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Top US Lobbyist Wants Broadband Data Caps
sl4shd0rk writes "Michael Powell, A former United States FCC chairman, is pushing for 'usage-based internet access' which he says is good for consumers who are 'accustomed to paying for what they use'. Apparently Time Warner and Comcast (maybe others) are already developing plans to set monthly rates based on bandwidth usage. The reasoning on the NCTA website lays out the argument behind Powell's plan."
Seriously the ISPs who get behind metering and capping are just trying to stop the cord cutter movement. They know they are dinosaurs and the end is near. They are the same ones who refuse to take free Netflix CDN boxes to reduce the Netflix backhaul by 90%, and improve the service quality to their customers as well, instead trying to charge Netflix bandwidth fees. There is nothing whatsoever precious about Internet bandwidth. Every few years some new tech lets them put 100x as many bits down the same single mode fiber-optic pipe, and it's burying or stringing that pipe where the lion's share of the cost is.
Since Google isn't in the TV game really, they have nothing to lose by letting you pass all the data you want.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Doesn't say anything about things being different for uploading, but if you are running an Internet facing video camera (or three as seen here) you will easily blow through that 5GByte/month bandwidth cap.
... for the industry perhaps?!? ;-)
NCTA calls is "Fair Broadband Pricing"
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I could get behind a hybrid plan. Base cost for a base level of bandwidth. Base should cover the "long tail" of the usage curve, i.e. the least-consuming ~90% of users. Then charge per unit over that threshold. If this over comes to pass it should be paired with a requirement that providers treat all packets the same, regardless of source and destination.
I'm actually completely okay with this. No more "guess the hidden bandwidth cap" games, just a simple decision about whether I really want to spend money for extra bandwidth usage to D/L something this month or not.
(Yeah, yeah, "they're going to gouge us, waah". Guess what, they were gouging you already.)
I know that techies will scream at me for this, but usage-based billing isn't too bad. This way, granny pays very little, and the power users pay what they should. I consider this to be a completely separate and isolated issue from net neutrality, and it's frustrating when people blur the two.
Net neutrality means treating all packets as equal and not implementing stupid filters and prioritization. Network access should be a dumb utility like electricity and water, which are billed per usage, which makes sense.
Pick your usage for the duration of the contract, what BS.
This is not going to work. Most software and games are moving to online distribution and many of these titles alone are over 10GB in size.
Some things never change.
It's past time for municipalities throughout the country - and whole states, even - to reclaim the easements that telecommunications companies rely on unless they can start meeting some very strict (and escalating) service quality targets. Practically nobody else in the West pays as much as we do for service as poor as ours when it comes to phone, television, and Internet access. Threatening to replace them with municipal and state-run companies should put their feet to the fire. We already know that they don't compete, and in fact collude.
The greed of these companies is boundless and they control access to infrastructure which our present and future prosperity relies on. No more games. They will continue to tighten the screws until they are forced to stop.
nothing about if it was the right thing to do, just: "If you don't do it soon people will won't let you do it because they'll expect unlimited Internet". No discussion of the technical need. It's pretty clear there is none, and this is just a money grab.
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Bandwidth is a time sensitive commodity. It's going to be sending either a 0 or a 1 100% of the time. Instead of caps, they should think about allowing customers to volunteer to be throttled for a reduced fee.
It's similar to an airplane ticket, in that it's worth full price, right up until the point the gate is about to close, at which point they will take any price over the marginal cost of fuel. I know many people that would be happy to let "full price" guy go first if it saved them a few bucks.
It's kind of like the MP3, which was one of the first formats that the *consumer* picked out, and media companies hated. I can kind of see both sides of the metering argument, but it would be nice if the market had a say in it, rather than it being just a bunch of bastards trying to pay off congress to ram it down our throats.
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
Artificial scarcity may be my least favorite of all the artificial things.
Even if you take them at their word, bandwidth is not the highest cost component of an ISP's business. It is all in the infrastructure and that is basically fixed whether you use one 1 byte or 10 terabytes.
Over the last few years, wholesale IP transit costs have dropped 50% per year. Nowadays big ISPs are probably paying roughly $6 per terabyte. With pricing so cheap it is obvious that usage is not the driving cost.
Source: http://www.dslprime.com/dslprime/42-d/4830-internet-transit-costs-down-50-in-last-year
(I realize that ip transit is priced by data rate not total bytes, but all of these usage-based billing schemes are priced in bytes per month, so I did a rough conversion of the units in the source to the units comcast would use for pricing.)
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
which he says is good for consumers who are 'accustomed to paying for what they use'
Such as paying $72 per month for cable despite never turning on the TV? No, sorry, my issue with this statement is that while they mean those who use more will pay more, they do not mean that those who use less will pay less.
Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul.
I would welcome limiting Comcast's ability to upload content to the internet. This would allow all the other content providers to blossom. 8)
AT&T currently caps us at 150 GB a month, so that'd lower our ISP bill to $15/month! I'm game.
And the people who watch Netflix at full HD for 5-6 hours a day will be paying ten times as much, but hey, screw them.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
So whenever you hear / read a press release from a corporation/industry body saying they're doing something for the best interest of the customer, just replace "customer" with "ourselves". The fact that our regulatory bodies have allowed ISP's to purchase media companies shows how broken / toothless they are. The fact that Michael Powell went from the FCC to lobbying for the very god damn companies his former office was supposed to regulate is baffling.
...until I hear what Bennett Haselton thinks about all this.
..as long as it's purely based on quantity used and cost to provide
It sucks when it's used as a weapon to kill competition (Netflix) or when it's based on the type of content
They might put in metered usage. I was a bit surprised really when it wasn't part of the deal at the outset of broadband services.
But then again, they might not. It's only going to take one of them to give the rest the finger and say "Unlimited internet!" and the rest will follow.
With so much moving to internet infrastructure, I think the entire idea of metered bandwidth for home users is a little absurd. I think it would cast a very dark cloud over the internet for Americans as we all go to metered and start watching our bits. Could spell doom for video streaming services.
