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Why Not To Meter Internet Access
A reader writes: "Many experts, especially pundit Bob Metcalfe, have argued that Internet access should be metered so that light users don't have to subsidize flat rates for heavier users. John Levine, author, expert and sewer commissioner, argues that this idea of metering the Internet flies in the face of 100 years of history."
By not rolling out ASDL - bastards.
When I were your age, all round here were fields...
Would you charger per bit.... per byte?
Would you charge for useage or perhaps throttle back those who used too much bandwidth?
(Jon Katz leaps to mind for some reason )
If they start metering internet access, next thing you know, they will start adding this, that and another tax to it and *everybody* will start paying more!
Why pay for internet access, when you can get it free? Ok, it's not exactly a T3, but still...
In the whole "Netzero" belief. While not being one of their customers, I still believe that the internet should be provided free, not at $20 a month, or 8cents a minute, or whatever the current rate may be.
How Jaded Are You?
It was just in our paper a few days ago...some poor sot started up napster for the first time, grabbed 100's of songs, and then left their computer on for the rest of the month. $1800 bill at the end.
Ouch
"The market alone cannot provide sufficient constraints on corporation's penchant to cause harm." -- Joel Bakan
John is too modest -- he was also involved in creating AIX for IBM. He's much more technical than he's usually portrayed as being (particularly when he writes Dummies books for Windoze lusers).
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
You pay a flat rate to be able to be online 24/7 if you so wish. There's no logic in charging per megabyte to lower the rate for the casual user. Besides, many Ethernet networks are switched these days, so every user has a nominal capacity no matter how much/little bandwith he uses.
Local phone companies don't charge metered rates for phone access, why should internet access companies? I'm a real light phone user, but I don't complain about paying $30/mo because someone else is on the phone 24/7 tying up more phone bandwidth.
--Mike
In the UK at least, well it used to be... erm...
Don't AOL charge per minute? Well they used to here at least, and as local calls have never been free in the UK we've virtually had metering through the phone bill (there are 0800 - freephone providers now, but that's only happened in the last year or so).
Did I make a point just then or just blather?
In most of the world, Internet access *IS* metered.
Just because you are in in America doesn't mean that I am. This is the Internet you know.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
The cost of letter-delivery used to be calculated according to the distance the letter was going to go. One of the first things that Babagge did (way before he designed the difference engine) was point out that it cost more to do the calculation than it did to deliver the letter. Hence the flat rate stamp was born.
I would have thought that the same sort of thing is probably true for Internet access - especially since sending data down a wire is just as expensive as not sending data down the same wire, once the wire has been laid.
Instituting any metering system will raise the operating costs due to the trouble it takes to track usage.
And how exactly would you do that anyway. Total bits per month? Total online time?
Too many variables and way too open for abuse by unsavory providers. There's little wrong with a flat rate system IMHO.
In packet networks (postal system, internet, etc) the cost to transmit doesn't rise proportional to the number or size of the packets but as the number of switch point.
--
An abstained vote is a vote for Bush and Gore.
Non-meta-modded "Overrated" mods are killing Slashdot
(Hey Ryan! Here's your proof!)
It seems pretty clear. Get what you pay for.
-- Profound quotes need not apply
This should and probably will be handled like business phone service -- we (businesses) pay much more for all phone services than residential customers because we are subsidizing residential users. At least that's the way it is here in the U.S., but I think it's different in some other countries.
Because it is this way here in the U.S. you rarely, if ever, find an existing apartment or house without a phone line. Go to Spain or France (for instance) and that's far from the case. One customer of ours told me that she had to pay over $1000 to get a phone line installed in her apartment, not to mention paying per-minute charges for all phone calls including local calls. (residential customers in the U.S. typically pay maybe $50, at most, to "turn on" phone service and local calls are always free)
So, I think the best way to get the internet into as many homes as possible is the way we got phone lines into every residence here in the U.S. -- have business subsidize it as much as possible because they are heavier users, generally. In fact, do that and cut my home connection fees in half, please (I have my wonderful cable modem in my house and regular modem dial-up for my laptops).
If Internet usage should be metered, you'd think that an ISP would offer such a pricing plan, and that it would be more popular for those light users, making the ISP more successful than its competitors until they too changed their plans. It's been tried (by the hour, AFAIK not by the byte), and it wasn't. People generally preferred the flat rate. Personally, I'd prefer a reasonable flat rate for other utilities as well. The reason there isn't one (aside from oligopoly/cartel theories) is that those resources are in more need of conservation, and a flat rate would encourage overconsumption. Overconsumption of bandwidth is not a problem in the same sense that overconsumption of fossil fuels is.
Does it not seem obvious that flat-rate access is what powered the internet growth in North America? Europe has never seen the same internet growth because of metered local phone lines. The rebutal in the article made a good arguement and I agree with it. Companies will see a profit with fewer users if they use a flat-rate model. This in turn will lead to more people using the internet.
"You need a license to buy a gun, but they'll sell anyone a stamp." - Red Green
Flat rate dialup is cheap (20 a month), with DSL/Cable being between 30 and 90 a month...are computer users that poor that they can't cough up a twenty for the access? US/Canada only of course...I can understand metered access in say Europe or Asia...with the gov't telcos and all..but for US users, I really don't understand why this is a big deal...
Recently, I have been considering getting a DSL connection from a non-telco provider. This article raises some issues for me. If I get a 1.5mb/sec DSL connection, I don't have any guarantee of getting 1.5mb/sec of useable bandwidth. Likewise, if I get a 512k DSL, will I even be guranteed that much?
I should just cave a get a T1 from UUNet... I mean it's $2000/mo vs $200/mo but I bet I could pull way more off of UUNet... Someone should do
some tests and comparisons on this stuff.
It might fly in the face of 100 years of history but that doesn't mean
a) it's wrong
b) it won't work.
My ten cents.
Pinky: "What are we going to do tomorrow night Brain?"
Brain: "I would tell you Pinky but this 120 char limi
Let the free market sort it out! This is along the same lines of the Impending Internet Traffic Jam of Doom that was prophesized years ago. Of course, market forces made the big pipes bigger. No problem. No, market forces will continue to guide Internet access. AOL users are generally light users. They pay for x number of hours each month. DSL users pay a larger, flat fee for a amount of bandwidth, for unlimited hours. There's nothing to do about this. It's not even an issue. The market will work it out.
This makes economic sense even if the cost of providing the service to both is the same, although, ironically, consumers tend to feel cheated if they find out.
Why are these people always surprised when this type of behaviour backfires? The role of sales seems to have shifted; from filling needs customers have, we instead have this constant bombardment of useless don't need crap which sales invariably passes off as absolute necessities. And how do they do it; by lying to customers and telling them that the Customer is #1 and that each customer is AS important as the next, at least until the sale is made. Naturally the definition of important is based largely on how expensively a good/service costs- the lower the price the more important the customer, right?
