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Australian ISPs Claim Net Neutrality Is an 'American Problem'
Posted by
Soulskill
on Sun Sep 28, 2008 09:41 AM
from the rabbit-neutality-is-all-you,-though dept.
from the rabbit-neutality-is-all-you,-though dept.
RATLSNAKE writes "The heads of some of the most popular Australian ISPs were all interviewed over at ZDNet about Net Neutrality. For once, they all seem to agree, and they say it's a problem with the US business model, or the lack thereof. They discuss why they don't think it's an issue in Australia. Simon Hackett, the managing director of Adelaide-based ISP Internode, had this to say: 'The [Net neutrality] problem isn't about running out of capacity. It's a business model that's about to explode due to stress. ... The idea that the entire population can subsidize a minority with an extremely high download quantity actually isn't necessarily the only way to live.' Of course, this also explains why we Australians do not have truly unlimited plans."
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Not just a US problem. (Score:5, Informative)
Unlimited plans (Score:5, Informative)
> "Their problem is that unlike Australia, they [offer] truly unlimited plans."
Except that the following countries also provide unlimited plans: Canada, Japan, Korea, Germany, The Netherlands, Sweden, Singapore ...
Wait... if I am not mistaken, it is faster to list the (quasi-industrialised) countries, which don't provide unlimited plans: Australia, New Zealand.
Re:Unlimited plans (Score:5, Interesting)
I had the same thoughts.
I would be much more interested in hearing what the top ten Japanese or Korean ISPs have to say about U.S. broadband.
Parent
Re:Unlimited plans (Score:5, Funny)
It would probably be something along the lines of, "Why do they [the US companies] get all the good suckers? Why can't our customer base be willing to pay so much for so little?"
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Canada is in the same situation as US, and there are often bandwidth caps too; Shaw for exampel have these plans:
High-speed internet Lite (256kbps with max 10GB/month) CAD $22/month (standalone $29.95)
High-speed (5mbps with max 60GB/month) CAD $32/month (standalone $40.95)
High-Speed Xtreme-I (10mbps with max 100GB/month) CAD $42/month (standalone $50.95)
High-Speed Nitro (25mbps with max 150GB/month) CAD $93/month (standalone 101.95)
Source http://www.shaw.ca/en-ca/ProductsServices/Internet/ [www.shaw.ca] (prices from each
Re:Unlimited plans (Score:5, Informative)
Please. My quick search shows that the *vast* majority of Canadian ISPs have unlimited bandwidth. Most that do have bandwidth caps set it at a reasonably generous 200GB.
See: http://www.canadianisp.ca/cgi-bin/ispsearch.cgi [canadianisp.ca]
I have Teksavvy.com, which is $40/month (in Ontario, at least) for unlimited bandwidth.
It's only if you have the misfortune of subscribing to the services of a monopoly like Rogers or Bell that you'd be scraping the bottom of the ISP barrel. These companies profit by marketing to the ignorant masses, and peddling the lowest common denominator. The quality of their service is irrelevant, so long as it meets the basic expectations of a statistically significant segment of the masses.
Contrast this with the plethora of competitive ISPs in Canada who must compete on quality of service.
That's not to say that your area has much choice in ISP. However, if it's anywhere halfway urban, there ought to be at least one non-monopoly choice.
Parent
You are NOT paying enough to complain, STOP IT (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm getting seriously fed up of this. You are not paying even in the same ballpark of the actual cost of supplying your full connection's worth of bandwidth for an entire month. If you want to use that much bandwidth, buy a leased line. If you don't like that you get more kb/s than you can use all the time, move back to a 56kb/s modem.
Why on earth the US ISPs have tried telling you that you can just use as much bandwidth as you want, for so long, I'll never understand. Comcast's model of "this much, then we write to you, then we cut you off if you do it again" is absurd, doubly so given they don't provide any easy metering, but that doesn't change the reality of what you're paying for vs what you wish your money covered.
