yt
Premium
join:2008-06-03
| reply to Neyland
Re: Pipes?
While there are many emotions, self serving positions and dooms day predictions in news similar to this, I don't often read many facts as the jury is still out on the future. That said I highly recommend people read Justin's (owner of dslreports.com) editorial on this topic. It actually makes sense and is pretty unbias (vs purely position or "consumer focused")
»Editorial: Caps are welcome
quote:
Clean fast bandwidth is not an inexhaustible resource. I want my ISP to deliver maximum speed without any perceptible congestion, and with minimal latency. I want them to invest heavily in their infrastructure to ensure they can meet the speed and latency targets morning noon and night. When an ISP engineer says that metering and caps are necessary for quality service, I believe them. Any customer of a data center understands the equation: they understand that BOTH speed and monthly usage are key factors in pricing. US ISPs, due to inheriting dial-up pricing plans (effectively included caps due to very low speeds) have been missing one pricing factor, to the detriment of the majority of users and the benefit to a minority.
The main issue is - historically, as speeds increased, the cost to serve the average customer has not (today) as their usage habbits don't substantially change. There is however a class of user that consumes all bandwidth that is given to them which in turn causes 1 of 2 things
•All the rest of us must share the cost of that group of users (small % of users consuming most of the bandwidth. It is estimated that those going over 250G are something like 0.1% of the user base) - I can dig up the data on this, but sources have been quoted before)
•Those few users should pay their own costs by moving to a business tier or some other method (vs the rest of us funding their traffic)
There is also a future prediction of more and more video services running over broadband vs. traditional means. This is good, but understand that if usage patterns change and double, tripple, +++ then there is an added cost to that as well as a lost revenue from traditional TV. You can say "greedy" all you want, but think through both sides of the issue.
Think through this from all angles. |
|
Karl Bode
News Guy
join:2000-03-02
Host:
Road Runner
PC gaming GAMES
PC gaming Tech
4 edits | It actually makes sense and is pretty unbias (vs purely position or "consumer focused") Yes, yes, one man's bias is another man's unblemished truth, depending on the degree it adheres to one's own belief.
I'd recommend readers read the responses to Justin's editorial as well. While I respect his positions, I don't believe his post explored the entirety of developments on the metered billing front, or acknowledged the use of the "exaflood" as a lobbying and policy weapon to keep prices high by over-inflating the threat of looming capacity requirements and the ability to adapt to them.
Secondly, Many people here aren't against caps, they're against unreasonable caps or steep overages that don't even remotely begin to accurately reflect costs. In Time Warner Cable's particular effort, the overages of up to 2,000% with caps as low as 5GB. Even accounting for delivery and support that was simply insane.
Network growth is manageable and the costs to supply bandwidth are dropping -- that does raise a lot of questions of what happens to a carrier down the line as bandwidth provisional costs continue to drop and content companies do a better job at innovation on the applications/services front.
I do believe carriers will do anything to avoid being unlimited dumb-pipe providers. That includes the the wholesale fabrication of capacity crisis and any number of anti-competitive tactics. That said, I don't exclude the possibility of innovative new pricing models that take consumption or even application use into consideration -- I just haven't seen any that actually deliver better value to the consumer over what they're getting now. |
|
S_engineer
join:2007-05-16
Chicago, IL
 ·Comcast
2 edits | Your right Karl, his editorial also seemed to be wrong on several fronts. The carriers appearance of collusion on pricing models and now caps have raised flags everywhere. Proper network management can be implemented for capacity solutions. The geographical impediments seem to be the excuse to leave America in this stagnant growth period in regards to our "pipes".
And I don't buy the argument that capping everyone saves bandwidth. Your low usage customers still outweigh the "abusers" by far, so the mean usage should never hit the point where a network can't handle it. It's like with cable HSI. From 9:00am to 9:00pm when everyones on the shared node, the network handles the capacity, including most of these low usage customers. Are you going to dictate when people use their connection so the average includes the overnight hours?
Lastly, if these carriers didn't have the capacity, why did you sell to so many customers? weren't these carriers paying attention to growth forecasts?
Edit*for errors
--
BF69~~~Please stop suffocating gerbils! |
|
Karl Bode
News Guy
join:2000-03-02
Host:
Road Runner
PC gaming GAMES
PC gaming Tech
| If 0.1% of the customers are causing the problem (their own numbers), you put them on business tiers or implement a high cap that catches them in a net. You don't implement an entirely new pricing model that will impact a significant majority of your customers down the road. Particularly in a market that you've bred to be reliant on the simplicity of flat-rate pricing.
Time Warner Cable hadn't even implemented DOCSIS 3.0 upgrades before deciding they needed 5GB caps and $5/GB overages.
It's about Internet video and preventing "devolution" into a dumb pipe. While capacity issues are real, they're manageable. Capacity is used as a red herring to justify a move that's about protecting content revenues and maintaining market power...I don't think many network engineers see this bigger picture outside the NOC.... |
|
yt
Premium
join:2008-06-03
| said by Karl Bode  :If 0.1% of the customers are causing the problem (their own numbers), you put them on business tiers or implement a high cap that catches them in a net. You don't implement an entirely new pricing model that will impact a significant majority of your customers down the road. Particularly in a market that you've bred to be reliant on the simplicity of flat-rate pricing. QFT. Bandwidth is not unlimited and major growth is not free |
|
Karl Bode
News Guy
join:2000-03-02
2 edits | nm |
|
sonicmerlin
join:2009-05-24
Cleveland, OH
| reply to yt
I wholeheartedly disagree with the implementation of caps. Considering caps are nonexistent in other countries with much faster speeds and much more competition, I believe caps are essence meaningless anti-competitive measures.
The whole point of "overselling" is that some users will use their connections heavily, while some will use them lightly. Punishing the heavy users who actually use their connections is disingenuous.
Furthermore, caps DO NOT manage network congestion. Putting a cap in to "net" the heavy users does nothing to prevent congestion during peak usage hours, when everyone including Grandma comes online to watch Youtube videos.
ISPs have never, ever revealed internal data to support the position that they're starved for bandwidth. Considering their massive profits and downward trend in infrastructure invesetment, it's hard to believe that they seriously need help 'managing bandwidth'.
Eric Massa's proposed bill would force ISPs to reveal their internal statistics to the FTC to justify their implementation of (ANY) caps and tiers. That's why they're so scared of the bill. They *can't* justify caps (even 250 GB ones), since they make so many billions in profits.
Bandwidth may not be unlimited, but major growth is a natural and cheap result of technological advancement. I believe it was only recently an article was posted on BBR about how backbone providers were awash with excess bandwidth, and content providers, consumers, and backbone providers were all putting the pressure on last mile providers to upgrade their infrastructure. It was these last mile providers who were lagging behind the rest of the world.
It's time to stop sympathizing for these vastly wealthy corporations. |
|
patcat88
join:2002-04-05
Jamaica, NY
| said by sonicmerlin :I wholeheartedly disagree with the implementation of caps. Considering caps are nonexistent in other countries with much faster speeds and much more competition, I believe caps are essence meaningless anti-competitive measures. How about these caps on cable in Belgium?
»telenet.be/219/0/1/nl/thuis/internet.html
Makes TW's 5GB look huge. |
|
sonicmerlin
join:2009-05-24
Cleveland, OH | Handpicking the offerings of one ISP in one country is hardly a meaningful rebuttal. |
|
