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FCC Boss Backs Metering the Internet
An anonymous reader writes "FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski has publicly backed usage-based pricing for wired internet access at the cable industry's annual NCTA Show. He makes the claim that it would drive network efficiency. Currently most internet service providers charge a flat fee and price their packages based on the speed of the service, while wireless providers are reaping record profits by charging based on usage, similar to the way utilities charge for electricity. By switching to this model, the cable companies can increase their profitibility while at the same time blocking consumers from cutting the cord and getting their TV services online."
By switching to this model, the cable companies can increase their profitibility while at the same time blocking consumers from cutting the cord and getting their TV services online
If cable companies take more money from their customers, with little extra investment in new technology or staffing, it means another sector of the economy loses out. Pay an extra $20 for internet access, that's 1 less dvd you're buying from a MPAA affiliated company.
The problem with this model is that it's very hard to control your usage. There's no practical way to know in advance how much a particular click will cost. Of course, the providers love it for exactly that reason.
So, cable companies failed to innovate, and depsite seeing this coming, didn't change.
Now their entire world is threatened by the internet, and the FCC are attempting to apply a band-aid to help keep their business model going. This will also be to the detriment of the consumer, and ultimately progress.
Sorry, but his application of the 'band-aid' is fundamentally wrong. In business, if you fail to innovate and keep ahead, you will eventually be surpassed by someone else/another business whereby they are ahead of the curve or willing to change. This is happening, and frankly, the cable industry has no-one to blame but themselves for failing to innovate.
They didn't innovate, and now they are realising that they are fast becoming obsolete.
He'is quite right, except if he wants to retain customers.
Used bandwidth doesn't consume more stored resources than unused bandwidth. Idle network bandwidth is lost forever and can not be used to improve the network performance at a later time. That's why data volume isn't a good metric for the consumed good - bandwidth used at peak times is. In a functioning market, volume pricing would result in prices that don't reflect the ISPs costs and therefore in uncompetitiveness for the ISP which uses this flawed pricing model.
the cable companies can increase their profitibility while at the same time blocking consumers from cutting the cord and getting their TV services online.
Does this mean that the current motivation behind mr. chairman is cable tv being worried about customers preferring internet video to their subscriptions?
He makes the claim that it would drive network efficiency.
This 'efficency' would then mean 'compensation for the loss of profit'?
FCKGW 09F9 42
It's bye bye World of Warcraft, and hello text-based mud!
How would they expect to compete against those providers who do offer unlimited internet? People would just abandon them and move to those who offer unlimited internet. Isn't that how unlimited internet started in the first place?
Usage based pricing violates the first ammendment and is therefore by definition an illegal tax.
(roman_mir, can't login)
"Cable providers have explored usage-priced pricing, but the idea has not been well received. There have been concerns that the companies were trying to raise their fees."
And instead they're doing it in order to save us money? When the whole debate stems from wireless companies having higher revenues?
By eliminating flat-rate they would be cutting out the main/only advantage wired connections have over wireless.
Or in other words: "My head hurts when I think of new things and I just want to milk the same old cash cow for ever and ever till the end of time. Fuck the customers and what they want or need. I don't want to bother making a new business model out of their needs. And also I eat baby kittens".
You have a very weird system over there. In the UK, one company, BT had a monopoly on the telephone system. This was recognised and legislation was put in place that the last 'mile' of the connection could be used by any company offering services many years ago allowing me to choose from multiple ISPs as long as there was space in the junction box for the hardware. Now there is concern that BT again may be able to monopolise the next 'evolution' as we move towards fibre to house, so there are calls to prevent this from happening.
In the US there seems to be a focus on the government doing what is good for corporate greed and not what is good for society. :(
Here in Sweden and many other parts of the world, we have cheap, fast 100 mbit/s and even 1000 mbit/s Internet connectivity at flat rate.
How about you American idiots expand and upgrade your Internet infrastructure so everyone can have more bandwidth instead of making people pay for using bandwidth?
You guys have slow, expensive, censored shitty Internet. Your Internet connectivity is even worse than Eastern block shit countries like Poland.
Over and over we go through this.
Metering has the eternal problem that ends with a enraged customer calling customer support over the shocking bill at the end of the month. AOL used metered services for years. When they finally went flat-rate, their business exploded with more customers than they could handle. When AT&T shifted from metered and offered flat-rate data for iPhone, they got more customers than they could handle.
Metered services can be good alternatives or add-ons to a flat-rate service, but they will be filling specific needs. A serious gamer may want low-latency. A serious file sender may want high-bandwidth on-demand. (I need to get this huge file sent to the office NOW.)
Metered services also have one big sore-spot: the meter itself.
- when do you get to see the meter? Just once per month at billing time?
- who verifies the meter is accurate?
- how are ISPs prevented from abusing the meter? Recall that long ago, laws had to be written to stop phone companies from charging for calls before they were actually answered.
- how are bytes being counted? Bytes are not counted like phone minutes. Packets are re-transmitted out of necessity. Do they count twice?
... but I get this feeling that under the current administration America is actually going backwards on a lot of things
Ever from the start of the so-called "Information Hiway" the users had fought hard to get the flat-rate package from ISP
It has been that way for decades and suddenly officials from the Obama administration supporting the metering of Net usage
It is also under Obama administration that the MAFIAA tried (and fortunately failed) to push their SOPA bill - and if my memory served me right, the Obama administration was supporting the bill, and only after stern objection from millions of Net users that the Obama administration changed their mind
I am afraid to think what will happen i4 years from now if this administration is to win the upcoming election
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
I missed the part where we all stand up and cheer. We already pay too much for internet as is.
Old content driven, highly scripted, highly time controlled, ads you can't block or skip while live, we drive the narrative money.
VS
New internet you go where you want, sandbox type choice for the user, ads are there but can be dialed down at the user end, DIRECTLY sells stuff to people, lets people connect in multiple ways, old we drive the narrative content still there but also many many other points of view.
Andddddddd, fight!
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
Back when dial-up was the only way to connect to internet, customers used their existing phone lines and a modem to connect to the ISP of their choice: AOL, Prodigy, CompuServe, Mindspring, Juno, and hundreds of smaller local providers. With so many ISP choices, customers could shop around and the cost of dial-up service went from 30/month to 8/month in the span of about 10 years. In addition, the dial-up service went from metered hourly connection rates, to a flat monthly fee with unlimited usage.
Cable providers have a monopoly on the coax cable coming into customer's home, and this explains why the price behavior of cable internet is completely opposite the pattern demonstrated by dial-up products. With cable, the prices started out low for unlimited access and gradually increased while at the same time speed and volume gets limited and capped.
Cable providers spend the initial investment money to lay down coax cable to everyone's home; but that cost is offset by subsidies from the government, and in forms of add-on taxes that appear on every subscriber's cable bill. So, in reality the coax cable is paid for with tax payer's money (in part) and with subscriber's money. Yet, the cable provider gets to claim those as their own property, refusing to allow other cable providers to compete.
In other countries, coax cables are not owned exclusively by one cable provider and a healthy competition among internet providers exists. The result: half the monthly fee, 5 times the speed, and no caps. Yet, those providers are still profitable.
Abolish the monopoly cable providers have over the coax cable infrastructure, and prices will plummet as competition flares up.
(I know, I know: lies, damned lies and...)
Mark Twain aside, if you still wanted to promote laissez-faire economics (not that that's always appropriate), the FCC should ensure that there is enough competition in a given market (far from today's sorry reality in the U.S.), publish GOOD (useful) STATISTICS on speed (indexed by time of day perhaps), latency, uptime, etc. Then let the consumers decide how they want to be billed. Or at least that's how it SHOULD work out, I don't understand how market forces haven't eliminated the insanely complex and restrictive 2-year contracts most people are locked into. Lobbyists perhaps?
