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What Kind of Alternate Business Models Could ISPs Use?
esocid writes "After reading multiple stories over the past few months about the practices of ISPs within and outside of the US I have started to actually contemplate the benefits of the pay-per-use broadband service. Monopolistic practices have strangled broadband to the throttled money-draining cesspool that it is today. Would a pay-per-use option, or some other strategy, be better than the flat fee offered by companies today? When you think about it you are paying for an XMbps connection, when in actuality you get an 65-85%XMbps connection that you may or may not use all of the time. In addition to that, speaking as a Comcast customer, you get a throttled connection that limits your usage of certain protocols. Essentially you pay about $60-70 for a connection that you only squeeze maybe $35-45 worth of usage out of it. If a pay-per-usage option were implemented, how do you think the best way to charge for it would be? Is there some other scheme that would deliver customers the kind of QOS and value they seek?"
I am myself in favor of a "you only get charged for what you actually get".
I only hope that commercial interests aren't so incentivized to oversell flat-rate fat pipes to refuse to change their model.
Overselling and undercutting is profitable, especially if you're a monopoly.
Then I could pay $500 and get $500 worth of bandwidth! w00t!
Remember... it is not your bandwidth.. you are just renting it... so you cannot do with it as you choose...
- Your stupidity got you into this mess, why can't it get you out? -Will Rogers
I'm sure there are several alternate business models that ISps could employ that would result in fairer, more even-handed access and pricing.
However, this is not in the ISPs best interests. The ISPs interests are best served by the current business model...the promise-you-x-amount-of-bandwidth-but-give-you-only-0.4x business model.
Don't expect change anytime soon.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
I want to know where the April Fools articles are. So far, everything is boringly normal. Give me some funny shit! Microsoft debugs Vista, "Best Windows yet!" crows Richard Stallman. Bush finds exit strategy for Iraq. Catholic priest shoves fingers up own ass for a change.
Where's the A material? Even Poniez is looking good at this point.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
I think that even in a pay-as-you-go type solution, a certain base threshold of traffic would have to be free, and the customer would pay on top of that. Otherwise, the user is penalized for visiting a site that rams heavy multimedia ads down their throats or for downloading spam to be filtered.
Another idea may be a price ramp: if I usually only use 5% of my connection, the cost for a spike in my usage should be low. Similarly, if I'm a heavy user than my spikes (higher, more frequent) would carry a heftier price tag. In other words, occasional spikes should be discounted while habitually heavy users would have to pay more to accommodate their persistent digital lifestyles.
Finally, I would only consider such a scheme if my account were discounted for every second of downtime during each billing cycle, whether it affected me directly or not. If have to pay for what I use, they have to pay for what they don't deliver.
These stories are free but worth money.
Having lived through the bad old days when pay-per-use was still popular with ISPs, I'm forced to say no way. It's great for the ISPs, I'm sure, as they can arbitrarily set the "value" of a certain amount of bandwidth completely ex recto and hold everyone to that. For consumers, however, it's terrible; they invariably end up paying more for inferior service plus the fear of using more bandwidth and having to pay more.
in terms of $ per megabyte broadband is the best deal going. taking into account the throttling and limited upstream pipes...it's still a screaming deal. go price T1's, or try to live with satellite broadband, dialup, or 3G. all these alternatives have profound limitations.
that they would charge the current $60-$70 for low bandwidth customers who don't mind the throttling, and those of us who have 2-4 torrents going at a time are gonna pay double, or more; and the only one that wins is the provider. I seriously doubt this would produce cost savings for any consumers.
--You can sleep when you're dead--
What customers want is Pay for what you use until you reach a point and you pay fixed price.
People want to be reworded for using less and not punished for using more. So if you have a Fixed Price internet Raise it up only a small amount a few dollars a month and set the point so 80% of the customers are paying less or equal per month and 20% are paying the same and perhaps a bit more, but not so much that it will put a shock to their budgets.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I think the subject line speaks for itself. If any of them was actually making a superior product consumers would flock in a heartbeat.
How about invest in infrastructure to help your long term business increase? Spend a little more to make something better to get an exponential benefit out of it in the long run. I seem to remember somewhere saying that to retain 10% more of your current customers will be more profitable than adding 25% new customers due to all the additional managerial and other costs involved (and ripple effect).
I of course, could be wrong, but this seems to be the simplest thing. If someone offered symmetrical 30down/up with no filtering across the US right now for consumers, I think they would have more people sign up than I can conceive!
I bet for every 1 person that realizes a lower bill, 5 will have an increase. The reason? The idea sounds good now assuming the variables will remain static....they won't.
As soon as a change is made, the laws of eqaulibrium will kick in and what is sure to happen is the ISP's will adjust their pricing to either maintain (or probably increase) their take.
That won't happen if people start paying less.
WTF? Over?
It's a huge heap of BS to do this, especially when some people pay for high-bandwidth file services. I understand saying "We can't guarantee that the internet connection will always be this fast" for technical reasons, but purposely slowing down traffic for cross-industrial reasons (concerns over the file sharing of media/mp3s leading to the throttling of all file transfers) *should* be illegal.
Pay-for-use internet subscriber models don't make much sense: eventually, it will cause people to use the internet less , and thus will make the companies less money, because it will have a collective effect as the internet community dissipates because one of the biggest draws of the internet is the interconnected user-base. Less people on the internet = less blogs, fewer reasons to have news sites on the internet, fewer reasons to have forums, fewer reasons for social networking sites and advertising, fewer reasons to participate in multi player gaming, etc. This is why AOL switched over from minutes to unlimited - to ramp up the connected userbase.
Has slashdot gone too corporate for April Fools stories now?? Not even one OMG Ponies story??
Geez...I usually look forward to April 1st just to see what kind of stuff shows up on /., but, this year...what happened?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
honestly, internet access is very nearly a commodity, why not bill it as such?
Assuming all my ports are equal, and I can xfer upstream and down at whatever the physical rate of the device is:
bill me by the megabit-hour. Just like txu bills me by the kWatt-hour. I can use whatever I want, but pay accordingly.
Alternately, bill me at the end of the month for gigs xferred, which is already done for hosting in some cases.
In Soviet Russia jokes are formulaic and decidedly non-humorous.
The current business model is just fine for customers like myself.
I get X amount of peak capacity, which I use fully a few times a day.
De price of X is low, because I'm expected to make 'fair use' of the service
and not fully use up X.
*Much* to be preferred to a more expensive and smaller X.
This question is not nearly as theoretical as the question suggests: there are many countries where various forms of metered or tiered access are the norm. You just have to look at what these countries offer (and how consumers react) to get an idea of what works and what doesn't.
Here's an example: Videotron cable internet (Montreal, Canada)*. They have packages that run from $30/month to $80/month, depending what you want. They all have usage limits (2 GB/month to 100 GB/month), and charge a fee per additional GB beyond this basic usage.**
Does it "work"? Of course. Customers buy the package they want. If they are routinely going over their monthly limit, they either cut back on usage or upgrade their package. Yes, it is slightly more complicated for the customer than just having a single "unlimited!" package, but then again it's also more honest. In fact the unlimited packages have hidden terms and limits, which makes them more complicated... or at least more annoying.
I'm a heavy internet user (as most Slashdotters probably are). I don't mind paying a premium to get the speeds and usage limits I need: as long as that service level is actually delivered! This isn't rocket science: just provide a variety of packages and let the customers pick. Importantly, price the packages so that you won't go out of business if a sizeable percent of your customers actually use the service you sold them.
[*] Note that I was a Videotron customer when I lived in Montreal. I'm not endorsing their service; merely using them as an example.
[**] Note also that if you really want unlimited usage, you can upgrade to business class service. Again, you pay a premium if you want that level of service, which is fine.
I'd go for a $10-increment model with rollover and customer-defined usage caps.
For $10 you get X GB at Y Mb/sec, where X is higher if Y is lower.
You set your own usage cap.
