Slashdot Mirror
ISP Data Caps Just a 'Cash Cow'
An anonymous reader writes "Ars summarizes a new report into the common practice of ISPs implementing data caps, ostensibly to keep their network traffic under control. The report found a much simpler reason: money. Quoting: 'The truly curious thing about the entire debate has been the way in which caps have mostly remained steady for years, even as the price of delivering data has plunged. For example, paying for transit capacity at a New York Internet exchange costs 50 percent less now than it did just one year ago, and many major ISPs aren't paying at all to exchange data thanks to peering. So why don't prices seem to fall? ... The authors of the new paper contend that all explanations are more or less hand-waving designed to disguise the fact that Internet providers are now raking in huge—in some cases, record—profit margins, without even the expense of building new networks. ...While Internet users have to endure a ceaseless litany of complaints about a "spectrum crunch" and an "exaflood" of data from which ISPs are suffering, most wireline ISPs are actually investing less money in their network as a percentage of revenue, and wireless operators like AT&T and Verizon are seeing huge growth in their average revenue per user numbers after phasing out unlimited data plans—which means money out of your pocket. In the view of the New America authors, this revenue growth is precisely the point of data caps.'"
... it must be faced for the US to whom the free market is as much a religion as anything.
Just about anything a mobile phone company does is aimed at maximizing revenue. The reason they would even pretend otherwise is that it can be easier to convince people to pay more for things, and avoid being as angry about it, if you can feed them some kind of cover story to mollify them.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Millions of cell phone subscribers are paying big money monthly in order to consume advertising, in a way TV viewers in the 60's and 70's were never stupid enough to fall for.
Am I the only person who has known this for years? No matter how much data goes through infrastructure, it's not going to change the cost of running the infrastructure (significantly). That's like keeping a huge lightbulb on in town square but making people pay for the priveledge of removing the curtains from their house to let the light in. Doesn't change the cost, just another way for ISPs to gouge consumers. However, there is an exception. Satellite internet it makes sense right now for their to be caps. It's a behavior adjuster. A single satellite can only transfer so much data at once, so they commonly have off-peak times where if you want to download a few gigs, you can do it in those times and it won't go towards your cap. This is required because satellites are a fairly precious resource. Where I use to live no one in a 50 mile radius could get satellite internet because the only satellite serving the region was already over utilized and they didn't want it to get even worse.
I've got a plan from another carrier for only $40.
However, there is an exception. Satellite internet it makes sense right now for their to be caps. It's a behavior adjuster. A single satellite can only transfer so much data at once
In theory, caps on cellular (3G and 4G) data are the same way because of limited spectrum and limited space to put up cell towers. Except for some reason, cellular doesn't have an off-peak discount like satellite does.
I doubt anyone here is really surprised by this. On the one hand, the arguments made by the ISPs make some sense: as more and more people go online and download more and more multimedia and apps alongside simple web browsing (which also uses more data than it used to), then of course bandwidth usage is also going to go up. However, that argument ignores the other side of the coin--namely that the technology the ISPs use continues to improve, becoming more and more capable of meeting (or exceeding) that demand. The caps also ignore usage patterns, peak hours, etc.
If the ISPs cut you off entirely when you exceed your cap, then their argument might have some weight. But they don't do that. They let you keep going, at the same speed you were before. Only they charge you extra money.
What borders on criminal is that they're so bad about informing you of when you approach the cap. Though she claims never to use the Internet on her phone, my mother always goes over cap. She has only twice received a notification from AT&T that she was approaching the cap--both of which came two days(!) after she had already gone over her allotted amount.
I'm still on a grandfathered unlimited AT&T account. I come nowhere near 3GB of usage each month (I'm almost always on WiFi), but I have no intention of dropping down to a cheaper account. It's maddening that I can't get tethering (officially...) without going to one of their crap capped plans.
If you can't convince them, convict them.
Of course they are. Just like the telco's and long distance charges. The lines where long paid for but they just keep say that to many people are making LD calls so to help increase the number we need more money. All the while they don't actually increase capacity and just pocket the money.
How we solve this I don't know. The only thing I can think of is to move to the ISP's that aren't gouging as much as the next guy. I know that's hard. I also live in a small town and have very limited choices of ISP's.
Here's one way to try and save your self some money. Buy shares in the ISP (if public). Just like the banks. Try and get some shares so you to can get in on the profits. Yes again easier said then done. I don't have solutions for everything and everyone just ideas, and not always good ones.