It would bring back a huge push for webpages to return to minimalist layouts to conserve bits and attract the new metered customers wanting to consume content with minimal impact on their meter.
Anyone remember the days before we had unlimited long distance calling? The big price wars (yea right, more like lots of fanfare about ripping you off.) over per minute charges between big telcos. Anyone remember that in any kind of fondness? I didn't think so. Metering internet is not going to be a very good thing if it gains steam.
What was that line you Yanks sing about "owing your soul to the company store" or something like that? Funny how the rest of the civilised world has ZERO issue with the provision of broadband without data caps. And yet, you Yanks suffer the dribble from endless shills 'proving' that unlimited Internet services can never be financially viable.
Here's a clue, Americans. Look at other lands. If THEY can do something, so can you. The rest of us have no need to mass medicate our children, no need to mass mutilate the genitals of our male children, no need to DENY appropriate medical treatment on the basis of illness rather than wealth, and no need to allow depravities to control effective telecom monopolies so they can provide the crappiest possible service at the highest possible cost.
Wasn't always thus. We Brits used to look upon your 'free' local telephone calls with envy, as we got stung for every minute used regardless of destination. We'd watch depictions of YOUR kids sitting on the phone for hours in the evening, thinking of how no-one could ever afford to do that in the UK. How low you Americans have sunk.
You allow the worst kind of evil filth to place your senior politicians in their pockets. You are cretinous enough to CLAIM you have 'democracy', while formally recognising lobbyists as a legitimate class of political operatives. Only a Yank could be so spineless as to allow a 'lobbyist' to proudly bribe your President IN THE OPEN. Other nations have these filth too, that is true, but they have to operate in the shadows. Only a Yank could claim a 'lobbyist' is an acceptable part of a true democracy.
Your media companies (including the owners of Slashdot) do NOT want the competition a free Internet offers. Unlike in other nations, the USA has a tradition of allowing criminal business cartels to create the laws under which you live. Criminality exists all over the planet, and so does bribery. Only America perverts the definition of capitalism, and formalises the process.
The best model for the Internet is the one that has grown it to the unthinkable success it has today. And I mean UNTHINKABLE. Go look at ALL the commentary when us enthusiasts first jumped into the new web-based version of the Internet. EVERYONE said "this is a nerd paradise that is going nowhere". Microsoft was the LOUDEST critic, sinking its fortune into CDROM instead (and I know that doesn't seem to make sense- but it is absolutely true). Obviously, a few years later, MS did a 180, but only when they could no longer deny how wrong they had been.
The Internet is unique because it is people driven. The usual filth played no part in its success at all. Now, this same filth sees the Internet like the Spanish saw the New World- as an undefended land of riches to be plundered. In America, Data Caps = 'rape', 'pillage', 'enslavement' and 'genocide'. But filth like Powell don't care, any more than the Spanish did, so long as his side gets some short term gain. To continue the analogy, it is notable that South America went historically to hell, compared to North America.
No caps mean, if you give people CHOICE for the first time in most American States, that people will pay to use the company whose policies match their usage. No caps mean very cheap monthly services will exist with caps (and NO, that is NOT a contradiction), and somewhat more expensive services will exist where 'unlimited' means customers own level of usage, along with sane traffic management policies, will define the quality of the service. New companies will arise if existing companies become lax offering what customers want/need/expect/can be given with state-of-the-art network tech.
More importantly, no caps mean that the tremendous level of innovation on the Internet (creating new services with new revenue streams) will continue unabated. This innovation is LOATHED by the filth by the filth that currently bribes your politicians, because it represents COMPETITION.
Will there be refunds of cash or bandwidth of for things like:
1) Cached content in the ISP
2) Banner Ads/Pop ups
3) Promoted content by media companies (trailers/promoted music videos/anything on myspace or facebook)
4) Content served by the Internet provider like cable tv on tablets?
Some pages are a meg with all of the attached BS and javascript.
Try blocking the hostnames that serve nothing but bloat, such as the hostnames associated with video ads and social recommendation ("like" buttons). You can do this with the hosts file or browser add-ons. Also try blocking Flash using the "click to play plug-ins" feature in modern versions of Firefox and Chrome.
So what now I can only watch 10 hours of TV a week, or listen to my car radio only during non peak hours. We have to watch commercials, does that time count. Internet pages that show an ad, then start video. Hell even 80 yr olds use netfix now, they dont even need a PC for that.
The moment this comes to pass, internet based advertising is dead. Nobody in their right mind is going to pay to load advertising videos and images that often are much bigger in bytes than the actual information on the page.
One way or the other. Not both.
Usage based fees will naturally mean keeping the current monthly rate as the baseline and then charging more for going over a ridiculously low cap that most users will exceed.
Compared to how much you save, the difference between capped and uncapped internet is negligible. Considering we now watch through services like Netflix, YouTube, hulu and others, and we get games through steam and new consoles will have 50GB games, the value proposition is just not there. Even for those who don't use these services, they would be saving at most a few dollars, but charged hefty fees for any overages. This does not reflect the benefit of "paying for what you use.". Powell is either confused or a con artist.
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What are the data caps like in Finland, Sweden, Switzerland, Japan, South Korea, Canada, Australia?
wake up and hold your nose
The problem is that this results in charging for information, effectively limiting the amount of information available to people.
Public utilities aren't perfect, but done decently they're much better than the alternatives. The telcos (and cable companies) have had their chance, and they've blown it, big time. So screw'em. Comcast, Verizon, Time-Warner, AT&T, and their smaller siblings are done. They can choose whether they sell off their broadband services, or to be bound by strong public-interest regulation on multiple levels, but that's it. Internet access proviers in the U.S. are greedy incompetents - they shouldn't be in control anymore.
*unlimited*, full and unsurveiled access to the internet.
Just remember kids, there is nothing companies hate more than a free market. Too much competition! We need regulation to keep those bastard immigrants from under-cutting our prices!