Anyway, I suppose that really was your $.02.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Now I need to decide if its worth .05 cents to refresh slashdot to see if there are any new items of interest! Yes, lets destroy a system that works well for the masses to benefit those who cannot use AOL correctly.
However, for the end user, connecting through an ISP and simply surfing et al this is just downright dumb. For one, it would require additional cost to monitor users. Second, it would discourage people from surfing as much. Third, you can say bye bye to banner ads (though maybe that's a good thing), if people have to pay for every bit of those pieces of trash they see they are going to block them. And finally, it would be moving away from closing the "digital devide". If little Timmy can't do something internetish because his parents need to spend their money on food instead of for the excess usage, then little Timmy is at a disadvantage.
Also, once you break down the essential "everyone pays the same" wall, what's next? If you access certain "more expensive" sites, will you be charged more. Might things begin to revert to the long distance phone call paradigm? I doubt it, but it's a very very chilling thought.
Flat rates are simpler, easier to use and understand, and make a lot more sense in the semi-egalitarian environment of the internet.
I pay on my DSL connection right now.
I get 5 gig/month (which is ACTUALLY 5,000,000,000 bytes, not 5 gig). As the base package, and after that, I pay 7cents per megabyte(1,000,000 bytes).
So, if I download in excess of 5 gigs, it costs me an additional $70 per pseudo-gigabyte. Fortunately, I don't use that much, but my ISP offers a larger package of 20 gigabytes for an additional $20/month, but you must already be on the plan to take advantage of the package.
Why don't I use another ISP? NBTel is the only ISP in the province that will provide DSL.
(note: 7c/meg WAS the rate, I'm not 100% certain that it's still that high, but I haven't heard otherwise).
Eircom, Irelands telecom / largest ISP provide two alternatives :
1 Free access / calls charged at local rate
2 Flat rate / toll-free number
Every type of user is catered for.
Just you try setting up a DVD-warez server and offer 500GB a day, and see how long it takes for your ISP to whup your ass and charge you for the bandwidth. The point is that _most_ internet users use a small amount of bandwidth, which doesn't cost the _provider_ money beyond his connectivity rental. That's why you get a flat rate.
It's much the same in the telecoms industry, where the cost of providing a local call is less than the cost of metering and billing those calls at a competitive rate. Obviously uncompetitive bastards like BT will suck their captive audience dry of money with by-the-second metering.
See the Campaign for Unmetered Telecoms for more such arguments.
Does my bum look big in this?
If you had a choice between an all-you-can-eat buffet, and an a la carte restaurant, both of which served the exact same food, and had the exact same level of service, what would you choose?
Sure, some people would say that they the buffet isn't worth it because they don't eat very much, but 90% of everyone I know would hit the buffet. And even light eaters binge sometimes, or go for the buffet because they don't know how much they're going to eat.
So the buffet restaurant makes major profits and the a la carte restaurant goes out of business (or starts offering a buffet, to stay competitive), which forces everyone to go to the buffet if they want to eat.
And then the light eaters of world whine about how buffets just aren't worth it for them, and want a la carte restaurants. But the restaurant owners already know that a la carte just isn't profitable enough, so they continue to stick to the buffet.
Who has the .sig "kids love the rich taste of content?" (or something like that) It's so appropriate here.
I can spell. I just can't type.
I used to work for a Telecomms consultancy in Cambridge (the original one), and several companies approached us for our input on the metering issue.
Charging fractions (we were talking thousandths) of a penny per k makes as much sense as telephone call charges, pay per view telly, and prostitutes. Pay for what you use.
However, in a free market there will be as many variations on the charging scheme as there are companies in the market. Some will opt to meter, others not.
One anti-metering argument is that you don't know what you are going to receive when you ask for it. It could be small, it could be big. So you don't know how much the download is costing you.
The counter to this argument is that when I phone a company which uses a telephone queing system I haven't got a clue how long I will be holding before my call is being answered. I don't like having to pay 50p/min in order to listen to a tinny version of Vivaldi's 4 Seasons.
So it's not a new argument against microcharging internet access at all, but a broader one applying to many media.
God I'm being incoherent today, sorry.
FatPhil
Oh - people won't think shockwave and animated GIFs are such a neat idea an more...
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
An ISP I know must pay extra $$$ for burst traffic. I would assume (perhaps correctly) that many, if not most other ISP's do the same, because it makes sense.
They must find a way to recoup that expense.
Some ISP's may have tried, or may try, to meter calls and charge higher $/minute rates during these peak times. This would make perfect sense, but breaks the goodwill between ISP and customer. A number of consumers would feel offended that the ISP is 'gouging' them a la long-distance companies.
Wise ISPs would continue on with flat-rate charges. If I had to choose between an extra $6 / months flat rate and metered usage, I would probably choose flat rate, even at a higher price.
From the article;
Odlyzko shows that the phone industry is not only bigger, it's growing faster than "content" industries. Movie theaters sell nearly $10 billion of tickets a year, but that's only two weeks' revenue for the phone industry. Similarly, the revenue of the recorded music industry is dwarfed by that of Fed Ex and the U.S. Postal Service. Even meterists such as Metcalfe believe point-to-point communication is the most likely type of traffic to be metered because that is what customers are willing to pay for.
The pressure for flat rate music is going to grow. It's just that the RIAA can't give up their $20+ CD prices. So they are going to nuke the internet instead.
Too bad that they can't get a brain transplant. One can only wait for the mighty to fall.....
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Unfortunately most of us live in capitalist societies where the price of something is based on the market demand for that something and has very little to do with the actual cost of that something.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
One of the local providers to Ithaca, NY, Lightlink Internet does that already. They offer high speed radio, DSL, etc... and you pay a reasonably small per month fee, and you can pull the maximum bandwidth that your connection physically allows, but you pay $10/Gigabyte over 1 gigabyte per month, so that way you can get quick downloads by using lots of bandwidth in short bursts, but if you don't pull down too much, you don't pay much. If oyu want to download a shitload of stuff, you pay more. It works well, the company I work for uses the service, and it's worked out quite well.
---
Play Six Pack Man. I
They did it in Newfoundland when I lived there. You could pay more for a higher cap, implementing the features of the cable/DSL modem. The service got better for everybody except the warez kiddies.
QoS is a great way to smooth out a network as well. Yesterday, I had to stop a download because our provider told us we were "bogging everyone else down." Unless I implement QoS on my laptop or our router, I can't control how much bandwidth I'm using for a download. I think the ISP should be doing it, rather than calling up people and telling them to stop using their connection.
