Just ask the Internet Archive.

Much like Wikipedia, the folks at Archive.org are also looking for funding, but they aren’t going about it with creepy images of editors that stare at you for the duration of your visit. Sure, there are prompts over at the Internet Archive asking people to donate, but the manner in which they go about asking isn’t anywhere near as intrusive as other sites. To put it another way, the way in which the Internet Archive is asking for donations has not become a Reddit meme where people poke fun at the monetary requests.

While I mention bandwidth in the article’s lede, it’s not the only reason for the donation requests, something the Internet Archive blog post reveals quite well:

In the last year, the number of people using the Internet Archive has increased to two million people every day, and our collections of free books, music, video, and web pages have also grown by twenty to twenty-five percent. This is great news, but we are doing it all on a shoestring budget.

This year we need your help.

The word “help” is linked and when clicked, visitors are taken to a donation page where you can contribute as much or as little as you can. Considering the role the Internet Archive provides, asking for a little funding is perfectly acceptable, especially for a site/service that offers this description as its primary goal:

We digitize books, collect video, music and the World Wide Web, and take contributions of digital media from anyone who would like their materials preserved.

We provide access to these vast collections to millions of people each day. All for free. {Emphaisis added]

So yeah, asking for donations to keep bringing such content to the masses is understandable, especially when the service is free. With that in mind, perhaps Archive.org could look into official sponsorship, or, who knows, maybe sell themselves to Google or Microsoft. Considering their massive amount of content, there could be some great opportunities for targeted advertisements.

If you’d like to donate to the Internet Archive’s cause, you can do so here.

Worse yet, apparently, he/she doesn’t seem to mind one bit. From AT&T’s perspective, their customers want the higher bandwidth users to pay more, therefore, “justifying” the upcoming cap rule.

Forgive the aside here, but why is it up the heavy bandwidth user to foot the bill for the mysterious cost of bandwidth usage when the company’s infrastructure may not be adequate enough to handle their rapidly increasing customer base? As more and more users enjoy the conveniences and pleasures of streaming video in high definition, high-end PC gaming, and other robust Internet tasks, the company needs to adapt in order to support this growth, instead of resorting to punishing its power users, or “hogs” for lack of a better term.

Another consideration is, as pointed out by Wired.com, there isn’t a great deal of information concerning the congestion issues these caps are supposed to prevent. In other words, there’s no proof AT&T or Comcast even need these caps to begin with.

Different subjects for a different day, apparently. As for the upcoming AT&T cap, the details are as follows: DSL customers will have a 150 gigabyte per month usage limit. Those that exceed the cap will be penalized an extra $10 for every 50 gigabytes they go over.

Needless to say, reaction to AT&T’s wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing approach to such a sensitive subject has set off a firestorm of reaction around the Internet. Endgadget’s post has over 3000 comments and Reddit’s is somewhere around the 600 mark by now. As one might expect, there aren’t many supporters of the upcoming cap.

Though the vitriol is fast and fierce, the first comment on Reddit’s thread stood out to this writer:

“I love it when people who use the services they paid for and were promised are referred to as “hogs”. Kills me every time.“

(via enderpanda)

Too bad such negative reaction won’t impact AT&T’s decision in anyway, shape or form. At this point, only a mass exodus would reverse this particular course. That being said, it would be nice to actually meet some of these ubiquitous customers AT&T keeps referring to.

The new cap makes its long-awaited debut on May 2nd, in what will no doubt be a red letter day… at least for AT&T

Will this affect you and your Internet usage? Let us know your thoughts.

DSLReports has learned that AT&T users will start receiving notices, about the change to the terms of service, sometime between March 18 and March 31. AT&T customers who exceed their usage cap will be charged a fee of $10 for every 50GB. (It should be noted is that the AT&T U-Verse TV Service WON’T count towards the GB cap).

Engadget has an interesting statement from AT&T…

“We are committed to providing a great experience for all of our Internet customers. Less than 2 percent of our Internet customers could be impacted by this approach – those who are using a disproportionate amount of bandwidth. We will communicate early and often with these customers so they are well aware of their options before they incur any additional usage charges.

The top 2 percent of residential subscribers uses about 20 percent of the bandwidth on our network. Just one of these high-traffic users can utilize the same amount of data capacity as 19 typical households. Lopsided usage patterns can cause congestion at certain points in the network, which can slow Internet speeds and interfere with other customers’ access to and use of the network. Our new plan addresses another concern: customers strongly believe that only those who use the most bandwidth should pay more than those who don’t use as much. That’s exactly what this does – and again, 98% of our customers will not be impacted by this.”

What are your thoughts on AT&T’s cap? Tell us what you think.

The majority (94%) of respondents see value in broadband service providers (BSP) that dynamically allocate premium bandwidth for some types of traffic, such as video, VoIP, and gaming.

More than half (54%) would actively seek to change service providers if another BSP offered this service and 26 percent would be willing to pay additional fees for premium bandwidth services.

