AT&T/Comcast Consider Aussie-Style Bandwidth Caps 512
LazySiow writes "Having looked at Australia's pioneering efforts in cappedband services,
AT&T Broadband and Comcast are considering applying download caps of their own. Since the two approved a merger proposal last week, they will be the largest broadband provider in the States, and will not only affect a large percentage of of users, it will set a large and potentially unstoppable precedent for caps all around the country."
Their prerogative. (Score:5, Insightful)
-John
Re:Their prerogative. (Score:5, Interesting)
Sympatico changing to 10 Gbyte (Score:4, Informative)
$30.00 (Canadian) maximum extra charge/month on anything over 10Gbytes upload or download.
To be fair to Sympatico, their servers tend to be always available.
Re:Sympatico changing to 10 Gbyte (Score:3, Interesting)
Charged at $8 per gigabyte over the cap. Reliable estimates by people in the know estimate that Bell's actual costs for bandwidth are in the range of 50 cents to $1 per gigabyte.
And the $30 maximum charge? The Sympatico website CLEARLY states that it is TEMPORARY.
There are a number of DSL competitors who give higher caps and charge between $3 and $1 per gigabyte for bandwidth. And they have to pay Bell for transit over the local loops!
(Thank God the ILEC, Bell, isn't screwing the competitors over wrt provisioning like the US ILEC's did to their competition.)
Unfortunately the Cable companies up here haven't yet been forced to share their infrastructure in the same way.
Capping spam (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Capping spam (Score:5, Insightful)
We've always been paying for spam via higher access charges, cost of ISP resources, equipment, etc. Nobody really cares because it's an abstract cost. But in a system where, after a certain transfer threshold, you are charged per byte(or megabyte, gigabyte, whatever) i can tell you EXACTLY how much any given spam is costing me. Sure, it's likely a trivial sum, but multiply it by the huge volume sent to everyone, and we'll have a rough idea of how much money spam costs the recipiants. That number might not be so trivial.
Then again, maybe it will be and we would need to rethink the "it costs us money" line from the antispam arguement. (not to try to vindicate spam in anyway, it mearly helps to have the facts straight) Anyway, i'm curious about it. Anyone have numbers for this?
btw, similar arguements can be made for popups and banner ads for stuff i'd never buy anyway.
Re:Their prerogative. (Score:2)
Re:Their prerogative. (Score:3, Insightful)
I just got a snail mail from Comcast advertising a new service (at least in northern VA)... It is based on "allowing the whole family to be online at the same time" plan. Yes folks, these are the same high speed providers that cry wolf and complain about bandwidth hogs.
A 802.11b wireless CM router all in one unit and 2/256 service for $64.99 with up to 5 machines. I currently pay $49 +$5 CM rental and only get 1.5/128 connectivity for one machine. So now we want your whole family to enjoy the internet all at once [until you hit that bandwidth limit].
The advertisment has nice color pictures of the whole family online d/l things, graphs of speed comparisons of large media files, and all the power of the internet etc.., I saw nothing about d/l limits. One week they offer something but the next they are trying some behind the scene limits? They are advertising one thing to get your money then switch you later. BAIT AND SWITCH.
Another twist is their usenet service. They outsource and provide 1GB with Giganews paid per month and if you want more they over a special deal with Giganews to get a discount on other packages. Well guess what, I did. I got a second account for 6 more GB/month and I use it all every month.
Re:Their prerogative. (Score:5, Insightful)
We on the other hand think that unlimited means no download limits and no bandwidth caps. Unfortunately that won't ever happen. "Unlimited Internet" is not the same as "unlimited bandwidth" or "unlimited downloads", so a company saying "unlimited Internet" is correct from their FUD-ish marketing point-of-view.
To me, if you want unbridled access, you need to be purchasing an unbridled pipe, such as a T-carrier line. It really aggravates me when people complain that they can't download 50 gigs of data in 10 seconds on a USD$39.99 Internet connection. It's like the people in my office that complain about rush hour traffic every morning yet refuse to take the toll roads that are often less congested. Pony up some cash if you want the luxury of faster access!
We shouldn't expect some kind of uber-bandwidth for a few bucks a month. Probably not a popular opinion with the crowd here, but it's my take on this whole broadband-in-the-home thing. Now if the company tries to pawn off unlimited downloading on the cheap, well that company deserves to be held to their advertisment.
It is NOT false advertising! (Score:4, Funny)
As a result of the dot bomb and stock market downturn, a lot of unemployed MBA's have sought work elsewhere. Some have gone to ISP's, some to Cell Phone services companies, some to Cable Television service providers. All have one thing in common - they are implementing the standard b-school "Suck 'em In and Fleece Them" tiered service model:
Dear Valued Customers,
We are pleased to announce our new tiered service plans, specially designed to suit your specific needs. Now there is a plan for everyone! You may choose from:
$9.99 Unlimited - The basic unlimited. There are limits and they're pretty damned low. No one will ever want this ( we just put it here so that our ads can scream "$9.99 UNLIMITED ! ")
$19.99 More Unlimited Plan - still limited. Just not as limited as the Unlimited Plan.
$29.99 Super Unlimited Plan - more unlimited than the More Unlimited Plan but less unlimited than the Ultra Unlimited Plan.
$49.99 Ultra Unlimited Plan - this one is really, well, unlimited. OK, not really.
$99.99 Mega Unlimited - Awesome! Really, really unlimited (on Tuesday nights only from 8:00 p.m. to midnight).
$299.99 Ultra Supermega Supreme Unlimited. - Totally unlimited. Some restrictions apply. See contract for details. Offer void where people eat toast and in the state of Tennessee. Available only to new customers. Who live in Pittsburgh. On 4th Avenue. In a red house. With blue trim.
$122,999,999.99 The Totally Ultra Supermega Supreme Buy the Damned Company Unlimited Plan. The most unlimited of all the unlimited plans. You can truly use all you want! Almost.
Note: All plans are subject to cancellation if we feel like it.
Re:I have ben capped since @home went away (Score:5, Informative)
capping your bandwidth is like having a speed limit on highways. most people don't have a problem with that. its when you start telling people how long a distance they can travel with their vehicles every month that they get pissed off.
two separate issues here.
Do this a different way. (Score:5, Interesting)
Sure, Comcast, go ahead and get upset when I download an ISO image of Red Hat at peak hours. But give me a way to get the ISO during non-peak times.
This needs to be implemented by a "download agent" installed on my system that can consult yours and operate only when traffic is not saturated.
If you don't have this, then don't complain.
Re:Do this a different way. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Do this a different way. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I have ben capped since @home went away (Score:4, Funny)
No, it IS telling me how long a distance I can travel. At maximum allowable speed in New Mexico (75mph) I can travel at most 55,800 miles in month (75x24x31) and THAT PISSES ME OFF!