The market isn't free because the incumbents buy laws to keep status quo.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
Then why would they vote for a center right party?
It's one or the other you dolt.
This is the exact behaviour you'd expect from a largely-monopoly or entrenched oligopoly market.
Governments or municipalities should own the infrastructure. Everything should be fiber. Most of the costs in those rollouts are administrative, not technical in nature.
There is a huge economic cost in not having gigabit FTTH infrastructure; it's big enough that companies like Google are stepping in.
..don't panic
is "Follow the money." Many things become clearer then, without even a white paper.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
From TFA:
"The best way to resolve chronic network congestion in the long term is to invest and expand capacity. Yet, a review of the publicly available financial document for some of the largest ISPs in the country shows a decline in capital expenditures—the costs associated with building, upgrading and maintaining a network, such as construction, repairs, and equipment purchases—for their wireline networks.Many ISPs are spending less money on capital expenditures now, both as a ratio to revenue but also even in raw dollars,than they have in years past."
Lack of competition coupled with the payment of lucrative dividends by telecommunications is the culprit. AT&T pays 6% and Centurytel pays 7.5%. There needs to be an incentive to redirect the money to modernizing the networks. Maybe a tax credit for re-investing in plant and equipment, or a lower corporate tax rate if the dividend rate is reduced, and the money used for plant and equipment.
This may seem like a really stupid question but it has always bugged me: why do both me and the content provider pay for data?
Back in the bad old days of Long Distance Calling, whomever initiated the phone call (assuming you're not calling collect or on a 800 number) paid for the call. It made sense: why pay for something that you didn't start?
However, in data, both sides pay. Am I the only one confused by this? I understand that I should have to pay for a connection (like the phone company) but why do I get a bandwidth meter along with the other side?
The only reason I can think of is because the data is "asynchronous" (e.g. the same amount of data isn't being exchanged). But this reason only goes so far since once side is uploading and the other side is downloading.
We don't live in Shouldland.
This is precisely why capitalism doesn't belong in some markets. Cue rabid "the free market is always right" retorts in 5...4...3... but the truth is when you have any infrastructure service; sewer, electricity, communications, roads, etc., that everyone needs access to (or at least a majority of people in the community use often), without regulation this kind of thing will happen. It creates a natural monopoly; And no, the government doesn't create the monopoly. It would happen whether the government even existed or not. This is the quintessential example of where and when government regulation is needed to rebalance things so that the service provided retains its usefulness to society without becoming parasitic. The government is the only thing besides an even larger monopoly power that can influence this kind of market dynamic.
And yet here we are, getting put over a barrel and raped because of our idealized notion of how the market will "correct itself", and how government regulation "hurts businesses". You know what, fine: Let one company's profits suffer a little for the greater good, rather than letting everyone suffer a little so the company can be massively profitable at our expense. We need to put a stop to the nickle and dime death march that is killing our middle class off. We need regulation.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
http://www.mysimplemobile.com/
Bandwith is not a commodity like water. We don't save anything when we under utilize it. The cheapest per bit cost is when the network is maximally utilized. Incentives that encourage people to use less bandwith are economically unsound.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
over on the ISP and backbone side of life, data traffic is growing 50-60 percent per year, and it's a wild race to try and keep ahead. an expensive race. at this point, at least one company I'm familiar with is asking do they raise the backbones to 400 gig or to one terabit inside the centers.
that ain't the flower fund they have to raid for it.
argue caps all you want, NostrilDrippus Predicts! (tm) that tiers of usage or per-gig usage charges are your next fightin' words in mere years of time.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Waiting until I get home is free. Have some patience.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
You can't let someone dig up the roads because a person on the street has decided to change ISP.
You can't let someone use the radio bands willy nilly because there's a new customer for wireless internet.
It's rather the intent of every single Randian faithiest to INSIST that any failure in the Free Market is due to government interference.
Given that you INSIST they should do some things such as enforce contracts and prosecute theft, murder, et al, that there is ALWAYS going to be government interference.
One thing that always shows up the idiot libertarian is that they blame government interference without ever considering evidence for the stance. Just "Government exists? Well, they did it".
If government got out of it and stopped enforcing contracts, then the ISP customers would be able to not pay for the connection and that would fix the failure, wouldn't it? But that's not allowed, government MUST interfere then!
