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No Such Thing As 'Unlimited' Data (wired.com)
An anonymous reader writes: According to an article at Wired, the era of 'unlimited' data services is coming to an end. Carriers don't give them out anymore unless they're hobbled, and they're even increasing the prices of grandfathered plans. Comcast's data caps are spreading, and Time Warner has been testing them for years as well. It's not even just about internet access — Microsoft recently decided to eliminate its unlimited cloud storage plan. The big question now is: were these companies cynical, or just naive? We have no way of evaluating their claims that a small number of users who abused the system caused it to be unprofitable for them. (A recent leaked memo from Comcast suggests it's about extracting more money, rather than network congestion.) But it's certainly true that limited plans make costs and revenue much easier to predict. Another question: were we, as consumers, naive in expecting these plans to last? As the saying goes, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Unlimited data plans clearly won't work too well if everybody uses huge amounts. So did we let ourselves get suckered by clever marketing? T-Mobile plans may also be dropping unlimited data in 2016.
The real question is why someone could ever pay a flat fee for an infinite resource. It was obvious that could never last.
The people that scream the loudest about it, are of course the ones abusing the system and hastening its demise...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
that is all
With shrinking cable television viewership, and the talk of making internet a utility, of course many of these companies want to find new ways to make money. The customers don't really get a choice - not enough people can get up and move to actually hurt many of these companies in any significant fashion. Look at cell phone plans. The real question is if there is collusion in the industry... To be certain: consumers don't get a real choice when the players are so few and so big.
Yes there is. Your pipe has a max speed. The theoretical maximum amount of data you could use by saturating your pipe 24x7 should be considered unlimited. Nothing less.
Only idiots would think data caps will work, with 4K videos starting to be streamed and 8K not far behind, people who think it's just those damn abusers are kidding themselves. Networks technology needs to grow faster and with much bigger bandwidth.
We have no way of evaluating their claims
Not directly, anyway. We can still take an indirect approach, though, for example by looking at how many ISPs have been gobbled up and merged into each other over the last few years, at what point were there only a handful of real options left, when these caps started appearing, and so on. It also might help to remember that we've already been through this with the cell phone providers and their price gouging/fixing. Many of those providers are now ISPs as well, or have merged with them. Typically, once there isn't any real competition, prices start to go up. So to answer the question: Everybody should have seen this coming once all the mergers and acquisitions got going full force.
Writhe your naked ass to the mindless groove.
Some services were naively setup in ways that allowed abusers to break it all for everyone (OneDrive).
The issue where consumers should be tossing molotov cocktails through windows is Internet bandwidth. I would have no issue paying for bandwidth in a metered manner if it followed the same guidelines as every other utility. First, the pricing would be a reasonably small margin over production cost, like electricity. This would mean that 500 GB of bandwidth would carry a cost of a few dollars based on economies of scale. Second, that means the monthly subscription costs need to drop to surcharge levels. No more $30-$100 / month Internet plans unless they are coming bundled with 1+TB / month of rollover bandwidth. The delivery charges should be under $20 including equipment rental and fees, again similar to electrical or water delivery. Make every incumbent data provider, whether fiber, cable, or DSL provide line service to all competitors. Lastly, if telcos want to implement metered bandwidth services, then they should be raked over the coals to be subject to PUCs and provide universal service.
There is no issue with service not being unlimited. The issues are pricing, availability, delivery, and ethics.
This is a bit like ripping off your grandfathers in plans. I have been buying my own phones so that I may keep my unlimited data plan, and now I hear the price will change? It makes no sense to retroactively change an agreement. I am most seriously displeased.
The only unlimited resource I'm aware of is the supply of irrational people that are too stupid to understand why.
And don't forget love, bro.. Love.
Example, calls within the US. I have not paid "long distance" charges in years. On the other hand, everyone accepts the idea of paying for electricity at different tiers of usage. Of course, (at least where I live) there is a lot of competition between middle men (the actual producers are still heavily regulated). I would predict that there would be a lot less resistance to tiered internet usage IF we had true competition.
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
whether it existed or not, recent common carrier reform from the FCC made it sacrosanct. You cant cap, shape, hijack, or rate limit internet. Carriers are toeing a dangerous line by continuing to experiment with pre-2015 policy as though no reform had ever happened.
Until the big penalties start rolling in, i suggest taking back as much bandwidth as you can. noscript and adblock get the job done, but you can also null-route known advertisers servers and subnets. http://pgl.yoyo.org/adservers/
If youre running internet in a household with more than one person in it, strict firewalls are also a good way to prevent random windows bloatware from phoning home or gobbling data without your consent.
Good people go to bed earlier.
That's what it would be called in any other retail environment, and it's illegal. The providers called it unlimited and therefore it should be unlimited. It's not the fault of the consumer for taking them at their advertised word.
The same week you inform me that I need to pay $10 if I exceed 250GB of data, I will be canceling my account with you and switching to FIOS.
I have no idea how carriers and customers are going to agree on sane pricing. We're right back to the AT&T model of very expensive metered connections. I'm old enough to remember when in-state long distance phone calls were billed at 15+ cents a minute. With HD video streams eating more and more bandwidth as quality improves, typical
unmetered monthly allotments will get used up after a couple of streaming sessions. There's that, plus Facebook constantly pulls data in the background, as do messaging apps, as does the automatic cloud backup mechanism on iOS. I predict the carriers will keep billing at current rates until enough people start complaining, then we'll go through another anti-trust process.
That said, there's parallels in the software/infrastructure world. Adobe knows they have a lock on professional creative applications (Photoshop, Premiere, etc.) and decided to force people to pay the Creative Cloud bill forever to use them rather than pay once for a license. Microsoft is headed that way too; Windows 10 may be free, but options for perpetually licensing server software are getting harder to justify to the MBAs. The next step is convincing everyone to just run their stuff in Azure for $XXXX per month rather than forking over that same amount one time. Both situations are only coming around again because consumers are receptive to them, or because they have no other choice.
The big question now is: were these companies cynical, or just naive?
Probably a bit of both.
We have no way of evaluating their claims that a small number of users who abused the system caused it to be unprofitable for them.
I happen to be a certified accountant (among other things) and my guess is that any claims that just a few users are able to make the service unprofitable are probably bogus. You could make a pretty good analysis with just a little bit of information. Comcast for example provides a breakout of their revenues from their internet services. We also know what their profit margins are overall. While crude we can get at least a rough idea of what the profits on their internet service might be. Then we can figure out how much service a "small number of users" would have to utilize to make the service unprofitable. You could apply the Pareto principle here (80/20 rule) probably to good effect. It's a very back-of-the-envelope analysis but probably not far off the mark.
Comcast for example has roughly 21 million high speed internet customers. Their operating income in 2014 was about $18 Billion and internet service accounts for about 8.3% of their revenues. So let's naively say that their profits from internet service are in line with their other offerings and so Comcast would have made a profit of about $1.5 billion on internet services. Could be less but we're probably within an order of magnitude.
So to believe that Comcast loses money on a "small number" of customers we would have to believe that those customers used over a billion dollars of bandwidth? That would mean that if we apply the Pareto rule, 4.2 million customers would be responsible for an extra $357 in cost EACH per year. (That's about $30/user/month) They charge more for faster service but the cost of providing faster service is a fixed cost so all they have to do is price it such that the marginal cost from a heavy user is less than the marginal revenue from the faster service. If they haven't done this then their CFO is an idiot and I'm pretty sure that isn't the case.
