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British ISPs Could 'Charge Per Device'
Barence writes "British ISPs could start charging customers depending on which device or which type of data they're using, according to a networks expert. 'The iPad created a very interesting situation for the operators, where the devices themselves generated additional loads for the networks,' said Owen Cole, technical director at F5 Networks. 'The operators said "If we have devices that are generating work for us, this gives us the ability to introduce a different billing model."' 'The operators launched special billing packages for it, which is in direct contravention to net neutrality,' said Owen. 'If things are left to just be driven by market economics, we could end up with people paying for the amount of data that they consume to every device and that would not be a fair way to approach the market.' Owen also foresees a billing system that charges less for non-urgent data, with an email costing less per bit than either Skype or video packets that need immediate delivery."
Congrads, you got first post. But was the Urgent Packet Delivery Fee worth it?
OK, not really, but it is really fucking stupid.
I would advise against this type of "hypothetical model" unless you want to slow innovation and business growth.
I would also advise against it because the industry is leading consumers into an "online world", where all data will exist.
If infrastructure can not handle the load (how much dark fiber do we have in the world?), then it needs to catch up. Living off the 90s infrastructure boon is just not going to cut it.
...and now our bandwidth too? When will this madness end?
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
These people seem like simple leeches to me. You just want an internet connection. Your probably connecting to your own router doing your own networking.
That's one connection
So you give me the internet and I'll give you the cash. Nobody needs to get screwed.
Wait... Your company bribed a politician, didn't it.
2 years ago I got an Android phone on my own (not through my Operator). I called them to add 'data' to my plan and they wanted to know if it was an iPhone or an Android as they had 2 different plans. They were the same price so I investigated a bit. It turns out that they block http requests if the referrer field doesn't contain 'Android'. Like that's gonna stop me from using the phone as a 3G hotspot for the rest of the bus, right.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
But they're completely possible and it's not unreasonable (in my opinion) to expect it to happen. We've already seen an instance where Comcast blocked/throttled bittorrent in the US.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
I means these blokes are in boardrooms licking their proverbial chops, and we are on the pick wheel.
Its look like the rapacious beginnings of the cable industry all over again, but this time you count amongst you shaledowns fees for your refrigerator's call to the repairman. 'wonder if there will be an opt out for that?
its looking spooky, people.
If it's a stereo to 5.1 upmix, you don't. You pay 16x.
Unfair, I hear you say? But no! You've got your left channel, your right channel, your center (using data from left and right channels), your left surround (using data from left and right channels), and your right surround (using data from left and right channels).
Clearly that's eight separate audio channels in simultaneous use, requiring eight times the licensing fees. And you do have two ears, right? So you're listening to each of those eight channels twice over...
Now, pay up, serf!
Translation:
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I can see where they are coming from, in a sense: you should pay for how much you use, which is hard to argue against. After all, that's how we pay for other resources we use - I don't use the internet for watching movies or other high-bandwith things, so why should I pay more to support those that do?
However, what they propose is almost exactly the opposite of paying for what you use; it's like being billed for water by measuring the size of your garden or the number of taps in the home. And just as for water, it is perfectly easy to measure the actual consumption; if they don't know how, I am sure there is a large proportion of /. readers who can help them figure it out.
It's the simplest mechanic of leverage. Shift general *perception* by suuggesting something insane, then 'settle' with a half measure.
It's all about making net neutrality seem like an extreme Communist Terrorist conspiracy instead of reasonable practice. Eventually, you just know they'd charge per device though.
My brdbnd ISP DS chg me pr crtcr typd, u insnstv cld.
"We live in a global world" - Harvey Pitt, former Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman
iPads don't use anymore bandwidth than any other device will that you can watch over the air video on. iPads cannot in principle do anything at all any other computer cannot do. This is pure gouging. Note that it is the cellular carriers themselves that have pushed video on command. The goal is good enough broadband that these and many many other applications can run for everyone everywhere. This is not achieved by nickel and dime-ing us.
Would you like to buy a vowel?