So this is something that big brother is there to help us out with, there's a real simple solution imho: the government owns the backbone and leases it to the ISPs, fuck level 3, fuck comcast, give it to uncle sam. Comcast can lease from sam, so can Syn, Syn doesn't like comcast, I lease the backbone all the way to a public gateway and comcast needs to be competitive or Syn will charge less (A LOT less in current market state) and take all it's customers.
Now the problem with this is that ISP's install their own backbone, so they own it, the government would have to lay down a backbone of similar nature house to house costing billions.
What upsets most people (in the western free mark world) isn't that they make a profit. It's that the companies don't reinvest some of that profit in actually increasing capacity. They (the companies) just complain about to much traffic and crank on the rates again. That and there is a complete lack of competition and almost zero ability for a new entry in the market. This makes it at best an oligopoly and at worst a monopoly in 99% of the towns and cities.
Also why do republican morons always think that the democrats/liberals are against profit?
Oh look its the big scary socialists again. They don't want anybody to own anything! See they want corporations and millionaires to pay TAXES!!!!
AC is a moron
As another point: I live out in the middle of nowhere, and according the the major telco/cable companies it's "not profitable" to provide any decent service to me. Yet, not 1 but *3* local ISP's have started up here--the newest one is close to 2 years old, the others have been around for substantially longer than that and are still in service, therefore presumably making money.
Qwest or Comcast could easily have owned the entire market here and left no room at all for these upstarts, but they just did not care.
I live in Toronto, Canada and there's two options for cable and cell phone: 1) get gouged. 2) don't get gouged but deal with a smaller player.
I have friends who complain about their overage bills using the internet with Rogers and Bell. I tell them that they can get unlimited usage (or 300 gb / month limits if you want to save a few more dollars/month) for half of than what they're paying via Teksavvy and they don't want to switch.
I have friends who complain about paying $70 / month for a cell phone that only gives them 1 gig of data use and tell them about the unlimited data/calling/texting/voicemail plans Wind offers for $40 / month and am met with "wow, that's a good deal, I should switch," but no one ever actually switches.
I understand that some friends say this just to be polite so I'll leave them alone, but there is something to be said for momentum that people have with a company even if it's ripping them off.
For my kid I automatically get texts for (IIRC) 50%, 75%, 90% and limit hit (she can't go over).
I actually work for an ISP in the UK. I don't know about the states, but here the big cost to us is the backhaul from the customers premises to one of our PoP's. Transit costs are going down dramatically but backhaul costs are not. People are using more bandwidth, which means overall it is becoming more expensive to provide services.
Yeah like when your car breaks down. Let me just walk home instead of being able to use my cell phone.
The Western States Contracting Alliance is an agreement that AT&T Mobility and Verizon Wireless extend to their government and non-profit customers. Aside from no early termination fees and some other sweet deals that make mobile much more palatable, they offer users unlimited data standard. Not "5 gigs and you're out", but truly unlimited mobile data at full 4G speed. I pushed 12 gigs last month as a personal best without being throttled or sent a nastygram. While I'm glad they extend this service to the IRS recognized do-gooders out there, I know that it came about because your senator doesn't want to worry about data caps and speed and those peasant concerns. They worked for this, they dictate the terms and I think everyone should know about it.
most people do not have a choice when it comes to wired Internet connectivity. I have access to Comcast and no other ISP for connectivity.
I thought most customers in urban or suburban areas lived within 3 kilometers of a DSLAM and could thus get DSL.
remains sound asleep.
Oh, I was hoping for something a little better than that from you, sir. A man of your education.
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life.
This, along with credit card companies raising your rate after you borrow a lot because you're "riskier"
How does that affect people who follow Dave Ramsey's advice not to borrow? Or even people who follow Polonius from Hamlet?
Waiting until I get home is free.
Even if it is free, I can think of cases where it is unacceptable. Without a cell phone, for example, how are you going to get help if you're stranded somewhere? Pay phone operators have been removing pay phones from public places because so many other people have cell phones that maintaining the pay phones has become unprofitable.
They have to pay for what exits their network and goes to the internet, but that's pretty much a flat cost. That link should stay saturated.
Caps exist to keep a single customer from being a disproportionate cause of that saturation, which reduces other customers' quality of service.
