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Broadband CEOs Admit Usage Caps Are Nothing More Than A Toll On Uncompetitive Markets (techdirt.com)
Though giant ISPs such as AT&T and Comcast continue to impose caps on users with several of their data plans, a crop of local ISPs is no longer hesitating from admitting that there is no justification for these caps as the cost to provide broadband services has only dropped in the past years. From a TechDirt article (condensed): "The cost of increasing [broadband] capacity has declined much faster than the increase in data traffic," says Dane Jasper, CEO of Sonic, an independent ISP based in Santa Rosa, Calif. [...] Frontier Communications CEO Dan McCarthy adds, "There may be a time when usage-based pricing is the right solution for the market, but I really don't see that as a path the market is taking at this point in time." Suddenlink CEO Jerry Kent said, "I think one of the things people don't realize [relates to] the question of capital intensity and having to keep spending to keep up with capacity. Those days are basically over, and you are seeing significant free cash flow generated from the cable operators as our capital expenditures continue to come down."
Surely the Invisible Hand(TM) of the Free Market(C) in the only Free(tm) country in the world will solve this problem?
Once Time Warner introduced a data cap on my broadband service, I instituted several efficiency improvements on my network. Im certain most ISP's will understand, after all, many of these are just content throttling to improve my user experience.
1. Null routing known advertisers: Its a fact of life, that many advertisers cause a strain on my network by utilising far more bandwidth than they should. If advertisers wish to continue, they can purchase additional bandwidth from me or enroll in my advertiser affiliate program for a nominal monthly fee.
2. Ad blocking software: ublock, and noscript are used to help curtail loading flash, tracking, or advertisements that some websites feature. these services also prevent downloading injected advertisements by my network provider (see affiliate program for more information.) 3. torrents: Netflix and hulu use an inefficient protocol in many cases compared to torrents and magnet links. I can watch the same video or listen to the same song at my leisure, whenever I feel like it, without reaching the cap or limit imposed by my provider.
Good people go to bed earlier.
When you're lying to people, make sure to give a wink and a nod.
Cable expenditures are going nowhere but up! *wink* The profit generation from such actions only hurts our bottom line *nod*. The only way we can remain competitive is to raise bandwidth caps to protect the precious little capacity our networks have! *wink* *nod* *wink* *nod* *wink* *nod*
Bye!
Your economics term of the day is rent seeking.
Government regulators used to claim that there were things called "natural monopolies" to justify their stake to power, saying that competition was impossible, for things like telephone wires.
Now that 80% of the population has switched away from PSTN (many to cable providers) the regulators are looking for another hook to hang their hat on. Watch your back - the FCC is starting to dig in on regulating everything-Internet. Not because there's a need, but because they can't possibly admit that their job is obsolete.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
For AT&T and Comcast, it's just business. At the moment, they have leverage in most areas. Most people don't have a comparable alternative to choose so they pick AT&T or Comcast. Comcast offers the best speeds. That's their value proposition over AT&T. When Verizon FIOS and/or Google Fiber show up to offer alternatives with not only faster speeds but no data caps, Comcast and AT&T will have to start actually competing in the free market or be put out to pasture.
We'll make great pets
Yep, so much for the so called "Net neutrality" that the FCC said they would give us.
I DID warn all of you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7WHoqsRuxU
So we have these tiny, no-name providers dangled off Verizon, Comcast, and Level 3 talking about the business internals of running Verizon, Comcast, and Level 3?
Maybe next MVNOs who use Verizon and T-Mobile's networks instead of building their own capacity can tell us how very little it costs to maintain national cell networks and admit that Verizon and T-Mobile are just overcharging.
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Would have been funnier as a rewrite of the "wink wink, nudge nudge" Monty Python sketch.
Amusing that today's headline is liars accusing other liars of being liars.
These small cable operators don't build the back-end infrastructure of the Internet. They're last-mile carriers. They're like MVNOs who only piggy back on providers, and they're talking about what it's like to build and maintain the Internet backbone as if they actually do that.