True, unlimited data is a myth but there are a lot of things that could be done to help this. By consolidating everything online the carriers have ensured they are in a position to make it as scarce a resource as possible to drive value. By introducing the option to cache content offline through intelligent AI and taking advantage of off-peak times we could make better use of the limited resources. I would have no problem 'DVR'ing my Netflix and YouTube content so that I can save my bandwidth for data that is truly real-time which would average out the usage of networks today. Just like electricity, there is a huge amount of unused capacity during offpeak hours that we could put to good use with the ever declining price of storage.
INB4 not applicable because FCC. The airlines tried claiming this due to their status as regulated by the FAA. They got slapped down hard by the courts and must comply with state regs.
Have gnu, will travel.
We have no way of evaluating their claims that a small number of users who abused the system caused it to be unprofitable for them.
Anecdote incoming, but when I helped out on college IT it was fairly consistent that the top 20% of users (well, network ports) were responsible for 80-90% of the usage. And further the top 2% (which was two dozen or so) were responsible for about 50-60% of the usage. This was pretty consistently the same few ports too -- not just that at any point the usage was skewed but that over time those users were using a ton. Since we didn't have a huge pipe to the internet, those super-users would, from time to time, really degrade everyone else's connection. That lead to the idea that we could mitigate this situation by a fair and objective set of rules:
(1) No data "caps" -- we are not interested in aggregating data over long periods of time
(2) A byte is a byte -- we are not interested in packet inspection, only counts
(3) Traffic shaping only kicks in during actual congestion -- we are not interested in doing anything until service is actually degraded
What we ended up doing was that when the pipe to the internet was 75% full or more, any user that over the last 15 minutes was in the top 20% of traffic and consuming more than 5x the average use for that time period would get shunted into the lowest QoS bucket. This classification continued until either the usage dropped or (most likely) the outbound pipe was no longer congested.
What the fuck does this have to do with Comcast? Well, as much as I hate them I do have to admit that there is a plausible case for a small fraction of users degrading service for the rest of their paying customers (or necessitating costly upgrades that will be passed along to everyone). And they have implemented their congestion control in the most indefensible way I can imagine -- monthly caps cannot possibly solve the issue of overloading on short time-scales. So I'm left with the idea that, instead of sperging about "unlimited", the tech community actually try to be productive in endorsing a fair set of guidelines (maybe not at all like those above!) on how to manage networks to ensure that a minority of users don't degrade service for everyone. Not that Comcast doesn't deserve sperging of course ...
Only idiots would think data caps will work,
I'm pretty sure you have to be an idiot (or simply illogical) to equate "infinite" with "large".
If people need to stream 4K video frequently than data plans that make sense for that use will naturally spring into being. Until that time people on the very bleeding edge (as 4K video broadcasting still is) will rightfully have to pay for the far greater than average bandwidth they use, not ride on the backs of the average user for their own gain.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Never underestimate the bandwidth of an envelope stuffed to the limit of being able to seal with 200GB microSD cards.
3rd party certified meters are needed with per small unit billing Like gas stations. Gas stations can't bill you for the next full gallon they have to bill you for what you pump and not round it up to the next Gallon. also the pumps are checked by the state / town / etc to see if they are reading right.
So did we let ourselves get suckered by clever marketing?
Yep, you did.
Streaming movies is so much better and more convenient than using physical media!
No, it's not. You're using tons of bandwidth watching movies in streaming 1080p all month, then you gripe about being throttled or charged for overage. Then maybe you screw up by having DVDs and Bluray discs, ripping them, and storing them in 'The Cloud', and again you whine about bandwidth charges. Yep, you all fell for it hook line and sinker.
Stop using 'The Cloud'. Stop streaming everything. Get an antenna, watch free OTA HDTV. Use Redbox, or get Netflix to send you discs, watch them. You like something enough to watch more than once? Buy the disc(s). Stop making your phone your lifestyle, you won't use so much data every month. Don't play their game, take control of the situation. It's really not that difficult.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Normal people understand that an 'unlimited' offer of a resource that is actually both limited and communal should not be unreasonably monopolized.
Normal people understand "unlimited" to actually mean "unlimited" when used to promote the service. If it isn't unlimited it should not be advertised as such. But these companies very clearly said that you would have "unlimited" bandwidth so any changes after the fact means that they lied. That is called bait and switch among other things.
If you are the guy that goes downstairs and takes the entire 'continental breakfast' plate of danish up to your hotel room your abusing the fact that the hotel didn't place a 'limit' on the number of danish you could have.
Did the hotel advertise the number of danishes as "unlimited"? My guess is that they did nothing of the sort. They merely said a free breakfast was available, not that you could take the entire buffet back to your room.
If you walk into a chinese buffet for brunch at 11am, plunk down your $8 for all you can eat, and then promptly take the entire tray of sweet and sour chicken balls depriving everyone else of any.
It's all you can EAT. Not all you can take. You seem to be fuzzy on the difference. Stomachs have a finite capacity and restaurants know this. (Well, unless you are the late John Pinette)
Every other country is offering unlimited plans. Cheaper unlimited plans in Australia and New Zealand are now the norm.
Here's the thing, we're not talking about a resource. There is not finite supply of water pouring into your house. We're talking about bandwidth. We're talking about electrons that are always flowing down the wire. There is no real resource being consumed by using more data.
During non-peak times when your switches are not at capacity, it doesn't really take more electricity to process more data (not really; not measurably). During peak times, it may be more difficult to offer quality of service because everyone is streaming something (even if it's just a video). Your total cost is in the infrastructure for standard data at peak.
It's not a resource like power or water. That electricity is always running over those wires. The more powerful switches you need are a sunk cost!
Probably not. It is hard to believe that more than (approximately) 0% of people thought it wasn't fraud. But because it was such up-front blatant fraud, everyone wanted to hold the fraudulent companies to their word, as a sort of punishment. Keep in mind that these same companies were already pretty hated and this probably isn't most peoples' first encounters with their lies, so the desire for punishment is pretty .. heart-felt. Maybe "vengeance" would be a better word. But anyway, if they aren't going to supply the unlimited bandwidth that they said they would AND nobody is going to go to jail and have their life ruined for their little lie (told to millions of people, so it adds up) then people are going to feel justice was denied and they're going to remain angry and not let it go.
Someone high up in each of the fraud orgs needs to take the fall. Let's hear about prison sentences, wives divorcing them while they're in the slammer, etc. Then we can put this whole "unlimited" thing behind us. Until then, any mention of the fraud is going to have people coming out of the woodwork, claiming they believed it. When you hear them, you think you hear them saying "I'm stupid, I'm naive and I think there's such thing as a free lunch," but that's not what they think they're saying. They think they're saying, "I'm angry, I was one of the people insultingly targeted, and I want a painful lesson dealt out."