Sent from my PDP-11
The catch right there is that most P2P and bittorrent traffic is not time sensitive and could occur in off peak times.
As for shifting traffic from peak to off peak as they are fantasising, firstly it requires incredibly invasive data monitoring and secondly it forces the users devices to either continually cycle over for hours on end trying to send traffic or the ISP must build in enormous data storage capacity to hold data for hours on end.
Incumbent telecoms want to keep making huge profits from local and long distance calls and despise VOIP and secondly want to establish content distribution monopolies on their networks. The reality at one stage, when we made a call we had our very own copper line and could send and receive as much data as possible down it. With fibre optic multiple communications share the same line and they want to make that line as profitable as possible and they simply do that via gross and extreme overselling, selling far more bandwidth than they have access to. They want to legally sell a lie, they want to sell you bandwidth and by the delusion of modern legal shenanigans and government corruption deny you the use of what they have sold you because they never had it to sell. By law they should be forced to detail what bandwidth they actually have available with simultaneous transmission to all their customers, as part of the advertised bandwidth.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
1) British law has no interpretation of "free speech". None. It's an assumed "right", not an actual one. Funnily, we seem to do a better job than those countries *WITH* such laws.
2) Even in countries that proclaim "free speech", nobody is ever obliged to provide you with a platform. They can't *stop* you from saying what you want, but they aren't obliged to publish your every word online, or in the papers, or the 10 o'clock news.
You can say what you like (under certain limitations, in ANY country that has "free speech") but nobody is obliged to give you a soapbox. Certainly not your ISP, who can cut you off if their T&C's say you shouldn't swear on their forums, in theory.
3) The ISP's are putting out a code to discuss traffic management, which most of the big ISP's are signed up to. Nowhere does it mention an inherent restriction on free speech. You might have to pay for to push your speech over bittorrent than over email, but see #2.
4) The UK is actually pretty aware of what's happening. ID cards were scrapped last year, by public demand, before they were ever used. It's actually the second time we've scrapped them because they were made compulsory during the War for security reasons and then we got rid of them when they were no longer required. It's MUCH harder to get rid of something you've spent government money on to establish and which would be cheaper to keep running, but we've done it twice.
We are one of the few countries in the world that *doesn't* have an ID system - I do *not* have to own any ID whatsoever, I certainly don't have to carry it on me at any time, and if I don't drive/fly then I probably don't have a passport or driver's license and thus no formal ID whatsoever, and yet I still could live quite happily in the country. You can open a bank account with a birth certificate and an electricity bill, if you want (i.e. something that says X was born on day Y with no way to prove you're X).
I *do* now drive and fly so I have license and passport but I've only *ever* been asked for them when driving (to ensure I had a valid licence, and it was only by luck I was carrying it because I'm not required to, and could instead present it within 14 days at the police station of my choice at a police officer's insistence AT BEST) and for crossing international borders - at the insistence of a foreign entity (the British passport has a kind of mystique about it outside the UK - nobody bothers to check them, or see the "UK" part and then wave you through).
My ID spends more of its life gathering dust than anything else. Sure sign of 1984, that is. Or I could mention that our privacy and data protection laws are some of the best in the world. Or I could mention that we have things like Hyde Park Corner. Or I could mention that, actually, for a country with NO formal rights to free speech, etc. that we're actually pretty damn high up on the list of freedoms we *do* enjoy.
Stop reading the tabloids, and instead look at what a UK person does during their lives compared to any other country (including the US!). Driving laws (ever roll through a stop sign in the US? I once saw a guy who "failed to come to a complete stop" at the line and he was taken out of the car at gunpoint. Do it in the UK and nobody would even notice. Which one is more reminiscent of 1984?). Privacy laws. Data laws. Telecoms laws (we made BT scrap Phorm, and initiated a legal case). Equality laws. And they *work*, for the most part. Sure, Phorm should have never got off the ground, or the ID card scheme, but when they do and come to the public knowledge, they end up dying a death.
Come live in the UK, and see what a real country is like. You can cross the road where you like, and everything.