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Amusing that today's headline is liars accusing other liars of being liars.
These small cable operators don't build the back-end infrastructure of the Internet. They're last-mile carriers. They're like MVNOs who only piggy back on providers, and they're talking about what it's like to build and maintain the Internet backbone as if they actually do that.
The units of the ISPs imposing the data caps are not back-end infrastructure providers either; they internally lease the infrastructure from the other sections of the companies that do the back-end provisioning, often resulting in routes to competitors and other vendors.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
...who should know better.
The justification is something like "bandwidth is a scarce resource, and have you priced a DS3 lately?" Or worse "you know, we're all sharing this resource, and why should I pay for the guy who downloads ISO's all day long"
Which shows a complete ignorance on how the major providers are peered with each other, and what bandwidth actually represents.
Verizon, to their credit, with their FIOS offering, does not care how much you download.
... spent on all the equipment and staff directed to data measurement and billing that tracks usage and imposes the caps, that recoups the costs spent on... wait.
Take it easy, Charlie, I've got an Angle...
Thanks for stating what all your customers have known for years.
Sorry, no. The last mile is the "expensive" part. Unless you think the ISPs that the small ISPs use for uplink are charitable organizations, you'll need to acknowledge that they pay the same uplink costs PLUS a profit to that provider. The large ISPs get it even cheaper by being their own provider.
The unit cost by transfer or rate have dropped steadily over time. The bigger you are, the cheaper it gets. As for the hardware, in 1995 Gig ether switches (dumb) cost about $1000/port. Now it's $5/port.
Wow, I take it you have no idea of how things work.
The expensive part of the internet connection is the last mile. Each endpoint has a cost to it and that's why server co-locations often have faster connections for less than you can get at home with larger data transfer allowances. I don't get how you compare that to an MVNO who rents the last mile from someone else.
They pay their upstream provider for their share of the cost of the internet backbone and here is a hint from someone who actually works from the industry: You pay for your usage on the backbone unless you are large enough for peering. The price is also not linear. Ex an unmetered gigabit connection is less than the cost of two 100mbps. Going the other way a 10 gigabit connection here (Montreal Canada) is only four to five times the cost of a gigabit connection despite being 10 times faster.
If they are paying for their uplink, and they have upgraded their internal connections to the point where they aren't saturated we should pretty well take them seriously when they say they don't need to charge based on usage.
If they are paying their uplink providers for enough bandwidth and all of their internal interconnections aren't saturated and after all that they say that
Why would anyone use you garbage? I looked at your page any your program is using 40MB of RAM. Lol
Why wouldn't I just use [a]http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm[/a]? It's free, and doesn't consume 40MB RAM. There are plenty of free other host sites too.
Why is it called APK? That's an Android package name and had nothing to do with hosts.
Why are you spamming /. with this garbage?
You mean Verizon, Comcast, AT&T, Sprint, etc.?
Comcast, who built the Cable network? Comcast who got into a ridiculous legal battle with Level-3 because Level-3 wanted to peer with Comcast to route traffic to parts of the Interent which required Level-3 to cross Comcast's backbone, but Comcast tried (successfully) to make Level-3 pay for peering? Comcast, who supplies Comcast for Business, placing Internet Web sites for independent businesses *directly* on Comcast's network, which is nation-wide, run on Comcast's own equipment, across Comcast's own fiber, and addressed with public IPs, meaning many Web sites simply aren't reachable without going directly through Comcast?
Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint, who built the phone network? You know, the networks which, if they go down, break your ability to reach random Web sites even though you're on some other network, simply because their network is between your ISP and the Web host's ISP?
These are the people Amazon, Netflix, Pandora, Google, Facebook, and Akamai directly establish peering with. These are the people EC2 and Microsoft Azure hook up to so their data centers (you know, S3 and Microsoft Azure Cloud) don't go down off the entire Internet just because Comcast or Verizon or AT&T unplugged the wrong router today.
