Putting the Squeeze on Bandwidth Hogs
How Operators Deal With Their Greediest Users
By Randy Barrett -- Multichannel News, 5/6/2007 8:00:00 PM
Broadband Internet providers want their customers to pig out on bandwidth — except when they don't want them to.
Ex-Comcast customer Frank Carreiro, who lives in West Jordan, Utah, raised a major stink on his blog after the cable operator dumped him in January for using too many Megabits.
“I'm concerned that Comcast is disconnecting people with next to no notification,” Carreiro wrote on his blog. His griping was picked up by several online and print media outlets, including The New York Times.
Carriero's experience cracks open a sensitive subject for broadband-service providers: a finite amount of bandwidth is available to all customers. In order to make money, all networks are “oversubscribed” with the assumption that only a small percentage of users will require bits at any one time.
Bandwidth hogs, slurping porcine quantities at peak hours, can throw a wrench into the whole business model. “We try to deal with it in the network by rebalancing,” Verizon Communications spokeswoman Bobbi Henson said.
SHORT ON SPECIFICS
While that sounds mysterious, the bottom line is all providers require residential customers to agree not to use too much bandwidth, but very few actually specify how much is too much. Of nine service providers surveyed by Multichannel News, only three — Cox Communications, Shaw Communications and Qwest Communications International — explicitly state limits.
Cox said if you download more than 40 Gigabytes downstream per month and send more than 10 GB upstream per month, you're a hog. Shaw puts the guard rail at 60 GB per month for its standard service. Qwest furnishes the rules of the road on a password-protected area of its site for customers; several requests for the information were unanswered.
To say the least, most Internet-service providers are cagey on the subject. The majority of terms-of-service agreements are oblique on the matter of limits. Comcast's user agreement, for example, lets the operator decided on a case-by-case basis whether you're out of bounds: “You shall ensure that your use of the Service does not restrict, inhibit, interfere with, or degrade any other user's use of the Service, nor represent (in the sole judgment of Comcast) an overly large burden on the network.”
Cable companies are particularly susceptible to abuse by bandwidth hogs, because their network design shares bandwidth that makes it possible for a single hog to degrade service for other customers in the neighborhood.
Service providers are more than happy to upgrade gluttonous users to higher-priced packages, and industry executives say the hazy wording of service agreements gives providers wide latitude to decide when and whom to push into upper tiers of service.
In the end, what matters most is not how much bandwidth is consumed by any one customer, but when. Evening is prime usage time for residential users, and heavy bandwidth gobbling at 8 p.m. can be a major problem for cable companies. “It takes only one or two guys to piss off hundreds of consumers in primetime,” IDC analyst Eve Griliches said.
According to operators and network-gear manufacturers, about 5% of residential customers generate about 80% of backbone traffic. They're usually heavy movie downloaders or online gamers.
When Comcast contacts this class of subscribers, “they know what they're doing” to get flagged, a company representative said, and the majority agree to change their behavior. “Most of our customers could increase their usage by 100% and still not be excessive users.”
Bandwidth hogs who scarf Megabits at 2 a.m. aren't really a problem because networks are underutilized in off-hours, Griliches said.
DEEP PACKETS
While vague wording to service contracts may lead customers to think the onus is on them to behave, in reality service providers constantly monitor and groom their traffic flows. Software and hardware from a handful of companies — including Sandvine, Ellacoya Networks, Allot Communications and Cisco Systems — make it technically possible.
The systems, using a technology called deep-packet inspection, track the digital envelopes of information and classify them by subscriber and application. The technology can identify bandwidth hogs easily. More important, it can track and control speeds of specific packet types, including e-mail, video and voice.
“The goal is to improve the aggregate experience of [all] subscribers,” Sandvine executive vice president for marketing and sales Tom Donnelly said.
The easiest way to curb bandwidth abusers is to limit their upload and download speed, if only temporarily, according to Tom Dimicelli, a product manager for Juniper Networks. “By mitigating [hogs] it really frees up other customers,” he said. “We can exert very tight control on the use of Internet resources.”
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