Pulp Free

After being on business for a few days, I returned home to have yet another piece of marketing mail from Charter… My favorite local broadband monopoly. However, this time it was good news!

We are pleased to inform you that Charter has upgraded your High-Speed Internet Max service download speed from 16 Mbps to 20 Mbps – at no additional cost. This speed upgrade is part of Charter’s ongoing effort to provide you the fastest and most reliable Internet speeds available. This means your favorite music, videos, and files can download up to 25% faster than before!

I really can’t find fault with that, now can I? Granted – most of the sites that I visit can’t pulp out that much information. Only sites like Microsoft (when I’m grabbing new ISO images) and fully peg out that connection. It’s finally happened, however… My own connection to the Internet (even if it is a neighborhood shared line) is faster than most upstream providers. Web browsing isn’t any faster… But large file downloads from multiple sites at the same time really do fly.

When I started posting my bandwidth tests back in September of 2007, I was getting 5 Mbps service… That was up from the 3 Mbps service I had previous to that. I was pretty happy (and only paying something like $25 a month…) I tested my work speed and was pulling in close to 12 Mbps down and 1.5 Mbps up. Seemed “fast” – but with everybody at work surfing rather than being productive, I’m sure it was a bit sluggish. 6 months later and I bumped up to 10 Mbps service, with 16 Mbps service coming another 5 months later.

So what does another 7 months get me? Sweet 20 Mbps service:

Dave’s a happy person for sure!! Score one point for Charter… Even if they are hassling people with bandwidth caps… Time to go see how much of this 20 Mbps I can sustain… However, to be fair – my 95th Percentile usage for the last few months is only around 5.5 Mbps.

I love my graphs! LOL! (And yes – I know I have a gap in week 6… Pesky SNMP!!)

As announced yesterday in an exclusive from DSL Reports, Charter Communications will be implementing new usage caps for their broadband bandwidth.

Broadband Reports has learned that Charter will be updating their acceptable use policy (AUP) next week, setting the stage for clear usage caps and potential overage fees. A source familiar with the plans tells us Charter will be imposing a 100GB cap upon any Charter connection of 15Mbps or less, and a 250GB usage cap for broadband tiers “over 15 Mbps up to 25 Mbps.”

So I was pretty excited when Charter finally hashed out their differences with the local Saint Louis CBS affiliate for HD broadcast rights. Charter Good.

Usage caps when I’m paying $70 a month for bandwidth in a Saint Louis monopoly… Charter Bad.

This news isn’t really news, I suppose. I’ve talked about this a few times already… So how have I adjusted?

Meh… No really. Considering I have the 16 MB service – I’d fall into the 250 GB cap. At $1 a GB overage charge… That would be over $470 for two of my months where usage was pretty high. (Average over the last 12 months was right at 251 GB…) Maybe that’s a better way to measure… A rolling 3 month average perhaps? And what about uploads? Do they count? Better hope that there’s some ways to track usage… (Currently there isn’t any…)

I suppose this is a way for the $20 Billion debt ridden company to force users to upgrade to a higher cost tier of service or have those fees roll in. Right now the next tier up from 10 MB to 16 MB is only $25 a month… Do you think that Charter will automatically upgrade users to the new service if they go over 25 GB in a month? Perhaps I should charge Charter $1 a month for every GB under 250 GB I don’t use? How about banking bandwidth like AT&T does with rollover bandwidth?

Now that I’m a full time telecommuter / work-from-home employee who has to pay for his own broadband (don’t get me started) – this just doesn’t help.

We’ll see how it works out… (Especially considering in a month, “unlimited usage” could equate to 5 TB of download capcity on a 16 Mb/s bandwidth tier…)

BTW – I have had a good time reading the comments on Slashdot… A search on Google will bring you plenty of other fun stories about this issue…

As being mentioned a bit more in the news lately… It looks like broadband bandwidth caps are being rolled out for real this time. This tidbit on Comcast looks to start the ball rolling starting October 1st… Charter – you need to look the other way:

Cable Internet provider Comcast said Thursday it will begin limiting how much data subscribers can transfer online each month. The 250-gigabyte monthly cap begins Oct. 1 and is designed to prevent Internet service becoming sluggish from heavy use.

First-time offenders of the bandwidth limit will get a call from Comcast, while future overages result in Internet service suspended for a year, reports said. In May, the second-largest Internet service provided talked of a $15 fee for every 10 gigabytes above the limit.

In announcing the limit, Comcast stressed the 250-gigabyte cap is far above the maximum of the majority of subscribers. The new cap would allow each customer to send 50 million emails or download 62,500 songs per month.

Others Internet providers are experimenting with the idea of limiting their users’ bandwidth. Cox Communication employs limits ranging from 5 gigabytes to 75 gigabytes while Time Warner Cable is mulling a cap between 5 gigabytes and 40 gigabytes.

Seriously – why am I paying some $80 a month for top 16M speeds if that just means I use up my “fair share” quicker. Since the last time I mentioned caps, I’ve broken through my all time monthly usage rate…

Let’s see how much that would cost me… Hmmm… At $15 for every 10 GB over – um… ugh… $545 if you count uploads and downloads… Plus the $80 – for almost $7500 a year? And with no other competitive broadband alternatives… DSL is out because it’s capped at 3M. And I mean – Charter’s home office is just a few miles down the road… Like I said, Charter… Don’t get any crazy ideas from your peers!

