Why Not To Meter Internet Access 265
A reader writes: "Many experts, especially pundit Bob Metcalfe, have argued that Internet access should be metered so that light users don't have to subsidize flat rates for heavier users. John Levine, author, expert and sewer commissioner, argues that this idea of metering the Internet flies in the face of 100 years of history."
Re:And how would you go about this? (Score:2)
U PUNCTUATIN': BAD
U SPELLIN': AWFUL
John is too modest (Score:3)
-russ
That's nonsense (Score:5)
Re:And how would you go about this? (Score:2)
Phone Companies (Score:5)
--Mike
Stamps (Score:5)
I would have thought that the same sort of thing is probably true for Internet access - especially since sending data down a wire is just as expensive as not sending data down the same wire, once the wire has been laid.
Ok. And? (Score:4)
Instituting any metering system will raise the operating costs due to the trouble it takes to track usage.
And how exactly would you do that anyway. Total bits per month? Total online time?
Too many variables and way too open for abuse by unsavory providers. There's little wrong with a flat rate system IMHO.
Re:Who pays (Score:2)
Same reason I don't use CueCat. There are things (like domain names and internet access) that you should pay for even if you could get for free.
I thought everybody knew this (Score:2)
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An abstained vote is a vote for Bush and Gore.
Re:I personally believe... (Score:2)
And when you can find a web provider who's going to provide service for free and take a loss out of the goodness of their heart (and not go out of business like most dotcoms), let us know.
Re:That's nonsense (Score:2)
And some people would pay less with a metered plan. Byt a lot of people (includeing me) don't like the restrictions of those, where you will be charged extra if you go over a certain limit. It's nice to no there's no such limit, even if I would have never gone over in the first place. And they always make it seem like it's only a few bucks more...
You should still be able to get a flat rate (Score:3)
Anyway, I suppose that really was your $.02.
Oh Great.. (Score:4)
Metering is stupid for home users (Score:2)
However, for the end user, connecting through an ISP and simply surfing et al this is just downright dumb. For one, it would require additional cost to monitor users. Second, it would discourage people from surfing as much. Third, you can say bye bye to banner ads (though maybe that's a good thing), if people have to pay for every bit of those pieces of trash they see they are going to block them. And finally, it would be moving away from closing the "digital devide". If little Timmy can't do something internetish because his parents need to spend their money on food instead of for the excess usage, then little Timmy is at a disadvantage.
Also, once you break down the essential "everyone pays the same" wall, what's next? If you access certain "more expensive" sites, will you be charged more. Might things begin to revert to the long distance phone call paradigm? I doubt it, but it's a very very chilling thought.
Flat rates are simpler, easier to use and understand, and make a lot more sense in the semi-egalitarian environment of the internet.
Re:It already is for some... (Score:2)
I pay now. (Score:3)
I get 5 gig/month (which is ACTUALLY 5,000,000,000 bytes, not 5 gig). As the base package, and after that, I pay 7cents per megabyte(1,000,000 bytes).
So, if I download in excess of 5 gigs, it costs me an additional $70 per pseudo-gigabyte. Fortunately, I don't use that much, but my ISP offers a larger package of 20 gigabytes for an additional $20/month, but you must already be on the plan to take advantage of the package.
Why don't I use another ISP? NBTel is the only ISP in the province that will provide DSL.
(note: 7c/meg WAS the rate, I'm not 100% certain that it's still that high, but I haven't heard otherwise).
It's like food (Score:4)
If you had a choice between an all-you-can-eat buffet, and an a la carte restaurant, both of which served the exact same food, and had the exact same level of service, what would you choose?
Sure, some people would say that they the buffet isn't worth it because they don't eat very much, but 90% of everyone I know would hit the buffet. And even light eaters binge sometimes, or go for the buffet because they don't know how much they're going to eat.
So the buffet restaurant makes major profits and the a la carte restaurant goes out of business (or starts offering a buffet, to stay competitive), which forces everyone to go to the buffet if they want to eat.
And then the light eaters of world whine about how buffets just aren't worth it for them, and want a la carte restaurants. But the restaurant owners already know that a la carte just isn't profitable enough, so they continue to stick to the buffet.
Who has the .sig "kids love the rich taste of content?" (or something like that) It's so appropriate here.
Ignorance is obviously bliss... (Score:2)
Capitalist society. (Score:2)
Some providers do that, and do well... (Score:2)
I prefer capping (Score:2)
QoS is a great way to smooth out a network as well. Yesterday, I had to stop a download because our provider told us we were "bogging everyone else down." Unless I implement QoS on my laptop or our router, I can't control how much bandwidth I'm using for a download. I think the ISP should be doing it, rather than calling up people and telling them to stop using their connection.
I agree totally. (Score:2)
Re:That's nonsense (Score:3)
Re:That's nonsense (Score:3)
EXCEPT: they tell you NO SERVERS, it may use too much bandwidth.
NO UNATTENDED USE. This is for casual web surfing only.
WE RESERVE THE RIGHT to terminate your connection if you exceed 5GB/month.
So yes, I'd much rather pay for my bandwidth per byte and have them fuck off and quit telling me what to do.
What about the future? (Score:2)
Personally I think such a system might be cheaper for the regular user in the short term, but when all things digital are converged then I think the system will break down.
Maybe this is just a plot by the RIAA to stop people from downloading MP3's? They might be thinking they can get a percentage of all internet traffic costs sort of like they get a percentage of blank media in Canada? Maybe I should be quiet before they get some ideas.
Re:How very Ameri-centric. (Score:2)
Everything is written from a clearly American perspective. They aren't "consumer" but "American consumers". Why try and bash it for this?
Metering will never work..... (Score:4)
This is a silly article. (Score:3)
"Users love low flat rates". Gee, what a shock. People like free almost anything but herpes. Of course they want it for free. I'd like my car to cost $50, too. So what?
