I recently bought a new wireless router. The old one was dog-slow and really unreliable – a problem since I use my 360 for Netflix a lot. Or, rather, I would, had I been able to get a reasonable signal. Instead weeks would go by when Netflix wouldn’t work at all; the rest of the time it minimized the picture quality to just above intolerable. Through sheer laziness I’d put off the purchase for almost a year, but I wanted my Netflix. I don’t like sitting at a computer to watch stuff. And, since the Sci Fi Channel inexplicably quit carrying Doctor Who years ago, I was way behind in one of those guilty pleasure shows whose pure British zaniness make it a must-see in my book.
The new Netgear solved it all. This thing is fast. Once again unfettered Netflix access was mine, and I was finally able to catch up on Doctor Who.
This article has no relation at all to Doctor Who but since I’m sure you all want my opinion I’ll quickly render it:
- Matt Smith takes some getting used to but in the end is a solid choice. While at first I thought he was merely channeling David Tennant, that turns out to be an unfair generalization. Both play the character as battily cheerful, but gone is Tennant’s brooding tragedy; Smith’s Doctor is instead imperceptibly menacing. Completely innocuous lines come with a hint of unspoken threat, while threats seem playful. Coupled with a more evident malice toward humanity reminiscent of Christopher Eccleston’s Doctor but alien to Tennant’s, it’s unique, tense, and effective.
- - Karen Gillan has a role that too often winds up being little more than the Doctor’s handbag, but manages to be delightfully inventive in it. Plus she looks too amazing to exist, and has that accent. Oh, the accent. And the skirts! Yes, like spandex and tank tops, short skirts are a privilege, not a right.
- - The season’s storylines were disappointing, a surprise given that Coupling and Sherlock scribe/genius Steven Moffat now has full control of the show. Oh well.
Anyway, for reasons that will soon become apparent, you should know that I installed my new router on June 1. Since then, in addition to about 14 episodes of Doctor Who plus the Christmas specials where Tennant got replaced by Smith and also the inexplicable one with the balloon, I’ve watched Kick-Ass (missed it on release); Macbeth (Patrick Stewart in the title role; he was good but little else was); Sherlock (on recommendation from Ajax19); Dead Space Extraction (awful); Lost in La Mancha (heartbreaking); Water Wars (depressing); Left Behind (sue me, I was curious!); The Cove (I’ll never eat dolphin again); and Starship Troopers 3 (I get a little weird late at night).
I also downloaded Infamous to my PS3 as part of Sony’s apology for getting hacked; the final release of Frozen Synapse; and Visual Studio Express 2010. I HBO Go’d a few episodes of Game of Thrones even though I have most of them on my DVR. I did a few Skype calls, Steam performed its usual housekeeping and patching, and of course there was normal email and site management and hothotgoatsex.com web surfing and stuff. Out of curiosity I checked with Comcast to see how much my house has slurped down:
Our Mat C wrote recently that an all-digital future may be less desirable than we think, and I agree. Though an all-digital future is probably inevitable whether we want it or not, the world is not wholly ready for one. While services like Steam have changed the way I buy and play games, and services like Netflix streaming have changed the way I consume media, this has naturally changed something else: the amount of data I require. It’s only going to get worse. Streaming game services such as OnLive and Gaikai may be embryonic at the moment, but they or something like them will eventually have a large market share. Cloud apps like Dropbox and Mozy play host to whatever-comes-after-terabytes of global data.
Many major ISPs cap subscriber bandwidth, and Comcast’s 250GB ceiling is actually quite generous compared to some. Time Warner’s limit on the Roadrunner service is 40GB per month. Cox Communications limits users to 2GB per day.
There is a vaguely plausible reason for this – ISPs are trying to prevent illegal file sharing, partly because it’s illegal and partly because it takes up bandwidth. Until recently, only users of BitTorrent would have that kind of traffic in a single month. Even I, with my shoddy SD signal from Netflix, would never gobble anything close to 250GB in a month no matter who much Doctor Who I watched. But full-on HD streaming has changed things dramatically. Comcast’s claim that only 0.01% of its users would ever be affected by the cap is simply no longer accurate. Streaming nearly everything I watch in high definition is going to gobble up more bandwidth – possibly more than I am allowed. And while I’ll be first to admit that June has been an unusually internetty month for me, it’s a little unnerving to be at 40% in ten days. I don’t use BitTorrent, I don’t share files.
I do, however, buy games on Steam – more and more of which weigh in at 8-20GB apiece. I do download large objects – S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Complete is a hefty gigabyte on its own. I do use my Dropbox for nearly everything, including my Outlook PST file, resulting in near-constant syncing between four PCs, two of which always use my Comcast account.
Size Matters
We’re in the in-between space now, where people are consuming exponentially greater amounts of data but the providers are still throttling access to it. It’s all made more murky by the fact that Comcast, Cox, Time-Warner, and other ISPs don’t actually own the pipelines they’re using to deliver data to your house. They rent bandwidth from the massive backbone providers, mostly companies you’ve never heard of: Level 3, LINX, Savvis – these are the outfits that own the physical aspect of the internet. And they too are threatened by the rising bandwidth consumption.
A time will come when 250GB a month is paltry. In 2008 a University of California study suggested that Americans consume 34GB of data per day across all media, non-digital and non-internet included:
At that rate you’d hit your Comcast cap in a week. As time goes by, those large slices of non-digital stuff are creeping more and more into the digital and streaming realm. Lots of people get Doctor Who through Netflix, and fewer watch it on TV. Print is going digital – books, newspapers, magazine. I’d bet that by 2015, 85% of the media I consume in a day will be streamed or downloaded. So much for 0.01% of Comcast users being affected.
