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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"
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.)
I'd be ok with it too if it meant that Granny paid very little, but I think that we'll see Granny paying the same amount she currently is while everyone else gets to pay out the ass without being able to turn to alternate ISPs. It's not like this is really going to lower anyone's monthly fees, even Granny's; it's just an excuse to charge more. I would love to be proven wrong, but that's just not the business model these creeps run.
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.
You haven't actually loaded any pages lately...
Some pages are a meg with all of the attached BS and javascript. And it isn't getting better.
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)
Bullshit.
The routers and fiber cost no more nor less if they are being used or not used.
Usage based billing is just another attempt to kill Netflix.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Until you realize there is no cheap plan but plenty of more expensive ones.
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.
granny pays very little
Google has this covered. Granny gets 5mbps for free.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
..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.
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.
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.
Twinstiq, game news
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.
The basic problem with usage caps is that usage doesn't actually COST anything. It's the provisioning of bandwidth that costs money to provide, not actually transporting the data. This leads to inefficient usage of available resources. You have to build out the network to handle peak loads, but there's no incentive to shift usage.
Dynamically adjusted bandwidth limits, with a lower "guaranteed" limit, makes much more sense. You'd pay a higher rate for a higher minimum.
You adjust the current actual max rate based on how much capacity you've used recently (on the order of a few minutes). Grandma goes to download her e-mail, she gets high priority maximum physical-limit speed for a minute, then (only if bandwidth is currently in short supply) ramp it down, perhaps all the way to the minimum if it's really busy. Grandma does nothing for a while, her priority goes up, perhaps after 10 minutes it's as if she never did anything.
Streaming a video, your priority would be dropped after a short while. In times of high usage, that would limit your rate. Once you stop, your priority would rise back up, same as Grandma. The algorithm would have to be designed to make sure you couldn't game it by bursting
Using the network at periods of low usage would be encouraged, as it would be much faster, which increases utilization of available bandwidth (which could actually save money for the provider as total capacity required might end up being lower).
One way of doing this is simply having a unit of, perhaps, 1Mbps, with offerings based on multiples of that. Grandma might have a 1Mbps service for her occasional e-mail and web-browsing, plus the occasional software update; the guy who regularly syncs with every open source repository might pay for a 10Mbps service (which, in the middle of the night, gets 200Mbps).
Use a fair allocation scheme - as total bandwidth becomes saturated, drop the max rate down until it's no longer saturated. Anyone using less than that rate (times a multiplier based on your current priority) won't be affected, anyone trying to use more will be capped (until it becomes available again). You should, perhaps, also be able to pay for higher priority (so you might have a 2Mbps minimum, but you get a multiplier of 1.5 when calculating your current cap). Priority is, as indicated earlier, based on your recent usage - high bandwidth (relative to your base level) reduces your priority, low or none raises it.
No, this is bad and wrong. Network access is a resource unlike electricity and water. If you don't use water today, the water will be there tomorrow. If you don't use electricity today, they can run power plants at lower capacity and save fuel for later.
Network access is different. Bits transferred today have absolutely no effect on your ability to transfer bits tomorrow. Any bandwidth that goes unused is wasted. Charging for bits discourages people from using bandwith, and encourages waste. Bad and wrong.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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.
This makes too much sense to ever work, but a more sinister problem with implementation is that ISPs currently severely oversell their bandwidth, and by selling you "best effort 50Mbps" they are able to throttle it as low as they need to to handle too many people actually using what they supposedly are paying for. Since it's only "best effort" that you're paying for, there isn't really anything a customer can do.
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.
And on average, everyone ends up paying 2x-3x more than they were before...
Everyone wins!*
*(except those pesky consumers, but to hell with them, what have they ever done for us?)
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
'Michael Kevin Powell (born March 23, 1963) is .. current president of the National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA).`
Yeah, people should only have to pay for what they use, just like with other services from Comcast and the like. It's not like I have to pay for the 200+ channels I never watch just to get the 3 that I do...
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.
This way, granny pays very little, and the power users pay what they should.
Except that granny only saves $5 which will then end up being lost in the rate increases she sees 6 months later.
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.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
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?
THIS. Its mostly about Netflix. Charge enough that it costs less to order Pay Per View than to use Netflix, then TWC pushes them out.
With that said, I am open for ISPs to offer usage tiers where there is access to competitive broadband.
