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ISP To FCC: Using The Internet Is Like Eating Oreos (consumerist.com)
New submitter Rick Schumann shares with us a report highlighting an analogy presented by an ISP that relates Double Stuf Oreos to the internet. Specifically, that Double Stuf Oreos cost more than regular Oreos, and therefore you should pay more for internet: The Consumerist reports: "Ars Technica first spotted the crumbly filing, from small (and much-loathed) provider Mediacom. Mediacom's comment is in response to the same proceeding that Netflix commented on earlier this month. However, while Netflix actually addressed data and the ways in which their customers use it, Mediacom went for the more metaphor-driven approach. The letter literally starts out under the header, 'You Have to Pay Extra For Double-Stuffed,' and posits that you, the consumer, are out for a walk with $2 in your pocket when you suddenly develop a ferocious craving for Oreo cookies." Of course their analogy is highly questionable, since transmitting data over a network doesn't actually consume anything, now does it? You eat the cookie, the cookie is gone, but you transmit data over a network, the network is still there and can transmit data endlessly. Mediacom's assertion that the Internet is like a cookie you eat, is like saying copying a file on your computer somehow diminishes or degrades the original file, which of course is ridiculous.
Would you?
I also make popcorn, and get ready to watch the (rightfully earned) invective fly :)
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
Come in Major Tom. Fuck it, no one liked him anyway
So if three of the oreos were poisonous, would you still surf the Internet? I need my geographical metaphors translated to Rhode Island units and my food metaphors translated to skittles otherwise I can't understand the science.
So in this metaphor, the internet is your hand not the oreo cookie. Should it cost more to glove the hand that delivers the double stuffed oreo?
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Isn't more like if the grocery store sells you a plan that lets you consume up to 10 cookies a day. Then after you've eaten 30 cookies over a week's time they say "Whoa, no more cookies for you, you've eaten up your quota for the month" - you'll have to pay us more money if you want to eat more, or sign up for our 20 cookie a day plan where you can eat 50 cookies before we cut you off.
You do not pay extra for "double stuff". The costs of the ingredients are a miniscule costs compared the larger marketing and distribution infrastructure costs, and more stuffing and less cookie is not even necessarily more expensive to produce. You can browse over at Walmart online and see for yourself that double-stuffed, triple-stuffed, chocolate, original, etc. all are very similar in price.
They want MORE money and MORE and MORE and MORE and never want to stop eating those tasty green dollar bills!
Because only other alternative is 1.5mbps DSL. That's what Mediacom preys on: cities that have 0 choice.
Moreover, they are fighting heavily for things to stay that way
Mediacom readies lawsuit against Iowa City
http://www.press-citizen.com/s...
That's a lot of blah blah blahs for someone who is asking for a constructive conversation.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
A 100 megabit network can only move 100 megabits in a second, so a person moving 100 mbps is consuming the entire network. Nobody else can use the network without the first person reducing their consumption accordingly. Yes, the network will make another 100 megabits available a second from now, just like the Oreo factory will make another Oreo to replace the previous one, but that doesn't mean either bits or Oreos are "unlimited."
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
Buh...But, I wanted Nutter Butters!
I'm fucked aren't I?
In addition to bandwidth is free you forgot the one about how since the hardware infrastructure for networks is a sunken cost it should be free to use. I haven't figured that one out yet; apparently the underlying assumption is that the investors who paid up front ought to be robbed of their expected returns.
The cookie analogy fails, on several levels, but so do the criticisms.
".. since transmitting data over a network doesn't actually consume anything," This is fallacious, as capacity is consumed and is a limited capacity. Take every criticism the article levels and apply it to seats on an airplane, which is a far better proxy for explaining the limits of network capacity, and you can see they're just as flawed as the original argument.
how does the human digestive system work in this internet analogy
Far more constructive than the presidential debate will be
Bandwidth caps are BULLSHIT.
On CenturyLink, if you're under 7mbps speed, you get a 300GB cap. Over 7mbps, you get a 600GB cap. Luckily, these are higher than 6 months ago when I signed up, which was at 150GB and 300GB respectively. However, if you're on a 1gbps line, you're uncapped. This is completely arbitrary. So, if 100 users at 5mbps saturated their link non-stop, they would consume 500mbps, and hit their cap pretty damn quick. Whereas a single 1gbps user using only 50% of their capacity can do so endlessly without penalty at all, while consuming exactly the same amount of bandwidth.
Source: http://www.centurylink.com/hel...
You want to pay less for your internet? Get some neighbours. Or in other words: move to a country with more than 35 residents per square km.
As a bonus you might learn how long a kilometre is.
will start running fiberoptics all over the place and offer high bandwidth internet for as minimum of a price as possible and start undercutting ISPs just enough so the ISPs dont even think about price gouging and jacking up prices, and maybe the municipal water or electric or gas companies can cooperate and run it together to save labor & maintenance costs, you know this can be done to stimulate competition in the marketplace and keep prices down
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
No one's saying bandwidth is free. We're saying the bits are free. There's a difference. Bandwidth is how many bits per second. Bits is a file transfer or data being streamed. A sliver of a frame of a video. A single millisecond of a song. Once sufficient bandwidth is in place, it costs an ISP nothing if you're downloading at 1 MB/s or 1 GB/s. Other people may suffer at the hands of your use of the total bandwidth at your area of the Internet but the costs do not change because they don't have to put bits into the hardware so that some can be used to give you your video, song, file, etc. You do, however, have to put Oreos in the truck.
Because the bits, the thing being transferred, are there whether you use them or not. What we call "used" bits is just some program deeming the electrons flowing into your data port actual data instead of garbage. Therefore, you cannot "use up" bits and the infuriating part is these people spouting the nonsense work for the ISPs in some fashion or another and should know this. Oreos, on the other hand, stop flowing when they are all gone and must be manufactured. Bits are not manufactured. They are charging for both the bits and the bandwidth, when the bits cost them almost nothing. The cost is the device to manage the bits (the "router"), which is not nothing but would may cost a $20,000. Compared to an ISP's income, that's grains of sand.
I feel like I'm wasting my time talking to an AC. With sufficient knowledge of how the Internet works, you understand that data caps are a way to create artificial scarcity. The common uses are to prop up a dying business model or to extract extra money.
And I expected them to cure every disease. Thanks for shattering my world.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Actually you do pay extra for double stuff. Fewer cookies fit in a package, and each package costs the same, so in order to get the same number of cookies you need to buy more packages. But at this point the analogies are completely lost and meaningless, much as they were to start.
Using the Internet is like eating Oreos: fattening, unhealthy, and you end up with a sugar high followed by depression.
You pay, say, $100 per month for an HD cable package with premium channels. You're allowed to watch all the TV you want on the channels you pay for. This is a concept that everyone understands.
But now imagine the cable company wants to cap the number of hours you can watch TV per month. You still pay the same $100 base price, but if you want to watch more than 30 hours per month, you'll need to pay another $10 for every block of 10 hours you want to watch above the base amount. The cable company argues that by watching more TV, you're somehow incurring costs that your $100/month doesn't already cover.