Re:You are NOT paying enough to complain, STOP IT (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a common misconception. Bandwidth is actually very, very cheap; if you use your full connection's worth of bandwidth, it costs only a tiny bit more than if you let it sit idle. In order to provide more bandwidth, you need two things: routers and fibers. Routers are cheap. In fact, thanks to Moore's Law, the price per unit bandwidth for a router falls exponentially over time. On the other hand, running new fiber is expensive, because it involves digging, which is both expensive in itself and requires expensive planning (to make sure you don't damage someone else's infrastructure) and bureaucracy (for the same reason). Fortunately, when you install fiber, you can install as much as you want for little extra cost. The problem that the US cable companies are experiencing is that they need to run new fiber to a lot of places, but they would rather put it off as long as possible. But this is a strictly one-time expense; once they've run the fibers, adding more bandwidth just means buying more cheap routers.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
While every fact you list as supporting evidence is true, your conclusion is simply irrelevant for most providers.
Regardless of the actual potential cost of bandwidth, companies are still leasing lines form other companies to make interconnections. Unless we're discussing backbone providers (who still have to make deals with other providers for interconnection), they're having to buy their bandwidth. That's expensive, no matter the hardware cost per bit.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm sure the telcos prefer to give 'all you can eat' to everyone, and live with the fact that there is a percentage of people that will actually use their bandwidth 24x7, than charge a proportional amount.
At least in Spain, they charge a minimum (I think it's around 20 euros per month now) just for access, even if you don't use the service at all. And when you have 10 million lines, that's a lot of money. If they decide to switch to a p
The whole argument is a scam (Score:5, Informative)
I think the whole entire "Net Neutrality" argument is a scam. IMO it's about two things primarily:
First, I think it's about making a whole lot of money for, and giving corporate welfare/protectionism to large communications companies that have had plenty of the subsidies from the govt and taxpayers in the past - technology is making things they used to charge an arm and a leg for free, or practically free - look at VOIP for one - and every year the web and our networked society seems to progress more.
Second though, and more importantly, I think it is about control and censorship. The government and these large media conglomerates don't like that people can get any sort of unfiltered information they'd like from around the world in real time. They don't like the fact that people can get news up to the minute from anywhere on any subject that they are interested in that is likely less biased, more accurate, and less full of "agenda setting talking point spin" than they can from TV News* (which has really become absurd, it's Paris/Britney mixed with a health dose of paranoia-behavior-control). They don't like it that instead of having some fascist douche like Bill O'Reilly telling people "what the news means to them," people can either look it up on their own or find their own place full of smart people with diverse views to have conversations with (Slashdot being a perfect example).. They don't like how the net can be used as a tool for orgaqnization and mass communication by practically anybody.
When one of your main goals is control, and knowledge and information are pwoer - the internet is your enemy.
*Now everything I have stated as populist advantages to a free internet can also have their downsides, for example - not all news online is accurate, honest, agenda free - but compared to what you see on TV it is, especially if you are even halfway savvy consumer of media you can find it easily. Also, anything that can be used to spread information can also be used to disinform - but I don't think anything comes close to the amount of disinformation/one-sided information and societal control as network television does.
So these are the real drivers of anti-net neutrality: Money and control. All of this stuff about not having enough capacity, and how strained the internet is - those issues can be solved so many ways properly without creating a digital ghetto for non-corporate/big money websites.
"problem with the US business model" (Score:3, Insightful)
Recent events indicate that net neutrality isn't the only "problem with the US business model, or the lack thereof". It seems that big business wants the profits privatized (as they should be) but any losses should be socialized.
There is plenty of blame to go around but the majority of the blame rests on the shoulders of big business. By the way, for the companies not incorporated in the US, there are some of the same problems. They are not quite as extreme as in the US but people not living in the US shouldn't feel smug, it could happen to you if you are not vigilant.
"Tie me Internet Down, Sport." (Score:5, Funny)
Let me ISP's go loose
They're of no further use, Bruce
So let me ISP's go loose.
Pricing of finite goods (Score:4, Insightful)
Until someone finds a technical solution that truly allows everyone to have 'unlimited' internet, you have to find some way to ration it.
I'd rather be charged for what I use and not have to worry about ISPs sticking their noses into my data stream and killing traffic they don't like.
