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European Internet Users boycott telecom June 6
troc sent us the the British strike site for this weekend's European Internet Users Telecommunications boycott. The boycott is over having to pay metered internet phone bills, which quite frankly, seems almost as silly as US crypto laws. There is also a site for the EU as well.
I live in Germany, where i have quite expensive internet costs. The problem with internet is, that the current billing model is not exactly covering the costs i create.
I think the phone call to the ISP should be free, and instead the traffic should be billed. The problem is, if im online for hours and do only low-traffic irc, im paying for these people who are online over a short period but are downloading Megs and Gigs of Data. And this is definitively unfair. I have to pay for all these persons who think that they need to download Episode 1 or other big files. For your knowledge: Episode 1 is worth about $40 to $100 of internet traffic, at least at the current prices in germany.
But the big problem in billing the traffic and giving the connection for free, is that the ISP and the telco are usually not the same company, and the telco wants the money for the actual connection i make.
If the telco and the isp would be the same company, i would only need a connection just to my local phone exchange, and the data would be flow as ip - and billed as traffic - beginning there.
So the only way to free internet phone calls would be to merge the isp and the telco in one company, but im afraid this would also be the worst move, because in Europe and specially in Germany we have only very few telcos, and most telcos dominate their local area, so this way they would monopolize the internet access, which may be bad regarding the prices.
The interesting thing about the telephone business is that their costs have nothing to do with how
many minutes you stay on the phone.
Variable costs for the telephone company are determined by peak usage. They have to buy
enough switch capacity and interoffice trunk lines to provide a specified quality of service during
peak usage periods. Off-peak usage of the telephone system doesn't add to the cost of providing
service.
You don't need a degree in maths to see that since Internet calls are usually longer than voice calls (on an unmetered service), more internet calls means higher peak usages. On an unmetered service, though, the cost of meeting these peak demands gets passed on to the voice-only customers as well as the net users who are hogging the capacity -- pretty unfair.
Kithran wrote: Well as I understand it local calls are unmetered in the US and the big question is why shouldn't they
also be unmetered in the UK (and the rest of Europe).
When the US Telcos introduced free local calls, voice calls was all there was -- and people didn't have any reason to leave a call connected for hours on end.
I'll bet US telcos would love to go back to metered pricing now, but since the consumer is now so used to free calls, it ain't gonna happen.
--
Witness the difference between mobile and regular telephony. Mobile telephony is a fairly recent development here in Europe. As such, the former state companies are more or less in the same position as the newcomers. Here in the Netherlands, there are probably ten mobile phone companies, making it a reasonably effective market. For regular telephony, as a private citizen there is effectively still no other choice than the former state company. (And, as the state company is quite wealthy, it can afford to make a loss on services like mobile telephony in order to put competitors out of business. The regulatory body ( OPTA) is putting a stop to some unfair practices and prices, but we're still a long way from a fully liberalised phone market.
A reasonably popular alternative infrastructure for internet access and voice is cable, but it's not available yet in many places (because it needs to be rewired for twoway connections), and the cable companies are often cluefully challenged.
Here in Denmark, it's cos one company sits on just about all the wire.
Resistance is not futile - www.gnu.org
Bandwidth is a scarce resource, and scarce resources should be charged, to moderate demand.
If everyone paid per byte for their internet access there would be almost no lag, because people would be more careful about their usage.
And ISPs would have a direct incentive to provide better service, because being able to pass more traffic would immediately generate revenue.
Don't be under the illusion that if we had unmetered phone calls in Europe, the telecoms companies would collect less revenue: it would just be collected in fixed charge not in call charges. The question of reducing telecoms' profits is entirely orthogonal to the question of whether the charge is a fixed one or a metered one.
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My phone and modem are going to be yanked out of the wall on Sunday, and will be plugged back in on Monday morning. I just hope that my parents don't try to call me and then get all panicky when they get a "disconnected" tone :-)
I actually doubt that this strike will do much good, but hey, it's the principle of the thing, isn't it :-) I hope that the strike generates some mainstream news in Monday's papers. Media publicity is more likely to get us noticed than the strike itself.
I agree entirely. More than one pricing plan would certainly benefit the end user. You could have a system in which metered is the default, and suits a lot of people, but a (fairly high) flat-rate charge is also available which would suit people who want to make heavy use of the network.
I think a system like this is in place in the UK for selling water - you can go on a water meter or pay a fixed charge depending on your usage. Don't quote me on that though - my water payments are included in my rent; I don't know how payment works for people in their own houses.
Do these laws apply to all telcos, or just BT? My phone is provided by ComTel, who provide my cable TV as well. If other telcos are exempt from some of the laws which apply to BT, they could gain an advantage in areas such as unmetered calls, and increase their market share.
Yes there are a number of 'free' ISPs in the UK and the number of subscribers are rapidly increasing. (Indeed I think Freeserve now have more users than AOL in the UK). There is still a big price differential between the UK & the US with regards to the cost of internet access.
These 'free' ISPs in the UK are just no mothly fee - you still pay for the phone call to connect (indeed that is how these ISPs are funded they and the teleco split the revenue from calls). Given the fact the cheapest phone calls you are likely to find will be 1 pence per minute the bills soon mount up.
I'm lucky enough to be with a teleco who provides unmetered calls to other customers of the same teleco - including my ISP and I pay 12 pounds a month for my net access. With a 'free' ISP that would equate to 20 hours a month. While that would be enough for light use (say email and a little casual surfing) as soon as you start making large downloads or spending more time online the savings with the unmetered model get more and more pronounced.
I'd be interested to know what sort of percentage of US internet users are online for less than 20 hours a month....
Kithran
Metered telephone calls aren't just expensive in Europe. Most of Asia also has metered calls. Even worse, in a lot of countries, the telco is owned by the government. I have to pay $1US/hour for using the line. Fortunatly, there is a local PBX where I live. So I use the PBX for Internet cals, and it's all free. But I still have to pay by the minute on my direct line. I just feel sorry for the poor chumps who don't have the advantage of a PBX.
But it makes sense, especially in poorer countries with old infrastructure. The telephone networks of the world were designed for calls which should last no more than 30 minutes. But Internet connections use the lines for hours at a time. And you guys in the States and Canada keep your telephone lines busy for months (i know i used to). This puts a lot of stress on the network.
I'm surprised that so many people in Europe are still using telephone lines. Isn't the European Infrastructure superior to the United States? I would image everyone there had xDSL or ISDN or Cable.
The REAL problem is that we keep trying to use the exsisting infrastructure for something it's not meant to do, in order to save money. This actually costs MORE and the users also have to suffer high costs and pathetic bandwidth. Hopefully the world will wake up someday to a SEPERATE, high bandwidth digital network just for the Net. No electrical sockets or cable TV jacks or telephone lines. Fiber optic for extreme bandwidth, copper for decent (100Mb/s) bandwidth and satalite for remote areas (100Mb/s?). Of course, it's unlikley to ever happen (except maybe satalite uplinks).