There's No Data To Prove Metered Billing Is Necessary > Hmmmmm

Hmmmmm

Trying to justify metered billing by using a generation that barely uses computers that will be mostly gone in 10-20 years makes no sense.

Especially considering if you just email you can use really cheap dial-up for the 1 minutes a day it takes to download emails and the 1 minute a day it takes to send the replies.

Metered billing is a money grab no matter which way you look at it. Because most of the cost on an internet connection is infrastructure, not bandwidth. Infrastructure is a fixed cost. This is why companies never used metered billing to begin with. The bandwidth they want to meter was worth nothing. 10-20 bucks a month for a line and 2cents a month for a gigabyte isn't going to be that profitable.

But after seeing how phone companies can get away with charging obscene rates for bandwidth, they want in on it. Text messages cost a carrier nothing and it's the most expensive metered service they have.

So their proposal is to charge 1 dollar a gigabyte instead of the true rate of less than 1cent. With a base line that costs 10-20 dollar in order to push most people into paying hundreds a month with normal use. Not only would the costs be extremely high it will deter people from using online video services and instead cause them to spend more on cable based PPV and ondemand services.

reply to moonpuppy
NO, NO, NO!!! Don't you people understand??? We, the poor Time Warner executives, don't want to lower our initial monthly bills. That would simply confuse consumers. No, what we want to do is simply add these extra charges on. It's much simpler that way. Besides, if we charge less on the front end, many people may not use enough data to make it to their current price point, so this would end up losing money for us. It's no different than a-la-carte cable. If we offered that, our revenue would go right out the window, since we know few people watch most of our channels.

Looks like most of you free-love hippies have never taken a business course. It's not about offering value; it's about squeezing the consumer hard enough to extract every possible dollar but just shy of the point that they're mad enough to leave. Why don't you stop by your local cable company someday? We'll show you how it's done, and we'll do it with a big smile on our faces.

reply to insomniac84
the example i used is real based on personal knowledge of some very low use consumers. unless ageism is the new hip thing, it doesn't make the situation any less valid just because they are from a different generation. all low use consumers should pay less under the proposed metered billing. having any significant floor is just a money grab.

it's like saying "why do you eat anything other than chicken noodle soup and drink anything other than water and a multi-vitamin? it meets your nutritional needs completely." see the problem with that logic?

i'm not ignoring the cost of the network. cable is arguing that EVERYONE (high, medium, and low users) should pay more for their service even though costs have actually gone down. that's what caps/metered service do. i'm saying that the only fair metered system would work both ways: extreme users pay more if they consume more and extreme low users pay less.

the problem i have is you're essentially accepting cable's "floor" for pricing at $39 as legitimate and reasonable. i am not.

reply to morbo

reply to insomniac84

espaeth

You know full well that commercial bandwidth is sold by the Mbps and not by the GB. The ISPs costs are significant during peak load hours (that is what they are actually billed on) and nonexistent during non peak hours (they are not billed for these). This applies whether you are looking at transit costs or hardware costs.

Supposedly the purpose of the usage based charges is to charge the users who use more bandwidth more. The vast majority of high bandwidth users I know, avoid using internet during high peak usage times becuase it is a waste of time. It is not unusual at all for people on a 16Mbps line to see sub 10Mbps speeds during peak hours. These people(off hour down loaders) put virtually no pressure on the system during peak hours (everybody does some, email, etc during peak hours). Their downloads(off peak) literally cost the ISP nothing extra over a "light" user.

This entire thing came about by the ISPs offering speeds faster than their system can support. It is not the 1% (that they are always talking about) downloading huge amounts that is slowing down the system (most of those people are downloading during off peak hours). As p2p bandwidth usage has dropped over the last couple of years, it is not them either. It is the 80% of users all downloading a little bit (at high speed) at the same time during peak hours. Effectively the heavy users are splitting the 38Mbps (the channel) amongst 10(?) people online in those hours vs the 100 (or more) people trying to split that same 38Mbps during peak hours. When the top speed was 10Mbps, it was somewhat reasonable(at least relative to now) for a large number of users to split up the 38Mbps, but now with 20Mbps (and higher, still on D2) splitting up that same 38Mbps. The jump from 10Mbps to 20Mbps is effectively the same (during peak hours) as doubling the number of people on the node. IF they would limit the D2 speed to 10Mbps and force higher tiers to use D3, it would help the situation considerable without having to resort to caps.