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Bandits of Bandwidth This is another one of those stories that cause you to say "Hmm." After applying some fifth grade math, you really begin to doubt the veracity of the claims. In December 2002 the toledoblade.com ran a story about some guys who had hacked their cable modems to remove the bandwidth cap. They say that the theft of service was worth $250,000. That's a very nice round number and has the feeling of being very convenient. It isn't that I think that anyone in a legitimate business or law enforcement would try to contrive something. But it seems very strange nonetheless. They didn't tell us the period of time that this theft of service covered other than to say that they became aware of the situation in February. I'll assume they meant February 2002. We can only guess when these plunders of electrons began to stuff their pockets with bytes. So I'll guess January 2001, a year prior to being detected and about two years of theft. They do tell us that 13 modems were seized and suggest that perhaps 6 more might be seized later. Being the good citizens that we are we must assume that all of the modems were hacked and used illegally. They wouldn't arrest them if they weren't guilty; right? So 19 modems in all over a two year period of time resulted in a loss of $250,000 worth of bandwidth. Doing the math we get: $250,000/19 = $13,157 in theft per modem. A quick check of their web page reveals that the service is $45/mo for 1Mbps download and 128 Kbps upload. So $548/$45 = 12.1 This means that on average each modem was operating at 12 x 1 Mbps download and 12 x 128 Kbps or 1.5 Mbps upload. Now, since there are 8 bits in a byte, then they must have been downloading 1,500,000 bytes per second or 5.4 GB per hour. Call me a pessimist, but I don't believe it. And even if they were, you'd sort of, kind of think that they were saving some of what ever it was that they were downloading. (Not that I really believe that there that much stuff out there.) If they saved everything that they downloaded every day on 40 Gig drives, then they would need over 3 drives a day. At $100 each, I seriously doubt that they could have afforded them. But who am I to question the motives of Bart Beavers* with the FBI. * You can't go wrong with a name like Bart Beavers. |