The people yammering about how much it costs to supply bandwidth are last-mile providers who lease their data lines to the Internet from Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, Level 3, XO, CenturyLink, Cox, or others.
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FTFY
http://www.google.com/search?q=windows+adblock+hosts
Top 3 links are free and non memory resident.
say no more!
You're using the argument: "Y must be more expensive than X because Y includes X + P".
What if P is much less than X, and provider of Y claims X is *exactly* the same as P, and thus X is wildly overpriced?
What if P is running the last mile, and X is the sum total of all operations a Tier-1 carries out to maintain and expand their network?
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Cartel = high price. That's all this is.
The expensive part of the internet connection is the last mile. Each endpoint has a cost to it
So you're saying putting 300,000 computers on the Internet in Comcast's network requires linking exactly 300,000 endpoints? There's no additional cost per endpoint? No back-end costs, no cross-state lines connecting California to Virginia, nothing but a little line run from your house to Comcast's little shack in your cozy little neighborhood?
You're saying the cost of running a ginormous, distributed network with multiple routes to reach from any point to any other point, spanned across an entire continent, is exactly the same (or less!) per customer endpoint as the cost of plugging one customer endpoint *into* that network?
You're saying this is the expensive part and this is the cheap part?
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See subject: It's how it works (cached) & my program's free & ONLY memory-resident if you let it auto-update so data is current.
* Personally? I don't run it that way - I do it manually myself (merging older hosts into it, which can be automatically done too, IF you edit it's BUILDFILES.txt adding in older hosts to it above the 2 files it uses by default...)
APK
P.S.=> What I do know is, for a fact, is that hosts do MORE than ANY OTHER single "so-called 'solution'" out there, for LESS, minus illogically "Bolting on 'MoAr'" to do the same job (usually they do less)... apk
Except that the Internet isn't anywhere near as meshed as the picture would lead you to believe.
Keep in mind the fiber cuts plaguing Seattle and San Francisco take down enormous amounts of infrastructure when they go down.
Also keep in mind that once the route is built you don't have to keep fiddling with it. The network has existed for 40 years. Comcast has millions of endpoints all over the country, they are making profit just fine.
Once you have your backbone in place the expensive part really is maintaining the end-user because they call your customer support because their coffee holder broke. They complain the Internet isn't working because they figured their router wrong. Those are uncontrolled costs. It costs Comcast no different if I download 100gigs or 100 terabytes. Additional 40gig uplinks for backwidth definitely cost several thousand, divide that by all the customers in the area and it is paid off within a month. So it stupid to limit up-link capacity especially when you're a tier 1 provider so peering is free.
As a much smaller entity I can still choose to collocate equipment at a proper datacenter and peer with 100s of providers quite affordably. I pay my commit charge and pay the 95th percentile for overages. If I am always going over the commit then it is time to change the commit. A 1gig commit doesn't cost much different than a 100meg commit. 10 and 40 gig start to get costly but not when you have hundreds or especially thousands of customers.
See subject: I use MVPS' data + 9 other great hosts sites automating deduplication & filtering false positives from 1 program's why.
* You're shorting yourself by NOT using it IF you use hosts is why... 1 hosts site doesn't cover ALL THE POSSIBLES is why!
My program consumes that much RUNNING - you don't need to leave it resident & it consumes FAR LESS with less complexity + stupidly "Bolting on 'MoAr'" illogically in browser addons (Adblock = 100's of mb, UBlock ~ 65mb++, etc. - et al)...
I'll also post others opinions of it, fellow /.'ers next that USE & LIKE IT, that put yours away easily & by many orders of magnitude more (in case the above that finished you off easily doesn't "sink in" to your thick skull - & all your downmods? I just repost, so KEEP BLOWING THEM stupid... I'll run you DRY of them!)