The notion is ridiculous to anyone who has ever paid for cable before, and is a perfect example of what they're trying to do to the internet.
Clickbait Title but rest of submission reads like surrealist poetry. e.g. OP doesn't mention this story is about data caps. There's a story there, but Slashdot picked a crappy submission to report it.
ArsTechnica responds with:
"It's true that there is only so much bandwidth an ISP can provide at any given moment, but a monthly data cap doesn't solve that problem. The per-second bandwidth limitations are addressed by the different speed tiers imposed by ISPs: Customers already pay more to get a higher number of megabits per second."
Bzzzt! Wrong! Caps cause customers to self-regulate, so a group of bandwidth-capped customers will statistically as a group use less bandwidth. And this allows ISPs to provide faster speed tiers WITH total-usage caps. Otherwise the ISP might have to reduce speeds overall to maintain service.
But people on Slashdot think all ISPs are rich, money grubbing organizations rolling in dough. Small ISPs are not at all. Many plow every extra dollar back into capital improvements to increase capacity, thus over time ramping up customer speeds and extending caps.
Bandwidth isn't free. However technology makes it cheaper to produce every day.
My cable internet has the same cables it always had for decades. As the companies course of business where they replace their technogy it gets faster and faster. So for your current price you should expect increased bandwidth.
When I was a kid I use to run a BBS. It was first at 2400bps. Then after the modem died I went to 14.4k my users liked the extra speed and there was no way I could find a 2400bps at the store anymore. Then after that died I went 56k modem.
Having a modem die was part of the risk running a BBS replacing it cost money but it was mostly the same amount each time and we get faster speed.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
but you don't mark your shit up a measly 1-6% like a supermarket does.
a major isp cost to provide internets is less than $0.20 per megabit/sec to the customer........ with no throttles limits or quotas.
my intenret charges from a major isp tally up to 40x what it should be... IF MY INTERNET WAS LIKE OREOS.
mark that shit up a measly 10% and skip the bullshit below the line charges.
then talk about your fucking cookies.
where you get horribly compressed streams, or fill up your cap in half a movie.
Bzzz! Hold it right there! What is "sufficient bandwidth" and is it ever in place? What if twice more of your subscribers have signed-up with Netflix — the company is enjoying amazing growth of subscriber base? What was "sufficient" two months ago no longer is and you have to spend real money again. In this regard bandwidth really is like tangible goods.
Charging the streaming customers for downloading much more than others finances the further increases in spending.
More generally, however a private company wishes to charge its customers should not even be a matter of public debate — much less actual regulation. The only legitimate role of government here is to encourage other private companies to compete — competition being the best judge of both the possible and the affordable.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
In addition to bandwidth is free you forgot the one about how since the hardware infrastructure for networks is a sunken cost it should be free to use. I haven't figured that one out yet; apparently the underlying assumption is that the investors who paid up front ought to be robbed of their expected returns.
In a large percentage of cases, those up front investments were paid for by the FCC. And yes, those investors ARE getting robbed blind.
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
Some food for thought- home servers have a taste for creamy filling too... share the love.
http://apps.fcc.gov/ecfs/document/view?id=7522219498
http://cloudsession.com/dawg/downloads/misc/kag-draft-k121024.pdf
https://www.wired.com/2013/07/google-neutrality/
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/10/google-fiber-now-explicitly-permits-home-servers
https://lwn.net/Articles/658006/
which costs more? a pound of regular oreos or a pound of double stuff oreos?
when religion is no longer the opiate of the masses, governments will resort to real opiates.
Having read the article I agree wholeheartedly. Broadband should be sold exactly the same as oreo cookies. No contracts allowed, no monthly service fees and one price for all, with a 50% markup margin over wholesale. Wholesale backbone data is ~$0.04/GB, so, being generous they can mark it up to $0.06/gb. So my ISP bill, which is now $70/month with a soft data cap and 50Mb/sec speed goes to zero and I pay only for what I use. If I download 500GB/month, I am looking at a $30 bill. On months when I use less, I pay less. Sign me up. Oh, and this would also motivate the ISPs to provide faster service and minimize down time. If you use more, they make more money, but if you cant use their service, they make zero...
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like
Not sure, but we're talking about mass now, not quantity. When you convert to electrons (or photons) for data, there is no mass.
"Of course their analogy is highly questionable, since transmitting data over a network doesn't actually consume anything, now does it?"
It's s more like this:
When you stream your new favorite YouTube video, actual bits of data are sent to your device. And when I request MY favorite YouTube video, my bits are requested also. Eventually many users, those of us using this same ISP, all asking for data, ask for more than can be delivered quickly enough so that no one is disappointed by their video stuttering. At any of several points long the paths all that data takes there is only so much capacity. In its all used no more data.
Your ISP, if they are popular enough, is confronted by this problem sooner or later. Their choices of how to resolve it range from buying more equipment to changing the configuration of their systems to discouraging demand at peak times to outright shutting off some users to, well, doing nothing and hoping they don't lose too much business. Buying more equipment could force them to charge more, make less money, or go broke. Charging more risks losing customers. If they are so damned popular that they have customers out the wazoo, they may charge more or just ignore the poor blighters. If they enjoy a monopoly, same situation basically. But don't believe the hype that your ISP just sucks up money and doesn't do anything. I've done this, back when it was a fraction of the trouble it is now. It's expensive. Users don't know or care. They shouldn't.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
What if I operate an unlimited buffet and suddenly, customers start coming in and eating more than before?
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Bzzz! Hold it right there! What is "sufficient bandwidth"
My ISP has advertised 100mbit service, and I have every right to expect that 100mbit will be available 100% of the time. ISPs oversubscribe their actual available bandwidth because they know almost no one ever uses 100% of the available bandwidth 100% of the time. That doesn't change the fact that they are charging multiple customers for the same resource. The ISPs can't then turn around and say, that there isn't enough because their customers are using more than their fair share, when in fact, the ISP has sold more than they had available in the first place.
Using that metric, Sufficient bandwidth is whatever is required to provide 100% of their customers with 100% of the promised bandwidth. Anything less than that is just the ISP whining because they are being held to the contract they themselves wrote.
In that regard, ISPs with data caps should be required to advertise the datacap / billing period instead of the peak speeds, customers will quickly stop coming in the door when it is made obvious that a 50GB / month limit effectively means that on average you can only get 150kb/s download speed over the course of an entire month. If the ISP had to advertise that 150kb/s instead of being able to claim 100mb/s speeds, they would quickly change their minds about data caps.
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
But how do the Oreos fit through the tubes??
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
But comcast pissed in my milk.
To illustrate this, here's a tray of regular Oreos(TM), and here's a similarly sized tray of double-stuf(TM) Oreos(TM). And if you were to consider the per-cookie cost, as Mediacom is clearly hoping you will, then yes, double-stuf(TM) Oreos(TM) cost more than regular Oreos(TM).