When companies are adding caps etc it is because they believe it will decrease costs. If there is competition in the market then that saving will, reasonably, quickly make its way through to lower costs to consumers. If there isn't competition, that saving will be kept as pure profit indefinitely. Charging for use isn't inherently evil, even though internet use has a very low variable cost, sharing the fixed costs of infrastructure etc based on level of use is acceptable.
The thing that I have a massive issue with is when companies start to differentiate based on content provider. I'd like to believe that this could work fine in a free market, sadly I don't think it will. Small businesses have boomed on the internet, and I doubt the likes of Skype, Youtube etc would have come about if the only way to get 'priority' on each ISPs network was to pay up.
1) British law has no interpretation of "free speech". None. It's an assumed "right", not an actual one. Funnily, we seem to do a better job than those countries *WITH* such laws.
I too am a fan of our uncodified constitution but you went a bit too far here. The European Convention on Human Rights, to which the UK is a signatory, has been in force since 3rd September 1953 and became directly enforceable in UK courts when the Human Rights Act 1998 came into force. Article 10, taken from Schedule 1 to the 1998 Act:
Article 10
Freedom of expression
1 Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers. This Article shall not prevent States from requiring the licensing of broadcasting, television or cinema enterprises.
2 The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary.
Firstly, the extra volume created for ISPs by iPads is close to zero: they're being used as extra devices in houses, and aren't capable of running any of the bandwidth-intensive P2P applications that (when they're pimping different things) ISPs and vendors are keen to tell us represent 90% of their volume.
Secondly, this is a vendor of DPI kit pushing applications for DPI. But it's a doomed endeavour. It would be impossible to split tariffing based on numbers of devices as the market would react with domestic proxies if NAT didn't provide enough aggregation. So the only way it could conceivably be done would be by inspecting packets at close quarters to see which application is being run. At which point the market would respond with encryption.
It does apply if they try to charge you per IP. I'd sure as hell NAT my devices then. Try reading the context to his post. I'd think it would also be useful if you have any still useful IPv4-only devices at home, an IPv6 NAT could enable that device to interface with the outside world by doing IPv6 DNS resolution, etc for it.
which is totally what she said
You just demonstrated the Anon's point perfectly. mirix gave a reason for users to want to NAT IPv6 - to avoid per-IP billing. You then say a lot of hoopla without addressing the point that IPv6 NAT would be useful in a per-IP billing situation.
Is per-IP billing stupid and unwarranted with IPv6? Yep. Will it exist? Almost certainly.
...finding more ways to charge you more for the same service you've had for years.
Hey ISPs? I've got a mind blowing idea, how about you ACTUALLY IMPROVE YOUR SERVICE to keep up with today's standards, instead of trying to live by the standards of the 90s.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
This rant might make sense if you completely ignore the context of the discussion, which is about how IPv6 would make it easy for ISPs to see how many different devices people were using and charge accordingly.
Nobody is trying to take things outside of that context except for you, and you are seemingly only doing it for the purpose of justifying a rant.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
It was my understanding that the zealots prevailed, and IPv6 NAT was declared a "nonfeature".
As if nobody is going to make software that does it anyway.
What is a business supposed to do when their ISP gives them IPv6 pubic addresses but they still have thousands of IPv4 computers with private IPv4 addresses and site local software that doesn't support IPv6?
IPv6 Privacy Extensions are a lame attempt to do what NAT does without NAT. And it doesn't even work -- if you have five PCs each with one IPv6 addresses all connected to the same host at the same time, it's obvious that you have at least five PCs. Moreover, if different machines have different usage profiles then you can track them individually as they change their addresses based on their usage profiles, instead of having all usage aggregated behind one IP address. And making machines change their addresses with a higher frequency can actually make it worse because it makes it more likely that a machine will change its address in the middle of a TCP connection, which will have to be reopened using the new address, making it pretty obvious what happened.
To make it work fully you would have to assign multiple IP addresses to each machine simultaneously, one for each connection it has open -- but that's just NAT by another name, using part of the IP address in place of the port number.