The problem is internet service in many places is provided by cable TV providers.
Those providers have a motive to set prices not based on the actual cost of providing the bandwidth but based on making internet TV services (which for most users are by far the biggest bandwidth consumers) less competitive with their own non-internet TC services.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
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
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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
Australia has had usage based plans for many years now and we have worked out the kinds in all of this.
1) Our telecommunications omsbudman has banned excessive overuse charges, so when people hit their cap they dont get suprise fees.
2) When you cap is reached, most ISP's will rate limit you down to 64kBit, so you can still get basic internet/email.
3) Some ISP's offer booster packs so if you have a low end plan and want to cover a heavy month, it's only a 1 off fee (maybe $10 or $20).
4) Competition on price per GB has been strong, so we're now seeing 200+ GB per month for about $50.
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?
Your ISP installs equipment in your area. That equipment is VERY expensive. You'd be surprised how much actually. In fact, your bill is likely heavily subsidized by the government and even other customers via fees and such. Your ISP figures out average usage in your area and then installs the equipment that will provide whatever speed they're trying to sell there. Not everyone uses 100% of their connection 100% of the time. If they did, your bill would be much more expensive. So the equipment that leads to your house CAN support the speed (usually) that you are paying for. And the equipment that feeds the remote in your area can usually support about 60% of users at max capacity.
Now, the problem is that Netflix and services like it concentrate usage at specific times. Not only that but netflix, unlike other content providers, refuses to work with ISPs. Google, for example has a department in charge of "peering" and when they have a contract with Level3 but plan to move to Sprint or something, they call up the ISPs and let them know in advance. The ISPs can then sign similar peering contracts with Sprint. Netflix is hostile in this area, they just switch... with no notice... and they leave the ISPs in the lurch. There are about 10 major players on the net, and Netflix is one of the biggest. When they just move all of their traffic to another network its equivalent to a stampede of elephants running to one side of your boat. The ISP either has to let customers suffer or sign a hasty contract with another carrier and take a loss on the previous commitment. Google doesn't do that, not even Microsoft does that.
Anyways, I'm not sure usage based billing is the solution, but like it or not, it IS coming to this country. and yes, I work for an ISP. They are trying to be creative about it, but I doubt it'll come to anything. The easiest solution is to just charge you more. So that's what will happen.
You keep insisting that there will be a cheap plan, yet I'm not aware of a single ISPs introducing a new cheap capped plan, every ISP I know of that introduced data caps, they simply capped their existing plan, kept the price, and added a charge (or shut you off) for going over.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
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.
Sadly it looks like we're wrong on all three counts.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
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.
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.
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.
Right. Because resources like electricity and water are exactly like bandwidth. . . . . . . .
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?
Yeah rather than usage caps it really should be like a utility. Granny gets a $3 a month bill. I get a $150 bill because I average ~500GB a month or so that would be fair. But you are right if they do it like they did it in Canada where I'm living what will happen is granny will need to spend at least $30 a month to get a usable connection, and the power user will pay $100 or so even though they use 100X the bandwidth.
It won't happen but I think torrents are actually a good thing vs things like youtube: when all the cute kitty watchers get home at the same time and start viewing their 1080p streaming content at the same time they drive the peak demand through the roof but I'm quite content firing off a 300GB TV series rip and having it run faster at times and slower at times over several days as long as I'm getting enough data every day to equal what I watch (~4GB or so) I'm happy. Moving people to an asyncronous model is always a win because it allows the system to load balance without effecting a user sitting at a screen waiting for his por... er blog content to load.
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
Bullshit. I used to work for a subsidiary of Deutche Telecom. We used to get Cisco gear like 60% off the list price, so equipment costs are almost zero. Juniper was something similar, although less. Palo Alto netwroks, Extreme networks, etc.. When you are big you buy the stuff "cheap".
And Netflix does not switch providers like you describe, perhaps you are too ignorant to know that Netfix is basically hosted on AWS, so it would be Amazon that switch providers, and I pretty much doubt that. You have to haul fiber and build a DWDM or similar to get their bandwidth in place. Those data centers are fed with 2, possibly 3 connections by different providers for redundancy, but traffic is balanced. Traffic shifting, means one of your competitors have screwed up, so stop yelling and play along like a nice guy.
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.