But foodstuffs such as cookies are not sold by the cookie. They're sold by unit weight (or unit mass if you want to be pedantic). Considered this way, the per-ounce cost of the regular and double-stuf(TM) Oreos(TM) is virtually identical (in this case, about $0.26/oz from this retailer). So if Nabisco(TM) has no reason to charge a premium simply because you consume the cookies in larger units, Mediacom has no such reason, either.
So Mediacom are full of shit.
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Sure, but it seems to be like ISPs are trying to have their cake and eat it too with data caps.
...). Now, it's true that a basic home electrical hookup has a "bandwidth" limit -- but this should easily be enough for everyone in the family to have their own computer or TV running, in addition to a fridge, washing machine, dryer, etc. So ideally, the "bandwidth" isn't a problem (brown-outs notwithstanding), and you pay for the energy used (data).
To use the power analogy, bandwidth ~ power capacity, data ~ energy use (or similarly with water, gas,
Contrast this to ISPs, where the norm has been to charge for bandwith. Now, bandwidth has historically not been something that we "have enough of" -- a starter package probably doesn't allow everyone in a family to do "normal internet things" at a respectable rate (download something in the background, watch HD or UHD streams, etc.). So, not only are we supposed to pay extra for acceptable bandwidth, but we are also supposed to pay for each bit?
It strikes me as double-dipping: either charge for the bits but give us "unlimited" bandwidth (fast enough for everyone in the house to simultaneously use it at adequate speeds), or give us the bits for free and charge us for the bandwidth. I certainly prefer the latter, but perhaps only because that's what I'm used to.
Regulation
Private companies have been put under the regulation gun before. Why should it be any different whether it's an ISP or an electric company? I'm pretty sure phone companies in the US are/were under pricing regulation (as long as they use POTS lines, thanks to loopholes). This is what happens with virtual monopolies -- and, in some regions, actual monopolies.
Of course, it shouldn't have to be like this. There should be competition so consumers have somewhere to go when they don't like one carrier's policies. But, they've crafted themselves regional monopolies. Until local-loop unbundling is a thing, this will never happen.
Sufficient Bandwidth
Ok, let's define sufficient bandwidth. If you have 1000 customers on a node and they're all at your max tier, say 50 MB/s, you need 500,000 MB/s on that node to support theoretical peak bandwidth. Of course, the node will rarely if ever reach 500,000 MB/s and ISPs know this so, naturally, they'll do some percentage lower, say, 75% theoretical peak. They probably set this number based on a monthly (yearly, likely, or else I'd rarely have to complain about persistent bandwidth issues) report of max bandwidth in a node.
But, we're forgetting that until they upgrade those routers, their costs are mostly comprised of replacing aging hardware (ROFL) and paying employees, along with putting away billions for the CEO's severance package (I'm bitter). How does this differ from a shipping company who has to replace aging trucks, or purchase more trucks as their business grows? The analogy isn't 100% but it's a damn shot closer than Oreos vs. bits. If the actual peak bandwidth rises above "sufficient", then purchase more/bigger routers/another node for more customers.
An ISP is a business that, once it has a footprint, won't grow much. The ISPs around the US have carved out their own sections and detest anyone creeping into their regions. Thus, their expansion can and will flatline. How else are they supposed to grow their income? I can't fault them for wanting to do so but I can fault them their methods. That said, my electric company isn't growing its income.
It's past time ISPs become utilities or, better yet: must not control both the last mile and "first mile", and cannot be part of a content company.
That seems ridiculous to limit them to advertising monthly data cap / billing period, as it doesn't address the thing most people care about foremost, which is bandwidth. Advertising bandwidth and advertising data cap sounds more fair. If they are disclosing the data cap in the contract, then I don't see what the problem is. You seem to be advocating for a totally useless metric. The reality is, regardless of how they communicate it, operating a network capable of handling all subscribers using all of their allotted bandwidth, is much more expensive than figuring out what the real peak load is and operating a network capable of handling that, which is again much more expensive than trimming users back a little bit under peak load. If you were to keep the margins the same, I bet you'd find that most people would opt for a tiered plan that degrades their bandwidth slightly during high usage times and opens them up under low usage times because it would be so much cheaper than the network that has dedicated bandwidth for each subscriber.
If I can just reach out with my words and touch a butthole, just one, it will all be worth it.
Once sufficient bandwidth is in place, it costs an ISP nothing if you're downloading at 1 MB/s or 1 GB/s.
That's not exactly true. The equipment is still using power regardless of whether or not it's transmitting anything. They could charge people flat rates based on rough estimates of how many users it would take sending "normal" (however that gets estimated) data to fill the equipment. If 1,000 users could each transmit at 1mbps through their equipment before it reaches capacity, then they could charge each user 1/500th of the cost of the electricity that equipment uses, for example. They would make a profit when a lot of people are using their network, but would lose a little if it's well below capacity. In reality they want to charge many times that, though. It seems like it's almost to the point where any individual user could pay for all of the power for the equipment they're using.
I remember back when cell phone companies charged a price per text message, the calculations were done to show that it cost more to send 1MB of SMS data than it did to get the same amount of data from the Hubble telescope. ISPs and cell carriers will always want to charge as much as people are willing to pay, I don't think any of them tries to come up with a pricing scheme were people only pay for what they're actually using (as in, what it costs the carrier) plus a little extra for profit.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
If they are disclosing the data cap in the contract, then I don't see what the problem is.
The problem is that they don't disclose the data cap and/or want to change it after they have sold it.
People eat the center filling of the Oreo but then you're left with all that useless cookie no one wants. Give us less cookie, save money, and pass the savings on to us.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Prime time does happen. Rush hour exists. People get home from work, eat dinner, then Netflix. Mostly at the same time. Kids tend to go to school during the day, etc...
The capacity, and I'm not any kind of expert here, but logically, the capacity is probably there. It's probably not THAT oversold. Again, this would depend on the patterns of how Netflix, etc. streams, and it's not like the entire world is running a speed test at precisely the same time.
Prime time is where the action is at. Kids, multiple HD streams, laptops syncing with cloud storage, etc. 4AM, maybe not so much - Windows updates, perhaps.
It is largely nonsense. It's obviously in everyone's best interests to prepare for a brighter future, and it's in content providers' interests to stream. As the cloud gets "closer" as a concept in our minds, how much data is being transferred will become largely irrelevant.
If you want to sell by the bit, then give me the full speed and charge me by the bit. Either way, it's a service - are you in the business of providing this service we call internet access to our neighborhoods or not? We're certainly willing to pay a reasonable, competitive, realistic price for it. It has value for us. Please don't take advantage of our neighborhoods; it's not in your best interests. Are you getting busy providing that service, or are you spending time doing something else dysfunctional?
I would like the ability to stream 4K and have my kids do it too; I would like the ability to switch cloud storage providers somewhat easily. I may lay into it, I may not. One month I may need more than a terabyte, other months I may only need a couple hundred gigs or less. My home router doesn't care if I transfer a terabyte or not. It doesn't really matter to it. If it's too slow, I'll let it happen overnight, or get a faster router.
