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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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Standard Oreo cookies on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00R...">$0.19/oz
Oreo Double Stuf cookies on Amazon: $0.17/oz
Double Stuf Oreos don't cost more, so the idiot metaphor isn't even accurate if it did make sense, which it doesn't. Why? The filling is whipped vegetable oil and sugar, which is cheaper than cookie, but takes more volume.
The guy who made this comparison is also an idiot because when you purchase internet service, you pay whether you use it or not. I don't see them offering rebates for under-usage, why do they think it's cool to charge my parents who just do email and facebook the same amount as someone who hits the cap every month?
These fucker ISPs don't get it both ways. Either charge flat fees and stop over subscribing the shit out of the network, or charge usage fees and watch your profits disappear.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
You transmit data over a network, the time it spend transmitting, the network could have been transmitting someone else's data. Thats opportunity cost.
Ah, I see. So it doesn't matter if, say, I decide to download a large file at 3:00am on a Sunday night, when (theoretically, for purposes of this discussion) network usage is at a low point, I'm still edging out some theoretical traffic.
..oh, wait, the ISPs aren't happy now, are they, because they don't get to gouge everyone! Especially telecoms, that wave the shiny thing of being able to watch 1080p movies on your wireless dataplan, then screw you six ways from Sunday when you actually use it that way because you use up your dataplan in no time at all!
..oh, I'm so sorry, I forgot again! it's unamerican to tell corporations that they can't screw people over! Silly me..
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 there's a hard mathematical limit to how much you can download in a month instead of distracting customers with a shiny thing (high download rate) then whacking them with a stick later (when they go over the arbitrary limit). Then everybody's happy, right?
Could it be that they overbook their networks instead of planning them for the actual capacity they're selling? Then price-gouge everyone for the privilege of using their undersized, overworked networks? Here's an idea: How about they sell realistic speeds that actually fit their networks and not price-gouge everyone for limited bandwidth?
> 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.