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AT&T's Metered Billing Off By Up To 4,700%
jfruhlinger writes "Metered billing for home Internet service may be the way of the future. But shouldn't we have the right to expect that the meters will at least be accurate? As AT&T moves its DSL and fiber customers to plans where they'll have to pay for overages, some users have noticed that the company's assessment of how much data is being used can be wildly inaccurate."
This is a schlock outfit, no better than Comcast: the AT&T of old is long gone now.
What I'd like for them to do is tell me what kinds of traffic are being counted on my bill (do port scans count? What about all the other crap that floats around the Internet that happens to have my IP in it?) Do they provide monitoring tools that I can use to verify my usage, and compare against what my router tells me I've used? If not, then they can make up anything they want and bill me for it, and knowing AT&T^h^h^h^h SBC that's exactly what they will do.
Now we start to understand why the government used to enforce quality of service standards. The fact that these guys got an exception for data services is just too bad.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I can see a 50-state lawsuit coming out of this. Wonder how ATT feels about taking on 50 government all at the same time.
Bastards.
- It reminds me how they tried to charge me extra for my 80s-era 1200 baud modem (i.e. ~1 kbit/s). I was paying for "unlimited phone calls" rather than per-call billing, but they said my 16-hour per day usage was excessive and tried to charge me an extra "data fee". I threw the letter in the trash.
Later-on we got phone company choice, and I switched away from ATT.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
complain to the state attorney general and make them sue.
Gas and power meters are certified and are at your home and not in some office.
The more and more these internet providers try to screw their customers, whether purposefully or inadvertently, the more we move to making broadband a public utility. If companies can't act responsibly, the only other option, in this semi-monopoly, is to get the feds involved.
If the correct charge is $0.01, and I'm instead charged $4.80, that's a 4700% difference but a significantly different matter than, say, getting charged $480 rather than $1. When it comes to people being overcharged, I'd much rather have the absolute figures as our measurement of how much SBC is being a corporate jackass.
I am officially gone from
It ends up being a power grab, much like the old days were. That, and it has a not-so-nice way of killing innovation.
The issue is largely one of accountability. For example, I have electric and natural gas service at my house. There are meters out back: they're built to government standards, are quite reliable and generally track my usage very well. Occasionally, I get a bill in the mail that has some outrageous numbers on it (I once got an electric bill for some three thousand dollars one month.) Usually that's because the meter reader mistyped something into his computer, or because of some issue with their billing system. Regardless, I still have the meter itself to fall back on, and I can call up the utility and either request a new reading or just give it to them over the phone and have the bill corrected. When I got that big bill, I was asked to go take a manual reading, and to just "tear up that bill, will send you a new one. Sorry for the inconvenience." No problem.
That's not what's going to happen here: AT&T is expecting people to just accept whatever usage they decide to bill for, with no recourse whatsoever if it turns out that they're wrong. And this will happen, with monotonous regularity, and most people will just pay because they have no idea what a gigabyte is, and how it relates to what they actually do with their computer online, and because Internet access is becoming less and less of a disposable luxury for millions of people.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Metered internet is not the future.
As described, it doesn't even make any sense either the reasons why or the implementation.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
The U-verse data measurement report is currently under construction. When completed, you will be notified if your usage exceeds the allowance. Until that time, U-verse customers should not be concerned about their usage patterns for billing purposes.
Wouldn't it be nice to get enough notice to evaluate if AT&T's product meets my needs? Alas, my router tells me I've used 230 GB over the last month; that's pretty close to their 250GB limit, and if the numbers are 'fuzzy' then all bets are off.
Because U-Verse TV service is IP-delivered, I'd like assurances that they're not including this traffic in any metering - I'm already paying for this content and its delivery on the 'TV' portion of my bill.
Eh? While i'm against the metering stuff to an extent, this statement is just nuts. This can provide the money TO innovate.
No, it won't: the big boys have a vested interest in only offering us the minimum service levels they can get away with (they've been petitioning the FCC to lower the definition of "broadband" in the U.S.) and have no particular desire to innovate. They just don't: these are money grubbers whose interest is in pleasing the stockholder first and the customer second (if at all.) AT&T is doing this now because they feel they've sucked enough customers off of Comcast's crappy service and can afford to start putting the screws to us just as that Robertson asshole did.
