Top US Lobbyist Wants Broadband Data Caps 568
sl4shd0rk writes "Michael Powell, A former United States FCC chairman, is pushing for 'usage-based internet access' which he says is good for consumers who are 'accustomed to paying for what they use'. Apparently Time Warner and Comcast (maybe others) are already developing plans to set monthly rates based on bandwidth usage. The reasoning on the NCTA website lays out the argument behind Powell's plan."
Help us Google Fiber! You're our only hope. (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously the ISPs who get behind metering and capping are just trying to stop the cord cutter movement. They know they are dinosaurs and the end is near. They are the same ones who refuse to take free Netflix CDN boxes to reduce the Netflix backhaul by 90%, and improve the service quality to their customers as well, instead trying to charge Netflix bandwidth fees. There is nothing whatsoever precious about Internet bandwidth. Every few years some new tech lets them put 100x as many bits down the same single mode fiber-optic pipe, and it's burying or stringing that pipe where the lion's share of the cost is.
Since Google isn't in the TV game really, they have nothing to lose by letting you pass all the data you want.
Re:Help us Google Fiber! You're our only hope. (Score:5, Insightful)
Google wants us to have 1gbps so we can pump our information to them faster. The more information Google can get from everyone, the more they know about existence from the perspective of a futurist deity, which could be a very powerful tool in years to come when we're trying to figure out what to do about all the problems our predecessors have left us with.
Re:I actually don't see much wrong with this. (Score:5, Insightful)
Flies in the face of online distribution (Score:5, Insightful)
This is not going to work. Most software and games are moving to online distribution and many of these titles alone are over 10GB in size.
Massive Profits, Miserable Service - (Score:5, Insightful)
Some things never change.
It's past time for municipalities throughout the country - and whole states, even - to reclaim the easements that telecommunications companies rely on unless they can start meeting some very strict (and escalating) service quality targets. Practically nobody else in the West pays as much as we do for service as poor as ours when it comes to phone, television, and Internet access. Threatening to replace them with municipal and state-run companies should put their feet to the fire. We already know that they don't compete, and in fact collude.
The greed of these companies is boundless and they control access to infrastructure which our present and future prosperity relies on. No more games. They will continue to tighten the screws until they are forced to stop.
You'll notice what he said (Score:5, Insightful)
He's an idiot (Score:5, Insightful)
Bandwidth is a time sensitive commodity. It's going to be sending either a 0 or a 1 100% of the time. Instead of caps, they should think about allowing customers to volunteer to be throttled for a reduced fee.
It's similar to an airplane ticket, in that it's worth full price, right up until the point the gate is about to close, at which point they will take any price over the marginal cost of fuel. I know many people that would be happy to let "full price" guy go first if it saved them a few bucks.
Typical media (Score:4, Insightful)
It's kind of like the MP3, which was one of the first formats that the *consumer* picked out, and media companies hated. I can kind of see both sides of the metering argument, but it would be nice if the market had a say in it, rather than it being just a bunch of bastards trying to pay off congress to ram it down our throats.
Artificial Scarcity of Freedom. (Score:5, Insightful)
Artificial scarcity may be my least favorite of all the artificial things.
does not work the other way around (Score:5, Insightful)
which he says is good for consumers who are 'accustomed to paying for what they use'
Such as paying $72 per month for cable despite never turning on the TV? No, sorry, my issue with this statement is that while they mean those who use more will pay more, they do not mean that those who use less will pay less.
Re:I actually don't see much wrong with this. (Score:2, Insightful)
Bullshit.
The routers and fiber cost no more nor less if they are being used or not used.
Usage based billing is just another attempt to kill Netflix.
Re:does not work the other way around (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly. Tell them they can have usage-based billing for internet when we get all our programming ala carte. That'll shut them up.