The backbones and the ISPs alike need to get their heads around this. The amount of data we consume is never going to shrink, and caps are completely unrealistic solutions. Sure, Google or Verizon may bite the bullet and lay a new fiber backbone. It’d take probably ten years to wire North America and Western Europe, and cost… I don’t know, as much as a trillion dollars, I’d think. And then we’d be left with a new superfast internet… owned by Verizon. I think not.
The future is more likely wireless, which presents its own problems. The electromagnetic spectrum is large but finite, and right now technology only allows us to use a small portion of it for data transmission anyway. Our fat pipes no longer seem so fat.
Think about this as you fire up your Roku Player, or your 360, to catch up on Ugly Betty. Before you click another one of Steam’s damnable daily sales, ask yourself if the game you’re about to download is worth it. Oh sure, it’s worth the $2.99 they’re charging, but is it worth the 6GB of quota it’ll gobble?
I don’t know what happens if I exceed 250GB in June, and I’m kind of afraid to find out. Will the Comcast Police come and get me? Will I be taken away to Comcast Prison for a rough cornholing – a sort of lesson in how those pipes feel as they choke down my irresponsibly enormous data packets? Will they just shut me off? If Steerpike falls silent on, say, June 23, don’t assume he’s been hit by a bus. He may have simply fallen foul of the Data Overlords, whose ire we shall all soon court.
Send an email to the author of this post at steerpike@tap-repeatedly.com.
Usually when you exceed your bandwidth limits ISPs throttle your access, they strangle it until it turns blue and chokes out blocky video pixels.
I’ve never understood how internet HDTV and OnLive gaming were supposed to take over when all this bandwidth is a physical limit for the consumers. It’s the corporate sell without the dose of reality. I’m reminded of Banksy’s intro for The Simpsons.
And despite the bandwidth limits imposed on their customers, the ISPs in the UK demanding the BBC PAY THEM for providing high-bandwidth iPlayer access. Never mind that’s the kind of reason people signed up for internet access in the first place.
Btw, the dolphin you order in restaurants is not the porpoises from the Cove. That is actually a fish, mahi-mahi, which for some reason is also called “dolphin”, but rest assured, you are not eating Flipper.
I don’t think you can find actual dolphin meat outside of Japan.
I was joking, Tanis. I couldn’t take dolphin or human child off my menu, no matter what the documentaries and “laws” say about eating them.
Looking forward to hearing a review on Left Behind. I feel curious too. It’s either that or a bowel movement.
lol. Matt, you’d be surprised how many people I know actually think that the “dolphin sandwich” they see on the menu of their local restaurant is made from Flipper meat.
I’ve never seen mahi referred to as dolphin. That’s disturbing!
Really? Maybe it is just here in the states. I’ve always found it odd, but since I knew the difference I never paid it no mind. I have had to explain the difference to many people though who would look at the menu with a shocked look on their face.
Example, this is from one the best seafood places here in Miami (where I live)
http://www.garciasmiami.com/menu#Sandwiches
Tanis that’s very odd.
Steerpike, I don’t mean to piss on your strawberries, but have you checked your new Netgear router out on your PS3? If judging by that image it’s a Rangemax router and you intend to use it wirelessly with your PS3 you might run into problems. I had one a couple of years ago and it was a great router but it was incompatible with Sony’s shiny black box. It just would not work. It was painful because the freebie I got with my ISP worked fine. The Netgear Rangemax? Nu-uh.
In the UK our connections are, I think, on average about 2Mbps (mine is 1.2Mbps) so 250GB a month bandwidth seems positively gargantuan. Since building my new rig I’ve been downloading stuff like a nutter. The way I look at it, if they’re willing to give it, I’ll take it. They can spank my botty when I overstep the line. Which is highly unlikely on 1.2Mbps.
Great article and +1 for pie charts. The cake is a pie.
Nice article Matt. I agree with you that this issue will become contentious much sooner than a lot of people think.
Gregg, I downloaded Infamous okay with this router, so I assume the problem has been dealt with. I don’t play online much, but it does seem to log into PSN without complaint.
One nice thing I’ll say about Comcast is that they do raise their subscribers’ connection speed pretty regularly. I think normal subscribers like myself get about 6Mbps, which is pretty darn fast. It doesn’t usually reach that, of course, but it’s still really good.
I’ve been poking through the Comcast terms of use and they’re comparatively vague. They keep reiterating that less than 1% of users will ever reach the 250GB cap – probably true, even among gamers, until Netflix and other HD streaming services came along – but they’re not clear on enforcement. They claim they’ll call and warn users who exceed the cap, but they also say they only call “serious” offenders… which sometimes they describe as anyone who reaches 250GB, and sometimes they describe as users who “greatly exceed 250GB.”
What’s kinda scary is that (according to Comcast policy), if they call you and then you go ahead and exceed the 250GB again within six months, they’ll cut you off for a year, no appeal, no nothing. That’s pretty hardcore.
The world is getting to a point where everyone is slurping down gigabytes at a scary rate. We’ll have to wait and see how the providers deal with it.
Me and Hailey watched Secretary the other week on Lovefilm via the PS3 and yes, the quality was pretty shit but not so bad that it was unwatchable. I mean, we wouldn’t want to watch Wall-E at that quality but for films that don’t expect any sort of high fidelity it was spot on. I bet if my connection was better the quality would have gone up slightly however.