If they are in the public eye, financially, they will have to do something with all that money.
Sure. But if you think that automatically means network upgrades you are just nuts. They'll bank the money, invest it on the stock market, whatever they think will make them more money.
... they took the money and ran. In the meantime, we're stuck with the likes of cable and U-Verse's VDSL.
But I think the GP was referring to innovation on the part of Web and Internet services offered by third-parties, not the ISPs themselves (correct me if I'm wrong.) Take Youtube; it's bandwidth-hungry but incredibly popular: would it be so if people were paying by the megabyte? What other services do we enjoy that use substantial bandwidth that might never have existed if providers were nickel-and-diming us to death?
We need to be moving forward, making bandwidth cheaper and faster. Look, they got nearly a hundred billion dollars in tax breaks to build out a nationwide truly high-speed network
So no, I don't expect SBC/AT&T, Comcast or any of these outfits to roll their extra profits back into the network.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
It is not illegal to offer a metering service without the customer has access to said meter? It was my understanding that such services, like the water company, electric and gas MUST have a meter available for their customer to read as well, not because they are super nice guys, but because US law mandates it.
How is metered internet service different?
If they insist on saying, well the utilities do it this way and that way, and when they insist on acting like utility, should they not also be bound by the same rules?
>>>meter reader mistyped
Really? Our meters were upgraded to eliminate human readers, by sending the data over the phone line (or possibly the electric line - not sure which).
>>>most people will just pay because they have no idea what a gigabyte is
I hope they're smarter than that. If I received a $200 bill from my ISP, even if I didn't know what a gigabyte was, I'd demand an explanation from their customer service associates.
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Isn't billing based on inaccurate weights and measures fraud?
It should have its incorporation revoked and all top executives and board members barred from ever being in the telecom business again.
These are the same players from the time when the first break up occurred. They did not learn their lesson about abusing their position, building monopoly and being bad for the consumer. They had their chance to straighten up and fly right. They can't be trusted to behave.
No they're not. SBC bought the old AT&T, and kept the name AT&T. What you have are the people who operated the worst of the original thirteen Baby Bells now running the show. Which is, I agree, not an improvement. Also, whatever you want to say about the old AT&T, remember that they operated under some very strict regulation, and did provide us, for a very long time, with about the best phone service in the world. Much of the problem we have now is that none of the big ISPs operate under any real regulation anymore, no real service standards apply: they can do pretty much whatever they want with little if any penalty.
But yeah, I think that most of the big players ought to be up on anti-trust charges at some point. What they're doing is not in the consumers' interest at any level.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Like someone on the comments section of the article said.. what about if someone is ping flooding you, DDoS'ing, or otherwise sending traffic your way... here's a very true story about a similar situation my friend had with Nextel:
Years ago my friend had Nextel, and I sent him a text bomb (basically I just stuck his cell # into the TO field as many times as I could on a single text message and hit "send". After it sent, I went into the sent messages and just kept hitting "resend".)
So he received around 100 or so messages. I didn't know his nextel plan didn't include texting, and he'd be charge $0.25 per message. That's about $20 bucks out of his pocket FOR NOTHING.
He called Nextel and explained.. and got no where. So he bitched.. still got no where. After 2 hours on the phone trying different people and supervisors bitching about "how can you charge me 25 cents a message for messages A> I don't want, and B> I can't stop/block from coming in?!
Their solution was "well we can block all text messages".. at that point he told them to go f' themselves if they can't run their damn network correctly and understand how you could cause someone you disliked to have a HUGE phone bill, and told them right then and there he was leaving their messed up network. He promptly switched and ported his number.
But it just goes to show they DON'T take those situations into account, or just don't CARE about those situations.. which either way is a very sad thing indeed.
>>>meter reader mistyped
Really? Our meters were upgraded to eliminate human readers, by sending the data over the phone line (or possibly the electric line - not sure which).
