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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?"
Sorry, I think thats a terrible idea. One of the major benefits of the Internet is its inherent globalization. You don't have to worry about talking to someone in Russia and paying $5 a minute to the phone company, its the same cost as connecting to a site next door.
Just think how people's lives would be different if international or long distance phone charges didn't exist. How many times have you heard of someone waiting until a certain time of day to make a really long distance call? Or using Skype or some other Internet-based replacement for phone calls to get around the fees?
What you're proposing is basically to bring that sort of thing to the Internet itself, and I can't say that I want to wait until 2AM to save on my bandwidth bill.
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!
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
Oh dear. Do you actually believe that's a possibility with private companies in charge? No, if anything like your idea happens, we'll keep on paying our flat fees, *plus* all those fun extras.
We had this "bandwidth bill" back in the form of hours on dial up services. It sucked. We need no "bandwidth bills" the ISPs need to either A) improve their network and offer us unlimited service or B) decrease speed in order to offer unlimited service. All "bandwidth bills" are going to make us do is take a huge step backwards in the form of good software. If someone isn't going to pay the $3 for downloading a 700 MB ISO for Ubuntu to try it the software is no longer really "Free" and we go back to the '80s style of paying for crappy software rather then just downloading it.
There is no "disagree" moderation, and troll, flamebait and overrated are not valid substitutes
>>There's a ton of spare bandwidth at night.
I don't know where you get this from. As an engineer for an ISP, our low point is only from approx 2-4 am. Bittorrent and other P2P clients left running all night still consume constant traffic in both directions.
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.
Here, I'll pay for it. Whom do I make the check out to?
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
+5: Implication that Ubuntu is crappy software
1178161 is prime...
What is your basis for claiming that the internet is clogged and choked up? With few exceptions, the internet is working just fine, thank you very much. Moving to a consumption-based billing model is nothing more than an excuse for the telecommunications providers to extract more money and perform fewer upgrades. The notion that ISPs are buckling under the weight of P2P and YouTube is even more retarded when you consider that P2P protocols by their nature prefer to use fast, local peers and companies like Google use backhaul networks to deliver content to local peering points.
The current model is elegant in that the exchanges between ISPs are essentially free. If Comcast/AT&T/Time Warner/etc are suddenly able to charge me in KB/s or have a tariff for each Email/IM sent like the wireless carriers do, someday they'll wake up and say "Hey, let's charge Verizon for accessing our customers!" Then the whole system breaks down, and you time travel back to 1989 when you had Prodigy (the IBM/Sears version), Compuserve and GEnie.
I work in an organization that maintains a carrier-grade private network that connects about 25,000 locations. But since even carrier-grade equipment has a relatively short lifespan, routine infrastructure refreshes give us next-generation technology, automatically, whether we need it or not. In 2004, it would have cost millions for ISPs to implement metro Gigabit networks to connect customer nodes... but today, equipment swap-outs will essentially give them that capability for next to nothing. In 2012/2013 when today's new equipment is obsolete, 10G ethernet will be the norm.
When your local transportation department discovers that traffic patterns have changed, they don't start billing you for your time on the highways. They figure out what the problem is, re-engineer traffic signaling or change maintenance schedules to widen/pave/etc roads. ISPs need to do the same.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
If we had a real market, I would agree with you about competitiveness in pricing and all. Unfortunately, we don't have one. Even when there is an appearance of an open market in the Internet service business, it all becomes fixated on leased lines and certain other dependencies on a few providers who have built their infrastructure by neccesity of other services they have a monopoly on.
If ATT/SBC or time warner or cox would be forced to spin off their infrastructure and offer flat rate charges to competitors for the same prices as themselves, it might be a free market. But we have to remember that they got their lines and infrastructure as an ancillary to their long time protected monopoly and government help in getting right of ways and so on. They are basically benefiting by their roles in other areas as to this point which makes or gives them an unfair advantage and closes the idea of a free market.
We have attempted to negate this advantage by requiring them to lease the lines and infrastructure to other companies at costs but we all know how costs can be manipulated. This doesn't even cover all avenues of infrastructure either, take time warner for example, they are under no obligation to lease their lines for Internet usage except for their conditions to purchasing AOL back in the 90's. Aol has since been spun off and they are free to mark up their "cost" significantly to their advantage. Cox and Covad networks are relatively the same with cable Internet. DSL on the other hand is heavily regulated as far as the infrastructure goes with a caveat of requiring a certain amount of investment capabilities which makes it easier to gain access if you are a large organization. But if your attempting to work with Cable access, your not really going to get anything unless your a very large organization like Earthlink or are partnering with the cable company to supply re-branded service at a dictated cost. You don't really get big over night and hence the problem of not being able to provide the service needed to get big enough to provide the service.
In short, there are too many limitations and non-natural barriers to the market to even consider the internet infrastructure a free market that could allow a perfect competition. Look at Verizon with their FIOS, they are using their utility right of way and telco business to run fiber and replace their out dated copper infrastructure with the fiber needed to provide the FIOS which we have read about plenty of times. Almost all other last mile deployments without this utility protection have failed for several reasons but mainly because of all the hurdles that non utility companies face.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
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