 japPremium
join:2003-08-10
038xx | Pay by GB throughput..... I can't believe nobody here has yet spoken of measured service!
What pisses me off is the ISPs are avoiding the PR pain of making the obviously-gonna-happen-anyway move to measured service. There is no way to avoid the fact that data throughput usage costs money and people consume wildly different quantities of it.
This silly assed finger pointing at software tools, traffic shaping on the sly, judgements of who's doing what, yada yada. It's astoundingly bad management that providers are not implementing fixed-capped accounts with real-cost (which is cheap off-peak) overage charges.
It's a frikken limited resource network like any other and congestion problems are regionally limited to business and evening hours. We need pricing that pushes heavy users into the low-load periods. And we need the user base (that's us!!) to pressure our providers to do it now or we'll suffer untold months of this shaping, invisible caps on selected accounts, bait&switch marketing, and all the other bad relations crap people here are complaining about. |
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TELUS
join:2004-02-16
TELUS | Maybe it's done differently in your area with your service providers.
There are some service providers here that charge for throughput.
You'd be surprised at how many people actually read or understand the agreements.
"ALWAYS ON! UNLIMITED USAGE" doesn't mean unlimited throughput, but since not all parties understand the contract, it provides a loop of some sort.
It's common to see $6 [$5USD] for every gigabyte over 10-20GB per month.
Everyone viewing this news topic thinks Shaw is the only provider, which is incorrect.
Eh. |
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 wintr
join:2004-10-13
Calgary, AB | reply to jap
Thanks jap, for saying something constructive. Your bang on.
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546f6f206d616e792073656372657473»augmentedreality.ca |
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japPremium
join:2003-08-10
038xx | reply to TELUS
AFAIK, no major providers in the US residential market rely upon measured service plans.
So far they deal with both peak-load issues and high usage users (read: costing them more money than the the account plan is priced at) by silently and often secretly denying services: account-specific shaping down to a trickle, port blocking, etc.. If a user calls and complains either nothing happens or they blame it on a network issue and remove or reduce the throttle they had .... for awhile. Each provider deals with high-usage account holders differently, but there's enough of a pattern and info-leaks from techs at major providers to conclude that these shenanigans are wide spread.
Users have (wrongly) come to expect unlimited throughputs as akin to an inalienable human rights issue and ISPs are avoiding the pain of a PR brouhaha by ..... err.... opting for the creation of another (and pointless) PR brouhaha. My point is users ought to be pushing for a reduction in cost of a basic account (say, 25$/mo for 3-6gb throughputs) plus a realistic per GB charge on overages - say peak-time $4-7/gb and offpeak $0.50-1.50/gb). It's all about managing peak loads, not total throughputs. |
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 John GaltForward, MarchPremium
join:2004-09-30
Happy Camp
kudos:3 | said by jap:It's all about managing peak loads, not total throughputs. He says it all...
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said by jap:What pisses me off is the ISPs are avoiding the PR pain of making the obviously-gonna-happen-anyway move to measured service. There is no way to avoid the fact that data throughput usage costs money and people consume wildly different quantities of it. That bandwidth only costs money to you, the end-user. If they own the network, then the amount of data that travels over it, up to its capacity limits, doesn't cost them anything. Now, certainly, the infrastructure and administration of that network do cost something; it's certainly not free. But it doesn't cost them per-byte - why should they bill you that way?
Eventually though, they probably will, because they will see that as a way to: 1) Make the most money, charging for every little byte, 2) discourage over-use of their network, especially when end-users have "big pipes", ones so big that they can't even fill them effectively. (I'm talking about FIOS here.) 3) Use that as a means to discriminate against potential end-users being alternative competing content-providers, especially when ISPs start partnering with commercial content-providers again to provide things like "movies on demand".
said by jap:It's a frikken limited resource network like any other and congestion problems are regionally limited to business and evening hours. We need pricing that pushes heavy users into the low-load periods. And we need the user base (that's us!!) to pressure our providers to do it now or we'll suffer untold months of this shaping, invisible caps on selected accounts, bait&switch marketing, and all the other bad relations crap people here are complaining about. Yes, ISPs need to be more open, accountable, and responsive to the needs of their customers, without deceiving them or trying to take advantage of them. |
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 IgnitePremium,VIP
join:2004-03-18
UK | quote:
But it doesn't cost them per-byte - why should they bill you that way?
So presumably Sprint, C+W, Level 3 etc carry traffic around the world between ISPs for free?
Google transit bandwidth, you'll find references to 95th percentile charging amongst other things. ISPs pay per Mbit/s for traffic that leaves their network, unless it goes to peers who they have an agreement with for non-charging. If the networks aren't physically linked or in an internet exchange this will cost per Mbit. |
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