>>>most people will just pay because they have no idea what a gigabyte is
I hope they're smarter than that. If I received a $200 bill from my ISP, even if I didn't know what a gigabyte was, I'd demand an explanation from their customer service associates.
This was a few years ago, I know they were still doing manual reads. Now I know my gas meter was upgraded: they still have a meter reader come by but there's a small black box on the front of the house. I think he just walks by and grabs a reading with a handheld of some kind, or maybe it goes over the power line or something, like you said. I don't know if my electric meter was upgraded or not: I haven't any problems since then.
That's not the point though: I was able to instantly correct the mistake because I had an accurate reference for my actual usage. I didn't have to depend upon some remote computer system to provide me with a tally of how many kilowatt-hours I'd used, a machine that is not under my control, and can't be argued with.
And we're not talking about people getting giant bills. What we are talking about is the potential for deliberate, systematic overbilling: small amounts that the subscriber might not even notice but that add up to billions over time. Matter of fact, that's guaranteed to happen. Didn't Verizon get busted for it recently? It's just too tempting: they just shouldn't be allowed to do it unless there are regulatory safeguards in place.
With a fixed bill every month, you immediately notice a rate increase (or an increase in Local, State and Federal fees, although some ISPs have put fake charges there too, so people will think that it's the "guv'mint" that raised their bill.) With metered billing, how will you know if you're being ripped off if there's an extra buck on your bill each month? Far too much potential for fraud here.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Where I live I have two choices, AT&T and Comcast. It's like trying to pick a side to root for on the Ostfront in WWII. Can we root against them both?
I've gone through a six month period of terrible service with the AT&T fuckers. Service keeps dropping out, problem isn't on my end. Their fucking Indians don't have any clue what's going on with the service techs over here, nobody updates the account info properly, nobody gives a damn. And while we're at it, why do I have to type in my phone number for them to route it properly if they're just going to ask me what it is when I get there?
The problem is that there's no fucking free market. There is no competition. There's a duopoly with each choice being craptastic. The next pro-business cheerleader who goes teary-eyed about the marketplace of choice is getting my fist in his gob.
"The human toll here looks to be much worse than the economic toll and we can be grateful for that."
-- Larry Kudlow, CNBC host and failed human being
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Thing is, in the countries where metering is standard, there's also a choice of metered plans. So if 300 GB isn't enough for you, then no problems, pay another $5 or $10/month and upgrade to a higher-allowance plan.
For example my current ISP (in Australia, FWIW) has the following ADSL2+ (24 Mbps down/1 Mbps up) plans at the moment.
30 GB
150 GB
250 GB
350 GB
600 GB
1 TB
I'm currently on the 150 GB plan and am lucky to use more than half of that on an average month. But if my usage patterns changed I'd upgrade to the 250 or 350 GB plan, which aren't that much more expensive. (Incidentally, traffic from Steam and quite a few other popular sources is 'free' on my ISP, i.e. not counted towards my usage - as a gamer this makes a huge difference and is one of the reasons I picked this particular ISP).
Anyway, my point is that metered plans are fine provided you have the option to pick a plan that suits your natural usage of the Internet. From what I can tell though, what's happening in the US is that they are starting to meter plans but NOT offering a choice of different plans. They are basically doing a 'one size fits all, and if it doesn't suit your needs, tough luck' approach. Which sucks. :(
The issue is largely one of accountability. For example, I have electric and natural gas service at my house. There are meters out back: they're built to government standards, are quite reliable and generally track my usage very well.
The difference is that when you use more natural gas, the gas company has to buy more natural gas. When you use more electricity, the power company has to put more coal in their furnaces. When you use more bandwidth, unless the network was already at 100% capacity, it costs the ISP nothing and the capacity you would consume would otherwise go to waste. If the network is at 100% capacity then it needs to be expanded whether there is metered billing or not. That is, unless you set the metered rate so high that it will materially suppress usage -- also known as "destroying innovation" -- in which case everyone will get less service for more money since you're now paying extra usage fees but the ISP no longer needs to expand capacity because metered billing is suppressing usage, so all the extra money goes to profit.