Data caps are a cash cow for ISPs but ISPs in general are obscenely profitable, they make energy companies look like chumps.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Sure, building and maintaing the *capacity* costs money. But that's a fixed cost regardless of how much of that capacity you actually use.
If subscribers use more capacity, the provider has to spend capital to add more capacity. Incentives to reduce use of capacity allow the provider to delay such an upgrade from one date to a later date. In opportunity cost terms, the provider earns interest on the cost of an upgrade between those dates by adding a cap.
The options are either use charges or high oversubscription rates, both of which Slashdotters hate. Why can't I have it all for free? And with the best technology and 99 9s of reliability.
Learn to love Alaska
Or rather, it doesn't go through with an equal probability that other packets won't go through.
Caps allow the provider to discourage one subscriber from reducing the probability that other subscribers' packets don't go through.
We all get our fair share of the network, regardless of oversubscription.
Caps allow the provider to discourage one subscriber from reducing other subscribers' fair shares below an acceptable share.
"Robber barons" is nothing but a catch-phrase, and the ones I know of fall mostly into category 2.
Somalia is also category 2 (insofar as it applies at all, I can't really think of any Somalian 'monopolies' and as such I wonder if you know what we're even talking about here), and isn't so much 'lack of government' as it is so frequently portrayed in the West (partly out of ignorance, partly out of a political agenda), as it is that Somalians hate being de facto ruled by Ethiopians and Kenyans. However every time they try to form a government that resists the Ethiopian et al 'peacekeeping' forces, the West says "No! Bad Somalia! No self-determination for you!" And topples said government in favor of some Ethiopian-friendly puppet the Somalians don't want... hence they don't recognize the puppet government and the cycle continues. The issue is really a lot different than it is portrayed in the West.
So, try again, and you need to be specific. X company monopolized Y thing during Z period. No buzzwords, no vague assertions--just a concrete specific case or go away.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
TCP/IP has mechanisms to handle the case where too many people want to use a link. If 10 people each want to saturate your outbound connection, they'll each get 1/10th of the available bandwidth. That sounds fair to me.
Caps exist to discourage a subscriber from bringing other subscribers' effective data rates below the last-mile burst rate that the provider advertises. If the provider advertises a burst rate of 6 Mbps down and 1.5 Mbps up, subscribers are going to get frustrated if they can't send at 1.5 Mbps because so many other subscribers are sending at 0.5 Mbps that the network has become maximally utilized. In this way, maximal utilization leads to embarrassing speed test results on dslreports for the provider.
BT charge by the byte to all customers, this includes BT's provider arm, but that's no different to Starbucks paying huge amounts of money to their Swiss arm for ground coffee beans: it's fake difference, the money goes in the same pot.
And BT have a requirement to sell to others.
Except
a) they can delay and fuck things up and not be dinged for it
b) charge huge amounts for data
And therefore you have ABSOLUTELY NO CHANGE.
The holder of the wires MUST be a non-profit governmental institute.
While I haven't looked into this seriously, I'm starting to wonder if there is a general ISP bash going on. I understand that some of their policies are seedy, however I'm thinking about the cost.
While I agree that there may be some of that going on...
They invested huge amounts to create the infrastructure they currently have, and it could be that it is only paying off now? Or it could be that it started off as this, with companies attempting to recoup the costs and start making profit, but then found that they could continue the status quo and make large amounts of money?
Not likely. The capital costs for the infrastructure were paid for during the upgrades, and pretty much written off shortly thereafter. It doesn't take long for that to be accounted for in their accounting systems. So the operating costs are not nearly that bad, and certainly are not significantly high all the time.
This also doesn't take into account that they are selling customers different speeds over the same network. Straight-line networks (like DSL, Fibre) this generally makes sense since the provisioning of the single line can be handled very easily; however, it doesn't make sense for ring networks (like Cable) as they all share the same bandwidth regardless. So either everyone gets the lowest or highest common denominator - that is, everyone gets stuck to the lowest or highest speed of what was purchased by everyone participating in the ring; realistically it means the highest speed.
Do they need to justify what they are doing? They have a responsibility to their shareholders, they serve their customers in the way they think their customers deserve,
Because of how they operate people are going to question it. Yes, they have a responsiblity to their shareholders (by law for public companies); but that is typically at odds with their customers.
what stops the customers from leaving to another company? Honestly is there? Lack of competition?
Lack of ability to change providers to another more meaninful on.