"...nearly all users pay flat rates regardless of their usage..." Not exactly. Dialup has an absolute bandwidth limit, there is only so much I can download over a 56k per month. ISDN has a higher limit, cable higher still, DSL, T1, T3, and up to OC48 (I suppose something exists beyond that). The rate I pay per month determines a ceiling on my usage.
"...metering would fly in the face of hundreds of years of history..." like metered mail (or stamps), pay by minute for long-distance telephone calls, and that is in the communications arena alone. We still have metered gas, electricity, and so on. Sounds like history is on the metering.
I don't even know where he was going with this content thing. It doesn't appear to be relevant. Maybe I'm wrong.
"Price discrimination..." way to coin a phrase that will automatically bias you against metering! Maybe he should have just used "Nazi Price Fixing" and been a little less subtle.
"...residential telephone users can get flat rate plans with free local calls..." Said flat rate varies wildly. How much you want to bet that if everyone got on the phone and began babbling 24/7, our "flat rates" would suddenly undergo an upwards shift?
"...one can add extra fiber capacity without limit..." conveniently ignoring the cost of the fiber, installation, repeaters, etc. That money has to come from somewhere. Until Slashdot posts a nice biotech story on trees engineered to grow fiberop, I won't be holding my breath on adding fiber for free.
"...When necessary, ISPs can discourage camping via monthly caps, limits on session length, or limits on peak time usage..." Oh, I see. So, instead of having the amount of time you spend on the net affecting the cost, you're going to use the cost limit the amount of time you have. Sounds a lot like metering to me.
"...As retail users move to DSL and cable connections, where each user pays for their dedicated connection, the pricing is invariably flat rate..." for now. It's a new technology. Examine the history of the catalytic meter in electrical service here. Once we have discovered the carrying capacity, you don't think this will change?
Aside from the huge problems above, this guy fails to look at what drives economies: limited resources. The world has limited resources. I cannot convert the entire bulk of the Earth into fiber optics. Electricity costs to make. We simply cannot take the current backbone, give everyone an OC48, and have them load up as much as they like. We will run out of our finite resource, the backbone (which is more like a backweb, I guess, given the multiple spines). All of these things cost. Adding new capacity costs. Lines can be saturated. It's just like bread ... it costs to make, and only so many can use it before it is all gone. Money is an abstract method by which we allocate our finite physical resources. Just because we would like a free meal doesn't mean that the universe is obliged to give us one.
I realize I should be addressing this Andrew Odlyzko, instead of the reviewer of the article, but, geez. I feel like a troll now.
Re:And how would you go about this? (Score:3)
The tricky part is how do you charge for this? There seem to be two schools, the "cost plus markup" and the "value" school. The telephone companies like the "value" approach, as it generates larger profits. One possibility is to meter usage, but make the rates time dependent. Charge full-rate during peak usage periods and much cheaper rates during off-peak periods.
Re:1.5mb DSL = 512k DSL? (Score:2)
The same holds true if you get a T1. All ISPs oversubscribe their bandwidth. If everyone maxed out their T1 connection at the same time, the ISPs connection would be saturated and individual customers would get less then they are paying for.
The ISPs can do this because most T1 users do not use their full bandwidth at the same time: Law of Large Numbers. The difference in quality between ISPs is the amount that they will oversubscribe the available bandwidth.
Re:This is a silly article. (Score:2)
That phrase certainly wasn't coined here. It's the standard term for charging people different prices for the same good. (It also wasn't quite as loaded when it was coined as it may be now.)
Not really true (Score:3)
I see that in other countries, too.
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Already happens. Look at the costs: (Score:2)
Re:ISP rates are still rising... (Score:3)
C'mon we have it good!
Re:How very Ameri-centric. (Score:3)
That's redundant.
Re:You should still be able to get a flat rate (Score:3)
Me too. Community networks seem like a really cool idea for a situation where lower bandwith links are expensive.
Maybe it's just that there's not usually a 'critical mass' of users that have the time, expertise, and money to start a community net.
I wonder if it will start becoming more popular to build small local nets now that RadioLAN cards are becoming cheaper and more available...
--K
Just my (unmetered)
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Re:That's nonsense (Score:2)
Depending on the cost of the overheads involved with metering...
And a few other things... (Score:3)
Re:Phone Companies (Score:3)
These schemes were cooked up based on an average call length which is no longer valid. Telephone exchanges were originally designed to handle a particular load, assuming relatively short average call times. That is, if you assume an average call length of three minutes, you can get by with a much smaller exchange than if you have to assume an average call length of two hours.
Re:That's nonsense (Score:3)
Being "switched" does not guarantee you any ammount of bandwidth. Nobody ever even claimed it would, except maybe you.
It's like this. A switch prevents traffic which does not need to be broadcasted from being broadcasted. By broadcasted i mean, on an unbridged, unswitched network, that is, an ethernet network with only repeaters, when machine E communicates with machine W, all machines from A to Z get a copy of what they said.
A switch minimizes that so that only traffic which is of unknown destination or that is specifically broadcasted (ARP requests, etc) get repeated to every station.
A switch is useful in only two situations. One, where you want to be reasonably assured that morons won't be able to sniff other peoples traffic, and Two, where you wish to minimize the ammount of broadcast radiation between segments of a network. But don't be suckered into believing that it is a panacea for either application.
Furthermore, on homogenous switched networks, ANY one user can prevent ALL OTHER users from communicating with upstream parts of the network by flooding the uplink.
Guaranteeing bandwidth on ethernet based networks is exceptionally difficult and involves exotic, expensive hardware.
ATM PVC's used by DSL lines are an entirely different situation but I fear that i would be casting pearls before swine to attempt to explain it.
