By Keith Bendy
Business Development Manager, NetQoS

It’s hard to miss the “human network” theme in virtually all of Cisco’s recent commercials. They are clearly advocating a lot of converged network capabilities – voice, video, and other interpersonal communication or information methods.

It makes sense – video and voice are bandwidth heavy applications, and it’s a logical growth area for Cisco if they can provide more information about video and voice traffic. The challenge, however, is that despite all the video products they’ve brought into the market, (from Telepresence to the acquisition of Flip), there aren’t a lot of robust capabilities built into the products in order to troubleshoot performance.

Medianet is one of the largest initiative in Cisco’s history, and it’s focused on bringing those exact troubleshooting capabilities to the market. The objective is to integrate media traffic reporting into Cisco products and IOS, and get the ability to really understand what performance is for video and voice traffic. And in addition to troubleshooting, even having the ability to have the infrastructure react to changes in performance (i.e., “Autoprovisioning”) is really what the overall goal is for MediaNet.

MediaNet is just starting up, but Cisco is addressing a need that is very real, so I anticipate that its adoption will be high. Cisco may be ahead of the demand curve, but the need is pretty well established.

At a very high level, what's important to MediaNet customers is the ability to understand what performance looks like, find out where the issues are, and then drill in to get the information required to get the issue on the path to resolution. And so, when Cisco wanted to demonstrate the MediaNet capabilities at Cisco Live, they used NetQoS Performance Center because they have a lot of experience working with NetQoS (on products like WAAS, ACE and NAM) and it can take advantage of capabilities that exist today (like NBAR, IPSLA, and Netflow)

With Netflow, the NetQoS Performance Center is able to show how much video is on the network, and use TOS values to determine how the traffic is tagged. We can also see what the end-point IP addresses are. But NBAR provides deeper recognition of the protocols than what Netflow will typically give you. NBAR reports on specific tags for various traffic - instead of saying "This particular TOS queue is all my video traffic, and I don't know what kind of video it is," the NBAR identifiers would say: "This is telepresence traffic, this is security camera traffic, this is WebEx traffic, this is a video-capable phone” - and tag all of it appropriately.

Below is a video, from Cisco’s YouTube page, where Aamer Akhter, Technical Marketing Engineer at Cisco, demos the Cisco Medianet 1.0 network.

By Brian Boyko
Editor, Network Performance Daily

I’ve been getting better and better with video as I’ve worked here – and I noticed that many people don’t really understand the nature of digital video files – what makes one file big, what makes one small, what makes one 20 MB file look good, while another 20 MB file looks lousy. 

Considering that Cisco is claiming that video will take up 90% of all traffic by 2013, it might be important go over some of the ideas about what makes up digital video files at the low level so that you can understand how they impact your network. 

If you already know this, I apologize. 

Digital video files are, essentially, pictures.  Multiple pictures played in sequence, with an audio track.  And like digital pictures, they can be compressed.  Uncompressed video is like a photo in BMP format – perfectly accurate, but huge.  Compressed video is like a JPG file – it creates artifacts, but is much smaller. 

There are many compression schemes, with advantages and disadvantages, based on different ways to compress the file.  Some are more effective at reproducing more accurate information with smaller filesizes, but ultimately, from a networking perspective, it’s really not important which you’re using.  What is important is the resolution, framerate, and bitrate. 

The resolution is the size of the video in terms of how many pixels you can see on screen.  It’s usually in varying rectangle sizes, but it’s usually expressed as the size of the rectangle (i.e., 640x480) rather than the absolute number of pixels.   High definition television comes in two types: 1920x1080 (a.k.a. “1080”) and 1280x720 (a.k.a. “720”), and “720” is the format used for YouTube high definition video.  Standard definition television comes as either 720x480 (NTSC) or 720x576 (PAL).  

The framerate is the number of frames – or pictures – that are shown each second.  In a filmed Hollywood movie, it’s typically 24 frames per second (or 24p).  On television, and with most recording equipment, they usually show 30 frames per second in the U.S. and 25 frames per second elsewhere in the world – though, in order to get faster motion, they often stagger every other line of resolution and place them between every other frame – so when you watch 30 frames per second of TV, you’re really watching 60 “half-frames” per second - also known as 60 interlaced frames  (or “60i”).