If people are provided accurate information they SHOULD choose the most efficient/best product for the cheapest price (except for "Geffen goods"). That's why ratings agencies are absolutely crucial to a properly functioning market; nothing was "wrong" with sub-prime mortgages, it's just that the ratings agencies were giving them AAA ratings (because they were being paid by the issuers). Those guys should be "castrated and blinded" (another literary reference, this one from "The Visit") or at least made bankrupt and their officers thrown in prison!
*Disclaimer: I've worked in Cable for years*
They have been innovating. You can only fit so many channel frequencies into a line before you have to upgrade the line your using or find a new way of transmitting over the existing infrastructure. Any innovation that would allow for an exponential addition of channels to the existing infrastructure would be a gold mine. They're trying, and they're all in it together. When was the last time you heard of any one cable company inventing anything? They don't. They have a group dedicated to research which helps all of them.. Anything that the group comes up with is made an industry standard, basically IEEE for cable.
But going back to the infrastructure: cable companies are obviously bound to this. And it costs a lot to both maintain and upgrade. The first half of the 2000's many companies used cable internet and later cheap phone service to multiple advantages.
1 was generating more revenue by increasing the amount of services their customers subscribed too. This also lead to increased customer loyalty, since its one thing to cancel just your internet service if a company pisses you off but another all together to consider dropping a company that hosts your TV, Internet, and phone.In upgrading a system of say, 50k subscribers you could double the amount of money it generated, which means
2 the increased revenue offset the costs of upgrading systems to support the new features. Think back 10 years ago, what was the fastest speed you saw in major cities? 3-5 Mbps if that. Some area's have 50+ Mbps now.
3 by increasing the capacity when HD came around many systems where already ready for the initial wave of channels. They did innovate, which is why many area's have 50+ HD channels available now if you have an HD converter. Without the investment into rewiring many area's, cable would never be about to touch satellite as far as competition in many area's.
Upgrading systems costs an insane amount of money. That more than anything is the reason that cable monopolies exist, the cost of entry prohibits competition. To install a new plant in an town of 50k takes something to the tune of 2-3 million dollars, with zero guarantee on how long it will take to recover that cost, if ever. Cable lines have reached their limit unless someone comes up with a new way of multiplexing, and if its that significant a step up you'll see it deployed very rapidly. Some companies are switching to fiber but the cost is insane. And where as if someone cuts a cable line the service could be back up in an hour, if someone cuts a fiber line it could take significantly longer.
Having said all that, the "Usage Allowance Plan" is a crock of shit. It is exactly what it is being labeled as, a stop gap measure to keep people from dumping the TV service. Because cable companies get charged by the broadcasters based on their install base*, which includes internet only customers in some cases, they're trying to stop the current trend of "Internet for everything" since it inverts #1 & 2: less revenue generated, but now node capacity has to be increased. Does it make it fair for the consumer? Of course not. Are the amounts for the usage plans in use by the larger companies fair? Considering that a large % of the subscribers never come close to the cap, it depends. COULD they offer an 'unlimited' package? Yes. Which is why its a crock of shit, their could be a way to pay more if you use more, but thanks to other industries showing that micro-payments for additional service is a viable model for monopolies that isn't likely to happen. Hence this whole hullabaloo, they're trying to have their cake and squeeze money out of it too.
*ask anyone who's worked for a Cable call center about NFL network. Just don't do it when they're holding something stabby.
X
Thankyou for your very detailed and informative response!
I pushed for usage based charging in my university as an alternate to the previous scheme of free bandwidth except for fining the top 20 users at £2/gig. They now charge by the amount charged per gig by the UK academic network (JANET) of ~15p (23c) and I think that's perfectly reasonable. Usage based charging is not a bad idea. In fact, it's pretty great for the majority of consumers. Why shouldn't people pay for what they use? Where it's bad is where there isn't appropriate competition to drive the price to the correct network cost, but monopolies are a problem for fixed rate plans, too.
Given that cable and DSL providers advertise speeds of "up to" whatever, and hardly anyone even gets close to the "up to" speed they're paying for, I think any change to how pricing works should require the providers to include service-level agreements. Want to make more money off me? Show me the bandwidth.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
A variation on this model has been in Australia since the introduction of broadband. We pay for a package which includes X amount of data per billing month such as a 30Gb, 60gb, 150gb deal, while the service is a standard ADSL2+ connection across the board. If you go over your alloted quota you get two options: Pay a premium per GB downloaded over your quota or be on the "unlimited" plan where you suffer having your connection limited to 64kb/s or 128kb/s (depending on the provider) until the next billing month. You can still find "connection speed" plans here and there, but they are mostly grandfathered plans from old old contracts.
"similar to the way utilities charge for electricity. By switching to this model, the cable companies can increase their profitibility"
This sounds like ignorant idiotism at its peaks. Most of you here will remember (some might still live it...) the modem days, pricing per kilobyte, browsing web pages with ads, images and everything disabled, replying to e-mails offline and sending in batch, no online video, no streaming radios, and sometimes still ridiculously high bills at the end of the month.
That's where you're headed, and they will call it progress.
You people recently seem to try to make those people's decisions increasingly easier who consider moving to the US.
Like, consider regular flat rate dsl prices. There were times when we were looking from central europa with awe towards the cheapness over the pond. Today, a 1.5mbit dsl in PST costs almost exactly what we pay for a 5mbit dsl in CET. And now they're "evolving" you back to usage-based fees. Nice.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
Uh, no. The differences aren't so huge after all.
The cost of GENERATING electricity is actually pretty small. The cost of getting it to your home is significant. Furthermore, fundamental laws of physics would tell you that the cost of higher data rates is more power. Literally. So at some fundamental level, this is not a bad idea.
However we need to recognize some facts: the delivery company of this content is a monopoly. The infrastructure to deliver FiOS was paid for and is maintained exclusively by Verizon. So, as a monopoly, they should not be allowed to "shape" traffic, they should not be allowed to block traffic, or even to inspect it without a court order. But it is not unrealistic for them to meter how much traffic is headed to your home and to bill you accordingly.
This will cause two things to happen: First, people will become somewhat aware of how much bandwidth they're using and what they're getting for that bandwidth. You want to play games at high bandwidth? Have at it. But expect to pay for it at the end of the month, just as someone who keeps their thermostat real cool in the summer and very warm in the winter will pay for it.
Nearly fifty percent of all graduates come from the bottom half of the class!
Note that I'm coming from a place where I don't know much about how digital cable systems work, but I'm curious:
What effect would it have on the cable system to convert all available frequencies for use on an IP network, and deliver the channel that you're watching via video-over-IP, rather than having a discrete data "channel" and delivering lots of channels of video simultaneously that you're not watching?
It seems that for the cost of a bit of channel-changing delay, they could harvest a shedload of bandwidth. Unless they've already done this with digital cable systems, then I guess I'm just catching up.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
They don't start wars for oil for one, though they have been known to continue them. They don't talk out their ass about how awesome God is all the time and act like uneducated jackasses. Obama spoke out in favor of gay marriage, albeit years too late. they actually tried to push through universal healthcare, although buckled under pressure from repug jackasses as per usual because they have no backbone.
You know the difference between the Obama admin and Bush? Obama has good ideas that they don't have the balls to implement. Bush had terrible ideas and giant balls yellong FUCK YEAH MERICA while screwing us over the whole time.
And yes they are both awful on copyright, the difference being that Obama actually understands how to use a computer while bush thought it was a magic box.
So let me get this straight, the government is suggesting that government supported monopolies (teleco & cable) change their behavior (in a way negative for the consumer) in one monopoly area in order to help their business in a different monopoly area?
Maybe it's time that the these monopolies are broken up. There is a reasonably obvious need for local monopolies on who owns and maintains the cable infrastructure. There appears less of a need for a monopoly on content providing over that cable. Since they are obviously leveraging the monopoly status in the first to extend the second, it's time to break 'em up.
If this crap becomes widespread will the makers of graphic heavy sites be able to sniff the ISP and deliver a more textual version of the page for persons shackled to the services of such ogres. I'm pretty sure it could be done using the dns, but how reliable it would be is up in the air.
Gamemaker can do anything!
