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Charging for Cable Internet Access in Australia
Anonymous Coward writes "Australian Cable Internet users suffered another major drawback yesterday, with simple services such as E-mail and Newsgroups being charged on a per megabyte basis. This practise is ludicrous as a client can now be charged for spam.
Previously, traffic from one cable modem to another was free, yet Telstra have amended their terms and conditions without user consent to include cable modem traffic. In fact, any traffic will be now charged on a per megabyte basis. So angry is the cable community, that it has made headines in Australian news.
"
And I thought 35 cents for a public telephone local call was a rip off...
Australia has flat rate local calls. Optus charges 20c (US 12c) per call, Telstra seems not to be telling... I think it depends upon your pricing plan.
There are two major problems we face with local calls to service providers - the first is the large land mass/small population, meaning that people not living in a city often don't have local call access to an ISP and have to pay long distance rates. The other is that if phone calls drop out while the modem is connecting, thus running up a large bill (our call waiting tends to kill a connection too), then Telstra, who own the lines, and the ISP can bounce the blame back and forth between each other.
Ummm... have you *been* to the California beaches here? Fine by me if someone wants to own 'em.
Cottesloe and City Beach is a different story... at least in the US they're not *pretending* to be an advanced civilization.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
if you can be charged for spam, you can put a precise, true, documented amount on the damage caused by spam. Then you have a leg to stand on,
unlike in the states, where it's not possible to say "this spam cost me $x"
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
So, as your homeland succumbs to the ravages of commercialism, you prefer to live in the country that invented and has the major franchise on it?
... If a Yank or Japanese company tried to to annex Dee Why beach in Sydney, the local surfers would KILL them once they entered the water. In Australia, I can walk along the beaches in Port Douglas, Broome, or Whitehaven ... I can't do that at the Hollister ranch in California.
... I think by moving to the States you went from the frying pan into the fire, boyo.
BTW, it's America that has private beaches
So we have inept and corrupt politicians, and Telstra is a monopoly run by morons
Stay there. You complain too much.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
I could swear that ISDN lines in my area used to be $40/month and $0.4/MB... Probably the same idea... The phone company made a killing until the cable company buddied up with @Home to do cable internet for $40/month...
Can someone from Australia tell us why there's always some sort of privacy abuse or internet racket going on there? Is it usually coming from one company (Telstra?) or is it corporate culture at all net companies?
here's some of the impediments to doing e-commerce/web companies and even just plain surfing in au.
- technical
- human rights
- business
- education -
While I may be portraying a gloomy picture (there are may success stories), the emerging theme here is that the problems are being created and perpetuated from the top. The real innovation and positive work is coming from the bottom up, much like the Internet itself. Moveover Beverly HillBillys, the Internet HillBillys are moving in.....bandwidth - because of the lack of competition, Telstra has effectivly hindered any growth in high bandwidth access to the backbone. What access exists is too expensive, is inflexible. Telstra goes out of it's way to extract $ (and hugh profits) but any implementations of broadband is laughable.
IT skills - it skills levels are good to very good, but there is a severe shortage coupled with a brain drain of top technical staff.
privacy laws - lack of, hence allowing business, government and external bodies to push the limits of basic privacy and rights, that other countries take for granted.
government censorship - federal government trying to force internet censorship that is technically very difficult even of it forces local ISP's for a lot of extra expenses.
governent cracking - ASIO given rights to crack domestic computer systems with permission from the crown, no legal process can be involved.
business - weak privacy laws allowing business (PBL) to attempt to capture, store and profile the entire country.
business conservatism - banks, big business, the engines of change for the country are reluctant to go boots and all>.
e-business's - toe-dipping, lack of funds, lack of business exploitation skills (not techincal skills) is holding back the growth of e-commerce.
venture capital - venture capital is looking up. More vc's are looking at funding start-ups.
funding - funding to education is being cut (Monash University), privatisation and business driven courses is the word.
course access - hard core science (and other non essential academic cources) are being replaced with vocational courses.
peterrenshaw ~ Another Scrappy Startup
That's more to do with payphone vandalism. In the States I somehow doubt payphone is as cheap as home phones... Those things cost thousands of dollars to thief proof (unfortunately hard to vandal proof againt sulphuric acid and some of the other stuff vandals have previously used!)