Something like that, anyway. Let's approach the future with love, excitement, creativity and common sense. We're probably going to need fiber to do this though, in one way or another. Coax can play a role, but fiber is probably the future, anyhow.
Data caps are like floppy disks, sort of. Something like that. Let's get excited about new technologies and facilitate their introduction into the mainstream.
Amazon shows standard oreos at $0.19/oz, and $0.17/oz for Double Stuf Oreos.
The shitty metaphor isn't even true, and is still shitty.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
If this is true... Wow
Since I ran out of Kit Kat and Ferrero Rochers I actually was eating an Oreo as I scrolled down to this article .. I had to do a double take, I couldn't believe it.
I suppose from your perspective it's a coincidence but from mine it makes me wonder what forces are out there directing my destiny. Maybe the universe is a crazy simulation my rival or even worse myself set up out of boriedom. No, it can't be .. I doubt I would be this bad to myself. Though you never know. Hmm. I better eat another Oreo.
More correctly, the Oreo's (including the double-stuffed ones) are free at the Oreo factory. However, a toll bridge has been set up on the public sidewalk outside your house where you are forced to pay a toll for each Oreo you take home (and double for the double-stuffed ones). This is in addition to the fee you pay to have the sidewalk in the first place.
These guys are still wanting to prove that their infrastructure cost is exponentially proportional to the data people spend. The problem: it's exactly the opposite - technology keeps improving in ways that copper, fiber, wireless and whatever transmit more data for the same amount of cash. Exponentially more. They somehow want to keep maximizing profits by spending pennies on their infrastructure, while the clients who pay more every year for a service that's supposed to have more max throughput. They somehow thought client needs would stay the same and that those extra megabits attracted more clients to their more expensive services just because they want that peace of mind. Guess what: clients want flat rates but they will use the bandwidth more because services on the web keep providing better content with more detail (read: more data), and paying for that content is already enough, they don't want their data plan to also go up, because in all honesty, it doesn't have to! Why would I pay 10 more bucks for 1gb/s when my 100mb/s is good enough for my 4k netflix plan (which I also pay for)? This is their problem. They aren't able to scale profit as their investors expected thus they can't grow financially, because they have to keep looking at their 100mb/s clients pay 30 bucks (example) when last year they only used a third of that bandwidth on 1080p, and now they stream 4k. They have that gb/s plan nobody will pay 100 dollars for because they can't convince individuals it's better (because it isn't for their needs), and they can't cut that 4k streaming on the 100mb/s plans because that is not neutral. In sum: they can't make money exponentially. So they do the only thing a good company does - they lobby politicians for ways of turning their flawed, net-biased logic into law that can be used to make the user cough up more bucks for a service they DO NOT provide. It's hypocrisy in its finest.
The problem is their business model is disingenuous at best. Luring customers in with high bitrates then telling them there's a limit per month how much of that they can use is disingenuous. If they're claiming that their network can't handle people actually using that speed all the time then they're not selling a credible product. It's almost a bait-and-switch scam. What they should be doing is selling a lower bitrate with no cap on monthly usage, or at least offering that at the same price. But they won't do that because then people would know that their network really isn't that great to start with.
If you actually go shopping, you'll usually find that the same sized packages cost the same amount.
Whether buying regular Oreos, Double Stuff, Double Triples, whatever. You just wind up with fewer individual cookies per-pack.
So. What does this teach us?
That, you get a set commodity at a set price REGARDLESS of how you use it.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Instead, every user, and the companies providing the service, prefer an over-subscribed service that cuts user cost. The only question is where do they put the line. Too much OS and the performance is bad. Too little OS, and the cost is too high. One of the solutions is more OS to cut costs, and bandwidth caps/costs to deter usage from the "worst" users to benefit all. The high-bandwidth users hate that solution.
Other people may suffer at the hands of your use of the total bandwidth at your area of the Internet but the costs do not change
If the suffering users leave the ISP, then it most certainly does change the Internet costs for the ISP (or at least the # of customers to spread the cost across). There is a real scarcity. There's not unlimited bandwidth everywhere, and it has costs to provide.
Learn to love Alaska
Have gnu, will travel.
> Hey, wait, I have a solution! How about you charge for the actual bandwidth in megabits per second, instead of for some arbitrary number of gigabytes per month? ... Then everybody's happy, right?
You CAN buy bandwidth that way. I do. It's exactly the opposite of what you want for your home internet connection. Those connections are called T1, T3, DS1, DS3, and you may remember ISDN. That's exactly how to make you UNhappy.
At home, you want to load a Slashdot, have it load in less than a second, then spend 300 seconds reading it. Then you go get a snack for another 300 seconds. You do that for a few hours, then go to bed. The next day, you go to work, then come home and use the internet. You'll use it for a few seconds at a time, for a couple of hours. You do NOT want to sit there and wait for stuff to load - you want the connection to be much, much faster than what you're actually using each hour.
You want a very fast connection, maybe 20-100 Mbps, but you're only downloading 1GB per day, which means you're actually using the connection 0.1% of the time. 99.9% of the time, you're not actually using it. Even you you did 300 GB / month, that 100 Mbps connection would sit idle 99% of the time.
It's good that you don't actually want to use it 99% of the time because a full-transit connection from your home through to the internet costs about $10-$25 per mbps. A full transit 100 Mbps line, about $1,200 / month, depending on location. The great news is, because you're using it less than 1% of the time, you can SHARE it with your neighbors and split the cost. If you each use it 1% of the time or so, 30 neighbors can all share that $1,200/month bill, paying $40 each. THAT is what you want for home internet service.
That's the basic reason why your cable modem at 35 Mbps is SO much cheaper than the 35 Mbps serving your office. Your office likely doesn't share the bandwidth with other companies, and doesn't share the cost. They get the full 35 Mbps 24/7 and pay the full $500 / month.
Sharing a fast connection is awesome, you save tons of money, but one problem arises. One of your neighbors sets up a server and hosts web sites for three or four of his friends, then another neighbor leaves Netflix streaming 24/7 in two different rooms, when he's not even home. That's quite wasteful, but what does he care, he's only paying a tiny fraction of the cost. You get less of the shared bandwidth because dumbass is streaming HD video to an empty living room.
There is no perfect solution to that, but about the best solution we have are caps. Unfortunately ISPs haven't been clear about what the caps are for different pricing tiers. Most consumers probably don't know how many GBs they want, so that's part of the problem. I think the best might be if the major ISPs offered three plans:
Light use economy plan.
Standard plan - perfect for daily browsing with some Youtube.
Power user / HD video plan - for people who watch a lot of Netflix.
Each plan should a little bit higher usage allowance than it's name suggests, so almost everyone people who doesn't use IP video or torrent regularly will be happy with the medium sized plan. That way everyone is paying for their fair share of the shared connection, and everyone is getting what they pay for. That would make customers happy.
Selling you 45 Mbps of dedicated, guaranteed bandwidth on a T3 line for $800 would make CenturyLink happy, but it wouldn't make you very happy. You'd rather share the cost, and the capacity.
