Recently,
many U.S. Internet service providers have fallen in line with their
international counterparts in capping monthly residential broadband
usage. A new study by a Georgia Tech researcher, conducted during an
internship at Microsoft Research, shows such pricing models trigger
uneasy user experiences that could be mitigated by better tools to
monitor data usage through their home networks.

Home
users, the study found, typically manage their capped broadband access
against three uncertainties—invisible balances, mysterious processes and
multiple users—and these uncertainties have predictable impacts on
household Internet use and can force difficult choices on users. Given
the undeniable trend in both Internet norms (such as cloud-based
applications) and home-entertainment delivery toward greater broadband
requirements, the study seeks to create awareness and empathy among
designers and researchers about the experience of Internet use under
bandwidth caps.

Marshini
Chetty, a postdoctoral researcher in Georgia Tech’s School of
Interactive Computing, interviewed 12 households in South Africa, a
country in which broadband caps were universal until February 2010.
Typically, the caps set by South African ISPs are severe with some plans
only offering 1 GB of data per month. At the time of the study, the
caps ranged up to 9 GB of data, far lower than the 150 to 250 GB caps
set by U.S. providers.

What
Chetty and her collaborators found were coping mechanisms built into
South Africans’ daily lives in order to manage their online activities
under the caps. For example, some would routinely “top up” their
accounts (pay additional fees for incremental cap increases), while
others would visit family members to use their Internet accounts, or
switch from desktop connectivity to smartphones. And with few (if any)
ways for customers to monitor Internet usage throughout the month, their
access often would be cut off in the middle of performing an online
activity.

“People’s
behavior does change when limits are placed on Internet access—just
like we’ve seen happen in the smartphone market—and many complain about
usage-based billing, but no one has really studied the effects it has on
consumer activity,” said Chetty, who earned her Ph.D. in computer
science from Georgia Tech in 2011. “We would also hear about people
‘saving’ bandwidth all month and then binge downloading toward the end
of their billing period.”

“Mysterious
processes” refers to customers’ inability to determine which
applications are eating up their bandwidth, ranging from being unaware
that streaming video or downloading songs consumes much more data than
normal web browsing, to not knowing that many background applications
(such as automatic software updates) count against the monthly cap.

“We
were surprised to learn that many of the households we studied chose
not to perform regular software updates in order to manage their cap,”
Chetty said. “This activity can be benign for some applications,
inadvisable for others and downright dangerous in certain cases. For
example, not installing security patches on your system can leave you
vulnerable to viruses and other sorts of cyber attacks.” Chetty
suggested that the frequency of such risky behaviors among the broader
population of metered/capped Internet users should be assessed via
follow-up scientifically representative surveys.

Finally,
in households with multiple Internet users, it can be difficult for the
heads of the household to manage overall activity when they are not
fully aware of each member’s Internet use. As with other consumable
resources in a household, from milk to hot water, the apportionment of
“fair” amounts of bandwidth reflects family practices and requires a
fair bit of nuance, varying by family style and composition.

“As
ISPs move more toward usage-based pricing, we need to keep in mind the
reactive behaviors that consumers adopt and the consequences of those
behaviors. Because when you have broadband caps, you will use the
Internet differently,” Chetty said. “This study was performed in South
Africa, and although the caps are higher in the United States, there are
still instances where people are hitting them. So if you’re going to
have caps, you should empathize with your users and offer ways for
customers to see how their data are being used and who is using them.”
More tools are becoming available, from ISPs, within operating systems
and from third parties; but this is one of the first academic studies
that systematically reveals why there is a demand for such tools, and
why they are important to users.

The
study’s findings are summarized in the paper, “’You’re Capped!’
Understanding the Effects of Bandwidth Caps on Broadband Use in the
Home,” which Chetty will present on May 10 at the 2012 ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
(CHI 2012), being held May 5-10 in Austin, Texas. Chetty’s coauthors
include Beki Grinter, professor in the Georgia Tech School of
Interactive Computing, and Richard Banks, A.J. Bernheim Brush and
Jonathan Donner from Microsoft Research.

Source: Georgia Institute of Technology