Data Hogs: the Monsters Carriers Created

jfruhlinger writes "A recent study claimed that the top 1 percent of mobile data users eat up half of the available bandwidth. But assuming it's true, who's at fault? Stats show data usage has increased radically with each new model of the iPhone, and similar phenomena are in place for Android phones — all of which are gleefully sold to the public by the same people who complain about 'data hogs.' Isn't this the equivalent of a car dealer heavily promoting Cadillacs, then complaining about poor fuel efficiency, then charging a ton for extra gasoline?"

Comments

yeah

[dropadrop]

I think the idea is to slowly promote an idea that caps and traffic shaping are good for the vast majority of customers.

Re:yeah

[imahawki]

The reality is though, they are cracking down on the top users but giving NO benefit to people who use 50MB a month. Those people used to subsidize high data users which you could argue was unfair. But now that people are being cut off or paying for actual usage over a certain point, the bill for people using much less should drop!

Re:yeah

[icebike]

In most other industries, high volume users end up paying the major part of the bill and subsidize low volume users, even as they benefit from bulk pricing.

Coal, gas, electricity, and even food. Bulk purchasers get a discount, but having them in the market assures an infrastructure which can handle thousand of other customers easily. The little customers pay proportionally more, but probably would pay even more with the bulk purchasers absent from the market.

The Carriers should charge a cheaper rate per megabyte for bulk data users. They shouldn't cut them off. They shouldn't charge them progressively more the more they use. They should actually give them discounts. Buying the next tier up should be cheaper than watching your data usage trying to live under the line.

Re:yeah

[wisty]

You don't understand - Carriers make money for overselling. They want you to buy 1GB a month, because they don't think you'll use it. If you do, they'll complain that you are using too much, and "hogging" data.

What they really want is to charge you for a 1GB plan, then charge you extra if you actually use it. Carriers want to upsell people to plans they won't use, and feel cheated if people use what they bought.

Re:yeah

[gadget junkie]

I'll note too that they fail to provide incentives for keeping your usage low. For example, from AT&T, for $15 a month, I can get 200 MB / month of data. For $25, I can get 2 GB / month. So, my wife, who was routinely using around 250 MB a month, upgraded to the 2 GB a month... and once she did, she started doing things like frequently streaming video to her phone. After all, she'd have to use eight times as much data as she used to before she'd exceed her new cap, so why shouldn't she?

It gets worse, though. For my work, I need to be able to remotely access the machines I work on at a moment's notice. I can't guarantee I'll always have a wi-fi connection available if I get an emergency call from the boss, so I have tethering. However, AT&T won't let me pay, say, a few extra dollars a month and use tethering with my 200 MB / month plan. Instead, I have to pay for their tethering plan, which gives me 4 GB / month of data, with tethering, for $45 a month. There is no lower option that allows tethering.

So now I've started watching videos online. I didn't bother getting 3g on the iPad I got myself for Christmas either... why pay the carrier another fee, when I can tether the iPad to the phone and actually get some use out of that 4 GB a month I'm having to pay for?

I would've been happy to give AT&T $5 a month for tethering and stay on my $15 a month, 200 MB / month plan, and not change my habits of using the phone at all. But if they're going to require me to pay $45 a month for a 4 GB plan in order to get tethering, I'm going to damn well increase my usage! Otherwise, I'm paying an additional $20 a month for nothing.

If I wind up using, say, 1 GB a month, I'm actually being charged 4.5 cents per MB. Before, with my 200 MB plan, I was being charged 7.5 cents per MB. If I somehow managed to use all 4 GB in a month, I'd be charged 1.125 cents per MB.

When the carriers effectively are giving steep discounts to "data hogs", what do they think is going to happen? If I had to buy 4 GB at my old plan's rate, I'd pay $300 for it. You can bet I'd be watching my usage carefully in that case! As it is, I *have* to pay for 4 GB a month, so I try to use as much of it as I can!