Re:I have ben capped since @home went away (Score:4, Insightful)
Unless you consider "move" a choice, which believe it or not is exactly what I was once told by my cable company (before they were bought by TCI, later bought by AT&T). They had the nerve to tell me to my face that they don't have a monopoly on cable TV because I am free to move! With this attitude, is it any surprise they will cap downloads? It's simple math: Those who use the most have the least option to switch, so they're the most likely to pay whatever you charge. Those who use the least could always go back to dialup Juno for email, so you have to treat them nice.
Be Proactive... (Score:2, Funny)
AOL (Score:3, Funny)
I thought AOL already imposed CAPS ON THEIR USERS
On The Plus Side...... (Score:2, Interesting)
On a more serious note, the Rogers answer was to cap speeds as opposed to a bandwidth cap. I went from 600kbp/s down to 150, and an upload cap of 40kbp/s which I can never achieve. =)
Re:On The Plus Side...... (Score:2, Informative)
Actually, Rogers capped the downstream rate at 1500kbits/sec, and the upstream rate at 190kbits a second, down from the old @Home setting on 3000kbit down, 400kbit up. This is just about half. Actually getting these speeds aren't really possible, Rogers doesn't have the infrastructure to support it.
Having said that, Rogers plans to introduce *byte* caps, where there is a monthly limit on the amount of data you transfer in January of 2003, with billing for overusage beginning in March. It'll probably mimic the Sympatico caps, for anyone who cares.
Now what am we gonna do? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Now what am we gonna do? (Score:3, Insightful)
No, thats not the idea. The corps want you to spend more money on your broadband, not download less.
So, you can download both redhat and pr0n, but you will be priced a bit higher. Now how much is that RedHat iso worth to you ?
Vote with your Dollar!!! (Score:5, Informative)
The day it is introduced, call your provider and let them know you will be canceling due to this restriction. Have new service with another company installed and cancel on the last day of your billing cycle!
Re:Vote with your Dollar!!! (Score:5, Interesting)
If all providers cap at the same time, then all of them make more money and nobody loses out...
Never doubt the power of the dollar to induce competitors to work together to milk more money out of their customers.
I agree though that companies should NOT be allowed to advertise their service as unlimited in this case.
Some sort of FCC/CRTC regulation is needed where companies MUST include information on bandwidth and transfer caps in their advertising, and not in 3 point font at the bottom of a TV commercial or print ad.
Re:Vote with your Dollar!!! (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, only temporarily. Very quickly, geeks across the country begin buying T-1's and starting their own, small, unlimited, ISPs.
What's more, when you become the ISP, you can tell the RIAA/MPAA to fuck off when they send you a cease & desist letter about one of your customers. You might end up in court (for sure, if you are so blatant about it) but that's quite rare.
Re:Vote with your Dollar!!! (Score:5, Informative)
Get real, I own a very small ISP, and there is next to no money to be made in that buisness. There is NO SUCH thing as free bandwidth! It costs me lots of money to buy my bandwidth. My customers pay me for thier usage, and I keep tabs on how much is used and when. Otherwise I would have one or two users killing the service for everyone else.
Now, a coop might be able to do such a thing if you have close proximity and can use wireless for distribution. But it requires that someone be responsible for the incoming line, and to deal with things, like DNS servers, email servers, IP allocation, or NATing and firewalling, etc. If you have a tight knit group of geeks, who do not quibble about usage and such, and you all can get along, you are set.
Nice idea in theory, but back to reality for the majority of people out there... In practice there are many more variables/problems/issues to deal with when running a coop or an small buisness. There is liability, accouting, infrastructure, capitalization, to name a few. The sad truth is that the Cable providers will charge as much as they can to skim the cream off the top of the customer base. Those with few other options are not going to start a Coop, or thier own ISP just to get unlimited bandwidth, it is too har and time consuming. The economics are not there...
Re:Vote with your Dollar!!! (Score:4, Insightful)
personally, i hope they cap speeds, not download limits. my cable company (time warner, who privides road runner) already has an option for "business lines", cable lines that download twice as fast and upload several times faster, for about double the cost per month. there are even more choices beyond that. while i dont need the extra bandwidth, id gladly pay an extra 10 bucks a month for my service now.
Re:Vote with your Dollar!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
The funny thing is, no there aren't.
Hear me out.
If you're the kind of user who downloads a gig a day, runs a web server, a MUD, a webcast radio station, and several sessions of KaZaA, the providers don't want you. They'd much rather do without your 30 or 40 dollars or whatever you spend a month than have to spend more providing you with bandwidth and technical support. To them you're more trouble than you're worth, and if by instituting a cap they lose you, well that's the price they're willing to pay.
ISP's need to think. (Score:5, Insightful)
If ISP's would embrace people that want to run their own web servers, P2P, etc they could reduce a lot of their upstream bandwidth usage. How many people look for local news on a server half way across the country? How many check their email on servers sitting somewhere at Yahoo? How many download the newest game, movie, or music from a distant P2P peer? That is a lot of bandwidth they don't need to waste.
Smart ISP's would provide community sites within their own network (and encourage power users to make their own sites) and provide nice web-based mail. A local IM server would be nice. Offering good proxy servers for web-surfing and a local P2P server that users can connect through rather than using servers elsewhere on the Internet. All are good ways to reduce the ISP's bandwidth usage while keeping happy customers.
I've seen community ran wireless networks that offer all these things and do a very good job at it. If ISP's aren't careful with their limits eventually enough users will join such community network projects that a good deal of the ISP's business may suffer. Wireless networks now are pathworking their way into covering most major cities and even rural areas. At the same time advances are being made in long haul signals for wireless. Eventually this will be a threat to the ISP/telco business and they just accelerate the shift by driving away power users.
Re:Vote with your Dollar!!! (Score:3, Funny)
Condalezza Rice and Michael Powell should get together and have the worlds stupidest politician. Through its powers of super nepotism it could grow up to have the diction of George Bush Mk II, the spelling and insight of Dan Quayle, the timing of Jimmy Carter, and the moral fiber of Ronald Regean.
Re:Vote with your Dollar!!! (Score:3, Informative)
Here (New Zealand) all broadband ISPs have data caps (eg. 10Gb free per month and 10c/Mb after), but many only apply this limit to international traffic, and offer free national traffic.
This means that the ISP is fast for international traffic because it isn't full of people leeching warez from america, and fast for national traffic because there is a lot of national broadband infrastructure.
It also means that I download my stuff from people in the same country --- and let those who do have unlimited access for whatever reason (eg. works at a big ISP) do all the importing, and then several people download it from this person's web server, and then everybody else can grab it from the national P2P network [p2p.net.nz], which is not subject to throttling [idg.net.nz] like the international networks.
