Mother Broadband: Mother Broadband

Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Mother Broadband

Traditionally, ISPs have used an "unlimited time" or flat rate model, with pricing determined by the maximum bitrate chosen by the customer, rather than an hourly charge. However the use of high bandwidth applications is increasing rapidly, with increased consumer demand for streaming content such as video on demand, as well as peer-to-peer file sharing.

For ISPs who are bandwidth limited, this model may become unsustainable as demand for bandwidth increases. Fixed costs represent 80-90% of the cost of providing broadband service, and although most ISPs keep their cost secret, the total cost (January 2008) is estimated to be about $0.10 per gigabyte. Currently some ISPs estimate that about 5% of users consume about 50% of the total bandwidth .

In order to provide additional high bandwidth pay services without incurring the additional costs of expanding current broadband infrastructure, Internet Service Providers are exploring new methods to cap current bandwidth usage by customers.This is despite the lagging broadband infrastructure in the United States, according to the Economic Policy Institute: "The United States has also fallen behind other countries in the deployment of new broadband technologies."

Some ISPs have begun experimenting with usage-based pricing, notably a Time Warner test in Beaumont, Texas. Bell Canada has imposed bandwidth caps on customers, with pricing ranging from $1 to $7.50 per gigabyte ($1 to $2.50 per gigabyte on their current plans) for usage over certain limits.

An often overlooked analysis when choosing an internet provider is comparing the different DSL and cable internet services at the plan level. Doing so will ensure that consumers do not overpay for a bandwidth they will not utilize.

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Broadband Internet access

Broadband Internet access, often shortened to just broadband, is high-speed Internet access—typically contrasted with dial-up access over a modem.
Dial-up modems are generally only capable of a maximum bitrate of 56 kbit/s (kilobits per second) and require the full use of a telephone line—whereas broadband technologies supply at least double this speed and generally without disrupting telephone use. (Though the opposite word for broadband is not dial up, it is used here for practical understanding purposes only.)
Although various minimum speeds have been used in definitions of broadband, ranging up from 64 kbit/s up to 1.0 Mbit/s, the 2006 OECD report is typical in counting only download speeds equal to or faster than 256 kbit/s as broadband, and the US FCC currently defines broadband as anything above 768 kbit/s
Speeds are defined in terms of maximum download because several common consumer broadband technologies such as ADSL are "asymmetric"—supporting much slower maximum upload speeds than download.
"Broadband penetration" is now treated as a key economic indicator.

Overview
Broadband is often called high-speed Internet, because it usually has a high rate of data transmission. In general, any connection to the customer of 256 kbit/s (0.256 Mbit/s) or more is considered broadband Internet. The International Telecommunication Union Standardization Sector (ITU-T) recommendation I.113 has defined broadband as a transmission capacity that is faster than primary rate ISDN, at 1.5 to 2 Mbit/s. The FCC definition of broadband is 200 kbit/s (0.2 Mbit/s) in one direction, and advanced broadband is at least 200 kbit/s in both directions. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has defined broadband as 256 kbit/s in at least one direction and this bit rate is the most common baseline that is marketed as "broadband" around the world. There is no specific bitrate defined by the industry, however, and "broadband" can mean lower-bitrate transmission methods. Some Internet Service Providers (ISPs) use this to their advantage in marketing lower-bitrate connections as broadband.
In practice, the advertised bandwidth is not always reliably available to the customer; ISPs often allow a greater number of subscribers than their backbone connection can handle, under the assumption that most users will not be using their full connection capacity very frequently. This aggregation strategy works more often than not, so users can typically burst to their full bandwidth most of the time; however, peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing systems, often requiring extended durations of high bandwidth, stress these assumptions, and can cause major problems for ISPs who have excessively overbooked their capacity. For more on this topic, see traffic shaping. As takeup for these introductory products increases, telcos are starting to offer higher bit rate services. For existing connections, this most of the time simply involves reconfiguring the existing equipment at each end of the connection.
As the bandwidth delivered to end users increases, the market expects that video on demand services streamed over the Internet will become more popular, though at the present time such services generally require specialized networks. The data rates on most broadband services still do not suffice to provide good quality video, as MPEG-2 video requires about 6 Mbit/s for good results. Adequate video for some purposes becomes possible at lower data rates, with rates of 768 kbit/s and 384 kbit/s used for some video conferencing applications, and rates as low as 100 kbit/s used for videophones using H.264/MPEG-4 AVC. The MPEG-4 format delivers high-quality video at 2 Mbit/s, at the high end of cable modem and ADSL performance.
Increased bandwidth has already made an impact on newsgroups: postings to groups such as alt.binaries.* have grown from JPEG files to entire CD and DVD images. According to NTL, the level of traffic on their network increased from a daily inbound news feed of 150 gigabytes of data per day and 1 terabyte of data out each day in 2001 to 500 gigabytes of data inbound and over 4 terabytes out each day in 2002.

Mother Broadband

Tuesday, August 12, 2008