APK
P.S.=> I've had the initials "APK" for decades longer than there has BEEN a "Google" is why - it's MINE... apk
Despite what you urban dwellers think bandwidth in rural areas is insufficient to the task without caps. That guys sounds like any other CEO who must have the facts dumbed down to their level. You as a luser might not think its fair or right but its a fact of supply and demand.
LOL now I know you are trolling. You provided that second link with no context whatsoever as to what it is.
And yes, I am. As I said I work for an internet provider and a few years back I worked for another one that had it's own DSLAMs in the telco buildings and in both cases, the cost of the uplink was the minority cost and I can be pretty sure that uplink was not sold to us below cost. The cost of connecting the last mile and providing support is where the bulk of the expense is.
I support APK's stand on the hosts file by Trax3001BBS
his hosts program is actually pretty good by xenotransplant
his hosts tool is actually useful for those cases in which one does indeed want to locally block stuff outright while consuming minimum system resources by alexgieg
I've never tried to belittle (APK's) work, I've flat out said it's good by BronsCon
I like your host file system by Karmashock
I find your hosts file admirable by vel-ex-tech
take a look at the APK hosts file engine by SuperKendall
APK is kinda right. I've given up on JS based adblocking and gone to blackholing in /etc/hosts, just like it was back in the 90s. The computational load has gotten intolerable for any ad-blocking using JS. I've tried his hosts file generating software. It works by bmo
APK is totally right on this count. Adblock Plus on Firefox mobile is a dog on older, or lower end, phones. A hostfile based adblocker makes for a much better experience by chihowa
APK
Your premise that hostfiles are a good way to deal with advertising and malvertising is quite valid by JazzLad
No complaints from me, I like APK's spam. Reminds me to use a host file. Also, his stuff is free by aaaaaaargh!
I'm a fan of apk. Yes he trolls, but he only trolls where it's contextually appropriate. I respect that by Noah Haders
APK was right! Is it time for us to point Sourceforge to a non-address in our hosts files by wonkey_monkey
APK's monolithic hosts file is looking pretty good by Culture20
APK... Awesome to see he's still spreading the good word by Molochi
dammit MS, you proved APK right about something by lgw
ABP is insufficient as a solid hosts file does everything that APK reminds us about by fast turtle
APK isn't wrong by cfalcon
APK, I know people give you a lot of shit regarding hosts, but please don't ever stop by nasredin
You need APK's hosts file by Teun
APK solution STILL relevant by Thud457
you're right about hosts files by drinkypoo
APK
Comcast is an important tier 2 network, and have built their own "back-end infrastructure", perhaps not to the same scale as AT&T or Level 3, but it's there.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
LOL now I know you are trolling. You provided that second link with no context whatsoever as to what it is.
You were commenting on the complexity of implementing networks; I showed a distributed network.
the cost of the uplink was the minority
The uplink to what?
The answer: the uplink to the big, complex, EXPENSIVE, distributed back-end network run by the major Tier-1 providers.
You're trying to claim this is just an uplink, a cable you plug into somewhere. What it is is thousands of miles of fiber run between regions, into regional hubs which distribute out to other regional hubs, which talk to each other so a break in connection between Region 1 Hub 13 and Region 1 Central can route to Region 1 Central via Region 1 Hub 7 (and so Region 1 Central has 6 paths to Region 2, or Region 3, or so forth). The last mile is the last mile of fiber run to a little cable on a pole trailing all the way to a little box in a closet at a hub data center, which is part of a sizable data center, which has thousands of miles of fiber uplinking it to other, bigger, more-complex data centers.
The problem is your experience is sitting on the last mile. You're looking down at the run to the end user and saying, "Damn, that's a lot more than the three-foot run to the uplink behind me. It's way expensive. 99% of our cost goes to that last mile." Then you're turning around, looking at the uplink, and going, "That's so cheap. Upstream providers have so little to do." You aren't looking at the upstream provider's network, which is a little three-foot cable running down to you and, on the other end, a massive, distributed, highly-complex network of large data centers spanning the entire fucking country.
