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Who Pays for Rebuilding the Internet?
pcause writes "The Internet (physical as opposed to technical) was really not designed for applications that want to use maximum bandwidth all of the time, such as P2P and streaming video. Here in the US we've seen Comcast try to balance the demands of P2P traffic with other traffic and its backbone capacity. In the UK, a flame war has broken out between the BBC and ISPs about the same issue. So the question is who pays? Should the content owners who make the profits pay for the extra infrastructure, or should the consumer pay?"
The interesting question is not who pays, but how can we all collectively pay less for better performance? The problem is that the billing model for the internet is broken. ISPs need to start billing for usage, that much is obvious. But in addition, I think it would be really interesting if they billed based on a function of their actual cost for delivering every individual packet. I.e. if it stays in their network it's really cheap, if it goes through a peer then it's still pretty cheap, and if it goes to a transit provider then it gets expensive. the upstream ISP could in turn bill based on their cost to deliver it. Routers could pass along this metadata about the cost, accumulating it along each hop.
Obviously this has tremendous implications in terms of the additional work that routers would need to do to account for traffic, and how the costs are communicated to the customer. However, I think the end result would be something quite incredible, because what would happen is it would drive the development of smarter P2P protocols that keep traffic nearby, and widespread deployment of caches for static content and such. Right now there is very little incentive to do these things.
The end result, once everything has had a chance to adapt, would be a phenomenally efficient internet, with reduced costs and better performance all around. ISPs wouldn't give a hoot about this new class of "smart" P2P because the bulk of the traffic would stay among their local subscribers, the bandwidth to whom is free. Massive loads would be disappear from peering centers and long distance links. The cost of bandwidth would plummet.
I think all of this is feasible, and it's worth doing.
A better question would be, "why is the market broken?"
This is in many ways, the same question we ask about factories/industries that pollute heavily. The environment belongs to all of us, so people ask "shouldn't they pay?"
"Taboo, like anything else, goes in and out of style."
Well, here is the catch. Who ever spends the money should gain control of the resulting infrastructure. If the BBC/British government pays to upgrade the lines you can expect a great big (politely worded) fuck you to the telecoms if they try to set any demands.
If the telecoms pay for the infrastructure, they get to say what happens to it. Within whatever terms they negotiate for the use of public land to build on. And if they continue the false advertising of their services, they can expect that at some point a class action lawsuit will be made and will break them.
This is essentially the same argument raised by those who are truly anti net neutrality -- not just "don't let the government interfere", but "why, yes, I do think Google should pay Comcast's bills."
Look, it's simple: Google pays Google's bandwidth bill. I pay mine. Both of them go towards building the infrastructure. If it's not enough, raise taxes to pay for it, I don't care.
What you do not get to do is raise the bar for the next Google, and continue to let ISPs deceptively advertise "unlimited" Internet access. Yes, technically, the advertising is truthful, but it is intentionally misleading, and we are all paying the price for it.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
What a silly statement. Providers didn't anticipate demand, but that says nothing about "the internet."
..adjust the rates based on time of day (or generally, demand at a given instant). There's a ton of spare bandwidth at night.
they both pay (consumer and content owner). They even pay according to the bandwidth they're provided, in most cases. Exactly who does the writer think is getting free service?
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Should the content owners, who make the profits pay for the extra infrastructure or should the consumer pay?
The consumer will pay. PERIOD. Even if the content owners pay, the costs STILL get passed down to the consumer.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
First of all, I question the assertion that the technology wasn't designed to operate at maximum capability, I would like to hear from the designers on that. That aside, using the BBC v. ISPs is a terrible example as the ISPs are just being whiny bastards. They are being paid for the the bandwidth THEY promised by both the BBC and the end users. This is like me buying a meal at a restaurant and then having the manager throw a fit when I say that I want the side item that supposed to come with the meal.
Also, I see no reason to automatically believe that an geeky type person like myself uses very much more bandwidth that the teen who is constantly using Facebook, MySpace and Youtube. While I am reading through wikis and django docs, others are watching stuff on YouTube
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
FTP has been around since the 70's and http since the 90's and they want to take MAXIMUM BANDWIDTH.
The question presumes that if the content owners pay, the consumers won't have to pay.
This is wrong. If the content owners are forced to pay, then the consumers will have to pay for the bandwidth when they pay for the content.
Here is the correct question: Should consumers pay for bandwidth when they pay for bandwidth? Or should consumers pay for bandwidth when they pay for content?
When phrased correctly, the answer becomes obvious. Consumers should pay for bandwidth when they pay for bandwidth. Any other answer has negative consequences, both to the economy and to the current nature of the Internet.
If you had super powers, would you use them for good, or for awesome?
"A better question would be, "why is the market broken?""
Because everyone wants the most expensive product billed at the cheapests rates, on someone elses dime.
The consumer will ultimately pay.
He may pay directly.
He may pay indirectly, getting subsidized delivery in exchange for advertising.
Guess who pays for advertising: The people who consume the product being advertised.
TANSTAAFL.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I thought we paid already, and the ISPs just didn't reinvest into rebuilding their network.
The last I checked most of these ISPs either had monopolies granted to them, and/or had existing infrastructure handed to them by Governments.
Some even had billions of _public_ money handed to them by Governments to build their _future_ networks.
So now they want us to pay again?
This is like the power and water companies asking us to pay extra just because they went "Oops, oh yeah forgot about this reinvesting into infrastructure for the future thing".
Compare how much ISPs charge and how much power and water companies charge, and what you get for it. While small ISPs have to pay per bit (like water and power companies which have to pay per unit of gas/coal/water), AFAIK large ISPs have cushier arrangements with each other, since the incremental costs of sending bits isn't high once the network capacity is paid for - if nobody uses the bandwidth, the ISP still has to pay about the same for the network.
Why don't the ISPs pay for their own hardware? I am not getting how it is the content creator or customer that pays for buying new hardware that an ISP owns. If an ISP is not able to pass on the cost of new hardware and stay competitive with service and price, then I guess that ISP goes obsolete. I think that is how the market is supposed to work, right? After all, it is the ISPs and bandwidth wholesalers that screwed the pooch by building networks and a pricing model that was asymmetrical because they thought the Internet was all web based.
The old breed of ISPs should go out of business if they can't compete and a new generation of ISPs will emerge with a better business model. There is demand and it is not going away so there is money to be made. If they cannot adapt, then too bad. By the way, nice fallacy that P2P apps are designed to use maximum bandwidth. What evidence do you have to back this up? It sounds more anecdotal than anything. Not all P2P apps are created equal and are designed to file share.
If the content providers pay, but cannot (or do not) pass those costs along to the consumers, then their business model will not be viable. They will be paying more than they are making, and eventually will starve to death.
Obviously, this isn't going to happen.
If the content providers pay, and can still squeeze a profit out of the deal, they will *still* pass the cost along to consumers, for two obvious reasons: 1) they want to maximize their own profit margins, 2) they will get sued by their own shareholders if they don't try.
The cost will be passed on to consumers one way or another...perhaps in the form of a direct infrastructure tax, perhaps in the form of tax incentives/subsidies specifically for ISPs, perhaps in the form of higher cost service to the consumers, most likely as a combination of all three (and maybe other common means of paying that I haven't thought of).
Remember...the workers generate wealth while the organizers skim off the top. There is no more universal principle.
You're in business selling a service that's so popular you cannot meet all the demand that exists for it.
And you're asking how you're going to pay for building out to be able to provide more?
(1) Raise your prices. Use the extra revenue to pay for buildout. Sell more service. Profit.
(2) Get investment. Use it for buildout. Sell more service. Return profit to investors.
I understand that the peering agreements make things more complicated, but the basic issue is that people on the ends of the network have demands for the services, and it really seems like there's fairly transparent economic solutions to that problem without trying to do anything particularly complicated like having ISPs shake down content providers who don't have points of origin on their networks.
In short: bill the people you provide service to. Don't try billing the people you don't provide service to.
Tweet, tweet.
This makes it clear exactly what the problem is with Bit torrent in the mind of Comcast and other ISP's. It is like getting a car on an unlimited mileage lease and then being screamed at for driving it too much. Simply unacceptable.
What I find most amusing is they will charge you more for higher speeds, and still maintain the same hidden bandwidth caps. I am glad to know that British ISP's are ran by the same kind of wankers that run US providers.
Consider all those folk choking up the internet with video downloads, P2P etc "because it's free" and they've got nothing better to do with their time. They're all choking up the pipes for everyone.
Pay-per-use is one way to get a free market into this and allow people to buy the QoS they want and the market decides the price points. It would also motivate some of the spam botters to clean up their act.
The only way to modify behaviour is to provide some sort of feedback/dis-incentive for excessive use.
Under pay-for-QoS you'd have the choice to wait til 2am and download a video for free or download it immediately for $2.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
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"Content providers" should pay for their bandwidth, and users should pay for their bandwidth. Passing off the cost of "providing content" to the theoretical consumers of such content distorts the market in two ways:
First, no matter who actually signs the check, the providers would find a way of passing off the cost to the consumer anyway. (Which they do now... the point is that having to pay for their own bandwidth every month at least shows where the money is actually coming from and where it is going.)
