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.