MyCleanPC says GameMaker is a pathetic sluggish virus-laden pedo-loving terrorist loonie spammer. Just like MyCleanPC, in fact.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
The government agency that was created to regulate communications and ensure only big corporate players can buy their way into the market, has a suggestion that would make incredible profits for the corporations it exists to serve.
See, government regulation is all about serving and protecting the public, isn't it...?
Liberty in your lifetime
My left nut if I could stop paying for sports channels. All of them, gone from my line-up and from my bill!!!
If you can't be good, be good at it!
flat rate pricing didn't come because USERS FOUGHT, corps do not give a rats left testicle- however you think people fought?
Compuserve got it's ass handed to it by the likes of aol, mindspring and earthlink because of competition.
when everyone could choose which POP to call the market created it's own efficiency- and found a way to work in a fashion that benefited the consumer, ultimately the pricing war became flat rate service.
the key to efficiency is choice of provider, followed by fiscal evolution.
The responsibility of the government, representing the people, is to ensure we have the choices.
not to write exclusive contracts with sole presence providers.
not to prop up entities with massive right of ways that don't get offered to others-- and to occasionally DENY a request to merge.
Anyone notice verizon is very in bed with comcast on a lot of deals? the fact that verizon stopped expanding fios- think it might be tied to the fact that verizon now sells comcast products? Cripes-- verizon had the poles to take on comcast territories without huge legal shenanigans- and instead they got into bed with the big fat fuck that is so efficient with it's operations (and fair with it's pricing) that it bought whole sports teams and NBC?
WHY the hell does a gov't granted monopoly service provider get to set it's rates so painfully & obviously above it's cost of operation that it can expand so far and fast. they should never have had enough money for those deals. as a gov granted monopoly they should be so bent over the 'justify the expense' audits that when you walk into the local business office customers should need their own pen to fill out a form-- cause they can't afford a box of them.
I fear every administration- unless you can vote with your dollars- you can't change anything
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
So, I take it the US has decided to lock in its technological gains from these last two decades, and will be out of the race for the next 40 years? Because that is what this is saying.
Remind me how ISPs in other countries offer faster speeds, for less? And this is supposed to be an improvement?
I am John Hurt.
You want to play games at high bandwidth? Have at it. But expect to pay for it at the end of the month, just as someone who keeps their thermostat real cool in the summer and very warm in the winter will pay for it.
Or, like most people, you're only a casual computer user. You have your computer on, but most of the time it's just sitting there, and you lack the technical skills to determine when something is going amiss with it. At some point, your PC gets infected due to a malicious ad that got onto a normally trusted site. You then get to find out that your PC has been turned into one of the millions of spam-spewing bots out there on the net via an unpayably high bill at the end of the month.
The problem with this model is that it's very hard to control your usage. There's no practical way to know in advance how much a particular click will cost. Of course, the providers love it for exactly that reason.
How many people do you know who understand what watching an hour of TV costs in terms of electricity usage? Sure, if it cost $3/hr they'd figure out sooner or later what was costing them so much, but it's no reason not to meter electricity.
It's also worth noting that electric companies offer incentives for more efficient appliances even though they profit from selling more KWh - capacity has costs as well.
Besides, without even looking, I'd make the bet that there's a Firefox extension that will tell you page sizes.
The trick with metering will be to have a very low connection fee (like phone or electric) and a reasonable per-bit cost, even in monopoly areas.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Surely, you mean iNet.
thanks for this
Oh, there's more competition now than there was 5 years ago. Now the telcos are offering video (such as AT&T's "U-Verse"). If you want to get away from cable, nothing to it.
But no, metered usage will force people to turn off Flash, block animations, and maybe even use compression like Opera's Turbo feature, or Amazon's Silk browser. Youtube loses, MMORGs lose, Facebook and Twitter lose.
I agree, here is why. First lets look at the part of the summary that really sums this up:
while wireless providers are reaping record profits by charging based on usage, similar to the way utilities charge for electricity
The argument there is that they want to make more profits. More money. More for the sake of... more? There was a comment above stating that cable companies need the money to innovate, and I respect that. I also respect the fact that profit for profits sake screws over people, stiffles anything that challenges it. The world abounds with examples, and the fact that some cable companies feel the need to take municipal fiber projects to court to stop them is evidence enough of that (even though that would free them from the burden of maintenence of the last mile and still allow them access to charge people money. They know they cannot compete or else they'd gladly hop on to the freely provided (to them) fiber line and continue on with business)
Another thing to point out is that electricity takes exactly a certain amount of effort to generate, and every joule used requires some fixed amount of fuel to be burned, uranium transmuted, etc etc (and even wind and solar have huge base costs and ongoing costs due to the fact that they are bursty in nature). It is much more complex than that with line losses and the like, but on the large scale average it is some fixed multiple number of Joules generated to every Joule used. No more, no less.
Now then, how much does it cost providers for their bandwidth? Well they do have to recoup the costs of installation, ongoing rate of technological advancement, and the ever growing price of labor (in theory / I wish). Once those costs have been covered there are still the settlement charges / peering agreements with other network providers. I don't know what those are.... but they aren't friggin $1/GB. Also with many of the largest services scaling out to dozens of sites across the nation / world so that they are closer to their customers (Akami, Amazon (and all their partners), etc) the number of hops that need be taken are small. 0, 1, or 2. Traceroutes to many popular sites indicate that (from comcast in MI at least) there is one last level hop to the other network very near to the destination and that is it.
So perhaps I did have this wrong, come to think of it. Perhaps there is a small variable cost to it all that varies with useage. Charge me some small fixed multiple of your settlement costs for the bandwidth on the exit nodes I use and some small fixed fee to aid in innovation and advancement of the network. Also, and lastly, if you want to compare yourselves to the utilities then you need to act like one. Not sure on all the laws, but I'm pretty sure that the laws regarding phone and electtricity are pretty inhibiting. Really don't think that they want that. They just want the profits. Careful with that bottle, I hear genies are hard to get back in.
md5sum
d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
1) Get a position paper or papers from an industry lobbying group. Why? Because you're a Bureaucrat and you don't have time to research things on your own. You have a big government office to run.
2) Get your staff to provide you with a one slide powerpoint to give you the highlights. The papers are too think and heavy for you to carry around and actually read.
3) Your staff then writes up a couple of talking points, i.e., "Metering the Internet is good, MMMkay." You then send these off to a marketing firm to make sure that the talking points score well with those people off the street that they pay $5 to for their opinions.
4) You use those talking points as a strawman to capture the public interest in the subject, 9 times out of 10 the public says"meh" so you're safe.
5) You give your trade group a token bone and accept their position because everybody said "meh." Since you're an administrator you can allow this as a staff decision and besides you have the power to regulate this kind of shizzle.
6) The public rebels and congressional hearings commence. Senator Franken leads the charge because he's like you know "Savvy on this shizzle." and says you're not "l33t"
7) Trade Group insures that you have a nice comfy job waiting for you when the next administration comes into power or after the president accepts your resignation over the stink you've created.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
"Some area's have 50+ Mbps now. "
fuck... look at the world.
and I'm not asking for everywhere like south korea is trying for, I'm asking for some areas to be competitive.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/22/technology/22iht-broadband22.html
"By the end of 2012, South Korea intends to connect every home in the country to the Internet at one gigabit per second. That would be a tenfold increase from the already blazing national standard --edit Each customer pays about 30,000 won a month, or less than $27.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Hrmmm, so if these assclowns want metered billing, then surely they won't mind if the gov't owns and installs the meters. And surely they won't mind being accountable to the PUC. Just like the electric and water/sewer, etc. And surely they won't mind having true net neutrality crammed down their pipes because now they are finally a *real* grown-up utility!
C|N>K
The fundamental flaw here is that cable capacity is shared between *all* users from the local node, i.e. everyone in your street, unlike ADSL.