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
Remember when unlimited data on a phone plan was no big deal, but minutes and SMS were severely limited, and you paid by the minute/SMS - both incomeing and outgoing? That was way back when everyone used voice calling and texting was done over SMS instead of iMessage and Hangouts. Now there's no pressure on the voice/SMS so the carriers are giving you unlimited of that, but data is being used more and more so everything is becoming metered.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
What was happening was a few businesses were uploading all of their CCTV data to OneDrive. Like, over a TB a day. OneDrive was not intended as online backup so that's what probably caused the change and choke. Take what I said with salt.
For those who seek perfection there can be no rest on this side of the grave.
Is it a problem if I am LITERALLY leaving the phone off the hook with a call connected to. . . anything?
Not as much. All the calls get turned into digital data, the only resource you are using is some local switching equipment (which probably would actually fail if everyone in your city decided to try the same thing). Even at the digital level you are at least some lookup in a table for open connections which obviously has a finite, though probably very large, size.
Back in the day you in fact were using limited physical resources that cost real money by limiting use.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
VW lied about car emissions so that more people would buy their cars.
Comcast et al lied about available data so that more people would buy their broadband/cloud-service/....
VW is paying a price for its lies, there may well be criminal prosecutions; I doubt that anyone at Comcast, Time Warner, Microsoft, ... will pay any price.
My argument is not that unlimited should not mean you cannot feel free to use whatever bandwidth you like.
My argument (and the point you are replying to) is that it would be crazy to think that can last forever, or even frankly for very long - as said, no reasonable person would see an offer for an infinite resource and think that could or would last forever. All it takes is a handful of people to blow out the average and unlimited is gone. And knowing humanity, why WOULDN'T you expect some people to blow the average?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I'm not personally aware of any large carrier that charges on data volume (for upstream/backbone) and they are paying for the same electricity basically regardless of use. Outside of making sure they have enough pipe all the costs for Comcast, Time Warner, etc... are fixed! So, yes they can give you an unlimited plan because basically unless you're flooding the pipe their own bandwidth is unlimited. The argument that you should pay more for more use is nearly insane -- it does't cost them anything extra for you to burn thousands of extra GB because they pay nothing extra for the data crossing the wire; as long as they have enough bandwidth to cover a bad day they are fine. (They would have already bought this ahead of time, so... Yea, it's already there even if you aren't using it...) This is price gouging at its finest and what they don't realize is all they will do is make municipalities launch their own ISPs without these silly fake restrictions. A 10+gig MPLS isn't exactly that expensive for a small town, and some towns have 30+ gig fiber just laying around for the future... Really, they're just going to make sure they die off -- as if cable fees weren't enough.
a 1000mbps dedicated backhaul line is $5,250/mo here. that works out to be $5.25 per megabit
That's how much the munifiber isp here in town pays for one of their backhaul lines
So a 10Mbps dedicated line would cost a minimum of $52.50/mo before isp costs.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
When you get rid of unlimited data, you bring back the old days of Compuserve. It removes the freedom of individual users and puts it in the hands of a few.
To think of it, doesn't Net Neutrality have a point in killing the meter?
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
That we need to just start charging for what is used.
A reasonable cost per megabyte downloaded/uploaded.
That would keep it cheap for those that use it responsibly and expensive for those who don't
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
The "unlimited" word was flung around to increase customer count which increases the market cap of the company, No, they never had any intention of maintaining unlimited data. Was the lifetime guarantee of "unlimited" that some companies offered deliberately misleading? Probably, but they can cover themselves by just multiplying the price by 1000 and maintaining "We never said it would always be unlimited at the starting price!" And... that's pretty much what they are doing now, isn't it? This is analogous to the business plan of every dot com company: Offer products and services for free (or even at a loss, i.e. jet.com) to begin with, then "monetize" or sell later when the customer count is up to an impressive number. Of course, with a dot com, you could always inflate your customers numbers by creating ghost free accounts (who believes Facebook and others aren't doing exactly that?)
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
...did we let ourselves get suckered by clever marketing?
Are you blaming the victims? Are you saying that if I take someone's word at face value that it is my fault they were lying?
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
There's a massive difference between an unlimited (I.E> no monthly cap) and infinite bandwidth. Carriers are not selling us unlimited bandwidth. They are selling us a connection, and when they label it unlimited this doesn't mean 999999999 MEG connection, it means i can use whatever amount of MEGS or GIGS I want without being stopped. What is screwing us, and the industry, is the fact that most people can't see the difference, and their telco sells them an unlimited 20 meg connection. The problem is, they are also selling that to everyone else, and they simply do not have enough trunks to provide max speed to all customers. Throughput is what's important, the amount of speed at a given time, not the amount of data I download. Me downloading 20 gigs or 2 megs makes no difference, unless they are selling more than they have to sell, which they all are. The data you are downloading and uploading doesn't cost them much, the infrastructure does. The infrastructure they have refused to maintain. The telcos are the issue
data transfer is dirt cheap (penies per gb)
Once cell towers or satellite transponders in an area get congested, putting up new towers or new birds to allow acceptable rates for a larger number of active users during peak time is decidedly not dirt cheap. And it appears cellular customers aren't quite as receptive to discounts for shifting usage to off-peak times as satellite customers are.
So STFU, you whiny liberal bitches. This is the "free market at work" and it's a glorious thing. Why, every country should create a regulatory morass (and when that fails, legal system) that leads to entrenched monopolies who can then ram it to their customers.
No shit there's no free lunch, dipshit troll. This isn't about a free lunch. This is about me getting the full goddamn meal that I fucking paid for!
Monthly download/upload limit should not have any cap except by the speed limitations of the data plan. For instance: My Cox account has a 2TB soft cap limit on my plan. My maximum bandwidth is 200Mb/s (~25MB/s). If I could peg that connection to maximum for 24 hrs a day, 30 days per month, that's roughly 1,080,000 MBs in a month (~1.03 TB). Roughly only half of my data cap. I'll never see the cap (and I've yet to even come close to half).
More realistically on a daily average: Pulling down 4K video from Netflix for about 4hrs in a day at the same time my roommate plays Destiny for 12hrs has only maxed out at a daily usage of 29.8GBs. Multiply that by even 31 days (again, extreme use case as the mega-Netflix/Hulu pulldowns only happen on weekends...while Destiny tends to run at most 5GB daily by itself), and that's 923.8 Gigs....Less than half the cap. In other words, this connection doesn't even need, and should not even have, the cap
My point is this: If companies offer data package tiers that give a hard limit to the data speed ONLY, there wouldn't be a need for the data cap, because there'd only be so much data that a saturated connection to ever pull down. If a company is having trouble providing a given speed tier to all their customers..then guess what... They've oversold the line, and they need to put money into improving the infrastructure to meet demand at even peak times or suffer the consequences of failure. Being a TNSTAAFL libertarian, you should be on board with that one. Meet your customers' demands, or get steamrolled and killed off by someone who will.
Look at cell phone plans. The real question is if there is collusion in the industry
If there were collusion, MVNOs and T-Mobile USA have done a decent job of breaking it up. Because MVNOs lease airtime from the top tier carriers, these carriers have to compete for the MVNOs' business, and then the MVNOs compete to offer service to subscribers. T-Mobile's "un-carrier" marketing has made phone subsidies in the US more honest as well.
Bandwidth is "a finite resource", but it's only scarce when it is congested. Yet many ISPs run the meter the same during uncongested periods, such as early mornings local time, as during congested periods.