Open Source. Closed Minds. We are Slashdot.
We're not really living in a high bandwidth world at the moment. Most of the content you see is designed for low bandwidth users. So while their claim that most customers will save from the switch-over may be true at the moment, in the long term, as high bandwidth content becomes more and more prevalent (video, live conferencing, etc.), everyone will end up paying more.
The same thing happened in my country, but this time with phone lines. The national telephone monopoly, in a prescient move, decided to charge time based rates for local phone calls that were formerly free. This happened right before the Internet became prevalent. Their claim was that most users would save from the switch-over: which was true, at that moment. But as the Internet became more and more popular and people were connecting with their modems, the money rolled in and people payed through their noses.
If this doesn't convince you, think about it: why would the company make such a change if their line that the vast majority of customers would save were true, and they didn't believe that it would make them more money in the long run.
> break the download limits. When ever they fix that people will be going back to anarchy mode. Right?
Nope. ISPs hate traffic that goes out over the backbone because it costs them money - IIRC all big ISPs pay by the byte as part of the peering arrangements. But all traffic internal to their network is free. The obvious thing to do:
$BIGCORP pays Telstra $BIGNUM dollars to mirror its $MEDIACRAP inside Telstra's network.
Since internal traffic is basically free of peering charges, it doesn't cost Telstra anything for two cable modem users to share data between each other's stuff. Of course, they can still monitor and charge for it if they like, leading to the second obvious thing to do:
Packets to any host other than the ones hosting mirrors of $MEDIACRAP get billed.
This gets us away from the Internet and back to the business model that cable companies understand. You can only get "free content" (TV) from "content providers" (TV stations) that your "infrastructure provider" (cable company) has "approved of" (has received $BIGNUM bucks from in order to put on their cable lineup).
As a sop to the little guy (public-access TV), you can still produce your own content, but in keeping with the TV model, you're just like the little guy in the TV world. Yes, you can host a web site (get on the air), but with a per-month bandwidth cap that ensures you look just as small and insignificant as you are. ("on the channel nobody watches", "your show gets aired at 3:00 in the morning every second Tuesday", and "look at the way the guy's old handycam washes out all the color and the big snowy skips where he must have pressed Record and Play on his second VCR to edit the video".)
The big problem (IIRC) is that when someone in Australia downloads from America, the Aussie backbone provider pays the US backbone provider, but not the other way arround!
I don't know if that's still true, but it used to be at one stage. The US arguement was basically that there was so much more US->AU traffic than the other way around that it wasn't worth the US paying for their share. It was a one way deal. The AU (and other countries) telcos weren't too pleased, but short of not letting their customeers connect to the US, their wasn't much they could do about it.
I pay per meg (uni dialup modem line). A$4 a month, + 0c/Meg local (inside a few local unis), 3c/Meg Aus, and 17c/Meg International.
The uni doesn't like us running servers either, but mainly becuase they (and the government, and the telco) subsidise it. We can't use it for commercial purposes, that that isn't as much of a problem.
They don't like semi-permenant connections when the lines are busy (which is fair enough), so they have a kickoff arrangment that starts by kicking off people who have been connected the longest when the lines get busy. Almost never happens though.
I prefer it this way. Its cheap and useable.
It's also the ISO code for the currency.
I believe you are thinking of "GBP".
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
..in relation to all of the "bad" news coming out of Australia in the last few months:
1. We currently have an overly conservative governement in place.
The current government came to power due to the economic hardships of the previous decade (thanks to a global recession), and the fact that the previous government had been in power for 13 years (ie. it was time for a change).
The current Government has been in power since 1996 and almost lost the last election, and are guaranteed to lose the next election. (They know it too).
2. Australia has the rough equivalent of the population of New York, spread across a land mass the size of the United States. This usually results in Australian's depending on its media services to highlight issues of concern. IT issues generally get drowned out by the latest political gaffe, or our sensationalistic story of the day.