Second, when you "spread" the cost among consumers, you end up with some consumers paying for a lot of stuff they don't get, and a lot of other consumers getting things they aren't paying for.
The only thing broken is the ISP mindset. Don't get into the business of being an ISP if you think it's going to be too much work and it's going to cost a lot. There are plenty of other people out there that are more than willing to run an ISP fairly. So COMCAST if you feel you're not making enough money by charging all of us $50 a month for crap then get out of the business and let someone competent take over. Please don't tell me you need more money because that's crap. Everyone pays, we pay a crazy amount to get crap access and when we use it we have idiots like the guy who posted this link say we need to pay more or should the content provider pay more, dumb. Then there are businesses who pay more just for the fact that they are a business yet for many small businesses they have the same exact service a non-business customer has, why? because if your business can make money by using the Internet for communication then ISPs feel they should charge you more and get a cut of it, crap!
Boohoo COMCAST and the rest of the ISPs out there. You're like the oil companies raising gas prices meanwhile reaping the largest benefits in the land. BTW both businesses oil and ISPs are recession proof. Cry me a river.
One problem is that there are some who make content without profit and distribute their content through P2P via consumers. If all content creators were made to pay for the privilege then it would have a chilling effect on the vibrancy of the internet. What might make more sense would be something so that if you are profiting significantly from the content you pay to distribute it.
Even so, this invades privacy and it begins a tiered internet for those who wish to profit from their work, which hurts independent artists. It would be ok to have maintenance costs be passed to users if there was more competition and the web was open with current ISPs not serving as the only ways to the net. As it is the ISPs hold a great deal of power due to their position and as such should be responsible for the infrastructure. If everyone could be a gateway to the net then everyone should pay. Since this is not the case the responsibility is that of ISPs.
Simple. Pay for it out of tax payer money. Who doesn't use the Internet? Of those who don't directly use it, who is not indirectly affected by it (their institutions of choice use it). The Internet is part of infrastructure like roads, water, etc. -- it's just virtual infrastructure.
I think we called it capitalism... If you don't want it, don't buy it
Here, I'll pay for it. Whom do I make the check out to?
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Connectivity should be treated like a public service. We don't expect private companies to compete at building our water infrastructure, so what sense is there in having them compete to upgrade our (wired) connectivity infrastructure? Both are analogous in that upgrades involve lots of digging where per capita costs are inversely proportional to population density. The ISP industry is a natural monopoly, and should be handled accordingly. If the government is hell bent on privatising things, surely they can figure something out, i.e. lease out the publicly owned infrastructure to private ISPs, which is what Bell is forced to do by regulation in Canada right now.
I think it will be the advertizers that will pay in the short term, then after a while it will be the stolen identities of the consumers that fall for the advertized services.
Oh Wait...
This is already reality.
All the posts so far talk about the consumer vs. the provider - but the internet is becoming an essential service just like roads and telephone service. So, it should be the government who pays for it - through our tax dollars.
So yes, this means that the consumer pays - but businesses pay taxes too. Everyone pays - because everyone benefits - because everyone needs essential services (like roads).
Countries in which taxes are higher have better broadband coverage. It isn't by accident - the governments of those countries (canada, japan, etc) realize that connectivity (and broadband access) are essential to consumers, and to competition in the world market. Those governments understand that costs will be lowest when a government sanctioned monopoly is subsidized through taxes, and everyone benefits.
The internet is more vital (and more interesting) to many people than the highway system, so why doesn't the government step in and help?
Is there a reason the summary pits the Content owner versus the Consumer in paying for infrastructure? Shouldn't we include the ISPs themselves? Just wondering why this submitter left that out.
(I'd add the government, but that ends up being the Consumer in the end)
Funtime Candy Wow! - my plan for eventually conquering Japan.
The "people"? Or the government? It would be an even bigger mess if the government took over! And really,do you really expect the government to run the Internet without also snooping on all of our activities even more than they do so now?
Better the Internet stay in the hands of *many* corporations than in the hands of a singular government. Look at what China does as an example. Hint for the clueless! :-)
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
That's an interesting link from the BBC, but perhaps not that interesting.
RichM
Data Center Knowledge
Okay, I live in a somewhat crazy country (New Zealand) in which we have this deal where both parties pay an ISP for Internet services. The consumer of the product (e.g. people who view videos) pays their ISP for internet traffic (something like $b + $x per hour + $y per gigabyte, billed or prepaid at some interval, where b, x, y may be zero). The providers of the product (e.g. people who host videos on their server) are themselves consumers of Internet services, so also pay their ISP for internet traffic. It seems to generally be the case that each party pays for both upstream and downstream traffic.
The idea of this approach seems to be that the money given to the ISP goes towards paying other higher-level providers for traffic, and upgrading the network where/when necessary. If the ISP doesn't think they have enough money to support traffic, they should either bump up consumer prices, or alter their accounting system. Both consumers and providers of products are already paying the ISP for the traffic and infrastructure maintenance.
Ask me about repetitive DNA
I believe that the designers of the TCP/IP protocol probably tried to set up the protocol to work as well as possible under adverse conditions such as heavy load. In that sense 'the Internet' was designed for maximum usage at all times.
At the same time I am absolutely certain that the ISPs who have built networks have used statistical assumptions about who wants how much bandwidth and when. I'm also certain that these assumptions don't reflect the real bandwidth demand we can expect shortly. It's only a matter of time before we have a similar showdown here in the United States. The difference is that there is no government-supported entity like the BBC with a vested interest in either side. In the UK, ISPs will likely demand government financial support in order to bear the burden of all this traffic that is being 'forced' upon them. In the United States, that devil Jim Griffin has proposed that ISPs become pimps for the content industry, charging all their customers a fee in order to prop up the ailing music industry. There can be no doubt that ISPs will jump at the chance to take a percentage of this money for their collection efforts. As of yet, there is no clear proposal but I suspect that it will be difficult to opt out of this supposedly optional payment. I had a brief correspondence with Jim in which he suggested that customers might sign an affidavit to opt out -- which seems a bit heavy IMHO.
What kills me about this whole situation is that legislators and industry players will tell us that the free market should run its own course when in reality the market is not free at all. If we in the United States have a choice at all for our broadband needs, it's basically a choice between a rock and a hard place. In my case, it's between AT&T and Time Warner--and AT&T only offers speeds 'up to 1.5Mbits/sec'. I have never once actually hit that speed downloading anything no matter how late at night. Furthermore, the 700MHZ auction didn't do shit. Basically, Verizon bought half and AT&T bought the other half. There is no real competition in the broadband industry. Given the law of supply and demand, we can probably expect some kind of price increase for broadband service.
For too long, the ISPs knew that their infrastructure would eventually get burdened down with data. It's not what kind of data, per se, but how many users are going to start requesting and sending data. The amount of users accessing the internet has reached a large enough point that the development of social networks seemed obvious. Every ISP knew about the potential to deliver video, but they must have underestimated the adoption of it by .....about ten years. How come we don't all have fiber to our houses? Better question, how come I don't have DSL and I live in a city of over 200K people? I had a cable modem since 1997 and all I can get is Comcast. When asking Qwest when I could get DSL, they insisted it would be in my neighborhood in two years. Two years go by and I actually called them. They said the same thing! Two years, sir. Eleven years have passed and I still have to be within a two mile radius of their main line or it's a no-go. If demand for faster speeds is so high, why, I ask is there no competition in my poor city?
Only now is Verizon taking charge, seemingly, to lead fiber directly into a single residence. I do remember a story in the late 90s about the former owner of Qwest saying he acquired the rights to 'improve' the length of most railroad lanes. Supposedly, he laid fiber in one tube and left the other empty so when the next, best-quality fiber became available, he could fill that tube. I don't know why I mentioned that, other than to illustrate the fact that people have been 'thinking' of upgrading the infrastructure, but it appears that they haven't.
If I had just made major investments in laying the major infrastructure for anything, I'd try to max-out my investment, too (aka, milk it for as long as you can before people get sour over quality.) Comcast has a maximum amount of bandwidth they can reasonably supply to a shared pool of users. When they try to balance users' internet demands while trying to sell more users on high-bandwidth HDTV and VOIP, they are just setting themselves up for having to do what they've been, rightfully, criticized for --throttle the most-demanding applications. While I strongly disagree with their actions, I guess I could understand it it I were a CEO wanting to impress shareholders, or if I were an IT manager wanting to get a raise.
In the end, I think we will see standard market forces doing what they do best --compete. I don't like the fact that I may have to give my money to Verizon, but I'd sure rather give it to them in the future (whenever that may be) than give it to Comcast.
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When it comes to anything related to infrastructure, all America seems to do is fail fail fail. Amtrek gets 1/10th of the public funding as Germany's railways. Our bridges our literally at the breaking point. Many places have terrible roadway infrastructure. (You can tell when you've driven over the Conneticut border by how quickly the roads turn to shit.)