Since ISPs introduced these caps, my P2P usage (and that of many others) has increased. The ISPs save money and provide better service too, the only losers are the vampires who continuously download without giving anything back.
Upwards and onwards!
I imagine ISPs in the USA may offer similar free-for-this-state traffic, and cap inter-state and international traffic..?
Re:Vote with your Dollar!!! (Score:5, Interesting)
traceroute to 128.101.101.101 (128.101.101.101), 30 hops max, 38 byte packets
1 xxxxxxxxxxx.rr.com (24.xxx.xxx.xxx) 1.480 ms 1.212 ms 3.600 ms
2 10.y.y.y (10.y.y.y) 12.314 ms 19.837 ms 8.476 ms
3 mplsmn01-rtr2-srp-2-0.mn.rr.com (24.26.162.2) 19.682 ms 9.169 ms 8.995 ms
4 mplsmn01-rtr1-srp-2-0.mn.rr.com (24.26.162.1) 20.112 ms 12.612 ms 12.008 ms
5 pop1-chi-P3-1.atdn.net (66.185.141.89) 28.199 ms 26.546 ms 23.704 ms
6 bb1-chi-P0-0.atdn.net (66.185.141.84) 24.655 ms 25.107 ms 36.789 ms
7 bb1-kcy-P7-0.atdn.net (66.185.152.125) 40.153 ms 38.884 ms 36.182 ms
8 bb2-kcy-P1-0.atdn.net (66.185.152.127) 38.371 ms 71.896 ms 48.152 ms
9 bb2-den-P7-0.atdn.net (66.185.152.188) 48.200 ms 48.099 ms 50.597 ms
10 bb1-den-P1-0.atdn.net (66.185.152.136) 48.182 ms 48.030 ms 56.077 ms
11 bb1-sun-P5-0.atdn.net (66.185.152.253) 74.332 ms 72.269 ms 73.656 ms
12 bb2-sun-P1-0.atdn.net (66.185.152.1) 104.375 ms 73.225 ms 73.054 ms
13 bb2-las-P7-0.atdn.net (66.185.152.22) 79.735 ms 81.554 ms 80.461 ms
14 pop2-las-P1-0.atdn.net (66.185.137.163) 91.439 ms 78.519 ms 92.356 ms
15 aol-gw.la2ca.ip.att.net (192.205.32.101) 98.355 ms 79.452 ms 81.495 ms
16 gbr3-p50.la2ca.ip.att.net (12.123.28.130) 83.982 ms 99.443 ms 93.248 ms
17 gbr4-p20.sffca.ip.att.net (12.122.2.69) 92.254 ms 90.989 ms 112.171 ms
18 gbr3-p50.dvmco.ip.att.net (12.122.2.66) 111.926 ms 110.579 ms 110.642 ms
19 gbr1-p100.dvmco.ip.att.net (12.122.5.18) 115.916 ms 111.989 ms 111.105 ms
20 gar2-p360.dvmco.ip.att.net (12.123.36.137) 111.924 ms 111.556 ms 112.587 ms
21 12.124.158.46 (12.124.158.46) 115.931 ms 120.008 ms 118.364 ms
22 den-core-02.tamerica.net (205.171.16.17) 116.331 ms 117.854 ms 115.497 ms
23 min-core-02.tamerica.net (205.171.8.98) 151.716 ms 141.178 ms 144.119 ms
24 min-edge-01.inet.qwest.net (205.171.128.10) 156.578 ms 141.673 ms 152.590 ms
25 65.121.10.62 (65.121.10.62) 151.691 ms 141.701 ms 242.474 ms
26 tc2-qtr.northernlights.gigapop.net (192.42.152.129) 145.372 ms 144.367 ms 141.991 ms
27 tc3x.router.umn.edu (160.94.26.97) 144.602 ms 143.957 ms 147.239 ms
28 ntc-1-rsmx.rswitch.umn.edu (160.94.26.1) 144.811 ms 148.737 ms 144.713 ms
29 ns.nts.umn.edu (128.101.101.101) 145.145 ms 161.426 ms 144.250 ms
Note: the private network (10.0.0.0/8) is not mine -- it's Time Warner's.
Even in the same state, I'm bouncing through 26 hops to reach the U of MN's border. More to the point, if I'm reading this right, the path on atdn.net is MSP-> Chicago-> Kansas City-> Denver-> sun(?)-> Las Vegas-> L.A.-> San Francisco-> Denver (again)-> Finally, back to Minnesota.
Jebus, that sucks.
Welcome to the 80/20 rule. (Score:5, Insightful)
Suddenly you have effectively twice as much bandwidth for your remaining users as before. With decreased expansion costs and increased service-levels for your remaining customers, you could quite easily profit from your customers "voting with their feet".
I bet the cable companies are just shaking in their boots over your threat to leave.
Flat-rate pricing is a myth. It does far more damage to the Internet than it heals, since the need to artificially prevent people from fully utilising their connections without charging them more is is the cause of stupid rules like "You can't run a server and we'll cycle your IP occasionally" that really do impact on user freedom.
Charles Miller
Re:Vote with your Dollar!!! (Score:2, Insightful)
Assume Joe Mpeg "votes with his dollar" and leaves Foo Company, no longer downloading 50 GB a month. Guess what? Foo Company can replace him with 50 "normal" customers who only download 1 GB a month each. In fact, Foo Company is likely to implement download caps designed expressly to get rid of unprofitable customers like Joe Mpeg, whilst still keeping the casual user who will never hit the cap during normal use.
Re:Vote with your Dollar!!! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Vote with your Dollar!!! (Score:3, Insightful)
Nope. In central Maryland (Howard County) there is one cable provider (Comcast) and no DSL (too far from the telco). Satellite is laggy and generally not Mac compatible. So what do you recommend?
The real cost of P2P (Score:2, Interesting)
Once you start paying for each MB over the limit, then your MP3s will no longer be free. So, the big question is, are the ISPs in bed with the music industry ????
Re:The real cost of P2P (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The real cost of P2P (Score:3, Interesting)
This is caused by providers not charging what bandwidth costs them. Major ISPs are not overutilized or oversubscribed, all the "problems" of p2p are happening on the edge networks. Why is this? Because nobody wants to pay to upgrade.
These providers are oversubscribing their networks by sometimes 6x their upstream capacity or more (3 is the norm). They do this so they can charge customers less for the bandwidth. Why would they want to charge less? Because they're in a price war with the cable modem company down the road.
They can't afford to stay in the market because they're in over their heads, so they switch tactics. Instead of fixing the problem, they blame the customer (a common solution nowadays).
So as someone said earlier, vote with you're money. If someone starts changing you're service in ways you don't like just go to their competitior. Saying "oh well, thats just the way it is" will only succeed in making this the standard practice for every provider.