Re:Help us Google Fiber! You're our only hope. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd say the monopolies need to end. They were granted at the time to encourage investment (ha!) and a return on for the rolling out of services. We are a decade past this in much of the urban landscape, but they actually want caps on these pokey little connections they have deigned to give us. Fibre Optic is nearing doorsteps, finally, in my neighborhood and all they have to offer is 24Mbs... Really. That's the best you can do AT&T? This doesn't sound like investment, it stinks like milking a geriatric cow.
The monsters never give up, do they? (Score:4, Insightful)
What was that line you Yanks sing about "owing your soul to the company store" or something like that? Funny how the rest of the civilised world has ZERO issue with the provision of broadband without data caps. And yet, you Yanks suffer the dribble from endless shills 'proving' that unlimited Internet services can never be financially viable.
Here's a clue, Americans. Look at other lands. If THEY can do something, so can you. The rest of us have no need to mass medicate our children, no need to mass mutilate the genitals of our male children, no need to DENY appropriate medical treatment on the basis of illness rather than wealth, and no need to allow depravities to control effective telecom monopolies so they can provide the crappiest possible service at the highest possible cost.
Wasn't always thus. We Brits used to look upon your 'free' local telephone calls with envy, as we got stung for every minute used regardless of destination. We'd watch depictions of YOUR kids sitting on the phone for hours in the evening, thinking of how no-one could ever afford to do that in the UK. How low you Americans have sunk.
You allow the worst kind of evil filth to place your senior politicians in their pockets. You are cretinous enough to CLAIM you have 'democracy', while formally recognising lobbyists as a legitimate class of political operatives. Only a Yank could be so spineless as to allow a 'lobbyist' to proudly bribe your President IN THE OPEN. Other nations have these filth too, that is true, but they have to operate in the shadows. Only a Yank could claim a 'lobbyist' is an acceptable part of a true democracy.
Your media companies (including the owners of Slashdot) do NOT want the competition a free Internet offers. Unlike in other nations, the USA has a tradition of allowing criminal business cartels to create the laws under which you live. Criminality exists all over the planet, and so does bribery. Only America perverts the definition of capitalism, and formalises the process.
The best model for the Internet is the one that has grown it to the unthinkable success it has today. And I mean UNTHINKABLE. Go look at ALL the commentary when us enthusiasts first jumped into the new web-based version of the Internet. EVERYONE said "this is a nerd paradise that is going nowhere". Microsoft was the LOUDEST critic, sinking its fortune into CDROM instead (and I know that doesn't seem to make sense- but it is absolutely true). Obviously, a few years later, MS did a 180, but only when they could no longer deny how wrong they had been.
The Internet is unique because it is people driven. The usual filth played no part in its success at all. Now, this same filth sees the Internet like the Spanish saw the New World- as an undefended land of riches to be plundered. In America, Data Caps = 'rape', 'pillage', 'enslavement' and 'genocide'. But filth like Powell don't care, any more than the Spanish did, so long as his side gets some short term gain. To continue the analogy, it is notable that South America went historically to hell, compared to North America.
No caps mean, if you give people CHOICE for the first time in most American States, that people will pay to use the company whose policies match their usage. No caps mean very cheap monthly services will exist with caps (and NO, that is NOT a contradiction), and somewhat more expensive services will exist where 'unlimited' means customers own level of usage, along with sane traffic management policies, will define the quality of the service. New companies will arise if existing companies become lax offering what customers want/need/expect/can be given with state-of-the-art network tech.
More importantly, no caps mean that the tremendous level of innovation on the Internet (creating new services with new revenue streams) will continue unabated. This innovation is LOATHED by the filth by the filth that currently bribes your politicians, because it represents COMPETITION.
For those not using ABP (Score:5, Insightful)
Will there be refunds of cash or bandwidth of for things like:
1) Cached content in the ISP
2) Banner Ads/Pop ups
3) Promoted content by media companies (trailers/promoted music videos/anything on myspace or facebook)
4) Content served by the Internet provider like cable tv on tablets?
Re:I'm okay with this (Score:2, Insightful)
(Yeah, yeah, "they're going to gouge us, waah". Guess what, they were gouging you already.)