Finally, the bitrate is the number of bits of information that are in the file for each second of video.  A file with a bitrate of 512kbps has exactly 512 kilobits per second in order to convey all the information it can about the video.  With more bits, you can contain more information. 

Ultimately, the only thing impacting the network is the bitrate.  Bitrate determines filesize for downloadable video, and bitrate determines bandwidth requirements for streaming video.   A 3Mbps SD video will be the same filesize as a 3Mbps HD video, for example, provided that they are the same length. 

The quality of the video, however, is impacted by resolution and framerate as well as bitrate.  

In one second of 640x480 video at 30 frames a second, and 24 bits per pixel, you have 210 megabits worth of information.  Representing that, with, say 3 megabits is a daunting task.  On the other hand, if you increase the framerate to high definition – 1280x720 – you get 632 megabits of data per second – and representing that with only 3 megabits is an even more daunting task. 

The higher the bitrate, the higher the quality of the video; but the higher the resolution and framerate, the more you have to increase the bitrate in order to get the same level of quality.  High definition files tend to be larger than standard definition files because they’re usually – but not always – rendered at a higher bitrate. 

This was one of the reasons that when NBC was covering the Olympics, they often sent the raw footage from Beijing in low-resolution, low-bitrate formats, and only sent high-resolution files to their editors in the U.S. when they knew exactly which shots they wanted to include in their broadcasts.

By way of metaphor, think of bitrate as a fixed amount of butter that you have to butter bread.  You could spread out a single pat of butter on a whole loaf of bread, but it wouldn’t taste very buttery.  Or you could just butter one slice with that pat, but the bread wouldn’t be very filling.

Where different compression schemes come in is that they’re ways to use the limited amount of bits in each second of video to represent all the information – some compression schemes simply look better than others.  Right now, the leader seems to be H.264, which is about twice as efficient as the file system used to store information on a DVD (MPEG-2.)  A 3Mbps H.264 file and 3Mbps MPEG-2 file will have the same filesize, but the H.264 file will simply look better. 

Bitrate is also important because for streaming video, the bitrate of the video is equal to the amount of bandwidth required in order to show a video without pre-buffering or jitter – especially important for live applications like teleconferencing.  Lowering the bitrate decreases the quality, but image fidelity is often less important than immediate response time in teleconferencing applications.  (There are other issues that can cause jitter even with sufficient bandwidth, so it pays to monitor your communications network.)

At any rate, I hope you find this information useful when dealing with bandwidth.  At least now, when someone complains about how long it takes to download a video file, instead of spending tons of time and energy on network upgrades, you might want to ask if you can get a lower bitrate file instead. 

The Guardian reports that among teens, at least, peer to peer downloading of MP3 files of favorite songs is on the decline.  That’s good news for the RIAA labels, who can control the content on streaming sites more than they can control peer-to-peer networks. 

The bad news?  The teens are switching to streaming sites, like YouTube and Spotify. 

From the record company’s standpoint, this is a good thing – it’s a lot easier to control distribution to streaming sites, and taking down a single song with a DMCA notice takes the song down for everyone, as opposed to peer-to-peer, which cannot effectively be shut down at all.  But there are several differences between MP3 downloading and streaming which can impact corporate networks.

While peer-to-peer downloading does take up some bandwidth, the main problemswith P2P usage at work is the idea of liability for copyright infringement and computer security.  For that reason, it’s tempting for office workers who cannot get that song out of their head to, instead, go to YouTube, do a search for what you want to hear, and listen to the song online.  The first problem with this: Streaming audio and downloaded audio take up the same amount of throughput – but a downloaded song is likely to be downloaded once and listened to multiple times; streaming audio is likely to be downloaded multiple times each time the office worker wants to listen. 

The second problem: The listener may only want the music, but more often than not, YouTube video comes along with it.  So instead of 128-192kbps for an MP3 file, you’ve now got a 2-6Mbps video file to deal with. 