Australia has also forced Telstra, the owner of the infrastructure, to allow the competition access to its infrastructure (at a wholesale price) to deliver said services. That is why competition is strong.
Ideally Telstra should have been stripped of its infrastructure before being privatised by the government, as now you have a stock market listed business being forced to open its infrastructure to others. That's a bit like forcing an airline to allow others to sell seats on its plane.
Regardless, it sounds like the US has a big anti-competitive problem with infrastructure owned by specific telcos.
I have long thought that the best model would be exactly like the electricity network. I pay for power I use. If I generate power (through solar for example) I get the wholesale rate for it. I also pay a connection fee.
In the data world I should pay retail for data I download and get paid wholesale for data I upload. The ISP would keep the margin between the wholesale/retail price and the owner of the infrastructure gets the connection fee.
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.
THIS. Its mostly about Netflix. Charge enough that it costs less to order Pay Per View than to use Netflix, then TWC pushes them out.
And this is pretty much what my ISP tells you if you call to complain about their 150Gb per month cap. "Use our on-demand services and it won't count against the cap." Same with their VOIP service (which I thought wasn't allowed). Bear in mind that their overage charge is $1.50 per 1Gb.
...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.
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.
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.
TWC is working on a plan that you can cut $5 off of your $100/month bill if you accept a 5GB cap instead of a 250GB cap. Obviously they must think that 245GB is worth about $5, yet they want to charge $10 per 10GB for overages. They're just making up numbers. Just think about text messaging. They charge more per byte to text message than to rent time+data from the Hubble telescope or Mars Rover.
That's a statistical anomaly that is less than the rounding errors of the many other users using their connection to browse FaceBook and look at cat pics. In a normal large population, a single person, no matter how badly they abuse their connection, will not make a difference on the trunk.
...is that he's getting paid to push this.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
That's what they did here in Canada.
some karma... and kinda lukewarm about it.
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.
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.
stop saying bandwidth, please. It is wrong.
Sorry, your asshole's attempt at pedantry is a fail. It's bandwidth. Alas for the pedant, the current prevailing usage of a word defines its primary meaning.
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.
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?
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 !
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.
One way of doing this is simply having a unit of, perhaps, 1Mbps, with offerings based on multiples of that. Grandma might have a 1Mbps service for her occasional e-mail and web-browsing, plus the occasional software update; the guy who regularly syncs with every open source repository might pay for a 10Mbps service (which, in the middle of the night, gets 200Mbps).
The problem with this is that once a week, Grandma has a video conference with the grandkids for half an hour. The experience would be better if Grandma had a 100Mbps connection, but Grandma is unlikely to justify the extra expense just for that short call.
A 1Gbps connection is capable of 324TB a month. For a residential user that is a huge amount of data, yet because it is available some customers will download torrents to /dev/null simply because they can.
Quotas are a much more reasonable approach than speed tiers and likelier to lead to faster speeds because ISPs will want you to be able to download more data so they can charge you more. If you happen to blow through your quota in the first day, then you are capped to 128Kbps for the rest of the month and learn for next month or purchase additional quota. Excess usage charges should be banned because of potential bill shock.
Use a fair allocation scheme - as total bandwidth becomes saturated, drop the max rate down until it's no longer saturated.
This was tried in Australia by Internode and called the FlatRate plan. I've provided details in another post. In short it failed because Grandma opts for the low quota plan because it is cheaper, resulting in only heavy users being on the FlatRate plan. This made it unsustainable compared to fixed quota tiers because users preferred the certainty of having 100GB, 300GB, etc a month.
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
Ok, I'll give you a typical scenario. You live just outside of town in a small subdivision. There are about 20 homes in your area. You have no DSL, and you're too far our for cable. The phone company would like you to have DSL, but the cost of laying a new trunk is in the 1 to 2 million dollar range. Then the equipment in the remote needs to be upgraded, and ADSL 6+6 cards (serves 6 customers) cost over $1000/each unless you get old ones off of ebay. The most the ISP will make off those 20 homes is $40/home on average (these are REAL stats) So 20 homes x $40 = $800/month. So it would take ONE HUDRED YEARS for those customers to pay off the istall of that equipment. The ISP is NOT going to do that. So the Feds com in, subsidize the upgrade. Yay! They all have DSL now! 2 years later, 3 of those homes get Netflix and saturate the trunk feeding the remote. No one can surf the net on friday/saturday night.