IT in general doesn't sell newspapers and as such, Internet censorship and other technology-related issues are not news-worthy. It should be noted though, that the PBL-Acxiom database story made the front page of all major newspapers and TV news networks. There was significant outrage... for once I was happy.
3. Don't forget to do the maths with the exchange rates. I don't know exactly what it is at the moment, but the Aussie dollar usually sits at around $0.70 USD. That means that ISP rates and Cable-modem rates are not necessarily as expensive as you think they are, if its an Australian news article.
M@T
'sapientia potestas est'
The problem here is in the terms and conditions. Australian corporate culture has made it almost mandatory for terms and conditions to have a little clause in it that lets the corporation get away with quite a lot. It doesn't matter if it's Telstra's cable Internet dodge here, or the terms and conditions of most ISP's, or the terms and conditions of your bank account, or your insurance. They all have a "we-can-change-the-contract-but-you-cannot" clause.
This clause would say something like "We can change these terms and conditions at any time without telling you about it." Or, to paraphrase, "This piece of paper is worthless. The terms and conditions are whatever we want them to be, and we will change them whenever we please if we think we're going to make more money out of you by so doing."
The terms and conditions commonly foisted by corporate Australia onto individuals and small business also tend use terminology like "We have the right to amend these terms and conditions at any time..." Note the use of the word "right" here, implying that the corporation has a right to do as it pleases, and you can't do anything about it. A more correct word to use here would be "privilege". The word "right" is also an unusual choice, with such terms and conditions usually being full of long words with Latin and Greek roots, instead of their more easily comprehensible Germanic counterparts. This suggests that the word "right" is a deliberate emotive choice intended to bully anyone questioning the terms and conditions into thinking that this clause is above question.
In practice, such a clause is far from being a "right". Instead, you have the right to negotiate on the terms and conditions of any contract. For example, while negotiating the contract, you could strike out the whole paragraph with this clause, insert a new clause that says "These terms and conditions cannot be modified without the written consent of both parties" and get both parties to initial the change. Of course the large corporation, being the bullies that they are, would have none of that because it's a more evenly-balanced clause instead of the clause that is extremely heavily weighted in favour of the corporation.
These corporate abuses are unlikely to be stopped as long as the corporation-friendly conservative Federal government we have in place now continues in power. This week, the Employment Minister attempted to "reform" labour laws (read: bash unions again and further erode working conditions of workers). This was understandably rejected by the Senate. Strange how there was nothing in these proposed labour laws to curb the widespread exploitation of salaried employees who work an average of 5 to 10 unpaid hours a week.
--
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke
For those who failed Geography, Australia is a fair distance from the states, and trans-pacific fibre aint cheap, and since there is a slight lack of spare fibre, Telstra seems to have most of the monopoly and they can charge whatever the hell they want.
So get this. Very few ISPs in Australia even offer an unlimited time+date modem account (I happen to be one of the fortunate few who signed up with Microplex, an ISP which was recently aquired by C&W Optus, and managed to get on an unlimited account while it still existed). Not many ISPs can afford it when Telstra charge like wounded bulls (don't believe me? - http://www.telstra.net has more info than you need). If one ISP decides to offer unlimited time and data (OzEmail, Telstra with their BigPond home dialup service, corplink/ozramp have done so in the past), all the users flock to the service, clogging dialin lines and incoming bandwidth, forcing the ISP to close the service. The only three ISPs who offer unlimited time+data that I am aware of are iHug (http://www.ihug.com.au) who use satellite for externally routed traffic (laggy), Dingoblue (http://www.dingoblue.com.au - $45/month, basically resold microplex accounts under a dealership arrangement or something) and EISA (http://www.eisa.net.au) who offer unlimited time and data, and are quite reasonable (they run a nice games server network) but they kick you off every four hours to stop abuse. This is a pain when on IRC, playing a good game of Quake, or doing a "make world" on a FreeBSD box.