Therefore, there's not really much improvement to be made. The only possible optimisation with this hypothetical IP system would be to "detect" that everyone is watching Australian Idol (or whatever people watch these days) and then allocate more capacity to that program perhaps to improve video quality. Otherwise, if everyone is watching something different it's no different to the current "broadcast" situation. DVB is compressed, usually with an MPEG-4 class of video codec, so it's already highly efficient.
Oh, and particularly with digital transmissions, there already is a substantial channel changing delay anyway, even with "broadcast" style DVB. Especially the case with MPEG-4 I've noticed, up to a couple of seconds even on modern receivers; even if the channel is on the same transport stream (i.e. same carrier), while it waits for enough key frame data to accumulate. Even worse delay if its on a different carrier, because the lower level receiver has to synchronise to that.
It seems to me that Switched Digital Video is a reasonable way to manage the limited channel capacity on cable, even though Cisco tuning adapters initially were garbage. How expensive is it to deploy SDV in a mid size market?
It happens all the time with utilities. People fail to notice that their toilet flapper valve is leaking until they get their next quarterly bill. And it will be a very large bill.
The same happens when someone fails to realize that the compressor for their heat pump is running nearly all the time and isn't keeping up with demand.
Most utilities have forgiveness policies for people who simply can not know any better. An example would be a deaf person who has a toilet flapper valve problem. He or she would never hear the water running.
Likewise, a busy single parent with kids and several computers could also have this happen. Computer hygiene is not always easy.
Nearly fifty percent of all graduates come from the bottom half of the class!
No, they innovated. They became our Internet providers. Greed drives this. The fact that a CEO can't recognize they shouldn't be making as much as they do or that maybe they shouldn't also get a fat bonus every few months.
I too know very little about cable.. but I'm guessing the problem starts when you have multiple TVs. Having 5 or more TVs in a house is not at all uncommon (living room, bedroom). That ends up being a lot of bandwidth.
South Korea is smaller Geographically than 39 United states and has a population of close to 50 million. Kentucky, which is slightly larger geographically has a population less than a 10th of that.
Population dictates cost. Economically South Korea can support that. because for every mile of network they build they potentially support 10x more people than in Kentucky. The cost to bring that speed to all area's of Kentucky then would increase 10 fold. There is a reason that we don't have high speed in our rural areas - it costs too damn much.
X
Upgrading systems costs an insane amount of money. That more than anything is the reason that cable monopolies exist, the cost of entry prohibits competition. To install a new plant in an town of 50k takes something to the tune of 2-3 million dollars, with zero guarantee on how long it will take to recover that cost, if ever.
That might be part of the reason for cable monopolies, but the bigger reason is the local laws in most cities that explicitly grant one company a monopoly.
Cable lines have reached their limit unless someone comes up with a new way of multiplexing, and if its that significant a step up you'll see it deployed very rapidly.
Early on, cable lines broadcast exactly the same signal to everybody in a city. These days that is no longer true. Cable internet basically requires that the city be broken up into multiple signal domains, perhaps as small as one per neighborhood. This is also used to provide targeted commercials, and on demand content.
Now that we have targeted areas, it is possible in theory to only send the channels in use in that area, and letting the system reuse the space for unviewed channels as DOCSIS channels. Indeed this technology has existed for a while. Yet, correct me if I am wrong, I believe this system is not in active use.
Stylish sheet to fix many problems in Slashdot's D3: https://gist.github.com/801524
I'm guessing population density.
That's the big problem here in Canada. Countries like Japan where they are packed in like sardines have great internet.
You are a strange one. Sports channels are only reason I have cable. Everything else I can find online.
Ordinary citizens can set up mesh networking and render the wired service providers damned near obsolete.
This development could be the kick in the ass they need to finally do it, resulting in a net positive.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Acts as in acting in this case. Pantomime one thing and do another while the audience is distracted with trivialities or in some case other legitimate problems with the calculation that the audience cannot follow and hope to have solved two problems at the same time.
Now their entire world is threatened by the internet, and the FCC are attempting to apply a band-aid to help keep their business model going.
This is the same FCC that slashdot fucks want in charge of network neutrality. I told you guys.
History is replete with the FCC fucking the consumer and protecting entrenched monopolies, but because "network neutrality" is a religion to you people, you turn your brains off and bend right the fuck over for them.
"His name was James Damore."
What has stoppped your ISP from metering your usage for the last several years?
And why would they start?
This is slightly off the mark, and worth an OT reply, I think. (I am motivated in part by also having a Canadian background; I am now a naturalized US citizen.)
The electoral college is made up of "electors", with one elector being in the college for each congressman and senator, plus three additional electors for the District of Columbia (represent!). The electors are nominally free to vote for any eligible presidential candidate, but in practice vote for the candidate who wins a majority of the votes in their state, and have done so in every modern election.
The reason a president can win the electoral college without winning the popular vote is that the electors in the electoral college are not apportioned according to population. Each state gets two senators, irrespective of population, and various states' congressional districts are different sizes in practice. This means that low-population states are over-represented in the college relative to their proportion of the population, so it's possible to put together a majority of electoral college votes corresponding to a minority of US voters.
The possibility that a member of the electoral college might vote for a different candidate than the popular vote in their state has a name, it's called the "faithless elector". This does happen, but has never changed the outcome of a US election.
2*3*3*3*3*11*251
SDV is a partial answer to the frequency congestion problem on cable networks:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switched_video
Instead of sending all channels down the wire, your cable box requests a channel, and that channel is dynamically allocated to a particular frequency at the head-end servicing your neighborhood. Other people that want to watch that channel will then tune to that frequency.
Ah, the idea of starting a company that offers unmetered services and pull all the discontented users from the traditional ISPs ripping them per usage...
Someone thought that they caught the scent of money unexploited.
"It takes $2-3MM to wire a community of 50k, with no guarantee of how long it will take to recover."
Well... That is $1 per person per month over a 5-year timeline. Assuming an average 3.5 people per household and 20% penetration, that is $17.50 per household per month. Assuming a cut-rate service provider charging $35/month/household, you have a very healthy profit margin including upstream connection costs. As you add subscribers, things become even more attractive.
The problem is legacy investments amortized longer than their practical life.
Early on, cable lines broadcast exactly the same signal to everybody in a city. These days that is no longer true. Cable internet basically requires that the city be broken up into multiple signal domains, perhaps as small as one per neighborhood. This is also used to provide targeted commercials, and on demand content.
Now that we have targeted areas, it is possible in theory to only send the channels in use in that area, and letting the system reuse the space for unviewed channels as DOCSIS channels. Indeed this technology has existed for a while. Yet, correct me if I am wrong, I believe this system is not in active use.
This is true, to an extent.
Targeted area's are really only as accurate as the provider makes them, and its filtered more by the physical line that they're on vs the IP address that they have. For example if CMTS 1 Services Central PHX and CMTS 2 Services East PHX, you can know what area's a node on each is going to affect down to the street addresses if you have an outage.
The problem is Analog broadcasting. The FCC says that if you aren't transmitting for older TV's on your lines, you have to provide an Analog converter. In many smaller systems its cheaper to supply a digital converter and do away with analog entirely since the equipment costs for side by side broadcast are more than just putting out a couple hundred converters (that the government gives a tax credit on).
There's the final part of the problem. The internet switches (nodes) only control the access so long as the equipment exists in three places. The office, the node and the modem at the user. In order to broadcast digitally in the same manner that the internet works, every TV for every customer must be compatible. That means the big, expensive converters the government doesn't subsidize. You know how you pay 5$ a month for them right now? If they threw that switch, there's a good chance the FCC could interpret the rules of the digital cut over to provide those for free, since now they're 'necessary' to have any TV connected. By keeping it simpler its easier to charge more money. *
*Note: I never said I -agree- with any of the practices in place. However, show me a for-profit business that isn't out for money and I'll show you a lie.
X
Don't worry, we'll just make it a crime to run an open access point since someone might use it to do something bad and not be caught. That'll take care of that.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
fromsport.com
now you have no reason for cable TV either.
"That's right...I said it."
Any innovation that would allow for an exponential addition of channels to the existing infrastructure would be a gold mine.