After you reach the cap, you get throttled back to dialup speed until you raise your cap or the month is over.
Heck, if it were prepaid you wouldn't even have to worry about the end of the month.
To make additional money, ISPs could sell you "speed boost" where you could buy an hour or a day at the maximum speed your wire will allow. They could also sell enhanced services like web-site consulting, parental-controls, business-account services, and the like.
Whatever they charge, it would have to be as cheap or cheaper than today's services for all but the top-10%-usage customers or people would rebel.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Not only should base charge be fixed (bandwidth is extra), ISPs should share revenue with
web sites providing the actual content.
The only sensible "par-per-use" charge should be the energy/electricity usage of the
packets + small percentage charge.
I know I'm risking what little karma I have as a new poster but this question seems bizarre. Throttled connection speed is primarily a US problem and has a lot to do with the telecoms not keeping their promise to Congress to create a fiber optic network across the nation. Now they're reaping what they've sown and are trying to create an excuse to pass the buck to their customers rather than fulfilling their obligations.
I could see a tiered system for connection speed that billed based on KB transfered being reasonable if the telecoms were doing everything in their power to meet increasing capacity demands but they're not.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
From the same telcos who charge $0.15 for a single 160-character-or-less text message, if you don't have a messaging plan?
And you expect their rates to be reasonable or palatable? Their whole M.O. is to outrageously price ala-carte stuff to drive you into a plan.
Please tell me this is an "April Fool" Ask Slashdot.
How about they give you what they promise, set their price against what they actually think it costs and let competition work its magic. Promising what they don't deliver fscks up Adam Smith's invisible hand.
Shh.
CmTaco: We need an April Fools theme for this year.
CbNeal: Let's be subtle. If we don't do anything, the joke's on everyone who likes pink ponies. I hate pink ponies.
CmTaco: Ingenious. I like it.
CbNeal: Bwuahahahahahaha
CmTaco: Bwuahahahahahaha
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The crux of the problem is that if an ISP says they are providing a "3MiB/s-down with 300kb/s-up" connection, that is what they should be delivering. You can't sell something as one thing and then not deliver it - this is called fraud.
If they can't deliver at the speed they sell it as, then they shouldn't be allowed sell it as the higher speed.
The fact is that they want to be able to promise one thing and then reneg on the delivering the goods. Why do we let them get away with this?
Graham
We should be asking what alternative methods of connecting to the internet that bypasses the ISP can WE use.
What?
A reasonable bitcap with a fair price for exceeding it. I'm paying 70cnd/mo for Cogeco cable highspeed pro with 1mbit up, 16 down, with a soft 100gig/mo cap. My service was suspended for 24 hrs (after multiple warnings for exceeding the cap by 44%) last month so I phoned and asked if I could pay for more but they didn't want my money.
There's your business model.
I'm dead serious. Telecoms is a "natural monopoly". (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly) A monopoly is not something you build a business around, it's something you regulate. Thus, it is best funded by a regulatory regime AKA, a government.
And, for the practical example. I'm in Taiwan where the telecom is state owned. I am using the state owned telecom DSL service at 8M/640K for about thirty bucks a month although we just got a slight reduction in fees this month. Yeah, imagine that, a reduction. We have no throttling and the service, which I've had for about five years at that level is excellent.
Sure, there's a monthly fee for use, but the service is provided by a government monopoly which is obviously derivative of taxes.
The only way any company will follow this is if they make at least the same amount of profit that they did before. Now tell me, if they need to make the same amount of money as before, and all these people who barely use their internet are paying so little for it, who do you think will be paying the rest of that needed profit? The only thing that comes from this is rediculous bills for high bandwidth users and small costs for your average e-mail and website user.
Have a two level plan. Users would pay for however many gigabytes of high speed service at the wanted, which would be ultra-fast, 10Mbit at least, preferably higher.
They'd also have access to a baseline service in unlimited amount, but highly throttled...512Kbit say. Plenty useable for basic stuff, even MMOs and the like, but not for mass pirating. The user could toggle between the modes so as not to waste high-speed bandwidth checking e-mail or whatever.
TODO: Something witty here...
The issue is primarily one of convenience and plant cost. To get you 10Mb/s is mostly capital costs, so you pay a fixed rate. Overselling is done because average users don't saturate their channels. Businesses, otoh, do and they pay for the luxury. Pay per bit service would be difficult to structure without a fixed cost. Once you cover billing, tech support, and plant, you're up to nearly what everyone is already paying. Adding per-bit charges will only make it more expensive. Sure, you can pay more for a guarantee but the value of that guarantee is far less to the consumer than to the operator. And if you put your guaranteeds on the same line as your basic oversold, you're going to have to actively sort them out.
BTW - how much data does $35 buy you? Maybe you're getting $100 worth of data for the $70 you pay Comcast, and you just don't realize it. I would venture to guess that if you divided the entire data stream by the revenue, most slashdotters are getting more bits per dollar than the overall system average. Even if you just camp on the throttled ports, you may still be getting more bits than a dollar of Comcast plant depreciation.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
My ISP does partly that right now (I'm not in the US though). I pay something like 35$ a month, I get 20 gigs at 7mb, with an explicit warning that since its a shared cable, during peek hour I may go down. When it is not peek hour, I cap out my 7mb if the place I'm connected to can output it (which obviously makes sense), during peek hour the worse I've seen (from a reliable server... let say downloading something from java.sun.com) its like 350kbyte/s. If I go over my 20 gig, like 1 cents per megabyte.).
If thats not good enough, they have other plans that go as high as 100 gigs per month or more speed as high as 50 megabit/s (the upload speed is shit on that one though!).
If I think my current speed isn't fast enough, I can up my service to the next step up in speed for 48 hours for 3 to 5$, depending on the difference between the services (to up my 7mb to a 10mb its 3$ for 48 hours).
Its definately not perfect, and that ISP has its own problems with throttling and such, but its still a start in term of flexibility, and its much easier for the ISP to deliver this than something rediculous like "UNLIMITED DOWNLOAD AT 20MB speeds, all the time!". Its definately more honest, at least, and considering the reliability of my connection, they obviously CAN deliver.
Please don't use "umm" or "err" or "erm".
One major problem is: How would I know that I'd been charged fairly?
In my experience, when I get details of my net usage, there's a lot of stuff there that I can neither control nor account for. Thus, most browsers honor a page's request to refresh it every N minutes, and don't give me a way to turn it off. Any browser that's running can be using bandwidth without most users being aware of the fact. This is especially true for pages that include advertising.
For a while, I had a smartphone with wireless net access. Even when I didn't use it, it ran up packet charges. When I asked, I was simply told that the networking software sends packets on its own. "That's how it works." It's not obvious how a customer can challenge something like this, except via extremely expensive lawsuits.
And what about that advertising? I didn't want it, but it comes "free" with the content that I wanted. Would I be charged for downloading the ads? Of course, I would; what a silly question. Even (or especially) the flash ads. Yeah, I have flashblock installed, but not all browsers honor it, and not all users are aware that it's possible, so this is a potential source of large charges by the ISP.
But the fundamental question is: When my ISP tells me I used X gigabytes last month, how do I know they're not just making up a number? What tools are available that will tell a customer exactly how many bytes of bandwidth they actually used? And if this number differs from the ISP's number, would the accounting tools' data stand up in court?