I've always thought metered plans were stupid. For $40/month I get both a speedy cable modem connection and cable tv. My phone bill was costing me, before I cancled my phone, $50 a month (using a free Internet account I had at the University) and I don't use long-distance. The crap I was getting with the phone was random charges added on overtime for stupid things I didn't even use. That is what metered access gets you. Even if you opt out of long-distance you still pay taxes for it. With my cell-phone I pay $30/month flat fee and get more minutes than I'm likely to ever use, get caller id, voice mail, etc plus the benefit of being able to carry it with me. Oh yeh and free long-distance should I ever want it. If they start metering or taxing the Internet I'm sure myself and others will break away and make our own Internet that is free of government hassles. What they can tax they can track. I don't want any eyes watching me 24/7. The idea of charging for emails sent has always made me laugh. In the days before the Internet where they actually did charge for email I never used it. Now if they tried to charge I'd have to wonder how they'd record my Linux box sending messages. If they decided to monitor and tax just those packets people would simply change protocols. Silly wabbits.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
I am not sure about all ISP's but some have limited hour plans for light users (like the one I work for). There are also people who leave their computers connected 24/7 so they can get to info while they are away or at work (like me).
Where am I going and why am I in this handbasket?
Not a good idea. Even setting aside the practical reasons against it (the accounting alone would be a nightmare that would make a collision between the IRS and the GAO look tame), it sets a rotten precedent. Who's to say that imposing metering won't be the gateway for a whole ton of other "net taxes?"
Metering might have been a good idea AT ONE TIME, when bandwidth was highly expensive and very limited, but bandwidth has become a lot cheaper in the last few years as old transmission facilities are upgraded, and new ones added. Doesn't it make sense that such a trend will only continue?
After all, look what's happened to the long-distance, voice, and cellular/PCS markets. Massive competition, cheap rates, and you can now buy blocks of talk time for obscenely low cost. Why should that not be the case with the 'Net? It's still all 1's and 0's.
If the article's author wants to meter something, maybe he should go stick a multimeter across his AC power main. Preferably with uninsulated probes...
Odlzyko seems to assume that service is service, and the guy who'd pay 10,000 will be satisfied with low-speed service, or that the services aren't really different, in which case the vendor is committing fraud (which is why, completely ironically, the second consumer would feel cheated).
Actually, the vendor can charge a flat rate if he chooses, anywhere between $12,500 to 15,000, and make a profit. This is because, in the artificial constraints of the long-road problem, the second person will pay the first person to sign up for the service so that he can have service as well.
What will happen in a few years when we have the technology to stream all media over the internet (ie. TV, Phone, Radio, etc.)? We have the power to use all those mediums however they suck up large amounts of bandwidth. Now in the future what if this "casual" user decides he wants his TV to be recieved over the internet rather than traditional means. It's going to cost him an arm and a leg to stream the TV over the net if he is paying per megabyte!
Personally I think such a system might be cheaper for the regular user in the short term, but when all things digital are converged then I think the system will break down.
Maybe this is just a plot by the RIAA to stop people from downloading MP3's? They might be thinking they can get a percentage of all internet traffic costs sort of like they get a percentage of blank media in Canada? Maybe I should be quiet before they get some ideas.
I don't understand. Bandwith seems to be getting less and less expensive (yes, here in America) yet ISP's are charging more than they were 5 years ago. Dialup users are paying almost as much as DSL users. Some places are charging as high as $22.95/mo. I pay $49.95/mo for 768/128k DSL. They really need to not do metered Internet access, I just see it as ridiculous. Reminds me a lot of AOL's olden days. Why the hell would any Internet junkie in their right mind want to do that?
:)
I apologize to all the non-Americans that have to pay, but unfortunatly, tough shit
- Bill
"I think this is a rights issue"
Not really, but I mean come on... What's up with this idea that it's my right to have free such and such? There are exceptions, but when someone has an original idea or provides a service [ie- Internet Access](if the idea or service is good) don't they deserve to be compensated? Or, in the case of offering a service, deserve to be compensated for their efforts (as long as extravagant compensation is not expected). Not mentioning any names *cough* RIAA, MPAA *cough* *cough*
Why argue when you can test it? If metcalfe's sure, why don't he start an ISP that charges rate of um, $.10/hour, or something like that? If he's more profitable than flat rate competition, everybody will eventually switch to that system. Frankly, I think flat rate is a bit of a gimmick: it assumes that most people won't take advantage of what it proudly proclaims: as many internet time as you want. The idea is just that even people who use it for 3 hour a month get a bit nervous (hey, what if I do want alot of time one month.. this gives me upper limit of what i'll pay in any case). So, psychologically, if not logically, flat rate is better. But then again, doesn't AOL have $5/month/5hour plan? I do think it's kind of biased, I mean, alot of idlers on irc spend 6-8 hours online every day and they pay $22 for aol and down to $10/month for some other isps, while use.. about 50-60 times more dialup time than users of that aol plan. Well, whatever. As I said, the guy can easily go and start a new isp, he's got :-)
the money. If he's successful all of us internet junkies will be sorry
-- ATTENTION: do not read this sig. It doesn't say much.
unless I can get a rebate on every byte/time unit spent downloading spam, cookies, and other advertizing I didn't want to transfer in the first place. :)
It says "Users love low flat rates"
Try again.
Something like Users love free access.
Last time I checked, "free" was a low, flat rate.
Metering your usage of the internet will both hinder the effort you spend innovating the net as well as narrow the scope of the internet that you will uncover. Metering internet usage just breaks down what the internet stands for(freedom) and oppresses something that has brought this world into the next millenium. FREE THE INTERNET!!!
Similarly, the revenue of the recorded music industry is dwarfed by that of Fed Ex and the U.S. Postal Service
Does this mean Fed Ex, UPS and the USPS are going to come together and put the bitchslap on e-mail? (We will firewall e-mail and source, we will firewall it at blah blah blah) Before you laugh, think about it for a second. The advent of the "3D printer" is pretty much a joke, but we can already send a large amount of things which used to require physical transport over electronic mediums. Once we get some kind of way to send patterns of physical objects over a communications medium and some way of re-constructing those patterns on the other end, then UPS, Fed EX and the USPS will be totatlly obsolete, won't they? A business model which believed(as the recording labels did) that it was immortal will be challenged again. This could get ugly. Especially since the USPS is a government branch.
Steven
-- I have marked myself unwilling to moderate-- I don't have other accounts to artificially inflate the karma of
"Users love low flat rates". Gee, what a shock. People like free almost anything but herpes. Of course they want it for free. I'd like my car to cost $50, too. So what?