And this is why they're failing. They're innovating for the 1980s. We don't live in Back to the Future, we live in the actual future, which didn't exactly pan out the way most people expected it to. No one truly wants 1000 channels: what they want is choice, but the only way anyone could fathom it was by increasing the number of channels. Well, we've been there and done that. Nine-tenths of the channels available in my guide never get watched by anyone in my house, even guests.
Before the Internet even came on the scene, people were talking about a la carte pricing (pay only for the channels you want), but the cable companies fought tooth and nail against it (despite already having the framework in place: if you didn't pay for HBO or Showtime, you didn't get them). I know there are non-technical reasons for this, but as I already said, it's not the 1980s anymore. The cable companies aren't some small upstarts that must grovel at the table of big media, they are the primary route of access for large swaths of people (and have local government-granted monopolies to boot). They need to realize that their consumers dictate their business model, not their suppliers. Otherwise, they're going to "innovate" themselves out of business.
What American operators fail to realize is that if a wired Internet connection is fast, uncapped and unthrottled (like they are in Finland), there won't be much incentive to rape a cheap unlimited wireless data connection. I have a similar 3G contract as the GP (7.2Mbit/s unlimited dual-SIM for 13,90 per month) and I would never even think of using that connection for something data-intensive because I know it'll just be faster to do it on the wired computers. On the other hand, if I had a 60GB per month cap on a 3Mbit/s DSL line, I'd try to use 3G for data transfer until I hit the cap (assuming 3G is faster than 3Mbit/s, which it usually is).
I think the real issue is one of innovation. With metered Internet usage, the entire Internet industry goes away. No more netflix. No more xbox live. No more steam. No more itunes. No more youtube.
Do you really think google, apple, netflix, valve, and microsoft are going to stand by and let these greedy bastards destroy their revenues?
Nope.
If the chair of the FCC backs metering the Internet, it's because he's ignorant, naive and needs to be replaced by someone who understands the Internet houses multi-billion dollar industries who will fight back. Perhaps google will roll their own Internet service. I see that as a good thing. It would put comcast and AT&T out of the Internet business for good, which is also a good thing.
They're using their grammar skills there.
I meant in the last mile, ala Fiber to the premises. (FiOS, for example). If it wasn't a couple hundred bucks a house to convert we'd have done it years go. Convincing the number pushers is why it hasn't happened, and why everything listed by kbolino above is true. Now I'm going back to Diablo 3. Good night.
X
US is a corporately own and run state, pretty much fascist at this point.
That's not fascist. Fascism is where the state dictates to private industry so that what they do serves the nation and in some cases takes over from private industry if it serves the national interest. I agree with you that US corporations are running the show in the USA, but that's not fascism.
Exactly, more efficient/fair usage is to let the network itself take care of things... If peak time usage is slow, people will be encouraged to do heavier things off peak instead...
One of the biggest problems here btw is streaming... I can download a torrent overnight and watch it in the morning no problem, but most of the official sites will only let you stream, which means you are forced to consume bandwidth at the time you want to watch.
Another is the ridiculous insistence on specific working hours, many people could do their job equally well at any time of the day, not just 9-5, and then internet, transport and various other things would have far more spread out and manageable load instead of daily massive peaks.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
You forgot the cost of losing other users because you are hogging the bandwidth and making things slower for everyone else. The overage fees are not there to make a ton of money for the ISP, they are there to get you to modify your usage. If you want to behave like you have a dedicated, unshared line then you can expect to pay for a dedicated, unshared line.
What, do you think the content is free or something?
Ignoring the television content for the moment, just the connection to the Internet for data is going to be 100K a month, easy. We aren't talking $700 for a T1 here.
I cannot recall the last time that I noticed things being slower internet-wide (indicating a bottleneck relatively nearby as opposed to at a peering node), but I'm certain that it happens in areas that are more densely populated and/or more tech savvy.
So long as the ISPs are turning "record profits" (not that they said comcast is, but the cell companies are) then this problem is one they created for themselves. Don't maintinan a level of service to customers that they expect despite having ability to pay for the needed upgrades (or some, at least)? Expect to loose customers.
I'm not against paying for my bandwidth. I'm against being charged more than a fair price for my bandwidth. If that means they low balled themselves and want to charge more, then ok. So long as it is fair. I know that the dollar per gigabyte or more that they charge for overages is WELL past the raw cost of bandwidth.
I hope I make it clear that I don't want them to be screwed and I don't want to be screwed either. I think that if they make this move they will drive their own profits are our expense and to the detriment of the Internet. Perhaps not, but cell phone plans are a good indicator. Let them charge by the byte, but make them charge fairly. Too much to ask?
Last thought: most ISPs are monopolies or duopolies (sp?), so they have to be watched like hawks so we don't suffer.
md5sum
d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
So, to some extent, it's already being done today. Most commonly is a technology called Switched Digital Video deployed by some (mainly Time Warner and Cox) but not all MSOs. What this literally does is only "turn on" channels (generally less popular ones) when they are being watched. If no one is watching them, they are shut off. While this is not over IP, I felt it warranted mentioning as it fits into your goals.
Up next, we already have some MSOs (mainly FiOS) that deliver video on demand over IP, so there is already some desire by MSOs to go there for linear channels, too.
Lastly, AT&T UVerse actually is a video over IP solution (It's essentially video over IP over VDSL2+). There's no reason that traditional MSOs can't go this route (and in fact, many are looking in this direction for the future).
While I would personally love to see the competition from a fully switched network, I'm not certain this will happen. In the case of SDV, if a channel is already on, you will tune the existing channel - so you won't see 10 copies of the same channel switched on for 10 users. This means there is potentially a real infrastructure cost to the owner of the wires if they are required to allow others to use their channels. The same thing with AT&T UVerse - you join an IP multicast stream.
Also, any claims of bandwidth being exhausted on coax are generally false - the problem is the analog channels. On most cable systems, analog channels take up more bandwidth than all digital channels, data, and other services combined. On a completely digital system, built out to 1GHz, there is potentially about 5.5gbps worth of bandwidth available (using current modulation technologies that are already deployed). And this would most likely be limited to just the local HFC node (few hundred houses), so it wouldn't even be shared through that large group of people.
5.5gbps is enough for about 350-550 HD streams simultaneously (depending on if they are MPEG2 or MPEG4, bitrate, etc)
So, if I'm a lucky person that gets an uncapped internet connection, then I pick a random Comcast address and start sending a 1Mbit UDP stream at them, by the end of the month, they will have gone over their data cap and be charged?
With Comcast's new data plan, people will get a 300GB cap with $10/50GB after. If I send 2Mb/s throughout the month, I will use ~618GB. This means they will be 318GB over their cap. That would be $70(rounded up to 350GB) added to their bill, plus whatever they use. A 2Mb wouldn't even be enough for them to notice and they would have no idea. Technically you're not flooding them, so it's not a DoS and it doesn't disrupt any services.
AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, Time Warner?
Inquiring minds want to know. This just reeks of getting agreements pushed to screw the customers only to retire from the FCC to his nice plush job at
My wifi barely has enough bandwidth for me, it certainly doesn't have enough for all you assholes.
Karma: Poor (Mostly affected by lame karma-joke sigs)
Essentially what the US has had for choices for president since '92 is a Good Cop / Bad Cop. This is where were gonna get fucked anyway, so do we get fucked with or without lube.
Democrats(with lube), Republicans(without).
Just like Clinton moved to the right, Obama has moved to the right of Clinton.
The government is now so totally beholden to corporate interests that the common American has very little ground left to stand on.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
Let's assume that the $137 million in compensation is actually fungible monies and not stock compensation, use of airplanes, etc.
Let's further assume that you are able to convince the executive team that they are willing to accept only $50 million combined, freeing up $87 million dollars in cash.
Does anyone with any experience in enterprise carrier equipment and networks know how far that would go?