Which is a stupid excuse for allowing them to gouge us more.
Re:I actually don't see much wrong with this. (Score:4, Insightful)
No, this is bad and wrong. Network access is a resource unlike electricity and water. If you don't use water today, the water will be there tomorrow. If you don't use electricity today, they can run power plants at lower capacity and save fuel for later.
Network access is different. Bits transferred today have absolutely no effect on your ability to transfer bits tomorrow. Any bandwidth that goes unused is wasted. Charging for bits discourages people from using bandwith, and encourages waste. Bad and wrong.
Free Market (Score:4, Insightful)
This must more of that "free market" behavior we keep hearing about.
Notice how lobbyists always seem to have a "better idea" about how the "free market" should work.
This is just more corporate greed. They see what appears to be lots of free activity and just can't stand it. They have to find a way to monetize it.
This irritates me as much as the phrase "In order to serve you better..."
Re: Help us Google Fiber! You're our only hope. (Score:5, Insightful)
But data transfer is essentially free compared to electricity, gas and water. Whether I download 1 megabyte or 500 megabytes it does not cost the ISP any more.
I really hate to dispute this, because I'm very much against bandwidth caps and per-byte pricing models. But the fact is that the more data ISP's handle, the more switches, servers, and cables they need to install, and the more power they consume. So arguably, those who transfer lots of data cost the ISP's more money because there is a causal relationship between increased data volume and increased infrastructure costs.
I think the better argument to make is that the Internet is like the roads - it benefits everyone in the country, even those who don't directly use it. Someone who doesn't drive nevertheless benefits from, say, a supermarket whose goods got there by road; and there are countless other examples of how someone who never sets foot out of the house benefits from roads. Similarly, even someone who doesn't have an Internet connection benefits from the lower costs of goods, greater efficiencies, more economic activity, etc, that the Internet makes possible.
Re:Help us Google Fiber! You're our only hope. (Score:5, Insightful)
How do you propose to end what's a natural monopoly: last-mile utilities to the premises? Let a half-dozen competing companies each dig up the street in front of your house every time they want to lay some cable?
An alternative could be to have competition at the service level, but turn the last-mile infrastructure into a regulated utility with capped profit margins. That's what many jurisdictions do with power: the lines to your house are owned by a regulated utility, but they are required to sell transit, so to speak, to any comers, and the market to buy power is deregulated.
Re: Help us Google Fiber! You're our only hope. (Score:5, Insightful)
But regardless of whether you have dial-up or OC-48, the data centers need to run, the lines need to be laid, the peering needs to be done. It doesn't cost any more to pass 1MB or 1000MB. Bandwidth costs real money, individual data transfers do not, the hardware is agnostic to whom, what and to an extent even where you are transporting bits.
In a datacenter you do not buy per MB. You buy per Mbps or Gbps or even simply to terminate a point-to-point fiber connection (where you are yourself responsible as to what hardware hangs on both sides).
For home and most business connections you can indeed oversell. Even in data centers you can oversell but less than a home connection. Currently ISP's like TWC are overselling 10,000:1. So they are SELLING 10Mbps of bandwidth for each 1 kbps they have peered towards others. This is possible since most consumers only burst data and local caching helps a lot. TWC currently implements DOCSIS, you can easily sell 100Mbps or even 10Gbps to a consumer with minimal hardware investments, plenty of headroom over urban coax, they don't NEED to upgrade their lines in the next 2 decades and the current infrastructure has been in place for the last 3. Fiber has virtually infinite bandwidth, once invested you NEVER need to upgrade it anymore.
Re: Help us Google Fiber! You're our only hope. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Help us Google Fiber! You're our only hope. (Score:5, Insightful)
Does it cost less when 0 bytes per second are flowing or if it's at capacity?
I can tell you, the Same $10.000 a month is charged if it's running at full capacitiy or if it's sitting there unused. Therefore the amount of data transferred HAS NO COST, it is essentially free, the cost is for instantaneous bandwidth availability.