Is this why windows has been leaving internet explorer hanging with a bing page open that loads new ads through ajax and uses 500Mb overnight?
from a Republican. I'm so sick of big business always trying to find ways to bilk people. Look at South Korea, France, all these places -- heaps of bandwidth for almost nothing. We are so far behind the rest of the first world.
'Michael Kevin Powell (born March 23, 1963) is .. current president of the National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA).`
Content providers and network providers should be kept separate. If you are one you cannot have any interest in the other.
Make that a rider on the same bill and watch it disappear.
This must more of that "free market" behavior we keep hearing about.
Notice how lobbyists always seem to have a "better idea" about how the "free market" should work.
This is just more corporate greed. They see what appears to be lots of free activity and just can't stand it. They have to find a way to monetize it.
This irritates me as much as the phrase "In order to serve you better..."
An effective "democracy" creates the illusion the people have a say in their government.
...consumers who are 'accustomed to OVER paying for what they use'.
milking a geriatric cow - aged cheese!
How 'bout f*ckhead Michael Powell stick his head back up his ass, so we don't have to hear anymore bright f*ckin' ideas!
Bet he's getting rimjobs from the telecoms. Sellout! WHORE! Bend over I'll pimp your damn ass at a public glory hole.
We like consistent bills. A reliable 50 dollar a month bill is actually a lot better then a variable bill that can double or quadruple unpredictably.
Further, most people will actually pay more under such a system. Remember, we're netflixing and youtubing etc now. Sure, the people htat just do light webbrowsing and email might pay less. But the same people tend to buy cheap internet policies already. Typically around 20 dollars a month or less. While the higher bandwidth policies are around 50 dollars a month.
This change will screw consumers. It will mean less reliability for low bandwidth users and much higher costs for higher bandwidth users.
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We should also pay exorbitant rates to AT&T rent restricted handsets that only they are allowed to provide us. Y'know, because we did it for so long and are used to it.
Powell is profiteeristic sack of toxic shit.
Many years ago in Australia, a well respected ISP Internode introduced flatrate plans, which prioritised traffic based on usage in the last 30 days. This Whirlpool interview with Simon Hackett about the new flatrate plans. The plans failed as explained in this End of flatrate announcement. The key point from Simon's post is that flatrate wasn't able to attract sufficient low and medium users to balance the leechers. There is a thread to discuss Are Flatrate plans viable under NBN?.
The difference between the Australian & USA market is that we've pretty much always had quotas. Customers choose the quota they want (30GB through to 1TB). Quotas are implemented as full speed until you reach your quota and the speed is capped to 256Kbps or 128Kbps for the rest of the month. Some RSPs allow you to buy additional data blocks. Some ISPs also offer extra downloads during off peak times (midnight to 8am) which are good for scheduling downloads.
The fact is that ISPs run networks with contention and in cheaper ISPs that leads to congestion in peak hours. There is not dedicated bandwidth between your PC and the server you want to connect with. Quotas are a reasonable way for ISPs to manage network traffic and make it cheaper to offer faster speeds. Bandwidth is a shared resource, which some people over exploit impacting on others. This is referred to as the Tragedy of the commons.
Would you prefer 8Mbps with no quota or 100Mbps with a 1TB quota?
Our copper based telco to modem link is running at 36 Mbps as I type this - the infrastructure is all run by the former monopoly who historically owned all the wires (much the same as AT&T as far as I'm aware), but you can buy unlimited broadband deals from numerous providers on this infrastructure which does lead to competetively priced deals. This gives a pretty good service, although 'unlimited' broadband seems to get throttled severely at least twice a day which has resulted in an annoying 'turn the modem off and on again' solution to reset it when this happens (usually at a crucial point in a movie or sports match).
We are being moved to optical fibre (fiber for our friends across the pond) in a few days as there has been a massive rollout recently and we're being promised at least double the current speeds. Shall be really interested to see if there's a noticable improvement and if the wi-fi on some of my older devices can keep up with it.
Companies that were forced to be creative could easily capture plenty of value from the heavy user without creating the undesired psychological consequence that people feel each minute online costs them money. For instance a slight monthly fee for static ips, cloud services cached on your local router, ipv6 routers. Right now you can sometimes buy this stuff but not in the small monthly fee way that would rake in cash. Besides, the problem with bandwidth caps is that without competition providers will charge far more than the extra bandwidth costs at a given time of day
Let's see, the President of the National Cable Television Association wants to hobble Internet service to effectively shut down streaming services and give Cable companies an unfair advantage over same.
So much for net neutrality, not to mention ethics. Can you say "conflict of interest?"
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How do you propose to end what's a natural monopoly: last-mile utilities to the premises? Let a half-dozen competing companies each dig up the street in front of your house every time they want to lay some cable?
Here's the thing - that is so expensive to do, that it's not going to be a half-dozen; at any one time in may be one or two. And what is so bad about allowing that?
In fact, that's what an alternate internet provider did to my home 15 *years* ago. I'm not sure how they got permission from the city but a company called "Wide Open West" offered fiber nearly to the curb then (in Denver which today has no fiber to the curb service from anyone), they ran a cable out to your house from a local utility box.
The sad thing was is that was the fastest internet connection I ever had, followed by the Sprint DSL I had for a year after Wide Open West was purchased and closed; ever since those heady days of the first internet rush it's been only mediocrity from cable companies and DSL providers alike. So I say let whoever has the capital literally pave a path to my door.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Charging for usage isn't necessarily a bad thing, the question is how much they charge for usage. If they charge anywhere near what the cell phone companies are charging, then that's ridiculous. If they can deliver high speeds I can use a ton of bandwidth and get away for less than $100/mo, that seems reasonable, and then if I'm just checking email and browsing the web I should be paying around $25.
The problem, of course, is that'll never happen. Obviously their prices for going over the caps will be ridiculous, because they want to make as much money as they can without having to spend anything upgrading their infrastructure.
When is the government going to wise-up (yeah, I couldn't keep a straight face when I typed that) and regulate it like electric and phone?
don't need lungs or knee caps.
