Didn’t arbitrary data caps start back in the day when torrenting was a big problem? The ISPs started cutting people off because only piracy could explain such heavy usage. That was in the early 00’s iirc, prior to the net neutrality debate.
> That was in the early 00’s iirc, prior to the net neutrality debate.
Net neutrality as a policy concept was first specifically named in 2003, in direct response to actions beginning to occur at the time, and the FCC chair at the time adopted four network freedom principles that are the core of net neutrality as guiding principles (at the time for case-by-case action without general regulation) in 2004; the first action in which they were put into practice was 2005.
The regulatory debate kicked off in earnest in 2010 when the FCC lost a court case over its non-regulatory application of the principles against Comcast’s BitTorrent blocking.
That was the guise to justify the caps but Comcast was setting caps around the data usage of someone streaming Netflix. The overage charges were ridiculous as well, if you used 2x your data cap it would cost you 100x your regular bill.
I had some Nest cameras in addition to Streaming and ended up taking them down because I kept going over.
In Australia my first broadband internet connection worked like that - though when you went over, your bandwidth was heavily throttled until the end of the month unless you upgraded your plan for the month.
As inconvenient as it is, honestly I think data caps are fair pricing. The load difference between a light internet user and a heavy user is orders of magnitude of capacity for the ISP to deal with. Having a flat price for internet sounds similar to having flat price for electricity or water - where your grandma (who turns off all the light switches whenever she leaves a room) would pay the same for electricity as a frat house mining bitcoin in the cupboard.
Sure, customers pay for speed. But residential internet is overprovisioned based on 'reasonable' usage patterns. Thats a good thing - internet would be much more expensive, or forced to be much slower otherwise.
> Having a flat price for internet sounds similar to having flat price for electricity or water - where your grandma (who turns off all the light switches whenever she leaves a room) would pay the same for electricity as a frat house mining bitcoin in the cupboard.
The difference is that to provide you with more electricity, the power company has to burn more natural gas, and pay more for that. When a data network is at less than 100% capacity, higher usage doesn't cost anything, the extra capacity is just lost. So to begin with, data caps that count traffic during off-peak hours are a pure scam; there is no reason for anyone to conserve bandwidth then.
Then you have the on-peak hours. Now, there are different ways to handle this. One is to set pricing that will deter usage, the other is to share the capacity. So you have a 1Gbps fiber connection but the uplink is oversubscribed and during peak hours you each get 800Mbps. People generally prefer this to paying more.
But some people want to have the 1Gbps per second all the time, so they should prefer metered billing, right? Still no. What you have instead is business service. If you want to be sure you have 1Gbps all the time, you pay a higher monthly fee and then get a higher class of service so that you do. Now the lower cost connection gets 1Gbps for 80% of the day and 500Mbps during peak hours -- which is a completely reasonable trade off for your grandma because she gets to save money and 500Mbps is still plenty enough. Whereas if you have some important need to always have the full speed, you can pay more and get it.
There is never any reason to meter it, and some pretty good reasons not to. It screws the people who actually need the guarantee if the metered pricing is ever insufficient to keep the network below 100% capacity. It also makes inefficient use of available capacity, because then you need to keep the network below 100% capacity, but that results in wasted capacity. And, of course, it creates a perverse incentive for the ISP when they can exempt their own services from the cap.
wow - go read up on oversubscription; you might get a better idea about how networks work. The idea that any provider has 100% back end capacity for the full bandwidth of every node connection is beyond laughable.
Though sometimes they do. Do you think the unmetered connection a data center buys is oversubscribed by their ISP? They pay for it not to be, and then they use the full capacity. It's still not metered.
Sonic charges you $30/month for gigabit and $50/month for 10gigabit if I recall correctly. No data caps. These prices are similar to what fiber costs in Europe (or at least France).
Data caps are not fair pricing in a competitive environment but it seems that way when you have a duopoly of competition that collude on plans, pricing, and messaging.
A duopoly? Wow, that sounds sweet. I have one cable company, and a phone company that gave up even offering Internet in my area at all. That phone company is AT&T.
PS: I live in a built-up suburb in a large metro area where the cities are all touching, not in the sticks.
Yeah, but most of those extra charges are because the FCC has failed to classify broadband as Title II. Because pure broadband hasn't been Title II, pure broadband providers have zero rights to get on utility poles.
So Sonic bundles in a voice line that no one uses - but that gives Sonic the right to get onto poles (owned by incumbents) at fair prices, and they can complain to the state and feds if they don't get that.
If we'd gotten classification right from the start (looking at you Michael Powell), that kind of chicanery would be unneccessary.
Still I'm paying $75 a month, fees and taxes included, for a 10Gbps symmetrical connection with no data cap. Happiest I've ever been with a broadband connection.
