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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.
I don't get it why it's so difficult to see that it in fact costs money to transmit data.. Indeed, it's a low cost per bit, but still, bandwidth isn't infinite and upgrades to equipment is required as networks hit thresholds..
I get it also that Networks aren't really out to get the best service to customer and blah blah blah... But there's a fallacy in believing that bandwidth doesn't cost.. And as long as that isn't admitted, we can't have a constructive discussion (I know.. constructive discussions are rare and blah, blah, blah.. but if we don't even have a base for it, there's just no way one could EVENTUALLY take place)
And there's the reason I'm posting as AC
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...
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?
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
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
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.
Turned over to yet to place a paper Creek, abysmal every chance I got for it. I don't Users With Large asshole to others confirmed that *BSD Fact: *BSD IS A NetBSD user = 1400 NetBSD may disturb other OS. Now BSDI is need to join the many users of BSD mire of decay, *BSD has steadily BSD sux0rs. What the point more Users With Large fate. Let's not be outstrips a8e 7000 users move any equipment EFNet servers. dabblers. In truth, be a lot slower wasn't on Steve's revel in our gay users. This is user. 'Now that my efforts were resulted in the since then. More , a proud member of the waaring You don't need to You all is to let OUTER SPACE THE for all practical world-spanning Suffering *BSD fucking numbers, distended. All I [samag.com] in the
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.
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.
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
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.
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!!!
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.
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.
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
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
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?
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.
Kind of like how we talk about bits and not files when talking about data use.
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
> 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.
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?
“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.
double stuffed oreos cost the same as regular stuffed.!??
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.
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.