Now, even though the amount of traffic is increasing, you should have no problem handling it by classing streaming audio with non-business related traffic and monitoring your network to see if there are any changes in performance. 

One of the things holding back the rollout of new applications (like VoIP, Video, and Unified Communications) is the fear that the new applications will cause network performance problems; according to Network World’s Denise Dubie, citing a survey from Apparent Networks.

Nearly 61% said that they had delayed a VoIP implementation due to network performance concerns. Some 35% postponed a video rollout for the same reasons and 26% put a unified communications project on hold. The survey also showed that network managers can’t always validate their service-level agreements (SLA) with external service providers. More than one-quarter of respondents don’t have the capability to validate SLAs.

It would be instructive to know if decision makers are “concerned” that new apps will reduce their performance because they have baselined performance and know that the network cannot handle new application rollouts… or if they’re concerned because they have no idea whether the network can handle it or not.

It’s the difference between being stopped by practicality and being paralyzed by fear.

And if you’re being paralyzed by fear, it’s costing you money.

For example, Cisco decided to “eat it’s own dogfood” and estimated that they saved $277M from bringing in their own virtual office telecommuting technology – a new application (based on their “Cisco Virtual Office”) for the network that leads to cost savings. If Cisco didn’t know that their network was capable of supporting the CVO application, they would have been out $277M.

Of course, the reason you don’t roll out an application that might save you millions when you don’t know whether those applications will negatively affect network performance is that poor network performance can cost more than whatever you’d save by the rollout.

You can know, or you can be paralyzed by fear of the unknown. I know which I’d rather be.

Well, coming from the land of the ice and snow, from the midnight sun where the hot springs blow, the Norwegian based Opera Software is following in the footsteps of the Vikings.  Opera Unite is a technical achievement and if it – or a worthy imitator - is widely adopted, will be a game changer.  The Vikings were the game changers of their day, engineering the best seafaring technology of the time.  They also pillaged and burned a whole mess of Europe, which many people may find reprehensible, but, hey, the Vikings were the best at what they did. 

At its core, Opera Unite is nothing more than a webserver – we’ve had these things for years, of course.  What makes it different is the ease at which it can be set up – download the browser, create an Opera.com account, and you’re done.  By routing through Opera’s servers, you don’t need to mess with VPN, Remote Desktop, IP addresses, or configuring those fiddly little port forwarding settings on your home router – you don’t even need to have access to it – or even to know what a router is – to use Opera Unite.

Right now, the immediate use is to run it on the home computer to access files from work, and vice-versa.  And that’s where the snag comes in.  Opera Unite cannot be considered in any way “secure” – the fact that it connects to a third-party server makes it ripe for a man-in-the-middle attack, people might mistakenly share sensitive information on their work or home computers, and of course, there’s the problems that you’d expect to have with any filesharing app on the PC.

But more importantly, this will have a major impact on performance.  Employees running data servers can choke the network links your company pays for; we have already seen this when highly technical users run FTP or Web servers from their office desktop machines.  Opera Unite doesn’t change the nature of FTP servers – it just places creation and access of FTP servers and hosting services in the hands of the many, rather than the few. 

Even so, I can’t help but think that overall, Opera Unite is a good thing overall.  It reduces dependence on third-party hosting sites and cloud apps – like YouTube.  If there’s a video that YouTube doesn’t like – or has to take down because of a mistaken or fraudulent copyright claim, the video can still be made available.  (Often times, copyright law is abused to get hosting services to remove unflattering footage of a company or organization.)  And if a particular hosting service should die, the data can still be accessed.  In this manner, it removes some of the risk from cloud computing by allowing anyone to run their own hosting services. 

It doesn’t hurt Opera that they’ve found a hail-mary pass for desktop software to remain relevant in the age of the “software as utility” philosophy of cloud computing… by essentially providing a desktop app that turns your desktop into a cloud computing platform. 

Additionally, although I don’t hold out much hope for it, it may increase demand for more uploading capacity for home users.  AT&T DSL, for example, maxes out at 768kbps upload speed – over three hours to upload a single gigabyte of information. There’s been little complaint about this because most people care more about download speeds than upload speeds – with their own hosting services however, people might be more likely to notice, and care, about what speed they can access their home computer from work, or their friends or colleagues can access their files.  That may lead to increased upload capacity provisioning. 