Once they are removed if should have to pay to get them back...
They claim they need more money for investment. I can bet that if this goes forward, we will discover in a few years that investment did not raise, but profit did.
Yep, if they're throwing fair around, let me quit paying for ESPN and any other "bundled" cable channels I don't want and can live without. I'd LOVE to quit subsidizing THOSE viewers.
The fiber provider in my area (Canberra, Australia) has options for n GB(8am-2am) + n GB(2am-8am) where n is 20, 100, or 500. It's $100/month for the 500GB+500GB option at 100(down)/40(up)Mbps. Dropping down to 100GB+100GB at 12/1Mbps costs $60/month, which is what I was paying in Berkeley for Sonic DSL two months ago, and is pretty much the speed I was getting. Once you hit the cap, you're throttled to 256kbps both ways.
Seems reasonable to me. The more I use, the higher percentage of their "tubes" I'm using and the more they need to build.
Wow, countries on this side of the globe are evolving from capped to un-capped.. and here you are going from uncapped to capped, truly you guys are the United States of Ass-backward..
Top US Lobbyist Wants Broadband Data Caps
Another bought and paid for crony capitalist.
We all agree we want these things, so why aren't we working harder to make them available? When we wanted to go to the moon, we did. So here we are and we want free Internet. Seriously, compared to the moon that's nothing. And entire generation of scientists said FU to gravity and we can't even transfer a bit of data without charging an arm and a leg for it like it's the most precious thing in the universe? When did we start giving up so easily? Maybe it was when somebody realized there was money to be made in scarcity...
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You CAN buy 10 Mbps dedicated. It costs about $500 / month. The standard model for residential is that you load a page, using the bandwidth for one second, then your neighbor uses it for a second or two, etc. An hour later, you're watching TV and a different neighbor is using the bandwidth. Since you're sharing the bandwidth, you share the cost.
I have dedicated bandwidth that I don't share. I pay over $1,200 / month. You can do the same.
The monopolies will end. I was part of the ATT divestiture team and no one would believe old Ma Bell could be taken apart -- but it happened in 1984 of all years. Does anybody remember when we paid $1/min for long distance calls with ATT Longlines? Now cell service to the continental US is included with the monthly fee.
Many communities around the nation are putting down their own backbones and wireless towers. My little town in Colorado is planning to provide service to citizens, putting Comcast out of business.
Even in bought and paid-for political America, monopolies will not be permitted.
Last I checked.... if I'm getting X speed over a month/billing cycle, that caps me already. Did I miss something?? I can only move that number of bits in that month based on speed of my plan.
Um...we know the argument behind his plan: Lots of cash from the providers to him to push this plan that's good for zero consumers.
The lobbyists can have data caps if they want. I prefer an unlimited data plan.
I currently do not have control of the amount of bandwidth I use, do you?
I control how much I download though, but not how long it takes.
For that I only have 2 options: 5Mbps down or 15Mbps down.
Once the ISP provide me with a pipe, please do not try to financially control how I would use it. It's my prerogative to check email once a week or have my NZB's running 24/7.
-vi
If bandwidth caps become reality, can we also get usage-based billing for cable and satellite too?
Charge folks for how much they use, but how do you determine what they asked for versus what was sent in their direction without their permission and possibly without their knowledge? Get hit by a flood of cruft while you are asleep and you could suddenly find yourself owing the ISP thousands of dollars.
"We won't count pings!"
TCP over ICMP to "cheat", anyone? Oh, and then we'll just be sure to flood with packets that "count".
The core issue though is that the network is a NETWORK. It's not like somebody opens a faucet and controls how much data flows. That data can be sent from the outside world. There is no way to accurately measure how much the user WANTED to use, versus how much gets sent anyway.
"We'll just make -everybody- work per byte, then flooding somebody to bankruptcy would cost the flooder too."
Only when credit card and identity fraud is 100% gone.
Given that it's already possible to get users of capped ISPs warned or cut off for breaking cap by sending appropriate data at a fraction of their bandwidth rate for the full month, it's not a long stretch.
@Whee
I want to see competition in the market place first. The idea that I can't pick between providers who offer plans on a competitive basis is unacceptable.
Once you allow competition then go ahead and offer this kind of service and we will be able to see what wins in the market.
wants to control us. It must be a Democrat. Oh wait, it's a Republican. Is that a Repubicrat, or a Democan. Oh bollocks, it doesn't matter.
Vote Libertarian. it's your only hope.
hey Anonymous, please make this guys personal life a living hell so he doesn't have the time to try this crap anymore. Thanks! Maybe tell him "You have gone over your quota of electricity and water for the month" and shut his services off, "You have used your quota of money out of your bank account" and report his cards stolen...I'm sure someone could come up with far more annoying things to show him what kind of future he is advocating.
...but ISPs didn't like the idea of a sane implementation and the CRTC (regulator) smacked them down.
During the discussion, "industry sources" (no clue who) indicated that the wholesale price to cover a GB of transfer over a typical ISP backbone is 2 cents, and the large ISPs didn't dispute it (sorry, I don't have a citation handy.) That price will have only decreased due to ever expanding scale.
A proper "pay for what you use" scenario might emulate how the power company (at least around here) bills their customers. Charge consumer accounts a base price of $20-30 per month for an internet hookup. This is what you pay if you don't use a single byte and all it does is get you connected. Then, charge per GB transferred. A charge of 5 cents per GB is a 150% markup which is pretty fucking big.
Caps don't need to enter into it. They just don't. Michael Powell and those who run him need to get this through their thick, entitled skulls.
For the record, Michael Powell is a first class asshole. He was a big censorship guy when he was running the FCC (because that's what his masters told him to do at the time.) He didn't give a fuck about their actual mandate and he was more interested in trying to police the airwaves. He can go fuck himself.
The few power users will get screwed over by the thousands of facebook/twitter users who do nothing but that on the internet...
Caps are nothing more than an excuse to gouge the customer. If they were anything about the actual costs of delivering bandwidth, then if you ran over the cap, the cost for excess bandwidth would be on par with the cost of the original data block that came with the subscription.
