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Re: Home media servers, AUPs, and upstream bandwidth utilization.

  • From: Thomas Leavitt
  • Date: Mon Dec 25 21:52:02 2006
Interesting suite of services and features at a price that makes our domestic wireless broadband look sick... however, look at their AUP:

http://www.three.co.uk/xseries/fair_use_policy.omp

* Mobile access to Orb or Slingbox does not include using your mobile as a modem. <-- so this isn't true wireless broadband

* When using the internet, you can’t use some websites (including adult websites) and some websites aren’t compatible with all mobiles. <-- so big brother company gets to decide what you can and cannot view

* Fair Use Limit: 1 GB each month <-- it says this right under "Unlimited Data" ... and they'll cut off your access to data till the following month if you don't voluntarily do so yourself, once that's been exceeded

* for some screwy reason (maybe just so they don't have to figure out who is a spammer and not) they limit you to 10,000 Windows Live Messenger messages (like these are going to suck bandwidth), which amounts to 300 a day... reasonable, unless you're a heavy user: that's a message a minute for five hours

* 5,000 minutes of Skype to Skype calls

* Slingbox and Orb usage is limited to 80 hours a month...

... all of these are listed under "Unlimited" usage headers. All of them are subject to being cut off for the month if you exceed them. Did someone change the definition of "Unlimited" in the dictionary?

I'm not saying these are unreasonable limits, but it is rather deceptive to advertise services as "Unlimited" while applying limits that a reasonable person, using them in the fashion intended, could easily exceed (my kids, mobile television, more than eighty hours if I let them, no sweat... yap on IM from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. 7 days a week? you betcha.)

These limitations, applied to services here in the U.S., make wireless broadband access very unattractive to me... even at $60/mo., it'd be doable, except for the restrictions... I spend well over $200/mo. between my company cell, landline/DSL, and the supplementary services associated with each. I'd be totally willing to go out on the bleeding edge, kill my wireline Internet access and my cell services, and go with a pure wireless data/VOIP solution... but not with the restrictions typically placed on them. I want to be able to have my wireless data connection backended to my office and home networks... I want to be able to download ISOs for Linux distributions, and upload AVIs and WMVs to my in house server... I want to be able to run the home media server of my own choice and access it from anywhere. Etc.

I wish someone in the marketplace would emerge to serve folks like me.

Thomas



Alexander Harrowell wrote:
UK UMTS operator 3 (a Hutchison division) is advertising its so-called X-Series service, which provides "unlimited" data service (plus various lumps of steam telephony) for £25 rising to £40 a month. Skype is being bundled with the devices involved, and here's the kicker - 3 is offering Slingboxen thrown in for £99 extra.

3 has just begun HSDPA Class 5 upgrades in metro areas (claimed maximum 3.6 Mbits/s) and plans to launch HSUPA in the uplink next spring, with a claimed max of 1.4Mbits/s.

On 12/25/06, *Thomas Leavitt* <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:

Check the AUP and TOS for that EVDO connection - my guess is that by
viewing stuff from your Slingbox, you're risking termination of
service.
I don't have an EVDO connection myself (still toodling along with my
Sidekick's GPRS), and part of the reason why is that they have a
lot of
what I think are unreasonable restrictions on how these services
can be
used -- this is based on what I've read on the various mailing
lists I'm
on (Dave Farber's IP, Declan McCullagh's Politech, and Dewayne
Hendrick's Dewayne-Net).

I don't know how significant restrictions like this are from a
competitive perspective, but my broadband ISP also has a very liberal
TOS... and that's one of the reasons I use them. I suspect that as
items
like the Slingbox become more common, folks will start paying more
attention to what they're permitted to do with their upstream
bandwidth.

Thomas

Roland Dobbins wrote:
>
>
> I recently purchased a Slingbox Pro, and have set it up so that
I can
> remotely access/control my home HDTV DVR and stream video remotely.
> My broadband access SP specifically allow home users to run
servers,
> as long as said servers don't cause a problem for the SP
> infrastructure nor for other users or doing anything illegal; as
long
> as I'm not breaking the law or making problems for others, they
don't
> care.
>
> The Slingbox is pretty cool; when I access it, both the video and
> audio quality are more than acceptable. It even works well when I
> access it via EVDO; on average, I'm pulling down about 450kb/sec
up to
> about 580kb/sec over TCP (my home upstream link is a theoretical
> 768kb/sec, minus overhead; I generally get something pretty close to
> that).
>
> What I'm wondering is, do broadband SPs believe that this kind of
> system will become common enough to make a signficant difference in
> traffic paterns, and if so, how do they believe it will affect their
> access infrastructures in terms of capacity, given the typical
> asymmetries seen in upstream vs. downstream capacity in many
broadband
> access networks? If a user isn't doing something like breaking the
> law by illegally redistributing copyrighted content, is this
sort of
> activity permitted by your AUPs? If so, would you change your
AUPs if
> you saw a significant shift towards non-infringing upstream content
> streaming by your broadband access customers? If not, would you
> consider changing your AUPs in order to allow this sort of upstream
> content streaming of non-infringing content, with the caveat that
> users can't caused problems for your infrastructure or for other
> users, and perhaps with a bandwidth cap?
>
> Would you police down this traffic if you could readily classify it,
> as many SPs do with P2P applications? Would the fact that this type
> of traffic doesn't appear to be illegal or infringing in any way
lead
> you to treat it differently than P2P traffic (even though there are
> many legitimate uses for P2P file-sharing systems, the presumption
> always seems to be that the majority of P2P traffic is in
> illegally-redistributed copyrighted content, and thus P2P
technologies
> seem to've acquired a taint of distaste from many quarters,
rightly or
> wrongly).
>
> Also, have you considered running a service like this
yourselves, a la
> VoIP/IPTV?
>
> Vidoeconferencing is somewhat analogous, but in most cases,
> videoconference calls (things like iChat, Skype videoconferencing,
> etc.) generally seem to use a less bandwidth than the Slingox,
and it
> seems to me that they will in most cases be of shorter duration
than,
> say, a business traveler who wants to keep up with Lost or 24 and so
> sits down to stream video from his home A/V system for 45
minutes to
> an hour at a stretch.
>
> Sorry to ramble, this neat little toy just sparked a few questions,
> and I figured that some of you are dealing with these kinds of
issues
> already, or are anticipating doing so in the not-so-distant future.
> Any insight or informed speculation greatly appreciated!
>
>
>
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
> Roland Dobbins < [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>
// 408.527.6376 voice
>
> All battles are perpetual.
>
> -- Milton Friedman
>
>
>


--
Thomas Leavitt - [email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]> - 831-295-3917 (cell)

*** Independent Systems and Network Consultant, Santa Cruz, CA ***




--
Thomas Leavitt - [email protected] - 831-295-3917 (cell)

*** Independent Systems and Network Consultant, Santa Cruz, CA ***


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