Ultimately, I’m psyched about Opera Unite as a desktop user, but in the trenches of IT, I’d want to make sure I had a way to track this traffic and see if it affects network performance in a meaningful way.  It may be nothing but a flash in the pan, but if it does catch on, I’d rather err on the side of caution.

When Savvis promises “proximity hosting,” they mean it – according to this New York Times Magazine article. In Weehawken, New Jersey, right outside of the Lincoln Tunnel, there’s a data center that houses the Philadelphia Stock Exchange’s computers. (The PSE is now part of Nasdaq.) Firms compete to have their computers located close – physically and in the networking sense – to the trading exchanges in that data center. Milliseconds of latency are unacceptable in this environment.

“It used to be that things were done in seconds, then milliseconds,” Varghese Thomas, Savvis’s vice president of financial markets, told me. Intervening steps — going through a consolidated ticker vendor like Thomson Reuters— added 150 to 500 milliseconds to the time it takes for information to be exchanged. “These firms said, ‘I can eliminate that latency much further by connecting to the exchanges directly,’ ” Thomas explained. Firms initially linked from their own centers, but that added precious fractions of milliseconds. So they moved into the data center itself. “If you’re in the facility, you’re eliminating that wire.” The specter of infinitesimal delay is why, when the Philadelphia Stock Exchange, the nation’s oldest, upgraded its trading platform in 2006, it decided to locate the bulk of its trading engines 80 miles — and three milliseconds — from Philadelphia, and into NJ2 [in Weehawken, NJ], where, as Thomas notes, the time to communicate between servers is down to a millionth of a second. (Latency concerns are not limited to Wall Street; it is estimated that a 100-millisecond delay reduces Amazon’s sales by 1 percent.)

Back in March 2008, electronic trading made up 60-70 percent of the daily volume of the NYSE. (I’m sorry I don’t have more recent numbers, but they might have been artificially affected by the credit crisis anyway.) And when you remove human beings from trades; the only thing that matters is the speed of a sale; whichever seller’s computer connects first to the buyer makes the sale, whichever buyer connects to the low-bidding seller first gets the bargain. Speed, while not everything, is not underestimated – and it’s one of the reasons you need to identify immediately any problems with network performance in financial applications. Every second a problem doesn’t get fixed – even problems that are imperceptable to the end user, like an added 3ms of delay - means more money is lost.

Now, if your company is over-leveraged and built on shaky investments, network performance won’t save you – we’ve seen a lot of companies with very good network infrastructures go downhill these past few months.

If you want to learn more about the topic of monitoring trading applications for performance, you might want to check out Alex Malone, Software Engineer Manager at NetQoS, who will be speaking at the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association Technology Management Conference & Exhibit on June 23-25 in NYC. Alex is scheduled to speak June 24, at 2:35pm. You can also look us up at booth #1822.

Novatel has come out with a new device it’s calling “Mi-Fi” – specifically, the “Wireless Mi-Fi 2200 Intelligent Mobile Hotspot.” Mi-Fi is essentially a wireless Wi-Fi router which connects to the Internet using a 3G data network over the cellular service.  Five users can connect at once, and the particular device is about the size of an old, first-gen iPod.  Current solutions for connecting a router to 3G or EV-DO networks are bigger, bulkier, often require an additional card, and don’t have a cool, marketing friendly name. 

Which begs the question, if it’s the first Mi-Fi device, where do they get off numbering it as “2200?” Were there 2199 prototypes that we don’t know about?  Will it hit the market in the year 2200 A.D.? Is it really 2.2, but someone accidentally misplaced the decimal point? I miss the days when technology started at 1, and worked its way up to… 3.11, then skipped ahead to 95, then 98, then ME, then 2000, then XP, and then back again to 7. 

But back to the matter at hand – a mobile router that is smaller than a cellphone would have multiple uses in an enterprise environment.  Note that I did not say that would have multiple uses for an enterprise environment. The way I envision this thing heading into most organizations is via being smuggled in, to bypass restrictions on Facebook, Twitter, or other sites. 