For DSL, the telcos share the lines as required by law; but the backend service is still managed by the same company operating the CO regardless of who you're paying to get the access from. It's the nature of the system. So if you don't like your DSL service from company A, switching to DSL service from company B isn't going to really change anything as Company C operating the CO provide service to both A and B - and may in fact be A or B to start with.
For Fibre, you only get three choices: (i) Verizon FIOS, (ii) AT&T u-Verse, or (iii) paying for the very expensive T1/T3/OC lines that businesses get - typically not something home owners do. And you don't typically get a choice of 'i' or 'ii'; usually only one of them is available if either.
For cable, the cable companies negotiate with municipalities and counties to lock in entire regions into their network. Don't like your cable company? Too bad, if you want Cable you only get one choice unless you move to another area; then you might get a different Cable provider but you still have the same problem if you don't like them either - and that's a rather costly way to change providers.
Satellite? Well, they still (typically) require a telephone line, but again - you get only a few choices, and in the US it's mostly limited to DirecTV or DISH (aka Dish Network).
So you might be able to switch between the various types of providers, but in any given category your options are typically very limited. Sadly, the companies behind the above get in the way of residents getting together to lease a line (e.g. T1/T3) to share - they have often taken the residents to court to get their exclusivity agreements with counties and municipalities enforced even when they didn't provide service yet to the area where the residents were.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
Publicly traded companies have to compete with other companies in the industry, and this competition is not only for customers but also for investors. The more investors are interested, the higher the share price will go, and the more money the company will raise when it issues more stock. To attract investors, many publicly traded companies promise to pay out some of their earnings as dividends. You want ISPs to put more of their earnings toward network upgrades instead of dividends, and I want a pony.
This is why the major credit card companies keep trying to make it really hard to make major purchases without using one of their cards.
Using a card doesn't always involve carrying a balance. I use two credit cards regularly, one Chase Freedom Visa (1.1% cash back) and one Target REDcard (5% cash back), and I have both set to pay the entire statement balance in full each month. So I treat the credit cards as if they were debit cards: if I don't have the money in the checking account, I don't swipe the card.
No: "Unlimited data with 4G speeds for the first 250MB" What's unlimited about that?
Please, the easiest way to keep one person from using too much throughput is to put a hard cap on the max throughput and sell it as such.
A monthly cap is a cap on average throughput over a period of one month. Divide the cap in gigabytes per month by 324 to get the effective cap in megabits per second. For example, a 250 GB per month cap is the same as a 250 / 324 = 0.772 Mbps cap on sustained throughput. You appear to be arguing against the concept of advertising a burst rate.
So how many times did you post this in the thread?
My goal is to discourage people from making a distinction without a difference. I'm trying to show that no matter how many different ways Hatta rephrases the anti-cap argument, there's a corresponding phrasing for the pro-cap argument.
Do you normally defend poor business practices or something?
It's called devil's advocacy. I'm not trying to claim that caps ought to exist in a perfect world. I'm just trying to express the rationale for using them as a tool to improve the experience of the majority of customers until a capacity upgrade can be completed.
Level 3 has a blog post on this subject. They point out that the amount of data that a user consumes is mostly irrelevant because an ISPs costs are driven by the peek data rate not the total amount of data transferred.
http://www.mysimplemobile.com/plans-40-unlimited.aspx
The first 250MB are at 4G speeds.
The reach of the Somali "government" is Mogadishu and its suburbs. The rest is ruled by an ever-changing clique of Al-Qaeda groups, Somali warlords and pirates. Some of those groups receive help from other governments, but your description of Somalia as an actual nation-state is flat-out wrong. The biggest give-away is that you think that the last government that was toppled had any sort of popular legitimacy - it was the local band of Al-Qaeda affiliates.
As for convicted monopolists: Microsoft was the most recent one. I'll let you fill in Y and Z. The previous one was Standard Oil - again, I'll let you fill in Y and Z. And Google is really close to becoming the next one. The reason there aren't more is because of Anti-trust regulation during mergers (see ATT and T-Mobile, for example), and the actual break up of companies that become monopolies.
"Robber barons" is nothing but a catch-phrase, and the ones I know of fall mostly into category 2.
Clearly you know of the existence of monopolists who didn't fall into your second category, nor into your first. Why are you asking then?
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
netflicks has been trying to make to so there data does not count on caps but that's a uphill battle.