So what pushed me over this month, you’re probably asking? Thank you TVTonic and your wonderful HiDef downloads for the Olympics.

That’s right – quite legal TV coverage of the Olympics…

The news has been a buzz on some of the possibilities of Comcast starting to implement bandwidth caps for their cable modem users. Fair enough from the standpoint that many other organizations have reasoned previously. However – for the $30-60 most of us pay for usage doesn’t contain provisions for usage – if I want to have something downloading all day long I should be able to. I chuckled to myself and said – hey – no biggie – I’m with Charter and they never make the news…

Wrong.

“Eventually, we will go to a usage-based solution,” predicted Marwan Fawaz, CTO of Charter Communications Inc., last month at the CableNEXT conference in Santa Clara.

Bummer. I was really hoping for those new DOC SIS 3.0 speeds to come my way without shelling out the $$$. However, my real concern comes in with the details outlined for Time Warner from my favorite Tech Web site, Ars Technica:

Last week, we learned from a leaked memo that Time Warner Cable is preparing to roll out usage-based broadband service tiers to new customers in Beaumont, TX. The company has since confirmed its plans, with monthly bandwidth caps set at 5GB, 10GB, 20GB, and 40GB. Customers who exceed their cap would be hit with an undetermined per-gigabyte charge, but Bell Canada’s overage fees, which range from CAN$1.00 to CAN$7.50 per gigabyte, may give some inkling of where Time Warner’s overage fees will end up. Usage caps are a short-sighted response to capacity constraints, one that’s likely to hurt the company more than it will help in the long run—especially with new broadband options on the horizon.

So where does that put me?

On my most ravish month in December, 2007 – I somehow managed to pull almost 270 GB of data. If my math is right, 100% usage of my 5mb line (for 30 days) would get me close to 1.6 TB – So should I be asking for an 83% refund for bandwidth not used? Or based on the pricing from Canada, would I be charged some $1,750 for overages?

Guess we’ll just have to wait and see…

(I will say that I’ve been much happier with my Charter service since they came out and replaced the entire cable line from the pole to my house last year… Not a single day’s outage… Don’t give me something new to hate you for…)

A few months back I decided to move my Web hosting over to Media Temple for several reasons… More space, ability to host multiple Web sites on a single account (and not just with domain forwarding) along with a lot more disk space. However – the real cool part of MT is the usage of their Grid-Service (GS) platform. Lately my own Web sites have been affected by some performance issues just like when the Grid-Service was put online… Latent Web site performance, seemingly numerous maintenance windows, etc. Knowing that I really only pulled in just over 3100 visits from around 2100 users in November (13 GB transfer) really meant that such outages weren’t really that much of an impact on my low volume Web sites.

However – this observational story of mine comes in two parts…

Part One – What is Grid Computing?

You would think that with a grid computing model that MT has in place would allow individual Web sites for flip around to different servers and I should “never” seen an outage… So why am I impacted? Is it really a grid system? Well – MT doesn’t really release any information about the technical nature of their hosting plans… There’s some nice “feel-good” information online that really sells the product… But again – light on details.

Now, for my daytime job – I architect & engineer fairly large WebSphere XD clusters for a large financial company. Probably have $10M spent on software and hardware alone… We’re clustered all over the place, N+1, no single points of failure… blah blah blah – and it really seems to work… Most of the time… However – just like MT – we have single points of failure when it comes to infrastructure outside of the application hosting model… For MT – this now seems to be related to their storage systems. So with great designs – decisions as to what gets engineered for different components really make the difference. I’m guessing that a lot of effort went into storage planning at MT – but when you build systems like this for a living (or for a company’s hosting plans) – engineering efforts really just shift the bottlenecks from one system to another. Fix the application layer and you could start having issues with database. Fix the database and you highlight storage performance issues (see a trend here?). It’s a moving effort – and in terms of how technology works – your customers continuously see “issues” all of the time… You have to set the expectation that those items happen… That is unless you get yourself into a circular path of destruction (whaa ha ha ha!!) or if you’re Google…. Okay – next point…

Part Two – Taking Responsibility

Even before I moved my Web sites to MT I rambled a bit about how I liked MT’s company philosophy on taking responsibly. Today there was a note simply called “We Apologize” from Demian Sellfors – CEO of MT.

Media Temple would like to apologize to our (gs) Grid-Service customers for the series of issues relating to the (gs) system in the past few months.

and

The situation with the storage upgrade is particularly frustrating because the vendor supplied update was intended to fix issues – not create new ones.

This one hits me at work since we fight such items with our own vendors… However, the company I work for (and MT) have a responsibility to provide hosting solution to our business partners. Failures, no matter if by a vendor or by our own actions, are still our responsibility. In this case, MT informs their customers about what has happened, what they’re doing to fix it, and an apology for the effect their service problems have had on their customers. Granted, MT is offering 2 months of credited hosting to help lesson the damages… But I wonder – do most corporate management teams offer their customers 2 free months of service for such ongoing problems? Do corporate customers actually “pay” for their IT services? Could you even offer a refund? Providing ownership and accountability for what services are provide really drive home the benefits and drawbacks of IT resources when there are real dollars involved…

In either case – it’s once again refreshing to see in writing efforts by a company to just do the right thing. (I do wonder what’s happening behind the walls at MT… perhaps not all of their team feel disclosure is best for business… I, for one, champion transparency when put into the right context…)