Packet bidding (Score:3)
There are good ways to charge for service rendered, and we need them so long as there is network congestion. One proposal I saw years ago (sorry, too long, no pointer) is that each packet carry a bid indicating how much the sender will pay to have it sent. In each time slice, routers transmit the highest-bid packets and bill them all at the rate of the lowest bid transmitted. (Billing is accumulated and done in per-day chunks or something, not with additional packets.)
A user would have some way of adjusting their bids, maybe telling email clients to bid nothing and telling their video streaming to bid 10 cents per megabyte. The email would go through eventually, which is fine, and the video streaming would work without annoying pauses -- or the user would choose to increase their bid to make it so, to suffer with the pauses, or to watch the video later, when network demand is off peak.
There are other details -- packets coming back from servers might be billed to the requestor according to some token, or maybe they would be billed to the server, who would balance the charge by revenue in their own way -- ads, merchandise sold, charges to the web viewer, whatever.
I liked the proposal when I saw it. I'm certainly happy paying a flat rate for unmetered service, and maybe I'd continuing bidding zero for my packets most of the time. But it would be nice to have the means to get some things faster when I wanted to, and it is entirely reasonable that people who want better service should pay for it. If you want to know what you're going to pay, you could set all your bids to zero, or software could help you estimate what to bid to match your budget -- and could adjust those bids as you accumulated charges to ensure that you stayed under budget.
Note that when the network is not congested, packets are transmitted for free, even the highest-bid packets, because the router is able to transmit all requested packets in each time slice. So this system is really asking the people who want extra capacity the most to pay for it.
Re:I only have one thing to say... (Score:2)
I don't want to pay my ISP for the latest Slackware ISO that I d/l'ed, nor do I want to pay for playing Q3 all night...
Well, metered access wouldn't do you any favours. However, look at it from my point of view. I (actually a hypothetical me...) transfer a couple of kilobytes of plain ASCII email every day. I don't want to pay the same monthly fee to my ISP as you do. I don't want to pay over the odds for my tiny needs, just because the ISP is installing fatter pipes and faster switches for Q3 LPBs.
Actually, the ISP service I'm (the real me this time) crying out for is this: a persistent unmetered low-bandwidth (14.4 is fine) connection so that a small news feed and email can get through all day long, which I would hope to be pretty cheap, with the option to manually switch to a metred high-bandwidth connection for gaming and streaming media.
I don't think anyone (here in the UK) can provide me with that.
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The Meter is running... (Score:2)
This is the way it works right now.
Basically the same as local calls, unless you get one of those cheapo deals which limits your number of calls each month. I'd hate to think I'm siding with Marx, after all the good he did the world, but I benefit from it. Granted, if I want higher throughput I do have to pay more for a better line. If I don't use it much, guess who I subsidising? Uh, huh.
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Chief Frog Inspector
REALLY bad idea (Score:2)
There are good ways to charge for service rendered, and we need them so long as there is network congestion. One proposal I saw years ago (sorry, too long, no pointer) is that each packet carry a bid indicating how much the sender will pay to have it sent. In each time slice, routers transmit the highest-bid packets and bill them all at the rate of the lowest bid transmitted. (Billing is accumulated and done in per-day chunks or something, not with additional packets.)
Re:Who pays (Score:2)
Just thought some of you might be interested. If you're curious and want to make waves against AltaVista, and you are a bit more technically advanced than I am, set up a 'Sacrificial Lamb' machine running NT or Windows 9x and sniff around. I think you'll find that the AltaVista client is poking around where it has no business. Could be a money-making opportunity for a young Linux-head willing to make some waves.
Re:Ok. And? (Score:2)
...
Since you didn't spell it out, once they are logging the use, they also can log what we do, where we link, etc. and sell it. Yeah, bug ol can of worms.
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Chief Frog Inspector
Re:That's nonsense (Score:3)
It's like this. A switch prevents traffic which does not need to be broadcasted from being broadcasted. By broadcasted i mean, on an unbridged, unswitched network, that is, an ethernet network with only repeaters, when machine E communicates with machine W, all machines from A to Z get a copy of what they said.
You are correct, but the net effect is that it can seem to bring more bandwidth to the individual users through reducing and/or eliminating collisions. If I have a 100Mbps n-way switch, users A and C can talk at 100Mbps while users B and D talk at 100Mbps. The net effect is that there is approximately 200Mbps worth of traffic flowing in that network. If both these same four users tried to do the same thing on a hub they wouldn't get anywhere near 200Mbps total throughput, as the collisions and resultant delays would kill the transfer speed of both "transactions" to well under 100Mbps.
So yes, you are technically right, but the original poster also has a point, at least in n-way switched LANs.
Re:And how would you go about this? (Score:4)
Being in the ISP business [brokersys.com], I have a slightly different perspsective on the matter, although I intend to read the full paper, once I get a chance.
The reason that we've never offered a metered service, even though a few people have asked for one in order to reduce their bills, is because we've never considered the work needed to keep track of users usage for billing purposes to be worth the effort.
Two answer your question, there are two broad schemes used. The first is the peak bandwidth scheme (used by those who sell "burstable bandwidth") where you pay for the peak data rate you use usually with some averaging and time dependance. (In the most recent deal proposed to me it wasn't clear to me what the penalties were for exceeding the base rate.)
The second is to simply charge by the bit, possibly with a certain amount provided at the base rate. For example, for 1.5 MB DSL service, you might be given, say, 50 gig per month (which corresponds to a utilization of about 10% of your line's capacity) at the base rate (maybe $10 per month for the bandwidth only.) plus, say, $1 per gig after that. I wouldn't meter outbound traffic at all. There's no point. I also wouldn't meter the traffic from your premise to my equipment, so you can check your mail as often as you'd like or load the Web page that shows your current month's usage without fear that that will put you over your quota.