Here in oz, I'm on a $A60 plan that gets me 40G/month @ 20 megabits/sec. I don't find that restrictive, I'm not constantly worrying about how much bandwidth I use (as some of the hysterical postings above imply) and I'm not paying for the wankers who download 400G/month of movies they never find time to watch.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What? (Score:5, Insightful)
whenever conservatives talk about socialized services they seem to conflate problems of government corruption, bureaucratic inefficiency, and unpopular government with the socialized institution. but you're forgetting that public schools, law enforcement, fire departments, public libraries, roads, post offices, etc. are all socialized public infrastructure. if you really think that having government run infrastructure (in other words, having a government) is a bad idea, then wouldn't it be worse having them run the military, police, and writing laws?
if a country is a true democracy, then its government is merely a mechanism for carrying out the will of the people. i mean, most people like the idea of having free schools, but a single person cannot establish a free education system, so you do it through the government. likewise with roads, libraries, the legal system, etc.
if the government isn't acting in public interest, then that's a whole other fundamental problem that needs to be addressed regardless of whether ISPs should be socialized. i mean, why would a government ISP ignore problems any more than a commercial ISP would? would the gestapo come out and silence anyone who complains? or would they just ignore customer complaints like commercial ISPs do? at least the public has a voice in government, whereas they don't have a voice in private corporations.
all the people i've spoken to who've used public wi-fi access have commented on how great it is and seem quite satisfied with the way it works. there's no reason to think that just because a service isn't run based on corporate profits that it would be inherently inferior.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not against government, I'm against federal government. Most of these should be controlled at the local and state levels, not by the feds.
Let's see. The local library, the police, the fire department (we have a volunteer fire department) are all controlled locally. Those work. Federal programs rarely do.
Re:What? (Score:5, Interesting)
i completely agree with you. the way i see it, the larger a government gets (in terms of the size of the population it governs) the less democratic it becomes, not only due to bureaucratic inefficiencies which are incurred as an organization increases in size, but also because of the logistical problems presented by trying to satisfy such a large population.
there's a huge political spectrum covering the vast American cultural landscape. that diversity is one of our strengths. however, being part of one large nation creates a single political hegemon which rules over this diverse cultural landscape. it's impossible to homogenize such a vast population spread over such a large geographical area, and even if it were possible, it wouldn't necessarily be a good thing.
i think it would be preferable to adopt the European model, whereby "states" are actually states, but their political autonomy and cultural diversity do not prevent them from working together to achieve common interests through the European Union. you could still have federal-level initiatives, for things like FEMA, but they would be run as international agencies similar to UNICEF or the IPCC.
Parent
Those are counterexamples? (Score:3, Insightful)
whenever conservatives talk about socialized services they seem to conflate problems of government corruption, bureaucratic inefficiency, and unpopular government with the socialized institution. but you're forgetting that public schools, law enforcement, fire departments, public libraries, roads, post offices, etc. are all socialized public infrastructure.
Good grief, you are using those as examples of socialism working? Lots of people have problems with police departments all over the place, and listing s
Re: (Score:3)
take a look at the US public education system and tell me there isn't a problem...
judging by the last seven years including the war on terror, patriot act, telecom immunity act, torture and numerous other unconstitutional doings, I'd say that we have a very serious probl
Re:What? (Score:4, Insightful)
Having attended both private and public schools, and driven on private roads, and also in areas with privately-run fire departments and security, as a user of FedEx, and video rental stores, project Gutenberg, university libraries (and having read books which were researched with LexisNexis)..
Yeah, I can honestly say that the government-run versions of these have all been inferior.
Parent
Re:What? (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:What? (Score:5, Informative)
I'm quite happy with my ISP.
I am with Optus, I get full ADSL2+ speeds and 20/40GB (20 peak, 40 off peak, and yes, peak is 12 noon to 12 midnight, off peak is the reverse).
I download enough to satisfy my needs, and the price is quite fair ($70 p/m).
I've only ever gone over my cap once, and that was to rebuild a Linux server for a mate.
I'd rather have a realistic cap than have some fucktard diddling with my packets.
As for "every Australian" you've ever talked to... what, is that a grand total of 5? I am a self confessed geek with lots of geek friends, we all love our ISPs because we're not idiots. We don't go for price, we go for quality and download capacity. I can only think of maybe 5 or 6 people I know that hate their ISP, and they aren't geeks - family members who didn't consult the family geek before getting their plan.
Net "neutrality" (I am still bewildered about how that term is valid) seems like a big excuse for ISPs in the US to punish their customers. I think the main downfall of the US is not having body like the TIO (http://www.tio.com.au/) to deal with ISPs fucking you over. I've had bad ISPs in the past that have tried to screw me, what do I do? Contact the TIO and have them fight my case for me. I don't go to court, I don't really need to do much other than contact them, give them details, and they do the investigations. They pull server logs, demand details of the case, and basically make the ISP think twice before dicking their customers. They don't enforce the laws, or even make them up, they are purely there to mediate cases. They have a "fee" structure that makes it hard for ISPs to see a net gain from screwing customers.