In my opinion bandwidth caps are ok as long as they're agreed upon when you signup for service (i.e. you ask for 500kbps down, and thats what you get). Per byte charges are historically disfavored for home users even though businesses like the idea. When's the last time you paid per minute on local calls? How many of you would accept a cell phone plan that provided no free minutes to call anywhere? Nobody likes it when the phone company changes their plan. Nobody would accept a new phone plan that was worse than the old one. Hows this sound: "Hey, we're lowering the amount of calls you can make on you're phone. If you go over 70 calls a month we'll charge you 45c a minute"
Would you accept it? No. So why accept their proposed plan for new cable modem caps? Find a new provider, and let Chapter 11 convince these people not to play in a market they don't understand.
Re:The real cost of P2P (Score:2)
Who's the cable modem company down the road? I don't know where you live, but here it is RARE for anybody to have a choice of cable service. The best they can hope for is a choice between DSL from one of the baby bells, or cable modem from their cable provider.
As a matter of fact, I've NEVER lived anywhere in the US where I had a choice between cable providers. The closest I ever came to that was when an upstart company tried to come in and compete with one of the big boys. They promised significantly lower prices. Guess what happened. The incumbent cable company pulled some legal crap to get them shut down before they even got up and running.
Face it. For most of us there is no real choice. The only way we can vote with our $$$ is to go back to dialup.
I wanted to say this... (Score:2, Interesting)
They should just charge by the meg.
Re:I wanted to say this... (Score:2, Insightful)
Please please please usage based charging (Score:5, Informative)
* Legislation against spam
* Fewer stupid graphic heavy websites
* Smaller more efficient programs
* Greater use of zlib
Furthermore, it means I can:
* Stop subsidising college geeks trying to collect 40Gb of ripped music for the hell of it.
Now, at the _commercial_ level, it's a different story, and I'd hate to see the removal of peering arrangements and so on. But at consumer level, gee, let's just pay for what we use and not pay for what we don't. Is it really so hard?
Ideally, signup and connection to broadband should be trivially cheap, and then payment should be usage based. This opens broadband to poorer people, with amount of usage based on inclination and ability to pay. Currently, broadband is expensive to signup for, meaning its users are exclusively rich people who then think they should be able to host websites / download mp3's eternally as a basic human right. Feh.
Re:Please please please usage based charging (Score:2, Interesting)
NO on usage-based charging. Here's why. (Score:5, Insightful)
I am firmly against bandwidth caps, and here's why.
The moral is: don't punish people who like your service. I don't get punished by DirecTV and TiVo because I watch 20 hours of TV in a week instead of 2. True, Internet access requires more infrastructure per user than satellite does, but DirecTV has a per-user infrastructure cahrge as well (more satellites; installation; tech support). I expect that additional infrastructure charge to be covered in my monthly bill.
Even traditionally per-use models, such as long distance, are moving to flat-rate fees for those who use them a lot. You can now get unlimited long distance for $30 a month thanks to VoIP, which was spawned by the same technologies that made the Internet possible.
Don't cripple the growth of the Internet by advocating bandwidth limits. The only thing you will end up crippling is the continuing introduction of new, interesting websites with full-motion video and audio. The last thing we want is people defecting back to 56K, or worse, moving away from the Internet completely because "it's just not worth it."
Broadband has made the Internet thrive. Don't hold that progress back.
Re:NO on usage-based charging. Here's why. (Score:3, Insightful)
"The last thing we want is people defecting back to 56K"
I know many people who use the Internet occasionally, and who would love the convenience of fast, always-on Internet, but cannot justify the hefty monthy charge for broadband. These people have no option but to use 56K until we see metered broadband access with a low subscription charge. Not a good thing, especially since many of the casual users who do take the plunge and fork out for a high bandwidth link, start using the Internet more and try new things with it.
Re:NO on usage-based charging. Here's why. (Score:2)
Satellite TV certainly has installation and tech support costs - but that is per subscriber - not based on usage. If I watch CNN 24 hours a day, or if I run it 1 hour a month, it costs them exactly the same - unless you count lost revenue to ads run by the satellite company due to lower ratings.
The cost of satellites themselves are per-channel, not per customer. A single satellite can carry a limited number of channels, but can broadcast to the entire USA. If EVERYONE had a dish in their backyard, the same satellite would provide service to all of them.
That is why satellite companies do not charge based on usage. Their per user cost actually drops significantly as you add users, since their biggest outlay is for the satellite itself. Their biggest outlays are huge one-time only expenses. After that they just sit back and collect...
FYI - I'm running at 56k myself (actually, less than 28.8 when you count the lousy phone line). I'm running gentoo, and download tarballs all the time. I frequently download 50MB zip files. My only limitation is that I have to queue up my downloads and run them overnight. Right now, my only other option is Comcast - no DSL in my neighborhood due to distance from the CO. Of course, if I had any confidence in cable at all there wouldn't be a DirecTV dish in my back yard, and the cost of cable internet is well over $50 a month (no bundle discounts if you don't have cable TV service). So, the only thing a $40/month outlay will get me that I don't have already is some instant gratification, and probably a load of customer service complaints...
As implemented in an Australian College (Score:2, Informative)
Our cost structure is driven entirely by our upstream providers, and since we're connecting students, we aim to break even on bandwidth costs, and pay for our infrastructure out of a $25 connection fee.
We have tiered charges, as part of an academic network, which look like this.
sites in
sites in
sites in
All other sites - 10 c (AU) per meg
In any case, our customers, I'll admit, are a fairly captive market as far as getting broadband access from their doom rooms go, however computer labs are run by a different division, and work quite differently. They have a 5meg per day quota, which accumulates over time, but is capped at 40 meg (and below at -20).
A lot of people have recently been asking for this system to be expanded to the dorms, although from what I gather, it's more because this access is 'free' rather than being billed, not out of preference for the cost model.
I would say, then, that we have a fairly good representation of how a system like this can work, and I would say on the whole it does so pretty well. We have a wide mix of users, from those who spend $100s per month, to people who don't even go through $25 in a year.
For a time last year, there was a hole in our billing system which was allowing people to get free web access through a proxy server on campus. People who discovered this, approached $400 a month before we found the problem (and luckily we had ways of tracking the usage, it just wasn't built into our standard billing process). Some of these people were rather displeased at having to pay back for the access, however it was all resolved without much trouble. What this proves, I suppose, is that the billing becomes a consideration for the residents, and they adjust their habits accordingly.
For an average user, however, people seem happy with the system. I can't imagine justifying a move to a flat fee structure, even if it were capped, because it would be impossible to sell to the vast majority here. I suppose that's the main moral, Average users aren't willing to subsidize the heavy users, and it's the average users who make up the majority.
There will always be some unhappy people when their loopholes are taken away, but these same people, in another area, are unhappy about subsidising others. Compulsory residents association fees, for example, most of which are spent on sport and alcohol, tend not to go over so well for those who don't participate, and hence don't get their money's worth. Of course, I could go on and on...free health care and so on and so on.
Anyway, I should put an end to this rambling...
The billing system we developed for all this is up for (open source) grabs if anyone wants to maintain it, since I'll be moving on, although it's very hacky and not exactly documented at all.
On the whole, I'd consider our experience positive, and I would personally look for a usage based system despite being a rather high end user myself. Basically, I figure there's always going to be someone with more time than me who I'll be subsidizing.
Re:Please please please usage based charging (Score:5, Interesting)
There are several big problems with the treatment of internet access in the modern world.
One issue is that telcos and cable companies imitating telcos are in control of the market. These companies take the physical asset cost saving approach of assuming certain peak loads and usage patterns per customer per hour of the day. The problem is that internet service is not a static one use service like the telephone was originally. As deliverables and uses change and grow, so do the bandwidth needs. This messes with those lovely assumptions about how much time and how much data each customer will expend while using their connection. In fact when people started using modems in large numbers the telcos started crying about how it was screwing up their careful usage calaculations because a modem user staid online for hours when the usage rates were calculated for the average 3 minute phone call. The internet is not a bloody phone system. Deal with it. There is a ton of dark fiber laying around out there that is not being used despite having already been paid for and having the hardware to connect it all. Give me the fiber link to my bloody house and light all the fiber out there before you start charging me more based on poor customer usage predictions.
Another issue is that american buisness has a horrible case of short sightedness (encouraged greatly by the reactionary and short sighted tendencies of the stock market). Bandwidth does not incur huge ongoing costs. Bandwidth incurs a huge initial cost (the laying of fiber/copper, routing hardware; etc) followed by rather reasonable maintenance costs (in most cases cheaper than regular telco lines). There are three ways to recoup your losses from the initial setup:
1) Charge a huge amount of money for use of the service because (in a wonderful self fulfilling prophecy arrangement) you have decided that not enough users will purchase the service.
2) Charge a very low amount of money for the service in the hopes that you will gain enough customers fast enough to reduce cost of operation per customer.
3) Charge a moderate amount of money to attempt to get as much back initially as possible while not alienating an overly large chunk of your customer base with prohibitive rates.
For a while now providers have been going with option number 3 (which makes the most sense) and charging about $50 a month for high speed access.
The recent moves towards usage caps is mostly in reaction to hemoraging money from failed or miscalculated ventures elsewhere and is an attempt to belatedly go back to option nubmer 1. Option number 1 being a huge reason why ISDN never really took off despite being around for a long time.
Now this trick (basically a big bait and switch) of hooking customers at a moderate pricing scheme and then swapping it out for an expensive one will work in the short term, but it is ultimately going to wind up less profitable than charging a lower amount for services and increasing your customer base by nearly 10 times. Right now the US is way behind other countries in terms of broadband deployment. And it is not so much because the infrastructure isn't there. It's because the costs are still outside the comfort levels for most consumers.
Leave broadband unlimited at $50 for decent (read higher than 512Kbps downstream/128Kbps upstream) connections and add lower cost plans at $12-$20 per month for low speed (below 512/128Kbps) and you will see a huge jump in subscribers that will also even out your bandwidth usage per customer (most people don't eat nearly as much bandwidth as gamers and the like do) and allow you to expand services.
The below is way oversimplified, but helps illustrate the point a little.
Current US households with broadband is estimated [europemedia.net] at ~15 million [www.nua.ie]. 15 million households with broadband now at $50/month = $750 million.
Assuming you would keep those subscribers (with no usage caps) but offer the lower speed (again with no caps)at around $20 and you can add the remaining US households (85 million of them) for an addition $1.7 billion a month.
This brings the theoretical total to $2.45 billion per month or $29.4 billion per year.
Re:Please please please usage based charging (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Please please please usage based charging (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Charging by the meg is stupid... (Score:5, Interesting)
It's like cable TV: you pay a flat rate, and you get a pipe "yay big" in size, down which content flows from someone else.
Or like the federal highway commission charging you based on the number of miles you drive.
If they want to provide some useful content, let them charge for that. If I elect to look at it, which I likely won't.
If I'm going to pay them per meg, then they can damn well pay the content providers per meg (e.g. where's the kickback for Slashdot?).
Sucks to be the guy who sells the pipe once, instead of the water company, who gets to sell the water over and over... oh well... if you don't like it, stay out of the pipe business, or buy into a water company.
-- Terry
Re:Charging by the meg is stupid... (Score:2)
If you use the net a lot, that means you transfer lots of MBs thru your adsl. You probably pay around $100. I use the net a little. I transfer more or less 5MB a day thru my crappy 56k dialup. Do you know how much that costs me per month? About $100. Even if my connection idles i still get to pay $100. Do you think that's fair?
If you drive a lot, you pay for a lot of gas and use the road a lot so you pay more (often) at those toll stations.
If i have my dialup idling i do not cost my ISP nothing (the phone company is another deal) except the occasional ping. That shouldn't cost me both my fucking arms and legs.
You obviously use your connection a LOT and you see that it isn't your best interest if they start charging by the meg.
I am not sure if there should be a charge for both up and down tho. i gotta think about that.
Article Correction - 5 gigabytes NOT gigabits. (Score:5, Informative)
Decimals hacked off
5 gigs / 30 days = 166.66 megs a day.
166.66 megs a day / 24 hour = 6.94 megs an hour
6.94 megs an hour / 60 minutes = 115 kilobytes per minute
115 Kilobytes / 60 seconds = 1.91 kilobytes a second...
and 1.91 kilobytes * 8 = 15.28 kilobits a second.
Comcast Online - 1994 speed at 2002 prices.
Re:Article Correction - 5 gigabytes NOT gigabits. (Score:2, Interesting)
If, as your calculation suggests, you are one of those people downloading things 24x7, then Comcast and all the others will be pleased as punch to see you cancel your subscription. Tell me this: which of the following persons incurs the highest operating cost to an ISP: the W4r3z d00d who is leeching a few gigabytes a day and hosting his warez on a server to others, or the housewife who likes the convenience of fast surfing and not having to dial up, but only surfs 1 hour a day and writes a few e-mails every now & then? Then tell me: is it right that both these persons should pay the same monthly fee?
I say bring on metered internet access! Charge a low monthly fee that is attractive even for casual users, then charge by the megabyte. I think the only way ISPs will survive in the end is by such price differentiation, by passing on the (non-zero) cost of bandwith usage to the subscribers.
(+5 informative? What gives?)
Re:Article Correction - 5 gigabytes NOT gigabits. (Score:5, Interesting)
Internet billing done right. (Score:2)
Just so! I am very much in favor of metered access done right. Based on how various people use the Internet, ISP's are looking at:
- Per-megabyte charging, possible variable based on usage and selected pricing plan
- A (variable) allowance of free megabytes, per month.
- Possibly a carry-over of unused free megabytes
- Peak and off-peak pricing
- Different options for exceeding the monthly free allowance: a hard cap (cutoff), a per-megabyte charge, or bandwidth throttling
- Etc. etc.
Unsurprisingly this looks a lot like the charging models that phone companies use. Why haven't ISP's implemented this yet? I'll tell you: because such complex billing systems aren't easy or cheap to set up and implement. Also, no ISP currently has the infrastructure and procedure to handle the complexity of the whole billing process: metering (collecting usage data), guiding (matching metering data to a particular subscriber in the billing system), rating (applying the correct price plan to usage data), invoicing (bill printing), and payments (direct debit, and applying incoming payments to a subscriber's balance). Most ISPs are comfortable with sending and collecting bills for maybe 2 or 3 different billing plans, all at a fixed price. But billing and collecting a variable amount is vastly more difficult, and not just for the billing process but for other business processes also. For instance: how many phonecalls do you thing phone companies get from people who do not understand their bill, or do not agree with it?
There's a very good reason for the fact that over here, ISPs rarely punish you for going over your cap every now and then: their systems and administrative processes cannot cope with handling a cap or a surcharge.
Re:Article Correction - 5 gigabytes NOT gigabits. (Score:2)
Comcast Online - 1994 speed at 2002 prices.
Well, by that kind of math, we were going a lot faster than that in 1994 - using technology which was accessible to even the most casual consumer.
Want instant access to movies? Just mail order a VHS tape - the equivalent of gigabytes of data in only two days.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a truckload of CDs...
You aren't paying for the ability to retrieve data - you are paying for the peak bandwidth of the cable line. By far the most cost effective way of getting dozens of GB of data from point A to point B is still the mail...
Thankfully theres still -some- competition (Score:2, Interesting)
I just hope that enough people are sufficiently wise consumers, and get the word out to the rest of the masses, to not stand for this, and to vote with their wallets.
With any luck, though, once the caps start hitting, there will be a sufficient incentive even for the unwashed adigerati to realize that this is a BAD THING, and do the same. I just feel sorry for those poor saps who don't yet have DSL available in their area, if this should happen.
It's a real danger, if it is allowed to set a precedent, if the consumers stomach it, than DSL providers too [as DSL is less and less provisionable by independant ISP's and more and more becoming a monopoly of the local bell [competing against the local cable monopoly]] may start to oligopolistically go along with it. Yikes; oligopoly, I wish... it's more a duopoly, given that CLECS are pretty much dead.
*sigh*. Sometimes, I wish I was in korea.
Re:Thankfully theres still -some- competition (Score:2, Informative)
Now, I rarely download MP3 and never DivX. But I have a web server (500 visit a day from 3614 players from a potential of 9000 french DAoC players), a mail server, and some DAV folders...
I never use more than 6 GB a month...
All that to say that the precedent is already set in others country and only the MP3 and DivX junky complain about it, the causual (and the not so causual) user have nothing to fear about this...
You fear oligopoly? well, in Europe we come from Monopoly of the national telecom and now we get oligopoly with telecom from other country 'invading' our country. And I can say that oligopoly is better than monopoly. It is near impossible to create a mom & pops ISP here in Europe...
Caps play right into the MPIAAs hands (Score:2, Interesting)
Once the ISP/cop legal battle has set a precident, it won't matter that ISPs won't want to expose their best customers, they will have no choice.
This backs up the idea that the best Digital Restriction Managment isn't technogly, it's lawyers.
As a former Telstra Broadband user. (Score:4, Interesting)
Then mid last year, they started capping at 3GB, no price reductions, nothing. Capping basically made it no longer cost-effective, so they gave us a chance to jump ship, which we did.
Within 2 months, all of the other broadband providers introduced caps (usually at 3GB). Only a few weeks ago has one provider re-introduced unlimited plans.
Point of my ramble is, that once you put a cap on broadband, you have to watch everything you DL, and that sucks. It'll just get to the point that you're better off with back with yor 56k. Yell at Comcast/AT&T until they back off. Do it for your own good.
I guess... (Score:2)
Mergers are good for competition
Obviously... (Score:2, Funny)
AT&T BI (Score:5, Informative)
AT&T BI is a great ISP if you enjoy...
- 75% packet loss or more to servers in the same city as you.
- 300ms latency to servers in the same city as you.
- packet jitter so bad you could swear you really were SURFING the internet because the packets come in waves.
- not playing online games.
- your "always on" internet service being disconnected.
- paying 5x more for the same service that a 56k user gets.
- the worst customer support center EVER! One of the many outages took 2 weeks to fix, and thats because they didn't send anyone out until one and a half weeks after I called!
- having your ISP change the TOS on you every other day.
The one thing with ATTBI that has always worked correctly has been email... well, that is when I am connected.I will go back to dialup if I have to. Heck, its just $10 a month. Saving $40 a month and still getting roughly the same service... sounds like a wise move.
Re:AT&T BI (Score:2)
How capping should work (Score:2, Interesting)
What I personally would like to see (well, preferably no capping, but I cant see that continuing) is a daily limit - say 500mb-1gb, after which the connection slows down to modem / just over modem speeds, with up to 3 days (for example) which can be carried forward to the next
The main problems are caused by so many people running kazaa/etc and leaving it on - they should be the ones who are restricted, not a blanket restriction like 5gb a month which could easily be exceeded by "normal usage" (I am confident I have used more than 5gb in any one month without running p2p applications)
However, having said all of that, I expect that even though some companies will introduce capping, it will follow (atleast in the UK) the same trend as phone access...
Some phone access is capped, but there are always the "unlimited" plans still available (and some companies actually do keep to the unlimited promise!)
The vast conspiracy (Score:5, Insightful)
The conspiracy has one simple, ultimate goal: to transfer as much money from your pocket into theirs. They have the will and organized money to make it happen and there is very little you or anyone else will be able to do about it.
You can make false claims that you are all powerful and can take your business elsewhere, but then you will all realize all businesses operate in this manner. They will all charge bullshit fees, they will invent reasons to charge you more bullshit fees, and they will all utilize contracts that lock you into them. They will all, in short, steal as much of your money that can get away with.
Welcome to the "free" market---free not as in fair, but free as in free to steal.
Re:The vast conspiracy (Score:2)
They will lie, they will cheat, they will steal, and the government is unwilling to stop them
That's because everytime a company gets some of your money, there's tax that going to be paid...
Re:The vast conspiracy (Score:3, Interesting)
This sort of stuff has been going on ever since there was competition. People have been taking advantage of each other for thousands of years. It's not new, it's just obvious in this case.
And since when did "free" ever mean "fair"? Fairness is nice, but for the most part I'd prefer to have freedoms than government-mandated "fairness".
*never* going to happen (Score:2)
For people in my age group (20 something) DSL is a *lifestyle issue*. I download the TV I wanna watch, I get all my music from emusic, my musican friends send me their track (24 bit wav of course -- mp3 eats quality) ... we will not give it up easily :) ... and just think of all the things I wont admit to doing with DSL
Re:*never* going to happen (Score:3, Funny)
Oh my God - This just in:
20 something American saw cool lifestyle portrayed in T.V. add - now pissed that reality is not the same.
I'm really crying for you buddy, oh yeah.
Telstra is evil (Score:3, Informative)
Telstra [bigpond.com]'s most limited account is 300Mb limit per month at AU$54.95. Each additional Mb is charged at 15.9c per megabyte.
Some Australian ISPs charge for each additional megabtye over your limit, and others throttle your speed to something ridiculous (like 28.8kbps). I ordered the latter for my uncle when setting up his ADSL because many people are ignorant of their web usage (at least at first).
If a user on the 300Mb plan downloads 500Mb in their first month, they will pay
$54.95 + 200Mb * $0.159 = $54.95 + $31.80 = $86.75.
If you think that is bad, if a 3Gb user downloads 3.8Gb in their first month (like most teenagers I know), they're up for
$87.95 + 800Mb * $0.139 = $87.95 + $111.20 = $199.15.
I'm suprised no Aussies brought this up in the recent article Add-Ons Add Up [slashdot.org].
Independent resources for market research include Whirlpool [whirlpool.net.au] (Australian Broadband News) and Broadband Choice [broadbandchoice.com.au] for indexed summaries of all providers plans. Read them first! Please!
Not exactly... (Score:5, Informative)
Optus offers a slightly nicer system. Once you use up all your limit, they drop you down to a 28kbps connection, so you join the hundreds of thousands of dialup users in australia on sub-par connections. But at least you don't then pay for phone calls on top of this.
And while I'm complaining about cable networks, it seems that Telstra & Optus can now give each other CATV channels, to "aid competition". Which is really strange, since they were always competing with each other anyway. And the ironic twist is this: Telstra (our partially-government-owned telco, soon to be fully privatized) is charging more for the extra channels from Optus, while Optus is charging less for the Telstra channels. We would have switched to Optus many moons ago indeed, but for some reason, the government wouldn't allow one single unified cable network to be installed, but insisted that both companies install their own. But Optus, not having the backing of the government, decided to put their cable up in more populated areas, so of course, people who actually might use it (like us) miss out.
In conclusion, you really have to fight it! Most broadband users just sat there and did nothing about the cap, and now we're stuck with it. I've always envisioned the USA as a "mondo cheap bandwidth" place, and now that you're reduced to the garbage that we have to face every day...
Viva la bandwidth!
It isn't all that bad with ADSL here... (Score:5, Informative)
Anyway, it isn't as bad as you make it out to be in your post. I live in Sydney and have iiNet ADSL [ii.net], which has 12GB caps on a 512/128 link for AU$80. They shape you to 72kbps once you hit the cap, and they have a heap of unmetered internal content, including a few 128kbps Shoutcast streams and free P2P within your state. It puts the value you get from Telstra/Optus to shame.
i-green [igreen.net] offer unlimited 256/64 for AU$80 too. Data caps aren't the end of the world - they just encourage competition in the market, and encourage ISPs to peer together to offer cheaper data to the customers.
these figures (Score:2)
i have DSL thru interquest.net and my apartment complex.
according to my windoze XP connection stats, I have downloaded 7.5 GB and uploaded 1.1 GB in the last 12 days, and that doesn't include my G4 Cube and my roommate's computer.
If my ISP decides to start capping our up/down totals, I will drop them like a bad habit.
Not all Australian broadband is capped! (Score:2, Interesting)
Green Telecommunications [applecomm.net]
Re:Not all Australian broadband is capped! (Score:2)
Surely, it's because the Australian Association of Apple-Growers fought against this company threatening their livelihood by making their (teenage) kids addicted to porno? The company then changed its name to reflect its eco-friendliness ("Hey apple folks, we're green; we're on your side!")?
They're shooting themselves in the foot (Score:2, Interesting)
Why? that's easy - choose between 3Mbps downstream speed and 256Kbps upstream for US$38/month or 6Mbps downstream speed and 256Kbps upstream for US$51/month. Theoretically you're limited to 100 or 200 hours respectively but they waive that as part of the continual promotions because the competition is so fierce.
The result? If you use the internet much you get broadband... it's become the norm. The mindset has shifted and dial-up is definitely only a legacy thing now.
Obsolete (Score:2)
Not a troll (Score:2)
You simply can't make a statement like this, because this move is going to piss people off and thus drive people away from AT&T. There is always going to be a player that will move in to fill this niche market and pick these people up with a better service that meets their needs.
Goodbyes streaming radio. (Score:5, Interesting)
And people will get extremely pissed off by paying to download all those x10 popup graphics. Not that I see those anymore. (Thanks, Mozilla.)
How much time did you spend searching and researching online for the last car you bought?
I think it will dampen the online economy.
Local Mirrors (Score:5, Informative)
I admin a system with a 5GB cap at work (1500kbps down) and so far this month we've transferred 715MB, between 10 of us.
Capping is fine , as long as there's a local mirror of something that I want, for free.
Eg. I'm with Telstra - they have a area for a lot of online games - they then have a file area for files required for games etc. All this (being on a local Telstra server) is free. Now
So, If they drop a SimTel (or whatever) mirror in locally and don't charge, then the only people who'll *really* suffer are the P2P crowd.
Yes , it limits other uses of the internet , such as video-on-demand etc... but the infrastructure still isn't there for everyone to have a cheap, guaranteed X Mbit pipe to their door.
WARNING! (Score:4, Informative)
The proper way to cap.. (Score:2, Interesting)
I believe BT Internet (UK) is doing this, but you won't find it mentioned anywhere.
Jason
I won't mind this if... (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh, and btw, I guess this will kill the idea of delivering movies over the net. Who is going to pay a few bucks to download a pay-per-view movie that takes about 800 megs if that's going to add to your monthly allowance?
Somebody has to pay for it (Score:5, Informative)
As a DSL customer (or cable, for that matter) you are connected to a circuit of the speed that corresponds with your billing agreement. But, you might say, why can I only get 350kbs when I have a 768/128 circuit? Well, that's because there are several people that either think it's their God-given right to do P2P at full throttle on the upload, or sustain a constant 500kbs download 24 hours a day.