For example, let's say the cap was set at 200GB/month for $50. If you ran over and it was about covering costs, then an extra gigabyte would cost you about 25 cents. But it doesn't. It costs many, many, many times what the basic allotment does.
It's all predicated on the theory that if you only screw some of the people, there won't be enough of them bitching about it to cost you customers. But it is, nonetheless, straight forward gouging.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Everyone knows the internet is tubes.
Cell phones did limits and usage based.
Market forces ended up with unlimited plans and $10 plans available. I see no reason to think internet wouldn't be the same, provided government doesn't force a monopoly in the area.
That "unused" router isn't unused, it's being used by your neighbor for a second or two as he loads a page, then you use it for a second or two. If you're using it 24 / 7 that's capacity not available to your neighbor. Residential prices are based on sharing the capacity and sharing the cost.
You can get dedicated, unshared bandwidth at ten times the cost by signing up for a business plan.
...is that he's getting paid to push this.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Japan's internet leaves ours in the dust because the participation of the government as a broadband competitor prevents sedentary ISPs from colluding. But I suppose you're content with a profitable, stagnant system, huh?
Can someone please tell my why I'm hearing so much bitching and complaining about how expensive cable is and why i'm not hearing are these words, "I cancelled my cable TV."?
some karma... and kinda lukewarm about it.
What you say is true for small purchases of consumer goods. For a multi-million dollar infrastructure, the cost is the same each month. I realize that's counter-intuitive if you've never managed a business.
The provider sets up a deal with Netflix and they see they'll need $100 million of equipment to upgrade the city. They figure th. e equipment will be replaced in five years. They can get that equipment in any of three ways. They can lease the equipment. You may have noticed that businesses lease a lot of stuff - copiers, cars, all kinds of things. You wouldn't lease a home computer, but businesses often lease computers. The reason will soon be apparent. If they lease the equipment, they pay $X per month every month, from the first month to the last. Since the equipment will need to be replaced in five years, they do a five year lease.
Instead of leasing, they can put $100 million on their Visa card and make monthly payments. ;). They borrow $100M from the bank and make monthly payments. They'll need to do it again in five years, so they need to pay this loan off in five years so they can afford the new one. The payment is the same every month.
Lastly, they can use the cash they have in the bank. They know that they'll need to replace the equipment in five years, so they better start saving up so they'll have $100M to do it again in five years. Every month, they put aside some money for the next upgrade. They set aside the same amounteqcheach month.
This isn't pocket change, they don't just get $100M from their wallet. They either borrow and pay back monthly or they save up monthly but either way it's a long term expense paid for over time.
You can see that all of the three options end up like a lease - they pay five years to use stuff for five years. The lease just makes the exact term and cost explicit. That's one reason why businesses lease more than individuals - it clarifies, simplifies what's going to happen anyway, and that clarity is good for the accounting and taxes. (No need to argue with the IRS over the value of five year old SFP modules).
So that's how capital expenses like upgrading a city wide network end up being paid as steady monthly expenses, no matter how the deal is structured.
Yes, we certainly need to increase the dollars traded that are worth absolutely phucking nothing.
You don't pay extra for your bed based on how many hours you sleep, or more for a driveway if you plan to take your car out three times a day instead of two? You don't pay less for a rental car because you had it parked for half the day. Consumers are _not_ used to that model. It is just one of many.
And some fancy new tuna sticks and reels. Will make all your ISP troubles go away. There is more than one cable you can cut. I know I lived the first 30 years of my life without it and suffered less ill effects link weight gain was not a problem walking a river and cranking in a salmon. Really lots better for you and your health. This message brought to you by the letter g. For get up off your ass and do something. Fuck um.
Send my bill to the NSA.
They're good for it.
Ponder this for a moment, dear industry: When I have to pay by the byte that reaches me, I'll monitor CLOSELY what bytes I get. So I will make sure that no ad banner, no ad flash, no navigation flash, no tracking cookie, no ... you name it I won't accept that I get it. You'll see a whole new era of filtering, even and especially from people who didn't mind the ads and the nuisance so far, because until now it only gets on their nerves. With that proposed change, it gets on their wallet. And while people are willing to put up with a lot, as soon as they notice that they could save a nickel by jumping a hoop, they'll do it. And that hoop will probably be filtering software.
I also foresee how we'll get services that do that for you, from countries that are not on the meter (and that cannot be hit with the near certain ban on such services), where they provide proxies that strip all the "unwanted" information out of the content (so it doesn't clog your pipe, something that would even with the best filters probably be unavoidable). So far such a service isn't viable, considering it would have to charge for something you can do yourself for free (if you bother at all), but with a metered line and being able to provide it fairly cheaply (which is far from impossible), this can easily take off. Not to mention that in this time and age of total surveillance the information where people surf to and when, and how long they stay there and what they do there, is money by itself.
And now I have to wonder, is that really what you want? Customers you cannot track sensibly anymore, whose browsing habits you cannot sell, because all their traffic is going encrypted to one single IP outside the country?
Not to mention that then customers will take a closer look at your "overhead" and wonder why 10-20% of their bandwidth is being wasted on ... on whatever the hell those "cable" connections waste it on.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
"good for consumers" of course, and I'd also add 'Think of the children!'.
Back in the days U.S. broadband was a dream for most, higher speeds and lower costs than almost anywhere else. Then times have changed, first by gradually increasing prices to a point where broadband in the U.S. can't be considered cheap anymore (some prices are simply hilarious), and now they come and tell us that going back in the early broadband days when because of the developing infrastructure and a large number of users we had datacaps almost everywhere. And they even tell us that it'll be good for us. Come on! I'd take a slower (by not much, however) uncapped connection over a faster capped one any day. Data caps are only good for the provider, plain and simple (i.e. they can slow down development, and increase profits over the existing infrastructure for a longer time period, who wouldn't want that?). Trying to argue that it's the other way around is a lie, yet they will easily get away with it and we all will suffer the consequences - the most important of which will be increased prices (again).