Unless you can answer this, a pay-per-byte scheme is merely an way for an ISP to charge customers whatever they like, and the customers have no recourse other than to terminate the service entirely.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
A very good book (that indirectly answers this question) is Customers for Life (available at your favorite online book store)
the author transformed "his Dallas Cadillac dealership into the second largest in America" but don't let this dissuade you ;-)
the "gotcha" from a business standpoint is that it costs money to "develop" a customer - so keeping customers happy means they stick around for a long time and that should equal $$ (and of course knowing when to end the relationship is important as well)
all businesses make a decision on how much service they are going to provide - I don't remember the specific examples but it was something like "WalMart" or "Tiffany's"
WalMart is the low profit margin/high volume/low service option, Tiffany's is the high profit margin/low volume/high service option - neither one is the "best" option, but you have to decide which you want to be (i.e. trying to provide great service at WalMart's prices will quickly put you out of business)
to me the "pay as you go" option is going to equal the "WalMart" scenario - I honestly don't think there are many "Tiffany's" examples in the ISP sector anymore (but it is still obviously a great way to differentiate yourself - a lot of people are willing to pay extra for better service)
and it is most likely that the real problem is that Net access has become a commodity and the profit margins are tiny (which makes the question academic at best)
It ain't what they call you. It's what you answer to. http://mylyceum.us/
Here's a truly alternate business model: screw the incumbent telecom carriers. Nationalize the grid that was built out with the help of public funds, and where the public has seen close to no returns. Turn everyone into a CLEC. Everyone plugs into an existing grid that is officially tax-payer funded with zero restrictions on what passes through. All the intelligence - traffic shaping, filtering, content - will be at the edges. Carriers compete based on service, what kind of pipe they can put into the home/condo/dorm and how much traffic they can exchange with the national grid.
Far-fetched? Not really. It's similar to what's going on with the electric grid already. Considering how much the economy is impacted if/when major trunks or local exchange points go down, the internet is also a similarly critical infrastructure. I don't see why lessons learned from the electric grid can't be applied to solving the mess that is the telecom industry.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
In 1996 I was able to get the same cable modem bandwidth I'm getting now. If anything it was better with fewer people using it. My uploads were capped at about 50 KB/sec (yeah they advertise it in kilobits, you know what i mean). The download speeds have gone up, maybe doubled since then, maybe 400 KB/sec tops. Yes they offer faster access for more money, but I'm still paying the same price, if not more than I did back then for the same thing. Where's the miraculous "factor of 10" increase we've been expecting all these years? I've heard that it's significantly faster in other countries, for less money. Time to move to India?
Not hard.
Raise the contingence ratio to 50:1
Then claim BS things like "We provide the pipe, not that the pipe can be filled". and
"We reserve the right to do anything to the downstream and upstream as we see fit. We wrote the contract, so bend over."
Oh... Thats what they do now.
Charging $X/TB isn't the problem. Charging $X/TB where it would drive a significant number of people to pay more than they do now OR make a significant number of people skittish about using the Internet is the problem.
It's the same problem cell phones and long distance had before it dropped to under a dime a minute in 2008 dollars. Now very few people pay more than 7c for each incremental minute of long distance and very few pay less than 10c for each incremental minute of cell time. Most people pay a flat rate that gives them either unlimited or a high-enough number of minutes and either they don't use overages or they don't pay a lot for them. If they do find themselves paying a lot, they change their plan.
Create price plans where 90% of today's users can get the same service they have now at the same or lower price and price the overages "fairly" so someone who uses twice the limit pays no more than twice the base rate and the ISPs and most customers should be happy. Those users who use 1000% of the 90th-percentile-based usage limit will wind up paying a whole lot or they will choose to do without, in either case, it should improve both the ISPs bottom line and their ability to service the rest of their customers.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I am myself in favor of a "you only get charged for what you actually get".
High-end commercial bandwidth is sold on a 95th percentile basis. The way it works is this: every 5 minutes they measure how many bits you sent and received in the preceeding 5 minutes. At the end of the month they throw the top 5% of the samples away. The next highest sample is your 95th percentile usage.
Are you still in favor of that payment model if I tell you that commercial bandwidth today costs between $20/megabit and $300/megabit with the average price around $100/megabit? In other words, you can have your 15-meg FiOS line, but if you nail it at 15 megs for more than 36 hours in a month, you'd pay $1500.
Still sound like such a good deal?
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
All I want from any ISP is the honest truth of 1) what the maximum throughput from my house to the first hop is and 2) what the minimum guaranteed rate is when things get congested locally. In effect I want to know how shitty things will be when everyone in the neighborhood is on and how great they'll be when people aren't. Don't nickle and dime us because we're using more bandwidth, just make sure we know how much it'll be throttled when your pipes can't handle it.
Right now, we're NOT getting the promised rate (if we actually use the access to our full benefits as the "Unlimited Access" claims) .. so people always talk about doing the Pay-As-You-Go model... The problem with that is this:
The top 5 ISP's will still own everything because the government isn't steping in as it should be!
So the "pay as you go" model from comcast, will now tell you that you can use up to 200 gigs in a month, throttle you at 25 gigs, charge you the 500% more than you currently are paying to get the 200 gigs a month, and then they will say "well we are still allowing you to download up to that much since that's the plan you're paying for. After that we'll just cut you off!".
When the government puts its foot down and smacks these huge ISP's / telco's / communication companies around a little to put them in line ... then something like this might be useful... but a change before that will leave most of us more broke than we already are with tons more to loose than gain.
Hey. What most private customers dont seem to realise is that bandwidth is very expensive. Some expects DEDICATED bandwidth from your ISP. That's entirely unrealistic. Maybe it's time to start charging private customers by the 95th percentile? if they want dedicated.. Private internet connection is not dedicated and will never be if customers expects prices to go down. It would increase tenfold if you were to pay the actual prices isp's pay for peering , transit et al.
i'd run forums and chat for users, which would give you great feedback and ideas. whenever you hear an idea that's cheap enough and actually possible, do it. you'd certainly get some unique stuff going that would bring you more users. also, your users would feel that they important to your company. running game servers, helping them set up vpns (for games, work and file sharing) and stuff like that might bring more users :) also, make sure you have good tech support.
In general, it seems like the point of "package deals" is to screw the customer. If I buy X amount of bandwidth or cell phone minutes per month and don't use them all, I wasted money. If I use any more than that, they charge me a hefty premium.
On the other hand, consumers should see "unlimited" as a good thing only if they expect to use more than the average person, whose usage the price reflects. If I think I will eat $15 worth of food and the buffet costs $10, it's a good deal for me.
In short: "pay for what you use" is obviously fair. Package deals are an attempt to screw the customer; "unlimited" deals are an attempt to screw the provider. (Who, of course, has already calculated the average use and determined that the house will win.)
That's quite high. I've heard of prices that high in Australia and other relatively-expensive-to-reach locations but not in Europe or the USA.
Now, if you were talking $15 + $10/10GB with the same $35 minimum, that would make more sense. In a few years as capacity grows, the pricing should be $15 + $10 per 100GB.
I assume you are using US dollars.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The problem with pay-as-you-go being optional is that the people who use less will opt for it, while others will go with the unmetered plan. This gives no upside for the ISP. Either one or make the pay-as-you-go a premium rate, in which case it won't be cheap anyway (like prepaid phones). Also, there is the whole measuring infrastructure that adds to the things they need to do and will mess up on.
The bottom line is there needs to be more competition, and better infrastructure. The infrastructure needs to be public property and cable companies should be able to compete over shared cables.
I am not satisfied with my cable service or their internet service, but I have no alternative.
OMGTF 60 - 70 $ 0_o I'm paying 12$ for 256kbits international and 1.5Mbits local peering. And for 20$ you can get 10Mbits international and 20Mbits local peering.
they need an alternate clue!
Like for example, the concept that if you advertise a certain amount of internet bandwidth, you deliver that bandwidth... not just the amount of bandwidth for the kind of protocols that THEY feel appropriate.
From TFA:
"Essentially you pay about $60-70 for a connection that you only squeeze maybe $35-45 worth of usage out of it. If a pay-per-usage option were implemented, how do you think the best way to charge for it would be? Is there some other scheme that would deliver customers the kind of QOS and value they seek?"
F*ck that. Would you like to know what would really happen? Instead of paying $60-70 for a throttled "unlimited" "highspeed" connection, you'll pay $60-70 (or more) for a less throttled limited connection, with options to pay even MORE for a throttled slightly less limited connection.
This is how it would start.