Okay, we can allow for that. Till the southern cross cable network (http://www.southercrosscables.com) comes in, international bandwidth will remain scarce, and yes, Telstra does deserve a little money to cover costs. But charging for a network which costs them pretty much nothing to operate in terms of whether it's 20% or 80% utilised is just beyond the joke. I was really considering Telstra BigPond Advance for a VPN, but I guess I've missed out. Thank god I didn't sign up with them these holidays.
So now everyone's hanging out for Optus@home (http://www.optushome.com.au), the cable service we've been promised for the last three and a half years by Optus. According to a phone call I made to their information centre, it *WILL* be unlimited data (yes folks!), and it will use standard DOCSIS cable modems (the telstra BPA network does not - so the market will be flooded with useless cable modems now), and it will be limited to a 128Kbit/sec uplink, so using the network for servers won't prove to be successful. IPs are also dynamically assigned (like Telstra), and running proxy servers/NAT gateways is against the Access User Policy (anyone know if they can actually detect a NAT gateway being used?). So if you want to run a server, you can either wait for optus@work (which will be bandwidth metred, but I've heard that it will have static IP addresses, IP address blocks, reverse lookup DNS records, that sorta stuff), or we can sign up with Telstra's ISDN service (around $270/month for OnRamp express, allowing you to have a perm virtual "circuit" which allows you to call the one number you need for net access) plus internet access charges (typically AU$990/month for unlimited transfer). They are prices for a 64K ISDN link. anything above usually has utilisation costs and excess bandwidth charges.
You know, I think that Australia is the only countery with a national bandwidth enquiry.
I've got a few friends of mine who are cable users. Both of them are jumping ship to optus@home as soon as they can, and one of them gets "smurfed" (flooded with data) every so often. A few months ago, he was smurfed a few GB (I think it was 3.something, meaning around AU$810 for data that wasnt used).
well in closing, I'd like to say that if Optus@home pulls off an unlimited data cable network and charges *reasonably* for it, it has the potential to change the Australian internet market.
Is this really that uncommon? We pay by the meg after a certain amount (5 or 20gb) on DSL. It's like that in a lot of regions of Canada.. it used to be a lot worse here in NB, where they were going to start charging $0.05/meg (cdn) for access over a gig. Mind you - we get very good speeds, 250+kilobytes/sec in some areas, but it can get very expensive.
What BOTHERS me is that I can write a client that might attack people I don't like with pingfloods when they're inactive on the machine, and run their bills up very high. This could easily be done given the average number of protocols you could exploit - ICQ, Quake ....
I wonder why people don't get more upset about this - the flat fee model for bandwidth is what has made the net a huge success in North America, allowing telcos to make obscene profits selling hardware and service. Mind you - pay per use / metered bandwith is what those marketing types have wet dreams over.
Ah well. U auzzies be SSLin stuff, eh. :)
Kudos..
..don't panic
I'm at university in the UK, and I can sympathise with the problems this can cause... For 100 ukp we get a permenent ethernet connection in our room, which is very tasty.
However there is a drawback. Because universities in the UK are now charged for their transatlantic bandwidth, the charges get passed down to us, on a per MB basis: each quarter, you get 5 ukp worth of credit; transfers are about 2 pence per MB.
During November, some loser decided he would smurf me though, didn't he....using American broadcast IP's. As I had a static IP, this was an inconvenience to say the least... The result: 25 ukp worth of ICMP charging! But kernel loggin on ICMP comes in handy when you have to show your sysadmin proof...even if it did mean being assigned an IP.
Making the "victim" pay for being DoS'd is a major flaw, which if protocols become metered, is going to become a major problem to the internet on which we work.
Bad ganster mvoies, maybe?
Officers Penelopy Persimmons and April Apricot closed in on Dangerous Dan.
"Watch out, Penny," cried April. "He's got a gun!"
Dangerous Dan snarled at Penny. "You'll never take me alive, copper!"
:)
... I am consistently disgusted by news of the state of the Internet industry in my homeland.
Oh sure, we can whore our coastlines out to any American movie company we want to (those portions of it that we haven't already allowed to be annexed by the Japanese, that is), and we will gladly divert taxpayer money into developing such amazingly destructive industries as tourism so that irresponsible Yanks can get their Dundee fixes any time they want to.