You have to understand the economics at the shareholder level.
Let's suppose that AT&T, instead of throttling usage, switched to a cents per megabite scheme. Ideally, they'd have the best of both worlds: they'd invest their clients money to expand capacity where and when needed, high capacity users would pay more than low capacity user, etc.
Now step back and imagine that you are AT&T's investor relation manager, at a big convention. A big name analyst steps up and asks: " How much of the data revenue is variable?"
The "right" answer is:"none", because money managers are keen to pay more for fixed revenue than for a variable one (I am a money manager meself); so such a switch would probably lop off hundreds of million bucks from AT&T market cap, assuming the same total revenue, simply because it's impossible to guarantee that average revenue per user stays constant. So, the economic incentive for AT&T is to maximize the number of users subscribing to higher paying fixed price contracts, not to reduce usage per customer. One sure way to do it is to make the goods seem scarce, hence the wailing about bandwidth hogs.

Taking a cue from

[future assassin]

>But assuming it's true, who's at fault?

Oh its the Internet users. Its always the 1% that are the hogs and the poor Internet providers must provide data caps to make their oversold lines work for the rest.

Cry me a fucking river. Maybe just maybe don't sell your packages when you now your network wont handle them.

Re:Taking a cue from

[gbjbaanb]

what's the alternative?

Build out some network bandwidth, then divide it by the number of subscribers you have, and charge them for their slice of the whole.

Make sense?

I doubt you'd agree when you get charged the hundreds of dollar per month that would cost you. Besides, its a bit daft to think that every subscriber uses 100% of their bandwidth 24/7, so why not oversell it? After all, if I use 10% of my total bandwidth, there's no reason why you can't allocate that to 9 more subscribers, thus bringing the price down to 1/10th of what it was.

So obviously overselling is ok, but what level is reasonable for this? There's a tradeoff between the price of the network, shared out amongst all subscribers, and the bandwidth you get. Most people don't use much bandwidth - your average mom and pop will use it to surf a little, read emails, etc and use 1Gb per month max, so if you assume all your subscribers are like that, the service should be dirt cheap.

Until you get someone who comes along and basically abuses the system by keeping it on 24/7, streaming torrents or running a video webserver. These people skew (or should that be screw) the carefully planned subscriber/bandwidth ratio which basically means everyone else is subsidising their use of the network, to the detriment of everyone's use of the network.

Re:Taking a cue from

[future assassin]

Nothing wrong with overselling and many companies can do it right but when your greed doesn't want you to reinvest the profits into the system its just easier to point the finger at those who use what they paid for and call them hogs. As a consumer I don't give a flying fuck that I'm causing your system issues when I use what I paid for. I'm not a charity...

Doin what?

[vlm]

Doin what? Until you answer that you're just spinning wheels.

Is there some kind of spam sending virus out there? That would make sense and you could hope they'll fix it.

Are they spending a lot of time at websites? More than 10 or maybe 15 years ago now, Akamai fixed that, maybe the mobiles need that?

Is it one specific app, like google maps?

Is it tethering people trying to run an entire disaster recovery site over a phone?

Does it really matter? Supposedly 1% of the population, that being teen girls, made up most of the call volume at one time. So?

How does their battery survive this intense use? My new android phone barely lives thru the day with light use, so they must be living on a charger?

Why are they "monsters"? What a weird way to describe human beings. That means I should use my leet skyrim skills and cast an ice spear at them, right?

Nice car analogy

[Baloroth]

Yes, it is like selling a fuel-wasting car and then forcing the consumer to purchase fuel from you and only you. And advertising the fuel inefficiency as a feature. And rationing the fuel and switching from unlimited fuel to rationed fuel... ok maybe the analogy breaks down somewhere around there.

The carriers want their cake, that is selling phones with data-heavy features that people love, and they want to eat it too: i.e. not expanding their network with all the profits they are making in order to handle the load from the phones they just sold. Greedy bastards. The solution would be to create some genuine competition instead of the cartel-like operation we have in the US right now, but the barrier to entry is so high that is next to impossible. Maybe some government regulation might even be in order (much as I usually hate such things), given that these companies often have what amounts to a government-granted monopoly on certain EM spectra.

3G Modems

[Dan East]

According to the stats, 3G Modems account for 26 times more data usage than the baseline (iPhone 3G), and nearly 10 times more data usage than the next biggest consumer device (iPhone 4S for downlink). "3G Modems" don't count as phones, at least not in my book. That would either be tethering, running a phone as a wifi hotspot, or a dedicated hotspot device.