What do apps manipulate?
(Other than the user's psychology, that is.)
For providers, bandwidth is rather cheap, especially in urban areas. All you need is enough competition.
Here the government decided DSL and fiber networks should be open to competition for a fair price. Cable networks are not open at the moment.
An example of what happened as a result of this:
In this city you can choose Cable, DSL or fiber. For cable there's one provider, for DSL many providers and for fiber at least three (one of which has many sub-brands). It means I can get a 1 Gb/s fiber connection for 55 euro, uncapped, including TV. Or, the next fastest provider, 58 euro's for 500 Mb/s and tv. If i want to pay less, i can and I'll just get lower speeds - currently i'm quite happy with my 50 mbit/s connection, that does 70-80 mbit/s in practice.
If a provider were to put a cap on the connection, people would switch to another one really fast.
Do not be fooled in thinking this is 'congestion management' or even 'cost management'. You are suffering from the effects of an oligopoly.
First, the pricing would be a reasonably small margin over production cost, like electricity.
Provided "production cost" includes a reasonable amount of CapEx, or capital expenditure for capacity expansion to meet growing demands for a service whose provision involves a scarce resource. It costs money to put up a DSLAM or CMTS. It costs even more money to put up cell towers or launch a satellite.
Businesses also pay substantially more per month. And I'm told that some markets allow a telecommuter to subscribe to business Internet at home, but in others, business Internet is available only on commercially zoned land to holders of a business license.
Not when they understand its limited and communal resource that they are being given unmetered access to.
A) They don't understand that and B) even if true it doesn't matter. If a company offers something in unlimited amounts in means UNLIMITED. Without limit. They didn't qualify it. There is no other meaning for unlimited than "without limit". If they made a bad deal then that is their fault and not the customer's problem. If they didn't really mean unlimited then they should have offered some other deal. There is no social contract here between me and you. It's solely between me and the company. If you don't like the effects of that, too bad.
You are trying to weasel word this and I am not buying what you are arguing. It's very simple. Don't offer "unlimited" anything unless you really mean it.
Its only bait and switch if they change the terms or product on you.
They DID change the terms. QED it is a bait and switch. They lured you in with one offer and then changed the offer. This is not complicated. They offered unlimited downloads and later realized that was a bad deal for them and are trying to weasel out of the deal.
They gave you unlimited access. You 'abused' it.
By definition it is impossible to abuse UNLIMITED access by utilizing said access. If you offer me unlimited bandwidth at a particular speed, you should not be surprised if I utilize it to the fullest extent possible. That is what they offered and what was accepted.
But none of the other resources are sold as unlimited.
Road access is; you are inherently promised you can driver anywhere on any public road at any time.
Have you ever tried to do so at rush hour in LA?
BAM
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Get an antenna, watch free OTA HDTV.
Agreed for many subscribers. But for others, what is the alternative to ESPN Monday Night Football or Food Network?
Use Redbox
Fails for any movie that's not a new release.
or get Netflix to send you discs
I'm told that when Netflix runs out of working copies of a movie, it doesn't replenish them. This leads to a queue full of Very Long Wait.
The average consumer doesnt know how their internet connection is measured. All most people know is that entertainment is moving to ala carte/on-demand in HD. For example, the majority of people I know are Internet-illiterates but they all subscribe to Netflix, Hulu, and HBONow and own several streaming devices. Most of my childrens friends have never seen traditional live tv. These people dont know or care about the bandwidth required for these services, and wouldnt know how to size a circuit if they did. ALL of the major ISPs know this because they want to be common carriers AND content providers. Consolodation and local monopolies/duoplolies make caps possible. Data caps are rent extraction plain and simple. Pure greed under the guise of curbing abuse.
We're talking about bandwidth. We're talking about electrons that are always flowing down the wire. There is no real resource being consumed by using more data.
We're also talking about photons that fill the air. Authorization to emit photons of a particular frequency in a particular area is a scarce resource so that different uses of EM fields in the same area do not cause harmful interference.
During non-peak times when your switches are not at capacity, it doesn't really take more electricity to process more data
It takes more electricity to grow food to feed customer service representatives who have to repeatedly explain to cellular subscribers the difference between peak and off-peak data. To reduce customer service costs, some carriers just simplify their offerings by eliminating a discount for off-peak data.
Your total cost is in the infrastructure for standard data at peak.
Agreed. But the market determines what infrastructure it's willing to pay for. Increasing efficiency by moving big transfers off-peak has been shown to work in the satellite market but not the cellular market.
Oh, and HDD space for leased storage is also a limited resource.
A subscriber whose carrier recently implemented overage fees mid-contract can probably get out of paying an early termination fee when switching to a different carrier. But I guess carriers that implement overage fees mid-contract probably think the loss of ETF revenue from these subscribers is a fair price to pay for decongesting the infrastructure at peak hours.
I like this approach. Punish the guilty, don't burden everyone else, and - the best bit - don't even bother punishing the guilty when it doesn't matter, so it's clearer to EVERYONE that when they're being punished they really deserve it. And, as you say, it emphasizes MANAGEMENT of resources rather than creating artificial scarcity.
Yes there is. Your pipe has a max speed. The theoretical maximum amount of data you could use by saturating your pipe 24x7 should be considered unlimited. Nothing less.
Your "pipe" is mostly likely shared with others.
Unless, of course, you are willing to pay for business/instiutional grade service.
Except we are not. We are number one at getting ripped off by the corporate greed that infests this country. As Bernie Sanders pointed out, Congress does not control corporations, Corporations control Congress.
Our so-called "elected leaders" are nothing but paid-for shills, puppets of corporate America and the real masters of the country are Verizon, Comcast, Time-Warner, JP Morgan, General Electric and Exxon-Mobile.
And until this situation changes, either by gaming the system or violent revolution, we are stuck with always paying the most for the most mediocre of services.
Our healthcare system is a giant mess, our roads and bridges are third-world, our airports ungainly, and even our internet, yet another thing that was created here, has been surpassed almost everywhere else.
We were once a shining beacon of high-tech and middle-class luxury when the rest of the world was still living in horrific conditions, now we are a symbol of a failing empire, mostly due to the obscene disparity between the ultra-wealthy and the ever-shrinking middle class.
Other countries and businesses are able to offer "unlimited" data plans. But that is due to infrastructure investments. However the money spent there isn't spent here, because that money instead goes into CEO compensation, bonuses, quarterly profits and shareholder dividends. That's why we can't have Unlimited Data, even though we pay double what a user does elsewhere, AND these companies were given money by the government (which is our taxes) to expand their infrastructure, funds that they then pocketed. So really, we paid three times for this, and got ripped off.
And not a single CEO goes to jail. Because they are running the show.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
There is zero "per-bit" cost for data transmission. The cost of a circuit is all physical plant. That is, the _actual_ cost is installation and maintenance and right-of-way and rent. All of which are dependent entirely on real wall-clock time. Metering something with a natural maximum capacity and no unit cost is the stupidest model _possible_.
When the various people decided to put a price on the data itself they created a bottomlessly hungry monster. That monster was the total cost of all the peering agreements that _also_ put a price on the data itself and a race between all the providers trying to claim their receptiveness was more valuable than their transmission burden.
So the current market is _boned_ because it isn't driven by any market force except greed.