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
Cheaper?
If the internet is going to be free of commercials, spam and other kinds of junk that right now is the bulk of the traffic on the net.
Most people will reach the data cap due to DoS attacks and other shit. This lobbyist is only after locking in the customers even more.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
I have no idea where you live, but in modern countries, you can get dark fiber, capable of hundreds of gigabits for less than you are quoting for OC48. Even if you lease the equipment to actually put data through at those rates, you will pay probably not more per month than what you are talking about.
Maybe the prices you are referring to are including full internet connectivity and an SLA of 99.8% availability or better and no more than 4 hours of consecutive downtime per interruption to a business end user? That's where ISPs make money. The risk is higher, because they'll have a huge financial problem if they won't meet the SLA and they have to dedicate their resources to just one line (they still overbook the hell out of it) but the rewards if nothing goes wrong are much bigger. Consumer lines turn a little profit each month, per line, but the large number of lines adds up.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
it was that when internet started, they have to adapt to market. Not market has to adapt for them. And why the fuck are they pushing it into laws?
Customers are used to many bad things they would be happy to do without, from flat tires to friends dying. Let's stop their Internet connection at random for a random amount of time (no less than 30 minutes). This is to make them stay in touch with the harsh reality of the world. They should thank us.
;-)
Data capping is not only about money
It is also about restricting the spreading of information
True, nowadays most of the data flow online are leisure vids (netflix, youtube et all) but ... critical vids, such as the ones that we got from area of conflicts, such as Syria, also consume up lots of data
Capping of the data could restrict the spread of information as well
Let's say there is something happening that the power-that-be does not want others to know, and it was an emergency and they did not have time to cut off the net feed ...
Without data capping anyone with a net-enable smartphone can upload the critical vids and perhaps store it in an online cloud somewhere
With data capping the power-that-be can, theoretically, get the ISP to stop the flow (even if they can't cut the net feed)
Never trust the intention of the power-that-be
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
The other half of capacity is needed to forward all your data.
Don't worry, apparently it's for your own good.
You CAN buy 10 Mbps dedicated. It costs about $500 / month. The standard model for residential is that you load a page, using the bandwidth for one second, then your neighbor uses it for a second or two, etc. An hour later, you're watching TV and a different neighbor is using the bandwidth. Since you're sharing the bandwidth, you share the cost.
I have dedicated bandwidth that I don't share. I pay over $1,200 / month. You can do the same.
Dedicated to where?
I have a 10mbit uncontended connection to an ISP in Sydney. Still get hit by packetloss when I send even 5mbit to Singapore.
I do have uncontended links to some offices, but they cost a hell of a lot more than $1200/month.
"The reasoning on the NCTA website lays out the argument behind Powell's plan."
You don't need a website to spell 'greed'.
Data caps have their places, however they have to be fair. For instance a data cap between lets say 100GB-500GB for residential user is totally fair, in 2013. Despite what people or consumers may claim, Internet, just like water, gas or electricity is a business model where costs are kept down because the global capacity available to the provider is overselled, specially to residencial customers. Both the grid and the facilities don't have the capacity to sustain everyone requesting the full capacity at full times. The capacities sold to residential customers are not guaranteed at all times, and the contract says rightly so. You want it, you pay for it, instead of 20-40 euros per month, you pay 100-1000 Euros and you get what you need if you are a medium-large business, or have specific SLA needs for instance. That is the business model despite how many times you cry and say otherwise in slashdot, don't fool yourself.
I don't watch much tv why should I subsidize all the heavy tv watchers out there with my outrageous cable bill? Dammit TV should be pay as you go just like water, gas or radio.
Gas...pay for what you use Water...pay for what you use Electricity...pay for what you use Big Mac's...pay for what you use Internet bandwidth costs money, so why shouldn't it be metered, the same as other commodities?
However, the user must be allowed to skip, remove, bypass or avoid any web page element that downloads through their connection that they do not wish to have.
I.e. ad blocking, noscript and user-banned tracking cookies (and webbugs, et al, being functionally similar) being legally enforced and the responsibility of the ISP to pursue on complaint.
After all, if the user has to pay for the advert, why can they be forced to have it?
Comcast Canada recently had to show in court their records for utlilisation and they were only pegged at capacity 3% of the time.
There were about 15x as many fibres put down in the DotCom boom as were lit. To increase total bandwidth would be a one-off cost of adding more cards to light those fibres and a marginal increase in power use.
Really weird place to live in ... America that is ... in Romania we have 1gbps connections for 18$ ... :s
No company has ever really demonstrated a shortage of cell phone minutes, text bandwidth, connection count, data [bandwidth latency voluume]. The companies have only demonstrated a need to maximize revenue based upon what was in vogue.
In the early cell phone days, it was "minutes". Suddenly, minutes became cheap to unlimited (especially as a marketing tool: "friends and family", etc.) and we moved to extensive charge-by-the-text-message. Now, phones are more versatile as data engines (pictures, streaming music/video, GPS, etc.) and we are offered unlimited text and voice, with caps on the things we use the most. Excuse me, extensive charges.
Mostly in the major providers. At the same time they boast of the best and fastest and most capable networks. "We have the most but you can't use it."
Same thing with the home data providers (internet providers). Capacity grows beyond use, perceived need/use increases, and now we are seeing the two financial vampires appear: data caps and bandwidth limitations (no network neutrality).
There is no shortage. This is not a supply-and-demand curve model. This is a monopoly-and-demand model. With limited suppliers acting in an unstated collusion, we have the movement towards pricing models that focus on today's usage patterns. "Last year we drummed up the demand by offering unlimited data, now you want it so we're going to create an artificial scarcity and charge you for it."
Sadly, as monopolistic as these services are, they are not treated as utilities. They should be. A quarter-century ago they were a nicety. Now they are an essential part of the functioning/growing society/economy, and should be treated accordingly. Doing so would increase stability, access, and overall functionality.
Any one else shaking their head at the CTIA doublespeak.