It's your ISP, what would you do? Running another trunk is another million or so depending on distance.
And if you're wondering about the people that live IN town... this is why ISPs are given monopolies. They charge the same rate throughout town (and are required to by law) and the city dwelling people are subsidizing the rural customers bill. The people in town are much more profitable. This is why AT&T/Sprint etc... have spent the past decade pulling their operations out of rural areas. They focus on big cities now.
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.
The problem with this is uploading actually costs money and with some/most/all tech is the limited resource. I seem to recall it is fundamental to how phone line based internet works there is more signal noise/lower bandwidth for some reason when the data is coming from the last mile vs the other way around. Regardless there is a cost of doing the switching for the incoming packets/managing the pipes. So not free but a spread in the buy sell could cover the network cost. The problem is the one that benefits (hulu and the like assuming they moved to a peer to peer model, application vendors that need smaller datacentres to roll out software updates etc) are different to the ones that own the wires.
This must more of that "free market" behavior we keep hearing about.
Except it not. In fact the absolute last thing broadband internet / cable companies want is a free market. In a free market, nobody would offer "caps" on their service, because they'd lose all their customers to competitors. This is an idea that could not even be pictured in a real free market.
So here's an idea. Tell broadband providers that we will totally deregulate their billing practices: they can bill however they damn well please, in any market that has three or more viable broadband competitors. They can have a "free market" on the day their customers can have one too.
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 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
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.
I'm not sure why you felt it necessary to post your anti-Netflix bullshit. As pointed out in a sibling post already, Netflix hosts on AWS and your claims about Netflix randomly switching carriers doesn't even make sense.
Further, Netflix has built its own CDN hardware and network and tried very hard to work with ISPs to get this equipment in their data centers. They've deployed CDN units to hundreds of ISPs but the big boys won't play. I don't suppose it has anything to do with the fact that these ISPs also sell content and have no desire to improve Netflix's performance.
...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.
See: philadelphia governor Ed Randal, in bed with verizon
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'm not sure if it's good for the consumer, but paying more for your Internet access will help the economy to grow. Millionaires like economic growth.
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.
I'd be ok with it too if it meant that Granny paid very little, but I think that we'll see Granny paying the same amount she currently is while everyone else gets to pay out the ass without being able to turn to alternate ISPs. It's not like this is really going to lower anyone's monthly fees, even Granny's; it's just an excuse to charge more. I would love to be proven wrong, but that's just not the business model these creeps run.
Even more than the inevitable cash grab, I'd be worried that this kind of payment scheme would lead to a lack of investment in upgraded infrastructure. If people get charged per bit, they will use less. Less demand leads to less upgrading of lines, and the people who do actually need massive data throughput, for stuff like, for example, off-site redundant systems, can't actually get what they need at all. People will always get charged for what they want compared to what the average is, no matter how much it would cost to upgrade everyone to that level. As an example of that: about 5 years ago a customer was paying â1k a month for a fast (for here) no contention line. Now you can get the same speed with 5:1 contention for about â30 a month.
If Grandma is video-chatting with her grandkids for 2 hours a month, she's not going to be on a plan for "just e-mail and light web browsing". If she's paying $5/month for 1Mbps, how many GB would that pay for on a data-metered plan? If you give her a 100Mbps connection, and she isn't careful about limiting the amount of bandwidth the video-chat wants to use, she's going to blow through her whole quota and end up paying more anyway, she may even need to limit it below 1Mbps! How does that help her?
If she's video-chatting with her grandkids in the evening, she's going to get more than 1Mbps, and if that's not enough then she SHOULD be paying more.
If someone is paying for a 1Gbps base-rate connection (in my scenario of $5/Mbps), they'd be paying $5000/month - so what if they want to download 324TB of data with that?
The problem with the plan you described is with trying to mix data caps with bandwidth caps, it sounds like. Users don't WANT limits, they want performance. If it's too slow, then they'll pay to speed it up. If they don't want to pay more, they can use the network when it's less congested. In either case, they don't have to be worrying all the time about how much data any specific activity is going to chew into their quota. Having a "certainly" of 100GB a month isn't something people want to even think about - with even 1Mbps, they have a certainty of getting at least 324GB/month, and knowing they can't ever possibly go over a quota is a much better certainty.