"...nearly all users pay flat rates regardless of their usage..." Not exactly. Dialup has an absolute bandwidth limit, there is only so much I can download over a 56k per month. ISDN has a higher limit, cable higher still, DSL, T1, T3, and up to OC48 (I suppose something exists beyond that). The rate I pay per month determines a ceiling on my usage.
"...metering would fly in the face of hundreds of years of history..." like metered mail (or stamps), pay by minute for long-distance telephone calls, and that is in the communications arena alone. We still have metered gas, electricity, and so on. Sounds like history is on the metering.
I don't even know where he was going with this content thing. It doesn't appear to be relevant. Maybe I'm wrong.
"Price discrimination..." way to coin a phrase that will automatically bias you against metering! Maybe he should have just used "Nazi Price Fixing" and been a little less subtle.
"...residential telephone users can get flat rate plans with free local calls..." Said flat rate varies wildly. How much you want to bet that if everyone got on the phone and began babbling 24/7, our "flat rates" would suddenly undergo an upwards shift?
"...one can add extra fiber capacity without limit..." conveniently ignoring the cost of the fiber, installation, repeaters, etc. That money has to come from somewhere. Until Slashdot posts a nice biotech story on trees engineered to grow fiberop, I won't be holding my breath on adding fiber for free.
"...When necessary, ISPs can discourage camping via monthly caps, limits on session length, or limits on peak time usage..." Oh, I see. So, instead of having the amount of time you spend on the net affecting the cost, you're going to use the cost limit the amount of time you have. Sounds a lot like metering to me.
"...As retail users move to DSL and cable connections, where each user pays for their dedicated connection, the pricing is invariably flat rate..." for now. It's a new technology. Examine the history of the catalytic meter in electrical service here. Once we have discovered the carrying capacity, you don't think this will change?
Aside from the huge problems above, this guy fails to look at what drives economies: limited resources. The world has limited resources. I cannot convert the entire bulk of the Earth into fiber optics. Electricity costs to make. We simply cannot take the current backbone, give everyone an OC48, and have them load up as much as they like. We will run out of our finite resource, the backbone (which is more like a backweb, I guess, given the multiple spines). All of these things cost. Adding new capacity costs. Lines can be saturated. It's just like bread ... it costs to make, and only so many can use it before it is all gone. Money is an abstract method by which we allocate our finite physical resources. Just because we would like a free meal doesn't mean that the universe is obliged to give us one.
I realize I should be addressing this Andrew Odlyzko, instead of the reviewer of the article, but, geez. I feel like a troll now.
"puzzling development"? I certainly wasn't suprised you had a spud up your ...
Steven
-- I have marked myself unwilling to moderate-- I don't have other accounts to artificially inflate the karma of
...What a boneheaded idea.
I use the 'net a lot and I don't want to have to count minutes (or megs) like I have to on my cellphone or long distance line.
I don't want to pay my ISP for the latest Slackware ISO that I d/l'ed, nor do I want to pay for playing Q3 all night...
I've not met anyone that's happy under metered access in the US, and from what I hear, in places where it is only metered (Like the UK), people hate it.
If my ISP started metering, I'd switch ISPs. Simple as that.
So what if it goes against history? That's called progress, fool.
--K
---
With the common utilities water, electricity, gas and telephone, the cost of measuring usage, calculating the bill and sending out the bill is the largest portion of the total cost. That's why here in the UK you can get your gas from any one of a number of companies, including your electricity provider, even though they don't own any infrastructure. They pay a flat rate to the infrastructure owner for supplying you with gas, and then do the billing to you. They are betting that they can do the billing more cheaply than the infrastructure company can, and thus charge you less and still make a profit.
And that just goes to illustrate why charging for usage for consumer Internet is stupid.
I see that in other countries, too.
--
Not true. In fact I could have gotten a CHF 75,- Cable subscription, but with only 800MB (above that it costs $0.10 per megabyte, way too much).
Instead I took a CHF 180,- flat rate DSL.
(yes such things are still very expensive in Euope/Switzerland).
I love flat rates, and I'm prepared to pay a lot more for it, even more than I would probably pay using metered access.
A fella by the name of Cannibal Harry got railed by Earthlink, his website had a short movie containing some highlights of a HALO get-together sponsored by bungie...and it got a LOT of downloads. So many in fact, Earthlink billed him for close to $30,000 (US). Check the story here:http://www.theregister.co.uk/c ont ent/1/13668.html
So there I was. Naked. In a refrigerator. With a potroast on my knees. Smokin a cigar. That's when it got REALLY weird.
The longer the phone call, the more you pay. Metering in action.
If you don't like this approach then sign up with someone like Demon for a flat monthly rate.
Here's an analogy for you: most people do not engage in much heated political discussion, but there are some of us who do with a great vengeance. Now, some would argue that political discussions should be capped, because that would raise the quality of life for all the people who hate politics. But that would fly in the face of universal rights to free speech (as well as their local ensconcements in the American constitution).
It's the same with network use. Think about it.
-- Anne Marie
Sewer Commissioner? Is that an inside joke by the author?
--
314-15-9265
Who decides what a 'heavy user' might be? A 'light user' could be someone that logs in once in a while to check their mail, but as time goes by, everyone will be using the 'net for *everything*, bringing everyone into the category of the 'heavy users'. Then what?
I'm sorry, but this is not right. Everyone pays for their access; keep these kinds of fees at the ISP level, and do not burden the end users with additional taxes/costs/etc. If you are the type of person that transfers gigabytes/month, then your ISP should be putting a bandwith cap on your connection, or you should be forced to pay for dedicated access (like some of us already do). Just because joe shmoe doesn't want to pay $19.95/month for his AOL thingy, doesn't mean that bill shmoe should pay $39.95/month because he happens to run a website with moderate traffic.
"We'll need 2000 crickets, 4 cans of Easy Cheese, and the fluid from 18 glowsticks for this plan to work...." - ph0n1c
It's probably the same BT lamebrain that modded me down, too. I'd still like to find the Sony loyalist that modded me as flamebait for accurately describing the gait of an AIBO as being slower than a bowling ball rolling uphill.
--
"A witty saying proves nothing" - Voltaire
You're right, but wrong. The local phone calls to the ISP is metered in most countries, by the phone company. That is not metered internet access, but metered phone access.
The issue is paying for bandwidth used, so that you pay much more if you spend an hour watching streaming video than if you write a few emails. I haven't heard of that being commonly implemented anywhere.
As John Levine states:
"In North America, almost without exception, residential telephone users can get flat rate plans with free local calls. (Internet growth has been slower in Europe where local calls are usually metered.) With great regularity, users pick flat rate plans even when their usage history shows that a metered plan would cost less. The reasons for this seemingly irrational preference appear to be twofold. By choosing a flat rate plan, users avoid an unexpectedly high bill if they make a lot of calls one month. Furthermore, most consumers don't want the hassle factor of deciding whether each phone call is likely to enrich their lives by 10 cents per minute."