Case in point:
An ISP wasn't delivering advertised speeds for my connection, I said I wanted out due to false advertising. They returned saying I needed to pay AU$550 to release from the contract. Well, I wasn't going to take this laying down, so I went to the TIO. They investigated the case and ended up ruling in my favour. While they weren't fined (this is something for Fair Trading or Consumer Affairs, depending on the state), they were liable for AU$1500 in fees due to not responding at the first and second level of investigation. I ended up paying nothing, they ended up $2050 in the hole for being dickheads about it.
I digress, if you want to hear about people bitching about ISPs, talk to a Kiwi... or an American...
Parent
Re:What? (Score:5, Informative)
Net "neutrality" (I am still bewildered about how that term is valid) seems like a big excuse for ISPs in the US to punish their customers.
It's a big excuse for ISPs in the US who chose not to re-invest in their ifrastructure with the billions of tax break dollars they received in the past decade .
In particular, cable companies here have done nothing to improve their core. They kept ramping up the claimed speeds in the last mile, but never bothered to fix their core networking so it could handle all those leaf nodes at full speed. Pretty much every cable company in the US requires transit from some other ISP before they hit major backbones, and they pay dearly for that.
But, the ISPs that did any forward thinking and build out are not punishing their customers with total byte caps or speeds reduced from maximum.
Parent
Re:What? (Score:4, Informative)
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Whats the US isn't doing... (Score:3, Interesting)
Two reason for this one being their cheap bastard or their choice of internet wasn't their decision
It was forced on them cause their parents/room-mate. whom makes the decision choose an ISP because the ad was on TV alot or Telephone provider with a monpoly that offers bundled Voice/Data + Mobile on a single bill.
Most likely these people are on a lower income to afford good ISP plan or under-contract, out of contract and CBF churning to another ISP.
I pay $150 for 8mbit service. This pays for 80Gb Download
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe basing a whole country's state of development on two people you know in an online game isn't a great idea? Why do you think it would be so different over here anyway?
Re:What? (Score:4, Informative)
>>>We have similar net connections in NZ and I don't see the problem. It is never a case of not being able to get what you want, it is a case of having to pay for it.
>>>
Precisely. I wouldn't mind paying $50 a month with a 100 gigabyte cap. I'd just download smaller files (70 megabyte tv shows) instead of the larger stuff. And if I hit my cap such that my access was cut-off for the rest of the month, I'd just use my backup 50k dialup account until October 1st came back around.
My fellow Americans do tend to make a big deal about small things, but I think that's a flaw with this entire "entitlement generation". I've heard a lot of university professors complain that young adults walk into a college classroom and expect to get an A just because they showed-up, and then they get yell at the prof, because he gave them a B. Likewise they expect to be able to download 1000 gigs while only paying $50 a month.
The world just doesn't work that way. You don't get something for nothing; you have to do the work and/or pay the cost.
Jeez.
I'm only 35 years old, and already I sound like my grandpa. ;-) Well at least I didn't have to walk to school in a snowstorm.
Parent
Re:Well.. (Score:5, Insightful)
It would make sense to me that costs on the network would be regulated to cost-distance acquired for said packet.
That's exactly what we need, having to watch all the time if we're not accidentally browsing transatlantic after we click a link, or chat with someone.
Other smart ideas :P?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Oh, come on.
If you communicate within your ISP network, it would be the least cost, preferably 0 cost per packet.
If you communicate within the local network (peering ISP's, geographically local), it would be a low cost but non-zero.
If you communicate over large distances in which high utilization lines are used (undersea, satellite..) you have a high cost per packet.
One is only charged for sending, NOT receiving. This is usable using ONLY QoS already built in TCP/IP and could be set up per program or even p
Re:Well.. (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that this idea undermines one of the main points of net neutrality, to make as many parts of the Internet as free and easily accessible as others.
I agree that P2P is holding us back, and unfortunatley current P2P systems aren't "smart" enough to prefer local connections over long distance ones (which might actually be a trivial fix, but I don't know enough about the inner workings of Bittorrent and others.
Plus, it kind of fits with one of the main truths of the Internet's capacity; demand will always meet or exceed availablity.