I was holding out for the bowl of skittles analogy myself. Saying it's like oreos means it must be a mexican cartel.
No, that isn't a realistic way to look at things. When you order a specific amount of bandwidth it is to support a need. What percentage is to cover peaks vs average loads should be disclosed, but it isn't really material. What is material is that an ISP has adequate bandwidth to support its users needs collectively.
So, how does the ISP deal with customers that have a disproportionate usage profile? Options I see are: pass costs on to other customers, drop subscriber, charge subscriber more, or throttle subscriber to be closer to normative usage. Make less profit is not one of the options.
What regulators (or someone) need to ensure is that changing average needs are not treated the same way-- that the ISP does not simply stagnate because they do not wish to invest. That is the obligation of a monopoly/duopoly.
Now, what percentile constitutes abusive customer is a valid question. I would imagine it is something on the order of the top 0.1-0.03%, but I don't have data to justify that.
it's like going to an all you can eat oreos buffet where you can stay in as long as you want, advertised with big bold letters outside the shop - and then be told after 20 oreos that you need to start paying 1 dollar per oreo.
oh and the oreo company provides the buffet shop with the oreos for free, but because the shop can only hold 20 people you can only eat 20 oreos before getting kicked out.
I'm all for it.
If you make it zero-sum, bitches. I totally support the idea, but don't forget your field of crops deserve the same revenue however you slice it, unless you're really just fucking us over a barrel and spouting noisy principles over the sound of cash register bells.
They wouldn't dare. Sure, it costs a little more to carry the wave of Normals guzzling netflix and streaming all day, you have to buy some more hardware (POOR BABY) but they really shouldn't be rocking the boat when grandma looks at her email once a week and pays $60/mo to do it.
As if piping data wasn't a ridiculous margin already.
It most defiantly is a matter of public debate and regulation as long as those providers have restricted competition. There are primarily 2 ways to get data, a cable and RF (freespace optics count as "cables") as long as those are monopolies or nearly so it's reasonable to regulate them.
Want company to be able to operate in a free market sure shift the last mile to technology neutral C/DWDM over fiber via muni's or a legacy provider. I'm talking at least one strand per house/business/apartment all the way back to the CO to allow multiple concurrent nearly arbitrary bandwidth per unit. Make the CO lease space and interconnects as a fixed rate.
Many concurrent last mile networks is a bad thing for the commons and should be discouraged (I've seen asia) but we need not be limited to a few ISP's in doing so.
As to the streaming is costing us to much, netflix is more than happy to provide cache boxes for the headends/CO's in effect making all this bandwidth come from the cheapest place possible right next to the cable head end/dslam. They are refusing to put them in because they are rent seeking to get paid twice for the same bits and/or view them as a competitor and looking to disadvantage them. This is a monopoly trying to leverage it's position to get a foothold into the market. It get especially ugly as they are all vertically integrating becoming content producers as well.
No sir I dont like it.
It still costs something but that cost for the hardware is dropping faster than Moore's law to the point where it is not practical to even monitor for a relatively small ISP. The main area of cost for ISPs is the last/first mile. For cable companies node splits are very costly and this is the reason why this executive is complaining. But when you have a proper infrastructure, upgrading is not a big problem. Witness AT&T lifting GigaPower subscribers capped usage.
And some of them will switch to another broadband ISP if one's available, costing the original ISP a customer and their money.
So in other words, it costs the ISP more when you're downloading at 1 GB/s than when your network connection is idle.
Next, at the risk of turning this into an economics lesson, I'd like to focus everyone's attention on the careful way you qualified your statement:
What is "sufficient" bandwidth? To an ISP customer, it might be such abundance that it never slows down during peak periods. In other words, the amount where the marginal revenue from adding more bandwidth is zero because already no customers ever see the network slow down. In other words, where MR = 0 no matter what MC (marginal cost) is.
But in the real world, at least where a company wants to maximize their profit, they will provide just enough of the product or service that the marginal revenue from increasing it equals the cost of increasing it (MR = MC), because any more would turn from a positive return to a negative return. This is why restaurants tend to fill up once or twice per day or per week. If they didn't, the tables and chairs and floor area that they have to rent or amortize and pay taxes on would go wasted more of the time, meaning that they overbuilt the restaurant. (Don't believe me? Next time you're waiting in line to get into a restaurant, ask to speak the owner and then try to make an economic case for them to expand the dining area. Good luck!)
Similarly, a network that never sees any slowdown is also overbuilt.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
This is just like it. Completely irrelevant and nothing but a misdirection. I expect this to be cited on the show "Bull" at some point.
Shall we the internet nominate the maker of Oreos for the Nobel Prize in Culinary Arts? It seems that they are the world favorite for Intenet and computer hacking nutrition.
Most Respectfully Yours Mark Allyn Bellingham, Washington
Over subscription to a degree is a good thing in terms of profit and service cost as nobody really uses 100% all the time. Unused capacity is just wasted capacity. Of course there is a point where there is obviously too much and people should be at least receiving their rated speed at least a % of their time as well a minimum speed that should be advertise alongside. If people like you want full capacity 100% of the time, you should be paying for it but the majority of people expect reasonable service at reasonable prices. The problem is data-caps doesn't fit the model of pipe capacity and throttling is completely unknown. If ISP was more transparent and fair in their throttling instead of trying to rip people off for more money, people would be complaining alot less.
Say a plan that guarantees a min speed 100% of the time, burst speeds x% of the time, and priority throttling partially influenced by average bandwidth usage in comparison to other users that is currently saturating the pipe. This detailed plan basically currently mirrors the state of how internet is and can be done without greatly increasing cost of internet in general.
I wish sometimes that I too could enjoy the bliss of having a utterly single-track mind, where there's always one and the same solution to all problems...
One of the things that puzzles me with respect to debates on internet throttling is nonsense being spouted by the providers with respect to bandwidth and contention ratios...
When I choose my ISP, I select both a provider and a tiered level of service that meets my requirements, then pay the price they ask. In the UK, the previously state-owned provider British Telecom offer an FTTC service (Infinity), giving me unlimited bandwidth and line speeds of up to 76MB/s for £25/month. A similar decision [although obviously a different price scale and bandwidth package] is on offer to the media companies such as NetFlix and Amazon Prime. In other words, we both respectively choose and pay for the bandwidth we want.
For the ISP to come along afterwards and start to impose throttling or bandwidth restrictions, *after* I have selected and paid for a package, is a bit like asking me to pay twice for something I've already bought. Their argument to the FCC appears to be the equivalent of stating that they are surprised to learn that customers are now expecting to be able to use bandwidths that they have been purchasing for years but never really using.
ISPs have become fat, lazy and rich. They have made their margins and their obscene profits from low-demand contention ratios. Now that more and more people are actually wanting to use the internet, these same companies have been found out. They have failed to invest sufficiently in infrastructure over the years, preferring instead to slice off huge profits and pay large dividends to their investors.