The Internet is going to supplant television and radio as we know it very quickly. We are falling behind other nations in yet another way. Let's hope whoever wins in '08 is a more tech savvy President who will get this stuff in better working order and get it out to the people who need it.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
I bet if we could get rid of all the spam, viruses, and other crap on the internet, we could remove 30% of the traffic out there anyways. I could be wrong, but hell, its worth it anyway.
... everyone used approximately the same amount of bandwidth, because WE WERE ALL ON DIAL-UP. I don't care how long you tried to keep your connection alive--at worst, someone who used much more than the approximate subscriber could probably use, what, ten times as much?
In that sort of a setting, it simply doesn't make sense for ISPs to maintain the complexity of billing by usage, plus they get the bonus of advertising 'unlimited usage'. Everyone loves a buffet, right?
I am willing to bet that the difference between the 'e-mail and text only' subscribers and the 'torrents 24/7' subscribers, in terms of bandwidth usage, are several orders or magnitude apart. The current pricing model essentially penalizes subscribers who use less than the average and subsidizes heavy users. While this has been true for years now, today the MAGNITUDE of this subsidy is much, much larger than in the past.
Of course the consumer pays (eventually). The important question is WHICH consumers pay? Is it in our collective interest to pay a flat fee, no matter how much bandwidth we use, so that bandwidth hogs end up being subsidized by the rest of us? Should the content providers pay, so that if you like Google, you'd better pay (in the form of seeing more ads or some subscription fee) to use it? Or should we adopt a pricing model more in line with individual usage?
It's not a trivial question. One of the reasons the internet has become so popular is because of this implicit subsidy that bandwidth hogs get under this pricing model. While it's great for increasing 'net adoption, it also encourages everyone to use more and more bandwidth. It's got to stop somewhere.
...because they're the ones telling consumers they can download as much as they want with their 'unlimited' plans.
We did all this in Australia years ago; the most common form of Internet we get is on tiered monthly plans (3gb/month, 12gb/month, etc). Our international bandwidth is still (apparently) really expensive, so the volume of data ISPs feel comfortable giving us is relatively small to what I'd expect US ISPs to offer.
All yall other countries need to just play catchup on this issue and stop those douchebags from selling unlimited plans and then acting all surprised when people actually expect them to have no limits. People that use 200gb a month shouldn't be paying the same as people that use 5gb a month, and that should be reflected by ISP pricing.
What we're looking at here is the Quality of Service question.
Different services require different service characteristics. For instance:
- File transfers can take "best effort" service. They don't care if the transit time of packets varies (jitter) or is long (large latency). They don't care if occasional packets get lost or corrupted because they can have them resent. They don't care if the rate is fast or slow - and can self-adjust to go as fast as possible to use the available bandwidth.
- Streaming protocols care about all of the above: If they're 2-way interactive they care about latency. They always care about jitter. They don't want packets to drop - but if occasional packets DO drop it's better for them to NOT try to get them resent, which would create massive jitter and latency. They have a bandwidth requirement that is either constant or related to what they are carrying - and has no relation to the actual speed available to the connection under varying amounts of congestion.
To serve both of these types of traffic on the same packet-switching network you have to treat them differently. Otherwise the file transfers will speed up to try to hog all the available bandwidth, dividing it evenly among themselves, and stomping on the streaming protocols. Things will only work for the streams on a best-effort net when all the file transfers are limited by some OTHER bottleneck and there is enough bandwidth ON EVERY HOP for essentially all the stream packets to go right through.
But because the streams have some other inherent bandwidth limit you CAN treat them differently. You can give them Quality of Service rules that puts them at the head of the line, limiting jitter, minimizing latency, and causing other types of packets to drop while they go through. And you can reserve bandwidth for them, refusing to set up the flow (connection) if there isn't enough to service them and have some left over for other services. Then you can guarantee they get delivered, while the file transfers etc. expand to hog and divide only the UNreserved bandwidth. Also: If they're going to multiple destinations you can use multicast and reserve bandwidth for only one copy while serving many endpoints.
And IPv4 was designed to do much of that: It has a "type of service" field that lets you declare what kind of service would be good for each packet. It didn't do bandwidth reservation (by itself). But you could declare preferences about latency, jitter, and drop probability.
Unfortunately, this means that packets could ask to be treated better than their competition. And it was completely on an honor system. And before streaming was widely deployed Microsoft deployed an IP stack that "improved" their product's performance by lying about the type of service the packets really needed, demanding stream-type service for everything, including file transfers. This got widely deployed. So ISPs generally don't honor the Type of Service bits, and QoS isn't widely deployed on the backbone.
Nowdays, in addition to the fast-as-mercury, dumb-as-rocks backbone routers, there are reliable-as-telecom, smart-as-firewalls edge routers, full of arrays of processors so they have a bunch of instruction executions available to think about every packet. These boxes can do things like act as a reverse-firewall to protect the network against cheaters, certifying that, if a given customer has bought - or temporarily reserved - a certain amount of high-QoS bandwidth he doesn't exceed it, and if necessary rewriting the QoS/Type of Service tagging so the backbone can trust the packets again.
So with the brains available to watch over the packets and apply rules, so that streams can get the bandwidth they need and file transfers can use all the rest on a common network, the question is what rules to apply.
Streams put a higher demand for service on the net - but have limited bandwidth. File transfers want bandwidth but are happy to take what's left after the strea
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
So the question is who pays? Should the content owners, who make the profits pay for the extra infrastructure or should the consumer pay?
What are you talking about? The content owners/providers ALREADY PAY THEIR FULL COST. Those who buy wholesale bandwidth and those who colocate equipment in datacenters already pay for the bandwidth they use, the real cost of that bandwidth. Datacenters would go out of business if they didn't charge the real cost.
The failure of an ISP's business model, oversubscribing of backbone bandwidth and then selling "unlimited bandwidth" at far less than the actual cost, assuming no customers might ever use it fully, has absolutely nothing to do with the providers of content.
To use interweb tube analogy... The content providers have already paid their datacenters $1000s of dollars per month to provide a 10" tube to ship 1000s of barrels of data per second to the interweb. If an ISP advertises 10" tubes to your doorstep for $30/month, but their backbone is a garden hose, and they never actually expected you to use it... that is a contract dispute between the ISP and the consumer. The content providers have NOTHING to do with it.
It's my understanding that the bandwidth problems exist not at the backbones where all the big networks join up but rather at the last mail to the home. In most cases, a consumer shares a given amount of bandwidth with all of his/her neighbors because it's rather inexpensive to build things that way. Your proposed solution does nothing at all to alleviate this bottleneck that exists at the boundaries of the network. What it *does* do is introduce a lot of overhead to track who is trading bandwidth with whom.
What kind of stupid question is that? Consumer or content provider? Network owner? Who pays? Is this indicative of the narrow minded idiocy that seems to pervade /. these days?
:)
When Bob's Flee-market starts getting more booths than he can fit in his market area, who pays to expand the market area? Bob? His booth customers? The consumer? What is the purpose of Bob's Flee-market? To make money. Where does that money come from? The booth leases. Why lease a booth? To sell to consumers. Who pays the booth lease and hence the cost of the market area? The consumer!
Okay, let's break this down in small words so you guys can get it - we all know that spending all day with your face glued to a computer reading dribble tends to drive logic and common sense from you so hopefully this will help...
The whole reason for this is the customer. Period. The purpose is to separate us from our money. Those doing the separating pay a premium to have access to the customer. Why? Because they get a return on their money.
The network owners pay a premium to lay and upgrade their networks (when they're not sucking up government subsidies and grants) to handle the traffic from the content provider who publishes content to separate you from your dollar.
Who should pay for upgrades? Wrong question. Not should - who already pays for it?
We do.
We shop online, we click on ads, we see ads when we watch media online and we shop some more. We are what makes it all turn. No longer is it an exercise of academia - but it's a business transaction. We get charged twice as well - even if we don't shop, all is not lost because more often than not, we're paying for our connectivity - nothing is really free, even for those of you leeches who piggy-back on other's wireless services - sooner or later your wallet is opened and money flows.
But wait, that's not all! Content providers are also paying for connectivity and bandwidth! We pay to line ourselves up to have them do their song and dance for us, they pay to get to a position to do their song and dance for us, and the network owner is making money hand and foot. That's equal to charging a head-charge for customers to get into the flee-market before they even get to shop.
And a cut of that money goes to the network owner. If the network owner is seeing a lot of congestion, it is up to the owner to see additional profit possibilities from expanding the network and make a smart investment. Even if some of that traffic is coming from other networks, that is traffic that is benefiting the network owner's customers, who are making money off their customers - us.
Who should pay for it? Stupid question. If my flee-market store isn't big enough, I pay to have it enlarged. Then I pass the cost on to the market booth leases. And they in turn pass the cost on to their customers. And since I know that people cannot live without browsing the flee-market, I charge a head-charge to every customer before they even get into the market. After all, I'm a shrewd businessman. In the end, I spend nothing - I didn't do anything but provide a place for someone else to do all the work and I return a profit from this wise business decision - the customers of my customers pay for it all and I go laughing the bank.