HA! And what do you think people did before everyone had a cell phone? I got my first cell phone in '99 (i think), 13 measly years ago. Believe it or not, you don't actually need one to live.
:)
Now get off my lawn!
Deja Moo: The distinct feeling that you've heard this bull before.
bandwidth caps are bs and i do not ever go to any isp with them.
... fire hot, water wet. GIFs at 11.
By the taping of my glasses, something geeky this way passes
I guess your argument makes sense if you live deep in the woods somewhere, but if you're as far out as I am your cell phone doesn't work anyway. Most places in the US have plenty of civilization around, and plenty of ways of getting help in an extreme situation like that...
Deja Moo: The distinct feeling that you've heard this bull before.
Google Fiber will put much of them out of business... not that I think Google wants to but if they keep the prices so artificially high they are not going to survive..
http://www.hawknest.com/
Most places in the US have plenty of civilization around, and plenty of ways of getting help in an extreme situation like that
Like what? If one's transportation breaks down, how does one call for a tow without a cell phone if the place where a pay phone used to be no longer has a pay phone?
...and why do they allow you to do that?
It's simple. They know that otherwise you'd be too smart for their scheme and wouldn't even have a credit card come the day that you happen to need more cash than is in your checking account.
Blah blah blah blah then you never actually state the actual reason why they permit that, which tells me you don't know what you're talking about. Store credit cards encourage people to shop with a given store. On other cards, the processor takes a cut of every transaction. There's money to be made even if you don't carry a balance, which is the reason credit card companies don't cancel cards that never have one.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Get rid of the laws that favor one or two big companies in an industry. "Get rid of all laws" as a response to "some laws are bad" is the mark of a demagogue or an idiot.
By the taping of my glasses, something geeky this way passes
Every business has a phone. Failing that, most folks in the rural US will be happy to make a call for you (on their landline) if you ask nicely and don't look and smell like a bum. Hitch-hiking is a lost art, but in a real pinch even that might work. If you're not in the rural US (meaning you're in the urban US; I don't know how this works elsewhere), you're near a business, and it's gonna have a phone.
Again I ask, how do you think people pre-1995 did this? Just sat in their cars and starved to death?
Deja Moo: The distinct feeling that you've heard this bull before.
All caps do is make someone who uses bandwidth at quiet times unable to use it when busy.
Then apply the cap only at times of peak packet loss and keep the off-peak times unmetered. Oh wait, you can't do that because providers have to use plan simplicity as a selling point.
A... bad saying?
You could make the same argument about a lot of things, like insurance. It's a slippery slope argument, I got 2 cards so I could build my credit in order to buy my house. I'll let you know when I don't pay off my cards in full every month - it's not rocket surgery here.
Just because someone was murdered doesn't mean he wasn't right. Billions of people follow (or claim to follow) Jesus of Nazareth, and he was sentenced to death by the leaders of organized Judaism.
you're near a business, and it's gonna have a phone.
However, the sign on the door states: "NO PUBLIC RESTROOM OR PHONE"
how do you think people pre-1995 did this?
Pre-1995, pay phones were commonplace in urban areas.
I'm just trying to express the rationale for using them as a tool to improve the experience of the majority of customers until a capacity upgrade can be completed.
Bingo. This is what caps are for and they do a great job. The ISPs will rake in record profits and pay out massive bonuses instead of upgrading capacity. Caps are the reason why our shitty network infrastructure still works as well as it does. Caps will also be used to postpone capacity upgrades as long as possible.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
Any such commission would eventually be captured by the industry it's supposed to regulate, becoming useless.
The only solution to our problems is a freeer market. Competition is the only thing that will provide the necessary downward pressure on prices and incentive to invest in better quality of service. The only way to achieve increased competition in these marketplaces, however, is probably through a decidedly non-free-market path.
The service providers must be broken up, with the divisions that control the infrastructure being split off from the portions that provide services/content to the end user--either into separate private corporations, or by nationalizing the infrastructure, thereby eliminating the conflicts of interest that plague the existing industries.
Yes, even as a quasi-libertarian die-hard free market capitalist, I am quite serious about the suggestion to nationalize. Infrastructure (spectrum/towers, copper cable, fiber, whatever) is a natural monopoly. The only way for it to be efficiently managed is either via heavily regulated (preferably via something like common carrier) private companies, or a publicly owned utility model. As long as the people who own the pipes are also the ones delivering you service, all the pressure is applied in the exact wrong direction, leading to increases in prices and reduction in quality.