Then the ISPs like Comcast will see absolutely no reason to upgrade their network and find that for the exact same costs of today's network, the bandwidth goes even further because people will be withdrawing from the internet to avoid going over limits and as a result they'll oversell their network even MORE and find that even with the bandwidth caps and few actually going over their quota, the network is so oversold that they introduce throttling again for the exact same reasons as before.
Do not accept downgraded service as a solution. Demand your ISPs to UPGRADE THEIR NETWORK LIKE THEY WERE SUPPOSE TO DECADES AGO. Furthermore, demand that they pay for the upgrades out of their own pocket this time for failing to uphold their end of the bargain they struck with the government for all that money and all those rate hikes which were suppose to pay for it instead of going into the pockets of shareholders.
Other countries are progressing just fine, some faster than others. There is NO reason why the US shouldn't be able to at least keep pace.
All we're really accomplishing by chasing Comcast around is MAYBE make them change.....their advertising. They have a good system going. They have a pipe of size X, and they charge everyone Y, regardless of usage. Most people only use a tiny fraction of the pipe, and the ones that do use a significant portion get throttled down. It's great for comcast, and crap for the consumer.
But if we complain, all that will change is that they will sell the current plan as the "*limited* broadband". It'll be exactly the same as it is right now, with the bandwidth limited by whatever they feel like, but the name and description will change.
If you're lucky they might offer a set of more expensive plans with fixed speeds. It won't be a guaranteed minimum - but it will be a guaranteed maximum. Maybe even an "unlimited" plan, that will cost WAY more than any of us will want to spend.
At least we don't have to pay per MB like Australia does. We get throttled down, but the bill will never be more in a month than we agreed to pay. No surprises, no accidental overages.
Somebody suggested that bandwidth should be billed by the number of gigabytes transferred per month, just like electricity is billed by kWh. That made me think of another idea: charge two different rates for peak vs. off-peak usage. Encouraging people to run their BitTorrent downloads at 8am instead of 8pm should reduce the amount of capacity needed at peak usage times.
My electric company offers something like this. I'm not doing it, because most of my electricity usage is relatively constant throughout the day and things like the oven or vacuum cleaner I can't shift to the middle of the night anyway. However, my dishwasher has a timer on it, so running a load of dishes at 3am is easy to do.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Here's one from a socialist: the cables in the ground are owned by the municipality. Any service provider can tunnel their service over those cables for a fee. They bill however they want. No monopolies. No barrier to entry. The pipes are neutral.
How about the I pay you for a service and you shut the F*CK up about me using that service model.
Keep the unlimited plans, but throttle bandwidth according to usage. For example:
0-20GB: 10 Mbps
20-50GB: 1 Mbps
50GB+ : 256k
Quota reset every month. My mother would never touch that 20GB ceiling, but a heavy user might want to buy a more expensive plan that give you full speed for 100GB. You can download as much as you like, you'll just take a bandwidth hit if you exceed your plan.
The business can never work unless there is a link between what consumers pay and what expenses they incur on the company. Any "all-you-can-eat plans" are simply not connected with reality.
Mind you, if people have to pay extra to upload more GB, P2P would no longer be "free". I think that would hurt P2P as nothing the RIAA have ever imagined. P2P popularity goes hand in hand with current "infinite usage" plans.
I lost my sig.
Yet another "end-user" who doesn't realize what the ISPs are paying for bandwidth.
$50 or $60 per month for 6 or 8 or even 10 megabits/second downloads, and a couple megabits/second upload? That's incredibly cheap. Go price a dedicated T1 for your home. It will cost you, at the VERY least, $200/month. And that's if you live in a MAJOR metropolitan area. In most of the country, a full T1 would cost you around $700/month.
The entire ISP model is built on oversubscribing. That isn't going to change. There isn't enough bandwidth available to give everyone all the bandwidth they want all the time. It's not "screwing the customer", it's REALITY.
The 'pay-as-you-go' model seems to be a popular topic of discussion on this thread. My question is this: what is to keep some malcontent script-kiddie with a vendetta from running up your internet bill by flooding your connection DDoS style?
I personally think internet services are too important to be left to the market
This is backwards. If the service, regardless of what it is, was so important, don't you think that should be sufficient incentive for people to pay for it? If it wasn't important, then people wouldn't want it. So, maybe the government should only subsidize things that aren't important.
This is my sig.
ISPs themselves would never lease their own lines based on volume rather than bandwidth - they surely know why.
And that's not even factoring in the further harm pay-as-you-go would do to the end-to-end structure of the Net...
The premise of the question is wrong. There doesn't HAVE to be a business model at all for ISP:s. Currently, no matter what connection you have, what you pay for is NOT for your big fat pipe, it is for the ISP to run the billing. It costs ISP:s a lot more to employ accountants, collect user data, keep customer databases, marketing and send bills than it costs them to deliver traffic. A tiered internet, or a pay-per-megabit system would just add to the overhead as ISP:s would need to employ more accountants and implement more monitoring systems to track exactly how many megabits their users transfer.
Kind of similar to how Nike shoes doesn't cost many Euros to produce using the Chinese child labour they employ, but are marked up hundredfold. But the case with ISP:s is even more egregious because they are all 100% government sponsored institutions. Governments either built all the infrastructure or heavily subsidized telecom companies to do it. The net is public property and companies really have no moral rights to charge money for it.
Football Odds
because you can't tell us how much of your tax money is spent (on top of th $35 you pay directly) on providing this bandwidth. Here's a hint: no government operated entity is ever as efficient, responsive, or agile as a private one. Period. Call me back when you can guarantee that you're not paying $100 a month in taxes (30 of which subsidies your connection and 70 of which is wasted on bureaucratic nonsense) the on top of your $35 a month fee.
Frankly, my ISP is bad, but not bad enough that I want to switch to getting my connection through the goverment. I'm not interested in having DMV-quality efficiency combined with IRS-level customer service and the mind-numbing bureaucratic pettiness of the city planning department. Especially when the system is serviced by the same kind of workers that DOT hires to lean on shovels on the side of the road.
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
Throttled connection speed now and then also comes up in Germany. Usually, it is a desperate measure by some provider that promised more than they can afford. Hint:
with cheap, unlimited access you will have some customers who create more traffic than their monthly fee pays for.
Now I have little sympathy for those providers, as the problem is well known and they should simply sell something like 50 GByte/month instead, with throttling to dial-up speed when you exceed the 50 GByte. That would be plenty for most people, but cut off really excessive use. And if you have misplanned your usage, you can still check email, albeit slowly.
C - the footgun of programming languages
In my area can choose from a dozen DSL providers, numerous dial up providers, and 1 cable provider. Then there are the wireless satellite providers...
I am failing to see the monopoly.
If there is a problem - its the rate charged by the wire owners such as AT&T. The only I can think of is state-owned infrastructure. However, that would be a dismal mistake since the Democrats and Republicans can't run any department of government efficiently nor adapt to new technology quickly.
It'd be simple if these broadband monopolies weren't sanctioned by state violence. Then people would be able to compete and stop the typical exploitation inherent in all monopolies (especially the state itself).
Internet companies should charge the same way Other utility companies charge: According to usage. Since Comcast is finding it necessary to throttle connections, that indicates they are running out of bandwidth. i.e. They need to lay more cables but lack the money to do so. Therefore:
Rather than throttle P2P, youtube.com, or itunes.com, Comcast should identify their customers who download tons of information, impose a limit on those people, and then tell them, "If you go over 100 gigabytes, you will need to pay $100 a month to gain unlimited downloads." i.e. a Tier system:
$15 == 20 gig
$30 == 50 gig
$45 == 100 gig
$100 == unlimted
If a company wants to expand, they need to invest money. That money has to come from somewhere. The logical choice is to get it from your top-tier/high-demand customers. Use them to fund your expansion.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
I wonder what's the average usage anyway? Most of the subscribers hardly are on-line 24/7. The same price is being paid by those who make the full use of their available bandwidth and those who tap on it only intermittently. How about letting everyone have the maximum reasonable capacity available all the time, but only the time on-line being monitored? The more you are on-line the more would it cost. People might be encouraged to be less on-line. Having the maximum capacity shortens the needed time anyway.
The maximum possible cost for being on-line 24/7/Month shouldn't exceed the maximum cost of today. That would only be fair considering the situation now. Most people are on-line only fraction of that, maybe totalling only a few days a month, and pay for nothing the rest of the time. If you don't have the equipment to reach the maximum available bandwidth you would also pay for nothing. The less your own capacity at any given point the less would be the cost of a single share of time. The system would scale to any equipment and use.
What are they doing in South Korea?
-- Prepared at the direction of, or to be sent to Legal Counsel, in anticipation of litigation. Attorney Client Pri
Wow, this idea just killed video services like youtube,online tv, online multiplayer(PC,Xbox,Playstation,etc), downloading large updates for pc's or even downloading OS's(linux..etc), not to mention you will be charged for all the ads you receive on websites, Especially video and music ads. Sorry, this idea is just impractical on so many levels in todays internet.
Once you have ponied up for the gear, it pretty much costs the same whether you use it to push one bit or billions. That is how the colos typically charge - by the size of the pipe.
Put 5mb/s for a few minutes and you will pay the same as running 5mb/s 24x7.
I would like to see the consumer ISPs be required to adhere to uniform standards for service description - sort of like cars and mileage. My preference is that if they specify performance levels they must specify:
Bandwidth: 99.9% of the time the data transfer rate will exceed X bits-per-second
Latency: 99.9% of the time the round-trip delay to the ISPs upstream provider will be lower than X ms.
And since network neutrality should be the law, traffic-blocking games a-la Comcast should not be an issue.
Of course the regulation would have to prohibit making up your own measures and hiding the required ones in the fine print. The standard measures would be the only allowed measures.
~~~~~~~
"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
I wouldn't want pay as you go because sometimes, sadly, I'm forced to use IE 7 to do stuff online. When I do I get a large amount of data shoved down my throat that I don't want to be paying for. Can you imagine having to PAY to receive all the junk images, ads, and pop-ups that you get with your browsing experience now?
Mind you, I typically browse with FF and AdBlock so I don't get too much garbage. Of course, I could use NoScript as well if I really wanted (but I don't bother). I wonder if a change to pay per use would increase the use of ad blockers and script blockers and thus reduce over-all ad revenue? It's a moot point anyway. I can't see it happening. It would seriously mess with I-net usage in so many ways.
I think you should have a few levels of payment. For example: a-b MB = $15, b-c MB = $25, c-d MB = $30, d-e MB = $40, e-oblivion MB = $55.
You should make this flexible. For example: you don't sign for any of these levels of MB's. Instead sign/pay for the lowest level of bandwidth, so the ISP can market that they only have one subscription for which you pay $15 a month (fine print: at 'normal' use) and whoever crosses it doesn't pay an insane amount of money per MB extra. When the next month arrives you pay $15 again until you enter a higher level of bandwitch consumption.
This way you have one offering (easy), which is cheap for the average internet user, and whoever crosses the line doesn't empty his/her wallet and doesn't pay too much when he/she doesn't download as much as he/she normally does. With this model both the ISP's and all the customers should be happy, right?
Here be signatures
how do you deal with unwanted traffic?
some botnet decides to target a swath of an isps ip space.
then what?
everyone gets hit with a huge bill? looking at the crap one of my boxes gets hit with, unsolicited traffic is about 35gb/month (am on 25/5)
who pays for this? me? why?
Or pocket the money and not lay any new cables anyway, which is the most likely thing to happen.
The problem with these companies is that the infrastructure should be publicly owned. Then if Comcast doesn't want to provide the service you want, you can fire them and hire someone who will.
The problem comes from municipality granted monopolies for payola from the companies who want the monopolies. The municipality gets a chunk of money that it can spend on something other than the service, and the company gets to wield monopolistic power and get away with providing an inferior service with no fear of the consequences of doing so.
-- Terry
Come on, what is wrong with a lot of you?!? Sure, at this point in time a minority of users might be using the majority of the pipes. "Tax the heavy downloaders!" you say. Have you forgotten that Microsoft (X-BOX Live and Marketplace), Sony, Apple (HD movies), Joost, Tivo, Netflix, Amazon, etc. etc., all want to push more and more bandwidth intensive apps and uses?? Sure, Joe average may only use 5GB now with occasional YouTube videos. Maybe $15/mo would be good for him. But if the big players have their way, and they will, Joe will be watching, buying, and streaming HD video and games in the near future. 5GB ain't gonna cut it. The ISP's would love to knock everyone up to a "high tier" service that's $100/mo, but that sucks if that's the entry point just because the ISPs have milked this cash cow as long as they could.
ISPs creating tiered service levels is only them trying to prevent the inevitable - that they are being pushed into only providing an on-ramp to the Internet, and that's all. We're in the middle of a revolution in how content will be delivered, this crazy notion of tiered service levels is only going to mess that up. Of course, it will be steamrolled by innovation in the field.
It's like a small town experiencing a population growth, and wanting to turn Main St. into a toll road to discourage new citizens. Tiered pricing isn't designed to make things more fair; it's designed to discourage those at the top end and make those at the bottom end feel like they're getting a good deal.
We're already seeing mobile phone service becoming a commodity, with carriers offering true unlimited service after years of nickel and diming you for each partial minute you use. Are the cell carriers going to start complaining that everyone is actually talking constantly 24/7 and using up their lines? No, they'll build out more infrastructure to meet the demand. Why would the ISPs go the opposite route??
I paid for car that can go 120 according to specs. I live in an area that has speed limits of 70 on Interstates. So I paid for something I can only get 70-80% usage out of! Most of the time I'm only getting less than 50% of the max.
On a more serious note, pay per time still exists in areas that charge for wifi access. I cover a small community with meraki wifi units. As it's a vacation home sort of area people pay daily since cottage owners don't pay for cable access. This is pretty typical for many meraki and muni-wifi rollouts.
Pay per bps would suck as you have no idea what content a site will be pushing on you. With flash advertising being so prevalent, for the typical user it would be a 'paying to get advertised to' model. It'd be like paying for basic TV on a premium service like cable or satellite - oh wait, they manage to sucker users there too. On second hand, you just might be on to something.
Nationalize the grid that was built out with the help of public funds, and where the public has seen close to no returns.
[...]
Far-fetched? Not really. It's similar to what's going on with the electric grid already.
The word "nationalise" makes me cringe. The less the government owns or runs the better. Governments should stick to making rules and making sure they are followed equally by everyone and let private enterprise do their jobs.
However, I find the idea of billing on the electrical model quite compelling. Basically large electrical users are charged based upon "peak demand" (highest MW value over a billing cycle) as well as for energy costs ($ per MWh). Most contracts have a cap on both, and if you go over you are not cut off, but you get a nasty shock on your next bill. However it is a fair system because you pay your fair share to cover the costs of distribution (via peak demand charge) and generation (cost of energy). If you start a whole bank of motors at once and the MW spikes for a minute, you have to pay a charge based on that value for the whole month. The reasoning is that if you max out the capacity of the copper line into your facility it will cost a lot for the utility to upgrade it. The same with surcharges on energy consumption overages--if everyone used more energy than they promised, the utility has to make unexpected upgrades in generation capacity.
Demand and energy charges translated to internet access would be throughput (Mb/s) and total data transferred (Gigs of data each month), and the justification would be the same as for electrical utilities. I would most strongly object to attempts to "nationalise" an "internet grid" though because that is in fact moving in the opposite direction of where (once very severely dysfunctional) electrical utilities are coming from. I think the government's role in all of this is to enact legislation mandating an "open grid" but for private enterprise to retain ownership and management of the assets. It would closely mirror a partially-deregulated, privately-owned electrical system that is becoming predominant. The cables and switches used in backbones would be "transmission", routers and servers (storage and directing of data) would be "generation" and the "last mile" including firewalls and "intelligence" would be "distribution". Corporations and other heavy users could participate in the "internet pool" through methods akin to "co-generation", whereby they generate revenue (or recover costs at least) by providing routers and servers to handle public internet traffic.
Incidentally, the electric grids in North America are NOT significantly government owned--not any more at any rate. Governments might have, say a 25% or less stake in a power pool or in the transmission or distribution systems at most, and taxpayer-funded investment in new infrastructure is also very much a minority stake. Transmission lines tend to be investor-owned assets; distribution lines (the "edges") are what tend to be owned by local levels of government more than anything else.
Historically various governments HAVE owned and (mis)managed the electrical grid. However, as government institutions these state-owned power companies were pretty big drains on the finances, and the capital investments required to increase capacity started outstripping governments' funding abilities. This has lead to a lot of privatisation of state-owned utility assets, especially since the 1990s. Government still plays an important role as overseer/regulator (they enact legislation and establish "commodity markets" for the buying and selling of electricity). The transition was difficult, but I believe if governments had retained and tightened control over electrical utilities we'd right now be subjected to Cuban-style rolling-blackouts. Things are far from perfect, and at the start of it all the elecetrical utilities were downright dysfunctional and government graft/corruption really tainted the process. Hopefully things don't get THAT dysfunctional with telecom before they get better too.
Ever so often some chap like 'zonk' comes up with this. Like fingernails scratchin on glass, office types with well padded butts sayin kids need no summer vacation, and signs in southern fillin stations sayin: "Due to fluctuation we ain't able to cash yer checks...!". And all of it, includin 'zonk's industry friendly 'suggestion', is full of it. Maybe a person that ate the wrong kind of 'shrooms' will dream that toyland really does have a rock candy mountain, and maybe some of the nazi victims actually told themselves that they were going to be 'deloused'. Truth is, face it, that the net will stay bein the net just like television kept commercials even after it became 'pay TV' when in the television industry's original pitch for pay TV, industry execs implied that the 'new' payTV would be commercial free. Even VHS tapes and movie CD's are full of commercials now. Greedy folks never, never have any problem 'justifying' their avarice, and ISP's will continue to throttle traffic in favor of fatcats with bags of money and an axe to grind or junk jewelry to sell. The problem is that some weak minds out there will actually believe that if they pay an exhorbitant amount of money for something that used to be reasonable, then all manner of fantasies existing only in the mind of the dreamers will come true. There is a logical disconnect between flat rate service and censorship or favoritism. Flat rate service came about because pioneering ISP's like Earthlink provided it as a new idea, and refused to withdraw or dilute it in the face of then 'a-la-carte-usage-model' hogs like 'The Source, AOL, General Electric's 'Genie', and other data services offered on dial up. Earthlink's model also 'provided the whole internet', not a censored one. If anything, so called 'a-la-carte' services could scale the availability down greatly, charging for wanting to use any other web sites than some few ones on a 'preferred list'. An 'a-la-carte' provider will also have greater responsibility for the sites that are available on it and consequently be more available for lawsuits from customers because 'johnny downloaded supermodels off the bad old net and became irretrievably corrupted' or lawsuits from the chinese because 'wong found the falun gong on their sites'. Once you have a 'pay as you go system', you are actually required to censor the content and to rat on your subscribers not only to the government, but by contract to people like RIAA, MPAA, the Chinese secret service, the British MI6, secretive lobby groups, commercial profilers, intrusive spammers, etc. Part of any so called managed internet plans like a 'pay-as-you-go a-la-carte' system will also forcibly entail the exclusive use of windows only as not only the access system but also the only operating system anywhere on the 'customer's pc or any other machine on his/her network if he owns one..and that windows system will probably be required to be 'Veeesta hoam', and the enforced installation of intrusive 'clients' on user's computers that will contain among other things the new favored commercial-ridden browsers, hidden remote administrators, and continuous running system file indexers among various and sundry malware totally concievable by the totally corrupt and evil purveyors of the monopoly that would get that kind of system sold. And it WOULD take a monopoly to sell such a system of a-la-cartes simply for the reason that given a choice any rational person would choose freedom over slavery! Just like the supermarket selling double strength detergent now a days. It gets sold simply because there is no other choice. It is crap! And it is suddenly present in every market everywhere with no choice for the original product. Only a monopoly of all the soap sellers can do that. Just try to buy single strength laundry detergent now! Just go and look. Such is your market in action. So readers, if you really buy Zonk's brand of digital hemlock that he is smuggly 'selling', be careful what you wish for. If you get your with, God help us all!
...may I take your order please? "Two singles and an order of fries, a large one" "OK, that will be blah blah, pull ahead".
You get there, open the sack, two burgers and a french fry box with one french fry in it....steamed, you yell at them "where's my fries?" "sorry sir, in the fine print and terms of using mcdonalds service, we reserve the right to throttle your french fry intake at our discretion"
Same deal, no one would put up with that, but the big ISPs get away with it. Screw em. Make them clearly state what the terms are in the main large print advertising, not buried in the fine print. None of this "up to" speed, no "you get an internet connection" when they block ports and disallow servers and throttle the speeds on their whims, that isn't a connection, that is a partial connection and lying about speeds and bandwith. Right now they should be forced to clearly state in their ads "port 80 only, only some protocols and these are them, and your maximum speed might be such and such, but realistically you will be averaging 1/10th such and such", etc. First step, get the consumers educated into what crap they are actually buying,by forcing the ISPs to come clean legally and clearly, then we might see some changes.
a big fat fiber connection at 100Gbps to my home
no flat monthly fee, instead 95% bandwidth billing over a while month (like used in colo facilities)
real time, web and RESTful interface to a control panel for my connection (so I can write and others can write friendly local clients for control) that will set my down and up stream connection speed throttle levels
options for web access and email delivery of pricing feedback for the useage I consume, so I can adjust my behavior. Warning emails if in a particular day I go about an expected price level, for example.
set up trust levels for users with deposit of credit that would allow them to up their speed levels above certain limits. If I put up a $1000 credit, let me put teh throttle at 100Gbit. For most home users, let them set the throttle to 6 or 10 Mbit. Charge them based on actual 95% bw level usage.
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable" - JFK
Maybe you should move to another country... one with less propaganda.
Let me guess, you live in that country where just going to Cuba, coming back and saying "I went to Cuba and it was very nice, and look, I brought you back some cigars." is a criminal offense. Am I right?
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
ISPs went long way from leasing lines from the "common carriers" and utilizing publicly available infrasturture in order to build the Internet to the point in time today, where they themselves are part of the public infrastructure, and they themselves are in many cases owners of the physical links that connect places. In the same time they went from lucrative business models to minimal margin (or even below margin in certain cases), while offering ever greater bandwith and for lower price. Now, that multitude of options, combind with the shere geograpy gives historically quite diverse ZOO of ISPs with different business models, different technologies, different business practices. But what's the result of all of it? Clearly, result is that only the strongest will survive. ALL business models have already been tried by at least some ISPs, and if the survived, the model survived. If they failed, model failed with the ISP. It's that simple. And today we can only see that only the biggest companies can offer a lot of bandwith, for acceptable price, with poor or bad customer service. But then again, the same can be said for almost any utility company. In essence, I just proved that "offering Internet" today has glamour of "offering Electricity" or "offering gas". And while we can understand "pay per use" with gas and electricity I would warn anyone against favoring "pay per use" in Internet. Internet became popular JUST BECAUSE it had different pricing model, where one could surf the content next door or accross the globe for the same price. Where one could just use it moderately, or heavily, and still pay the same (if it's the same speed). Internet is a reality. It can be crushed only if it's taken over by (geographic-wise) monopolies. Only then they could choose whatever business model, pump the price and get away with it. And we had that in times of old TELCO's. Never forget that TELCOs were the last to start their own IP routers.
1) If they're overselling their capacity and pocketing the difference now, what makes you think they won't equally overcharge and under-serve customers in a pay per megabyte system.
2) As bandwidth increases and the bandwidth necessary to run XYZ application increases steadily over time, when am I assured that prices will change accordingly? A pay per megabyte system on my current DSL line would look significantly different if I was being offered FIOS or a competing fiber service. And 5 years from now, this will look different again. Without competition forcing providers to price down, I could agree to a per-megabyte price that is excellent for YouTube, but is going to blow when I start downloading movies on my 360. Or I could get a plan that's great for downloading movies on my 360 today, and next year is going to seriously hurt when I have a device to download HD quality video. You think the big telco's are complaining now about streaming video, wait until Youtube is regularly serving H264 and beyond.
I have about 100 objections to what the realities of this type of pricing would entail, but those two are good for starters.
I think that the problem with "pay as you go" would be theft. People have no clue how to secure their wireless networks and others would be stealin' bandwidth left and right if it would save them money. The honest (and dim witted) people would get huge bills.
I wrote a few. Little did I know that no one would get to read them because they're skipping this year :(
Unless they do it a day late, like so many other stories...
I think to make this work you'd need reliable local accounting so that you can make sure everyone is sharing resources reasonably equitably. You don't need perfect balance, but you need to prevent one leech from using infinite amounts of services and giving nothing back.
Of course the existing players will fight like hell against anything so revolutionary, but the basic idea would be a barter system. You might provide caching services or relay services or backup services for other computers that share other resources, and you would "do business" by listing local neighbors who would testify that you did, in fact provide those services and therefore deserved access to the services you were requesting. If you provide a critical service, such as the long-distance wired connection to share, then you would have big credit in the network and should be recognized and compensated appropriately.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Two things to clear things up:
1. Customers, at least in America, *hate* the idea of being nickel-and-dimed. Hence, unlimited SMS, long distance, etc. Anythig
2. ISP's really don't want to meter access or charge extra for large movie downloads. Metering annoys customers and is a burden to maintain, operate, and bill for. An average triple-play provider wants one thing: maximum revenue per user. Whether that revenue comes from Internet, cable TV, or phone, doesn't matter. All that matters is that $100+/mo comes in the door, in exchange for selling access to *something*. If people stop buying cable TV and instead download all their shows, the providers are going to have to charge more for Internet.
If ISPs started to meter total usage, then Ad-blockers, Flash-blockers, and anti-ad Host files would become standard installations in every user's browser.
-Users would think twice before clicking on those "marginally interesting news links".
-They would stop using YouTube to watch those bandwidth-hogging "cat on the ceiling fan" videos.
-They would stop editing files remotely on Google docs and start to edit files locally again (in word?).
-They would stop clicking on Google ads since it would be an unnecessary waste of costly bandwidth.
-Google, and all advertisers, would be "fenced off" from the "internet eyeballs" and would start to die off as ad revenues plummeted. (You can't click on an ad you don't see.)
-Millions of news & information websites (that depend on advertising) would also start to suffocate - the smaller ones closing shop first.
-Also, the quality of authored pages would take a severe hit as web site owners cut back on those 'costly' writers (similar to what's happening to newspapers now).
-The whole ecosystem would start to suffer greatly as people held back on internet usage in general (similar to the recession now as people hold back on spending, or driving less due to the high price of gas).
It would be a downward spiral that would be extremely hard to pull out of. Even if ISPs saw the error of their ways and restored flat-rate pricing, users by then would be so used to all their great ad/flash/host blockers that they would have no (individual) incentive to remove them from their browsers. Think about it, if you had the ability to remove commercials from tv, would you ever turn commercials back on again? The record industry has already crossed the line of pushing up p2p usage to the point where those users will never return as customers.
The whole net currently depends on people seeing ads. Most people today have no incentive to install ad blockers since their 'flat' internet-fee covers all the additional bandwidth. The free flow of information and the quality of the net we enjoy today is fueled by this advertising; which, in turn is fueled by users' ability to freely travel the net without an odometer counting each byte transferred.
Metered usage would be the end of the net as we know it today.
Each customer gets a certain amount of transfer each month (if they pay for a more expensive plan, they get more transfer). It might be 20GB or 50GB or whatever depending on the plan. Once they use that up, their speed goes back to 64kbps (i.e. near dialup speeds) for the rest of the billing cycle.
This is what most ISPs in Australia are using.
Metered charging is a step backward. The rest of telecom has gone to flat pricing -- even cell phones. I don't trust Comcast to change their pricing for any reason than to make more money. They've continued to raise prices and cut back on services. Bandwidth on cable has increased but so has the number of users. Performance got so bad in my area they had no choice but to increase the bandwidth or loose customers to DSL. On their TV service they continue to cut back on the channels on the basic service to push users to more expensive services. Telecom continues to close the capabilities of devices so that users must pay more. Think ring tones on cell phones on Verizon phones.
Thank a veteran -- George
End user systems could bid in realtime for access to a given percentage of available bandwidth. This would allow heavy users to trade latency for average data throughput and should spread loads more evenly. You could go so far as to set p2p tasks to wait until off peak times when the cost drops below a given level. This method can also involve routing priorities. dan@tekgnu.com
Let me guess, you live in that country where just going to Cuba, coming back and saying "I went to Cuba and it was very nice, and look, I brought you back some cigars." is a criminal offense. Am I right? Funny, maybe you should move to another country with that teaches better reading comprehension. Your claim that Cubans are happy because everything is provided and they don't need anything else is just ridiculous. OK, that is my opinion. But, just so happens that one of my best friends is Cuban, and his take on it is a bit different than yours. Granted, (and here is the read comprehension part), I did not say anything negative about Cuba other than Freedom of Speech issues. That does not mean there are or are not other issues. Maybe it is just me, but I tend to hold the Right to say my government is horrible, (and it is now), as something that I could not live without.
Even though the main stream media here might suck ass here, I have the ability to find other views. This is something I do all the time.
You are seem to have fallen for binary debate. Life is not binary. It is analog. Personally, I think the USA trade restrictions with Cuba are as stupid as they come. Kill 'em with kindness I say. And if that don't work, then the same thing except without the kindness.....
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable" - JFK
You have to look at the reason behind all these: the ISPs lack the capability to deliver better bandwidth, so they try to get around it with tricks. The solution was there for the last 14 years and it's simple: upgrade the damn telco infrastructure already! In countries that have done so, there are no such tricks on ISPs.
From an economic standpoint, pay per use may actually resolve some bandwidth issues, as it would encourage people to ration their internet usage. When a person pays a flat rate for a service or good, he keeps using that service or good until (per the law of diminishing marginal returns) it's just not worth it to him psychologically to do it anymore or something better comes along that he'd rather spend his time doing/buying - essentially to what I'll call his "full benefit". However, if one has to pay per unit, he or she keeps buying/utilizing units only until the point that the additional cost of the next unit exceeds the additional benefit of obtaining that unit (marginal cost > marginal benefit). Therefore, the person in question uses less of the good (theoretically) because that last little bit isn't utilized and frees it up for use by someone who values it more. Consider a buffet vs. a pay-per-item lunch - if you get the buffet, you eat until you're stuffed. If you have to have to pay for each food item, even though you could stuff down one last hamburger, the benefit of satisfying that last little bit of remaining hunger doesn't outweigh the purchase price.
I heart anarcho-capitalism.
"Is there some other scheme that would deliver customers the kind of QOS and value they seek?" What makes you think that if they don't give what they promise now there is some other kind of arrangement where they won't won't give what they promise?
E Proelio Veritas.
"Rather than throttle P2P, youtube.com, or itunes.com, Comcast should identify their customers who download tons of information, impose a limit on those people, and then tell them, "If you go over 100 gigabytes, you will need to pay $100 a month to gain unlimited downloads." i.e. a Tier system:"
I somewhat agree. The aspect you are missing is "during peak". Peak is what the ISP needs to provision capacity for. If they throttle at all, or charge for "excessive" usage, it should be during peak only, and take any restrictions off during non-peak. Resources during non-peak are essentially free (or at least far less expensive). I know I tend to start my big-ass downloads (usually large ISOs) right before I go to sleep (around midnight or so). youtube-type services are the main exception (as I obviously watch them real-time). P2P usage during peak is a bit on the wasteful side, during non-peak it is not heavily affecting others.