We the people pay for everything. I see responses like "public service" and "tax dollars should pay for it" and "nationalize it". Doesn't make a difference one tiny bit - because we still pay for it. Who finances nationalized institutions? Who finances public services? Where do tax dollars come from? Your hard earned or easily stolen dollar, folks.
In that, this question is completely bogus and demonstrates a clear manifestation of not seeing the forest because of the trees.
Put a tax on spam emails, and popup advertising? Then use that tax to pay for the new Internet.
Also charge the spyware and adware companies fees for infecting a majority of the Internet and affecting bandwidth, and use those fees to pay for the new Internet.
My plan is to get the money from companies and people that abuse the Internet via taxes or fees and use that to build the new faster Internet.
Maybe it will cut down on spam, adware, spyware, and popup ads? Just a thought.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
The internet was not really designed for ISPs to offer amounts of bandwidth they can't provide! What a shocker!
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
"So the question is who pays? Should the content owners, who make the profits pay for the extra infrastructure or should the consumer pay?"
Um... how about the third option, which is why haven't the ISP's been upgrading their bandwidth capabilities? This smells of marketing PR to me.
Question: Should the big-bad-rich content providers pay for it, or do YOU the little-guy customer want to pay to for it?
It's not like ISP's didn't know bandwidth usage was going to increase. Instead of investing in their infrastructure, they choose to line their pockets with huge profits. Now as more people are using the so-called UNLIMITED bandwidth they promised, they're freaking out because they can't handle it and make that claim at the same time.
They know they customer isn't willing to pay for it. They're drooling over the fact that they might be able to get another source of income off of the content providers (Which I believe are already paying for their bandwidth capabilities). So what do they do, they try getting the public to sway to their side with articles like this.
The real Sig captains the Northwestern. This one captains
Actually the internet needs to be free and ubiquitous to maximize productivity and value. P2P does not demand full bandwidth at all times. Every P2P app I know of is well behave or tunable by the user. Streaming video also is not that terribly hungry if it is done with decent compression and a reasonable size segment at a time. The tech behind backbones and fiber has kept up pretty well. The real problem is at the "final mile". Some form of WiMax like technology that took advantage of MIMO and more up-to-date encoding to share any given bandwidth would help. IPV6 everywhere would help P2P as more peers could talk directly with one another more easily to share content. I think these thing will be funded by private sector easily if some vested interests get out of the way including the goverments desire to control or surveil everything and Media desire to restrict and Telco desire to nickel and dime new charges on every rather obvious incremental advance.
The ISPs need to figure out that the content providers are providing a valuable service to the ISP. Free content lures customers to the ISPs. ISPs or online services (AOL, etc) used to have to pay for content or work out partnerships with content providers to have something to lure in customers. Without online content the Internet would be just a place to email, IM and spam.
The big thing is that ISPs just don't want to put out the money to upgrade their aging infrastructure. They want to put the blame on someone other than themselves for the bandwidth problems. If they had to pay for online content, they'd still have to upgrade their infrastructure so it looks like they are getting a bargain for not having to pay for the content.
*It's not what you can do for the Dark Side but what the Dark Side can do for you!*
The whole concept is flawed. First, "content creators" and ISPs and telco's are all different people. Second, we're talking about the same content creators who're supposed to be providing all of their content for free? And all subsidized by advertising that no one wants? Those content creators?
Only on Slashdot would someone propose that all of the "content creators" pay more to provide you with free services.
In reality, we're already double-dipping the system, with content providers paying for bandwidth and users paying for theirs. That same byte was paid for both upstream and downstream. And if that's not enough to fund maintenance and further development, then someone needs to raise prices.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
How is pulling files via p2p any different than pulling files by other means? It isn't. The typical user doesn't pull files continuously. They spend a signficant ammount of time searching. Even if you are using BitTorrent, and are sharing, you are not typicly maxing out all the time. Users who keep the pipeline filled are the exception... yes, it can happen, but it's rare. So. The whole premise seems faulty. Use of p2p doesn't imply anything about using maximum bandwidth. The answer is easy. Players like ComCast can maintain the status quo, and just re-word their TOSs to state the defacto standard: You have a nominal ammount of bandwidth that may be limited based on the statistical likelyhood of a large number of users competing for the same bandwidth, and you have a transfer limit, T, within some timeframe. In other words, they can sell the same 6Mbps to N customers because they know that odds of all N pulling data at the same time are low. This would be fine with me (and I suspect many others), if they just specified the N and T, and then we could calculate our worst-case scenario. It's just that the marketing droids are caught in an infinite loop over the word "unlimited". Very few of us actually need or want a Service Level Agreement, which would be comensurately more expensive.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Anyone got a light for my sig?
(2) The phone company recognizes that their network is there to serve their customers, not the other way around. If overall phone usage goes up, they build more lines. They don't start blocking certain numbers, or certain topics of conversation, for being too popular and tying up the network.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
Sorry, but I think "pay per use" solves all sorts of problems. Use more gas, oil, water, or electricity, and you pay more. Use less and you pay less. Simple. (And before someone starts the tangibleintangible argument, we're still faced with the fact that there's only so much electricity/water/bandwidth available at a certain place and point in time. They're all finite resources.)
And personally, I think that for most accounts the system should be biased towards paying more for "upstream" usage than downstream. In fact, most ISPs already state two bandwidth rates, with, say, 600Kbps up and 1.5Mbps down. I say charge accordingly. (Helps the ISPs with the P2P problem too. If upstream traffic costs more then you turn more people into leachers, which in turn drives more providers off the web.)
Secondly, if you have a home account you're ALREADY paying a monthly fee to get Ubuntu. It's not "free". And if you don't think you're going to get $3 worth of value from it, then you're probably better off not wasting the bandwidth in the first place.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
this
You, or they, want to talk about a free market? Guess what? A free market demands you deliver what you promised. ISPs offered unlimited connections but now that people have taken them up on the offer they complain. Either deliver what you offer or don't make the offer.
FalconShould there be a Law?
I guess another way of looking at the situation is this:
Comcast: Google, here's a bill for $20M for the traffic you sent over our network.
Google: Comcast, here's a bill $16B, a proportion of your net income based on the fact that our content formed 80% of your business.
Comcast: Damn, we need to buy better lobbyists.
Corporations are run to turn a profit first
Corporations were first granted corporate charters for the common or public good. Once the corporation did not satisfy that requirement it's charter could be revoked. Of course as Thomas Jefferson warned of though corporations became too powerful.
FalconShould there be a Law?
In a perfect world, we'd set up network infrastructure that is both upgradeable and has tons of headroom (even gigabit's getting old). Sure, the cost would be substantial, but it is amortized over a very long time and has tangential benefits like merging all our communications over one multiplexed transport. Why bother with digital cable when you can have true IPTV for a fraction of the cost ?
What irritates me is how I can lease a server (overseas) with a fatter pipe and lower monthly bill, than what I pay for residential weak-ass cable. Yep, my servers get dedicated bandwidth, which means I can hold them at line speed, both ways, without anyone throwing a fit or threatening me with surcharges. How can bandwidth be so cheap over there, and so expensive over here ? It reaches the same internet, and quite frankly it's as fast as anything stateside, not to mention I don't have to worry about laws-du-jour landing me in court.
Here I am, living downtown in a medium-sized apartment building. Datacenters may cram a lot of PCs per rack, but I've got two dozen floors, and I'd guess about 80% of tenants have at least one computer (U students and office drones). How hard can it possibly be to run fiber to this one building and set up a few switches in the basement ? I mean, frig, there's a peering facility a half-block away!
Some countries "get it", not only do they have network infrastructure in place, they're not afraid to put it within reach of everyday people. I sure wouldn't mind splitting a few gigabits with my neighbors while halving my monthly bill.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Whenever I hear the "who pays" question I'm dumbfounded. The consumer pays, it's the only way it can go. If the content owners "pay" then there will be more advertisements, or most things will become pay services. If the ISP pays, the consumer will pay in larger monthly bills. Everyone always pays. An expensive upgrade in a service without an increase to the consumer is a ridiculous thing to ask for.
If i had one dollar for every brain you dont have, i would have $1.
Who gets the contract to do the fiber? How much should be paid to do this contract? Should everyone get it or only dense populations? How dense do the populations have to be? How do we pay for it, do we inflate the currency through debt or do we increase tax?
Who gets the maintenance contracts? How much do we pay for the maintenance contracts? How much maintenance should be spent on all fiber or should only dense populations get it? How dense do the populations have to be? How do we pay for it, do we inflate the currency through debt or do we increase tax?
Who gets to use the fiber? How much do we charge companies to use this fiber? How do we ensure its being used for the right purposes and companies aren't bidding for contacts and locking in those customers? Who is responsible for faults in the network? How are costs allocated?
The market is fine, the solution is to deregulate so companies are forced to compete, as opposed to the more segregated systems that we are used to now a days.