I'd suspect that even heavy-duty Web surfers and email addicts would have trouble getting anywhere near the base rate, and I'd offer fixed-rate service (maybe $20 per month) for the Napster users and guys who browse the binaries newsgroups.
In my opinion, the key to customer acceptance of this mechanism is twofold. First, you need to offer a fixed rate for those people who want it. As the article points out, many people will pay substantially higher for a fixed-rate service than a variable-rate. Second, you have to make it easy for people to know what their usage rate is.
One reason why people who have cell phones will pay extra for a large flat-rate plan instead of choosing a metered rate plan which might actually cost them less money is uncertainty in their usage. When starting out, most people don't have any idea how much they're going to use their phone. Once they now, then it isn't worth the bother to make the change. Take away that ignorance any fewer people will make that choice. Make it easier to switch and people will.
I will tell you that although I worked out this scheme in some detail, it's not likely to be put in place. That's because the largest part of the cost of providing the service doesn't have anything to do with the upstream bandwidth, which is all this scheme meters.
Re:That's nonsense (Score:2)
bandwidth != online time (Score:2)
Metering would say that I should only be charged $1/month for my bandwidth, but my ISP says I'm connected 24x7 so I should be charged for every minute that I'm online. Until ISPs start charging people by bandwidth, metering simply won't work.
"You'll die up there son, just like I did!" - Abe Simpson
Re:Stamps (Score:3)
Re:Ok. And? (Score:2)
Re:That's nonsense (Score:3)
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Re: (Score:2)
Most people are risk adverse (Score:2)
It is fairly well recognized that most people are seriously risk adverse. For example, given a choice between two bus schedules, one that makes you wait eight minutes every time, and the other that makes you wait five minutes three times and then fifteen minutes once, most people will choose the eight-minute schedule. Yes, they wait less time on average with the other schedule, but they are risk adverse and will "pay" a premium in order to avoid the 15-minute outcome.
I myself am work adverse, and since there are four people on four computers behind the firewall server attached to the cable modem at my house, and one of the four is a teenaged boy whose downloads dwarf the rest of us, I am adverse to trying to define what each person's "fair" share of a metered limit would be, and even more adverse to having to implement it. I will pay more for the flat-rate plan just to avoid those hassles.
a solution! (Score:2)
maybe the solution is for the light users to become heavy users, so we're all getting the same for our $!.
Duh!
Tell gramma to log into
sure. (Score:2)
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Re:This is a silly article. (Score:4)
Um, where exactly did the word 'free' come into play here? He never mentions how much the flat rate should be. Pricing specifics don't enter into the picture here. You're using the exact same tactics you accuse him of using (see below).
Thank you for having missed the boat completely. The point here is to let the _technology_ determine you bandwidth technology, and to charge equally across the board for it. Thus, for (pulling a number out of a hat) 29.95 a month, you get all the bandwidth your DSL line can handle. Just like a phone line and local calls. The whole point is to argue for the removal of arbitrarily-induced bandwidth limits.
No. You've again demonstrated that you've missed the point. There are things that *have* to be metered. Electricity and gas are one of them, because the costs associated with allowing a flat-rate fee for these services is astronomical. This is not true with bandwidth.
You've just used the same tactics by pointing out the "Nazi Price Fixing" comment. Also see above, where you begin dragging the concept of "free" bandwidth into a discussion that had nothing to do with things being "free".
And how exactly were you expecting "flat rates" to be determined? This is how "flat rates" are currently determined in the world at large, and it's the same "flat rate" that is being discussed in the article. Were you under some mistaken assumption that a "flat rate" is a price that never changes, even if associated costs rise?
Um, yes, have you been paying attention? The money comes from the flat rate fees that this paper is all about. If you set your fees properly, the number of users it takes to saturate a unit of bandwidth (like a T-3 for example) should pay for the bandwidth itself. If you have priced your flat-rate fees so that they do not pay for the resources they consume, you have priced yourself at a loss, and it's your own fault when your network can't survive an increase in load.
No, it's nothing like metering. There is no distinction between service levels. All users are affected by these caps. They don't pay a different price to be able to ignore them, or to be less affected by them. It's a hard limit, whereas metering represents a "soft" limit.
And who the heck said anything about giving people OC48s?? The point is to charge people a flat rate fee. Nowhere either the article by John Levine or the associated research papers by Andrew Odlyzko. If we charge a flat-rate fee for those OC48s that covers their costs to produce, there's no reason at all we can't give everyone one of them. As long as they pay for themselves, there's not an issue. The backbone is perfectly capable of growing as demand requires it, as it continues to do on a practically daily basis.
Perhaps you should start the "free bandwidth fund". Nobody's mentioned free meals here but you.
Re:How very Ameri-centric. (Score:2)
Re:I personally believe... (Score:3)
I currently pay a phone bill, an electrical bill, a wireless bill, cable, rent, my car, buy groceries, and put fuel in my car. I choose not to pay for internet access (lunchtime/morning workbreak instead). I also do not pay for water or heating - two common bills which are covered by my landlord.
Personally, it would be ideal if I did not have to pay for any of this, but that is equivalent to wishing money grew on trees.
I classify bills into two types: essential and non-essential. Essential bills cover any survival based service: Water, Electricity, heating, grocery, and housing (rent). Non-essential bills include Phone, Wireless, Cable, a car, gasoline, and ISP access.
The government subsidises most essential costs for families who are low-income. They do not pay it outright, they do however cheapen or give tax credits for these costs.