The overwhelming majority (81%) are opposed to the idea of establishing a bandwidth cap and charging for use above the cap. Fifty-one percent would try to change service providers if their BSP implemented bandwidth caps. Light and moderate users are even more against capping and metering than heavy users.

Eighty-three percent said they either don’t know what a gigabyte is or have no idea how many they use. Ninety-five percent said that those who use more bandwidth should not have to pay more.

"While some of the results of this survey were in line with expectations, others were significantly at odds with prevailing wisdom," said Matt Davis, director of multiplay research at IDC.

"Specifically, consumers continue to be protective of their privacy but are adamantly opposed to bandwidth caps and keenly interested in premium bandwidth services. These last two points may come as a surprise to those believing that bandwidth caps are inevitable and that consumers are unwilling to pay more for better services."

Huh? Right. Last I heard the legislature had not addressed robots.txt, but it’s possible I missed it. Bygones and on with it. Though it’s unclear which sites are participating, if any, social media users may encounter a notice that they’ve been blocked. Some of the reasoning is as follows:

"The users of sites such as Digg, Netscape, Reddit and StumbleUpon openly endorse Ad Block Plus, a plug-in that blocks advertisement on web sites, and are well known for providing no value to the sites they visit. Software that blocks all advertisement is an infringement of the rights of web site owners and developers. Numerous web sites exist in order to provide quality content in exchange for displaying ads, Digg users who don’t click on these ads are stealing bandwidth without paying for it and website owners deserve a method to block this unauthorized bandwith theft.

"Since social media sites do not allow website owners a method for excluding content and do not obey robots.txt law, abiding webmasters are forced to block all users from social media sites."

I suppose also if one were to visit "abiding" webmasters’ sites without Ad Block Plus and chose to ignore them they would also be guilty of "theft." Does that also apply if I go to the bathroom or kitchen during TV commercials? It would seem so.

But this article can’t be closed without a third opinion, and why not just quote one of the original opponents of WhyFirefoxIsBlocked.com, the webmaster behind WhyIsFirefoxedBlocked.com:

"Why is firefox blocked?

"Because some douche wants to infect your computer with popups, search bars and endless ads, the same kind of douche that made you get Firefox in the first place because of horrific popups, search bars and endless ads."

For a detailed explanation of why the logic of blocking social media sites is flawed, give Muhammad Saleem a visit. 

The more-bandwidth argument has been made most convincingly (read: most unemotionally) by British Telecommunications, when the company’s CTO Matt Beal opined that with enough bandwidth, there would be no need for traffic shaping, or prioritizing traffic, a goal that is exactly what has gotten the pro-Net Neutrality movement up in arms.

Let me put that simpler: Increase bandwidth capacity and the argument that traffic prioritization is necessary is moot.

With that in mind, it seems rather convenient that three of the five authors of a study comparing the costs of "differentiated" and "undifferentiated" networks are employed by AT&T.

This type of thing isn’t rare, companies commission studies all the time. Just when everybody was down on AOL’s enlistment of Goodmail’s services, Time Inc. released a study about the benefits of CertifiedEmail. Last month, Pitney Bowes, a company that bases its business around snail mail, played an interesting numbers game with a survey about email.

And who could forget Senator Ted Stevens’ Verizon-funded Net Neutrality poll disguised to be a poll about TV?

The point is, words and numbers can be put together to say anything you want. But for the remainder of this article, we’ll assume an AT&T-sponsored study on one of the core technical issues of the Net Neutrality debate hasn’t been doctored up.

“The study makes clear that there are substantial additional costs for the extra capacity required to operate networks in which all traffic is treated alike, and carrying traffic that needs to still be assured performance as specified in service level agreements (SLAs),” said principal investigator Shivkumar Kalyanaraman, professor of electrical, computer, and systems engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the institution AT&T made out the check to.

About 60 to 100 percent more costly in terms of extra capacity, according to the press release about the study.

“Clearly, an undifferentiated network in this context is less efficient and more expensive,” said coauthor K.K. Ramakrishnan of AT&T Labs. “We believe understanding the real impacts of the alternative strategies is important as the debate about network architecture unfolds.”

However, TechDirt CEO Mike Masnick, who’s been keeping track of exaggerations on both sides of the issue, notes:

It also doesn’t consider all the costs associated with a non-neutral network.… requiring 60% more bandwidth does not mean 60% additional cost. Furthermore… the cost of bandwidth keeps dropping, so it actually gets cheaper and cheaper over time. However, the cost of labor associated with setting up and maintaining a non-neutral network is likely to increase over time.

And that doesn’t even begin to address the limitless capacity fiber will offer once available everywhere (in the US, most likely 10-15 years later than the rest of the world), which the incumbents will own…

"I believe it is important for companies like Google to establish a place of meaningful dialogue with the general public," he writes, "and to open our policy advocacy role to outside analysis — and yes, criticism."

Following is a quick summary of Whitt’s main points.

What Type of Network control is okay for access providers?