I don't recall anyone ever saying "To have a free market, it must be provided by public Government services", a free market can never have any Government regulation or intervention, else it is not a free market.
This is my footer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Well! It's a good thing you offered because we're not getting anywhere with the BBC and my smashing lady needs money for catfood. Anyways, just make the check to CASH and send it to:
Ye english ISPs
London, England.
ps: If you could send a little extra, mp3 downloads are killing us, it'd be capitol!
Very well then, toodles.
What do "back in my day", "old people", "lawns" have to do with people seeding on BitTorrent?
This is my footer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
For the obligatory car analogy... If you bought a car using a 48 month loan (I've never financed a car, but I assume that may be a typical duration nowadays), by the time the loan is paid off, the value of the car is substantially reduced (perhaps down to your down payment depending on how many miles it was driven) and you paid both the principle and the interest over the primary useful life of the car.
Of course, ongoing maintenance (labor of repair and administration as well as cost of replacement parts) and operational costs such as power, cooling, insurance, also must be recovered. For example, it really does cost more to run 2N routers than to run N routers.
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
Actually,, for state owned broadcaster like BBC, the question is whether it should be paid by the consumers (those who need the larger bandwidth), or the tax payers (those who finance BBC, essentially everybody).
It's bizarre arguments like this that make the Australian system of clearly identified download quotas and subsequent excess usage charges or speed throttling (depending on ISP) suddenly seem a lot more palatable.
You would never get an argument like this from an ISP over here, simply because anyone that suddenly started watching a lot of streaming video would find that their low quota email-and-a-bit-of-websurfing account wasn't cutting it anymore and would have to either pay for a higher download quota or stop watching the streaming videos.
The BBC connects to one or more ISPs - either they pay a content-provider-market or transit-market ISPs, or some eyeball-market ISPs accept their traffic for free because that's cheaper than getting it from other ISPs. The consumer is paying an eyeball-market ISP to get them content, and that ISP either peers with a content-provider-market ISP for free or pays a transit-provider ISP or maybe peers with a transit-provider if they're balanced enough.
I did a traceroute to BBC, and it connected through Telia, a mainly-European ISP. I don't know how many other ISPs BBC is using, or how Tiscali connects to Telia, but Telia seems to be in some combination of eyeball and transit market. (Telia just recovered from a peering squabble with Cogent, a mainly-US content-provider-market ISP.)
If Tiscali's complaining about the impact on their traffic capacity, either they need to work with BBC on how to cache traffic in their network (so they only have to receive it once), or else they need to look into getting a more cost-effective connection to the BBC. Or they could work with BBC on using a P2P distribution system such as Bittorrent.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Ummm... didn't Verizon and AT&T both volunteer to design networks to support always on applications such as IPTV. All it takes is application of QOS policy that other readers speak of to make this happen. Last I checked both are well on their way to a million subscribers. Seems viable to me and all this was done under free market policies. It would seem to me that where bandwidth is needed based on demand, carriers will invest in it to the tune of many billions of dollars. Did I miss something?
It has been obvious since dialup-to-BBS days that bandwidth demands were only going to go up, and go up fast. Every new, faster modem was snapped up immediately, until the bandwidth of voice lines was saturated. And those of you with longer memories may recall the RBOCs/ILECs bitching along the lines of, "Oh noes! Our trunks and switches, they are overloaded! We can haz data tax?" Proposals to surcharge data traffic were floated, which were all greeted with hearty, derisive laughter.
Fast-forward not-at-all-many-years to the broadband age, and the RBOCs/ILECs are saying, "Oh noes! Our switches and routers, they are overloaded. We can haz content tax?" The only real difference between then and now is that now the cable television providers are joining in the chorus. This, however, does not make the argument any more valid.
Now, whether or not heavy users of the network should be surcharged, and how much they should be surcharged -- while a subject worthy of some discussion -- is nevertheless completely swamped by the Actual Point. Here is the Actual Point:
YOU SHOULD HAVE BEEN BUILDING OUT YOUR NETWORK IN THE FIRST DAMNED PLACE!
Really, after watching dialup explode in popularity, after watching broadband explode in popularity, after watching other nations build out their digital infrastructure to some amazing levels... There is no fscking excuse for any RBOC/ILEC to be whining about overloaded networks!
You had plenty of warning, you had more than plenty of money, you even got $200 billion in handouts from the Fed... I mean, what the fsck have you been up to the last fifteen years?
The floor of your monthly fee structure should be covering not only maintenance, but also aggressive buildout. If they aren't, then you've deliberately kept your head in the sand this whole time (and you suck at math).
Tweak everyone's base rates, build out the network to the required capacities like you should have been doing, and stop trying to propogate this self-serving pathetic meme that some network users are more equal than others.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Who uploads, pays. Packet by packet. I can't think of an easier, more fair economy. And that means that an 24Mbit/512Kbit ADSL like that we get in Italy should cost WAY less.
Moderation is overrated.
There's a line in the original article about whether the company who profits from the media should pay. However in the context of the BBC, they don't profit. They already have the money for the content before we even think about accessing it. The programs that are being served up using iPlayer have already been made and paid for by the consumer. The consumer has paid for the content and for the net connection to get it to them. The BBC has provided material and is simply offering it to the people who have paid for it as a bonus. The ISP's are in a poor condition to complain. They make money - quite a bit of it - by offering people the capability to access data on the web. Now people are simply doing that more than they were before, and more of them are doing it. The ISP's simply don't enjoy seeing their business model - built on the assumption that people wouldn't make full use of the net connections they are paying for - take a beating. ISP's are the ones profiting by the increased appeal of the internet. They make the profits in this case so they should handle the cost (which they will inevitably pass on to us in the end).
"There are three schools of magic..."
In the UK "Be" internet have 24Mb/s (if you live close enough to a supported exchange) and have a 1:1 contention ratio. So if I pay for a Be account with 1:1 contention ratio, I am already paying to be able to access high bandwidth content. Why should the BBC pay as well? If your ISP does not want to pay for the upgrades to their networks, just change ISP to one who does. There are obviously ISPs who have paid for the extra bandwidth, and still charge a resonable rate, the other ISPs are just wining about not getting enough $$$ because they are greedy.
This assumes there really is a major cost issue. When monopolies are involved, it's hard to tell if that's really the problem, or if it's mainly one of profiteering.
I'm surprised that no-one has picked up on this yet... as far as I know, this is the first time that a major TV channel has actually made its content available online for free. Although it is a good example of how whiny the ISPs are, there is another point - HD, full-length videos of a TV series are now freely and legally available to the public. This by itself demonstrates that the infrastructure is going to need a major overhaul over the next few years.
Most human behaviour can be explained in terms of identity.
As a consumer and not a content provider, I believe the consumer should pay. I should purchase a certain level of service. The ISP should tell me what level of service they offer, I should make my decision, then they should provide that level of service. And the penalties for anti-trust violations and monopoly violations should be astronomical.
Why? Because I want to be the person that controls the purse strings. I want to be the person deciding what level of service is appropriate. The last thing I want is for a few dozen major players to make that decision without my direct input.
The person closest to the purse strings makes the decisions. That means that if you want to make the decisions, you have to be the person closest to the purse strings. You want to be the person who is getting charged for QoS. That gives you the power to decide what QoS should be. The last thing I want (and the last thing I think any of us want) is for Internet service to work the way cell phones do.
Please, charge me. Give me the power of the purse. In an amoral capitalist economy, the power of the purse is the only power that matters. Unless we're figuring on going socialist, I want to be the decider.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
... is exactly the word I was looking for. Reading that exchange made me want to get popcorn yesterday!
I did a keyword search through this thread for dupe and checked the tags, nothing came up.
But isn't this clearly a dupe of BBC and ISPs Clash over iPlayer posted the 9th? It links to the exact same article. The only difference I can spot is that this is more of an "Ask Slashdot" type story.
If anything the "BBC and ISPs Clash over iPlayer" story should have been linked under "Related stories" should it not?
Perfect is the enemy of done.
Who paid for it to begin with?
I really don't see what the fuss is about with all this infrastructure "debate". It's damn obvious who should pay for it: the ISPs. There isn't even a case to answer. The customers have paid for their connections, the BBC have paid for their connections. End of story. It has nothing to do with last mile or neutrality or anything else. ISPs who have planned their businesses badly and mis-sold connectivity are trying to blame it on other people.
Content providers should pay for the infrastructure? Seriously? The BBC has nothing to do with the infrastructure, it's a cost of doing business just like electricity and water. They don't care who provides it or what the difference between the first and last mile is. The ISP *is* in the business of internet infrastructure... funnily enough, they are going to have to pay. At least, here's hoping.
sam brightman
The QOS point at network level is a good point. TCIP/ip (v6) supports QOS, but as long as there is no incentive to makr some packets as less important or less time critical than others, everything in the internet will be marked Top-priority.
There needs to be some incentive to mark some traffic more important as others. Otherwise internet will be one big goo where the isp determine what is important, and not the users.
