Are you a bandwidth hog?
In South Africa broadband consumers have grown accustomed to low monthly bandwidth caps (aka usage limits), typically ranging between 500 MB and 5 GB for most mainstream broadband offerings. Until recently uncapped ADSL accounts were usually very expensive and mostly used in the business market.
Many telecoms providers argue that bandwidth hogs – subscribers who use an inordinate amount of bandwidth – are to blame for restrictive measures like bandwidth caps and traffic shaping. As far back as 2003 Telkom said that its ADSL service was never intended for bandwidth-hungry applications.
“The 3 GB cap protects users from a small minority of people who abuse the service and use it for purposes it was not intended for. Capping ensures that most customers will enjoy the true ADSL experience of fast Internet,” Telkom said at the time.
According to telecoms operators a handful of heavy users often consume a large percentage of the available bandwidth, something which is neither sustainable nor in the best interest of all users on the network. Even in developed countries like the US certain broadband providers have started to introduce monthly usage limits (a move away from their traditional uncapped models) to limit the impact of bandwidth hogs.
What is a bandwidth hog?
According to WikiPedia Bandwidth Hogs are “otherwise legitimate users of a paid or free service who use so much bandwidth that it adversely affects other users or the company’s ability to make a profit.”
But how much is too much? According to Benoit Felten, a Yankee Group analyst, typical US data caps are between 50 GB and 150 GB per month. “This is therefore a good indication of the level of bandwidth at which you start being considered a ‘hog’,” Felten says in his blog. “But wait: 50 Gbyte a month is… 150 kbps average (0.15 Mbps), 150 GB a month is 450 kbps on average. If you have a 10 Mbps link, that’s only 1.5 % or 4.5 % of its maximum advertised speed! And that would be “hogging?” Felten asked.
In South Africa data caps are significantly lower, but since data is charged per-GB the term has not become common place in South Africa. What is however interesting is that a 5 GB cap allows a subscriber to use on average around 16 Kbps throughout the month, well below the 4 Mbps line speed which is advertised.
Bandwidth hogs a myth?
According to Felten it is not justified to call users hogs merely because they download more than others. “Blaming them for network congestion is actually an admission that telcos are uncomfortable with the ‘all you can eat’ broadband schemes that they themselves introduced on the market to get people to subscribe. In other words, the marketing push to get people to subscribe to broadband worked, but now the telcos see a missed opportunity at price discrimination,” he writes.
“TCP/IP is by definition an egalitarian protocol. Implemented well, it should result in an equal distribution of available bandwidth in the operator’s network between end-users; so the concept of a bandwidth hog is by definition impossible. An end-user can download all his access line will sustain when the network is comparatively empty, but as soon as it fills up from other users’ traffic, his own download (or upload) rate will diminish until it’s no bigger than what anyone else gets,” he continues.
Felten challenged ISPs to provide data to show that heavy users do indeed degrade an operators’ network, and that caps actually relieve congestion. Felten seems confident that there will be no real proof that caps will ease congestion.
“If Felten is right, then the “bandwidth hog” is an imaginary creature for the digital age, a sort of postindustrial unicorn. Unlike the unicorn, however, bandwidth hog makes terrific eating; its bacon is the single tastiest kind of bacon imaginable, shot through with the flavors of 4chan, the essence of Twitter, and a small pinch of TechCrunch (warning: it’s pretty pungent). If Felten does slay the mythical beast, Internet hipsters everywhere can rejoice… then slap crispy strips of bandwidth hog bacon into their vodka and ice cream,” Ars Technica journalist Nate Anderson said.
Bandwidth hogs – are they real?
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