CEOs look at the popularity of services like NetFlix and realise that, suddenly, their companies are going to have to work for a living. The CEOs are worrying that if they are expected to actually deliver the service that their customers are paying for, shock horror, then this might put a squeeze on their fat profits, hitting share prices and their generous bonus packages...
It is not my fault that their company chose to extract profits when it should have been investing in infrastructure.
But it should be illegal for a connectivity provider/ISP to be allowed to charge customers twice for the same service.
There is an instantaneous consumption at all times. It only matters when congestion arises. At that point, for the best experience, a stream may need some priority over others, which could be accomplished via how much the consumer is willing to pay for it (double stuf vs. the regular kind.) Without either ensuring that the network is always overprovisioned (the approach so far, when things worked) or providing the consumer the ability to purchase a better quality of service, some kinds of performance cannot be guaranteed to a sufficiently high level. I've long distinguished between net neutrality when it relates to special deals between providers and carriers (especially when they're the same) and the kind of neutrality forced upon everyone, including the end user, that limits what is possible.
Urm. $1200/100=$12. Add the extra capital of connecting to multiple locations, and admin overheads and stuff, and $20-30 is quite reasinable. (Those pesky damned off-by-1 errors when you're working log10...)
John_Chalisque
ISPs have been around for 20 years, I think anybody who's been online for 12 months, has gotten a data cap warning, regardless of their age. Why aren't customers asking this question? Data is what they're paying for, since the bandwidth is a function of technology and data packet contention.
Most countries have legislation demanding the product detail the total amount delivered (kilograms, liters, units, gigabytes) and the total price after consumption. Is this missing in the USA, in which case, those petrol vendors are being too kind, giving you a running count of the gallons already poured into the car's tank? Or is the US government, again, allowing corporations to say what they please?
Funny then how at the first hint of Google moving in, my ISP managed to triple the cap without upgrading the last mile or raising the price. Either the laws of physics changed or...
Granted, off by one. Too bad they charge $75-100.
Mediacom's assertion that the Internet is like a cookie you eat, is like saying copying a file on your computer somehow
diminishes or degrades the original file, which of course is ridiculous.
I hate those greedy ISP scum bags as much as the next guy, but that is misleading bullshit. Of course you consume a limited
resource when you use the Internet: Its called bandwidth (as others here have noted). If what you're trying to say is that Mediacom is
abusing their quasi-monopolistic dominance of certain segments of the market, then just say so and don't devalue your whole argument
by stating idiocies.
oreos ... turns you poo & the ISPs heart black
...only when it first started, each cookie was filled with tasty filling.
Now every cookie is filled with shitty ads, while every digital provider tries to convince you it tastes the same.
TL; DR - Shit-filled cookies are NOT a food people want to pay for.
So in this metaphor, the internet is your hand not the oreo cookie. Should it cost more to glove the hand that delivers the double stuffed oreo?
No. It's going to cost you to keep your hand. A repeated, rising Vig, to be paid monthly on pain of dismemberment.
We're keeping the Oreos.
--signed, your local Internet Service Provider
Posting a legal filing to a regulatory agency under a .docx format is like a double stuff oreo too. Assuming that consuming oreos equates to enthusiastic support for the kludgiest, most ubiquitous, garbage ever created.
Or maybe they're just nihilistic trolls.... well played Mediacom, well played.
So the analogy is apt, considering that the "maintenance" on the cables is dwarfed by the overhead for bureaucracy, bookkeeping, advertising, management and all the other crap you don't give a shit about.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Actually, they're cheaper.
Double stuf vs normal.
At least check your crappy analogy that it's at least true. Don't get me wrong, the analogy holds as much water as a sieve, but it also simply being a blatant lie is just the icing on the shit cake.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
> My point is that usage limits are pointless, there is no limit to the data a connection will transfer, the only limit is the bandwith.
So you're thinking there there is a limit to the number of bits per second, but not a limit to the bytes per month? Those are actually two ways of expressing the same same thing, how many symbols can it transfer in a given period of time.
GB = Mb / (8 * 1024)
month = (seconds * 60 * 60 * 24 * 30)
GB per month = Mbps * 316
Minus overhead, 1 Mbps = 300 GB / month
So for each Mbps, there's a hard limit of 300 GB / month, because those two numbers represent exactly the same thing. Just like your speed in MPH limits how far you can drive in a day.
Then somewhere along the path, you're sharing the connection - you don't have a direct connection to each and every web server. If nothing else, obviously you're sharing the links between your city and other cities. If you're very lucky and you in an office building which houses a significant peering point, you are are only sharing a high speed links. Anyway, on each link, the mathematical maximum average bandwidth (measured per second or per month) for each user is the bandwidth of the link divided by the number of users. If your city has 1 Gbps (300 TB/month) of connectivity to the rest of the world, and has 100,000 residents, that 300TB of capacity the city has is shared by the 100,000 residents, giving 1 GB/month per resident.
I tried them, they're great: How do they fit into this analogy?
What about those Pepperidge Farm Milanos with double-chocolate?
Who did what now?
So, it's to be a battle of wits, is it?
First, I gather you know much of the US has nowhere to go if they want to switch, making your first point moot. But, I fail to see how it's any different from any other business doing cost analysis based on estimates.
Reasonably populated areas in Europe pay far less than reasonably populated areas in the US. New York City and San Francisco, two big cities, have some of the worst service in the country. Why? Effective regional monopolies. NYC is suing Verizon for failing to meet terms. Verizon doesn't want to build more. Can't imagine why. (Simply, costs more to maintain than wireless. Why serve customers when you don't have to?)
And yes, I carefully worded that because I'm not a network engineer for a major ISP and don't know how they over-subscribe. I thought I made it clear that is acceptable practice but if not: that is obviously acceptable practice. Theoretical peak is just that: theoretical. I'm not going to make a case for a restaurant to build out for unused tables and will not make the case for an ISP to build out for unused bandwidth. Both are silly. Again, I thought that was clear. Haha, wasted your time.
The argument is ISPs are, in fact, super-villains. Why? Data caps have nothing to do with over-subscribing or bandwidth management. I'm not comparing this to restaurants because the analogy would be poor. In fact, none of what you argued have anything to do with the reason most people hate their ISP. Bits are not consumed. The only scarcity is bandwidth. Restaurants have a max capacity but that does not cap the speed at which people can be moved in and out. People would be pissed if they were rushed because they had a time cap and would go elsewhere. Whoops, I did what I said I wouldn't do. And yep, the analogy is awful.
It's really more like a series of tubes.
They should get their facts straight. My quick research shows that both Oreos and Double Stuff Oreos can be had for the same price: $2.79.
Two choices:
There is no magical third option.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Have you ever run a business? Anything? I think not...
Spoken like a true Statist — the government knows best, does not it? Down with the greedy KKKapitali$ts!!
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Begging the question, aren't you? Why do they have "restricted competition"? Because the government chose to regulate them to begin with — from the AT&T monopoly, to cable TV, to the cellular duopolies, the problem is the same.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Kind of like how we talk about bits and not files when talking about data use.