A cursory search shows a cell site costing $200,000, but that seems like it would only cover the cost of physical construction (tower base, tower, antennas, equipment housing, power feed) and not the networking equipment used to run it, the network links for backhual, and back end configuration and installation costs (which are kind of covered as fixed operational costs, but have some opportunity value). Nor does it cover the administrative costs of acquiring a site, local government lobbying, legal costs, etc. A fat round figure that seems better is $500,000.
Let's say there's other unaccounted costs and our $87 million will buy us 160 new cell towers. What does that buy in terms of actual network coverage or additional bandwidth? My guess is it would be splitting an existing cell footprint in half to increase available bandwidth within an area already covered.
It's a great idea, though.
Personally, I'd rather he crawl back under his rock and leave the rest of us in peace.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Let them know how you feel. I personally think that when you start differential charging you start to have a haves network and a have nots network. Since access to information is so vital to our everyday lifes now, this move makes that have and have not status unstable, the haves will have even more and the have nots will have a harder time. Network neutrality at least gives a level playing field which is what the American Dream opportunity is all about. Too sad that after those that start to have a little they try to close the door after them.
Many cable companies already implement Switched Digital Video where only the channels that are actually being watched are sent down the wire. This may actually explain the couple second delay that you have experienced when changing channels. This allows the cable companies to offer more channels than their system has the capacity to support.
Once a federal law goes into effect allowing tiered internet usage pricing, Mr Genachowski will quit his post as FCC chairman to take a high-paying top level lobbyist position for Comcast or one of the other major carriers. Why do I say that?...Because we've seen it before. These companies have the politicians in their pockets.
the cable companies
I chuckled at this. I've never lived in a place with more than one source of cable.
Many cable companies are doing this already. I don't remember the exact name for it, but most (high-end?) digital cable boxes only stream the channel(s) you are currently watching/recording.
The fiber isn't to the pole outside your house (9 times out of 10, the 10th being your house is next to the node).
The Node is the part the fiber connects to. Think of it like a hub that converts from one type of cable to another. From the Node coax cable is run through the neighborhood, from 30 to 200+ houses depending on the configuration. That node and coax cable is what would have to be replaced first, followed by a junction box on the house to allow for all the coax connections in the home to connect.
It's more complicated then that, but that's the basics of why they don't just slowly replace (more) coax with fiber.
X
We need the engineers to create a peer to peer wifi net. With a node in almost every house and a cheap connection to the internet somewhere It could potentially eliminate both cable and phone companies! A national co-op to bargain as a group for internet backbone access could reduce the cost to nearly free and provide cell phone via wifi for free. Then we would only have to solve the problem of rural and distant connections. Maybe something like an infrared laser bouncing off a balloon in the stratosphere could provide coverage over distance cheaply.
No, actually, it's not bullshit. Higher data transfer rates genuinely do have higher power demands (and therefore consume more energy in a shorter duration) than lower data transfer speeds. Reductions in power at higher data transfer speeds that have been achieved so far are the result of improving technology that would actually save even more power at lower data transfer speeds, but in the end they are still facing an uphill battle. Just because you don't understand the laws of physics and their application to real-world data communications does not mean they do not actually exist.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
The thing is, we don't have that speed in our cities either.
A big problem for us is that there are usually just 2 players with the ability to deliver "the last mile" of connectivity for broadband. And data is NOT their main line of business.
The cable company main business is delivering video. Data was an add-on they could do because they have wires to the home. Now they want it to make money the same way as the main business.
The phone company main business is delivering voice communications. Data was an add-on because they have wires to the home. Now they want it to make money the same way as the main business.
What we really need is a company whose main purpose is data services with wires to the home.
If traffic "declared" itself to be of a certain type, such as "real time audio" or "real time ultra-low-latency" AND the customer had the choice to treat such data "special" in exchange for a slightly-higher cost, then traffic shaping is important. We already do an approximation of this by port-type - port 80 is typically not real time but is typically not bulk-data either. Port 21 is typically bulk data.
Likewise, customers should be able to tell the ISP that certain data is less urgent, such as "ftp" or "torrent" and allow the ISPs to throttle this or introduce latency in exchange for a lower cost.
Some traffic, such as encrypted traffic or traffic deliberately masquerading as another type (e.g. http file transfers, which look like web traffic) will be treated as they look not as they are.
Traffic shaping is needed during times of congestion. As a provider, I want to keep the latency-sensitive traffic going but introduce latency or drop packets of bulk data first and latency-tolerant traffic like web traffic next.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
What possible reason would ISPs have for concealing usage in this situation?
I'll give both incompetence-based and malice-based reasons. The incompetence-based reason is that perhaps the ISP's routers don't support reporting of subscribers' use in real time, that the process is a monthly batch. The malice-based reason is that the ISP can stick the customer with a surprise overage bill.
I know someone who works at an ISP - I'll ask him how they keep that from happening.
Probably by blocking all incoming connections. This means, for example, that FTP would have to use passive mode, and Skype would have to use a supernode, and torrents would have to use peers on business-class SLAs (which can accept incoming connections) or HTTP seeds, and games would have to use a dedicated server on a business-class SLA.
(Arguments always seem weaker to me when started with "IF"...)
The largest numbers of customers will consistently choose a flat-rate plan over a metered plan for very simple family reasons as well as economic reasons.
People buy data services for the whole family or household to use. If Dad has to start yelling at family members about using too much, then Dad will shut it off or quickly switch to a flat-rate plan. (Anyone else pay more for flat-rate texting for kids' cell phones?)
Surprise bills put stress on relationships as well as wallets. People don't like them. And in uncertain times, they will be a hard sell.
The OP's comment wasn't intended to be a comparative statement or campaign endorsement one way or the other, so why do you insist on trying to twist it into one? It was observations of simple fact based on readily available public information. Had you been paying attention since his inauguration, you would have noticed that it's not the Big Banks that have this President and Vice President in their back pockets... it's Big Media, Big Content that are really pulling the strings. It's been evident from the very beginning. Joseph Biden in particular might as well drop the pretense and just admit he's a sock puppet for the MPAA. Mark my words, Biden is envious of Chris Dodd's current job title.
If that is the case, it is only because the amount of power being used is being regulated, regardless of what data is being transmitted, not because the amount of power actually needed is the same. Specifically, the amount of power being used in such a case would have to be sufficient to achieve whatever the maximum data transfer speed is. In reality, however, lower data transfer speeds literally *DO* take less power to achieve. If it's taking up the same power at a lower data transfer speed, then it is wasting energy.
Again, this is something that you could learn from any college level textbook on data communications.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Ideally you want each subscriber getting a fair share of the available bandwidth based on their contract terms. Within that available bandwidth, it would be nice if I as a subscriber could specify how I would like my packets prioritized.
They already do this. It's called Switched Video
Beauty is in the eye of the beerholder.
This is the best argument yet as it shows the opposite of what they want to happen. I love how you point out that fixed rates that ignore actual costs and peak usage patterns actually increases inefficient use by actively discouraging off-peak usage.
GameMaker (...) is a Windows and Mac IDE
Huh?
GameMaker Studio will allow development for platforms such as iOS, Android, Nokia Symbian, Windows, Macintosh, and HTML5.
Not that I like the Gamemaker trolling, but it isn't a Mac only software.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
We do not want, and should not aim for an Internet which is 100% full. Inevitable network congestion issues aside, the Internet only has real value when there is significant room for growth. It is disturbing to see the concept of "efficiency" increasingly applied in this manner, as it is indicates a fundamental misunderstanding of the Internet, and to pursue it, is to deliberately damage the Internet.
The only "efficiency" here is in how efficiently existing infrastructure is monetized, and how thoroughly startups and other newcomers can be squeezed out by the large incumbents. Metering removes any incentives to actually grow the Internet. The problem is a fundamental disconnect between what is sold and what is provided; by metering data, the relationship is entirely arbitrary, and lacking the most crucial parameter: time.
Data, which is measured in bits, is not an actual consumable, and there is no fair way to attach a price to it. What is consumed is bandwidth on the Internet links the data traverses at the time of usage; both of which are time-dependent. Needless to say, it would be insane, both technically and otherwise, to try to bill in this way. Furthermore, there still remains no incentive to actually grow the Internet, in the absence of competition.
