The Web 2.0 Has Toll-Booths: Cox, Comcast, and Some Clarity
On a recent call to Cox about a billing issue I was having I stumbled across a very interesting finding: Cox is already implementing data transfer caps. The rep on the phone told me about it, and acted like it was no big deal. Intrigued, I looked into this further and found some interesting insights.
The rep I talked to mentioned the data transfer caps when he was telling me about the difference between a couple of the plans he was talking about. I mentioned that I was surprised they had caps and said what they were. He was surprised I said that and nonchalantly said that everyone does it. I mentioned that it has been big news that Comcast is acknowledging their network management practices including bandwidth caps, and applauded the rep and Cox for being more straight forward about their caps.
After getting off the phone, I went to Cox.com to see what all of the caps were and surprise, surprise, I couldn’t find it. Their Internet service page lists upload and download speeds, the type of IP address you’ll get, whether the plan has “PowerBoost” or not, how much webspace you get, and even how large the e-mail accounts can be, but it doesn’t list caps. I looked all over the site and couldn’t find it anywhere. So I searched Cox for download caps using Live Search a few times and it came up.
Turns out it is <sarcasm>really easy</sarcasm> to find. Just click on the 4pt font “Policies” link at the bottom of the page, then click on #13 “Bandwidth, Data Storage and Other Limitations” and then in the middle of that paragraph click “Limitations of Service”. Isn’t it so obvious? The Policies page is the only page on Cox.com that actually links to the caps (that I could find). To be fair, once you finally find it, the page is quite clear on what each service plan allows.
For the record, I am not against the idea of consumption caps actually. There are just three major problems with the current implementations I’ve seen in the marketplace.
#1: They are very unclear to consumers. On Cox.com it is buried in a series of pages that only attorneys would be attracted to. The consumption caps need to be shown on the same pages as the bandwidth speeds.
Comcast is even worse than Cox, they don’t even say exactly what the caps are. How much data is 40 million e-mails really? While their examples are a little more understandable to average users, they really need to list the actual cap.
Oddly enough when I used their benchmarks with the averages for my files/emails to calculate their caps, their caps are much higher than Cox’s, so you’d think they wouldn’t be shy about it. Although the difference between the examples is a joke. The effective cap is about 64GB/month using the photo example with my pictures (and I have an 8MP Canon 20D so my pictures are actually quite large), but it is a whopping 4TB (yes, terabytes) if you use the 40 million e-mail example. Talk about unclear.
There also needs to be a way for consumers to check their consumption. There is no place (at least that I could find) where consumers can see how much they are consuming (ala cell phone minutes). Even if you track your own consumption somehow (DD-WRT can do it on a number of routers) the ISPs conveniently don’t recognize anyone’s numbers but their own.
#2: There is a wide disparity between plans (at least at Cox). This is really a byproduct of #1; they don’t make it easy to find what each plan allows.
When I recently signed up for Internet with Cox they tried to sign me up on some combo promotion deal for Cable TV and Internet. It included their Value Internet plan (1.5Mbit/256kbit @ $29.99/month). I opted to upgrade to the Preferred plan (7mbit/512kbit @ $43.99) mostly for the higher uplink for online gaming and VoIP.
It turns out that the Value plan only includes 4GB of downstream and 1GB of upstream traffic per month versus 40GB and 10GB (respectively) for the Preferred. So for 47% more per month I get 1000% more transfer allowance. Who would think that the difference would be so large?
I can easily download 2-3GB in game demos in one day over Xbox Live on a regular basis. I would have blown past my cap in less than a week for sure. I wouldn’t have known the difference until my Internet got cut off or I got a threatening letter. Hence the need for clarity in listing what is included in the Internet packages.
Some examples at Cox are even worse. They have Preferred on a special for $19.99 and Economy (the lowest tier) for $14.99 right now. Economy only includes 3GB of downstream traffic. For an extra $5 you’ll get over 13 times more download capacity. Why can’t this be more obvious?
#3: The caps are ridiculously low. I analyzed how much you could utilize your connection for 24 hours a day, and for an adjusted day of 16 hours (to account for sleep) and here is what I found. I looked at what I call acceptable average utilization (AAU). It is the average bandwidth expressed as a percentage (acceptable speed / rated speed of plan) you can consume without exceeding the bandwidth caps imposed by an ISP.
Every plan allows less than a 2% AAU rate at their rated speeds. On the Value plan (read: not even the lowest tier) you can only average 13kbps! If you account for sleep (not that BitTorrent or my backup software sleeps) then the top adjusted AAU rate of any plan is still only 2.7%.
To put that in perspective, on the higher Preferred plan, streaming music from an online radio at 192kbps constantly everyday would use up your entire consumption cap by itself. If you live with a couple of other people who stream music too, then you can each only do 8 hours per day. In my book that is hardly “excessive usage” for someone paying for the second highest tier plan.
I think I’ll have to check out what DSL and Fiber are offering in my neighborhood to see if I can find a company who agrees.
*Here is a link to my spreadsheet with all of my numbers in more detail.