Also, looking at your other post, and a bit at the FlatRate plan and explanation of it not working, it doesn't sound like "certainty" was referring to how much data you could download but performance. With data-capped plans, you also don't get performance certainty - if everyone is trying use the network at peak periods, they're all going to get much lower performance than they would at other times - the heavy data users don't have any incentive to not use it at that time, so you have to build in enough capacity to handle them as well. It will end up costing more to handle the same number of customers, which means everyone pays more than they would otherwise.
The biggest difference between what I described and the FlatRate plan is that it's averaged over a much longer time period (on the order of a month) rather than a fairly short time period (on the order of minutes). It also isn't strictly trying to be a priority-based system (individual packets aren't handled at different priorities), just that your router speed-caps you based on your priority and current network congestion. If you aren't trying to use more than your current speed cap, you won't even notice it when your priority goes down.
I think they just screwed it up. They should have been able to offer it at competitive prices, and marketed properly could have competed against quota-based systems (queue video of trying to talk to the Grandkids when your data rate suddenly gets cut to 128K, and only getting 1Mbps during peak usage periods anyway - compared to Grandma getting 20Mbps in the evening and never worrying about going over quota and paying less than she would on the "other" plan that only gets her 50GB/month).
You asked in your other post
Would you prefer 8Mbps with no quota or 100Mbps with a 1TB quota?
but we're talking about quota of 250GB. At 100Mbps, you'd blow through that in less than 6 hours. At 8Mbps you could transfer over 2.5TB in a month, and with the method I described, most of the time you'd have a much higher sustained speed.
I rural farm area, the cost of FTTH is about $5k per house passed, assuming mostly above ground. At $40/m. It will take about 11 years to pay it off at that rate, but quite a few people closer to the $70 range, which puts it at 6 year mark, but that ignores lots of the on-going costs. Yes, need some government money. The good news is once it's installed, you're good for the next century.
As for a trunk you don't need to purchase a new trunk every time you need to add bandwidth, you just purchase a new line card and add another 500gb. Current tech can push about 288tb/s over a 72 fiber trunk and that will give you a range of 700km with no signal regenerators. Just make sure you lay enough fiber the first time. Fiber is cheap, the man-hours to lay the fiber is not.
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)
Your ISP installs equipment in your area. That equipment is VERY expensive. You'd be surprised how much actually.
...if you're paying over $100/port for any equipment, you're being ripped off. I've found DSL tends to be the most expensive equipment on this basis. Cable and OLTs less so.
In fact, your bill is likely heavily subsidized by the government and even other customers via fees and such. Your ISP figures out average usage in your area and then installs the equipment that will provide whatever speed they're trying to sell there. Not everyone uses 100% of their connection 100% of the time. If they did, your bill would be much more expensive. So the equipment that leads to your house CAN support the speed (usually) that you are paying for. And the equipment that feeds the remote in your area can usually support about 60% of users at max capacity.
Mostly true - it is a numbers game.
Now, the problem is that Netflix and services like it concentrate usage at specific times. Not only that but netflix, unlike other content providers, refuses to work with ISPs.
Are you sure? https://signup.netflix.com/openconnect
Google, for example has a department in charge of "peering" and when they have a contract with Level3 but plan to move to Sprint or something, they call up the ISPs and let them know in advance. The ISPs can then sign similar peering contracts with Sprint. Netflix is hostile in this area, they just switch... with no notice... and they leave the ISPs in the lurch. There are about 10 major players on the net, and Netflix is one of the biggest. When they just move all of their traffic to another network its equivalent to a stampede of elephants running to one side of your boat. The ISP either has to let customers suffer or sign a hasty contract with another carrier and take a loss on the previous commitment. Google doesn't do that, not even Microsoft does that.
What? They multi-home and work with AWS. If your traffic to Netflix is all of a sudden being routed through another AS, it's more likely that someone is throwing a tantrum like the one with L3 and whatnot a while ago. That doesn't necessarily mean Netflix itself has done anything, it may mean that (for example) L3 has decided to stop carrying Netflix traffic or something along those lines. They may or may not have had warning themselves, and both parties may or may not have had a point.
Anyways, I'm not sure usage based billing is the solution, but like it or not, it IS coming to this country. and yes, I work for an ISP. They are trying to be creative about it, but I doubt it'll come to anything. The easiest solution is to just charge you more. So that's what will happen.
Which one? Remind me to avoid it.
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>
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