Parent
Re:Well.. (Score:5, Interesting)
I agree that P2P is holding us back, and unfortunately current P2P systems aren't "smart" enough to prefer local connections over long distance ones (which might actually be a trivial fix, but I don't know enough about the inner workings of Bittorrent and others
Ah, but they already are, to a large extent, based on three principals:
1. (Almost) All P2P systems will prefer high bandwidth and/or low-latency peers. These tend to be the ones that are local.
2. I've seen plugins/mods to several popular clients including eMule and Vuze that do a version of this by IP address look up.
The real problem is that ISPs don't encourage this, for example, by never throttling local connections and/or excluding that bandwidth from any caps.
I don't want to start getting charged different rates per country, but might not be so offended by a bandwidth cap if it excluded local peers; particularly if the ISP actively facilitated taking advantage of this feature.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
>>>The problem is that this idea undermines one of the main points of net neutrality, to make as many parts of the Internet as free and easily accessible as others
I disagree. My understanding of "net neutrality" is that all packets will be treated identically, regardless of where they came from, or where they are going. It has nothing to do with providing cheap service. It's about not censoring access (such as Comcast giving nbc.com packets low priority).
>>> "The idea that the entire po
Re:Well.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Disclaimer: I'm on what is considered a very good plan for Australia. Optus Cable, 20GB peak/40GB off-peak (off-peak is 12 midnight to 12 noon), 10Mbps down/256kbps up (though in practice it's really about 7Mbps down). After all my peak usage is used I get shaped to 64kbps down/up (and my extra off-peak becomes unavailable). If I use up all my off-peak it starts taking from my peak usage. No free sites - all traffic counts towards my usage no matter the source. I pay about AU$70/month for this service (which BTW is very reliable - my only real issue with it is the pitiful upload speed). It's a grandfathered plan - you can't get it anymore but I'm allowed to stay on it - the new plans are much less friendly (value for money for net access has been trending downwards in Australia over the last few years).
I find your definition of "application" strange - I would have thought "application" would refer to type of traffic, rather than source.
I want ISPs to prioritise traffic based on type, just I do at my end. I use cFosSpeed [www.cfos.de] to prioritise real-time applications (VOIP) highest, things requiring low latency (e.g. web browsing) next, and things which aren't particularly time-dependent lowest (e.g. downloads, P2P).
Most of the time, P2P runs at full speed, because there's nothing else going on. But as soon as something else starts using the net, P2P slows down - and then quickly speeds up again as soon as the higher-priority activity stops.
I'd love ISPs to do the same thing, so my VOIP calls were at the highest priority end-to-end. ISPs should never prevent any type of traffic, but I'm very happy for them to reduce the performance of applications that are not significantly time-dependent so that significantly time-dependent traffic is preferred. I'll still get my downloads - it'll just take a little longer.
I'd also be in favour of per-megabyte charging, so long as it's at a reasonable rate (not $150/GB as Telstra charges for excess usage!), and that you can set a cap after which you get shaped to low speeds, at which point you have to go to a secure web site and set a new cap for that month only (or something along those lines).
Parent
Re:Well.. (Score:4, Interesting)
>>>I want ISPs to prioritise traffic based on type
That seems logical, but given how companies like Comcast act, they'd decide that the NBC.com "type" or the CWTV.com "type" should be given low-priority simply because it competes with Comcast's own television sales. It is better, I think, to simply tell ISP's to ignore the content. Be neutral.
Rather than have the ISP control traffic, let the sender adjust dynamically to congestion. For example CWTV.com's video player is constantly fluctuating from 128k to 500kbit/s based upon changing conditions. (BTW Voice-over-Internet is hardly a demanding application. I don't about your country, but in the U.S. telephones are only 56k wide. That's all you really need for voice-quality connections over VoIP.)
And finally, ISPs need to stop being lazy. They should be constantly upgrading the network & adding more bandwidth. I get the impression ISPs want to just sit on their butts & "freeze" capacities at current levels rather than add more. So they are trying to limit usage, rather than expand.
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Re:Well.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, we see the bandwidth caps here in Oz, and the transatlantic cables are why there's caps and high costs.
No, the reason that we have high costs is because of the Telstra/ Southern Cross duopoly. Telstra are well known for their high costs (for example the NT pays two to three times as much as the rest of the country only because there is one link. Tasmania has even worse problems). Southern Cross provided much needed capacity when it went in but (AFAICS) doesn't compete on price.