Voice Federal Subscriber Line Charge Fee - STI-0555086-8/PAIR200 6.50
Voice Federal Universal Service Fund Fee - STI-0555086-8/PAIR200 2.62
Voice California 911 Emergency Surcharge - STI-0555086-8/PAIR200 0.30
Voice Oakland Utility Users Tax - STI-0555086-8/PAIR200 1.46
Voice California Public Utility Commission User Fee - STI-0555086-8/PAIR200 0.08
Voice FCC Interstate Telecom Service Provider Fee - STI-0555086-8/PAIR200 0.04
Property Tax Allotment Surcharge - STI-0555086-8/PAIR200 1.64
Voice Regulatory Recovery Surcharge - STI-0555086-8/PAIR200 1.29
Fiber Phone Service - 5103800838 - STI-0555086-8/PAIR200 0.00
Fiber - Fusion 10Gbps - STI-0555086-8 59.99
Fiber Information - STI-0555086-8 - Data $49.99 Voice $10.00 0.00
Voice California 988 Suicide Prevention Surcharge - STI-0555086-8/PAIR200 0.08
Voice California Public Purpose Program Surcharge - STI-0555086-8/PAIR200 1.11
The rub is that ISPs, at least in the US, do not charge a fair rate for data and under provision the service because it can compete with their other service offerings. Consumption is a huge problem until you subscribe to their triple play packages, all IP based, then it magically goes away.
A 1 gigabit connection represents 384 Terrabytes of data over a month.
You can certainly say using 100% of that is excessive and not many disagree.
The question is what is excessive? 50%? 10%? For me it is 0.4% without up charges.
Additionally on the topic of costs bandwidth is by definition free. Pretty much everybody is okay with $0/gb pricing for network traffic.
Capacity costs money. How much capacity does an excessive data user consume? Certainly not 10x as you surmise, they are only one user.
Just look at their pricing for the answer, I can pay 50% more for unlimited data which means it costs them at most 50% more (certainly less since this is a scheme to earn more revenue).
On the topic of provisioning residential is hugely under provisioned as a cost cutting measure. This isn't all bad as there is never a time where everyone wants all their bandwidth. But blaming slow downs on high bandwidth users is silly when no one bothers to track capacity in these situations.
The reality is they just throttle you to keep bandwidth evenly split during high traffic time (as they should, everyone should share the bottlenecked line equally). Which resolved any capacity problems as much as they care to.
Bandwidth caps have always been a charge that isn't technically a charge and nothing more.
> You can certainly say using 100% of that is excessive and not many disagree.
If it does not affect other customers, and if it does not exceed the ISPs peering agreements such that they must spend extra to serve that bandwidth beyond what would pay normally...
Then how is it "excessive"? But even if it was, then the ISPs are ethically obligated to publish what they consider to be excessive so that its customers can avoid any penalties and/or animosity. Network bandwidth is by its very nature a commodity whose demand will only increase into the future, after all, and some people are "getting there first". They shouldn't be chastised as troublemakers or gluttonous or whatever.
I don’t think that’s excessive either. But if one user is using 384 TB of bandwidth each month, the ISP needs to pay for that bandwidth somehow. If another user is using 40gb per month, it seems unfair to me that both users should pay the same amount of money for their connections.
The user who uses 10 000x the bandwidth should pay more than the person using 10kx less bandwidth. Not proportionally more - a lot of the cost of connection is fixed. But some of it isn’t. The ISP at some point needs to upgrade their network links to handle the extra bandwidth going through their network. And I think it’s reasonable the person who’s using all that bandwidth pay more for the upgrade than people who aren’t using the bandwidth.
The nice thing about having a financial model around bandwidth is we don’t need judgemental words like “excessive” and “gluttonous”. You just pay for what you need. Simple as that.
I don't mind paying for bandwidth. I mind paying well in excess of 1,000x what that bandwidth costs.
Peering costs are effectively zero and so your costs are hardware to peer and bandwidth to the site. They already split bandwidth so we will consider that unimportant for this discussion.
You have a 10 Gb connection to a peer and that connection costs around $10k and lasts 5 years give or take.
So given a per year rate of $2k and 10% maximum utilization the entire bandwidth cost is ~$200/year.
Since that is 4.6 Petabytes that means it costs 4 cents per Terabyte of bandwidth.
Sure I could be off by a bit but an order of magnitude puts it at 40 cents per Terabyte.
Now let's compare Cox's price of $10/50 GB or $200 per Terabyte.
Even inflating the costs by 10x you are looking at 99.8% profit margin on bandwidth fees.
> I don’t think that’s excessive either. But if one user is using 384 TB of bandwidth each month, the ISP needs to pay for that bandwidth somehow.
Subscription fees should be set to cover the costs of bandwidth. Right now ISPs want to advertise unlimited service for a certain (already excessive) price and then complain when users actually use the service they're paying for as advertised. They've changed their ads many times over the years as a result of being called out for their word games (see for example https://consumerist.com/2010/03/02/comcast-unlimited-usage-d...)
If the ISP has a reasonably capable network the few users who are using tons of bandwidth will be more than made up for by the majority of users who barely use the service at all (the check email/weather/facebook/sports scores crowd)
That's still a clear motivator, considering that "piracy" via bittorrent directly competes with the streaming services that pay for preferential bandwidth allocation.