In a rational world I could sell you an unlimited link to my backbone at a known fixed speed, with the understanding that your effective throughpt and potential delay to any destination is simply not something I can control.
Then the market force would be "Provider X is too congested, I'll switch to provider Y". The cost of the link and the speed of your first/last mile, and your best bet for a good provider with a good backbone would be your selling points.
So the problem with the internet here in 'merica is that it's become a Libertarian Ideal Toll Road... Its clogged up, over priced, full of unmet promises, and barely functional. People are all trying to over-burden "the best" roads because the normal roads have all fallen to shit. The service providers have had to limit the hell out of their points of connection because each one is metered so the mesh has become a set of inter-linked long-armed stars where my transmission of a packet to a business down the block may pass through several of these united states.
If the costs weren't inflated by the per-bit pricing and predatory nonsense then the connections between networks wold be much more open. People wouldn't be worrying about "who's data is on my network" and most routes would be much more direct. Each provider would see user uptick as a opportunity to shorten their net spans instead of a call to throttle their nets. The best networks would promise not a speed in megabits but shortest transit time off their net. Bulk providers (Goggle and Youtube, vs Netflix, etc) would be invited to make as many close-end and colocated insertion/service points as they could muster.
An "unmetered" internet just works. Ask most of the rest of the world. You pay to connect. You take your chances for throughput. And all the effort and human and monetary expense is spent to get your data to its destination by the best route possible. Then Open Shortest Route does the work so you don't have to.
NOTE: This doesn't hold for "unlimited data storage for free" models. It's _incorrect_ to conflate transit and storage, everything is completely different for storage. That's the difference between being able to use a road and needing to build bigger warehouses.
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
The once the infrastructure has been built" argument is getting really old. Carriers spend billions of dollars every year upgrading infrastructure. First, people wanted to get the most out of their 56k modems, downloading blink tags from Geocities (hundreds of bytes per page). When the infrastructure was fast enough, it was hundreds of kilobytes of images per page at hundreds of kbps. Then postage stamp sized video at 1Mbps. Then buffering Youtube. Then HD Netflix at 4 Mbps. Now multiple simultaneous Netflix streams.
We've gone through several generations of infrastructure, increasing speeds by 500x so far, and they're still building it faster and faster because there's no sign of Americans' appetite for more better faster chabging any time soon.
Once you have 10 gigabit fiber to your house and yo want it any faster you can "now that the infrastructure has been built". Well, after it's built and paid for - these things are often built with bonds that need to be paid off.
All the providers who currently enjoy double-dipping the consumers ( once for Internet Access, again for Video Services ) are really starting to feel the sting as more and more folks are dropping traditional Cable and Satellite and moving to competing streaming services.
As a result, they're simply doing everything in their power ( at the cheapest possible cost ) to disrupt, destroy and / or prevent folks from utilizing competing services in the video market. They'll use every trick in the book before they're forced to do the obvious and upgrade their networks. Netflix currently burns about 3GB / hour for HD content and consumes a huge chunk of download bandwidth ( something like ~35% ). This number is only going to go up as more folks drop Cable and Satellite in record numbers, as well as future offerings of even higher resolutions ( 4k, 8k ).
Continuing to allow corporations to dictate the rules is why we're falling behind in Internet Availability and bandwidth offerings vs the rest of the World. While unpopular with the /. crowd, perhaps corporations should be forced to put X percentage of their profits back into the company to improve itself, instead of paying CEO's and execs more money than they could ever possibly spend in a dozen lifetimes. :|
Do ISP's in other countries have these issues or is it just the profits-above-all-else mentality of American corporations that are keeping us in the Internet Stone Age ?
The FCC needs to bring out the biggest hammer they have and use it. They need to split those companies who are both Internet Provider and Content Provider into separate entities. Watch how fast those data caps and grey-area network tricks vanish when their own video streaming services suffer due to the same bandwidth limitations everyone else must endure. The whole " What's good for the Goose " argument as it were.
I'm ( like many others ) personally DONE with paying $$$ for a dozen Jesus channels, another dozen shopping channels, two dozen channels in languages I don't even speak, sports packages I don't care about, extra fees for the privilege of HD, and rental fees for each receiver and / or DVR. I was basically paying ~$100 / month for maybe 3-4 channels that I watched. F*ck that.
Even if they manage to destroy the streaming Video revolution, I'll never return to the Cable / Satellite teat.
Crud...just noticed that I forgot one multiple of 60 in my initial calculation. I'd blow by the 2TB cap in one day if I consistently pegged the Con. But even with that fudge, the rest of the post is the truth of my usage. We have to struggle to pull down more than 30Gigs of usage.
"The tragedy of the commons is a term, probably coined originally by William Forster Lloyd and later used by Garrett Hardin, to denote a situation where individuals acting independently and rationally according to each's self-interest behave contrary to the best interests of the whole group by depleting some common resource." -- Wikipedia
The answer is penalize the highest demand users based on the normalized usage of the entire group. If you're using more bandwidth than say, +3 standard deviations from the mean of all users, pay a surcharge. If you're using less than -3 SD, thanks, have a credit.
Mission: To provide products that consume time and energy as entertainingly as permitted by the laws of thermodynamics.
The 3rd party certified meters is also needed as well.
There have been quite a few cases of them not working right / being delayed and running over to the next billing period (and not using what was left over last period) so you get f* on trying to burn up what left on the last day and get docked usage for the next period.
Apps are made of code, and code is data. Unlimited data means unlimited apps.
At some point, you reach a limit where you can't download more than a certain amount because your transfer rate makes it impossible to exceed it.
(EG. Whether I have 50 people sharing a 6mbit DSL circuit or just 1 person on it, we're collectively only going to be able to pull down 6mbits of data per second, maximum, multiplied by the number of seconds in one billing period.)
Especially as the transfer rates sold with broadband plans increase, it's arguable that the massive amount of data possible to download in a month is far greater than what's reasonable to allow for the price paid .... BUT that argument has a few holes in it too. (Most providers start ignoring caps or "soft limits" where you're throttled down in speed past a certain data xfer threshold, as long as you pay for the fastest tiers of service!)
I never really expected that I was getting truly "unlimited service" on any of the data plans I paid for which advertised it. IMO - that was always just marketing hype, kind of like those "unbreakable" combs, mirrors, and other odds and ends they sell. What I *expected* for my money was a service that charged me a reasonable price to cover my typical/average use of the plan, with the understanding that the times I might do heavy data transfers were offset by the times I don't do much but still pay as much as others who do.
Downloading the entire Internet is still a finite quantity.
Have gnu, will travel.
The problem that we face, and my guess the reason for the anxiety among the public, is that we've built an entire Internet ecosystem that is built around the assumption of unlimited data. Video and application streaming, network storage / cloud, VoIP and FaceTime, digital software distribution, streaming advertising, and even things like "work from home"... the whole American Internet ecosystem was built around the assumption that monthly data consumption was not an issue, and it's been like this for decades. You have entire generations of people who have grown up, knowing nothing but unlimited data; numerous companies building software from AAPL to a startup without having to worry about data consumption. Suddenly, you have ISP's coming out of nowhere shattering assumption, and it's going to throw the whole system into chaos. Users never paid attention to how much data their lifestyles consumed, and now they have to quantify and track something they never had done before. Doesn't matter if the cap is set at a reasonable level, the unknown of it, the sudden change of the assumption, is going to make people uneasy, scared and angry. Companies who have people working from home because they assume that those employees have unlimited data - are they going to face bills from their employees for the data that was consumed? Advertisers who streamed unwanted videos - does it go from just an annoyance to a real cost pain point for users? Is FaceTiming grandma have a much more discreet cost? Even the idea of something in the past as simple as watching a YouTube video all of a sudden has a real, quantifiable cost attached to it.