In this article they say "it is good for consumers who are 'accustomed to paying for what they use",
yet when asked about reducing cable TV costs to consumers by unbundling channels, they excuses are quite a bit different
Sure....as soon as time warner/Comcast etc are prepared to give up their monopoly status then they can go to timed metering......while they operate as a monopoly....they are there as a service to the people
You CAN buy 10 Mbps dedicated. It costs about $500 / month.
Sorry you don't have FiOS available to you, since you can get 35-50Mbps (depending on location) dedicated from Verizon for $100/month (business service...residential is cheaper).
The standard model for residential is that you load a page, using the bandwidth for one second, then your neighbor uses it for a second or two, etc.
The only difference between FiOS residential and business is that residential TOS forbids servers and they can terminate you for it...they won't unless you are a complete jackass. Otherwise, you get the same dedicated bandwidth.
If it's so good for consumers, then why don't they want it? There's logic behind why they have to lobby for it... to force something down consumer's throats which would by rejected unanimously, if it were actually out in the wild.
I see a lot of complaining but not a lot of doing. If you're serious about changing this, you can start by making a donation (time/effort or money) to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. They're the most significant group I'm aware of that actively works to fight crap like this (there are others, but their scope and focus may differ; the EFF specifically focuses on fighting issues that threaten internet freedom).
I called to order FIOS. The sales rep told me it's not just shared, it's way over sold, so during business hours I typically wouldn't get nearly the "up to" speed I was paying for. I see elsewhere that they have 64 customers per fiber, that you're sharing with 63 other people. That's less sharing than cable, but it's not dedicated.
> And why the fuck are they pushing it into laws?
What are you talking about? What laws? The story is that the head of the industry association said internet providers should offer plans that bill customers based on usage. I don't see anything about any change in law here.
What they say: "This will reduce costs for most users! Only the top users will have to pay more."
What they mean: "We're going to keep our pricing structures exactly the same and continue increasing them by 10-20% every year. With usage caps, if you actually use the service for anything more than checking your email and updating facebook, you'll be assessed additional fees."
And if you think they're not all tooled up to implement caps already, I present you with this: https://pic.twitter.com/kbGNJiMIWU
(To see if your area has that, sign into your Comcast account, click "My Account" and then "My Services." It's in the sidebar under "Equipment.")
Yes, let's cap bandwidth in the US and fall further behind Europe and other countries. Caps aren't good for the consumer, but they are good for the shareholders. Caps, are really nothing more than artificial price controls used to support an antiquated model. Usually, however, a government employes them against foreign entities, not their own citizens.
To make usage-base charging fair to all content providers, all content providers must be included, including Comcast TV, Comcast On-Demand, etc. If the cable owners content is getting a free ride, the pure internet providers will have a major problem.
In the day and age where we should be making bandwidth more and more available they want to limit it. What a crock of shit. It gets cheaper every year. Those fools just don't want to become commodities. I welcome our Google fiber overlords.
Time for some grass-roots movement here folks.
Need to start class-action lawsuits against big-media companies that own Internet distribution pipelines.
Force the courts to issue rulings that clearly expose the conflict of interest in big media companies owning Internet delivery companies.
Where is our FCC enforced network neutrality ruling? We need that to prevent ever increasing raping and pillaging of consumers.
In order to reliably track every user's usage to enforce a cap, every user's connection needs to be constantly monitored to count the packets.
Of course, if you're tracking the user's packets, one might as well keep an eye on which servers those packets are going to and coming from at all times, since it's all automated anyway. That will help us "optimize" your Consumer experience.
In addition to making it easy to "prioritize" traffic to and from favored "premium" servers (It's for your BENEFIT, Consumer! This way we can count data per site which will allow us to offer you an UNLIMITED FACEBOOK upgrade for only $5 more per month! For only $10 more, Twitter, Youtube, and Pinterest won't count against your data cap either!), and if we're tracking the servers that each account connects to we can also fight crime and/or terrorism and/or undesirable behavior by "flagging" accounts that connect often enough or send enough data to certain servers and/or IP addresses to be suspicious.
You know, if we've got all of that capability up monitoring each account's traffic, we can refine our response to the threat of people trespassing on corporate Intellectual Precious and other forms of terrorism if we just go ahead and check the contents of those packets for illicit data, I mean, we're already taking a look at each packet to count them and see where they're going anyway. Looking at the rest of the packet isn't so much more, right?...
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
What are you talking about? It's $20/mo for a 24mb connection, unlimited, in Canada.
Are you seriously equating the complexity and cost of the last mile with a cell tower?
Consumers in the USA are used to not paying for local phone calls why should they suddenly think this is fine - you also pay for cable channels you dont want to use if I went with sky or virgin in the uk to get the Syfi channel I woudl have to buy all those sports channels as well.
...so long as we get to regulate them like any other utility company...
This is a discussion about billing models.
If my 6GB of usage is billed at $50 flat or $10 + $10 / GB. It really has nothing to do with the physical medium used to connect. It applies to cable internet, phone line DSL, satellite, and fiber.
No matter which kind of wire is used, they can offer 10 GB for $X and 100GB for $Y, or unmetered for $Z.
Exactly who are the "everyone" this guy is speaking of?
Anyone here on / want bandwidth caps?
The only question that remains is ' how long before he was on the FCC was he owned' ?
Why not make physical connectivity a municipal service?
Network admin for a city govt here.... trust me, you do not want this. We barely have enough budget and staff to run our own internal municipal govt business networks "on the cheap". Outdated/obsolete equipment is used until it physically dies, then we still have to beg for funds for replacements, and the powers that be then blame us for not "keeping up with current tech" when it is they who denied us funding and then ordered us to run the old stuff until it dies. This is a never-ending saga. Municipal governments refuse to pay the kind of salaries it takes to keep skilled and experienced IT people too, most of the time the new hires always come from some other department head's niece or nephew who once took a Windows or MS Office class at the local junior college, thus they now get hired as the new head of desktop support for our team. Also if you think your customer service from the major wireless phone companies is bad, just imagine how much worse your ISP customer service would be when given to you with all the attitudes and competence of a typical DMV office.