The same principle applies the other way around as well. Companies/corporations can be especially hard to sell on spending more now in order to receive future savings. They often look "penny wise and dollar foolish". It all boils down to: People/corporations want consistency and predictability above all else (much easier to plan/budget around). Change is often viewed as a bad thing.
Despite the cost of living, it remains popular.
America started as "The land of freedom" is now the land of money... Everytime they can have you pay for something, they will... That's sad, but that how it is now...
See, at University of Waterloo, everybody who lives in residence gets free Internet in their rooms. The only problem is the download limitation. Different excessive usage are handled differently (see here).
Luckily, I didn't live in residence.
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dd if=/dev/random of=~/.ssh/authorized_keys bs=1 count=1024
Dr. Levine is also the moderator of the comp.compilers newsgroup, and the author of _Linkers and Loaders_, which is one of the few well-written books out there dealing with linkers and run-time loaders. (If you ever wanted to know all the fsck-ed up things with the Windows .EXE and .DLL format, read this book. :-)
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
Who in an ideal world would choose to pay instead of having free access?
Of course, paying a flate rate to get premium access to fast, high-bandwidth connections is fine, again, preferably at a low rate.
Obviously the key here is choice.
Something which not everyone in the world has the luxury of.
At UCSD before ethernet/cable modem was available to everyone, we did string up our own network.
You should have seen it, coax running through windows, along the roof, under ground, across paths, it was great.
Well, it was great until the RA went around cutting the cable at 10ft intervals.
There are good ways to charge for service rendered, and we need them so long as there is network congestion. One proposal I saw years ago (sorry, too long, no pointer) is that each packet carry a bid indicating how much the sender will pay to have it sent. In each time slice, routers transmit the highest-bid packets and bill them all at the rate of the lowest bid transmitted. (Billing is accumulated and done in per-day chunks or something, not with additional packets.)
A user would have some way of adjusting their bids, maybe telling email clients to bid nothing and telling their video streaming to bid 10 cents per megabyte. The email would go through eventually, which is fine, and the video streaming would work without annoying pauses -- or the user would choose to increase their bid to make it so, to suffer with the pauses, or to watch the video later, when network demand is off peak.
There are other details -- packets coming back from servers might be billed to the requestor according to some token, or maybe they would be billed to the server, who would balance the charge by revenue in their own way -- ads, merchandise sold, charges to the web viewer, whatever.
I liked the proposal when I saw it. I'm certainly happy paying a flat rate for unmetered service, and maybe I'd continuing bidding zero for my packets most of the time. But it would be nice to have the means to get some things faster when I wanted to, and it is entirely reasonable that people who want better service should pay for it. If you want to know what you're going to pay, you could set all your bids to zero, or software could help you estimate what to bid to match your budget -- and could adjust those bids as you accumulated charges to ensure that you stayed under budget.
Note that when the network is not congested, packets are transmitted for free, even the highest-bid packets, because the router is able to transmit all requested packets in each time slice. So this system is really asking the people who want extra capacity the most to pay for it.
The only fair way to make metered access work is if you know what you are downloading, and how much you will be billed, in advance. Picture browsers being required to pop up a window when you hit a link that says "This request is XXXX bytes, and will cost you YYYY to download, do you want to download this file?" Alternatively, imaging if every link were required to have something like "Click here (XXXX bytes of data) for my fun site?"
Most people aren't *asking* for the majority of data that's pushed onto their browsers by most websites; it's just crap that some hot-shot web "designer" thinks is "way cool".
Cut out all that bullshit and just deliver content.
*Then* there wouldn't be any need for talk of metering.
t_t_b
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I think not; therefore I ain't®
I'm on PJ's "enemies" list! Are you?
From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.
This is the way it works right now.
Basically the same as local calls, unless you get one of those cheapo deals which limits your number of calls each month. I'd hate to think I'm siding with Marx, after all the good he did the world, but I benefit from it. Granted, if I want higher throughput I do have to pay more for a better line. If I don't use it much, guess who I subsidising? Uh, huh.
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Chief Frog Inspector
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
That has to be one of the WORST ideas I have heard of. Putting monetary squabbles into web protocols? Come on. That sounds more like CompuServe's idea. You had to pay more to play the games, etc. Look where they are now.
There are good ways to charge for service rendered, and we need them so long as there is network congestion. One proposal I saw years ago (sorry, too long, no pointer) is that each packet carry a bid indicating how much the sender will pay to have it sent. In each time slice, routers transmit the highest-bid packets and bill them all at the rate of the lowest bid transmitted. (Billing is accumulated and done in per-day chunks or something, not with additional packets.)
All dialup ISPs charge by connect time, not bandwidth. So what's the point in metering it? A comparison. I have a 56K modem, my neighbor ("Bob" for this comparison) has 1 56K. We both use an ISP that charges a flat rate, 20 hours/month for $10. Bob connects to check his email, read the news, and occasionally downloads some MP3s. My computer is connected 24x7, monitoring uptime by sending a ping packet to my 3 servers every 10 minutes. If a server isn't responding, it starts flashing lights and doing jumping jacks etc. Bob uses 18 hours per month, and is doing something all 18 hours. I use over 700 hours per month, and only use a small fraction of the bandwidth Bob uses. Assuming Bob is maxing out his modem, Bob is using 354 MB of bandwidth every month. I'm using under 500 K per month. My ISP charges $1 for every extra hour of connect time, so I get a bill every month for $750 while Bob pays $10, and he uses 700 times more bandwidth than I do.
Metering would say that I should only be charged $1/month for my bandwidth, but my ISP says I'm connected 24x7 so I should be charged for every minute that I'm online. Until ISPs start charging people by bandwidth, metering simply won't work.
"You'll die up there son, just like I did!" - Abe Simpson
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
In such a system, I'd probably track my bandwidth usage and maintain my own logs. If a given ISP comes up with significantly different usage stats for you at the end of the month, you can argue with them and try to get your bill reduced (Not unlike arguing with your telco over a phone bill). When that fails, you can always pack up and switch to an ISP that has a potential to be more honest.
Yeah, it was like that for me too...it's ok until you accidentally go over the time you paid for...then it was 6 cents a minute...that adds up quickly when your sister is on a chatline.
A flat rate inevitably results in more high usage users than metered service - specifically, the people who enjoy the net, but can't or won't pay higher fees. Heavy users fuel development, with online participation, advertising dollars, ecommerce activity, etc. Lowering the number of heavy users will lower the number of dollars in the industry, which in turn lowers the rate of progress.