Of course, a computer that can connect to either the corporate network or to the unsecured general internet provides unique security problems, but also some infrastructure problems.  Who wants to tell the CEO on the 3^rd floor that the data entry team on the 2^nd floor is using a 3G router and the signals are interfering and that’s why he can’t go online?  What happens when a crucial piece of equipment auto-connects to the wrong network? 

We’ve mentioned the hurdles and headaches in supporting 3G devices like the iPhone in the enterprise; though when we did so in January 2007, it was speculation, and since then Network World has written an article with more concrete real-world examples of the problems that IT pros face in integrating iPhone tech with the rest of the enterprise.   Supporting not just 3G devices, but, essentially, 3G networks which can spring up anywhere at anytime is likely to be far worse. 

And now, the obligatory pitch: how do you catch someone using illicit or misconfigured 3G network devices?  Simple – the same way you catch someone operating an illicit FTP server, or a malware outbreak.  You baseline your data, analyze the traffic, and look for anomalies.  Interestingly enough, most problems in the network are marked by a severe increase of traffic over the norm.  Illicit and misconfigured 3G traffic will show up – not as an unusually large traffic volume on the corporate network, but an unusually small one.  But with visibility into the network, these things should be detectable. 

Interop in full swing in Vegas; and already both my work e-mail and my personal e-mail are filled with press releases, press-releases disguised as e-mail, and in one odd case, ninja disguised as press-release. 

If you’re asking how a ninja can get into my e-mail, you don’t know much about ninjas.  Ninjas can get anywhere.

Still, I figure I might as well check in to see what’s going on at Interop.  For example, Jim Metzler just put out a post on his blog on his Interop first impressions:

I stepped out of the hotel I saw something that I have never seen before in Vegas – there was absolutely no line for a taxi. Every other time I have come to Vegas there has been a long line, often lasting a half hour or more. My fear was that the Interop show would be as empty as the taxi line. It is not. It appears to be down some from last year, but there still is a lot of energy here...

…Then we got to the Q&A and the gap between what is being promoted by vendors and analysts and what is being practiced by IT organizations became painfully clear. For example, vendors and analysts have been talking for years about what IT organizations need to do to meet their internal SLAs. When asked, hardly any of the participants stated that they offer internal SLAs. That did not surprise me. Even more interesting is that vendors and analysts have also been talking for years about the need for visibility into applications. When asked, relatively few of the participants stated that they had that kind of view even though most of them had some kind of APM tool. That did surprise me.

Meanwhile, Network Instruments polled the Interop attendees on virtualization deployment, and released the results via a press release on their website – pessimistic reading if you’re keeping track of virtualization in the enterprise.  Some findings:

• 27 percent identified a lack of visibility and tools as the largest troubleshooting challenge in virtual environments.  Other troubleshooting concerns include a lack of training on virtual infrastructure (26 percent) followed by an inability to secure infrastructure (21 percent).


• 55 percent report experiencing more problems than pluses with virtualization, while 45 percent thought the technology’s benefits outweighed any problems.


• 47 percent report roll-out costs were too high.

That’s not great news for virtualization deployments, and goes to show you that visibility is extremely important in virtual environments in order to keep costs down and make sure you’re going to receive benefits before large deployments.

The Bilderberg Group, an annual invitation-only conference of 130 high-influence politicians and businessmen is currently meeting in Athens, Greece.

Quite a lot of secrecy surrounds the Bilderberg Group – quite a lot of security goes into making sure that photos and recordings of the meetings do not get widely distributed, and combined with the high-profile nature of the attendees, keeping a low profile requires massive effort.

Unsurprisingly, the Bilderberg Group is the subject of many, many, conspiracy theories. It’s human nature; if you don’t have information about something that’s scary, you tend to assume the worst. Just as nature abhors a vacuum, the human mind abhors ignorance, and will gladly make up something – anything – that sounds like it’ll fit. This is probably how Greco-Roman gods got started.

This has implications for IT – specifically, underlining the importance of having the right information to make the right decisions – but allow me to go forward a bit with the Bilderberg group.

