth of material on many aspects of broadband pricing, service levels, and telecom lobbying:

Many companies in the broadband industry are engaged in a high-priced lobbying campaign to manufacture a “bandwidth crisis/exaflood” or “shortage,” suggesting that consumers are abusing their broadband connections at such a rate it threatens the integrity of the Internet and its distribution platform...[but]...most of the companies complaining refuse to open their records to independent verification “for competitive reasons.”

If you do visit Stop the Cap you will see where I got the inspiration for the graphics in this post. Anyone who wants to raise awareness of cap-creep and other net-farious telco activities is free to re-use or link to my images. However, use of these images by any telco without written permission is prohibited. (Okay, so it's highly unlikely anyone from AT&T or T-Mobile or Comcast or Time Warner or Verizon is going to read this, but I'm just saying, you've been warned, right.)

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Actual Speeds on HughesNet Satellite Internet Service

  August 28, 2009    

This is just a short post for anyone who is curious about how well HughesNet Satellite Internet service works. I pay $80 a month for HughesNet ProPlus service which is described on the company's web site as follows:HughesNet Actual Speeds
"With the ProPlus plan, connect to the Internet with maximum download speeds of up to 1.6 Mbps, with typical speeds about 800 Kbps to 1000 Kbps during peak times. Upload speeds, which are capable of reaching 250 Kbps, are typically 130 Kbps to 150 Kbps during peak hours."
As you can see from the chart on the left, I do not get anything like that. The highest burst of speed was 679 Kbps up and 68 Kbps down. But that speed is for a fraction of a second, transferring only part of a file. The best average speed over the course of a single file transfer in these tests is 275/67 which is a far cry from the low end of the 800/130 cited by HughesNet. BTW, that chart is a screen shot from a widely tested and trusted speed test program on my iPhone. I have checked it against other tests in other locations. The chart is all the results from my random tests in the last month or so. I have not edited out anything. As you can see, I have never clocked the promised low end of 800/130 let alone the fabled 1600/250. As for the average, what I typically get from this 1600/250 service is 174/52.

These results match those my wife has recorded using Hughes own speed test application. In other words, according to Hughes themselves, we get way worse service than we pay for. One of these days I will make yet another attempt to get Hughes to address this problem. My wife has made numerous calls to them in the past but things have not improved. They have a very cavalier attitude to problem tickets and consistently close them out without actually resolving the problem.

Like many other HughesNet users we hesitate to get too angry with them because they are currently our only option for "high speed" Internet (given that, in our case, fate has us living on a hill in upstate New York, one of the millions of places in this country that phone and cable companies refuse to service adequately). So it's not like we can switch to anything else.

There are many other problems with satellite Internet service, like lack of support for VPN and VoIP, latency times that are worse than dialup, and a daily bandwidth cap of 435 megabytes. We have learned to live with these, but we have not received anything in return. We are not even getting one sixth of the speed we pay for. Hopefully, this information will be helpful for anyone who is thinking about chosing to live beyond the reach of cable or DSL. My advice? Don't do it, not unless your goal is to disconnect from the Internet. Believe me when I say, if the housing market were not so depressed, we'd be looking to move to a place that has cable or DSL and ditch this over-priced dish.

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Why Satellite Internet Is Not Really Broadband

  February 08, 2009    

I recently posted a review of HughesNet satellite Internet service over at DSLReports. You may need to sign up to read it--which is totally worth the effort, DSLReports is a great source of info and news for bandwidth hungry net surfers--but I am also posting it here for ease of access:

Pros "Downloading is quite fast (but capped)"
Cons "Poor latency, 13Gb monthly cap, costly, flaky DNS, not true broadband"

Despite the fact that there is Verizon fiber optic at the end of my drive and Road Runner cable about 3 miles away, I cannot persuade anyone to run a broadband line to our home/office near Cooperstown in upstate New York (unless I pay $1,000 per month for a T1).

So, we pay HughesNet $80 per month even though it does not fit my definition of broadband (e.g. does not support VoIP, VPN or watching Netflix on demand movies).

Although traffic is fast enough when it gets going (from 1 to 1.5Mbs down) the latency is terrible (around 500ms, way slower than dialup) and if we exceed 435 megabytes downloaded in a day we are stuffed for 24 hours (Hughes actually slows your connection down to dialup speed--a death sentence if your boss wants you to take a quick look at his big deck of Powerpoint slides).

I should point out that the latency is not the "fault" of HughesNet but rather an unsolvable limitation when sending signals into space and back. This creates a huge overhead for things like logging into your bank account (what takes 20 seconds on true broadband takes 70 seconds on satellite). Doing online bill payment becomes a very tedious chore.

Hughes warns you not to try VoIP or VPN because of the latency, but does not make this clear in their TV ads. They also fail to give sufficient warning about the practical effect of bandwidth limits. For example, recent automatic operating system upgrades from Apple and Microsoft have both blown out our daily limit. Needless to say you have to turn off automatic OS upgrades, which potentially puts your system at risk.

HughesNet does offer a form of unlimited download, limited to between 3AM and 6AM. But we have found the speed and connection to be flaky when using this "feature." For example, you set up your download manager to get that big 600Mb file from your boss at 3AM but the connection flakes out and when you get up at 8AM you find most of the file arrived between 6 and 7 thus blowing out your allowance for the day.

There is also a problem with DNS flakiness (as reported by others in this forum). Random sites report DNS lookup errors but they are online. This was particularly weird when I found I could not get to my own web site over the HughesNet DNS servers for well over a week. If I used alternative DNS over Hughes, like running Anonymizer, I was able to see my site, as were friends on other ISP connections. I have a video of that issue here.

As a geek I am still amazed that I have a satellite uplink hanging off my porch that actually sends and receives, but that does not make up for the painful price/performance ratio and vicious bandwidth caps.

After a year on HughesNet I am devoting every spare moment to exploring my options (like getting that T1 and blasting WiMax out to all my neighbors--who have the same problems I do with satellite).

Bottom Line: "Should not be sold as broadband (no VPN, VoIP, OS upgrades, or movies)"

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