Metered billing is the model of perpetual stagnation. It gives the ISP an incentive to never upgrade because the more scarcity there is, the more they can charge for it. Why on Earth would they make a capital investment to alleviate a supply shortfall, the result of which would be lower prices to customers? They certainly have no real competition to make them do it.
If I'm paying for PPPoE and ATM overhead, I'm gonna be pissed.
AT&T must be measuring bits at the DSLAM, if what they're reporting is anywhere close to being accurate. If a 150GB "cap" includes the approx. .5% PPPoE and 10+% ATM overhead, what I'm seeing means that my 150GB cap is in reality closer to 135GB.
Sucks.
Another problem here in the US, like said before, we lack choice. Where I live my choices are TW cable or ATT, with those options they can both screw me knowing that the other option is no better.
What a bunch of bullshit. When AT&T ruled the earth, you couldn't connect anything but a Company Approved Phone [tm] to their lines, otherwise something might explode. Oh, and you can't buy a phone from the store, you have to rent one from the company store. You can have any color you like, as long as it's black.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
If your numbers don't match mine, than you're padding the traffic.
Sure. But they're not going to care about your router's stats.
Exactly. I once tried to tell a police officer that I wasn't going as fast as he said I was. I even measured it with my speedometer. Apparently, the people making the rules don't care too much for your opinion if it is different from theirs.
I'd suggest you take them to court, but people have been taking telecoms to court in the USA for decades... and you're still having the same problem - which leads me to believe that it's the system that's broken, not the players. Since you can't change the system... *shrugs*
Quartz Extreme and Core Image. Are there any other real reasons to spend all that money on generic hardware?
Our local cable internet provider has a 100Gb monthly cap in place. A few months ago, a friend of mine called in a panic because here usual $52 internet bill had come in at over $600. The first thing I did was check the daily breakdown of her usage on the ISP's website. It showed a fairly consistent 16Gb a day of usage. Bear in mind that this is a woman who lives alone, is totally non-technical and has one PC hooked up to a cable modem. No wireless, no laptop, no consoles, nothing. I was showing here the daily usage when she remembered that at the start of the month, she was visiting a relative out of state. Those days still showed the 16Gb a day. I checked the Windows event logs for those days - nothing at all, which fitted pretty well with her insistence that the PC was switched off. So called up the ISP. After getting nowhere with billing, I asked for the tech support people. Was pretty much told that I was lying and she wasn't going to gt out of paying the bill. Their attitude was that their system was foolproof and that there must have been someone in the house using the Internet that weekend she was away. No one else has a key and the house sits on an acre lot on the outskirts of town. Then the support guy told me that the metering was still showing high usage in real time. I pulled the plug on the cable modem and guess what? No change in the metering. Asked him to explain that and was told again that I must be "mistaken". After getting escalated yet again, I finally got them to cancel the overage charge but they still wouldn't accept that there was a problem on their end. My friend is now on a wireless Internet provider now and the software I installed shows a pretty ocnsistent usage of around 6Gb a month.
Well, the only thing we can really do about it is:
Write your congress-folks... Start doing it. Tell them to give the carriers a choice:
1) Don't meter.
2) Submit to utility-style regulation...
Make them pick their poison.
What a bunch of bullshit. When AT&T ruled the earth, you couldn't connect anything but a Company Approved Phone [tm] to their lines, otherwise something might explode. Oh, and you can't buy a phone from the store, you have to rent one from the company store. You can have any color you like, as long as it's black.
I wasn't talking about subscriber level equipment. The service worked, it worked well, and that was what was required of AT&T. How often did your phone service simply not work? Sure, AT&T owned the phones ... but they were built like brick outhouses. Their technicians were generally far more competent and well-trained, the network itself better maintained. "Better" is a relative term. All I know is that nowadays (and I have AT&T U-Verse for my phone service) is that I'm subject to more outages, poor quality phone calls, and other crap than I ever had in the days before the breakup.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Except they won't be sticking you for $200 old CPU dude, they'll be sticking you for $2 and you will pay which just gives them an incentive to stick you for $3 next month. think about how many customers AT&T has, now figure up what they'll make if they overcharge 40% by $2 and 60% by $3. Wow what nice profits!