It is fairly well recognized that most people are seriously risk adverse. For example, given a choice between two bus schedules, one that makes you wait eight minutes every time, and the other that makes you wait five minutes three times and then fifteen minutes once, most people will choose the eight-minute schedule. Yes, they wait less time on average with the other schedule, but they are risk adverse and will "pay" a premium in order to avoid the 15-minute outcome.
I myself am work adverse, and since there are four people on four computers behind the firewall server attached to the cable modem at my house, and one of the four is a teenaged boy whose downloads dwarf the rest of us, I am adverse to trying to define what each person's "fair" share of a metered limit would be, and even more adverse to having to implement it. I will pay more for the flat-rate plan just to avoid those hassles.
Maybe the solution isn't metering to prevent light users from subsidizing heavy users.
/. and start a-trollin'!
maybe the solution is for the light users to become heavy users, so we're all getting the same for our $!.
Duh!
Tell gramma to log into
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
One for smart people (a slightly higher unlimited access) and One for dumbasses and newbies: charge 'em by the minute. They'll quickly change to the unlimited fee and we'll all be right back where we started.
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In Canada you're used to be taxed to death.
I think this kind of behavior in the US would
kill the internet.
It is not because others get screwed that
we in the USA should accept to be screwed
as well.
US IRS employs tens of thousands of people.
Instead of that, if you have a flat tax or just a simple formula, then people (rich and poor) pay less taxes because they do not pay the salary of thousands of tax collecters.
Whether or not people realize it, metering already exists in the sense that if you need a certain level of access you have to pay for a bigger pipe. The home user who is occasionally picking up email and doing a little shopping doesn't need DSL or a Cable Modem. The heavy gamer or downloader will pay for the higher throughput. Those with business level demands pay for the T-1 or OC-3.
Well, one thing's for sure - if you start charging Americans by bit or byte, you'll make them angry. We're used to paying a flat rate per month for just about everything, including our cars. It would screw up our expectations completely. Anyway, if an ISP did that, I'd expect any self-respecting-used-to-flat-rates American to change ISP's.
I spent two years in Britian, where they charge you for your time on the telephone. I hated it. And at least half the people I met didn't even have a telephone, especially in inner-city Glasgow. By contrast, almost everyone in this country has a telephone - why? Because with a flat rate, it also costs less.
Charging anything but a flat rate will only drive people away, and widen the "digital divide."
I got my Linux laptop at System76.
How "does" one edit a post?:)
It's just so crazy it might work!
/* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */
My apologies, billybob2001. In trying to be clever and swift in my reply, I came off sounding like a jerk. My only intention was to point out (humorously) that you seemed to see a difference between a "low flat rate" and "free", where I saw the latter as a special case of the former. Re-reading my response, though, I can see that I was actually being snide, and there were a dozen other ways I could have made my point without sounding like a smart-ass.
In response to your new post, let me say that I definitely agree with what you're saying. All other things being equal, I'd prefer free service, or perhaps a reasonable flat rate for most services (except cable TV; I really resent paying for fifty channels when I only watch twenty to twenty-five).
So, in summary: I'm sorry I didn't think before I posted, especially since we appear to be in agreement.
Except that, in the (U.S.) government's infinite wisdom, they have transferred 99% of the cost of calculation to the taxpayers themselves. The cost of calculating your tax is not widely considered a part of your tax, but surely it is.
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Well then in that case...
Politicians should pay a $1 liars fee to each and every single person their lies affect. This way people lied to by a politician know that at least it cost THEM for a change. Then we can start metering verbal speech, by the word of course for those whom don't speak much...
-1 Overrated (Too many big words for me to comprehend)
I don't understand the point this article is trying to make. Internet usage IS metered, right now. If you buy an OC-48 connection, you will almost certainly be charged based on what percentage of it you use.
It is true that home lines -- modems, DSL, and the like -- are generally not charged on a per-usage basis. The amount of bandwidth consumed by the average home line is too small to make it worth the expense of metering.
- Damien
People, please, don't try to return back to metered access. The only who earns on this is the telephone company. The only reason that blocks the expansion of internet in Europe is that there are not flat rates for phone calls!
Low flat rates of phone calls is something that everyone envies you. In czech republic you get aproximatelly 20 times lower income than in US at average ($2500/year) and you can pay up to $200 per month for phone in case you use internet. $30/month is dream of anyone there even though the income is much lower!
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
Why should internet access be any different than cable TV? My cable TV provider says that for $20 bucks a month I can "have unlimited access" to channels 1-36. What this means is that if I want to switch to Nick At Nite' on channel 34 and watch 23 hours of classic re-runs a day it will cost me the same $20 bucks a month as my neighbor who never watches Nick at Nite', and only subscribes to Cable so he can watch the golf channel on weekends for 4 or 5 hours, and do his workouts with Richard Simmons on channel 9 for 30 minutes each morning. And the minute that cable TV companies decided to penalize me for watching 14 episodes of "Bewitched" a day, and say that I was "abusing" the system -- I guess my whole purpase for having cable TV in the first place would be wiped out.
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
Actually, metering tech support would make more sense. But 900 numbers have such a bad reputation (and the telco takes such a big cut) that that doesn't work.
Metering connect time has been tried; remember AOL. That's history.
The only way metering is going to happen is if somebody gets a monopoly. Otherwise, unmetered services will wipe out metered ones.
In Malaysia we only have 1 phone company. Local calls used to be flat-rate, but since we opened up an ISP here, they started metering (since the dialup service is a phone call away). Telekom profits tremendously from this, despite protests from users. Oh well... I guess that's what happens when monopolies have too much power.
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
Imagine if residential electrical usage were paid flat rate instead of metering. It seems to be much the same model as Internet access: everyone needs a certain amount of infrastructure to handle their needs, even though they don't often use it fully.
The main objection would be that the cost of producing electricity is not marginal when compared to the cost of building infrastructure, EXCEPT for nuclear and renewables, where the cost of maintaining infrastructure is almost all of the production cost. So flat rate would actually encourage utilities to invest in renewables and nuclear, and discourage use of fossil fuels.
Residential usage can benefit from conservation practices under metering, but only so much. Today, we subsidize electric utilities' conservation and education efforts. If flat-rate were the model, the advantages of such efforts would be evident to the utilities, and the efforts would increase: utilities would likely pay appliance manufacturers and home-builders to build in efficiency, rather than conservation-minded consumers having to pay a premium and hunt for such products.
Electric use wouldn't suffer the same level of "abuse" as bandwidth -- after a certain point, you don't need any more wattage in your light bulbs. If bandwith flat-rates can survive with "campers", electric flat rates could survive with people running businesses on their residential feeds.
Finally, we are facing an electric capacity shortage in the US today, and the article's point that metered service increases peak use is important here.
Has anyone heard proposals along these lines?
What would it do to the home-generation and co-generation efforts that benefit from reducing their metered usage? Could these producers simply not pay the flat rate and provide the power themselves?
"You can't get something for nothing." - my grandfather, on the stock market and Reaganomics.
Man, that was a good paper. It describes people like me exactly - I hate metered phones, even though I'd pay less if I had one. Just as I hate metered email or DSL, even though I'd pay less.
It's emotional. Forget logic. The market reacts to many feedbacks, and one of them is the emotional reaction to pricing plans. Sure, I could switch to Sprint and save money, but I hate having too many choices. I just want to pay one flat rate and phone whenever I want and not think about it. Just as I want an unlimited account for DSL - I'll get a lower speed (256K) but I don't want any cap on how much email I can crank out.
And I'd drop the web in a second, if I had to choose between it and email.
Also, remember that women use the Net differently than men, and they are now a majority of Net users. Women prize email over super-duper graphics and voice streaming geek toys. And they're right.
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
The assumption is that micropayments are so small that no one will care. But this isn't true. There is still the floating anxiety and bother of "mentally counting" each minute (pun intended) purchase. Also related, if what you are purchasing with micropayments has clearly perceiveable "high value", such a system will likely be trivially accepted by users. If your prospective users do not clearly perceive value (whatever that means to them, not to you as a marketer), either due to the type of product offered or the way you've "positioned" your product, micropayment economics will fail.
I suspect that micropayments haven't really taken off in part because this fundamental piece of psychology was never integrated into either the protocols or the business plans of those creating micropayment systems.
I'm from Utah, but I spent the last two years in England. British Telecommunications (BT) charges local phone calls at a certain rate per minute, depending on your plan and the time of day, etc. Most English people I knew were fed up with it, and I (being American and used to flat rate phone bills) was nearly beside myself a few times after a particularly high bill would arrive. I would think, "Why can't we just simplify things and pay the same price every month?" The high bill would always come exactly when you were a little short of cash.
The general movement in Britain is towards a flat rate system. Where private phone companies have been allowed to set up business in certain counties, they invariably adopt a flat rate system. A friend of mine who came from Kingston-Upon-Hull, East Yorkshire told me that the most popular phone comany in his county charges a flat rate.
The arguement for ISP's to charge an hourly (or bitly) rate makes sense when you first hear it, but when you think about it you realize that it's really not what people want. It was really a bother to get my silly BT phone bill every month and study my previous month's phone usage until it made sense to me. It was something I didn't want to have to think about.
Is that what the internet is about? No! It's about convenience. It's about getting information and media as quickly and effortlessly as possible. Throughout the history of man, advancements in technology and application have been motivated by a desire to simplify life - not to give you another thing to worry about.
So he invented Ethernet. That doesn't make him an expert, by any means.
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* CmdrTaco is an idiot.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Yucko.
sulli
RTFJ.
I'm just struggling to understand how I'd been modded down to 0, Flamebait.
I'm glad there are open minded /.ers out there to balance out the reactionary moderators I've had the misfortune to be judged by.
I'm at home for the weekend now, where I do have to pay (yes a fairly low flat-rate, ok capped-rate, but I still have to pay call charges) so I'll be relatively quiet until Monday.
I shudder to think what will have happened to my karma by then if the k-police are having a slow weekend.
in germany, all providers offer time metered access, while a couple also offer flat rate schemes. This way, people can decide on their online behaviour (low/free monthly charge, higher minute charge -> light users higher monthly charge, low/free minute charge -> power use) i don't see what is bad about more consumer choice. anyway, before telco liberalization we only had metered local calls. i wonder what the prices for umts service are gonna be like
I heard that he lives here in Boston, in the posh Back Bay. I'd like to show up and give him measured rate air.
I think an important quality of Internet access which is desirable for the evolution of society into cyberspace ( opening myself up a bit there eh? ) is that Internet access must be considered as always on, no cost and fast. It needs to be so cheap and convienient to use that there is simply no thought of not using it for whatever communication / research / play / whatever task is at hand. Ie do not want to continue or exacerbate the class dichotomy of the computer/internet haves vs. the have-nots. By charging per unit access, poor people will have less access to Internet, which will serve to keep them poor. Sounds like bad juju to me.
enough is too much
...for broadband connections.
Why? I currently have @Home service (yeah, I know it sucks, but it is all I can get right now), but in order to stay legit, I am not allowed to run servers. I am also capped on my upload bandwidth (and probably capped on the download, but at several times what the upload cap is).
Before I signed up for the service, I repeatedly tried to get them to offer me more bandwidth and the ability to run a server (hey, I am not wanting to so I can run an MP3 or p0rn server - I just would like to host my site at home, instead of through HE), even offering to pay more for any extra bandwidth I use, etc. They suggested I look into @Work - but since this is a hobbiest site with low hit counts, I can't afford that kind of access.
I was even willing to keep the cap, and just allow me to run a server, but they wouldn't do it (they wouldn't even let me negotiate the contract)...
Bleh...
Anyhow, if we could get metered service for those who want it, and allow us to run servers and pay for what is used, then maybe we can get out of these stuffy contracts that disallow you from reselling the service or using it to run a server or whatnot, and get back to just providing a pipe to use.
I support the EFF - do you?
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Around these parts (Calgary, Canada) there have (over year ago last I looked) been the CHOICE of flat rate at $20/month or Small cap (5mb) for $10/month and some $/meg after the fact for phone connections.
Same should be available for high speed, but it isn't ('cept for a cap for web hogs) because most people prefer higher but steady monthly charges. So we get $40/month cable or DSL and that's it for your 'options'.
The water utility offers flat rate and metered, yet most people keep flat even though (they say) that most people would pay less on metered.
Quite simply people will pay more for financial stability and simplicity of billing. BUT I wish there would be more choices for those of us who have enough of a clue factor to know their usage patterns.
I went with a total pay-by-the-minute cel phone this year because I KNOW that my usage is low. I would never have gotten a phone at the $20/month rate for time I'd never use up.
I can't do this for web access; Thus I stick with a cheap 56K phone rather that pay the same for a limited (but fast) high speed connection.
Is it worth it for administration and # of customers for this option to be offered. Dunno.
W9x:Thanks for the make-work project Bill.
One of the biggest problems with metered billing is what do you do when someone decides to rack up your bill? Let's say I'm some script kiddie whose on an unmetered line (say at college.) Let's say I do a ping with 10K packet size to your home DSL address at the default frequency of once a second for a month. By my math, that adds up to almost 25GB of traffic. One ping a second won't even get noticed by 99% of DSL users, until they get that $200 dollar ISP bill.