Usually I keep paying more and more while getting less and less. Woo my Internet worked half the time this month at a fraction of the speed I'm paying for.. I must be the lucky customer. Networking is very cheap to deliver when done right. Disk space also is very cheap and by removing duplicates it quickly reaches a point where expansion needs slow. All these things are dropping in price constantly. Unlimited might be unrealistic but very cheap wouldn't be. By treating it as virtually unlimited you remove the cost of bookkeeping, explaining the bookkeeping, etc which can easily come to be a bigger expense than the actual product.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
I'm not paying for data, I'm paying to be connected to the internet, period. If it's truly a few bad apples, and not just a money grab, then figure out a way to deal with them. We in the US already have the shittiest, most expensive internet service of any "developed" nation. These assholes want to make it worse?
Cloud storage is a different matter. There's no reason why you can't set a limit there, and most companies do.
As for phones, I really don't care too much, personally. I'm not one of these people obsessively playing with their phone all day, and certainly not trying to watch video on it. Nevertheless, once you give an inch to these corporations, they try to take a mile. I can see them squeezing harder and harder, trying to wring more money out of us over time. Indeed, "unlimited" plans and flat rates were a response to just that kind of thing. It's exactly why I went to T-Mobile. I got tired of unexpected charges showing up on my bill every month.
-- sudon't
Air-ride Equipped
An extra fun thing that comcast does it flag ALL packets as low priority (except of course their services), so they're pretty much already implemented that, but with everyone.
To quote a radio personality I stopped listening to years ago: "Words Mean Things". You can't say unlimited and in the same breath say (Up to n GB) Unlimited means Unlimited. No caps, no slow-down. The ISPs need to stop using that word if they don't mean it. I'm surprised the FTC is letting them get away with using that word. Whatever happened to truth in advertising. Worse yet, the limits they do impose is usually in the squint-o-vision font.
It is not fair for those that use bandwidth responsibly to bear the increased costs of rolling out more infrastructure to support the top 2% of users.
Nor does it make an engineering sense ... the problem is not the infrastructure if it meets 98% of users' needs.
Most consumers have limited control on the data coming and going. Ads come along for the ride mostly outside of our control. Websites are often bloated with autoplaying videos, tons of picture, and are coded with very little efficiency. As a user the control you have is to not visit a site, which is a blunt instrument. Even then we have no infrastructure to let someone know how many MB's loading clickbait.com is going to take.
Windows is constantly phoning home, even auto-downloading GB's of Win10 install files.
With so little control I also see no good path that does not include unlimited data.
On the other hand, it would be good to have some sort of cost imposed on the folks who bloat the world with spam, ads, and unbelievably big downloads (70 GB games are getting common?!).
Well, as much as I hate them I do have to admit that there is a plausible case for a small fraction of users degrading service for the rest of their paying customers (or necessitating costly upgrades that will be passed along to everyone).
No, there is not a plausible case. Comcast sold a service, and the paying customer is using that service. If Comcast cannot live up to its advertising, then it should not advertise. It really is that simple.
If I pay for X Mb/s, then I am well within my rights to keep my pipe running at X Mb/s for every single second of my subscription. If my Internet provider knows it can't keep up, while taking my money, then that is stealing from me.
I just did a web search for "unlimited data plan". Let's see what we find...
http://www.t-mobile.com/cell-p...
https://www.metropcs.com/cell-...
http://www.boostmobile.com/sho...
https://www.virginmobileusa.co...
Yep, every one of them describes the plan as "UNLIMITED" in big bold letters. Of course, it you search really carefully, you'll sometimes discover some tiny text at the bottom of the page explaining that "unlimited" doesn't actually mean unlimited at all. It's just what they call "false advertising".
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
The one thing that I don't understand about the discourse regarding unlimited data is the use of the term abuse. How is it that the top users of unlimited data are considered abusers? Should they have purchased the tier that provides more than merely unlimited?
If I pay for X Mb/s, then I am well within my rights to keep my pipe running at X Mb/s for every single second of my subscription. If my Internet provider knows it can't keep up, while taking my money, then that is stealing from me.
You clearly have no idea how much X Mb/s actually costs. A 100mbps cable connection costs about $90/month. A dedicated 100mbps pipe costs $1,000+ /month. You're getting a massive fucking discount being subsidized by grandparents sending email and then bitching about how you're being robbed.
You're also advocating for the most ass backwards form of service imaginable. When I want something, I want it now. The ideal service is that when I want to download a 3GB file I get 3GB/s and it takes 1 second to download. The ideal service from a customer standpoint is total bandwidth used not speed. Let's say tonight I want to watch a 4k video but I will be working the next 3 nights. That means I want 4 nights worth of bandwidth NOW not spread out over 4 days of downloading. Your ISP could give you 10GB/day of bandwidth speed. Or give you 40GB/week of unlimited speed to use as you see fit. If you aren't home or awake 75% of the day it makes sense to get 4x burst speed that is oversubscribed so that you can only use it 6 hours a day but 400% faster.
I've had dsl from the beginning when the fastest they offered here was 1 megabit down / 384k up.
few years went by and they upgraded to adsl2plus offering 3 tiers
3 megabit down / 768k up
6 megabit down / 768k up
12 megabit down / 1 megabit up
unlimited of course. And for the power users you could order a 2nd 'naked dsl' line and with your own or buy or rent from isp you could get bonded bringing the max to 24 megabit down / 2 megabit up.
it sat like that for about 5 years. We have comcast locally and every month a new doorknob flyer hung from my front door advertising comcast.
The doorknob ad was a direct attack to the telco, and it even claimed "Unlimited data" then a tiny asterisk by Unlimited. haha!
Now my provider has rolled out VDSL2plus. The new 3 tiered service is on 1 single line.
25 megabit down / 5 megabit up
50 megabit down / 10 megabit up
100 megabit down / 25 megabit up
and the nice thing the prices are only $3 higher than the 3 tiers in dsl2plus was.
We also get free newsgroups access with account. Which most cable isp's stopped doing that long ago. Back when I worked netops dept at a dialup isp in 1998 to early 2000's when we got our CLEC and moved to DSL service. We also offered free newsgroup access, back then we used Giganews of course but we ran a local caching server for them also to help cut costs.
So far in all these years my provider keeps swearing they'll never add caps. I know it could happen, anything is possible.
I was on 12 megabit for 5 years and my monthly usage across my lan, which is setup a little funky, but it's dsl modem-> linux box that is my router, runs nat/firewall/upnp support/etc, then off the switch I have a wireless access point for tablet/laptop.
between all my devices I average 380-418 gigabytes per month when i was on 12 megabit.