If you are located in the UK, why not try out the UK Free Software Network ISP? All their profits go to open source software funding, they set well defined badnwidth limits and good speeds, and don't interfere with your network traffic like some ISPs do. I haven't used them before, but it looks awesome and I will definately be switching in the near future.
This is how the loudness war is killing music.
all you sillys, Al Gore would pay to rebuild the internet, it's his creation! FACT: Al Gore did create the internet (and global warming).
Be lucky you are close enough to an exchange. Out here I am limited to ADSL 'Max' as they call it, the 'Up to 8MB' thing. Of course, I get about 2MB. Our local exchange is going under an LLU soon, so I can only hope it'll improve, but I reserve my right to doubt. I think the only time we will see a good ISP is if a load of P2Pers/Geeks or whatever set one up with the purpose of providing a really good service.
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
It's a loaded question and it angers me when I see it; "Who should pay?" This implies no one is paying already! If you've hosted videos, streaming audio, or anything that requires good quality bandwidth you know the costs involved can be huge. And for the consumer a monthly contract with setup fees and decent hardware isn't cheap either.
What irks me even more is this BBC/ISP argument. The BBC is serving video content from London, its only a hop or two from the major UK ISPs. And lets face it, the country isn't exactly large.
Stop pointing fingers wildly in the sky when you've created a cut-throat industry and oversubscribed. No wonder Google want to put portable datacentres in neighbourhoods.
This is such a ridiculous argument I literally cannot believe the ISPs are trying it on like this! Providing bandwidth to consumer is what the ISPs do! People are using the ISPs product more, surely that should be a good thing for the ISPs!? No, because they fucked up the industry too much with 'unlimited' deals. Well I say "Fuck 'em", they can sort it out. Free broadband is obviously not a viable option so why did they start it? The ISPs will have to start charging more for broadband to pay for the increase in demand. That's how the market works, why the fuck should BBC have to pay a dime!?
Whooosh!
Firstly, there simply is no practical use for keeping a phone line engaged 100% of the time. There are many practical uses, which should have been readily apparent early on, and are only growing, for using as much bandwidth as you possibly can, most of the time.
The reasons for this should be obvious, but let me summarize them all: A phone call is all or nothing, and it's interactive. At least one person is using it interactively while making the call, and all calls are equally hard (or easy) to route. Bandwidth usage can scale -- thus, it can appear to work, for most people (who aren't using much bandwidth), yet can be absolutely abysmal for someone attempting to download a large file -- or even someone who watches a lot of YouTube. Also, many bandwidth uses are non-interactive -- you can leave something downloading and walk away -- completely non-applicable to the phone.
Second, as another poster said, phone companies are audited -- specifically, I almost never pick up a phone and get anything other than a dialtone. If that ever does happen, the phone companies build more infrastructure.
Finally, the problem with an IP network degrading gracefully here is, the ISP can pretend the problem doesn't exist. After all, there are a LOT of places where something could go wrong (spyware on your box? neighbor on your wireless?) which would make you think the ISP was throttling you, or overtaxed, when they really weren't.
Look: Your analogy sort of make sense, for phones. Now try it on power. "But if everyone started pulling power all at once, you'll start hitting the limits of the generators!" Yeah, just imagine if the power companies whined like that when summer hits and everyone turns on their air conditioners. Yes, occasionally, we run into the limits of the system -- and then they upgrade the system. Why shouldn't Internet function the same way?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
You pay £Y a month for a guaranteed 100% bandwidth of X. No metering, no FUP, no caps. Then for each 72 hours where more than 90% of the possible bandwidth is used, all customers get the month free. If it gets worse, add a free month for excessive outage. E.g. if it's 3 days out, that month is free. If it's out for another 6 days for that month (remember, add all hours), then one month credit. If it's out for another 9 days (27 days total at 90%+ usage), another month.
Maybe add in again if users are unable to get connected because of congestion and back-off.
The costs will all go up and would be based on usage possible, then competition should kick in with ISPs attempting to model usage so that they can undercut the competition without having to pay penalties that wipe out their profit.
so by rights its free. Can't we knock up some open source routers and cables. Then no one has to pay.
I have excellent Karma and I am not afraid to Troll it.
When the options are for a corporation to pay or the consumers to pay, then the consumers will pay one way or the other. The corporations may be making the actual transactions, but they'll just pass the costs along to us in the end.
The same is true of governments, of course, though we call the people "taxpayers" in that case rather than consumers. Either way, there's no way to escape it: either we end up paying or we find some means of achieving the same goal in a more palatable way.
I don't know why more people don't understand economics. This same understanding should be applied to taxing companies. Companies never pay tax: they only pass the tax along to the customer.
Most businesses don't upgrade a piece of capitol equipment until the item is either nonoperational or the costs of acquiring, installing and operating the the replacement is less that the cost of the old piece; given the effects of depreciation, the increased energy effeincey of new equipment, less demanding administration, increase operational capacity and not to mention the Billions of dollars worth of tax breaks and favorable regulation changes, everyone should be on the latest and greatest network by now.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
...if and only IF I actually get something good from it. The net service is a service like my water, gas and electric. I expect when I pay for my utilities that the vast majority of it goes back into upgrading the system that provides it and a little profit for supplier. The telcos saw the internet as a gimmick, a bolt-on, "Who the hell wants constant access to a global comms network?". Stuff it we'll bang it out dirt cheap and for the few KB people will download, little email, little browsing, we can just about cover that and a little profit.
We'll you drove it down so cheap, cut of noses to spite faces and now your all crowing about not being to handle all the on-demand video, the P2P. Now surely you telco freaks knew that technology expands and adapts and keeps getting bigger, fatter, faster and more demanding? No, well more fool you! Put the price up, no problem, but you better damn well stop that capping my connection between 4pm and 9pm every evening crap that Virgin Media ISP do here in the UK. I don't see the gas supplier capping my supply when i turn up the heat in Winter, no they do that to old aged pensioners when they can't pay their bills after one missed month, anyway, the electric company don't cap my supply when I run my lawn mower, stereo and PC kit in the Summer when I'm outside on my patio!
No they do their best to provide the service I pay for, 'cos the UK watchdog OFWAT make 'em, but OFCOM are a bunch of gutless turds who will not go up against the might of the evil empire British Telecom or that beardy wierdy Dicky Branson and his Virgin c***s!
( deep breaths, calming thoughts, deep breaths, caliming thoughts....breath in the hate, breath out the love...)
Windows guys please stop pissing on everyone and the Linux guys stop pissing in the wind, hoping to hit Windows guys!
The question presumes that the current system is the best of all possible systems, and that the only adjustment that needs to be made is for someone, somwhere, to pay more.
Even in the (unlikely) event that this turned out to be the case, it would still not be valid or helpul to assume it a priori, thus heading off all discussion of options other than "A" or "B".
Capital costs (including installation and equipment), along with debit service on that sum, must be recovered over the useful life of the asset for a business to be viable.
Guess that explains why so many huge corporations and government agencies are still running COBOL codebases on mainframe equipment from the 70's...
=Smidge=
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Regardless of all previously posted comments, I feel the ISPs should pay for the
change, if a store wants to sell me something, do I pay for his shelves to store bigger items,
or the display cases for showing me what I might want to buy, no I just pick up what I want and pay, couldn't care less about the decor, however if they feel it necessary to offer us
this way better bandwidth, they will never give it for free, they will always hide the charges,
story is moot
It is only the greed of companies who artificially cause scarcity to raise bandwidth prices (the same reason why they won't deploy IPv6 so they can cash on the scarcity of IPv4 addresses). Yet again, it will become necessary to have the government regulate (cue the government-hating Ayn Rand-style brain-dead libertarian freeloaders)..
Holy crap, people actually get it... Great post. This whole advertising 'Unlimited' internet bandwidth to Millions of customers is what has perpetuated some of this. It didn't use to be that way, there were limits do how much data you could use in a month. There was a very good reason why. But GREED got the better of the Cable and Telco companies. Just like the banks and sub-prime lending, I really don't feel like bailing them out.
Please, I don't know if we can handle any more 'deregulation'.
What if a Walmart, Homedepot, giant shopping mall with a Cineplex, and a Disney water park all moved in to a small town neighborhood next door to each other?
You would have an immense volume of car traffic, not to mention tourist busses, and trailer trucks to deliver goods.
Before you know it, the 2 lanes roads and several traffic lights heading in and out of town can no longer handle the capacity.
Now more sophisticated traffic lights and intersections must be built to accommodate the giant parking lots, and more lanes/ wider roads must be built.
Perhaps larger bridges to handle heavier trucks and busses.
Who foots the bill? The small town's public works? The county? Maybe the State? Why not the businesses causing the increased traffic? It's in their best interest to have better roads. More customers can get in and out faster.
I think the businesses causing the traffic should help pay for the increased infrastructure, as well as the town or state, since the would benefit from the tax revenue.
I know this comparison doesn't quite match telecoms and ISPs, but I think it's a good way to look at it.
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Unsurprisingly enough, it doesn't seem that most people around here actually understand what they're talking about. But I've done research into telecommunications regulation, so I think I've got something to offer here.