On the other hand, when anyone can become a service provider by paying for access to the lines/towers (on a pricing schedule that treats all providers equally), if a service provider starts overcharging or under-performing, a competitor can move in and eat their lunch. People will flock to providers who provide the best value, since they will no longer be chained to a specific company by regional monopolies on the resources.
Oh, and while you're at it, get rid of that abomination called CDMA.
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
The issue is probably not interconnection and peering, it's probably provisioning for peak usage.
Take a neighborhood of 1000 houses. Ten years ago there may have been a few people download mp3s, someone downloading a movie, some people doing web and email, aggregated you probably would've gotten away with a 10Mbps connection, maybe less as the internet wasn't as widely used. These days during peak periods you could expect perhaps 100 people streaming HD Netflix to their TV, some downloading torrents, others browsing images, watching youtube videos, you have people on phones, tablets, smart TVs, devices doing updates, etc - that would probably require more like 1Gbps, 100 times more bandwidth than ten years ago.
Interconnection costs less, but you have to upgrade your huge number of expensive routers and various network equipment, upgrade your back-haul, provide local caches for youtube and netflix, etc, etc. Sure they're making increasing profits every year, but it's not like they're standing still.
DISCLAIMER; I actually work for an ISP, and have done so for over a dozen years now.
The phrase you're looking for is "punitive damages".
At some point an ISP will charge a non-trivial amount of money in order to avoid network congestion.
The main problem with this equation, if there is one, is NOT the price being charged but rather the amount of data included before excess/usage-charges are applied.
In practice you should ALWAYS cause financial pain-and-suffering to your Top 'N' customers, because they're the ass-monkeys abusing your capacity as hard as they're capable. If they *really really really* want that much bandwidth, all the time, every day, then they should be prepared to pay for it.
ISP financials (for retail customers, at least - business people pay "real money" for services) are based on the assumption that "on average customers use X% of their line-rate".
REAL WORLD EXAMPLE: little-ol-grandma absolutely NAILING her DSL line torrenting DVDs of movies (yes, violating copyrights no less), burning them to disk and handing them out to friends WHILE SHE NEVER WATCHES ANY OF THEM (there aren't enough hours in the day anyway). Are you going to SERIOUSLY going to argue that her usage costs should be happily averaged out across the entire userbase?
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
For the same reason that a duck is not a dog, yes.
I am John Hurt.
Exactly. If we just get rid of all of the laws, the market will be free.
I mean, we've seen how well things have worked thus far with laws, and have noticed that increasing the number of laws on the books seems to decrease happiness. So, let us embrace anarchy for a while, and see where it leads us.
I am John Hurt.
Invisible hand, where are you when we need you to pimp slap the greedy? Just as invisible as the emperor's clothes?
so instead prices are raised a bit for everyone to pay for [transaction fees].
The prices were already raised to cover the cost of counting cash, including the cost of cash registers occasionally being short.
"let the government own the backbone"...anyone know of any toll roads that removed the tolls when the superhighway / bridge was paid for?
In NSA America social networks join you!
Can't come soon enough.
DUH!
When the Internet first came out, [formerly] gov't-owned Australia's de facto monopoly telco - now known as Telstra - had no qualms "milking" low-income families - who could afford the company's "cheapest" wired Internet plans (eg, one costing $29.95, but included just 500 MB of data, ie, before the plan's $150 / GB "excess usage" penalty-fee kicked-in).
I met the father of one of my students, who'd experienced "bill shock" on receiving a month's bill for wired Internet service of -over- $1,200 the week before... We'd prohibit power utilities from building "poverty-traps" into their Electricity tariffs (often - in that era - even -rewarding- bigger users with -lower- KWh rates).
But Telstra never thought twice about likely -social- consequences of its residential pricing. It was enough that the company made money.
It may surprise some, that it wasn't -that- long ago, the Telstra -finally- removed such "poverty-trap" plans from its Internet plan offering.
Value is a function of scarcity; packets of data are not a scarce resource. How, then, do ISPs get away with selling them in units of volume?
