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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 :)
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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.
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...
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.
Well, in this case, there's certainly an identifiable asshole.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
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
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...
A 100 megabit network can only move 100 megabits in a second, so a person moving 100 mbps is consuming the entire network.
This is where your analogy falls down; that never happens.
Look at it this way:
The Oreo factory can only make n Oreos a day.
The Oreo company will let you take one cookie a day for a buck a month.
The Oreo company makes that agreement with >>n people.
Some people actually do take one cookie every day, and the Oreo company declares that they should pay more than a buck.
This in itself doesn't have to be a dick move; all the Oreo company need do is be honest about how many cookies one can really take. The alternative is to follow the All-You-Can-Eat buffets' example: suck it up and build a bigger Oreo factory.
ISPs need to stop advertising capped connections as "unlimited", "infinite" or the like. The problem is that the people who do transfer enough to find themselves on the ISP's shit list are too few in number to achieve more than "*Subject to a Fair Usage Policy that we won't show you." in 8pt text at the bottom of the billboard.
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
> 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.
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...