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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."
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"
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
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.)
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.
But data transfer is essentially free compared to electricity, gas and water. Whether I download 1 megabyte or 500 megabytes it does not cost the ISP any more. Data caps is like air breathing caps or sun solar rays caps, it just doesn't make sense. If anything they need the opposite, minimum viable tranfer speeds, so these ISPs can't lie about the transfer rate. Bandwidth caps only hurt Netflix, YouTube (google), and any other website that uses high bandwidth which means less taxes for the govt. Why would th govt want LESS money? Is the govt going to tell us to stop spending so much money and hide it under our mattress so they get less taxes? More bandwidth = more consuming = more money to tax.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
I'd say the monopolies need to end.
Since the FCC seems to be the source of all these problems, we need to bypass them and form a wireless citizen-based infrastructure. Because the FCC won't take kindly to being shut out and unable to excercise regulatory control over it, it will have to be resistant to triangulation.
Fortunately, our military has already provided the path to this future; The communications systems onboard our stealth bombers. They use ultra wide band transmitters (UWB) and rapid frequency hopping technology on the order of around 300,000 times a second. By syncronizing a pair of PRNGs (Pseudo Random Number Generator), you can create a symbol matrix that adds +1 or -1 to the digital signal; effectively an XOR mask. The reconstructed signal can then operate at near the noise floor, and without knowing the PRNG seed, you will only get a lot of multiple-source noise -- there's no way to separate out individual very low power emissions and source them out. This is how GPS operates. Combine software defined radio with a bunch of FPGAs for front-end processing and you've got yourself a wireless digital transmitter suitable for use in a citizen-based mesh network.
Now, is unregulated wireless a good idea? No. It's a very bad idea. But if you weigh out the costs of allowing businesses to dictate terms to the FCC, who has totally lost their way with regard to their primary mission: Serving the people, with the costs of raising the noise floor by a not inconsiderable degree and potentially impacting wireless services worldwide... I think a substantial and growing minority would agree this may be the only way to solve all these problems of internet surveillance, privacy, and corporate control of most of our natural resources (which includes the EM spectrum).
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
The cost of the SFP+ module is nothing against the cost of burying 500km of fiber. Those fibers used to carry 1Mbps when they were laid in the trenches, and were almost all dark. Now they can carry 200,000 Mbps, and they're still almost all dark. At the current pace of progress there is no reason to believe most of it will ever need to be lit up.
Google is putting in the fiber in KC and so far there are no complaints about oversubscription. Google designs and manufactures their own switches, fabrics and ports - as anyone pulling that volume should do, so they aren't paying retail prices, markup and all that jazz. It's not even proper Ethernet. Perhaps Google is using a better fanout than you are thinking, also, with 200Gbps links to the neighborhood. They claim to be turning a profit with $70/mo unmetered, unfiltered, uncapped symmetric gigabit fiber to the door. Why don't you ask Google how they're pulling that off when these cable companies claim they'll go broke if their subscribers saturate the measly 15-30Mbps they're given.
Also, Google is manufacturing the fiber terminal switch and wifi router, the set-top box, the tablet. They didn't just buy Motorola for the phones.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
oh? veterans have fought for our freedom recently? or have they been waging wars of choice against people who did not attack us for the last 60+ years?
Dude you can do a citizen based network with good old consumer routers and gear, we did it a decade ago before the telcos lobbied to make it illegal.
Which is exactly why you need equipment that resists triangulation. And this equipment needs to be expensive. Prohibitively so. Right now, the state of the art is that UWB + rapid frequency shifting and some cryptography is really, really, difficult to triangulate. As a happy side-effect, it's also difficult to jam, and those two factors are why we have poured hundreds of millions into a unified wireless communications system for our military.
Now, we don't need that level of technology for it to be a sufficient deterrent to all but a high level organization like the NSA. And frankly, the NSA has better things to do than track down tens to hundreds of thousands of pirate radios. The goal wouldn't be to prevent detection, but just to make it so cost prohibitive that it would be impractical to shut down.
That can be done for only a few million in R&D costs... and the units themselves could be produced for about $350 apiece, lower if you can find someone to mass produce it.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
In a datacenter you do not buy per MB. You buy per Mbps or Gbps or even simply to terminate a point-to-point fiber connection
This x 1000. There are a growing number of providers that offer a 1 Gbps dedicated line with a 100TB monthly transfer limit for $200/month. This includes server rental or rack rent, power, and keeping your gear on a UPS with generator backup, and fuel contracts that will keep you running at least two weeks in the event of a severe power outage. There's no way the consumer-level ISPs are going to convince me that it's just too expensive for them to give people more a terabyte on a 50 megabit line for $50/month, even factoring in the last-mile plant costs.
Peak bandwidth is the rate at which data is delivered. Putting a monthly cap on data transfer reduces the average monthly bandwidth but not the peak. Remember the old adage: never understimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of backup tapes. There are 2,419,200 seconds in February. Divide a 50 gigabyte cap by 2,419,200 seconds and you get an average monthly bandwidth of roughly 160kbps. About 3x dialup. Barely even broadband. Before you make fun of this math, I used to pass this much data in the 1980's, buying and aggregating new lines to meet growing real bandwidth needs as an ISP.
90% of users never get anywhere near even this cap. So what they're trying to do is to keep the actual utilization of broadband down even below saturation of dialup would do. There are two possible reasons for this:
I'm willing to bet the answer is the latter, not the former.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
And will there be a new method of attacking someone?
1) Find a user's IP address.
2) Stage a DDOS attack against them.
3) Laugh as their Internet bill goes through the roof (aka "reverse Profit").
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.