Now, don’t get me wrong – the conspiratorial view of history is, in some cases, the right one. For example, The Butler Affair, Operation Valkyrie, Operation Ajax, MKULTRA, Guy Fawkes, and, of course, “Votefortheworst.com.” Does the Bilderberg group qualify?

Probably not. In 2001, an article in the Guardian, in part, gives Bilderberg’s side of the story, explaining that Bilderberg members prefer secrecy so that it’s members can speak more freely; that it is a high-powered meeting of the minds but has no more influence on world affairs than any other think tank like the CATO Institute, Brookings Institution, or Tellus Institute (though to be fair, that’s still considerable influence on world affairs.)

The best a shadowy evil mastermind could hope for is to make a persuasive argument explaining what he feels are the best governmental policies would be, and hope that world leaders find the ideas compelling.

“While furiously denying that they secretly ruled the world, my Bilderberg interviewees did admit to me that international affairs had, from time to time, been influenced by these sessions.

I asked for examples, and I was given one: ‘During the Falklands war, the British government's request for international sanctions against Argentina fell on stony ground. But at a Bilderberg meeting in, I think, Denmark, David Owen stood up and gave the most fiery speech in favour of imposing them. Well, the speech changed a lot of minds. I'm sure that various foreign ministers went back to their respective countries and told their leaders what David Owen had said. And you know what? Sanctions were imposed.’”

But the difference between Bilderberg and CATO, Brookings, and Tellus is that while other think tanks actually publish their findings, the levels of secrecy approaching the Bilderberg group border on Kafkaesque. The meetings are, indeed, secret, and the Guardian’s reporter for this year’s Bilderberg conference, Charlie Skelton, started out reporting on the Group in a light, humorous style, talking about how he managed to check into the wrong hotel (“this is who Bilderberg are up against,” he writes,) but over the course of a few days, is no longer making jokes.

Yesterday, he started writing on being harassed for taking photographs, and being questioned who “Sylvester McCoy” was by Greek police whose behavior was uncannily like Daleks (or perhaps, Cybermen.)

“All around me: "Delete! Delete photos!" followed by a lame tug of war for the camera with no great self-belief on either side, which I won. Camera back in pocket.

Then it became: "Get in the car!" Get in the car!" I wasn't about to get in the car. I remember saying: "One of you has a machine gun, you're shouting at me, I don't understand why, I took one photograph, this all seems a bit strange. What's going on here?"”

Today, he reports on being followed.

“But before I begin, please believe me when I say: I haven't gone nuts. I really haven't. Nine times seven is 63 and the capital of Italy is Rome. I know what I know. And I know that I'm being followed. I know because I've just been chatting to the plainclothes policemen I caught following me. As absurd as it sounds, I've just "made my tail".

They're watching me now. REALLY. They're sitting on the wall outside the cafe Oceania or whatever this is called, watching me type this sentence. I asked them in for a coffee but they declined. They laughed sheepishly when I called them Starsky and Hutch.”

And later,

I feel a bit like I've driven down the wrong alley and suddenly don't recognise anything, and people are staring at me and not simply to admire my hair. I'm jumpy. I think someone has been in my room and moved my laptop. I know this sounds bonkers, I know it does, but I took a photo of it before I left the room and it wasn't where I left it.

Listen to me. I sound like a fruitcake. Three days and I've been turned into a suspect, a troublemaker, unwanted, ill at ease, tired and a bit afraid.

So, is it any wonder that the Bilderberg group is the subject of numerous conspiracy theories?

In order to understand the world; whether the world of high finance and high politics, or the world of the Enterprise network, it is important that you have information, otherwise, you’re blindly groping in the dark for things that sound right. This is the familiar cause of “the network always getting blamed” for anything that causes a slowdown, whether it be network, server, or application.

As mentioned above, if we don’t have information about something important, we often make up something that sounds right. This is not a bad thing; the first step in scientific experiment is to make a hypothesis that fits the observable evidence. The second step is testing the hypothesis. Anything that stops at the first step isn’t science, and isn’t particularly useful. As such, being able to gather the evidence and test to see what effect changes on the network don’t just help you solve network and application problems faster – they are the only real method you have for solving the problems in the first place. Sunlight is the best disinfectant; the electric light the best policeman.