Give the film industry nice big fat government sanctioned kickbacks so that we can make trashy TV shows and B-level movies and be proud of it, no problem.
But when it comes to propagation of the Internet, which is guaranteed to be one of the big industry motivators for the new millenium, oh no, we have to resort to old-school big-business tactics and draconian censorship laws.
I'm ashamed.
My plans for moving back to Australia have just been extended another 5 years... which sucks, because I miss the beaches - oh wait, those are for Japanese tourist families only, now... (sarcasm)
Erck.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
I don't see what the problem is - there is adequate compensation. My unmetered traffic at present is definately not more than the 150MB difference. It's definately a benefit for me.
Drag n' Drop DVD Recommendations
I respectfully disagree. First, (in the US) there are too many providers out there that offer flat rate pricing. So implementing usage pricing is next to impossible without all of them essentially agreeing simultaneously.
Second, Moore's Law suggests that performance will double every 18 months for the same cost. So as time goes on, that T3 will cost half as much to provide. 18 months after that, 1/4 as much. Sooner or later, someone will figure out that bandwidth availability is growing faster than the number of people getting connected. That person will make a killing as the only company to offer flat rate pricing. And then everyone else will be forced to offer it, too.
The only reason that AU and UK provide usage based pricing right now is that the cost to jump the pond is prohibative. Right now, most of the info on the net is in the US. You'll note that US users don't pay anything to get data from UK or AU. That's because for all practical purposes, the US gets very little data from them and provides huge amounts of data to them. As time goes on, that will even out, and they'll provide enough valuable data to merit a US company paying for a link to AU or UK, instead of the other way around. When that happens, prices will be alleviated in UK and AU, too.
The cost of technology always goes down over time. Usage based pricing of Internet services would not survive the market. I don't think it will ever happen in the US, and I think it will eventually become a dinosaur everywhere else, too.
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
\begin{professor_of_economics}
:)
Usage based pricing isn't necessarily socially desirable. Most goods get classified as private goods, where a public good such as a park or lighthouse is distinguished by two characteristics:
1) nonrival--one person's usage doesn't diminish the value of the good to another, and
2) non-exclusion--it's difficult or impossible to stop anyone else from using it.
Another class of good is "excess capacity," which is nonrival, but possible to exclude people from, such as a movie theatre.
Internet access might (depending upon conditions) fall into this category.
Digress for a moment to your favorite public park. Suppose you go 20 times a year, and pay $100 in taxes to support it, and that you're satisfied with this arrangement. Now suppose that instead of the tax, you pay $5 every time you go. Would you still go as often? Or turn this around: you go 10 times a year, paying $10 each time. If it was a $100 tax, you would go more often (20 times).
Either way, the park is $100. Assuming that it isn't overcrowded, you're much better off with the flat rate. But take it a step further: if you pay the 10x10, you would likely be happier paying $125 for a park with unlimited use--or better yet, the $100 is all that's needed for that park, and you help build yet another one.
There's plenty of ways to manipulate these numbersl, but the point is that there are combinations where you will happily pay *more* for unlimited use than you would have paid in total for metered use. You're happier, and the park system gets better revenue.
*if* the ISP is not running into bandwidth limits (i.e., nonrival), it may see better revenue by flatrate pricing than by usage pricing, while its costs remain the same. If usage is forcing it to lay new lines, it *may* be better with metered usage. However, if technology causes capacity to grow faster than demand, this will not necessarily be the case.
For more info, take a course in public goods or finance at your favorite university
\end{professor_hawk}
I assume the 80% is the www user who clicks around and talks about "surfing" and propogates the email worms when they get them by blindly clicking.
I assume that the other 20% is advanced users and gamers.
And I really doubt that this is cost recovery. More likely profit taking.
> "(The remaining 20 per cent) are basically using the network as a data network and they're pulling vast amounts of traffic off the network."
Just magine, people using the Internet as a "data network". How the fsck else do you use the Internet?
More to the point: unless Telstra assumed that the only people interested in cablemodem service would be the casual web surfer (for whom a 56K dialup is probably quite sufficient - most dialup users sit on a 56K dialup and has it idle for 5-10 minutes while they read a large web page), if you use your broadband connection like a television or a telephone (which about the only way other than "as a data networK" that I can think of), aren't you using just as much bandwidth as if you're using it to download gigs of pr0n, warez, and MP3z? :-)
The more cynical side of me says this is the first step towards a policy of "if you use it to upload large piles of your own content or download piles of data from other cablemodem users, that's bad, but the quotas won't apply if you're downloading streaming video from our TV-based mondo-multimedia-marketing-partners, 'cuz TV is Good For You" -- i.e. the logical first step that mass media might want to take in reclaiming their role as the gatekeepers of content. After all, what would a cable company like more than to see a world where writing your own content and downloading other people's content was bad and expensive, but downloading mass-media-approved and advertiser-sponsored content was good and free.
I'm still holding out for a modem that works using quantum entanglement to send data instaneously across arbitrary distances without the use of wires.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Honestly, per-meg pricing, IMHO, is THE way to go.
At some point, there is always a shared medium. The only way to regulate these services fairly is to put a price on it. It really irritates me that @home sold me an internet connection that was '100 times faster' than my dialup, but then told me that 'Oh, you can't run internet servers. You can't use it unattended. It's for one computer only'. blah blah blah...
I want to be told 'We'll lease you the equipment for $25/mo, and we'll charge you $xx/GB, period.'
Because, in the end, the resource they claim to 'protect' with their bandwdith limits and rules about fair use is nothing more than the channel capacity. Put a fair price on the bits, and I'll pay for my fair share.
Also, yes, spam is a problem. Yes, spam will end up costing you a bit of money. 2 things to remember, though.
1) Spam messages are *small* compared to everything you do in a day. This doesn't neagate the fact that spam sucks, but the totaly bytes incurred by spam every day, and I get a lot, is dwarfed by the amount of traffic involved in simply loading up the slashdot page once, or heaven forbit, the default MSN or Netscape page.
2) If you can put a real value on traffic, then you have a leg to stand on when you charge a spammer.
3) You can force the ISP to SHOW YOU what traffic they are charging you for. They can't just throw numbers at you, saying 'you used xx bytes'. They must be able to back that up somehow. That means records of how much traffic you used, what type, and when. After all, it's only fair.
In the end, billing by usage is a good thing, but we have to make sure we do it right.
Hey, at least you guys don't have to deal with a plague of Californians in their 4WD SUV's (Let's go to Starbucks! I'll use my credit card!) I'd take the Japanese any day. At least THEY'RE polite.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
3) You can force the ISP to SHOW YOU what traffic they are charging you for. They can't just throw numbers at you, saying 'you used xx bytes'. They must be able to back that up somehow. That means records of how much traffic you used, what type, and when. After all, it's only fair.
So you want your ISP to record all of your internet activity? Remember that you'd have to pay for that too; it'll take extra processing time and hard drive space to record confirmable details (not much, though, I suppose). I'd support it if it was just "during this hour you used X bytes", but I don't want a record of IP addresses accessed or anything of that kind.
I can just see the billing disputes:
"Let's see, you spent 14 hours downloading pictures of half-dressed semi-humanoid female cartoon characters, you ran a chat server all month for people who secretly fantasize about turnips, and spent an average of 4 hours every day playing a network game of a Sailor Moon Quake mod where you shoot hearts that make the target giggle and remove a piece of clothing. If you want to make a public fuss about what we're charging you, we'd be happy to release our supporting data."
InfoWorld scribe Bob Metcalfe has been predicting for some time that Internet packet metering would happen sooner or later. In fact he has even suggested 'ePostage' for email to deal with the cost of Spam. In other words the Spammers pay to send rather than you paying to receive, putting many of them out of business. Of course you and I would have to pay to send our personal and business email as well...
But then Metcalfe is also known for repeatedly prophecying the collapse of the Internet from an overload of data, and then changing the date he predicts it will happen as each past date rolls by. Not to mention some other rather bizarre musings about the possible impact of the real world on the Internet.
Still, if we assume a metered Internet of any kind, it only seems fair that the person originating the packet (requesting it if viewing a web page or sending it if email) should pay the freight.
Jack
- -
Are you an SF Fan? Are you a Tru-Fan?
Let's simplify things. How about:
I think one of the moderation things options should be "SIG".
My blog
The real cost of spam is the time you waste sifting it out from among your worthwhile mail. There will never be a precise, objective way to calculate the damage caused by spam.
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http://www.itnews.com.au/story.cfm?id=632
http://www.it.fai rfax.com.au/breaking/19991201/A10364-1999Dec1.htm
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while i like having an unlimited account, bit taxes will eventually be necessary. i pay by the unit for electricity, natural gas, water, gasoline and many other products. why not pay for our media and internet with the same scheme. sure, we are all complaining because a 250 GB/ month limit is not a lot when you download code all of the time. but eventually we will all be downloading lots of things much bigger than linux kernels and using many more GB/mo. and when that day comes the price per GB will be very low. lower than the unlimited accounts we have today. internet deployment isn't sustainable without such a metered scheme.
lets take a look at some examples of flat fees:
the phone company: do you realize that a phone bill in the city is subsidising the cost of providing phone service to rural areas. i don't even use a phone very often because most of my communication is in person or through email. and yet i still pay the same amount each month. if i paid by how much i used and how expensive it was for the phone company to provide the service to me (not much since i live in a 4 million person city), then my phone bill would probably be 5 bucks a month instead of the 25/mo i pay now.
the cable company: i pay 35-45 dollars to media one per month for cable. and yet i only watch 5-7 stations. if i could pay by the station i would have fox (for The Simpsons), wb (for buffy), comedy central (for southpark), cartoon network (for dexter's lab) and a few educational channels like the history channel and discovery. and yet i have to pay 40 bucks a month to media one because i have no choice. if i paid by the channel then media one would know exactly what i want to watch and it would be to their advantage to offer stations i really want rather than the most popular or the cheapest stations. (ever wonder why they have so many shopping channels? because they make money off of those instead of paying for them). with metering they might start to offer stations like m2 (mtv with actual music instead of reality shows) or oddessy (with lots of muppet stuff). a metered system would do wonders for my tv viewing, but as it is i can no longer justify paying media one for 50 stations i never watch. i may switch to a dish if they can offer fox, but i'll still have to pay for much more than i watch.
summary:
flat fee: gives some people a free ride and others get screwed. this is oppression.
metering you pay as you go. you buy as much as you can afford. you save as much as you want. this is freedom.
vote for choice. vote for freedom. vote for metering and competition.
(maybe i went a little over board there. :)
Prop me up beside the jukebox if I die.
I hate to say it, but my first reaction to this ludicrious idea is that we should organize "ping parties" so that each of us will send a few megabytes of data to every single person who was either responsible for the idea of billing a person for the actions of others, or who declined to strangle this shining example that of misconceived raw capitalism in the cradle.
Let's see, if we get even 1% of the people who currently devote cycles to SETI@Home to donate bandwidth we should be able to saturated this arseholes' bandwidth. That way the don't get horrible performance and a sizeable bill. (E.g., 250 kbps, for a month solid, is over 80 GB.)
Of course, in deference to Jane's that would be cyberwar if non-Australians did it. But if it was done by Australians, within Australia, the worst they could call it is cybercivil war, and most people could call it the world's first cybercivil disobedience. That, and a damn fine example of being hoist by your own petard.
The saddest thing is that I honestly can't decide whether I'm serious about this. I have a very low opinion of DoS attackers, but I have an even lower opinion of anyone who would casually break one of the central foundations of Western Society. If a country allows you to become liable for a substantial charge for something totally beyond your control, it's only a very small step to other charming ideas we left behind at the last millennium (or at least the last century).
Some other ideas not far removed from this, at least IMnsHO? Visiting the sins of the father on the son. (Your mother died owing MegaHospital for his cancer treatment? *You* are now responsible for her unpaid $500,000 bill. Your father died in prison after serving only 12 years of a 20 year sentence? *You* will spend the next 8 years in prison finishing his term, and if you die, your child will finish the term!). Debtor's prison. Slavery (or in polite society, "indentured servitude") in lieu of payment of debt.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
It seems that Telstra's finally figured out what has been going on for a while now. Last year I remember discussing data comms issues with a number of the multimedia operations in Melbourne. They were connecting to Telstra's cable network and transferring gigabyte files between themselves for free. Basically, Telstra wasn't charging them for any packets that were kept wholly within the cable network. It was only packets that originated from outside the network that were charged for.
:)
:)
Thus, they could transfer to their hearts' content within the loop. I think that this was what the Telstra rep was referring to when they said "used as a data network" - eg: intensive data transfer between points on the cable net.
This is also similar to what happened when some ISP's changed from "all you can eat for $x per month" to time & MB charging. They had profiled their useage and discovered that 80% of their bandwidth useage was consumed by 10% of their clients. At one ISP, one guy was paying AUS$30 per month and sucking AUS$1k per month 'cos he was listening to radio, watching videos, grabbing warez, etc. After they changed to the new billing, the slurpers left (following LOTS of bitching) and their previously congested link suddenly became much more effective
Thus, it could be that Telstra have realised that their network is being overloaded and they haven't even reached the majority of the population. If they keep going this way, they'll need to upgrade their infrastructure (which has already cost them a shitload). Thus, they're clamping down on internal "freebies" to ensure that bandwidth is available for charged useage.
How they're doing it may suck, but hey, when you're looking down the barrel of a major infrastructure upgrade vs pissing off a few people - which one do you go for?
I left my body to science, but I'm afraid they've turned it down...
This is nothing new for the telecommunications industry in this Country.
Those in the US who enjoy unlimited local calls?
We dont, we pay for each one.
Those who enjoy ADSL?
Telstra here are testing it to the point of stupidity, we will be lucky to see it before 2001. And even then, only in sydney.
Those who enjoy cable in the US?
Only one, perhaps two cities(Sydney, perhaps melbourne) in all of Australia even have cable. So most of us dont even have it.
Australia is an internet Dinosaur in regards to integration of emerging technology and services for internet access, and Telstra charge ridiculous fees to users and ISP's alike. To the point where it is rare to find a decent unlimited data dialup connection.
Until we get some large well funded competition in this country(at&t, bell, MCI, sprint etc), and can loosen telstra's strangle hold on the larger internet fibre pipes and services here, we will still be that dinosaur, and will be poorer for it aswell.
Insert something insightful here, or I'll insert something painful there.
We pay 24c. And you can get as low as 18c...
Open Source. Closed Minds. We are Slashdot.
See you on #au-help ;-)
SeaBreeze
Open Source. Closed Minds. We are Slashdot.
The problem they are talking about is the cross cable traffic, not internet traffic. There is currently no metered data so long as you do not exit the cable WAN to the rest of the 'net.
What does it mean?
It means, for AU$65/month you get a 1Mb/s WAN link, regardles of distance, time or utilisation. That makes it about 100 times cheaper than ISDN, and about 500 times cheaper than a 2Mb frame link. It's safer, and more reliable, and so long as you don't turn off you box, you can run a Linux based router, with software firewall, on a 486 with cable connection for about three months on the same IP. IP changes? no biggy, just manually update your routing table and viola.
This is what the 20% (more like 5%) of people they're referring to are doing. I know, I suggested it to our Co. for a cheap alternative to Frame (Melborne/Sydney/Brisbane) plus, you get net access direct in each city.
I understand where they are coming from but they are going about it the wrong way. They should be metering traffic on a port to port basis, thereby selecting the difference between standard internet and mali et al traffic.
Dan. -- So what if it's spelt wrong, nobody's perfect
Why aren't they? The same reason as lawmakers in the States aren't, when they pull stunts like CDA and Son Of CDA
Open Source. Closed Minds. We are Slashdot.
BPD users can happily do whatever the hell we like. Of course we get gouged. Just not as much. :)
Yeah, my access costs SUCK. $435 ($300 US or so)a month for 128kbps ISDN plus 19c/mb received.
I like it tho :)
Open Source. Closed Minds. We are Slashdot.