Once upon a time, we toyed with the idea of supplying MuniWiFi citywide, and were going to partner with one of the big name companies that was trying to spearhead MuniWiFi projects in many cities across the nation in the 2006-2007 timeframe. The math, the money, and the physical laws of nature all clearly showed that this would be budgetarily unfeasible and could never be made to function any better than as a half-assed hobbiest/experimental project. Nobody in power wanted to believe the facts either, only emotions. I breathed a huge sigh of relief what that potential boondoggle was averted by the big company suddenly coming to their senses and cancelling all these MuniWiFi misadventures. If we would've been forced to try and deploy such a service, it would've been an utter disaster.
See: philadelphia governor Ed Randal, in bed with verizon
I find it annoying how all the ISP plans always advertise the download speeds, but it is almost impossible to find their upload speeds.
I need more upload speed, but nobody can give it to me unless I get a fiber business line.
I like the idea of having ISPs sell you a guaranteed minimum speed (both down and up) that you pay for. If their is additional bandwidth available then give it out.
Of course the minimum speed is hard to promise. Minimum to some Google site or at some other hop? If a peer ISP gets congested 5 hops down the line is that a violation of your minimum speed? Probably not. Perhaps a minimum speed promised at least 2 hops from my house.
I was upset at his appointment because he was corrupt and he immediately went about doing bad things from day 1.
Remember all that stuff with hearings and tons of protestors and comcast PAYING people off the street to fill up seats at the hearings? That was Powell's biggest mistake in not stopping those hearings pushed by older members of the board.
Today, the old farts are gone and the new ones at not as bad but they are not good either... Hearings will not happen this time around; almost no opportunity for the public to provide feedback is going to be provided and we'll have a rehash of all the unpopular issues AGAIN. Including SOPA by other methods (but extremely careful this time since politicians were traumatized by SOPA-- but one of the main people behind that they did get to kill himself...sending a message to future organizers.)
Well, if the ISP's succeed in switching us from a base/tiered bandwidth billing scheme to a metered or base+metered billing scheme, then they better be prepared for highly-customized clients that skip/morph pages to avoid useless downloads. Adblock is just the tip of the iceberg.
Block my javascript and you block my page
Block your page from noscript browsers and you block users of Google from finding your site. Search engines browse with noscript. You could try progressive enhancement: wait for the HTML to load and then use jquery to transform it into the flashy popups.
I suspect the NSA sees unlimited data as a threat to its powers of surveillance. After all, if we're restricted as to how much data we can transmit, it makes their jobs that much easier. OTOH, if we are digitally unfettered, obfuscation becomes a serious problem, especially in light of various VPN solutions.
I got 50mb of dedicated bandwidth that I don't share for $100/month. I just don't get an SLA.
Besides the fact that there are 4 contact mobile companies and 5 non contact mobile companies that service where I live, whereas I have 2 providers for internet - TWC and Verizon. I have been happy with Verizon. I always get the speed I pay for, and then didn't bitch when I downloaded my 400gb steam library after a hard drive died.
...is if they did something similar to how commercial usage-based billing works (i.e. by data transfer or 95th percentile, etc). In other words, it may work out better for some folks, but heavy users will pay more. For example, I don't use a ton of data, I stream Netflix for 2-3 hours a day, check e-mail and Facebook and occassionally spend an hour playing an online game. I would guess that translates to maybe 250 GB a month.
I pay for 60 Mbps service, and assuming my real world speeds are 85% of what I'm paying for (to allow for overhead, etc), that means I could transfer about 16.5 TB of data per month if I used the service at 100% capacity all the time. Based on that, my usage translates to about 0.00151% or about a thousandth of what I'm currently paying for. That illustrates just how little I use my service in comparison to others out there that actually do make use of all the bandwidth available to them.
If they offered me a plan where I could have 100 Mbps service and pay 10 cents/GB, I'd go for it because I'd save about 50% on my monthly bill, but I'd have better performance because I'd have more available bandwidth.
fedgov pushing usage based pricing? sounds great! let's do it with taxes first... then look to inflict it on the private sector
I'm in Southern Illinois right now and I've just finished negotiating 100mbit/s DIA on a 1gbit port for $10/mbit. The next hops will be St Louis > Chicago in one direction and Paducah > Atlanta in another. Including 3 phone-lines to the office, I'm coming out at $1090 + tax / month with capacity to upgrade if/when I need to.
Mediacom and Frontier wanted as much as $20/mbit (for DIA), although Frontier came down to $13 when I pushed them really hard. Verizon wanted $55/mbit.
Founder & COO, Hayai India (hayai.in) / USA (hayaibroadband.com)
1. pick some good thing that once was rare, metered, unaffordable
2. something that has become common, unmetered and affordable
3. something that is not owned or directly under government control
4. claim that some people somewhere are 'abusing' their 'privileges'
5. cite financial losses based on hypothetical behavior, as compared to hypothetical profits
6. if the blue party is in power, fool the red party into promoting and defending it, the majority blues will oppose it because it is a 'red' thing without knowing or caring why. Or vice versa.
7. find Hollywood celebrities to talk about conserving it, write moral conservation memes into soap opera dialog
8. bring the Terrorists into it. Somehow. Anyhow. Equate unregulated (competitive) business with terrorism.
9. pass sweeping 'reform' legislation by voice vote while most of Congress is in recess
10. Congratulations! You have now made life suck a little more. But your children will only resent you a little bit because things aren't a whole lot worse.
Applies to just about everything.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
If I thought for one microsecond that this would drop the current price that I pay for Internet (~$60/mo for FIOS) you had better believe that I would jump on a metered service for the 2-3gb per month that I use. (mostly netflix) Unfortunately I don't believe it. I believe that they would figure out a way to crank up my bill even more.
Powell was the industry's boot-licker when he headed the FCC. Is anybody surprised by his stance?
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman