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 Oh_NoTrogglus normalus
join:2011-05-21
Chicago, IL | reply to rradina
Re: He forgot a level. said by rradina:I don't buy it. By your own logic, your scheme will have the bandwidth hogs pay less than those who just do some light surfing and e-mail. That's why the ISP's claim we all should welcome metered billing.
You can fix that by dropping the price once you go beyond four hours. Don't the electric, gas and water companies do this? Aren't their business models the same? You don't get any free electricity, gas or water. While electricity and gas companies expenses rise with increased usage because there is a cost to create/acquire the raw product they deliver, what about the water company? Where I live they draw water from the Missouri and Mississippi rivers. As far as I know, mother nature doesn't charge a fee and their sanitation costs should be fixed, sans adding chlorine and fluoride, since they build to a certain capacity just like ISPs.
Try again to convince me why an ISP is so special that it cannot be run like any other business.
Why do you keep trying to compare unlike things?
The costs for eletricity, water, gas are based off a tangible product that can be stored, bought and sold.
For an ISP you are just paying for the connection and equipment. That connection and equipment costs the same if you use it a lot or a little.
You cannot store bandwidth and the costs of the network are not connected to usage like with those other utilities.
I dont have a scheme, but in reality there is no such thing as a hog, you can only use what your ISP gives you.
In reality your connection costs almost 100% the same if you use it very little or if you use it 24/7.
For an ISP actually who is more profitable is way more based on who calls customer service. The person maxing out their connection 24/7 and who never calls tech support is way more profitable than the customer that only uses email and calls support for every stupid thing. | |
rradina
join:2000-08-08
Chesterfield, MO | Why do you keep drawing distinctions based on whether or not the product is physical or some kind of service?
Does a water company have usage costs? Don't they build to a capacity like ISPs and whether or not they deliver 100 million gallons or 100 billion gallons, the raw material they use is free? Do their sanitation costs really rise that much when they clean a lot more or are they relatively fixed sans minor linear relationships in power consumption and chemical treatment costs?
Expenses are expenses and however a business decides to cover those expenses, if they make money, why isn't that a valid model? Why wouldn't I want those that use a lot to pay a lot and if I use a little, to pay a little? I've explained many times that this can be mitigated by progressively charging less as usage rises but you never seem to take note.
True UBB is perfectly legitimate scheme and the maintenance costs for a physical network running by 100 homes is the same whether or not all of them subscribe or 50 of them subscribe. This is a similar risk to having them all subscribe but paying nothing unless they actually use some bytes.
Retail stores live and die by volume. As long as they have sufficient volume to cover their fixed costs, the rest is gravy. Why can't an ISP operate this same way and have the risk that in some months, usage might be too light to pay the bills and in other months it's like Christmas?
There's a reason the day after Thanksgiving is called Black Friday. It's when retailers finally make a profit. Many lose money the rest of the year. Why do we want to view an ISPs business model as requiring an exception to these risks? | | |
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Oh_NoTrogglus normalus
join:2011-05-21
Chicago, IL | said by rradina:Why do you keep drawing distinctions based on whether or not the product is physical or some kind of service?
Does a water company have usage costs? Don't they build to a capacity like ISPs and whether or not they deliver 100 million gallons or 100 billion gallons, the raw material they use is free? Do their sanitation costs really rise that much when they clean a lot more or are they relatively fixed sans minor linear relationships in power consumption and chemical treatment costs?
I hope you realize that in some areas they do not charge for water by the gallon, because as you seem to understand it does not make sense when they have plenty of water.
They charge everyone a water fee on their property taxes so you have unmetered water and all the fixed costs are paid for.
Water can be billed much better by the fixed costs than by usage unless your someone that barely uses water then you would rather have a by the gallon so you do not have to actually pay your fair share of the water system.
A retail store could never operate on a fixed fee where you can just take whatever you want as the costs are based on what you buy or use.
The costs for an ISP is not based on what you use thus the UBB does not work.
What you speak of is not a rule and does not make sense for an ISP. Why would you base your billing on something that has virtually nothing to do with your costs???
UBB is not legitimate if you based the usage prices off of something that has nothing to do with the actual costs.
For UBB to work you need to base it on usage that is actually directly tied to the costs. | |
rradina
join:2000-08-08
Chesterfield, MO | I'd change the word "work" to the phrase "make sense". That is, for UBB to make sense to the rest of us, it should be based on something tied to the costs. That doesn't stop them from billing in a manner that doesn't make sense and UBB does work even when usage isn't truly tied to incremental costs.
In my area, I get charged based on how much water I use and then the sewer company bases their monthly bill by looking at the quarterly inbound water consumption. The idea is that's the amount you send into the sanitary sewer system since we don't water lawns, gardens, fill swimming pools or wash cars in the winter quarter.
Whether or not billing like this makes sense, they still do it even though both systems are built to a certain capacity and have few incremental costs.
You keep saying UBB doesn't work for ISPs but it does. Whether or not it makes sense or is a raw deal for who receive the bill is entirely different question.
Regarding the retail example, at one point I believe you claimed that UBB would cause ISPs to never make money. I wholeheartedly disagree. As I said, every day a retailer takes the risk that they won't cover their fixed caused with their variable sales. Why is it different for an ISP just because they have limited or no incremental costs? I agree that a retailer can never offer all you want for a flat fee. (They could but the flat fee would be so high, there would be no buyers.) It just doesn't work for them because they have mostly incremental costs. Just because an ISP doesn't have significant incremental costs, why do you think that invalidates a UBB model?
The only thing that invalidates a UBB model is if it's not feasible to measure the usage by which you bill. For instance, charging someone for every hour they wear a pair of sunglasses. It could be done but it's impossible to determine such a metric short of hiring someone to watch you 24 hours a day. Obviously that kills UBB for the sunglasses industry.
I suppose there is one other thing that invalidates a UBB model. If there's competition and it offers a better deal with their flat-rate plans. This is what torpedoed AT&T when it divested the baby bells and was left with the LD business. Competition stepped in and folks realized they'd been getting screwed for years and AT&T was a rotting corpse until it's child yanked it out of the nursing home and asked it to come live with it. | |
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