So these are probably people that don't have broadband service and use 3G for the home connectivity, or people that constantly travel. My uncle just set something up like this a couple weeks ago - they have no other options for broadband at their home, and even had to use a DSS dish as a signal reflector to be able to get 3G service because they are so remote (the dish was my idea, seemed to work good).

But what is the percentage of the network?

[Anonymous Coward]

Who cares about total usage? What is the percentage of the network that is being used? If the network is 10% loaded and 1% of the users use 80% of the 10%, who cares? If the network is 100% loaded, then I might care.

1% use half of the data

[Relayman]

"A recent study claimed that the top 1 percent of mobile data users eat up half of the available bandwidth." No it didn't. It said that the top 1% download half of the total data downloaded. There's a big difference.

Re:Big diff between data hogs and just iPhones/and

[Fluffeh]

we in Australia are stuck on 1, 3, maybe 10gb plans at the most

I really don't get why carriers in the US don't use this sort of a model. I am on a 1.5 gb plan with optus, and it is more than enough for my phone, and for my laptop (I use my phone to wifi tether). There isn't ever really anything that I want to do using my phone that will use up more data than that.

If I want to update drivers or files, I generally do it at home, not on the move. The only thing I really use data for is email/browsing on my laptop, the phone is also email or the occasional map when driving. Aside from that, I do all my serious stuff at home. It isn't because of a low data plan, it is simply because if I am out and about, the last thing I am thinking of is torrent files, distro updates or any other data heavy application.

Re:To be fair

[PopeRatzo]

Who would have guessed that consumers would actually use their data plan?

I'm more surprised at how many users don't use their data. I know a few iPhone 4 users who pay for the highest AT&T cap but don't use more than 250mb a month. Have never used more than 250gb in any month.

If the telecoms are going to start charging more for people who use a lot of data, will they start charging less for people who don't use anywhere near the amount of data they're paying for?

My family plan, with my wife and daughter and me, allows for like 1200 minutes or something. We probably don't use more than 400 or 500 minutes. Why don't I get a rebate? If I go over 150gb on my DSL connection, I have to pay an additional $10/50gb. The month that I was on vacation and used 0 gb, I still payed full price.

Telecommunications needs to be a highly regulated utility. I really don't need to pay someone who is going to work so hard to develop new ways to get me to pay more for less.

Re:To be fair

[wierd_w]

this means "I don't watch netflix on my phone, or if I do, it is over public wifi, and not the cell network."

1 netflix movie is over 500mb transfer, even on a tiny device like a phone. If you watch even 1 movie on the phone per month over cellular, you are a "data hog".

When the carriers proclaim "you can get live sports coverage and watch movies online with our blzing fast $cellgeneration service!" I feel they lose the right to complain about people doing exactly what they advertise.

Now, if you are pulling over 10gb a month transfer, that is excessive, even for streaming media.

The exception would be cellular tethering devices used for primary internet. A special package should be set up for that.

Really, the problem here is overselling capacity in a batshit crazy fashion. You can oversell capacity, and do it sanely. Such as actually metering actual network utilization over time, and oversell by perahps 10 to 20%. Instead, these carriers are pathologically allergic to improving their infrastructures, and pathologically oversell their capacity, to the point where they think using more than 100mb in a month is "heavy use". News flash: if you have lots of apps installed on your phone, simply enabling the autoupdater will push you over that pathetically small limit.

Carriers need to establish what "heavy use" is, not compared against current system load, but against average intended use statistics. Eg, using 2gb a month for watching 3 netflix movies should be considered "high end" of "normal", and not "excessive." Excessive would be watching a movie every day. (30 days in a month x 500mb per movie == 1.5TB transfer.) They should then either restrict smartphones, total numbers of dataplans sold, or FUCKING IMPROVE THEIR NETWORKS, so that network instability doesn't occur from "normal use."

Theyneed to stop headplanting and redefining terms with self-referential metrics.

Re:To be fair

[NatasRevol]

if you are pulling over 10gb a month transfer, that is excessive, even for streaming media.

So I can't watch ONE movie a day? Because that would be like 15gb.

Re:To be fair

[gmhowell]

And it's an absurd quibble. What, my 11 year old kid can't watch movies in the car? Girlfriend? Perhaps I live somewhere with a decent/new cell tower nearby but am limited to dialup. Not everyone's life is the same as yours.