I know I am preaching, but if we all made an attempt to concentrate our use of resources during off-peak, systems would be more efficient and more enjoyable for most. Not only bandwidth, but this concept also applies to transportation, electricity, water, restaurants, vacation destinations, etc.
A good non-Internet example is skiing. I tend to ski during January/February, and often fly in on Sunday night, fly out Friday night. I get cheaper rooms and flights, with a big bonus of shorter lift lines, less skiers on the mountain and often better snow conditions. The ski resorts love me as my money is gravy to them, they have empty rooms to fill, empty lifts they have to run anyway, etc. The profit margin on me, percentage-wise, is much higher than the family coming during the holidays, while I win paying less for a better experience. My employer likes it as I am glad to work during the holidays, and take time off when they are fully staffed. Everybody wins.
The only athletic sport I ever mastered was backgammon - Douglas William Jerrold
I have a revolutionary idea!!!!
No really -- hear me out. Please!!
How about this:
Advertise a relatively inexpensive unlimited internet access plan. Charge a certain amount for of it per month.
Advertise a budge plan - one which is not limited in terms of usage, but in average and peak bandwidth. Charge a lower price for that plan.
Oh, really? ISPs are already doing this you say? And they're terminating accounts when customers actually try to use what they paid for? (keep reading)
I am suggesting that ISPs actually DELIVER that which they ADVERTISE and for which they ACCEPT PAYMENT. If they do not want to deliver what they advertise, they need to either adjust their advertising to not be fraudulent, or they need to simply get out of the business and let Verizon or someone else deliver it through fibre optic lines.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Simplest model (first-order):
x * Mb downloaded + y * Mb uploaded
where x and y are prices for downloading and uploading data, respectively. These values could be tied to certain physical connection technologies. For instance, a cable modem connection might have different x and y's than, say, a T1.
This model is just for reference, though, there is a much better model, that happens to be "optimal" in an important sense:
Bandwidth adjusted model (i.e. second-order model):
sum[ x * Mbps * Mb downloaded at that rate + y * Mbps * Mb uploaded at that rate ] over all Mb
since Mb transfered = Mbps * seconds, this is the same as:
sum[ x * Mbps * Mbps download rate used + y * Mbps * Mbps upload rate used ] over all seconds
This second model means that downloading, say, 100 Mbs on a 100Mbps connection would cost 10 times as much as downloading 100 Mbs on a 10Mbps connection. It means "faster costs more".
I think this second pricing model would be ideal. I originally thought it up when thinking about how one should price processing power in a cloud computing model, but it works for data transfer just as well. This way, everyone is always paying the same price as everyone else for every unit of bandwith that they use. This is the only pricing model that garauntees this.
Assuming each $ represents the same "demand", supply and demand will drive bandwidth distribution in the direction that maximizes the total value gotten from it (summed over all of the customers). I.e. this will maximize the efficient utilization of the total available bandwidth by minimizing the Kullback-Leibler divergence (maximizing the self-entropy).
with a per-bandwidth (Mbps) pricing scheme, somebody noted that having a virus or spyware on your computer may become uber-$$$. also, there are times in the day where there is more traffic on the internet, and times where there are less (higher and lower demand). There are two solutions that could be done independantly or together:
traffic-adjusted pricing model:
Instead of paying for a fixed amount of bandwidth, you could pay for a bandwidth "factor" or ratio. If you pay twice as much as person x, you get twice their bandidth, thus if there are 2 person x's on the connection, vs. 1 person x, you get less bandwidth.
bandwidth you recieve = your "bandwidth factor" * total available bandwidth / sum [ consumer's "bandwidth factor" ] over all consumers
The bandwidth you get is the total available bandwidth, divided by the sum of the bandwidth factorsnumber of customers transfers data, times your This would be a traffic-adjusted model - you pay more for each amount of bandwidth when the bandwidth is in higher demand. (It would be great if you could dynamically change this ratio.)
Bandwidth self-throttling:
In addition to traffic-adjusted pricing, or apart from it, it would be nice if a customer could set a "maximum bandwidth usage" so that they could regulate their own bandwidth usage and thus have more control over their internet bill. When combined with a traffic-pricing model (such as described above), they could also use this to save money by not paying for more bandwidth than they need.
advantages of pay-per-use
As a side note, I'd like to point out that w/a pay-per-use model, on average a person will pay the same for their bandwidth as they had before. However, since bandwidth will be more efficienctly distributed, they will actually be getting more bandwidth for their buck, on average.
It would also, by turning bandwidth into a commodity, make ISP more competition-based, as they would compete over price-per-bandwidth, which would amount to how good their infrastructure is per the size of their customer base. When an ISPs loses customers, their price-per-bandwidth will go down proportionally, and that'll attract more customers, and vice-versa. This negative feedback loop creates a stable equilibrium at the optimal price point (assuming there are multiple ISPs).
I live with BrightHouse service. They have a tiered pricing model. I started out with their top level plan and found I had problems during peak periods of the day. I reduced to the middle tier, then the bottom tier. No difference at all levels. You can't really enforce tiers when you have 40 connections sharing a single community hub because, during peak periods, the span between the hub and origination point become saturated.
I'm in favor of metered bandwidth with a cap, where the base rate is determined by the cap.
...if governments go the right direction. The "Net Neutrality" bills in the US fairly closely parallel how the electrical grid was privatised in many places. When de-constructing regulated/mandated monopolies and government-run utilities to create an open market it generally involved legislation enacted to establish a "power pool", whereby those with generation, transmission or distribution facilities were legally required to participate in the "power pool" electricity market if they wanted to be connected to the public grid. The Net Neutrality bills parallel that stipulation (if you provide internet service, you must treat all traffic that traverses your network the same, regardless of origin and endpoint).
The wireless part of things is heading that way too, with phone number portability and frequency and licensing auctions in Canada and the US that encourage new entries in the market as well as some partial measures towards "neutrality" (in Canada, bills have been introduced to require that all carriers allow compatible traffic from all other carriers over their networks at cost plus a limited, reasonable percentage markup).
What is left after universal access is mandated by government is the establishment of a "network pool" to replace outright regulation of prices, so that they properly follow the forces of supply and demand. If the costs to ISPs followed market forces and usage, then it would be more practical to bill customers along the same lines.
One thing to caution about, however, is that though the concept is sound and the end result very desirable and fair, in practice the transition (in the electricity market) has been difficult and tainted. Industry lobbyists are very good at protecting their interests, and those with established generation facilities were given a very easy ride. Barriers to entry for new players were high and auctions were not well managed or publicised. As a result, when the "power pool" markets were put into operation there were only a few players in the market, and the majority were the former monopolists/sold-off former government operations. This allowed the system to be gamed and prices to be manipulated.
ISPs don't tend to have the geographical monopolies that existed in the electrical industry (and deregulation of telephone companies broke down the RBOC monopolies that existed, at least to a degree) so that might help keep manipulation to a minimum. Nonetheless, the ends are positive even if the means aren't perfect.
"Kill them with kindness" is the approach we're using with China. I'm not convinced it's working. While they have developed a free market, China is still an authoritarian state. And they are becoming strong economically... pretty soon they'll use that strength to buy weapons, and possibly be a threat to America and Europe (both militarily and as an economic powerhouse). China right now looks like Germany or Japan in the 1930s, minus the crazed dictator. China is strong.
IMHO the approach we used with Russia was far more effective: Cut them off from trade until they go bankrupt, and then rebuild them as a Euro-style republic.
I think Cuba should follow the Russian approach.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
The huge difference is that China is a rival and thus requires different rules than Cuba, which is more like a small puppy.
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable" - JFK