We faced this at my last company and this is actually a super mild case. In our case, we were dealing with call toll fraud. We ended up with tens of thousands of dollars in charges in less than 24 hours.
In our case, Twilio reached out to us to tell us they were detecting toll fraud. Before that, we actually had no idea what toll fraud was.
We quickly tried to address it with distributed rate limiting and that worked, for all of a couple of hours. The fraudsters quickly figured out the rate limit and worked around it by spacing out the calls and using more IPs.
Eventually, we had to disable a set of countries known for toll fraud and change our product to not connect calls in a variety of scenarios.
This letter is clearly not written by someone who interacts with customers. As someone who has tried to work with Elastic, their pricing is atrocious even for the most basic of features.
You can't get alerting without paying a king's ransom for features you'll likely never use.
I think this is a terrible idea, but time will tell. As a former Hulu employee, I can say that the media rights business is a mess. It took us (and Netflix) a very long time to convince media companies that the future is streaming. Now that they understand that, it's natural that they want to control all the revenue streams for their content.
What they fail to understand is that online streaming is not easy. Netflix and Hulu have invested a lot of resources into their tech stacks. Also, have you tried building an app that works on all the different streaming devices out there? It's annoyingly difficult. You have to do all that, keep up with the latest technologies (e.g. 4K), and still provide unique features and value. Storing the content is the easiest part.
Point is, media companies should stick to what they do best and let the likes of Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon do what they do best.
I saw that and I can't speak for HBO Now, but my experience with WatchESPN (which apparently also streams through BAMTech) has been abysmal. This may be incredibly naive of me, but I'd much rather have an independent tech powerhouse like Netflix focused on content delivery.
In my experience, traditional media companies stifle innovation instead of encourage it. It was never easy to work with them and they held us back. The whole industry is a mess. I can't imagine Disney buying a controlling stake in BAMTech will make things better.
That being said, Disney is better with technology than most other media companies. Of course, I could be completely off-base here. It's just my opinion.
I've been wondering the same thing. At the very least you should be able to argue that they've changed the contract and you should no longer be held liable for early termination.
I agree completely. My bet is this is Comcast's way of fighting back against net neutrality. With 4K streaming coming fast, it seems like they want to further pad those profit margins under the guise of fairness.
That's not what's going on. You're not paying a flat price. If you want more bandwidth, you pay for it. The currency for an ISP is bandwidth. The amount of data that's transferred does not matter. This is basically pure profit for Comcast and comes from an artificial excuse that last-mile ISPs have effectively made up.
But it does matter. ISPs simply don't have the means to provide capacity for every user to simultaneously max out their connection at once. That is not, and never has been how Internet infrastructure works. That'd be like building a 100 lane highway because on Christmas it gets congested.
You're paying for peak performance, not 24/7 performance.
You're paying for a rate, not an absolute amount. The internet infrastructure works on that rate (bandwidth). You don't buy a 10GB switch or router, you buy a 1gbps switch or router. ISPs peer based on bandwidth.
I do understand, though, that by having a data cap they're encouraging users to use less of that bandwidth. However, again, they're just passing on costs to the consumer instead of paying a fixed cost to upgrade their peering arrangements.
There is nothing reasonable about this. You pay Comcast for bandwidth. It shouldn't matter how much data you're using as long as you're not exceeding that bandwidth. If I pay for 250mbps, I should be able to download 24/7 (assuming I did the math right, that's 83.7 TB). Comcast isn't storing the bits, they're just moving them. This is simply their way of avoiding having to upgrade their peering arrangements (which are already abysmal). Level3 has a great blog post explaining a similar issue (http://blog.level3.com/open-internet/observations-internet-m...).
Well aware of contention ratios. That's the gamble the ISP makes. Now they're trying to pass the risk onto the consumer. That shouldn't be the consumer's problem. That problem also doesn't quite relate to a data cap. Contention ratios are entirely dependent on bandwidth. If everyone in my neighborhood had a 250mbps connection and we all downloaded at full blast at the exact same time, sure we'd face an issue with contention ratios. The amount of data transferred doesn't matter though.
How can you possibly not see these concepts as fundamentally related?
Yes, you're paying for a 250Mbps max connection speed, if your limit is 1000GB then you can only max out your connection for 9 hours a month, meaning other users have a chance to use the backhaul bandwidth, not just you!
Applying quota limits means less usage and allows for higher contention ratios to be used throughout the network. Which is absolutely the only way ISPs can afford to deliver you an Internet connection without charging thousands of dollars a month.
Infrastructure costs money, absolutely. But infrastructure is largely a fixed cost (plus some maintenance cost). After that, it's all peering arrangements. ISPs here in the US can have some pretty ridiculous profit margins (probably exaggerated, but http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bruce-kushnick/time-warner-cab...).
With gigabit internet slowly becoming standard, ISPs do have to invest quite a bit in upgrading their infrastructure. However, that investment is easily amortized over time.
All that being said, the amount of data is never in play. Only the rate at which you can push data through that infrastructure matters.
Yes, data quotas help ISPs have higher contention ratios, but that's simply cost cutting and it hurts the consumer. Effectively, the same money you're paying now is buying you less.
Last-mile ISPs have a very nasty way of trying to lie to consumers about how the internet works. I highly recommend you read the Level3 blog posts from around the time of the net neutrality discussions. They're very insightful into how the internet actually works. Last-mile ISPs can be and are effectively bullies because they own that last mile.
In our case, Twilio reached out to us to tell us they were detecting toll fraud. Before that, we actually had no idea what toll fraud was.
We quickly tried to address it with distributed rate limiting and that worked, for all of a couple of hours. The fraudsters quickly figured out the rate limit and worked around it by spacing out the calls and using more IPs.
Eventually, we had to disable a set of countries known for toll fraud and change our product to not connect calls in a variety of scenarios.