How much do you think it costs to expand that back-end with new fiber, new equipment, and new capacity when demand goes up?
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You keep trying to imagine what I am thinking and create arguments based on what you think I am thinking but you are getting it horribly wrong.
In both cases the equipment is the cheaper side of the equation. Most of the expense is in the actual running of the cables, the cost of paying for wherever municipal fees/rental for the space the cables take in the ground, and repairing faults as they happen. The difference is that we can (with some equipment on the back end) plug multiple users into the same uplink to the backbone and aggregate the cost.
Again, our uplink provider is not selling us anything below cost and I never saw any argument in the original article about forcing the backbones to lower cost, only that they couldn't justify charging usage based pricing to their own customers.
Wouldn't be Slashdot without the obligatory and completely-unrelated-to-anything-in-the-thread post about APK!
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
BEWARE: links above lead to Chinese malware sites
In Canada we have internet worse that many third world countries, and caps that make people laugh out loud.
For example, there's Bell Alliant fiber out east. People can get a 1GBit fiber line into their homes, with a 250GB monthly data cap, and if you want more you'll be paying hundreds for not much improvement. So yeah, you can literally burn through your monthly allotment in under 30 minutes.
Come join our QUANTUM Tunnel Network. We have the best Quantum Tunneling algorithms and no limits. You can use all the Q-Bits you like. We have hubs in all Major cities. If you want a direct line to your home all you need to do is get one of our Q-Boxes (Cat's not included). This will give you the superposition you need today. Warning, some Q-bits might go faster than light under certain conditions, not responsible for lost bits. All this for $14.99 a month, inquire about our lifetime plans also.
Would you please define your terms? This reads like the Chewbacca defense.
Comcast would charge to smell their farts if they could. Worst rated company ever.
Just like this bullshit.
https://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=9210593&cid=52270353
In other news, George Bush Sr. saved USA from 9/11 Twin Towers attacks due to the help of Saudi Arabia.
Twats.
The last mile is very expensive. It costs a ton to maintain that infrastructure.. Yeah, so I can add a downstream DOCSIS QAM to an existing chassis for $50.. Say 8*50 = $400, it is just the beginning. Cable modem termination systems? Go buy and maintain a bunch of uBR10012s and ASR routers and tell me how cheap it is. The taps, the wiring, the amplifiers, the trouble calls cause the plant is old. Do I need additional chassis to handle, will the lasers even do it, if I split the node how far will I need to trench new fiber? Do I even have spare fiber back to my headend? Will it even fit in my existing building, do I need more AC? Have I maxxed out my power panel?
The broadband CEOs quoted have no clue.. They clearly don't work for tier-1 MSOs.. Multiply by 10s of thousands and it starts getting real -- very fast. Anyone can run 50 service groups out of one small town. (E.g. Sonic?) Frontier hardly faces the same constraints.. They have distributed DSLAMs and offer crap speed through them.
In the real world, broadband demand is quickly outstripping cable plant capacity. Just adding 8 or 16 QAMs would be too easy. (Assuming you have it and a lot of plants don't.) This means - more money. Plant upgrades to 1.2 Ghz, CCAP, all active/passive component upgrades, and it still only buys you a few years the way things are going.
If it were up to me, municipalities would run fiber to each house and then connect us to the provider of our choosing. It's a nice dream.
I *DID* say the last mile is the expensive part. However, as I said before, the smaller broadband providers have the same costs PLUS profit for their providers. I'm quite certain they're not getting all of that for free. Things get cheaper overall at scale, not more expensive.
They're not just talking out of their asses, their companies actually don't have caps and they actually are profitable.
APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ SR-4 32/64-bit http://www.bing.com/search?q=%...
Works vs. caps & HTTP PUSH ads w/ firewalls.
Avg. webpage = big as Doom http://www.theregister.co.uk/2... & ads = 40% of the size.