Trust me, I'm stuck on Cox (nice name since they're dicks) that does the metered crap (35Gb a month? WTF?) and they go out of their way to keep you from finding out what you've used. No meters, no gauges, just their word for it. Oh you can complain and they're quick to drop it, but how many don't?
Metering on a service with no government regulation when it comes to meters is a BAD IDEA in capital letters. imagine if you just had to take each gas stations word for it that they gave you a gallon? How many do you think would be shortchanging you? It doesn't take much with a huge client base to clean up my friends, not much at all.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
The difference is that when you use more natural gas, the gas company has to buy more natural gas.
Well, that's true, but that just means that the company has a vested interest in accurate billing so they don't lose money. As you point out, ISPs have a vested interest in exactly the opposite, so I agree with you about metered billing.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Perhaps the price per megabyte needs to be regulated, as well as the method of measuring that usage?
I don't see how that would fix it. The problem is that there is no sensible price. If you set the megabyte price low enough that it doesn't suppress usage then you might as well have flat rate pricing for all the difference it makes. To the extent that you set it higher so that it does suppress usage, you create exactly that amount of disincentive for capacity upgrades -- because who needs more supply if high prices are driving down demand?
Metered billing is, literally, raising prices to reduce demand. That is precisely the opposite of what we want, which is to increase supply and have lower prices.
I'm usually against increased regulation, but looks to be true that there's no free market way to deal with what appears to be another natural monopoly in place. Personally, I think this should become a public works project now, like power and the sewers. Yes, we'll probably have companies operating the infrastructure, but it needs to be regulated to provide access for everyone and the ability to upgrade it not based on a pricing model, but based on increased demand. It's very true that the backbone providers have little incentive to upgrade when they can charge more for scarcity. The only reason that they will do so is to make sure that they can keep adding a quantity of customers at some minimum bandwidth allocation. Quality, however, means capital improvements without getting more money for their effort.
Free market mechanics break down when you can't assure sufficient competition. The drive for efficiency becomes all consuming, and without the competition, the company is free to look out for itself and not care about the customer above a certain minimum level.
The only real hope for real competition, is something like reliable metropolitan-area wireless access. If you don't need actual physical infrastructure all the way to the house, you have the chance for local providers to compete. If you can hook those local providers up to government-owned fat pipes, which will be driven by voters wanting more shiny, as opposed to corporations wanting more profit, you have a chance. All you then have to do is use anti-trust to prevent the big boys from buying up all the wireless providers.
Of course, whenever you have the government involved, you have your own set of issues (like privacy and waste), but they manage to operate the infrastructure decently for the most part, so I think they could handle unfettered access as a utility, especially on the backbone side of it.
the electronics that deliver the service to you consume no electricity at all
The electronics consume effectively the same amount of electricity regardless of the transfer rate or number of active connections. To the extent that there is any difference at all, it's negligible.
the ISP doesn't in turn have to pay for bandwidth connections to other ISP
It works the same way for upstream connections. Metered billing is bad whether it's between the ISP and the end user or between the backbone provider and the ISP. The fact that it may exist in one place is no reason to extend it somewhere else; it should be eliminated across the board.
You might also mention to your congress-critter that letting AT&T buy T-Mobile is anti-competitive, anti-consumer and violates the spirit of the anti-trust laws that are already on the books.
Congress can still put the brakes on this merger, and it's in our interest to do everything we can to make sure the merger is stopped.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Excerpted from ScrewMaster (602015)'s rant on iLECs and metered Internet usage:
the big boys have a vested interest in only offering us the minimum service levels they can get away with ... and have no particular desire to innovate. They just don't: these are money grubbers whose interest is in pleasing the stockholder first and the customer second (if at all.)