Telecoms are businesses which exist to make money. They are not public service entities. They make money when the revenue they receive for their services is greater than the amount they spent on building their network, and when that revenue is at least as much as they could have made if they were to go into another business.
The problem that most people here don't seem to realize is that building a network, particularly to residential destinations, is expensive. I mean expensive. So expensive that most consumers are not capable of paying enough to make that service profitable without some form of subsidy. Using landlines as an example, it costs about $100/month for the telecom to provide that service. Yes, the cost is spent up front in some sense, but consider that they could have done something else with that money which would have made them that much. Essentially, unless the telecom makes $100/month from each and every residential connection, they're losing money.
Most people simply cannot afford to spend $1200 per connection to a network. With today's legacy divisions between phone and cable services, that would mean an annual bill of $2400. The few people who can afford such a price don't want to pay it.
So saying that the telecoms should just eat the cost of such a buildout really doesn't demonstrate any connection to reality. The only reason the current system works is from arcane franchise regulations. Part of the regulatory scheme allows telecoms to use commercial revenues to subsidize their residential activities. Businesses pay a lot more for their network services than individuals so. Another part allowed for monopoly franchises, guaranteeing the telecom a market and creating an incentive to reach everyone in a municipality. Exclusive franchises are no longer permitted under US law (Telecom Act of 1996 did away with them) but the fact is that networks are sufficiently expensive that a new player isn't likely to build on areas where there is an existing network, particularly with common-carrier laws in effect.
So the problem here is not a simple one, and it's not one that can be solved by spouting off one's "net neutrality" credentials. I do think some form of neutrality is desirable, but the blanket statements made here are not helpful.
"So the question is who pays? Should the content owners, who make the profits pay for the extra infrastructure or should the consumer pay?"
.. :)
Given the low price they are charging for 'unlimited broadband' it's obvious it isn't either broadband or unlimited. Maybe they should stop the false advertising. It is also obvious that the ISPs don't have to infrastructure in place to support such services as iPlayer. To do so would cost them money. If the BBC and other IPTV companies want them to carry the traffic then they should at least carry part of the cost. Another solution would be to charge a real price for 'unlimited broadband', which would be ten time the current cost.
'O2 Broadband, £7.50 per month , up to 8Mb download speed, unlimited usage, 1.3Mb upload speed'
That should of course be 8Mb shared between you and the other 49 customers connected to the same switch and only late at night or at weekends as they choke off home bandwidth during business hours. Also you'll only get high speed for the first week, after which they'll wind it back down again
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Or said in another way. It is far more profitable to sabotage your competitors (by e.g. sending assassins after them), than to improve the value/cost ratio of your own product.
The main problem with Libertarians is that their dogmas prevent them from seeing the simple economic reality.
It is obvious that IPTV does not scale and is bandwidth hungry. eg For 1000 people watching the same program the server has to er .. serve up 1000 IP streams. Some kind of peer to peer solution at the ISPs is what's needed. That way they only need to download one stream from the IPTV company and then redistribute it on the local network. ISPs usually have masses of bandwidth to spare on their one internal network. A hack of Multicasting and VPN would do it ..
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He bashes the music industry and uses big words, thus showing his superior intelect!
The problem is that charging a flat rate wouldn't accomplish much when it comes to addressing peak usage.
It's really starting to sound like the direction the electric industry is moving towards in the United States. I work as an IT developer at PPLSolutions, a subsidiary of PPL Corporation. Many areas throughout the country (e.g. Texas, New York, etc.) are deregulating energy to allow the market to dictate the cost of electricity (or gas). As a result, PPLSolutions is in the business of complex billing: creating billing calculations that reflect competition in the market, on/off peak usage, and other tariffs.
The reason I bring this up is that in a deregulated market energy is not sold at a constant price. You have to account for congestion on the power lines (similar to bandwidth), demand, line loss, to name a few factors. Energy suppliers purchase and sell energy at different rates each hour to minimize cost and maximize profit.
Chances are that if ISP's were to start billing for usage, they would enter a similar market to the deregulated energy market, where they would not just be charging a flat rate per KB, but rather, they would want to factor in the use of various DNS's, the amount of fiber (or cable/satellite) that your packets need to travel, and additionally would factor in on and off peak hours to your bill.
It gets even more complex, when you consider that people access websites around the world: if DNS's were to charge ISP's for routing requests to the corresponding servers, then each DNS might charge a different amount based on their own on/off peak hours and so on. Wrapping all of that into a customer's bill is going to be complex, if not hectic.
Likewise, it will likely result in people changing their browsing habits to avoid on peak charges (similar to night and weekend cell phone plans). I don't know if people would have enough patience to deal with this kind of pricing model (especially commercial and industrial companies). This kind of billing model would either change the way people use the internet, or would cause outrage altogether.
The one plus is that it will keep people like me in business.
Please, the ISPs pay for there infrastructure, the government puts in the serious backbone.
The ISPs charge their customers.
Both sodes are already paying and they want someone to pay more becasue they want more profit.
Boo-f'n-hoo
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Wait till you see how high Comcast and friends jack up the prices once all desktop publishing and more is done online, and everyone's files are no longer stored locally. Not to mention net TV and phone continuing to expand. Did anyone NOT see this coming?
The thing is, the ISPs are in the same situation that the North American auto companies are in. They twiddled their thumbs and failed to innovate and keep ahead of the trends, and now they're crying for handouts.
Boo hoo, Toyota got the jump on us, and we're losing market share. Boo hoo, we didn't pay attention when web content providers got creative and started offering heavier media.
When did North America lose it's drive to innovate? Push the boundries? The ISPs should have been upgrading the networks a decade ago.
Time to deregulate and let some foreign company with vision jump in and start laying fiber like it's... actually... in demand!
But your 2N router concept makes little sense.
Assuming that it's a physical limitation... Everyone needs routing, high speed backbone access and last mile service. That's it... all of these are technical limitiations, while traffic may be growing exponentially so too is bandwidth availability.
It's obvious with most ISPs that billions are being spent on advertising, lobbying, litigation, wireless spectrum, support, etc.
The trans ocean cables (which DO cost billions) and deliver a measly few hundred gigabit are expensive... but with proper caching this isn't really a bottleneck.
Another thing to remember is that people's need for bandwidth won't continue increasing forever.
In fact I think we are very close to the point where it levels out, key points are the point where it becomes easier to download a movie of your desktop (No app that requires transfering more data than a video stream can't be run remotely), video game maximum bandwidth (which seems to be evening out aorund 7KBps), and video... which if the telecoms hadn't tried to ban would all be cached at the isp.
As far as your car analogy goes, that's all well and good but it doesn't resolve the fact that new cars should have enough bandwidth for voip, video, gaming or p2p at a reasonable level... Technology in cars isn't growing that fast because it's materials engineering... once you get into silicon you get Moore and his nifty law.
The question in how much will ISPs spend on tech support and billing before they even CONSIDER upgrading their networks.
They seem to feel secure that no one can compete with them, and so they're not making their service better they're aiming for more market penetration... they spend billions on support when that money could just offer more of what they're selling... BANDWIDTH. NOT CONNECTIVITY, not individual apps, they sell bandwidth.
Also the people who can't afford (as much of) the product due to the costs of advertising it.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
The problem is, companies like Time Warner/Road Runner, Charter, Comcast, and the DSL providers make so much profit off their networks that massive upgrades get paid off in an extremely short period of time.
...
Knowing the costs involved the local Road Runner division, coupled with the number of accounts they hold, the proper analogy would be something like this:
Tell the customer it will take 48 months to recoupe the cost of this upgrade, regardless of the fact that it'll be paid off by half our subscribers next month, leaving the other half for pure profit.
2N routers does cost more than N routers, this is true. The problem is that they could manage 100N routers and fill them up with bandwidth and STILL make a fair profit.
You're completely ignorant if you think the cable/dsl providers aren't making a fortune. Even putting new fibre in the ground gets paid off when the first year in most cases, and once its there its just a matter of lighting it with the right bandwidth, think about the half million dollar router that gets implemented. If its only spread across 50k customers, thats $10/customer to pay it off. Thats less than 25% of a monthly bill in most areas. The UBR routers don't serve that many people of course, but they also don't cost half a million.
We ARE (the cable/dsl customers) already paying for the upgrades! We've been paying far more for service than we should have been for years. We've paid for the upgrades. The BBC pays for the bandwidth that is required to keep from filling up their own pipes. Our ISPs are not paying for the bandwidth required to serve their network, hence their pipes are full.
This is the way the Internet works. I pay for my pipe to the cloud. BBC, Yahoo, Google/YouTube, Microsoft, Apple, all of them, pay for their pipe to the cloud. I get my fair share of their pipe. If they want me to have more speed, they pay to make their pipe bigger, and assuming mine isn't overloaded, I get more. The Internet has always been a 'pay for your own pipe' type of network, the service providers would rather it be 'the other guy pays for the privledge of using the pipes I'm already charging my customers for' which is ridiculous to say the least. If the various countries of the world don't step up and enact network neutrality laws, I fear the Internet we know and love will not exist in the long term.