Less power/cpu/ram + IO use vs. DNS/routers/addons/antivirus (slows you) + less security issues/complexity. Compliments firewalls (w/ layered drivers blocking less used IP addys vs. hosts blocking more used domains) & DNS (lightens dns load). Gets data via 10 security sites.
Ads rob bandwidth/speed, security (malvertising), privacy (tracking) + anonymity.
Hosts add speed (hardcodes/adblocks), security (bad sites/poisoned dns), reliability (dns down), & anonymity (dns requestlogs/trackers) natively. Hosts != ClarityRay blockable (vs. souled-out to admen inferior wasteful redundant slow usermode addons)
APK
P.S. - Safe https://www.virustotal.com/en/... (Verified by Malwarebytes' S. Burn "I've seen the code & it's safe" http://forum.hosts-file.net/vi... )
Data caps are all about uploaders and have nothing what so ever to do with downloaders. The PR or course is always about people downloading but the reality is about killing off uploaders. The idea is ISPs want to become middle persons, publishers of content and want to charge a percentage for that. Hence caps target uploaders, raising up their costs, in order to cut them out of the market, unless they sign up with the ISP to be their publisher. For the end user, typical the ISP does not metre data coming from the ISP but does for all competitors to the ISP content publishing model.
Every greedy fucker on the planet wants to be a publisher, produce nothing but bullshit marketing whilst seizing permanent ownership and control of all creative content in order to basically print money via monopolistic practices. This in spite of the fact that the internet has pretty much made publishers redundant, which is why they strive so hard via corruption of government to maintain control of information channels.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
I'm very curious what the caps cost given the need for metering, billing and support costs.
And are they set eternally at a couple hundred GB or something?
Could it be that they cost more than they save? Couldn't be, right.
If that's what it's called. An additional charge for usage over a certain amount per month.
A bit's as good as a byte to a dark fiber..
You mean Verizon, Comcast, AT&T, Sprint, etc.?
Comcast, who built the Cable network? Comcast who got into a ridiculous legal battle with Level-3 because Level-3 wanted to peer with Comcast to route traffic to parts of the Interent which required Level-3 to cross Comcast's backbone, but Comcast tried (successfully) to make Level-3 pay for peering? Comcast, who supplies Comcast for Business, placing Internet Web sites for independent businesses *directly* on Comcast's network, which is nation-wide, run on Comcast's own equipment, across Comcast's own fiber, and addressed with public IPs, meaning many Web sites simply aren't reachable without going directly through Comcast?
You do realize that there are separate divisions/units/etc within Comcast, AT&T, Sprint, etc that deal with last-mile versus backbone. Yes, they may ultimately be under the same overall corporate entity, but they are internally segregated. Even internally businesses cross-charge their units; so the last-mile unit will purchase back-bone capacity from the backbone unit - even if it's just moving numbers around on paper.
The internal separation allows the company to easily migrate technologies (e.g dial-up -> Cable -> DSL) or service different kinds of customers differently, f.e business vs residential - each of which are serviced even for last-mile by different units with services that overlap and are substantially different, i.e businesses don't get data caps on their services.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
I work at AT&T. And would just like to say I routinely post these articles for everyone to see, to basically say to them
"WELL!?!?! WELL!?!!!"
You do realize that L3 actually built most of the fiber backbone, right? And wanted to use, undoubtedly, their infrastructure? L3 literally has fiber lines that are within feet of Comcasts, and they go unused. I walk past them on the street on a daily basis in Houston, not just my own street but all over the place.
When Level 3 had the two links get cut on the East coast, all kinds of bad happened. With so many alternate routes from other ISPs like AT&T, Charter, Comcast, and others, why such the issue? Turns out those two links carried so much traffic, all of the other ISPs combined couldn't handle the overflow. Level 3 handles A LOT of bandwidth.
The last mile is very expensive
According to some smaller ISPs, last-mile infrastructure consumes about 1%-2% of their revenue. 8 years ago, it was 20%, but the cost of infrastructure keeps dropping. Is last mile expensive? Yes, but only 1% expensive.