Rather than data based metering, ISPs could be required to sell connections based on minimum guaranteed bandwidth to customers, at regulated prices. This is not the only fair scheme, but regardless, there needs to be a correlation between what is sold, and what is provided. If people want to purchase more, there must be an incentive to build out the networks, rather than to adopt a model of artificial scarcity, and bill accordingly.
Of course, selling connections fairly in this way also has technical difficulties, and it would be far simpler and cheaper if they just dispensed with all of this nonsense, and reverted to the way it used to be. Sell connections based on bandwidth, and build out the networks until there are no significant congestion issues. Other countries have proven that this model is still economically viable, even while providing people with gigabit connections. The only thing preventing it here is the lack of competition and associated stagnation of infrastructure and gouging. Let's not adopt new models of pricing which encourage more of that.
If everyone is watching something different, you aren't using less bandwidth, but if half the people on the block are watching the same show, and the other half is watching something different, video over IP will only send the shows people are watching. Multicast would take care of the duplicates, and you save huge amounts of bandwidth currently being used to broadcast what a few customers are watching. You would need to change out the cable boxes, but that isn't anything new to cable companies.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
There is a reason you pay a connection fee on top of a usage fee for power. Maybe ISPs should start doing this. $15/month connection fee and $2/mbit-avg during peak hours and $0/mbit-avg during off-peak.
I'm down with this. Even with "heavy" usage, my bill would be much cheaper. I bet my bill would be under $20/month even using BitTorrent.
Having 200+ channels streamed to your house doesn't?
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
If I am strange because I still have Dish Network despite being able to get everything else online, then yes I agree. I still haven't made the mental leap to cut that cord. Even though I almost exclusively watch DVR'ed shows, I still like the idea of having a single place to get on-demand background noise.
If I am strange for not watching sports [shrug] don't know what to tell you. I grew up playing soccer, baseball and lacrosse, and now as an adult I play soccer 4-5 times a week. But I can't be bothered to watch any sports, no not even soccer. The World Cup and the Super Bowl serve mearly as excuses to have / go to a party and I'm the guy chatting up the girls in the room with my back to the TV. I derive no enjoyment from watching other people play for whom I have zero connection (read: I don't have kids to watch).
Also I guess I just don't pay THAT much for Dish and I consider it my "nod" to paying for content that I'm might, in theory, also be torrenting because I don't have enough DVR's or because I hate edited/censored TV (I'm looking at you BBC-America). Oh and aren't there still commericals on the likes of Hulu that I can't skip? Even one is annoying, and with my DVR I can skip them really quickly.
If you can't be good, be good at it!
Fiber Testbed in my City: 50/50 uncapped $60/month - get speed at all times and low latency(rollout going live soon, expecting prices to drop)
California fiber 1Gb/1Gb $70/month no cap - get speed at all times and low latency
Except of course, for live syndicated sports like NBA, MLB, NFL, some NCAA, local college and high school sports, and, of course, sportscenter (the original live show is unedited, then they cut out the goof ups and the swearing for the 8 reruns following).
Is this even the real problem? I see this as the ultimate goal of the cable companies. They offered unlimited bandwidth in the beginning to get people to sign up and limiting how much any other company or municipality wanted to invest in infrastructure, and now that there is so little competition they can start charging more for less and less service. If there was a healthy amount of competition it wouldn't matter if one or the other offered tiered pricing. And on Slashdot non-US commenters have been telling us the right model *is* tiered pricing for years- for mobile and wired internet. If I had any faith in the FCC or competition I don't think tiered pricing would be a bad thing.
Promotes efficiency in the same way that cutting out someone's tongue would prevent them from eating too much ice cream.
Don't worry, we'll just make it a crime to run an open access point since someone might use it to do something bad and not be caught. That'll take care of that.
Just like it took care of piracy, eh?
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
The summary doesn't make it clear, but the original article doesn't say anything about the cable companies being able to increase their profitibility while at the same time blocking consumers from cutting the cord and getting their TV services online, and I doubt Genachowski said anything like that either. I'm assuming it's the opinion of the poster.
It may be true, but it would depend on how well the FCC enforces network neutrality. Don't DSL providers of TV services (like Surewest) transmit their TV shows over TCP/IP just like Netflix or Hulu? So if they are going to charge you for bits, they should have to charge you for their bits as well, right?
And Comcast has digital streaming content that comes over your internet connection. Would they be allowed to offer their programming for free while charging you by the bit for video from other sources?
Who this might really screw is satellite TV customers like me. We have DirecTV for TV and movies, and Comcast for the internet. But if I want to watch a video on demand from DTV, it downloads over the internet. Would this be a disincentive for people to switch from Comcast even if they aren't "cutting the cord" per se?
Unfortunately, laws are being written by politicians with vested interests (corporations - which are run by and who's net profit most positively benefit the rich) which have the effect of NOT protecting the majority who have less power, money and influence.
The only recourse you have is to vote the yahoos out of office, but that becomes extremely difficult when your vote is put up against 'Joe Sixpack' and the like.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
racism. Google for the phrase 'Southern Strategy'. The real power is in getting a base out to vote. So few Americans vote that a tiny minority can dictate national policy so long as they a) vote and b) are allowed to. That's why back when Bush was elected for term # 2 there were armed police in riot gear stationed outside polls in poor black neighborhoods in Ohio & Florida. 'cause nothing says safe and inviting to a poor minority like police in riot gear.
Oh, and the reason Obama was elected was during the last election he sent 5000 (Yes, that's the right number of zeros) lawyers to Florida to keep an eye on Brother Jeb. Funny how a few days after that Jeb announced the polls in his state would be open for extra hours, and how no chad was left to hang...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Any thing that reduces the volume of banal chatter from Facebook is a pro-civilisation move.
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
Early on, cable lines broadcast exactly the same signal to everybody in a city. These days that is no longer true. Cable internet basically requires that the city be broken up into multiple signal domains, perhaps as small as one per neighborhood. This is also used to provide targeted commercials, and on demand content.
Now that we have targeted areas, it is possible in theory to only send the channels in use in that area, and letting the system reuse the space for unviewed channels as DOCSIS channels. Indeed this technology has existed for a while. Yet, correct me if I am wrong, I believe this system is not in active use.
This is true, to an extent.
Targeted area's are really only as accurate as the provider makes them, and its filtered more by the physical line that they're on vs the IP address that they have.
True, but the fewer people on each cable, the more useful being able to able to broadcast the digital channels only 'on demand', letting them become data channels when not in use. If you have one area for the whole city then most of the channels will be in use most of the time, but the fewer in each area, the fewer distinct tv channels are likely to be being watched at any given time, and thus more channels available for data.
For example if CMTS 1 Services Central PHX and CMTS 2 Services East PHX, you can know what area's a node on each is going to affect down to the street addresses if you have an outage.
The problem is Analog broadcasting. The FCC says that if you aren't transmitting for older TV's on your lines, you have to provide an Analog converter. In many smaller systems its cheaper to supply a digital converter and do away with analog entirely since the equipment costs for side by side broadcast are more than just putting out a couple hundred converters (that the government gives a tax credit on).
There's the final part of the problem. The internet switches (nodes) only control the access so long as the equipment exists in three places. The office, the node and the modem at the user. In order to broadcast digitally in the same manner that the internet works, every TV for every customer must be compatible. That means the big, expensive converters the government doesn't subsidize. You know how you pay 5$ a month for them right now? If they threw that switch, there's a good chance the FCC could interpret the rules of the digital cut over to provide those for free, since now they're 'necessary' to have any TV connected. By keeping it simpler its easier to charge more money. *
Could they not avoid this whole mess by always broadcasting the non-encrypted analog channels, and only do the 'channels on demand, DOCSIS when not demanded' for the channels that already require a set-top box or CableCard? That sounds pretty easy. Existing cable boxes could be upgraded in place with a firmware update, so that they communicate the channels they are watching in the same way they communicate VOD requests. Upgrading the CableCards might be harder depending on a few implementation details, but my understanding was that relatively few subscribers opt to use CableCards anyway, so even if they had to all be replaced, the cost should be relatively low.