Re: Help us Google Fiber! You're our only hope. (Score:3, Insightful)
Would you really be happier if no ISPs ever oversold their services and they sold you exactly how much you would get?
Instead of 10/5 you'd get 1/0.5 because that's what they can guarantee if everyone uses their internet at the same time. When almost no one is using it, you still get 1/0.5 because the ISP needs to keep that bandwidth ready for the other people that might us it at any time.
Yeah I don't like being lied to either. But we all know how it works. We all know that we aren't going to get the advertised bandwidth at all times. No one is getting tricked. This is a better system than giving everyone their own dedicated guaranteed small data channel.
Maybe it would be nicer if they said you get 1/0.5 and usually it's 10x faster because most people are not using the internet at once, but the product you would get would be the same and it would cost the same thing.
Re: Help us Google Fiber! You're our only hope. (Score:4, Insightful)
I am afraid you are quite wrong, the issue is PEAK volume, not total. All of the infrastructure costs relate to the peak data flow the ISP is handing. The only costs which correlate to total volume are peering relationships. That is such a small fraction of the total cost that it is not worth considering.
Re: Help us Google Fiber! You're our only hope. (Score:5, Insightful)
Why not make physical connectivity a municipal service? Aside from the physical lines to my house, what roles do ISPs actually fill? DNS and DHCP? I hear some of them offer email address or cloud storage, but those are optional and available elsewhere for free. Certainly doesn't sound like $50-100 a month worth of effort, especially considering companies like Google would likely offer DNS for (here look at this advertisement) free
The way ISPs are currently structured, it feels like someone standing at the edge of my driveway, demanding $10 every time I pull my car out onto the road ... and we can't figure out why this is a bad thing.
So what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Help us Google Fiber! You're our only hope. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: Help us Google Fiber! You're our only hope. (Score:5, Insightful)
No, data transfer is NOT free. The datacenters (HVAC/power), equipment (hello depreciation, upgrade cycles, support contracts), lines (installation/repair), peering arrangements (outside of tier 1 backscratching) are all very expensive, and it takes a small army of people to keep all of this low-volume, insane-price junk running.
You've got it wrong. It's not DATA TRANSFER that is expensive. It is CONCURRENT DEMAND that is expensive.
Suppose I want to download 1 Terabytes of data and upload 1 Terabytes of data.
It will have A VERY DIFFERENT COST for the service provider, if I insist on fully utilizing my 30 megabit link to demand 100% of its throughput for that transfer during peak hours, than if I Spread out my file transfers over a longer period of time, and I structure my demand for capacity, so that it falls at times other than the peak usage hours for their network.
Or if I run that 1TB transfer at 5 Megabit per second 24x7 on my 30 megabit link.
It will take me 20 days worth of time to move that file.
Now, you can't possibly tell me that this costs the provider just as much as me maxing out my connection 24x7 for 3 days to move all 1TB at 30 Megabits/S down and 30Megabits/S up.
Which one do you think REALLY matters to the network?
CAPACITY DEMAND or data usage?
Re: Help us Google Fiber! You're our only hope. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Help us Google Fiber! You're our only hope. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Help us Google Fiber! You're our only hope. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Help us Google Fiber! You're our only hope. (Score:5, Insightful)
The customers of municipally operated Greenlight in Wilson, NC don't seem too unhappy with their service.
Time-Warner's unhappy about it, of course.
You say Comcast knows they have to compete with AT&T.
Are you talking cable versus DSL, or cable versus cable in the same neighborhood?
Most places you have a choice of between 0 and 1 cable companies from which to choose, and your phone wiring may or may not be new enough and close enough to the central office for DSL to be a viable alternative to cable internet.
Re: Help us Google Fiber! You're our only hope. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Help us Google Fiber! You're our only hope. (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, if you have ever negotiated peering agreements, you do not pay per TB. Certain data centers do indeed charge per TB over transfer limits but that's merely to increase profits. I have been involved in building data centers and negotiating contracts with the largest peering centers in the world (AMS-IX, NYIIX, ...) if you're large enough, you simply pay per physical plug.