Consider this: When Pipe International announced it was building a new cable (PPC-1) and were selling it at a much lower cost to their customers, Southern Cross massively increased it's capacity and Telstra announced they intend to build new fibre. Pipe have stated that they intend to market their cable at approx 30% less for those who sign up now (IIRC). I can only conclude that we are currently paying far to much to the incumbents. Considering that Telstra and Southern Cross have probably paid for the cost of the infrastructure a high percentage of the money they get now is pure profit. Given the impact that Pipe Networks has had in the peering arrangement between ISP's in Australia I have high hopes that they will have just as much of an impact in international transit.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
This already happens. I know of at least one colocation company that has different bandwidth caps for packets to the domestic exchange than packets that have to go abroad. Typically this is because their linkups are supplied by different companies, and the international link costs more.
Re:Well.. (Score:4, Interesting)
Come on. The United States is still the largest democracy.
But the point is that net neutrality is indeed an American issue. It was not the first time that an issue was raised and turned down by the lobby but net neutrality is very proactive. It is like an open source preference and Microsoft starts to lobby against it and then you complain that you don't get it. It gets stronger as the lobby fights against it.
Net neutrality is the dominant pratice worldwide. Do we need to codify it? ...no But could be fun to keep the Telco lobby busy.
The Europeans explicitly endorsed the net neutrality this month in the forward looking Toia report [europa.eu].
Europeans don't have a real net neutrality debate but it sounds good, so politicians adopt it.
Parent
Re:Well.. (Score:4, Informative)
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
>>>Come on. The United States is still the largest democracy.
I'm sure you posted this just to demonstrate how bad the Government Monopoly Schooling is in America. Right?
Or maybe you were demonstrating how Americans tend to think the whole world revolved around them. Right? Hello??? ;-) As already mentioned India is the largest, with the European Union being the second largest at 450 million citizens. I'm not sure who's third... is the Russian Federation more populous than the U.S.? I don't kn
Re:Well.. (Score:5, Funny)
This reminds me of something:
docsigma2000: jesus christ man ...!!!!!! FUCK FUCK FUCK
docsigma2000: my son is sooooooo dead
c8info: Why?
docsigma2000: hes been looking at internet web sites in fucking EUROPE
docsigma2000: HE IS SURFING LONG DISTANCE
docsigma2000: our fucking phone bill is gonna be nuts
c8info: Ooh, this is bad. Surfing long distance adds an extra $69.99 to your bill per hour.
docsigma2000:
docsigma2000: is there some plan we can sign up for???
docsigma2000: cuz theres some cool stuff in europe, but i dun wanna pauy that much
c8info: Sorry, no. There is no plan. you'll have to live with it.
docsigma2000: o well, i ccan live without europe intenet sites.
docsigma2000: but till i figure out how to block it hes sooooo dead
c8info: By the way, I'm from Europe, your chatting long distance.
** docsigma2000 has quit (Connection reset by peer)
It's sad, that bash.org is gone. :(
Parent
Re:The Australians miss the point. (Score:5, Interesting)
It's simple: You pay for 'unlimited' usage, and that means you get usage that is as unlimited as the resource permits.
And since that isn't really unlimited, there's a bit of a problem. You're paying for one thing, and they're providing something else. That's usually called "fraud" or "false advertising", and it tends to annoy people who want to actually know (and get) what they're paying for. That they probably put something like "unlimited doesn't mean what you think it does" in the fine print only matters from a legal "see, you can't sue us, nyah nyah" perspective, not a "this isn't what I paid for, you bastards" perspective.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
People should not confuse 'unlimited' with 'infinite'. Everything humans do is finite.
According to the context you agree with when you get the broadband account your account really is 'unlimited'. In the context of broadband it only means that the company is not going to single you out and limit what you can do. That's all it means. There is legal precedence to use this word in this context. It's not fraud of false advertising.
The problem I think is one of defining the value of information. How does o
Re:Shock and awe (Score:4, Interesting)
I'd even go as far as saying that downloading continuously at max capacity is somewhat immoral in itself, so long as you know that you are using far more than everyone else _and_ that it causes congestion problems. You are like the person founding a car wash next to the canal and saying that the contract stated unlimited access.