That behavior is far from confined to the telco industry. In fact, it's ubiquitous within the U.S. business sector, and nearly as much so in the rest of the capitalist world. Virtually across the board, this is because they're run by MBAs. MBAs have it hammered into them from admission to matriculation that increasing shareholder value at all costs is not simply their central duty, but indeed their only goal in life (aside from craven self-advancement, that is). And at no time are they ever led to question whether the highest, best good is best served by delivering that increased value over the shortest term possible (otherwise known as the "what have you done for me THIS quarter?" principle). Because, hey, by the time the problems inherent to this relentless short-term focus become apparent, the suits that inflicted them have long since been wooed away to positions of greater power, pay grade, and perks elsewhere, and it will be someone else's responsibility to return the company to record (short-term) profitability. And share price. Temporarily.
Circle of deceit, baby. It's a beautiful thing.
Check out my novel.
Build your own "meter" ... Setup a cheap little spare box with 2 nic cards in bridged mode.They will not require a Real IP address so anyone can set this up!! Then just install bandwidthd and Apache2. It may not be perfect but, at least YOU will know about what your usage is and have something to show to back you up.
I've had this setup for years now and Thankfully I've never needed it...sure nice to know what my systems are doing bandwidth wise though!!
Doubt anyone here would need it it but, if someone does need some help with this setup feel free to email me.
And it still won't mean a thing:
Why can't
We already know a flat fee for unlimited bandwidth is unworkable.
How is it that we know that? The only problem with it is that the ISPs have taken all the money they should have been using to increase capacity and instead used it to buy each other up and line their own pockets. The solution to that is to either bring about competition (e.g. municipal fiber) or to pass legislation requiring them to make upgrades. Metered billing does nothing -- they would still have no competition and no incentive to expand capacity, and any solution that gets them to expand capacity sufficiently would eliminate any use for metered billing.
increased usage *does* cost them more via increased electricity usage
Let's go ahead and measure the actual increased electrical usage caused by increased transfer rates and make that the usage charge then. But when it turns out to be something like one cent per 100GB, we might realize that the cost of metering exceeds the metering charge.
It is impractical, if not impossible, to buy phone lines that are so big that every user can use the network at 100% and not saturate the link. It would sit there 90% unused.
It's a good thing they don't actually have to do that. All they have to do is build enough capacity for the expected usage of actual customers -- which is what they have to do either way. The only thing metering even has the potential to do is to suppress demand by charging artificially high prices -- which is a bad thing, because we like demand for bandwidth. It spurs demand for services, which provides incentive for innovation, creates jobs, etc.
it finances the upgrades
The ISPs already have more than enough money to finance the upgrades. But nobody is forcing them to actually make the upgrades, so they instead use the money to buy each other and line their pockets. Metered billing would provide them with more money, but how would it give them any incentive to make more upgrades? Especially if it causes usage to go down?
it causes them to think twice about downloading every fucking Buffy episode in 4000k resolution.
Which is half the problem. It causes services like Netflix and YouTube to have fewer customers, which stifles innovation and encourages consolidation in that sector.
The fact that they may be operating at less than 100% capacity is not a good reason for them not to charge you to use it.
Are you serious? That's the exact reason they shouldn't charge you to use it. No one benefits from equipment going idle.
It costs money to run a network. The more use, the more load, the more electricity consumption, the more maintenance.
In other utilities the amount of costs that come with increase utilization are significant. A ton of coal costs a lot of money. In broadband they are trivial -- the amount of extra electricity used because an interface has more packets going through it is totally immaterial, and there are no increased maintenance costs at all. Moreover, replacing a 1Gbps router with a 10Gbps router is a one time cost that neither increases electrical consumption nor maintenance costs -- in fact, it can decrease those costs, because if you replace several 1Gbps routers with half as many 10Gbps routers, you have five times as much capacity with half as much equipment to operate and maintain.
They should not be operating at 100% capacity because of use fluctuations; they need overhead. If you want to use that overhead, it should come with a price, because that overhead has value.
You're confusing value with cost. Air is valuable, that doesn't mean we should have to pay for it -- especially where, as in the case with bandwidth, if it isn't used instantaneously then it goes to waste. You can't save up idle bandwidth in the wee hours of the morning to use later in the day -- either you use it immediately or it's gone.
There's excess natural gas capacity, there's excess electricity, and excess other resources that are billed at a rate. Why not set a monthly price and let people use whatever they want?