AMS-IX at one point upgraded to 10Gbps routers (that was years ago, they currently offer up to 100 or 250Gbps if I am not mistaken). They simply notified us it became available and told us that if we wanted in, we just had to upgrade our equipment and instantly we would be peered at 10Gbps with other providers, off course we had large companies like Microsoft in our data centers which others wanted to peer with.
Peering centers are basically clubs of who's-who in the ISP industry. The largest providers pay a membership fee to participate and get the latest (if they so want), smaller providers pay-per-line, the cost per bandwidth unit is minimal.
Re: Help us Google Fiber! You're our only hope. (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you REALLY sure you want that? (Score:5, Insightful)
Ponder this for a moment, dear industry: When I have to pay by the byte that reaches me, I'll monitor CLOSELY what bytes I get. So I will make sure that no ad banner, no ad flash, no navigation flash, no tracking cookie, no ... you name it I won't accept that I get it. You'll see a whole new era of filtering, even and especially from people who didn't mind the ads and the nuisance so far, because until now it only gets on their nerves. With that proposed change, it gets on their wallet. And while people are willing to put up with a lot, as soon as they notice that they could save a nickel by jumping a hoop, they'll do it. And that hoop will probably be filtering software.
I also foresee how we'll get services that do that for you, from countries that are not on the meter (and that cannot be hit with the near certain ban on such services), where they provide proxies that strip all the "unwanted" information out of the content (so it doesn't clog your pipe, something that would even with the best filters probably be unavoidable). So far such a service isn't viable, considering it would have to charge for something you can do yourself for free (if you bother at all), but with a metered line and being able to provide it fairly cheaply (which is far from impossible), this can easily take off. Not to mention that in this time and age of total surveillance the information where people surf to and when, and how long they stay there and what they do there, is money by itself.
And now I have to wonder, is that really what you want? Customers you cannot track sensibly anymore, whose browsing habits you cannot sell, because all their traffic is going encrypted to one single IP outside the country?
Not to mention that then customers will take a closer look at your "overhead" and wonder why 10-20% of their bandwidth is being wasted on ... on whatever the hell those "cable" connections waste it on.
A dangerous side effect on data capping (Score:5, Insightful)
Data capping is not only about money
It is also about restricting the spreading of information
True, nowadays most of the data flow online are leisure vids (netflix, youtube et all) but ... critical vids, such as the ones that we got from area of conflicts, such as Syria, also consume up lots of data
Capping of the data could restrict the spread of information as well
Let's say there is something happening that the power-that-be does not want others to know, and it was an emergency and they did not have time to cut off the net feed ...
Without data capping anyone with a net-enable smartphone can upload the critical vids and perhaps store it in an online cloud somewhere
With data capping the power-that-be can, theoretically, get the ISP to stop the flow (even if they can't cut the net feed)
Never trust the intention of the power-that-be
Re:A dangerous side effect on data capping (Score:5, Insightful)
Data capping isn't really relevant to that - a hundred megabytes of, say, LAPD beating up a suspect or university campus police tear-gassing non-violent protesters is no bigger a datastream than a hundred megabytes of my cat chasing his toy mouse round the floor, when it's being uploaded to the likes of YouTube; once it hits there, I don't think Google use cable modems to send it from their datacenters. A hostile power would just cut the connection, whether you have an "unlimited" connection or a pay-as-you-go one - as has happened a few times in recent disturbances (Egypt or Syria?) - they don't bother looking at individual data packages anyway.
The poster further up had it exactly, I think: it's all about killing off competition from Netflix, Amazon and Hulu. Any guesses why else it would be Time Warner and Comcast - i.e. the cable ISPs - pushing this, rather than AT&T and Verizon? (Not that those two would be unhappy either, of course: more money, an easier market for their FiOS and U-verse TV offerings - but it's obviously Comcast and TW who have the most to lose.)