Slashdot Mirror
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.
"
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.
... 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. --
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.
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."