**Looks like the caps are already causing problems.
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11 Responses to “The Web 2.0 Has Toll-Booths: Cox, Comcast, and Some Clarity”
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Consumers can’t rail against what they don’t know about! Thanks for putting some real numbers out there. Hopefully one of the big guns will recognize that there are enough savvy customers out there that putting these kinds of numbers out front will boost sales and that they can easily beat the competition’s numbers. Somehow I see this all trending back like the cellphones are doing now with unlimited plans. Oh well. As long as the consumers have a choice things will improve. Take away the choice and things really start to suck.
So since you’re “not against the idea of consumption caps,” can I push the issue a little further and ask what you think an acceptable cap might be? In asking the question, I guess I’m just pointing out that “acceptable” will mean different things to different people.
I think most everyone (consumers, at least) can agree that the current caps are a bit low. It’s just finding that right level… which I think will be difficult… which is why I don’t think caps are a good idea.
I think it is somewhat irrelevant, or certainly much less significant, as to what I personally think is an acceptable cap. My usage is different than many others. If the information is clearly laid out on the product pages then I can make that decision when I shop around and sign up.
Personally, I am very concerned about my upload cap. The 10GB cap will get blown by with my online backup software. I do use BitTorrent once in a while (usually just for new Linux distros I want to try out) and I do a lot of long-form online video (Xbox Live rentals, Netflix, Hulu, Orb, etc).
What I’d love to see would be some sort of uncapped time of day. Similar to the nights and weekends concept used for cellphones. Why not only meter speeds and data transfers from 6am-midnight? That would allow people to use online backup solutions and P2P during off-peak times without affecting most other users.
Makes sense. Clearly laid out information is probably the first step, but just like cellphone plans, that shouldn’t mean that there isn’t at least an option for unlimited. And the nights/weekends concept is intriguing, though I still feel the whole thing feels like going backwards to try and go forwards. The bottom line is that I don’t want to deal with caps.
Maybe the highest tier plan should be unlimited, but there is certainly a market need for low bandwidth cheaper plans. You can’t sell $15/month internet plans with unlimited bandwidth with people BitTorrenting their hearts out at a profit.
I don’t think I want it to get as granular as cellphones are (do you want texting? how many messages? how many minutes do you want? data plan? unlimited or limited data plan? 2G or 3G? 1 year or 2 year commitment? etc, etc, etc) but 3-4 plans should be ok. The lowest plan could be for my grandma and the higher tier could be for people like you and me.
The bottom line is this. The main alternative to bandwidth caps that ISPs are going to look at for network load management is going to be prioritized traffic based on the payload, and I’m not comfortable with that. Then you’ll end up with online video/gaming/etc being slow unless you pay for that specific feature (much more complicated like cell phone text messaging, data plans, etc). I’d much rather see an application agnostic approach to network management.
Well, if those two extremes become the only two options, then I’d side with bandwidth caps. But I think that the current most expensive Comcast plan (for consumers) should have unlimited bandwidth for the price it currently is (i.e., there shouldn’t be price raises all of a sudden).
I’m fine if lower plans are introduced or tweaked with bandwidth caps. But whatever the top package is should remain the same price with no bandwidth caps (this would appease me, at least).
I’m actually ok with the top plan just having a really really high cap, but not unlimited. Similar to how my night and weekends plan has 5000 minutes which is functionally unlimited for all but people who would abuse the system. I don’t think it is necessary to have a residential Internet package that has an AAU over 50%.
If you can average 50% of your top rated speed 24 hours a day every single day non-stop that seems pretty reasonable to me. Beyond that and you should probably have to step up to a commercial plan.
I still think unmetered off-peak hours would be really good. You should be allowed 1-2 months per year where you exceed your limit too. That would account for the rare occurrences like signing up for a new online backup when you will upload a ton all at once, but from there on out it will just be doing updates.
[...] You’ve heard the stories, you’ve read the commentary, you’ve weighed the pros and cons, and most of you have likely fallen on the no-limits side of the divide. For data consumption, that is. If nothing else, it’s really just a whole lot less complicated than what Cox and others are proposing and implementing, which is to tell you the subscriber to eat your heart out, if only to a certain extent. One more person to follow countless others in learning first-hand of a glass ceiling is Paul Ellis of TechConsumer. [...]
Welcome to the Australian ISP market, except they have to be upfront about the download limits (and starting to add upload limits too now).
Choosing a plan is not just speed, but peak and off peak download limits. Do they have upload limits, is the telephone line rental(usually around $15-$20 a month) bundled etc.
And it is expensive here $70AU = $65US a month for 10Gb (includes both up and down) + 20Gb off peak (2am – noon), 16Mb/1Mb (right distance from exchange), include line rental and VOIP. If I go over my cap, slowed to 128kbs/64kbs for rest of month.
Could of got it cheaper through a less reliable provider, could of been more expensive through others.
I’m a Cox Preferred customer, and in the past month, I’ve downloaded an order of magnitude more than 40GB.
But it’s all been Usenet, and Cox *does* limit nntp bandwidth to ~220KBps (whereas FTPing a big file runs at 600-750Kbps).
That is interesting. I have heard that from another Cox customer as well. Perhaps they only selectively enforce their policies. They are sufficiently low that they could choice to cut a lot of people off.
I should say that of all of the ISPs I have dealt with Cox is actually my favorite, and I have tried quite a few (Comcast, Time Warner, PacBell, SBC, AT&T, Covad, Insight, DirecWay, some regional wireless provider, and of course Cox).