*Note: I never said I -agree- with any of the practices in place. However, show me a for-profit business that isn't out for money and I'll show you a lie.
Stylish sheet to fix many problems in Slashdot's D3: https://gist.github.com/801524
I will send your helpful comment to my boss who pays my mobile bills. I think he will see the light and give me a plan with more data to prevent being stabbed with a pencil.
Or maybe a paperless office was part of that plan. no paper -> no pencils.
The ONLY purpose of such a law would be to keep poorer people down and in their place by denying them access to the best richest and most byte-filled stuff and limiting how much they can do online relative to their more fortunate peers.
If they can meter bytes the way they meter water they can control who sees what. Rich people see more and better things sooner. That's the ONLY purpose of schemes like this.
We have that now to a degree, but this scheme would codify it in a way it's not now codified. The vast majority people have the same per month cap imposed on them. Metering bytes would effectively cap people in direct proportion to their wealth. Sure , rich people can afford to buy as many capped monthly accounts as they want (say) but that just describes the problem- rich people have unfair access to more and privileged information, not a state of affairs we want to codify.
This guy is acting as a stalking horse to this long wished for wet dream on the part of the telcoms and cable companies. Rest assured they're watching to see what the reactions will be. Be sure to register your reaction.
Rest assured also that this sub-human gutter animal will position himself to profit enormously should such a byte regime ever come down.
It's long past time to pay for universal and near -as-you-can-get-all-you-can-eat internet access with taxes. This is what they're really terrified of- Muni WiFi.
Taxes paid for he development of the internet and the only legislation and regulation I want to see on it is
1) network neutrality- no bidding wars between content providers for access to the internet and
2) mandated bandwidth / total megabyte allowances going up each year at the same or better cost using South Korea and other first world nations as models with technical analysis of reasonable potential capabilities and capacity conducted by MIT as benchmarks of what can and should be possible at any given time point.
I'm ashamed to be forced to admit that this loser coke snorter private island owning whoring tax dodging revolving door participant 1%-er's profile makes it appear that he's a nominal liberal. Scum come in all guises; a big L Liberal this guy is not.
Do they realize how many poor people have given themselves an education through the internet? As well as the many poor, seniors, and disabled who rely on it for access to easily accessed, cheap entertainment.. this will SHUT out the lower income.. it's loke going back to the old modem days.. with the shock surprise bills you got (What? I was on line for that long? You want HOW MUCH?)
yes the "rub" as in rubs me the wrong way. I'm very much aware of the facts you state, hence my comment about donating a gonad to break out of that RICO circle.
If you can't be good, be good at it!
Same reason why in high density areas of the US like New York City you can get fast internet really cheap too.
Oh, wait...
from working for ANY government agency.
Or at least investigated to find out who exactly is paying him off.
Not sure about you, I have a paid for cable that's just for Internet access. I paid to have the bandwidth increased, though lately it can be really suck city! Sunday I had upload speeds around 10K. That's pathetic. 1990 called and said "Ha ha." I should get 2M, that's what I'm paying for. Regardless, it isn't free.
He must be a republican. Only a republican would consider doing something so awful.
The point you're trying to make is incorrect.
The advantages of fibre optic over electrical lines is just exactly that you don't have to push electrons across a wire to transmit information. In general, increasing bandwidth over an electrical connection requires more power. Carrying terabits over fiber optic networks requires phenomenally less power and the power is not proportional to the number of bytes that fiber optic is carrying.
Any increase in power that comes from keeping the equipment optical going - lasers, tranducers and modulators - is minimal enough compared to the HUGE increase in bandwidth to effectively break the connection between bytes sent and running electrical costs.
. It's not enough to point to a distant law of physics when you're arguing about real world economics.
The point I am trying to make is twofold. One is as a business, the concern fo ISPs is to maximize profits. The best way to do that is to charge more for doing nothing, or repressing competition, which is what they're always looking to do.
That's why we need something outside of business to look after the interest of people . Something with enough collective power that it can control those real world entities who would advantage themselves, or Hisself in the case of a King, at everyone else's expense. The idea we came up with a couple hundred years ago was called "government" by for and of the people.
Utilities are regulated for just this reason. People NEED the internet as much as they NEED electricity. It's now a fundamental necessity for modern life. If you don't pay your electricity bill, the lights go off, but that's not the same as saying the electrical companies are deregulated. Enron was deregulated electricity. That's when they started doing shit like turning off generators to drive up prices. This is what businesses will do given the chance. Sorry.
The point of my post is to say that these ISPs need to be regulated and watchdogged and minimal price / performance standards set by an entity outside of themselves.
That's how modernity works. anything else is a form of despotism either by Kings or businesses, whoever gets enough power to screw everyone else over.
I don't think we're disagreeing much, but I am going to point out that even in a very practical sense, bandwidth costs money. You focused upon the physical fiber infrastructure, whereas I focused on the concept.
In a practical sense it costs money to get the hardware to support that connection to the home. It costs money to modulate it on a cable to the end user. It costs money to trunk and coordinate the flow so that we do not need to overbuild infrastructure. The Terrabit link you cited may be very low in power, but the gear to process that link at each end is not.
After all, you don't have a pair of wires that go all the way back to the generation plant. You have wires that go to a pole transformer that goes to a substation on a transmission ring through very large transformers, breakers, relays, and so forth. THEN you get to one of several generation plants.
Data networks are no different.
Do we need to regulate these monopolies? Of course! Do we need to set minimum performance standards? Of course! Do we need to set privacy laws? Yes, of course!
This all costs money. My question to you: The infrastructure is expensive. Who pays for it?
I work for a large industrial user of electricity. We have medium voltage substations and we buy our electricity by bidding for blocks of energy in advance and by buying it off of the spot market from the PJM grid. We do get good prices. Why? because we own some of the infrastructure and we attach at the inner tiers of the grid. If you could afford to put a large substation in your back-yard and to run feeders to the transmission grid at a million dollars per mile, you too could get these rates.
Likewise, if you build a data center in your basement, and you manage your bandwidth, you will be paying a lower rate than someone with a home firewall/switch who just wants an ISP to handle his e-mail, DNS, and web site for him.
But you will still be paying for the bandwidth. Someone needs to make the connection in to the rest of the Internet. Someone eventually has to attach to the inner Tiers of Internet routing. That infrastructure isn't free either. The hardware and the trunks and the energy that hardware uses isn't free.
So there will be graduated pricing and volume pricing for how you use bandwidth. Eventually, I predict time-of-day pricing for bandwidth use.
It's not that outrageous. Look at bandwidth use on the Internet. It is not constant. It has a rhythm and flow just like most energy firms have diurnal curves of consumption.
What the FCC seeks to do is to set up a framework that acknowledges this reality. I don't like it, but I also realize that it is very necessary.
Nearly fifty percent of all graduates come from the bottom half of the class!
Yeah we're not disagreeing that much . Of course consumers have to pay for stuff... I am a big defender (around these parts LOL) of recognizing that people need to get paid to produce work and cable companies are no different.
My concern is with the fact that this guy is the head of FCC and seems massively disinterested and out of touch with what's going on in the land - air duopoly (comcast- verizon) . Your general point is that it costs money to run stuff -hey that's the same point I am always trying to make around here. ! It costs money to run stuff and it costs money to invest in infrastructure so you can run stuff. That money has to come from somewhere, but without a truly competitive market in place where there are low barriers to entry and consumers can switch their choices frictionlessly , we need oversight.
Sadly the FCC has not been doing much oversight or even decent regulation for a good many decades. I've been following it off and on since the late 1970s. They were a mess back then, and they're still a mess. This is what happens when technical people leave judges, lawyers, and politicians to fend for themselves.
Nearly fifty percent of all graduates come from the bottom half of the class!