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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.
"
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.
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.
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.
There are many problems with Australia in regards to the Internet.
Of course the people probably most outraged over the cable modem fiasco are the ones playing network games, chewing through large amounts of bandwidth on the cable network. They didn't have to pay before, and suddenly they are paying LOTS for what they believed was a free service.
Remember one thing. We are an isolated country. Unlike the US, which has borders with Mexico and Canada, we have no such luxury. The Island nation. We also have a lot of land that has very few people spread across large areas of it. Providing services for them all (and usually at a flat rate across all areas) is a difficult task. Things you might take for granted aren't happening here. No DSL (due to Telstra not allowing Vendors access to their copper - Telstra want to run DSL services once they are ready, and not before). No multi-vendor infrastructure. I guess you can see where this is heading.
... 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
\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}
> "(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.
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.
... that's because you don't understand what they're saying about you...
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."
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.