That's one of the big problems with metered billing. It's one thing when a script kiddie gets upset at you and floods you with traffic for a few hours. It's a whole different story if you get a huge bill from your ISP because of it.
If everyone goes to metered billing you will see all sorts of abuses as crackers try to set up servers on other peoples machines to avoid paying the bills for their traffic. Add that up to the aforementioned harrasment traffic jacking up peoples bills. Plus the dishonest users who blame their traffic spikes on "hackers".
I just don't see it being worth the headache for an ISP to charge by the byte. You can bet that any user that is hit by the above problems is going to run screaming to the nearest flat rate ISP. Besides, the rates are metered to a certain extent. Dialup access is not the same cost as OC-3 by a long shot. So all the dialup users are in the same cost pool. So what? They are in a different cost pool from the DSL users, who are in a different pool from the T3 users, etc.
Europe and Japan already have metering ... it's by the local phone company who charge for local phone calls by the minute. I've lived there, and it s#x. IMHO, it has caused slower I'net adoption and reduced usage.
You can view Andrew's paper on his website at www.research.att.com/~amo/doc/ net works.html, where you can find several other interesting papers too.
Direct links the the Content is not king paper are: [Abstract] [PostScript] [PDF] [LaTeX]
One interesting quote in the paper was:
SPF support for most open source mail servers can be found at libspf2.
What a horrible idea. I don't want my electric bill to go up, just because all my neighbors prefer refrigerated air over evaporative cooling, incandescent over flourescent, etc. Flat rates take away peoples' incentive to be efficient.
The reason you can't compare bandwidth to electric is that when electricity is flowing a resource is really being used up. It's not just infrastructure, it's consumed energy too. With bandwidth, there isn't the consumption aspect of it.
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
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But ISP service is fundamentally different. Buffets offer a wide variety of food, and can charge a flat rate (and offer very skimpy table service) because they can average it all over a large number of fairly predictable users. ISPs, on the other hand, offer one thing: internet access. It's more like a cafe where you get free refills, and they know that most users don't get the refill; they can afford to accommodate the few all-day coffee drinkers, who also buy more donuts (think email accounts, listservs, that sort of thing). It all works out.
sulli
RTFJ.
Every Internet user in Europe would commit suicide if this happened. Not only would they have metered phone service, they'd also have metered Internet service. :/
Robert Metcalfe founded 3Com Corporation and designed the Ethernet protocol for computer networks. Metcalfe's Law states that the usefulness, or utility, of a network equals the square of the number of users. I believe that this is true of internet traffic. If we had metered bandwidth, less people would post on slashdot, less people would share their napster files, there would be fewer downloads of linux, fewer patches posted for linux, a dramatically, exponentially smaller free software movement. The internet would suck.
ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?
Hey mate, move over to New Zealand.
DSL has very good connection speeds, and we can do what the heaven we want with our connection (with the exception of enabling bridging on your modem).
Yes data transfers (upstream and downstream) are metered and we get charged extra if we go over 'n' megabytes, where 'n' is one of 400, 600, 1200, or whatever you signed up for.
Voice over IP for a user in Britain with a dialup connection.
The way I see it, this would increase the digital divide. Let's say I'm a computer whiz kid developing the next Napster on steroids. Am I going to be able to pull together the 110 bucks per month to pull it off? Hell no.
Just about anybody can afford $20/month. Maybe you'd have to sell an extra 3 joints or work an hour extra each week bagging groceries to pull it off, but you could do it.
I'm all for a sliding scales for expensive items like taxes, college tuition, and heating bills, but coming with some complex and mystical formula (you thought your phone bill was confusing?) to justify saving families a few bucks a month is plain bullshit.
Don't believe a fucking word of it. Metcalfe is a shill for the capitalists. I heard it straight from his mouth on the radio that he is voting Republican. Fuck him.
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
Count out your XACCT change to merge to the Pay-As-We-Go Internet
What an idiot. How are you going to meter "premium" internet services, when all they do is use internet access. Fax? Just send a file, and have it print. Same with anything else. Nothing a little software or hardware can't solve.
Maybe he should start monitoring his own brain access instead.
(nt)
At the risk of getting all political, this reminds me of one of the reasons that a VAT or flat tax seems so much more logical than the ridiculous tax system we currently have here in the U.S. Sure, a flat tax might be "less fair" because rich people would pay a lower percentage of their income than they do now, but there would be massive society-wide savings of money and time because of the simplification of the tax code (which currently is about the size of the Encyclopedia Britannica and is incomprehensible even to experts) and reduction in enforcement and litigation costs. Food for thought...
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
I have a permanent modem connection (33kbps) and it cost me $500 to install, $20 per month up to 100MB and then $20/per 100MB after that. Average bill is about $70/month for a measly 350MB!!!!
We also run an ISP...
We have metered by the meg for years because our suppliers meter us - we have no choice. And get this, the list rate for wholesale in Aus for a small ISP is around AU$0.14-0.19 per meg. Of course you can get better deals than that if you shop around and sign anti competitive NDAs, but not much better, certainly not what it costs in the US. Typically a customer in Aus pays between 10-20 times as much as the same customer in the US.
Typically ISPs here deal with it in three ways..
1) directly charge the customer per meg.
2) factor the average megs into an hourly rate.
3) apply download quotas on all you can eat accounts in various ways.
Either way, it has totally screwed up the market here in Aus.
Having personally spoken directly to the current CEO of Australia's largest Telco (and ISP) who supply wholesale to a large chunk of the market, the word is that that's the only way they can recoup the huge cost to plug into the US backbone, carry traffic across the Pacific and then deliver it around Aus. This is the same company that makes billion dollar profits every year without fail. All the other capable telcos just follow suit and so in general the public is being screwed by such schemes.
I can tell you it sucks.
Technical details...
We have a sophisticated RADIUS based usage tracking mechanism which feeds into an SQL database through to a rules based billing system. And if our system as much as sneezes, the customers are down our throats wanting refunds. The worst is when they are unware that their connection is slowly draining their quota even when they aren't apparently doing much. Imagine the financial pain when an ISP get smurfed.
bandwidth metering... hah.
Maybe where you live. I have a client that pays by the minute to call across the street. They did not realize it until they analized phone bills to find their LOCAL ISP was costing $400/month in phone charges. That was for one user who did nothing much more than sit online all day just to get the email.
domebot...carpet-denim!
The arguement for ISP's to charge an hourly (or bitly) rate makes sense when you first hear it, but when you think about it you realize that it's really not what people want. It was really a bother to get my silly BT phone bill every month and study my previous month's phone usage until it made sense to me.
BT is already set up to meter calls, issue variable bills and deal with queries. However this is not the case with ISP's who'd have to set up such a system from scratch, which wouldn't be cheap.