1.    Manage their network with content-neutral practices to neutralize "objective network harms," like denial of service (DOS) attacks, viruses, and worms.

2.    To prioritize packets of a certain application type, like video, because there are tangible end-user benefits such as video quality.

3.    Prioritization based upon objective criteria such as latency or jitter, applied in an even-handed manner.

Not okay.

Prioritization used for discriminatory purposes, such as degrading or prioritizing certain applications based on an intention to impair the offerings of competitors. "[S]uch practices should be prohibited as unreasonable," said Whitt.

AT&T’s Full of It

Former AT&T CEO Ed Whitacre complained that Google and others would have to pay to use his "pipes." However, Whitt confirms what everybody knew. They already do pay for it:

Web companies must arrange with network operators to: carry the data traffic from company facilities to their Web servers over local telecom lines (the “last mile”); carry the data traffic from the Web servers into the Internet over high-speed, high-capacity data lines (“special access”); and carry the data traffic over the numerous interconnected networks that make up the Internet (the “Internet backbone”).

To accomplish these important connectivity and transport functions in a fast and effective manner, Internet companies collectively pay many billions of dollars per year to network operators, which fully compensates them for their network investment.

There Is No Competition In the Broadband Market

1.    Phone and Cable companies control 99.6% of the broadband market
2.    Alternative broadband does not compete in terms of speed, price, or availability.
3.    Entry costs are enormous.
4.    Switching costs for consumers are too punitive.

"Together, these salient factors — excessive market concentration, no viable competitors, considerable consumer switching costs, and substantial barriers to entry — should lead policymakers to conclude that there is a major competition problem in the broadband market."

Check out Whitt’s full, detailed posts on the broadband market, type-based differentiation, and paying for bandwidth.

The FCC required AT&T to offer DSL at this price for two years, as well as adhere to Net Neutrality principles. They didn’t, though, say they had to promote the cheaper offering, or offer it to everyone.

Reuters points out that the service is listed fairly deep in the website and is only available to new subscribers, meaning loyal customers are stuck paying the standard 40 times bandwidth price they’re already paying.

Reuters still hasn’t figured out the value of linking, so the Consumerist has picked up the slack. Writing for the Consumerist, Meghann Marco advises:

Keep an eye out for the next concession, so-called "naked DSL." Within 6 months, AT&T will be required to offer DSL with no local phone service. The treasure hunt to find that one on their site should be equally fun.

He looks at how some ISPs cut back your bandwidth after you’ve downloaded a certain amount per month, which with video isn’t difficult to exceed, and how some put a cap on downloads period. Many ISPs also use “bandwidth shaping” to restrict the flow of peer-to-peer apps such as Joost and Skype.

This is an issue that is going to become more and more important as Joost and Babelgum and other peer-to-peer video apps become widespread. One thing Steve doesn’t mention is that many ISPs also have ridiculously tiny upload speeds, and this is just as much of a threat to peer-to-peer apps. It’s no good to have a big fat download pipe if the upload is a tiny drinking straw.

Update:

Of course, if you live in an area where Verizon’s FiOS is available, you can get 30 megabits download (no details on uploads or whether they use bandwidth throttling). As Cynthia Brumfield notes at IPDemocracy, there’s no such thing as too much bandwidth.

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Taken from the storied pages of the How To Stick It To Your Customers manifesto, Comcast has once again proven that just when you think a company can’t possibly tarnish their public image any further, there’s always a new low that can be achieved.

According to PC Magazine, Comcast is now pulling the plug on “bandwidth hogs” and will not allow those customers to re-establish service for a full year. Of course, subscribers have no actual way of monitoring their bandwidth usage, and Comcast is all but refusing to provide any of its own data to support their decisions.

In the PC Magazine Article, Comcast outlines the process:

The customers who are notified of excessive use typically and repeatedly consume exponentially more bandwidth than an average residential user, which would include, for example, the equivalent of sending 256,000 photos a month, or sending 13 million e-mails every month (or 18,000 emails every hour, every day, all month).

In these rare instances, Comcast’s policy is to proactively contact the customer via phone to work with them and address the issue or help them select a more appropriate commercial-grade Comcast product.

Frank Carreiro is a former Comcast subscriber who got the ax from the Internet provider despite being assured by the company’s customer service department that he was in no danger of service termination.

Carreiro finally got Comcast to provide a figure concerning his bandwidth usage. In a blog post, however, he reveals that the information he received wasn’t accurate when compared with figures from his current provider:

My ISP (xmission.com) provides a stats section where I can see exactly what I’m consuming. The numbers are shocking. I’ve learned we are actually using much less than Comcast told us. I could post what my firewall is telling me but hey, I might have faked it right? After all, I’m a bandwidth hog. Or am I?

It’s baffling why Comcast would voluntarily terminate paying customers. When looking at figures posted by fellow writer David A. Utter, however, perhaps the company is afraid that subscribers might actually be getting their money’s worth out of the bandwidth.