I'm on 50 megabit vdsl2+, I just barely qualify for 100 megabit range, but I just went with 50 as it's more than enough for just me, and i didn't want to add another 25 bucks to bill just now.
since upgrading to vdsl2+ 50 megabit dn / 10 up, my useage did go up a little Im now averaging 402-460 gigabytes/month total useage
that's gaming pc, fileserver i tossed all old and new hard drives in so it's got 6 internal hard drives, 3 external usb hdd's and 1 esata external hdd so about 10-12TB storage "overkill" but i just tossed everything i had into the fileserver box. It runs rtorrent/rutorrent web front end to control from any device on lan.
drives shared to stream to any device on lan.
then the other linux box which is pretty much used as just a router. built using a mini case, it also auto downloads ad block lists so ads are blocked at my router, therefore blocked across all devices on lan.
tablet/laptop
So my traffic is mainly netflix, torrents, and gaming. occasional video chat/voip/random junk.
Still today they stay unlimited. They even offer bonded vdsl2+ so if you can qualify for 100 megabit well you can get 200 megabit bonded vdsl2+
but they are testing 2 gigabit to home services in 1 market up north. Dunno which one will win, but
G.Fast uses copper like DSL. They don't have to run fiber to the house but for 1 gigabit speed the distance is 100 meters or less to the fiber.
G.Fast is still being "researched/tested"
the other option of course is like Fios.
It will probably be 5-8 more years before gigabit comes to town here. If they stick to their "promises".
Most non AT&T DSL services are unlimited though.
seems only cellular and cable internet use caps.
seriously if ya want unlimited DSL see if your town has VDSL2+ from the Telco. It's solid as a rock and very low ping times. I get 8ms pings to google.com
and I love free newsgroup access :P
Making money....DUH! When mobile phones came along...all they did was make phone calls. Minutes were a premium. Texting came along. Minute prices dropped, texted was a premium (even though it did not cost the phone companies ANYTHING to send/receive text. The texting was carried on the back porch of the already being used cellular signal) Now data has become the cash cow. Minutes & texting are pretty much free, and data is the premium. If something else comes along, data price will drop and whatever the new thing is, will be the premium.
If I pay for X Mb/s, then I am well within my rights to keep my pipe running at X Mb/s for every single second of my subscription. If my Internet provider knows it can't keep up, while taking my money, then that is stealing from me.
Right, so in that alternate universe, why wouldn't the service provider come and say to you "You know what, you pay for X Mbps, but I can offer burst speeds of 50*X Mbps for you and 49 other neighbors, provided you agree to only use that max for an average of 1/50th of the total time. That "burst speed" would let you surf the web much faster, but if have any bulk non-interactive data transfer like OS patches/updates or large offsite backups, we require that you limit them to X Mbps."
Why on earth wouldn't I take that deal?
First of all, there are quote tags for a reason. Learn to use them.
Second, by your definition every single service on planet earth is "oversold". There aren't enough roads and bridges for everyone to drive to the same place at the same time, nor would there be enough parking when they got there. There aren't enough ambulances or hospital beds or doctors for everyone to come to the same ER at the same time. There aren't enough phone circuits or available spectrum slots for everyone to make a call at the same time. There aren't enough planes for everyone to fly at the same time, or enough runways/taxiways/gates for all the planes that do exist to go to the same place at once. The supermarket will run out if everyone comes in at the same time trying to buy peanut butter too.
All of these services continue to exist because, as it turns out, it's absurdly unlikely for everyone to want to use the same service at the same time. Instead they are tuned somewhere in between average and peak demand (planes probably towards the former, ERs towards the latter) and nowhere near the "100% use factor".
What's more, no sane designer would have it otherwise. Roads that could handle everyone trying to drive the same direction at the same time would be dozens of lanes wide and go underutilized 99% of the time. If we wanted to ensure that everyone could fly at the same time, we would need 1000 times as many planes, and most of them would just sit on the ground all the time. A supermarket that stored enough peanut butter in case everyone in my town decided to buy a jar at the same time would end up storing (and throwing out) literally tons of peanut butter for no good reason.
In Canada everything has be caps for like a decade. The "unlimited" data model died a long time ago... The trend is slowly improving... It used to be that caps were generally too small. With network enhancements, caps have gotten bigger to the point that they are reasonable, though some you pay though the teeth for. Most recently I have seen a combination of Cap/Unlimited which I think is a better balance... You get "unlimited" cap, but at a certain cap, your speed is degraded, which to me is pretty good. You pay for the 1GB or 2GB or 5GB cap at full speed, but after that you have unlimited, it is just a bit slower. Typically any user stays within a cap more or less, its just that every now and again you blow it, and the result is either you have no more data, or that you pay some exorbitant amount per GB. At least this way, you watch you cap and you get good service, but if you do happen to blow it, you still have service if a bit slower.
Why the hell are you defending these weasels? Your arguments are nonsense and not based in any contract law or any reasonable interpretation of reality. There are NO communal resources here. Not applicable. If they didn't have the resources to offer what they were offering then the company is committing fraud.
Unless you have a contract that extends into the future, neither of you have any significant obligation to each other going forwards.
People DO have contracts that extend into the future. If you have unlimited service (which some do) and they cap that service (which has happened) contrary to the original agreement (which also has happened) then the company has violated their obligations. Period. End of Discussion.
The definition in question is not 'unlimited' we agree on what that means. The definition in question is that of 'abuse'.
There is no debate about abuse because it cannot occur by definition. If they offer "unlimited" service then you cannot abuse that by using it as much as possible. If they slow the connection intentionally then they are violating their agreement after the fact. The fact that they later feel it is a bad deal for them is irrelevant. The fact that it might impact others (but probably doesn't) is irrelevant. They offered and you accepted. That is the deal and there is no abuse.
And this is why we can't have nice things: everyone's a lawyer, looking for the legalistic loophole they can take advantage of to get theirs
There is no loophole here. If a seller offers something and a buyer accepts, it is reasonable for the buyer to expect to get exactly what was offered. No more, no less. Insisting that an ISP actually provide "unlimited" service when they offered "unlimited" service is not unreasonable. If they were unable to provide such service at the time they offered it then they are committing fraud. I have no objection to them making a reasonable profit but whether they actually do or not is not my concern. If they lose money on the deal that is their problem. Similarly if I buy more than I can actually afford that is not the concern of the ISP.
It's the consequence of living in an adversarial society, I guess, but it's rather unpleasant.
Welcome to the Real World my friend. These companies are not your friend. The ONLY thing they want from you is your money and the exist for no other purpose. If you want to pretend otherwise then you are being naive. This is exactly why we have contracts, even between friends. Arguments occur when agreements are ambiguous or when one party tries to change the deal after the fact.
The issue is money. For a long time, broadband subscriber growth was massive - all companies had to do was sit and watch as their subscriber base (and profits with it) grew steadily without them lifting a finger. In recent years, the market has started to reach a saturation point and growth has greatly slowed. That's natural for a relatively young industry, but it doesn't look good on a balance sheet, so ISPs have gone looking for new ways to boost their profits back to the levels they're used to.
The reason you paid for speed and not data in the past is that's the part that actually costs the ISP money - more speed requires more backhaul and other infrastructure to be built. Once that has been done, however, it doesn't matter how much or little data flows through that infrastructure - the cost of maintaining it doesn't change. Routers don't have moving parts that wear out when so many bits have gone through.