Because unregulated capitalism has done so well for Internet access in America. Prices are low and speeds are high. It's been amazing for consumers. Self-regulation was a runaway success!
Unregulated capitalism never had a chance — by the time of the Internet, we've had crony capitalism throughout.
They are, actually. When I signed up for FiOS 7 years ago, I got 35Mbps up and down. Today I'm paying the same monthly fee for 50Mbps up and down — thanks to Comcast constantly breathing at Verizon's neck.
I do wish, there was more competition, of course, but even a duopoly is leaps and bounds better, than a government-owned monopoly would be.
It certainly is much better, than a government-run monopoly — be it Amtrak, or TSA, or public schools, which quadrupled the per-pupil costs (inflation-adjusted) since 1960ies without any increases in education-quality...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
A is to B as C is to D - in a logical world, no information is given about the relationship of A to C. In the media, even the "techy" media or the "nerdy" media, an analogy is ALL about the relationship of A to C. Hence we see scads of NOLO's (non-logicals) screaming - They're comparing the internet to double-stuffed Oreos! They're comparing Immigrants to Skittles! Just take a logic 110 course - PUH-lease!
Some settling may occur during posting.
Fine: charge more for the larger 'cookie'.
In that case, I want to pay less, FAR less, for the half-cookie I usually take!
Plus, you owe me for the grief and poor service!
Oh, and also for letting malware get to my network!
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.
"You eat the cookie, the cookie is gone, but you transmit data over a network, the network is still there and can transmit data endlessly. Mediacom's assertion that the Internet is like a cookie you eat, is like saying copying a file on your computer somehow diminishes or degrades the original file, which of course is ridiculous."
While you're using the network to transmit data, someone else can not. The network has a finite bandwidth: by definition, it can only carry so much. If you're hogging it, someone else is limited.
Two houses are on fire. One home owner has a garden hose; the other has a fire hose. They're both drawing from the same hydrant. The amount of water available is basically unlimited; the water is unchanged no matter which hose it goes through .. but the amount available to be pushed through a hose is not! Now .. who do you think will get the most water on his burning house?
Why is that so hard to understand? Who do you want to be? The owner with the garden hose, or the owner with the fire hose?
The internet is more like a pipeline. You pay an ISP for a certain size access pipe. The ISP should be providing the flow rate you pay for. What you pipe and how much you pipe is irrelevant. Data caps and throttling are ways to weasel out of of providing the size pipe you are paying for.
NRRPT/RCT
I think you're under the impression that I want a government monopoly. I don't. I want local loop unbundling. I want what Europe has: one company controls the wires, one controls the service. None of this is even worth discussing.
Yes, you do. You said it yourself:
That means "monopoly". Whether it is nominally government-run, or simply government-guaranteed like electric companies or "transportation authorities" is irrelevant.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
> but for whatever reason there actually seem to be a lot of people who object to the idea of being charged for their actual usage
I have a monthly expense of $870/month for child care. Some months I use it more than others. I spoke with person providing the service and we BOTH prefer that I spend, and she receives, the same amount every month. It makes budgeting easier for both of us. Also it makes sense because when I decide not to use the service that particular day, she's already made the service AVAILABLE for me, I have the spot reserved whether I use it or not.
Both are true for internet. If you're going to pay $600 for internet this year, most people would rather it be $50/month rather than $10 one month and $90 the next month.
Also, the ISP has to provide you with the capacity every day, whether you use it or not.
I provide a hot spare service, where I keep an extra copy of the customer's web server. I used to charge by how many GBs of storage were used. Customers didn't like that the charge varied a few dollars each month. I changed it so now we bill un 100GB increments. Unless your site gets 100 GB bigger, your cost stays the same each month. Most costumers prefer that. Of course, Amazon AWS shows that variable pricing *can* work.
Lastly, regarding everyone buying more than you need, the price of the 300 GB isn't related in anyway to the actual cost of carrying 300 GB. The price is a function of the AVERAGE USAGE of customers subcribed to that plan. If the average customer with a 300 GB limit actually uses 1GB, pricing becomes a function of that cost to serve the customer 1 GB.
*claps hands*
I'm done. I'm not going to try to untangle my meaning anymore. You win. I don't want a government monopoly. We had it good when POTS lines were the Internet because there were hundreds of companies. I want that again.
Or they had previously been collecting more profit, and cut into profits to compete with a competitor. Cutting the price of something doesn't cut the costs.
Learn to love Alaska
Yes, but in a bowl full of Oreos, how many are poisoned?
That's your interwebs problem.
"is like saying copying a file on your computer somehow diminishes or degrades the original file, which of course is ridiculous." exec's would love if the internet was like star trek. where somehow downloading a database deletes the original copy. lets transmit our doctor across the galaxy so he can give a message to star fleet and not be able to use him locally because... ... DRM?
You missed:
Many concurrent last mile networks is a bad thing for the commons and should be discouraged (I've seen asia) but we need not be limited to a few ISP's in doing so.
Lots of last mile networks is not a good thing to allow on the commons. We only need a single well built physical plant for last mile data and we have had the technology for awhile to allow many providers to easily share a single plant. Between regulatory capture etc we lack the will to build them.
No sir I dont like it.
They are, actually. When I signed up for FiOS 7 years ago, I got 35Mbps up and down. Today I'm paying the same monthly fee for 50Mbps up and down â" thanks to Comcast constantly breathing at Verizon's neck.
You're getting screwed mi, I'm getting Gigabit speed for the same price I paid for 100 Mbps in 2009.
You should move.
No, they aren't. The same lamp-post, which brings a FiOS fiber-cable to my house, also carries a Comcast cable to my neighbors. It can easily carry 5-10 more.
The owner of that "well built physical plant" then becomes a monopoly — an evil far worse than even a whole bunch of "unsightly" cables.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Sure, but when they can make a change that big and still be profitable, it does say a lot about how much economic rent they have been collecting all these years. (The word rapacious comes to mind).
It also reveals that everything they ever said about needing the caps to manage network load was just a pack of lies. It lends a lot of credence to the theory that the caps were more about leveraging a monopoly to keep the likes of Hulu and Netflix out than they were about network management.
Compared to what they have been charging, bandwidth must be damned close to free.
“In the case of virtually everything you buy, the fact that your cost goes up as you consume more will neither surprise you nor set you off on a passionate crusade to get the government to force producers to sell an unlimited quantity at a fixed price ... Remarkably, the only exception to this truism we can think of is bandwidth. A fair number of otherwise intelligent people vociferously complain about ISPs imposing a ‘cap’ on bandwidth usage.”
Hmm, I pay for cable TV.. It does not matter if I watch one channel for 1 hour a month, or if I have 10 TV's set to 10 channels and do meth and watch it all 24x7 for the whole month.... The cable bill is the same.
If I buy a one year state parks sticker it does not matter if I go once in the year and hike for an hour, get bit by a snake, and leave, or if I am there every waking moment taunting snakes the whole time. The price is the same.
I can pay for entry to an amusement park. It does not matter if I go on one ride, vomit, and leave, or if I am there every second that they are open going on rides and vomiting all over the place... The entry price is the same.
