approval from:
aefstoggaflm 
| reply to viperlmw
Re: A small point on data usage ISPs have been getting away with overprovisioning their lines since the dawn of time.
They essentially had an internet arms race where speeds rose and rose, to the very limit of copper based technologies. 5000 households on a crappy node with 10mbit? No problem, because 80% of those households will use the line for maybe 5% of each day!
Now the ISPs have come to fear several things:
- the internet exaflood boogeyman that will make their copper infrastructure cry salty tears because people actually want to USE the service they are paying for
- the transition to internet based content delivery and communications that will nuke their tv and phone profits from orbit
Thus, they have no more incentive to raise speeds and the next economic shift would be to grow/maintain a large market share. But that requires some sort of product differentiation that users will jump on. Value is the next logical move, but none of these companies wants to have a price war.
This news article nails it; they see their self-induced "congestion" threat as an opportunity to lower the base price of internet services and then jack them back up on overages. They can create a false sense of competitive pricing and value without actually cutting prices.
This is the same sort of parasitic behaviour seen in the mobile industry, where they nickel and dime you for everything that could possibly be called a standalone feature. Even ones they aren't providing themselves - like tethering. And on top of that you have other mysterious charges, like the SAF, whose removal is announced every goddamn year.
The big flaw in all this is that users could be using bandwidth without actually using their computers. Unlike mobile charges measured in an understandable unit like "minutes" and "number of texts", you have kilobytes, megabytes and shit that 95% of households have no clue about.
They only understand these capacities in relative methods like "how long does it take me to download 1gb?" and "how big is a movie?". Except these relative measurements are different for everyone. A movie file can be anywhere from 300mb to 30gb.
I still can't understand a nation which allows people to get billed TENS of THOUSANDS a month for service that cost the company a few dollars to provide.
There are numerous solutions to the network congestion issue:
1. Ditch the fucking copper already. And you do this by mandating all new homes costing over 200k to be built with fiber. You also create a non-profit entity to build and maintain a national network, then wholesale it as many other countries have done.
2. You put the heavy users on lower speeds. A person is doing 750gb a month? Well, bump him down from 50mbit to 16mbit and the problem is solved. Hard caps should be kicked to the curb, because all lines have a natural cap imposed by the line speeds x 24/7.
3. Develop better technology for automatic node balancing. Often congestion for thousands of users can be attributed to just a few overloaded nodes, because of sudden subscriber influx in that area (college students moving in for example). This can happen even as there are underutilized nodes nearby.
Of course, none of these solutions would let an ISP bleed their customer dry. |