Look at your electric bill sometime: That is what they do. You pay a fixed cost based on your service, e.g. $30/month for 100 amp service. If you want 200 amp service then you pay a somewhat higher monthly fee, analogous to wanting a 50Mbps connection instead of 25Mbps. Then you can pretty much use however much electricity you want, but you pay the generating cost for it. With bits there is no generating cost. There is only the infrastructure cost.
You're arguing that any extra capacity should be yours to use for free, and if there's not enough extra capacity the network needs to be upgraded. Do you not see the problem with that?
There is no problem with that. At some level of upgrades the network will have enough capacity to meet demand. The cost of upgrades can then be amortized over many years. Installing point-to-point fiber to the customer premises is a huge, one time cost, after which the cost of last mile upgrades becomes the cost of upgrading terminating equipment, which is epically less expensive. (Think thousands vs. millions.)
The faulty assumption you are making is that the demand for additional bandwidth at zero cost will be infinite. It is not. There is a finite amount of capacity required to operate a network in which anyone can use as much as they want, because there is a finite amount of want. There may be a few users who would use a bottomless amount of bandwidth given the chance, but each of those users is constrained by their individual connection speed. The far larger majority of users will never average more than the amount required to stream HD video, so you build a network capable of that once and you're done.
In addition, connection speed tiers solve much of this problem. If all you do is check email and you want cheap service, pay $30/month for 1Mbps service. Then you can't be a heavy user, because even if you run at 100% 24/7/365, you can't use more than a few hundred gigs a month. Whereas if you want 100Mbps service then you pay $100/month and the extra $70/month goes to making the network capable of handling that.
I me
Yes, the trolls are way beyond the one obligatory FP item that everyone ignores.
In the new redesign, the customizable comment modifiers seem much harder to find. The easiest method seems to be http://slashdot.org/my/comments.
For the longest time I used to have a penalty on 1 sentence comments and left the rest alone, but lately some if the informative comments are coming through at 10 words + a link, and the trolls are writing more.
Now I switched it to penalize the last 40,000 accounts created, enough to knock back the 2-mil-uid crew.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Wow that sucks. I always thought that Canada, with its proximity to the US (which has the majority of Internet hosts that English speakers would access), would have higher caps and lower prices than Australia. Both are untrue. Not only do our caps go up to 1TB+, but our prices are cheaper than yours for the same sized caps. I get 150 GB for $44.95 (AUD and CAD are worth about the same so conversion not really necessarily).
That's a bit sad when most of our traffic is US-bound and has to go through a handful of (expensive) undersea cables to the other side of the world, and your traffic just has to hop over the land border on one of many, many links...
Australia has a slightly unique situation, in that it has mostly English-speakers and most English content is hosted in the US. It's not the internal network capacity that's the problem, it's the capacity on the handful of undersea cables linking us to the US. Metering in Australia has mostly been required to prevent those international links from hitting capacity (the cables as a whole have plenty of capacity, but ISPs obviously only buy a particular amount of capacity, and it's damn expensive). For an ISP to offer unlimited here they'd need to purchase a massive amount of undersea capacity which would be uneconomical for all but the biggest players. In fact, the main well-known ISP who does offer unlimited can only afford to do so because it is a majority owner of the largest undersea cable (referring to TPG and the PPC1 cable to Guam).
This problem doesn't apply to the US so I fully agree with your comments in the US context. There should be no real reason to cap connections in the US - it's simply ISPs being lazy and not wanting to spend money upgrading their network as required (i.e. maximise profits, as you said).
Seems like a painfully simple app to write for you programer types out there. My nokia has a meter but I've never reset it. It should have a field for billing date and update automatically. Also could have a reconciliation function and or link to carrier website listing of you use.
It's not only simple, but a number of third-party firmware offerings for certain models of low-end routers already do this. I run Tomato on my venerable WRT54G: it has bandwidth monitoring and it works reasonably well. The problem isn't that end users can't monitor their usage, it's that the providers won't care if they do. "Oh sure, Mr. Smith, we'll be happy to knock a hundred bucks off your bill because your little toy router says so. Now go away and pay your bill before we turn your happy little ass off."
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.