Why? Because in all of these you are paying for ACCESS.. When you pay for ACCESS you are able to fully utilize the product or service for the amount of TIME that you pay for ACCESS.
When I pay for one month of internet ACCESS at a certain speed it does not matter one bit how much of that TIME I spend utilizing the service I pay to ACCESS.
Now.. The real thing here is that USAGE does not cost them one damn cent.. (well, maybe +/-1 cent in power?)
As long as they do not over provision that is.....
I am sure they over provision.. I think that should be fraud.
If, in some hypothetical situation we had a ISP with two customers and they sell both 10 meg internet, and the ISP did not over provision.. So they have 20+ meg connection to the backbone... How does our usage change their costs? It does not in any way. The only way it can is if the ISP is a liar, sell bandwidth they don't have, and then bitch and blame customers when their speeds are so low that they start to loose to the competition.
Sure, it's a monopoly. That's because it's really expensive to run last-mile internet to everybody's house, and so the barrier to entry is high. If Comcast is the only high-bandwidth game in town, then Comcast can abuse their customer base, because where are they going to go? If another company comes in and starts running fiber to everyone, they're spending a lot of money, and Comcast can drop their rates enough to make money on what they've already got, but to make the other company's capital investment unprofitable. Moreover, it's a big waste, since having two last-mile connections is not inherently better than one.
It's a natural monopoly, because the barriers to entry are really high compared with expected profit. Utilities are frequently these, since it makes no sense to run redundant gas and electricity to neighborhoods. Since these utilities are monopolies, and there's no way to stop them from being monopolies, the only way to keep them honest is government regulation.
One way to deal with this is to separate the fiber from the service. If there's a company that's paid to provide last-mile internet service, they can be regulated like the electric company. I don't know about anyone else, but I get nice, reliable, smooth power at a very reasonable price. It works.
With the last mile taken care of, anybody with some capital can set up an ISP, providing connectivity from the last-mile provider to the rest of the Net. At that point, we get enough competition so that we don't particularly need regulation.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
5-10 sure what about 20 50 100? Wait till you see their crews actively sabotaging each other, hell I see it with AT&T phone vs fios since one in union and views the others as scabs. I assume you have never been to someplace where there are many last mile networks in competition it's pretty ugly but aesthetically and functionally.
A last mile monopoly, no different than water or sewer. I'm only talking about last mile not transit, ISP's simply colo some gear in the CO or pop a bundle of fiber to their own location. Were talking about literally only glass and channel allocation nothing that needs power etc etc etc. The ITU defines 18 channels for CDWM though 8 or 16 are normally used. Security wise mandating macsec is pretty trivial. That is about 25gbs per channel with today's tech. At the end of the day muni's do monopolies well in a cost effective manner.
No sir I dont like it.
double stuffed oreos cost the same as regular stuffed.!??
It also reveals that everything they ever said about needing the caps to manage network load was just a pack of lies.
True. Basic shaping is much better than capping, or "advanced shaping". Advanced is when they try to shape down Netflix, but not their own video service. Basic shaping is the shaping allowed by every proposed "network neutrality" bill or suggestion, where you target P2P and such for lower quality, boosting voice, video and web.
Learn to love Alaska
In my experience, most ISPs are a monopoly, at least for residential customers. For example, where I live, Comcast has the city council in its pocket, so no other cable company is available. OTOH, I was able to get AT&T to provide Uverse over the copper phone line coming into my apartment. (Previously, I had DSL over the same wire.)
I guess it's kind of the the current election. I think AT&T is bad, but I think Comcast is much worse, so that guided my decision.
I'd really like it if Google fiber were available to me, but even in their home-town, no go.
So where you live there isn't a monopoly.
What was your point again?
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
If it only affected the top 1%, they would keep the caps the same and happily let the 'hogs' go plague Google.
In fact, they were set just low enough to discourage cutting the cord and streaming instead.
As far as actual network management, fair queues with borrowing would be the ideal approach.
My more detailed point is that usage limits are set arbitrarily and artificially low, compared to the available bandwidth.
Eat the rich.
Yes, using the internet is like eating Oreos except for that part about paying ahead of time for a specific number of Oreos, eating one more so I now have negative Oreos, and getting fined for it. At least with Oreos, I can unambiguously count the number of Oreos I have left.
Tell me again why pay as you go internet does not end when I run out of bytes that I paid for?
I have no doubt that your cap is set lower than what you'd like it to be. Hopefully you have the option to upgrade by paying $10 more to get the plan you want, or a new competitor entering your market.
> arbitrarily and artificially low, compared to the available bandwidth.
During peak times, available bandwidth is in fact pretty well saturated at many points. If it weren't, ISPs would be stupid - they would have spent money on equipment that they didn't need, and aren't fully using. The ISPs aren't stupid - their marketing departments may be a bit slimy, but their engineers know how to provision a network.
No, they aren't. The same lamp-post, which brings a FiOS fiber-cable to my house, also carries a Comcast cable to my neighbors. It can easily carry 5-10 more.
No, it really can't. Working with that many would be a pain for anyone, and there are other issues including pole limits, interference, and even safety. Not to mention, it's actually more expensive. Why have 5-10 lines, when 3-4 will do to service a branch of dozens of houses?
The owner of that "well built physical plant" then becomes a monopoly — an evil far worse than even a whole bunch of "unsightly" cables.
Not at all, people are only evil if you let them be. Which you can do by giving anyone freedom. Because it's only when people are free to be evil that they are evil. So don't let them be evil. It's much easier than you realize, it's only the cowardice that leads you astray.
Good constrains itself, evil demands free rein.
Cable is actually a type of DSL, but here we'll talk about phone-line DSL. There are many, many versions of phone-line DSL. IDSL, CDSL, and DSL Lite can provide about *up to* 1 Mbps for absolutely no more than 18,000 feet (2.5 miles). VDSL has an "up to" bandwidth of 51.84 Mbps, with a maximum distance of 1,000 feet.
So basically you have a DSL connection between your house and the end of the block. At the end of the street, your DSL connection ends at a DSLAM, where it's connected to a segment shared by you and your neighbors.
The SLAs have three costs associated with them. As you suggested, they may have higher repair and maintenance costs, because problems get fixed faster. Rarely, the ISP may have to pay out on the SLA. More importantly, bandwidth usage is very peaky - demand is much higher than average for short periods. If I have an X Mbps line, I can use that to provide X Mbps to 1 customer 100% of the time, or X Mbps to 10 customers 99% of the time, or X Mbps to 40 customers 90% of the time. In other words, the ISP can serve many more customers per fiber if congestion is allowed occasionally, during peak periods. There's a big cost difference between "you'll have 10 Mbps dedicated to you all the time" and "you'll have 10 Mbps most of the time, but it may slow a bit during peak hours".
There is no data cap on my current connection, and no caps on either of the two alternatives I mentioned.
I know the small print says that the speed is only guaranteed to the ISPs own network.
Eat the rich.