It *could* be argued that all of these bills are non-essential, as there are people who chop their own wood for heating, do not use electricity and grow and hunt for their food. Quite literally I spent the weekend with friends who do this. They have a phone (for business actually), and gas power. If they need electricity *for his laptop* they use car batteries. Soon they will be adding solar to their cabin and actually charge batteries that way. They have gas lights, gas stove and a gas refridgerator. Their house is amazingly warm from the woodstove (though I hear it gets a little nipply during a cold snowstorm if the fire goes out.) Quite honeslty they are making little impact on the environment (they would be getting Nuclear Power - which they are against, and the addition of the solar/wind powers will increase their self-sufficency). Lastly their water is gravity fed not pumped - what exactly that means I am unsure.
While I grew up in rural Maine, I now live in Boston and I am afforded an amazing amount of conveniences. I however, envy every aspect of that house - it is an engineering dream. They built a nearly autonomous home and are expanding its autonomy from overpriced utilities further.
But I digress....
Internet access is so survivally trivial that to even consider that it, of ALL bills, should be free is ludicrous(spelling?). You have no RIGHT to be online. You have no RIGHT to own a computer. You made the decision to purchase a computer, you made the decision to purchase an online service. There was never a question of your survival if you did not.
I will consider my friend an exception to the system and maintain the "essentiality" of the services I qualified as essential before. Proposal of free online service is silly - as there are many services necessary to survival in modern society which should be free long before ISPs are.
An ISP is a "PROFFIT" based company. They have every right to charge whatever the hell they feel like (within reason).
I work for a research engineering firm and to even consider charging half of what we do (let alone offer it for free) is completely ludicrous.
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Metering already exists (Score:2)
Re:Stamps (Score:3)
- Luckily, since Babbage's day, we have made some progress in the amount of time needed to calculate things.
- or -- If only Babbage had made such a statement after developing his engine.
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It does (Score:2)
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Re:It's like food (Score:2)
If your area is like my area, there aren't many buffet restaurants around. And the ones that are around serve cruddy food.
And so, for some reason, the market has demanded and gotten buffet service, and the "food" is correspondingly cruddy. Lower bandwidth than expected, 3-4 month install times for DSL, incompetent service, etc.
We should be demanding restaurant service, so that we could get better food.
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Good for the Goose, good for the Gander (Score:2)
Politicians should pay a $1 liars fee to each and every single person their lies affect. This way people lied to by a politician know that at least it cost THEM for a change. Then we can start metering verbal speech, by the word of course for those whom don't speak much...
Internet usage IS metered. (Score:2)
It is true that home lines -- modems, DSL, and the like -- are generally not charged on a per-usage basis. The amount of bandwidth consumed by the average home line is too small to make it worth the expense of metering.
- Damien
Re:I pay now. (Score:2)
The real problem I see with that type of billing is that you're paying to receive instead of to send. That means you pay for spam or unsolicited packets. What if some asshole sends you 20 Gig of ping packets overnight? Ugh.
If metered billing is done, costs need to be payed by sender. Alas, that means that servers will have to bill users to cover bandwidth costs. Still, it's the only way that's fair.
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Real costs for an ISP (Score:3)
Actually, metering tech support would make more sense. But 900 numbers have such a bad reputation (and the telco takes such a big cut) that that doesn't work.
Metering connect time has been tried; remember AOL. That's history.
The only way metering is going to happen is if somebody gets a monopoly. Otherwise, unmetered services will wipe out metered ones.
Re:Capitalist society. (Score:2)
Re:Stamps (Score:2)
Should electricity be this way? (Score:4)
The main objection would be that the cost of producing electricity is not marginal when compared to the cost of building infrastructure, EXCEPT for nuclear and renewables, where the cost of maintaining infrastructure is almost all of the production cost. So flat rate would actually encourage utilities to invest in renewables and nuclear, and discourage use of fossil fuels.
Residential usage can benefit from conservation practices under metering, but only so much. Today, we subsidize electric utilities' conservation and education efforts. If flat-rate were the model, the advantages of such efforts would be evident to the utilities, and the efforts would increase: utilities would likely pay appliance manufacturers and home-builders to build in efficiency, rather than conservation-minded consumers having to pay a premium and hunt for such products.
Electric use wouldn't suffer the same level of "abuse" as bandwidth -- after a certain point, you don't need any more wattage in your light bulbs. If bandwith flat-rates can survive with "campers", electric flat rates could survive with people running businesses on their residential feeds.
Finally, we are facing an electric capacity shortage in the US today, and the article's point that metered service increases peak use is important here.
Has anyone heard proposals along these lines?
What would it do to the home-generation and co-generation efforts that benefit from reducing their metered usage? Could these producers simply not pay the flat rate and provide the power themselves?
Re:I personally believe... (Score:2)
As an example, heating with wood causes far more pollution than using gas or electricity for heat (especially if the electricity comes from a hydroelectric, solar, wind, or nuclear sources). Unfortunately, I don't have the data to compare heating with electicity generated from a coal- or oil-fired plant vs heating with wood.
On solar power: Unfortunately, solar power costs far too much to generate electricity practically. The only time it is worthwhile to generate electricity from solar power is when the location is too remote to run power lines to from a more conventional source. Unless your friends live in an area unserviced by power lines, their choice of solar power will be a costly one. However, it is their choice, and I am glad they live where they have the freedom to make that choice!
Related implications to micropayments (Score:2)
The assumption is that micropayments are so small that no one will care. But this isn't true. There is still the floating anxiety and bother of "mentally counting" each minute (pun intended) purchase. Also related, if what you are purchasing with micropayments has clearly perceiveable "high value", such a system will likely be trivially accepted by users. If your prospective users do not clearly perceive value (whatever that means to them, not to you as a marketer), either due to the type of product offered or the way you've "positioned" your product, micropayment economics will fail.
I suspect that micropayments haven't really taken off in part because this fundamental piece of psychology was never integrated into either the protocols or the business plans of those creating micropayment systems.
Re:Ok. And? (Score:3)
I work for a major national ISP, and this is absolutely true. Metering usage requires large amounts of engineering, significant new equipment, support systems, etc. - and leads to vast amounts of customer support calls for a few bucks in service charges. Just not worth it. Even in dial-up service, you only meter usage if you have to - e.g. 800 dial-up, where costs are fairly high - not in basic service.
Also, it's a competitive market, and customers want flat rate, so that's what we give them.
It's interesting: every couple of months, some fancy-pants vendor sends me a package in the mail promising "You can charge for usage! Make money on QoS! Decommoditize Internet access with VPNs, traffic shaping, etc.!" I don't have a single customer willing to pay for such a thing, so into the can they go. So the vendor names keep changing, and not because they sell out to Cisco.
The old KISS rule makes the most sense in the ISP biz. Avoid confusing your customers and they'll be more likely to buy and upgrade.
Re:Counter-logs? (Score:2)
Remember when Sprint announced ION for home users, [sprint.com] with metered bandwidth? It went over like a lead balloon.
that's appalling. (Score:2)
Yucko.
Re:Cable TV (Score:2)
Re:that's appalling. (Score:2)
In NB now, we can get DSL in 3 (maybe 4 now) cities. And only in certain parts of those cities.
Cable service is a joke. Last I checked, you needed a modem and had to use your phone line for the upstream. So, really, the only choice for broadband is the DSL I explained earlier, and it's only available through one provider, who also happens to be our ever-growing telco.
Unless you're rich. Then you can get a T1 or ISDN or whatever for outlandish prices.
So, as I said, I'm moving to Montreal, where at least there are more options.. but I've heard that Bell Canada likes to.. uh.. flex their power up there.
Re:I pay now. (Score:2)
And I've never had DSL in those other provinces, but is it normal that service just dies for 1/2 hour at a time once a week or so?
metering (Score:2)
Metering would be fine... (Score:3)
Why? I currently have @Home service (yeah, I know it sucks, but it is all I can get right now), but in order to stay legit, I am not allowed to run servers. I am also capped on my upload bandwidth (and probably capped on the download, but at several times what the upload cap is).
Before I signed up for the service, I repeatedly tried to get them to offer me more bandwidth and the ability to run a server (hey, I am not wanting to so I can run an MP3 or p0rn server - I just would like to host my site at home, instead of through HE), even offering to pay more for any extra bandwidth I use, etc. They suggested I look into @Work - but since this is a hobbiest site with low hit counts, I can't afford that kind of access.
I was even willing to keep the cap, and just allow me to run a server, but they wouldn't do it (they wouldn't even let me negotiate the contract)...
Bleh...
Anyhow, if we could get metered service for those who want it, and allow us to run servers and pay for what is used, then maybe we can get out of these stuffy contracts that disallow you from reselling the service or using it to run a server or whatnot, and get back to just providing a pipe to use.
I support the EFF [eff.org] - do you?
Give me choice or give me death (Score:2)
Around these parts (Calgary, Canada) there have (over year ago last I looked) been the CHOICE of flat rate at $20/month or Small cap (5mb) for $10/month and some $/meg after the fact for phone connections.
Same should be available for high speed, but it isn't ('cept for a cap for web hogs) because most people prefer higher but steady monthly charges. So we get $40/month cable or DSL and that's it for your 'options'.
The water utility offers flat rate and metered, yet most people keep flat even though (they say) that most people would pay less on metered.
Quite simply people will pay more for financial stability and simplicity of billing. BUT I wish there would be more choices for those of us who have enough of a clue factor to know their usage patterns.
I went with a total pay-by-the-minute cel phone this year because I KNOW that my usage is low. I would never have gotten a phone at the $20/month rate for time I'd never use up.
I can't do this for web access; Thus I stick with a cheap 56K phone rather that pay the same for a limited (but fast) high speed connection.
Is it worth it for administration and # of customers for this option to be offered. Dunno.
New Script Kiddie Trick: Big Bills (Score:5)
That's one of the big problems with metered billing. It's one thing when a script kiddie gets upset at you and floods you with traffic for a few hours. It's a whole different story if you get a huge bill from your ISP because of it.
If everyone goes to metered billing you will see all sorts of abuses as crackers try to set up servers on other peoples machines to avoid paying the bills for their traffic. Add that up to the aforementioned harrasment traffic jacking up peoples bills. Plus the dishonest users who blame their traffic spikes on "hackers".
I just don't see it being worth the headache for an ISP to charge by the byte. You can bet that any user that is hit by the above problems is going to run screaming to the nearest flat rate ISP. Besides, the rates are metered to a certain extent. Dialup access is not the same cost as OC-3 by a long shot. So all the dialup users are in the same cost pool. So what? They are in a different cost pool from the DSL users, who are in a different pool from the T3 users, etc.
Europe & Japan already have metering (Score:2)
Re:Capitalist society. (Score:2)
Unfortunately most of us live in capitalist societies where the price of something is based on the market demand for that something and has very little to do with the actual cost of that something.
Well, once the widget has been made this is true. This is why lots of analysis is done to figure out what people might pay. If those numbers are too low, then the comodity won't be produced. Likewise, when you have an excess, and the market sale price is too low, you may opt to do something other than sell it.. For example, if I have a car, and the resale value is too low, I might strip it down and sell the pieces.
You say unfortunately, but this is a very efficient model. In the case of essential goods, the government can step in an regulate (such as the power industry, telephone, welfare, etc). In a non-market-based society, it's like having every resource regulated, which makes most services sold at inefficient levels. Often, there are pricing departments that supposedly try and find the "right" levels, but the market is too dynmic. This year, more people will want to buy the PT cursuer than next. How can you best determine who gets what? Is it first come first serve? Or should the market price adapt based on Supply and Demand, and the very first are just lucky, while towards the end, only those that really want it (or happen to be rich) get it. The difference is that it's more difficult to determine who really deserves to get the widget a-priori. Much like it's more difficult to maintain accounting on IP or CPU traffic for the entire net.
-Michael
Re:Capitalist society. (Score:2)
What most people fail to realize is that the cost of production for "something" ISN'T just the worth of the materials used and the machine and people that put them together. It now also involves cost of advertising, marketing, research to design new iterations of the product, etc. All these things cost money and manpower to, and drive up the "real" cost of "something."
You can think of it like a B-tree. The leaf nodes are the resources. But that's not the total number of nodes in the system. You have all the connecting nodes all the way up the tree. The next to bottom level would be the workers that work the materials, then the supervisors, then the planners (who direct the supervisors to direct the workers). You break off the planners into R&D. At the very top is the executive board and finally the CEO. Every one of these guys has a cost.
BUT, none of this has anything to do with the price. The marginal cost (which includes interest on any borrowed resources required to produce the factories) is factored into the initial price. But once it gets going and the factories are set to produce x-widgets / cycle, then the supply is set, and prices is totally based on that fixed supply and the varying demand (which is affected by competition).
Cost only influences prices in the long run (in terms of entry or exiting a market, or in adjusting the number of manufactured widgets).
Telephone / cable company already has your wires layed, their cost is really that of the BW on the major trunks, and the power lines. They also try to factor in the depretiation cost of the hardware, but that's only taken into consideration at initial cost time. Your rates only really change seasonally when any major changes take place (which typically affects volume or quality of service)
Re:Stamps (Score:2)
A wire can only carry so much data.
When it's full, everyone else has to suffer.
Not necessarily true. You offer Quality of Service to your high-paying customers. Filter out a percentage of packets from your variable rate customers. POTS Telephone lines (like modem connections) have a fixed channel rate, and could seriously disrupt things if sample-packets are periodically dropped. ISDN, DSL and T1's however are all digital, and entire frames are droppable since the end points can recover.
The carrier marks your Point-to-Point interface with a QOS which ultimately determines the drop-rate. The average user would be tied down during peek-hours. They'd have to spend more for peek-hour use just like current long-distance services.
Long distance carriers can afford to do 24/7 same-pricing only because they're gambling that people make mainly regional calls. With the internet, that's not the case. We're all over the world and back several times in an evening.
Monitoring that BW at every point and probagating trunk charges would be insane. Major trunks or backbones couldn't keep up with the volume of charging data (especially in light of their having a fixed cost no matter who sends to whom). It's only the ISPs with hundreds of home-connections and one or more major trunk connections that would have any incentive for this. And that's what we see today. For anything higher than a fixed cost modem-line, you pay proportional to the BW.
The source: Andrew Odlyzko's original paper (Score:2)
You can view Andrew's paper on his website at www.research.att.com/~amo/doc/ net works.html [att.com], where you can find several other interesting papers too.
Direct links the the Content is not king paper are: [Abstract] [slashdot.org] [PostScript] [slashdot.org] [PDF] [slashdot.org] [LaTeX] [slashdot.org]
One interesting quote in the paper was:
Re:Metering is stupid for home users (Score:2)
This would make for an interesting stratification of the web. Only the rich can afford streaming video and audio.
Re:I personally believe... (Score:2)
Heating with wood is far more detrimental to the environment than most of the other methods. Including nuclear power. As someone who worked in the nuclear industry for 10 years, you're just going to have to take my word on that. (Yes, there are some dirty reactors still in operation but we actually know how to build them right these days. The fact that no one is doing so is unfortunate. Coal fired power plants are even worse on the environment. Ever visit a strip mine?)
Your friends have a lot of money. Adding solar power to a house is expensive and probably not worth the money in most states in the US. The southwest, Texas, Florida perhaps. Not many other places. Gas stove? Gas costs money. They hunt for their food? On their own land? What would happen if all 300 million of us had to hunt for our food. Your friends' lifestyle is only sustainable because the rest of us live differently.
The fact that you can survive without phone or internet access doesn't say anything about your quality of life.
First let's look at lifestyle. If you're the loner type, then moving to a house in the woods might be the thing for you. Man (and woman) is a social animal. Most (>70% I believe) of the US lives in an urban area. We want to be around other people. We want to communicate. Picking up the phone and calling any one of my friends at any time is a convenience and definitely improves the quality of my life.
Secondly, let's look at money. If you're not rich, how do you achieve a lifestyle of no phone/net access. How many professions (or ways of making money) are left without using the phone or harming the environment. Damn few. You can live in your shack in the woods and proclaim you're not harming the environment, but what do you do for a living?
And lastly, I believe you're incredibly shortsighted. Right now it's not necessary to have net access. I'm not sure that's going to be true in 50 years. You'll likely get everything but the essentials via the net. Music, books, entertainment, interactive games, etc. You'll be able to get by without it, just like you can get by without a phone today. The Amish do so. Doesn't mean the rest of us want to live that way.
Perhaps in this day and age online access shouldn't be subsidized, but I see a point in the not too distant future when it becomes necessary. I know that phones are still subsidized for low-income families. I believe that will happen for 'net access also.
You can proclaim your friends as having less kharmic debt to nature than most of us but the only thing that allows them to do so is the rest of us living differently. 100 million people hunting and searching for fire wood for their families would shortly deplete our forests and game.
Your friends are not living an ideal life in any absolute sense. Just in your estimation.
--
Looking for a job [hotjobs.com]
No! (Score:4)
What a horrible idea. I don't want my electric bill to go up, just because all my neighbors prefer refrigerated air over evaporative cooling, incandescent over flourescent, etc. Flat rates take away peoples' incentive to be efficient.