The problem is the cable and DSL providers have over sold their crappy bandwidth and don't want to pay for more. It has nothing to do with not having the money to pay for more, they are making an absolute fortune every month. If someone else wants to start another broadband provider in the area other than the massive initial investment that someone has to lay out, which wouldn't be a problem if the new provider could charge the same price as the monopilistic provider already in the area, the local monopoly can just drop their price. Go from $40 to $10, still turn a profit, although much smaller, and you've just made it a lot more difficult for the new guy to get funding. To the point that the funding won't want to risk it. Monopoly upheld, customers still get screwed.
The worst part is that my tax dollars funded half this crappy network which doesn't meet any of the things they said the funding would get me when begged congress gave them the money in the first place. Very frustrating
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Most of them are actually running COBOL codebases from the 70's on modern mainframe hardware. Unlike most desktop operating systems (e.g., Windows, or Linux), both IBM and Unisys mainframes have had stable ABIs for decades.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
This would give a lot of power to script kiddies. If you piss off the wrong person online, they will jack up your Internet bill by a thousand dollars and there's nothing you can do about it but cancel your ISP contract. And they will do it using compromised machines, charging those computer owners as well.
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
I though here in the US that we already gave buckets of money to the telcos to build out this new broadband ready internet years ago.
Which sounds pretty, but that same short life means the cost of purchasing drops quickly too.
I've worked in networking at an ISP myself, and if you're comfortable riding the back of the wave, you save a lot of money and can still keep up with bandwidth needs.
Trouble is, the company has to keep upgrading all the time, and I'm sure that Bell, etc, operate much like my company did - the managers resent the constant costs and see sparkles as they count the potential huge savings by delaying purchase/rollout by 6 months.
It's a constant trade-off: Unhappy clients vs Costs to keep up
The top managers *love* arguments (comes with being evil) - my director used to cut bandwidth payments and pretend to be hard up, just to force negotiations with the other company. Sucked for us techs, but he loved the fights. And the company's would usually cut a deal, saving our company $30k-$100k at a time. Keep flipping this around, and it really adds up.
the US lacks a free market because of public provided roads and waste water systems.
A better question would be, which is a more free market, the last mile operating on private property through government easements provided to one private company, (and, of course, the government having the power to withdraw those easements at any time making the private companies investment valueless) or having the last mile government owned and allowing multiple ISP's to use it.
A car analogy:
The government lets Ford use private land without owner permission to put in roads, and Ford requires all cars be Fords, or the government builds the roads, sets the standards for cars that can use the roads, and lets any car that meets the standards on them. The second is, in my opinion, the more free market.
I run P2P because I want to download something - I usually don't care how long it takes to download.
What we really need to to take QoS to the next level. Applications such as BITS, Bitorrent, Gnutella, et al should tag their packets with QoS data. Not enough to identify what they are, but to resolve this issue before it is resolved in a way which we don't like.
If my P2P traffic/updates/downloads/et al are tagged at low priority, then I can consume IDLE bandwidth allowing Joe the web surfer to have quick page load times. The impact is minimal on me, until the ISP *WAY* oversubscribes.
This solves most of the problems.
I have 100Mb/s Internet connection. Was pay based on 95th percentile utilization (Take all 5 minute averages for month into Excel and sort, remove top 5% of the rows, pay for the usage at the top row now.) So one month is $600/mo then next may be $1500. Works for me.
Apparently, the real cost (at least in the UK) is in transporting the packets from the end user to the ISP systems. Most UK ISPs use BT's network, and I seem to recall reading the cost of transporting the data from their own systems to the rest of the internet is about 1/10th of what it costs per gigabyte to get it from the exchange to their own systems over the BT network. (Plus, the BBC does open peering, which means that the ISP just has to get a connection to the peering point the BBC is at.)
Of course, ISPs might be able to put in their own connectivity to the exchanges, but even if it is possible they're just not interested.
Umm, back in the '80s and early '90s we didn't buy software, most people would take disks from their house to somebody elses with programs that they had and we'd make a copy of it for ourselves.
Basically the sneakernet was how we coped with it. Amazingly enough people did get on just fine in that manner. It's still an effective strategy today under certain conditions. With enough data to transfer it becomes more efficient to just send an intern with a huge disk array over to the other location to transfer the information that way.
What is really costs are inbound packets from transit networks. Reduce those and you drastically reduce costs. Keep it on the same network entirely and it's essentially free. Also observe that, given a choice, any network client would prefer a 'closer' connection -- less hops, less latency, fewer chance of problems, etc. The two are NOT mutually exclusive and some carriers are getting the picture. What they need to do is share routing information in some sort of standardized, publicly available way. Think DNS but for network topology. So, you start up your BT client, it queries the service for routing information before beginning a torrent, and always preferrs closer packets. protocols already exist for selecting routes and hosts based on "priority". Now, publishing network topology is akin to the RIAA removing DRM. It will make them nervous as hell! And, ultimately ISPs want a bigger slice of the pie, not to just be better ISPs. They want control because control is what they can charge for.
As with everything else the government does (except when people cheat on the process which is another problem entirely), the lowest bidder.
How much should be paid to do this contract?Whatever the lowest bid ends up being.
Should everyone get it or only dense populations? How dense do the populations have to be?Everyone should get it. If you live on a farm in the middle of nowhere, it's likely to take a while more, but it's not like the government didn't do this before when it subsidized power and phone lines to those people.
How do we pay for it, do we inflate the currency through debt or do we increase tax?The government should borrow money with future taxes as collateral (whenever this is done, very low interest rates can be worked out, because it's very low risk debt). Then a tax should be introduced on people who subscribe to the fiber, so that nobody else has to pay.
Who gets to use the fiber?Every single company that has a business plan and can prove they have the capital to implement it.
How much do we charge companies to use this fiber?Nothing. Users of the fibers are getting taxed on the bill already. Those companies will pay their other corporate taxes for running a business.
How do we ensure its being used for the right purposes and companies aren't bidding for contacts and locking in those customers?Same way anti-trust laws are enforced. If there's reason to investigate, start an investigation.
Who is responsible for faults in the network? How are costs allocated?Government contractors that bid for the privilege. They get paid from the same taxes.
The market is fine, the solution is to deregulate so companies are forced to compete, as opposed to the more segregated systems that we are used to now a days.Competition over laying fiber is stupid and doesn't work. The cost of entering the business is way too high, so competition is naturally kept low (which is why the government ended up subsidizing the telcos so they would do it at all, creating the monopolies in the first place. Besides, the fiber is going through public property, and I strongly believe that anything going through public property should be public.
Don't get me wrong, I don't want the government to be my ISP, but there's no way you're going to get competition if every ISP needs to lay down their own fiber (and leasing it from another adds costs preventing them from competing).
I don't recall anyone ever saying "To have a free market, it must be provided by public Government services", a free market can never have any Government regulation or intervention, else it is not a free market.People get really pissed off when I say this, but a completely free market sucks. A free market is only great when you can ensure plenty of competition. The moment monopolies show up, everyone gets screwed. Government sponsored local monopolies are a bad idea, but they're not the only way monopolies arise, and they can (and WILL) happen in a completely deregulated market, by simply having the companies with more resources squashing the others.
What I want is a free market with large amounts of competition. And I need anti-trust laws and government services over public areas in order to have it.
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The fact that they're over capacity means that demand is greater than supply.
If the price goes up just enough to drive away the excess customers, those that left would be using it to capacity.
But yeah, jacking up prices might not work, because the ISP's are happily screwing the customers who aren't bitchy enough to drop the ISP over lousy service.
Well, lets check the facts.
"Everyone" (especially broadband providers) has been saying for years that as soon as broadband is widespread enough people will get everything from their net connection. For years, the broadband providers have urged people to get off of dialup so they wouldn't be left behind when that happens.
For years ISPs have been crowing about a bazillion Mbps unlimited use connection for a low monthly fee.
So, the BBC, at no cost to the ISPs, actually puts uo some of that content that the ISPs have been promising would be there one day in order to sell their services.
.In other words, much to the ISP's horror, the things they swore would happen (with no intention of doing it themselves) in order to get customers are ACTUALLY HAPPENING. That means their customers are actually starting to use their net connections the way the ISPs said they could.
Now it's time for them to hold up their end of the bargain. The hand's been called, if they were bluffing, they have nobody to blame but themselves.
There is an opportunity cost the longer it takes you to recoup your investment.
I've said it before and I'll say it again - they ruin the internet.
Most of this is the ISP's fault in the first place. By mis-selling the speed and 'unlimitedityness' of their products, they've given the illusion that we should all be getting 20Mbit unlimited connections, when in fact their networks can't even deliver half of that.
I'm already paying for a 10Mbit connection, but I don't actually get a 10Mbit connection, and if I actually use it too much I get capped to an even slower speed.
The regulator's should force the ISP's to advertise what they can actually deliver, not this unlimited 20Mbit crap, that none of them can.
btw this post is uk based, so please adjust all figures for your relevant crackpot nation.
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