Everybody here on /. is smart enough to realize that cable and DSL are consumer products, and as such, the pricing model is not designed for 24/7 max upload and download. If you want 24/7 1.54/128, buy a T. That's only about $700 a month.
It's kinda like dialup; if you and a bunch of other customers are connected 24 hours a day for $19.95/month, but the phone line that you are connecting to costs the ISP $25.00/month, the ISP loses money.
High speed is similar. The _average_ download/upload is maybe 20kbs/8kbs. If enough people sustain for days (or weeks) 300kbs/128kbs, the network is gonna get thrashed, and the ISP will do one of three things - charge more, throttle bandwidth, or go out of business because enough of the customers bailed out due to slow download speeds, attributed to 5% of the customers using 50 or a hundred times the bandwidth of the "normal" customer. Or, if they are really gluttons for punishment, they'll order up more T's to handle the psycho bandwidth, then go out of business, because 5% of the customers thought that it was their God-given right to go full throttle 24/7.
To further belabor the point, I recall a really good analogy, and that is of electric power. If there were no power meter on the outside of your abode, and you thought it a cool idea to set up a Beowolf cluster of a thousand machines, all with monitors, you would be getting more power than your neighbor, but paying the same amount. But let's say PC's (with monitors) were $1.00 apiece, and lots of your neighbors could install clustering software in an hour. So, you and a few of your neighbors are each using 50KW, while the _average_ power usage is maybe 400W. Free lunch? For a while...until the power company figures out that they are losing a ton of money to the Beowolf gangs.
Hey, I have fairly sucky cable service. It drops off every couple of days, and the latency is so bad sometimes that I have to go to our office to do any work using vi!. (I can't get DSL from my employer...too far away from the DSLAM.) But still, as evil and sucky as the cable company is, there is only a finite amount of bandwidth available, and if they want to get more, of course they have to pay.
I hereby propose an inititave to P2P developers: default upload is not full-throttle. THAT is what is making P2P the black-sheep of ISP's. Something like a dialog box that spells it out for the user. "At what percentage do you wish to upload? If you choose 100%, Your ISP might not think you're very nice.
Re:Somebody has to pay for it (Score:3, Interesting)
As someone who also managed a small ISP for a time I can understand what your saying, but there is a solution.
Find out who these BW hogs are and TOS them out the door! Thats the great thing about being a private buisness, is that you can refuse service to anyone.
Yes, I know that those who are useing full bandwidth 24/7 will scream like bloody murder and generate some bad PR over it. But it is better in the long run imho to get a rep for killing users who are obviously violating TOS rather than the alternative.
Re:Somebody has to pay for it (Score:3, Interesting)
No, bytes don't cost you money, your connection does.
Understand this: there is no fixed relationship between traffic and cost.
Here's what a connection costs:
The only cost that has any relationship at all with bandwidth capability is the acquisition of equipment, and as I noted that should be something which drops significantly over time because of Moore's Law.
So: the fact that your upstream provider charges you based on your bandwidth usage is artificial. It needn't be that way. I'll go so far as to say that it shouldn't be that way.
It seems to me that a lot of this nonsense would disappear if upstream providers charged for what they're actually providing: a pipe, and little more.
Anyway, people need to get a clue about what bandwidth costs and why it costs. Then they'd realize that download caps are nonsense.
Pressure on Sympatico forced compromise on caps (Score:2)
Australia (Score:3, Informative)
Telstra caps thier retail broadband at a certain limit, and then starts charging.
Optus also caps their retail broadband and then throtles the speed to 40-56k once the customer goes over, but does not charge more.
For retail customers optus's system is better because they know exactly how much they have to pay. I had one customer who paid AU$700 ($400US) for his internet because he did not understand how much 300mb was.
Business is another matter all together.
This is what happens.. (Score:2)
Now its true they have the right its their lines, but considering you cant choose your cable company, we dont have a lot of alternatives in many areas. Hardwire cable service IS a monopoly in any given market area.
I'm not debating the rational of *reasonable* capping, only the lack of options if i want to go somewhere else for my broadband that does cater to my needs.
I also dont agree with changing agreements during a contract.. but that's a whole different topic.
Rationale (Score:2)
Telcos are charge by the MB for data, ie the more data the more expensive the customer is to the telco. So why shouldn't high users pay more than the casual user? It's very fair. The only problem I have is the high cost of data in australia.
Secondly networks with Unlimited internet have higher contention ratios (usually 1:30 or 1:50 or even 1:100) leading to a few high-bandwidth users slowing down everyone else. Business users on the other hand pay a lot more (2-3x) than retail, but get better ratios, 1:5. This extends to dail-up as well, the ISP who don't have unlimited accounts have better overall speed.
(A contention ratio is how many people share a pipe. Say on a 1.5mbit ADSL connection, on a 1:50 ration, 50 people with 1.5mbit connection share a 1.5mbit connection to the internet. So if all users were to use their connection at the same time they would only get 1.5/50mb/s = 30kb/s. I should know, I work for an ADSL ISP)
Don't like it? Pay for it. If you want a guaranteed download speed with very low data costs, get a T1 . The top speed is equivilent to a 1.5mb/s ADSL, but costs 3-4 times as much because you will always get 1.5mb/s. It is much cheaper to multiplex several, bursty data lines over the one line. This is because if you look at typical end-user usage it varies wildly.
Korea (Score:5, Interesting)
With so much competition for customers, the providers here are looking for any method to gain new ones, and to keep the ones they have. The govt. is pushing the telecoms to make sure that citizens have tons of affordable, fast access. This will drive e-commerce, etc. I pay approx. $25.00/month for my internet...the service is top notch. I split it between three computers and never have a problem. I have a feeling I'll miss it if I ever go back to Calif.
Re:why copy australia? copy japan (Score:2)
Things have changed here in the last couple of years.
Re:why copy australia? copy japan (Score:2)
Just incredible to think what I am getting now, when just 3 years ago I was averaging the equivalent of $250 to $300 USD a month for my dialup (local phone calls are tolled).
Something to be said for a high density population and competition.
The problem with that is this.... (Score:2)
So if it weren't for the fact that the ISP's would have to then endorse a system for home users that violates their own term of service, then yeah... I'd say it's a good idea. As it sits, however, it's only a good idea for businesses since they're the only ones who are entitled to run servers without violating their TOS.
Telcos do *NOT* have to make money... (Score:2)
-- Terry
Re:Download caps, spam, and popups (Score:2, Insightful)
Mozilla offers a form of this, right clicking on a pic and telling it to never download a pic from this server again. dark days are coming and I see alot of Surfing dollars being spent where marketers could be footing the bill.
as a AT&T victim^H^H^H^H^H customer I think I'll be looking into this as soon as I'm done posting.