The reason you can't compare bandwidth to electric is that when electricity is flowing a resource is really being used up. It's not just infrastructure, it's consumed energy too. With bandwidth, there isn't the consumption aspect of it.
---
Viva Las Vegas (Score:2)
But ISP service is fundamentally different. Buffets offer a wide variety of food, and can charge a flat rate (and offer very skimpy table service) because they can average it all over a large number of fairly predictable users. ISPs, on the other hand, offer one thing: internet access. It's more like a cafe where you get free refills, and they know that most users don't get the refill; they can afford to accommodate the few all-day coffee drinkers, who also buy more donuts (think email accounts, listservs, that sort of thing). It all works out.
Re:It does (Score:2)
Re:Stamps (Score:2)
What makes you think a "long distance" packet doesn't really cost more money to send then a "short distance" one? If you send a packet up your ADSL line to someone down the block (who is signe up with the ISP) the packet will go up your ADSL line, maybe across a DSLAM, into some manner of router, maybe to another router in the same hub across a relitavly cheap gigabit ethernet (or maybe just 100Mbit).
If you send the same packet from VA to NJ you also involve one or more long haul links which have a large monthly cost. Sure you use a tiny bit of it, but if you packet it part of the peak demand, then it is part of what causes the next round of expansion (if it is off peak then it is essensally free).
If you send the packet from VA to Europe there are even more expensave links involved. (very very costly undersea links...expensave links in countries where the PTT has a monopoly, or effectave monopoly on data lines...)
If you cross from one ISP to another you have the cost of the links, and you have the cost of whatever polotics needed to be run through to get peering, or dollars to be a "wholesale reseller", and monthly rent on more space in the middle of some telco facility, and...
I don't think it is a good idea to charge for long-distance Internet traffic, but the idea that distance is free is just wrong. I think the cost of even finding the cost for IP packets would excede the cost of the packet, let alone the cost of recording it! Even if it didn't nobody would want to pay.
Re:Metering would be fine... (Score:2)
I have thought about running on high ports, but that isn't quite the same as how I have my site right now, where anyone who clicks the link above can see it, and search engines can see it easily as well. IOW, I would rather run on standard ports for http.
Now, high non-standard ports would be OK for me to do some other work I have thought about (setting up a personal, my use only, FTP server - to xfer files between my work and home - etc), but I still would rather be able to do this legally, than skirting the edges and getting my contract canceled because I ran a telnet daemon on my box that I used occasionally...
I support the EFF [eff.org] - do you?
Metcalfe's Law (Score:2)
Re:Stamps (Score:2)
What makes you think a "long distance" packet doesn't really cost more money to send then a "short distance" one? If you send a packet up your ADSL line to someone down the block (who is signe up with the ISP) the packet will go up your ADSL line, maybe across a DSLAM, into some manner of router, maybe to another router in the same hub across a relitavly cheap gigabit ethernet (or maybe just 100Mbit).
Have some fun with traceroute. I have sent packets to a location only a few miles away that got routed (in several hops) across several states and then back down (through different states) only to arrive a short distance away. If it really cost much more to do that, I'm certain that the various providers would have made sure that such routes didn't happen.
The real costs are based on peak usage. The equipment needed to maintain 10Gb is much more expensive than that needed to maintain 28Kb. The long route I saw will be eliminated when enough packets take that route to require equipment upgrades. At that point, the cost of adding a peer route locally (possably as cheap as 20 feet of Cat-5, possably as expensive as laying several miles of new fiber and 2 new switches + rack space) will be compared to the cost of upgrading the existing route.
In the cost equasion, there is never any benefit to carrying less than peak traffic (though in reality, that happens all the time). So, someone sucking up an extra Mb at peak time on a network running at capacity costs real money. The same person doing the same thing at 3:00 A.M. with a network at 10% capacity costs nothing.
Costs also involve a lot of other factors such as the difference between simply charging everyone in the user database the same thing and not worrying about invoices vs. actually measuring the average peak used for each user, producing an invoice (electronic or paper), charging the various amounts, and fielding questions from customers who don't understand why they got a high bill this month, or who feel that they were over charged. Include in the latter category those who feel certain enough (right or wrong) to actually refuse to pay.
To top it all off, there's the guy down the street who's just getting started and charges a flat rate to entice your customers away.
Re:Capitalist society. (Score:2)
Re:Stamps (Score:2)
Re:Stamps (Score:2)
You are right, so am i, and the guy above you and below me is wrong.
Actually, I was just providing information one could base an opinion on. Personally, I feel that in many cases the issues in the last paragraph can be expensive enough to make adding a bit more pipe or just clamping bandwidth during peak hours cheaper than metering.
That includes low usage customers. You'd never notice the clamps since you're not a big consumer. High usage customers would likely use cron jobs to do their transfers at 3AM or just attribute the slowdown to heavy traffic (somewhat true no less). Any savings you might see based on your low usage would be eaten up paying for the overhead of actually measuring your low usage and billing every customer a different amount.
There is a good arguement for simply offering broad categories of usage and using a traffic shaper to enforce it. Low use for the person who is primarily interested in email and light surfing, moderate for most people at about 33Kb and a high usage bracket providing DSL like limits. Possably a HAWG usage for people who do Napster 24/7. For the person who really is only interested in email, an email only account is also a possability.
A well configured shaper would allow any category to burst to full capacity briefly and only clamp it down as it approaches the usage pattern of the next category. In the best case, the shaper would only go into effect if the usage would push the ISP's average peak higher or starve other users' bandwidth.
Short summary: I believe there probably is room for multi-level flat rate service, but metering is probably too much of a pain.
It is also worth noting that most ISP's now don't have any traffic shaping provisions. You'll notice that dialup users don't get committed rates at all.