The golden age of crazy broadband subscriber growth have passed, and ISPs are looking for other ways to boost their income. That's all this is about.
In many cases the adverts take more bandwidth than the content! If I'm paying for bandwidth consumed - you can bet I'm going to control who gets to use it
if "Faith" could be proved with facts - would it still be faith? So why does "Faith" try to present beliefs as fact? -
Read the leaked the Comcast memo.
They state quite plainly that data caps are *not* about network congestion. Their network is running just fine, even with the so-called "data hogs". The ONLY reason they are instituting data caps is that the average use is rising has risen to the point where instituting a tiered data usage system will make them a lot more money.
Ex. Many more households have *multiple* users streaming Netflix or similar services and they are exceeding 250gb / month. Charge them $10 per extra 50 gb. $10 X a few million users = a LOT of money for almost no expense on Comcast's part.
I already responded to this comment, but I will go again. I won't respond to the trollish posts that you reply to every one of my comments with. I have kept that statement true, despite the nearly 200 replies you have given to me. I have no sockpuppets downmodding you, that is happening because your posts are redundant, are trollish, and are offtopic, and people are modding them appropriately.
What does that KGIII post have to do with AD and DNS? How does that disprove your earlier statement that you claim wasn't you? The GPO comment comes from your reply, the very same one I am talking about where you claimed that hosts files should be distributed by GPO, which is absolutely a waste of resources when there are 1000s of workstations on a network, the better place to load these entries is into the AD DNS server, you then went on to rail against DNS resource usage as if that isn't already a sunk cost, and instead was something being added to AD just to deal with ad networks.
I can keep this up forever too, I find your need to be right absolutely hilarious, you constantly post about refuted points like you are winning some kind of dick measuring contest, and as if you have won some argument.
My signature will remain as long as you lose your mind over these minor points I made against your software. Here is the current one for your enjoyment since you refuse to use an account:
APK likes posting replies. Making APK lose his mind one post at a time.
It matches your subjects quite well.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
There are tradeoffs. For one, we were a cash-strapped small college and couldn't afford the kind of hardware to do deep packet inspection. The other is that a lot of encrypted bulk traffic (CrashPlan) is indistinguishable from high-priority traffic. It doesn't do to say that people moving large quantities of data over SSL or IPSEC should get a pass. Finally, we had serious privacy concerns with inspecting and tagging the content of internet traffic.
In the end, the fatal blow (besides $$$) is that it's pretty damned obvious that if you moved >1GB in the last 15 minutes, you must be doing something that's not interactive. Schedule your bulk transfers for 3AM so they don't overlap
PS. The car analogy doesn't work because we are not regulating traffic "on the highway", we are regulating the "on ramps". And we don't need to check to see whether a particular on-ramp is connected to something important like a police station -- we know that a on-ramp that's sending 100x the average traffic in the last 5 minutes is definitely not important.
PPS. For us, perceptible latency kicked in around 75% congestion, not 95%. At 95% the system suffered complete congestive collapse to throughput. YMMV.
Yet again, the same arguments already refuted, acting like you won the discussion. So, are you really in your 50s? If you are, I am truly concerned for your mental health, as you act like a 12 year old.
Funny how you actually haven't won a single argument against any of your supposed trolls that gave you rightful criticism. Where is the source code so it can be inspected for back doors and security issues anyways?
P.S.=> Lying about me ISN'T MINOR -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p... [slashdot.org]
I agree, which is why I have never lied, only thrown your own words back at you.
I didn't libel you, I am not the person who is calling your software malware, it is people on the internet who believe the software slows down their computers and is possibly malicious in nature.
I never admitted you were right, you just don't understand the difference. Needing admin privileges every time a program updates is a poor design, and it is due to you using 90's technology to try and fight a modern war. Virus scanners don't need admin privileges to update. Adblock software doesn't need admin privileges to update. But our software does, and as you won't reveal your source code, that is an extraordinarily dangerous thing. What is stopping you from pointing my bank's web site at your private server? Nothing, just the possibility of being caught, which would be pretty hard to catch with such a large hosts file, as no one can go through it manually. What are you going to do when Windows gets rid of the hosts file completely? They have already taken steps to make it useless in Windows 10.
When I am wrong, I admit to being wrong, but as you haven't proven me wrong, why would I admit to it? I am not wrong, not matter how much trolling and spamming you do, it isn't going to make you suddenly right.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Then factor in if your usage isn't predictable and can swing by 50% or more each month you then start talking about wasted money (paying for a big enough plan to cover your "bad months") or are getting screwed by the overages on the months you run high.
Right. That's why I'd like a reasonable per-gigabyte rate. In a month where I use 14 GB, I don't mind paying twice as much as in a month where I use 7 GB, as long as the per-GB rate is reasonable.
Basically, that's the same "plan" I have for paying for gasoline, strawberries, etc.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
we're not talking about a resource. There is not finite supply of water pouring into your house. We're talking about bandwidth.
Yes, bandwidth is a finite resource.
Telcos started running fiber when the bandwidth of copper became inadequate. They started running more fiber when the first strand was used to capacity. Look how many undersea cables run between New York and the UK: http://www.marinebuzz.com/mari...
Why so many? Because just one won't handle the traffic. Bandwidth is a finite resource.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
In areas where there is no competition, telcos can charge what they like and will invent ways of getting away with it.
Compare and contrast with what's happening across Europe.
Three UK still have an unlimited data plan. £20 a month, and I quote the operator I spoke to some years ago: "You paid for it - suck down as much as you like, you'll never be throttled."
True to their word.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
Three Clarifies What "All You Can Eat" Actually Means
All you can eat data allows you to use as much as the Internet or consumer as much data as you wish without worrying about the cost or having to search for hidden and unfair “fair use policies”.
If your smartphone plan includes all you can eat data, then this is for data consumption actually on your smartphone. It does not include using your smartphone as a modem to connect other devices such as laptops and tablets – also known as “Tethering”. Tethering is included in (i) The One Plan; (ii) the One Plan SIM only; or (iii) By purchasing an Ultimate Internet Plan with the Tethering Add on. The add-on can be purchased via My3 on your handset and is also available to customers on our Talk and Text plans.
Three don't actually know if you're tethering! Actually, they don't care! You've paid for it, if you know your way around a computer, you're golden with their £20/mo unlimited plan. The above options are for those who really don't know any better. No offence to any here who are on Three and already on one of these "extra" plans.
Are you an existing customer on any of our pay monthly plans (except our Essential Internet 200 plan)? You can get All You Can Eat Data for the remainder of your contract at an additional cost of £3 per month.
Does all you can eat data come with any limits? The limit is how much your device can consume – if you were to actively use data or the Internet on your phone every second, of every day, in every month (and we would be worried if you were !!!!) you would, subject to the current traffic management requirements (which vary from time to time), use up to 1000GB per month. So in essence there is a limit of how much data you can actually consume which is up to 1000GB. All this means that you can have absolute peace of mind and enjoy all the internet you need on your smartphone, without worrying.
What shaping? In my experience, Three have never throttled my connection. I have had 4-week periods where I've downloaded a solid 2TB on a dedicated system and filled a RAID.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel