Comcast to start charging fees based on how much you download...

[Attic]

This follows a general succesful business practice. Create a road block on an otherwise open road, then charge to get around the block.


Business/government has gotten fairly clever at creating artificial road blocks into peoples daily activities and endeavors. I don't think the data download cap vs a guaranteed speed is all that clever and I hope it fails for that reason.

Obscene permits and government control of industry and business is not that clever either, and it works... so I guess there's hope for Comcast.

 

[Attic]

I don't have a problem with that either... SO LONG AS... it's "fair". Meaning, that the price floor is a minimum monthly cost of something on the order of $5. NOT that ISP charge a price floor equal to what they used to charge for "unlimited" internet, and then charge data overages ON TOP OF THAT. Now that's horseshit.

If I only NEF on forums, and don't file-share, then I would expect to pay SIGNIFICANTLY LESS every month, than I currently do.

Granted, I have FIOS, and I share Linux ISOs using my NAS. I think, that for usages like mine, I would still hope that ISPs would offer "unlimited" plans, at certain best-effort speeds.

IOW, I would be for metered billing, if pricing accurately reflected usage, which I believe for the majority of broadband ISP customers, would result in LESS revenue, not more.

They are not doing this to be fair, they are doing this to exploit. The average user will pay substantially more according to their models of price per gigabyte, not less.


Competition should blow these kind of shenanigans out of the water, but most of us only have on option to our home for high speed internet.

 

[cubby1223]

I don't have a problem with that either... SO LONG AS... it's "fair". Meaning, that the price floor is a minimum monthly cost of something on the order of $5. NOT that ISP charge a price floor equal to what they used to charge for "unlimited" internet, and then charge data overages ON TOP OF THAT. Now that's horseshit.

Nothing is ever "fair" to everyone. Your concept of what is fair is different from another person's concept of fair. Just keep that in consideration. Someone I know actually once called comcast demanding a refund because she didn't use her computer for two consecutive days. She believed it was fair to demand a refund for unused service.

 

[realibrad]

This stupid debate again? *sigh* There is nothing inherently evil with an ISP charging per gigabyte versus a flat monthly fee.

I, for one, absolutely do believe someone who only checks email once every day *should* pay less than someone who streams a hundred gigabytes every single day.

So long as the government does not subsidize the ISP. The problem we have now is was eski said. The government protects them from competition and they get to keep the profits. He is for protecting the ISPs from competition and limiting their profits, while I am for removing their protections and letting them try to make profits.

I have brought this up before, but Google is going to be getting more disruptive. The main argument that people make for protecting ISPs is that without that protection, they would only build networks where they could reduce risk and make money. Google found a way to test the market and build the network.

What google does is survey the places they want to move in and build. If they get enough of a response, they build.

ISPs have always claimed that building more would be impossible because of lack of demand, yet Google has found a way to give more to its customers and not lose money on its projects. This recently forced Timewarner to increase its bandwidth its customers without an increase in price.

If we want more bandwidth we need to pick, either state owned, or free market.

 

[Sonikku]

Nothing is ever "fair" to everyone. Your concept of what is fair is different from another person's concept of fair. Just keep that in consideration. Someone I know actually once called comcast demanding a refund because she didn't use her computer for two consecutive days. She believed it was fair to demand a refund for unused service.

Ok, then let's open the floodgates to competition and let that sort it out then. We'll see what flies and what doesn't when they aren't the sole source of internet in a city.

 

[fskimospy]

So long as the government does not subsidize the ISP. The problem we have now is was eski said. The government protects them from competition and they get to keep the profits. He is for protecting the ISPs from competition and limiting their profits, while I am for removing their protections and letting them try to make profits.

I have brought this up before, but Google is going to be getting more disruptive. The main argument that people make for protecting ISPs is that without that protection, they would only build networks where they could reduce risk and make money. Google found a way to test the market and build the network.

What google does is survey the places they want to move in and build. If they get enough of a response, they build.

ISPs have always claimed that building more would be impossible because of lack of demand, yet Google has found a way to give more to its customers and not lose money on its projects. This recently forced Timewarner to increase its bandwidth its customers without an increase in price.

If we want more bandwidth we need to pick, either state owned, or free market.

To be clear, I am explicitly against protecting the ISPs from competition, I would just go about it differently than you would.

 

[BxgJ]

Data caps do not take into consideration who else might be using the pipe, only the amount of data transmitted. The points you bring up are better for arguing that people should pay for a guaranteed amount of speed, which is of course what we do now.



I didn't argue that it didn't count because it wasn't physical, I said it didn't count because the transmission cost is basically the same no matter how much data you send.

The fact that you aren't taking a physical object is also an important argument when discussing piracy and should absolutely not be ignored or dismissed as inane, but it's an entirely different discussion.

Basically agree here.

There are two different things being talked about here with regards to data caps. Data caps limit the total amount of data transferred over a period of time, usually a month. The discussion about the cost of infrastructure is not the same thing. That limits the total throughput of data at any one point in time. Just as velocity is not the same as distance traveled.

Isn't network management (throttling) a better way to deal with that? Data caps don't distinguish whether you are using the network when it's congested or not. They would be very effective, however, at protecting legacy tv revenue from cord cutting....

As for transmission costs and utilities, shouldn't we consider the cost of generation as well? The cost to generate the electricity, clean the water, etc. are directly proportional to how much a person uses, and at least in the case of electricity are a significant portion of the total cost. The infrastructure argument for metered isp billing, that more usage equals more cost, seems to be a network capacity issue, which is entirely different from generation cost. If we exclude network maintenance, which is always present for both utilities and isp's, isn't increasing network capacity for more bandwidth just an infrastructure upgrade/investment, and not directly proportional to any one user's usage?

 

[Sonikku]

So long as the government does not subsidize the ISP. The problem we have now is was eski said. The government protects them from competition and they get to keep the profits. He is for protecting the ISPs from competition and limiting their profits, while I am for removing their protections and letting them try to make profits.

I would prefer the latter. But at this point either scenario would likely be less bad than the current one.

 

[cubby1223]

I didn't argue that it didn't count because it wasn't physical, I said it didn't count because the transmission cost is basically the same no matter how much data you send.

The fact that you aren't taking a physical object is also an important argument when discussing piracy and should absolutely not be ignored or dismissed as inane, but it's an entirely different discussion.

You're so wrapped up in your need to feel right you cannot grasp the mere concept of an alternate point of view.

Bandwidth is not unlimited. Every point to point transmission medium has a hard limit of how much can be transmitted within a given time period. There is a cost to building and maintaining that link. Take that cost, divide by capacity, that is your cost per gigabyte.



The water analogy? I don't know, did the municipal service have to spend money to cause the clouds to drop their raindrops into the lakes and rivers so they could divert it to your house? How much did they pay for the water? Nothing. Therefore water services should be a flat-rate, correct?

The local McDonald's in town, since the cost to build the building, and the grills and fryers and other appliances, and labor costs, completely dwarfs the costs per food item used. Therefore every fast food joint should be a flat-fee all-you-can-eat buffet, correct? Otherwise you'll be upset? Because, analogies!



For years your charged price per gigabyte downloaded has been subsidized by other people. Now that it is changing, you want to resist and continue receiving your subsidy on the backs of other people. How does that make you feel? Does it make you feel like providing another analogy?

 

[realibrad]

To be clear, I am explicitly against protecting the ISPs from competition, I would just go about it differently than you would.

Don't just dangle that, finish it.

I am all for letting ISPs build if they are willing to pay, and get consent. I personally would not let 10 different ISPs build lines to my house, but I would like having more than just ATT and Comcast. I really dont get having a single type of ISP in a city.

 

[Svnla]

My local cable ISP has a limit of 250 GB for my $40/month of 50 Mb down/5 Mb up and so far, I hadn't use even 1/2 of that allocation for that last few months.

I do miss the unlimit of DSL/U-verse from ATT but only 10 Mb down max out at my location (and with the same price as my local cable ISP).

 

[BxgJ]

Nothing is ever "fair" to everyone. Your concept of what is fair is different from another person's concept of fair. Just keep that in consideration. Someone I know actually once called comcast demanding a refund because she didn't use her computer for two consecutive days. She believed it was fair to demand a refund for unused service.

I can agree that nothing is 'fair' to everyone.

The person you mentioned probably did not think of the cost of the infrastructure to service her residence. That is present whether or not the network is used. There is also a cost to using the network.

What some here are saying is that the majority of the cost for the isp is infrastructure related, both installation and maintenance, and not usage related.

edit - can we please distinguish here between data usage and bandwidth (throughput)? These are different issues....

 

[fskimospy]

You're so wrapped up in your need to feel right you cannot grasp the mere concept of an alternate point of view.

What are you babbling about?

Bandwidth is not unlimited. Every point to point transmission medium has a hard limit of how much can be transmitted within a given time period. There is a cost to building and maintaining that link. Take that cost, divide by capacity, that is your cost per gigabyte.

Of course bandwidth is not unlimited, but what you're saying is again about speed, not about quantity of data transmitted, because network usage doesn't work like that.

Your calculation for cost per gigabyte would be much more salient if all of those points were always running at capacity, which they are not. The costs associated with data transmission are about peak capacity, not dollars or cents per gigabyte.

It costs an ISP effectively nothing to send data at 4AM when network capacity is at very low utilization. It costs an ISP a lot to send that same data at the same speed at peak times. Data caps make no distinction between these two times despite that being by far the most important part, which is one reason why they are stupid. The ISP pays to build and maintain that line whether it is operating at peak capacity or at 0% capacity.

The water analogy? I don't know, did the municipal service have to spend money to cause the clouds to drop their raindrops into the lakes and rivers so they could divert it to your house? How much did they pay for the water? Nothing. Therefore water services should be a flat-rate, correct?

Water can't simply be delivered to your house, it has to be stored, treated, etc. The costs of this scale with the amount that is used, unlike data. This is a stupid analogy and you should know that.

The local McDonald's in town, since the cost to build the building, and the grills and fryers and other appliances, and labor costs, completely dwarfs the costs per food item used. Therefore every fast food joint should be a flat-fee all-you-can-eat buffet, correct? Otherwise you'll be upset? Because, analogies!

Hey look, another stupid analogy. Food costs are absolutely not a trivial amount of total costs at a McDonalds. So just like water, they most certainly scale costs along with quantity. Where did you get such a silly idea in your head?

For years your charged price per gigabyte downloaded has been subsidized by other people. Now that it is changing, you want to resist and continue receiving your subsidy on the backs of other people. How does that make you feel? Does it make you feel like providing another analogy?

Again, this is based on a pretty flawed understanding of how this actually works. As for how I feel, your question mostly makes me sad about your ability to construct analogies, haha.

 

[fskimospy]

edit - can we please distinguish here between data usage and bandwidth (throughput)? These are different issues....

Yes, I wish more people understood that.

 

[fskimospy]

Don't just dangle that, finish it.

I am all for letting ISPs build if they are willing to pay, and get consent. I personally would not let 10 different ISPs build lines to my house, but I would like having more than just ATT and Comcast. I really dont get having a single type of ISP in a city.

As I think I've mentioned before, I'm in favor of forcing ISPs to lease their 'last mile' lines to any company who is willing to pay for it, kind of like what we do with power companies.

 

[Moonbeam]

You're so wrapped up in your need to feel right you cannot grasp the mere concept of an alternate point of view.

Bandwidth is not unlimited. Every point to point transmission medium has a hard limit of how much can be transmitted within a given time period. There is a cost to building and maintaining that link. Take that cost, divide by capacity, that is your cost per gigabyte.



The water analogy? I don't know, did the municipal service have to spend money to cause the clouds to drop their raindrops into the lakes and rivers so they could divert it to your house? How much did they pay for the water? Nothing. Therefore water services should be a flat-rate, correct?

The local McDonald's in town, since the cost to build the building, and the grills and fryers and other appliances, and labor costs, completely dwarfs the costs per food item used. Therefore every fast food joint should be a flat-fee all-you-can-eat buffet, correct? Otherwise you'll be upset? Because, analogies!



For years your charged price per gigabyte downloaded has been subsidized by other people. Now that it is changing, you want to resist and continue receiving your subsidy on the backs of other people. How does that make you feel? Does it make you feel like providing another analogy?

What about you with your alternative point of view openness. Can you get the fact that some of us don't like the notion of paying per usage when we are locked into a single provider? How about the notion of government owned internet that provides rural areas with high speed at the expense of people in cities so that all US citizens have high bandwidth high capacity internet that put AT&T Comcast and Time Warner out of business.

 

[realibrad]

As I think I've mentioned before, I'm in favor of forcing ISPs to lease their 'last mile' lines to any company who is willing to pay for it, kind of like what we do with power companies.

Would you regulate the prices of the last mile? I would imagine that an ISP would want to charge as much as possible.

Would the government subsidize someone to build more connections last mile? This would be related to the first question. If ISPs were forced to lease out their lines for too low of a price, then they would not want to invest in building lines that gave a very low profit margin. This would reduce access, so the only way I can see around that would be to have the city or other government body pay to have the lines built.

 

[trenchfoot]

I have little faith that our government regulatory agencies that have been thoroughly infiltrated by corporate owned stooges or corrupted into their control will stand the test of integrity, not when so much influence money can be spread around that it creates a self-sustaining bureaucracy all of its own.

 

[theeedude]

Seriously? You're going to move from an arbitrarily limit to a hard limit? That's your great plan to thwart the powers that be?

Go right ahead and switch!

If they are both capped, I'll go to the cheapest one. What's the point of high speeds if you can cap out in a few hours when you actually use them? I'll just get something good enough for less money.

 

[Screech]

Not quite the same subject but always somewhat relevant:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0sAVtOt2wA

 

[Atomic Playboy]

What's the point of high speeds if you can cap out in a few hours when you actually use them?

To get things faster? If I drive faster on my commute, that doesn't mean I drive right past my office and keep going until I've reached a certain amount of time driven; it just means I arrive sooner. If I'm downloading a 10 GB file and it finishes quicker because the ISP doubled my speed, I'm not required to turn around and start downloading a new file. I don't have to keep my bandwidth use full just because it's available.

 

[theeedude]

To get things faster? If I drive faster on my commute, that doesn't mean I drive right past my office and keep going until I've reached a certain amount of time driven; it just means I arrive sooner. If I'm downloading a 10 GB file and it finishes quicker because the ISP doubled my speed, I'm not required to turn around and start downloading a new file. I don't have to keep my bandwidth use full just because it's available.

If it can stream 1080p, it's fast enough for me.

 

[fskimospy]

Would you regulate the prices of the last mile? I would imagine that an ISP would want to charge as much as possible.

Yes, definitely, in much the same way we do with electric lines, etc already.

Would the government subsidize someone to build more connections last mile? This would be related to the first question. If ISPs were forced to lease out their lines for too low of a price, then they would not want to invest in building lines that gave a very low profit margin. This would reduce access, so the only way I can see around that would be to have the city or other government body pay to have the lines built.

In the UK they force companies to lease out their lines. The government doesn't pay for it or subsidize construction as far as I know and I'm not aware of any issues with the UK not having additional capacity built. Their internet is both cheaper and faster than ours.

 

[realibrad]

To get things faster? If I drive faster on my commute, that doesn't mean I drive right past my office and keep going until I've reached a certain amount of time driven; it just means I arrive sooner. If I'm downloading a 10 GB file and it finishes quicker because the ISP doubled my speed, I'm not required to turn around and start downloading a new file. I don't have to keep my bandwidth use full just because it's available.

It becomes a lot easier for people to fill up their cap if they have faster speeds.

A family can easily hit a cap by watching hulu/netflix.

2-3 GB an hour x 4 people and 1 hr of watching is 8-12GB a day if all watched only 1 hr online each. 240-360 gigs for 30 days. 1 Hr of shows per person is not a crazy amount. Weekends would/could easily go over that. Keep in mind that is only watching shows. Start including browsing, files, gaming and you start to see how quickly it could all go.

 

[BxgJ]

Of course bandwidth is not unlimited, but what you're saying is again about speed, not about quantity of data transmitted, because network usage doesn't work like that.

Your calculation for cost per gigabyte would be much more salient if all of those points were always running at capacity, which they are not. The costs associated with data transmission are about peak capacity, not dollars or cents per gigabyte.

It costs an ISP effectively nothing to send data at 4AM when network capacity is at very low utilization. It costs an ISP a lot to send that same data at the same speed at peak times. Data caps make no distinction between these two times despite that being by far the most important part, which is one reason why they are stupid. The ISP pays to build and maintain that line whether it is operating at peak capacity or at 0% capacity.

I was wondering about the details of this, don't the tier one transit providers bill the isp's based on bandwidth? Some quick research seemed to indicate this is at least somewhat accurate.