After being followed, detained, and with his room ransacked, Charlie Skelton had this observation about Bilderberg and the very, very high levels of secrecy around the organization:

I don't care whether the Bilderberg Group is planning to save the world or shove it in a blender and drink the juice, I don't think politics should be done like this.

Worse than not bothering to gather information is intentionally keeping people in the dark. And we see this in IT in some semi-rare cases, where those in IT consciously choose not to provide information about network performance to managers and executives, the theory being that IT personnel have more value to the company if they’re perceived as the only people in the organization who know what’s going on.

This theory, however, doesn’t hold water. If you provide network information to decision-makers in a format that they can understand, you end up proving your value to the organization. If you do not provide information to decision-makers, they’re going to end up, well, assuming the worst…

Part 2: Killing Network Performance

So, let's take a look at what Time Warner is doing and compare it to some other offerings. First, Time Warner has four plans, at four speeds with four caps. While a TW spokesman has said that people will be able to mix-and-match data caps with bandwidth plans in Austin, we'll use the Beaumont plan as an example.

Let's make some quick assumptions. First, let's assume that no user wants to go “over” their cap – that is, that whatever they're paying now without a cap, is what they want to pay, and they don't want to pay more. Second, let's assume that TW's prices do not change significantly. Third, let's assume that Time Warner makes good on their promise to bring out a “100 GB” cap for the Austin market. Considering the rate changes in Beaumont, these are probably good assumptions to make. 

Time Warner Cable Vs. The 56.6k Modem. 

Time Warner advertises speeds of 1920kB/s, 1024kB/s, 640kB/s and 96kB/s respectively for it's four tiers of bandwidth service.

However, remaining under the cap means that, on average, you only have an effective speed of 250bytes/sec under a 5 gig plan, 500bytes/sec under a 10 GB plan, 1.01kB/sec under a 20 gig plan, 2.02kB/sec under a 40 gig plan – the largest possible plan in Beaumont – and 5.06kB/sec under a theoretical 100GB plan.

5.06kB/s... versus an advertised 1920kB/s. Now would be the perfect time to point out that the top speed of a 56.6k modem is 7.08kB/sec.

Time Warner Cable Vs. “The Average U.K. Teen”

Now, you may argue with me that these are only averaged numbers, and that a 5.0kB/s might very well mean a burst of 50kB/s for one second, followed by 0kB/s for nine more.  Quite right. 

You may also suggest that “no one uses the Internet 24 hours a day,” and aside from 24 hour coffeeshops, work-in-shift development teams, roommates with day-shift and night-shift jobs, and professional networking bloggers, I would also agree with you. 

So, how much does the average Internet user actually use the Internet? I couldn't find that after some weak Googling. However, I was able to find out that the average U.K. Teen uses the Internet for 31 hours a week . I like using that number as a base, because it seems adequately conservative when trying to measure the amount that any particular household – perhaps filled with more than one teen – will use the Internet.

But even averaging out the numbers over 31 hours a week, rather than over a full month, it's still disappointing. The 56.6k modem still beats out the 5, 10, and 20 gigabyte plans at 1.47kB/s, 2.04kB/s, and 5.87kB/s. The 40 gig plan does not fare much better at 11.74kB/s – certainly beating out the modem, but not in any way being a speed you'd call “broadband.” The theoretical 100 GB cap results in 29.36kB/s average, which sounds good to a person just now getting off dial-up, but even the lowest Time Warner broadband speed is advertised at 96kB/s; the top tier, once again, is advertised at 1920kb/s.

Oh, remember one of the tricky things about using the “average” U.K. teen as the benchmark.  That means that about half of U.K. teens likely use more than 31 hours a week. 

Time Warner Cable vs. The Ghost of Internet Past

In fact, the speeds only start to become competitive if you use the Internet about 5.5 hours a week.