Some of us are paying for 3Mbps down/ 384kbps up, I see nothing immoral about actually using it. If the business did not anticipate that people would use what they pay a a premium on, then the business needs to change. We're not here to second guess them, if they offer a service, expect us to use it. They absolutely have, and always have had, the ability to regulate our bandwidth to the contracted rate. You won't get a penny more than you pay for.
It's very easy to caclulate the total "bytes" needed to accomodate this, although it's misleading to do so. Unlike your reservoir model, the actual limitation is the flow rate through the pipe, not the "available bytes". At certain times of the day the flow rate might be maxed out and they start dropping packets. More importantly they already have the models to know what they need to do to meet their capacity demands. No one can drain the reservoir, unless someone is selling a product he can't deliver on. Who wants to start that class action suit? Count me in.
The real issue is the networks are horribly out of date, since there has never really been a push to give customers better service, only service to more customers. The question they want to get answered is "who is going to fund upgrades?" because in a monopoly, you don't take the cost of upgrades out of your net profits, you make customers pay. On this I can't blame them, why should they suffer just to deliver a product that won't deliver a single extra dollar?
No, karma doesn't count, that they've been robbing us for half a century has been long forgotten, at least by them.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You may want to look up "monopoly" in the dictionary.
A dictionary is a book that has sentences which describe what an individual word is. You can go to a library or bookstore (they have pages of paper with words written on them, which is the form a dictionary tends to come in). Or search the web for information (probably using Google, which is a good example of an actual monopoly).
When the government loans money to a business to keep it afloat, its usually called a "bail out." It has nothing to do with mono
Re:Summary (Score:5, Informative)
Except that's not what net neutrality is. Net neutrality isn't about charging everyone the same price regardless of how much bandwidth they use, or requiring that everyone has unlimited network capacity. That's silly. It's not even about saying that certain types of traffic can't be prioritized over others -- net neutrality wouldn't prevent ISPs from throttling bit torrent, for example (though there is overlap in the people who support net neutrality and the people who oppose such throttling).
Net neutrality means that Microsoft can't pay your ISP to improve your bandwidth to MSN search while throttling the bandwidth to Google. Net neutrality means that your ISP is not allowed to charge you for bandwidth and then also charge websites to actually connect you to them. (Google is already being charged quite a lot for bandwidth.) Traffic of different types (web vs. bittorrent vs. whatever) can behave differently, but traffic from different sources should be treated the same, to avoid protection-racket style abuses (nice site you got there, it sure would be a shame if my 50 million subscribers were no longer able to reliably access it...)
So, no, net neutrality is not at all about all users paying the same amount regardless of their level of usage. But some of the ISP monopolies have managed to frame it that way by implying that the rules that would apply to destination sites (Yahoo vs. Google) are actually rules about individual subscribers (large versus small bandwidth demand from a single individual). The intent of net neutrality is that ISPs should only be charging for throughput at the network endpoints they control, not at both endpoints of all connections, so we don't end up quadruple-charging for every transmission (as opposed to the current double-charging, which is reasonable since it allows the two parties to the connection to share the cost of the bandwidth they both use).
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
They are demanding to pay the same $19.95 as their grandma who only checks her email once a day.
Riiiiiight. That's why I pay $60 for a faster network connection, and why just about every ISP that isn't dialup offers "fast" "faster" and "fastest" packages. Smell that? I think your strawman seems to have caught fire.
The fact is, the ISPs have been using this tired "tiered" argument to sideline the real neutrality debate (note how "speed" and "neutrality" aren't synonyms?), as opposed to facing up to having threatened to block competitors' Voice (or TV) over IP offerings rather than competing, or threa
Re:Ignore the Australians/New Zealanders (Score:4, Insightful)
RTFA = what simon says is that because Australia has download caps it's not an issue.
Which is bullshit because net neutrality isn't really about bandwidth congestion; it's about money and control. The big telecoms want the internet to be more like cable television, and a "tiered" internet is their way of implementing it.
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Re:No Shit (Score:4, Informative)
No, there is no cartel. What there is is one monopoly (Tel$tra) abusing its power and dictating to ISPs what those ISPs need to pay for access to the Tel$tra network.
To be considered a cartel, there would have to be some kind of deal done between the major players to deliberatly keep prices higher than they should be. The huge number of players in the DSL market means that that cant happen.
If there was a cartel and some kind of secret "lets keep the prices high" agreement, would we really see some of the deals coming from the likes of iiNet, Optus etc?
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