Most of my expenses don't change much from month to month. I basically stopped doing the impulse buys shortly after I got my first job and wondered why the hell I bought some things. Also having an emergency fund saved up just sitting there ready to be tapped just in case does wonders. There are an awful lot of things that can be planned for but it does take discipline and delaying gratification which given how many people are having problems now would indicate that I am in the minority.
Time to offend someone
If you were outside of a town or city you were stranded until someone came by or you had to walk. If you were in an accident and were injured you had a much lower chance of getting emergency response in a timely manner.
Also, no one said you need one to live. The point is that cell phones have more uses than needing to make trivial calls that can wait until you get home.
Comcast is no longer enforcing their 250GB/month cap. From a friend that still works at Comcast. "I know there used to be one on your Comcast.com Account page but when they started letting people stream via XBox, it kinda screwed with those numbers because they said it wasn't going to impact customer's bandwidth cap. I tried pointing it out as in "how are we going to tell what is streaming traffic on Xbox vs someone's normal useage when it's all coming from the same IP?" They "assured" me they had it covered. The enforcement of the "data consumption threshold" was pretty much suspended after they found there wasn't an easy way to determine what traffic was what..... We keep being told something is coming but not sure when. They do actually have a different bootfile for the modem that I believe should be providing an individual IP for the Xbox (like the phone has it's own IP/provisioning as well) so eventually they may be able to figure something out but I've not heard much more on it recently. For the longest time the only way we could see any useage was to log into CMTS and look at modem's raw useage since it was last rebooted."
you also believe that increasing the per-gallon gasoline tax is supposed to discourage driving to work or home during rush hour.
Some countries do tax motor fuel to encourage use of mass transit.
You are everything that is wrong with consumers. Go educate yourself, please.
I concur. I put damn near everything on credit cards and have only ever carried a balance in a couple of instances (and mostly because it was easier than moving funds out of other investments to settle it).
Depending on what promotions I'm on, I usually end up with something in the region of $1500 in cashback or rewards in a given year. Then there are extended warranty benefits, I dropped an expensive pair of sunglasses and Amex covered it. Had a paypal purchase go wrong and visa took care of the appeal for me. Then I have Amex's premium rental car coverage which gives me primary coverage for rental cars when state farm wont. The Visa concierge service is handy in a pinch, if you find yourself stuck somewhere they'll happily arrange hotels and such.
Sure you can misuse credit cards, but that doesn't make them evil.
"The report found a much simpler reason: money." You think? DUH!!! I've always known that. It's BS that these big ISP's don't have the bandwidth to handle the data flow. The biggest ones definitely have the manpower and infrastructure to constantly upgrade and improve their networks, which is what they should be doing anyway with all the obscene amounts of $$$ we keep paying them. This is especially important for the mobile carriers (they're ISP's too, they serve Internet content), because more and more computing is being done over the smartphone and tablet now, and the wireless plans are mostly the ones with the data caps, right? My home ISP service is still unlimited access (unless I've just been grandfathered in with my two-year price protection plan). Anybody happen to know if Time Warner Road Runner service went to data capping?
All the bullshit argument on here is mind-boggling. I run a company that is the SECOND CLEC in the ENTIRE FUCKING STATE OF OREGON to EVER connect to remote (non-Central Office) cross-connects. We are self funded. And we're one of two companies in Oregon that lease copper to rural homes, but don't own it. All this mental masturbation about free market vs. state organized is COMPLETE BULLSHIT or BRILLIANT, either-or.
NOBODY else can serve some addresses that we can serve. It all comes down to people doing the actual FUCKING WORK to string the physical infrastructure to the end user. EVERYTHING ELSE IS TOTAL BULLSHIT. NOBODY leases copper lines out of non-CO cross connects in ALL OF OREGON except for our tiny company which found a way to serve certain remote cross-connects in Central Oregon, and Douglas Fast Net out of Roseburg.
Why do I point this out? GET OFF YOUR FUCKING ASSES AND START DOING THE FUCKING WORK. ALL OTHER CLECs are simply colocating in downtown Central Offices and milking business phone lines for all they're worth. They SKIM PROFITABLE BUSINESS SERVICE AND DO NOTHING TO REACH RESIDENTIAL CONSUMERS.
The CLECs are FAT AND LAZY. The ILECs are LOCKING THEM OUT OF ACCESS to DARK FIBER as per 2003/2004 FCC TRO/TRRO. AND RIGHTLY SO.
If anyone with both the technical and construction skills comes around to provide competitive service, or any service, support them.