At 5.5 hours a week, you can get 66.20kB/s average without going over your 40GB cap, 165.49 for the theoretical 100GB cap. 20, 10, and 5 GB caps clock in at 33.10kB/s, 16.55kb/s, and 8.27kb/s respectively. None of these speeds are anywhere close to what we've become accustomed to from “broadband,” and none of these speeds are acceptable – the 5GB plan barely better than a 56.6k modem even at the highly reduced Internet usage of 5.5 hours a week.

You may ask yourself why I chose “5.5 hours a week,” specifically, as my benchmark. That's because 5.5 hours a week is the amount the average American or Canadian spent on the Internet in 1996!

I think that that’s a particularly revealing number.  After all, in order to stay under the cap, many (if not most) people will have to use the Internet less.  But what these caps do is limit TWC customers to the habits of the Internet’s early days, before YouTube, Hulu, Netflix, Skype or Vonage. 

What data caps actually do is take us back more than a decade in our cultural and technological development of the Internet. It is an attempt by Time Warner to stuff the genie back in the bottle – to cripple the Internet as a possible competitor to the television (and cable telephone) business by causing us to curb our habits back to the “bad old days” of the 1990s... and, of course, to grab an awful lot of money from those of us who simply can’t bear living in the past. 

Any customer who finds any of these bandwidth plans “acceptable for what they do on the Internet” should, instead, look into much cheaper, less stressful dial-up Internet service.

The counterargument for charging for consumption.

You could ask the question: that if we pay for gasoline, electricity and water based on what we consume, why shouldn’t we charge for the Internet the same way?  But this is based on a logical fallacy. 

We already pay for what we consume on the Internet.  We pay for bandwidth.  A 728kbps connection from Time Warner costs $30, while a 15Mbps connection from Time Warner costs $60.  And this is fine because bandwidth, not data, is the limited resource. 

Allow me to explain for those in our audience (Hi, Mom!) not familiar with networking technology:  When you lay down a network "pipe," that pipe can only send so many bits a second - this is called "bandwidth." When everyone wants to use the pipe at once, "congestion" occurs and not everyone can get all the bandwidth that they want. 

So what most Internet companies do is charge you based on the amount of bandwidth you consume. They do this by putting you into one of a number of "tiers," or "speeds." If you're willing to pay more for more bandwidth, then you get more bandwidth. This is how Time Warner – and practically every other broadband company in the United States – does things now. 

But data - data is not a limited resource. Unlike water, gasoline, electricity, there is literally an infinite amount of data over the Internet.

Grabbing data does not reduce the amount of data available to others - even though this is essentially the argument cable companies put forth when they try to blame "heavy users" for the need for data caps. What Time Warner is trying to do is create an artificial scarcity where none exists, and then charge for it.

The electric company, in essence, charges you, indirectly, for the limited resource of the coal, oil, uranium, etc, to fire the plant.  Even with wind power, you’re paying for the limited resource of wind that can be captured by windmills – wind may be limitless, but we can’t currently use 99.99% of it. We can only use the 00.01% that runs into the windmill. 

I didn't see “Quantum of Solace,” but if this helps you to wrap your head around it, what Quantum was trying to do with the Bolivian water supply, Time Warner is trying to do with our “data supply.” (Why yes, data caps are a move worthy of a Bond villain.

Time Warner vs. Comcast

Comcast also has a 250 GB cap.  No one is thrilled about it, but it is certainly more reasonable than a 40 or 100 GB cap, by far. At 250GB, the effective performance hit is 73.41kb/s for the 31-hour user. This is still poor compared to uncapped services, but at least, at 250 GB, most people won't have to worry about how much Internet they're using.

That is another thing – when you go over your 250GB cap on Comcast, you either get a warning notice, or you get your service cut – the latter certainly annoying, but at least you can go to another service. When you go over your Time Warner cap, you're being charged, GB by GB.

Because the caps are so low, it's pretty clear that that is exactly what Time Warner intends to have happen – that is, the system designs to place you into overages.

And in this system, you pay for every bit. Every annoying video ad that you don't want. Every zombie malware host probing your connection. Every pop-up ad. Even, dare I say it, every Rick-Roll.

We take a look at the costs that Time Warner customers will have to eat under the new plan in Part Three of this article.