Easy, if TWC enters into this arrangement, I’ll get FiOS or DSL.
I guess you qualify as “shittier than shittiest”. Congrats!
-Joe
You both are assuming something not in evidence – that Comcast’s costs are proportional to the data usage of individual consumers.
Remember that fiber has an enormous capacity and adding more enormous capacity is extremely cheap. Let’s take a hypothetical case – if a neighborhood on a single, shared feed has a capacity of X with a fixed cost to the supplier (infrastructure), and the total data moved by all users is 10% of X, then it makes no difference how that amount is split. If one consumer doubles his use, that doesn’t double the supplier’s cost. It may not change the supplier’s cost at all.
My complaint about the new Comcast policy is it is short-sighted and a thinly disguised scheme to raise EVERYONE’s bill. The trend for all consumers is to increase their data use by leaps and bounds over time, so even if only 5% of their customers are affected (by the surcharge) this year, the chances are great that 50% of them will be affected in a few years.
Also, the trend is for decreasing costs per MB, not increasing. History has shown that supplier’s costs are going down, not up. Comcast is bucking the trend.
Another thought. The largest users tend to be the most sophisticated. Does Comcast really want to piss them off? In my residential neighborhood, I’m probably the biggest user of data services, and I’m the go-to guy if anyone wants an opinion on what services to use. Piss me off, and how likely am I to recommend that service?
Not that it matters to me. Comcast doesn’t come to my neighborhood, and the service I get thru Charter has been unlimited, only restricted by speed maximums. And so far, I’ll recommend Charter to anyone who asks.
Answered by Rysto. Also, congestion limits expansion capacity without affecting current users.
Why don’t they charge people who make lots of local calls extra? Same argument.
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Cable doesn’t offer the option, but most phone companies have a much cheaper rate plan (often unadvertised) where they do charge by the minute (outgoing). If one uses a phone for only 10 minutes a month, that person might be better served with the cheapest phone cost structure.
The problem with phone (cell and landline) companies (and I don’t see why TWC would operate differently) is that when you go over your allotment of whatever, they start to charge per minute rather than bumping to next price band. It would be fairly easy to write a program which charges the lesser of extra usage (of you are only over by say 1 or 2 minutes) or next price plan (if you are over by double your minutes). It is a very consumer-unfriendly practice.
Charging for usage may have gone out of fashion during a highly competitive period where ISPs were fighting for customers. But as with any resource if you allow people to take freely they will abuse it.
Charging models are a big deal in network research circles and I’ll be up front and say that I will always be an advocate of bandwidth being a commodity you pay for and of pay per use charging. I’ll try an illustrate why.
The first point is the tragedy of the commons I alluded to in my first paragraph. Others have also raised this issue. If you allow free access to a commodity usage will grow to take up any slack, but it will not grow fairly. A certain percentage of your users will take more than you could possibly have imagined possible and because it is a shared resource the remaining users experience will be degraded the odd time they do want to look at something on youtube or whatever. There are multiple ways ISPs have attempted to combat this, traffic shaping, terminating the accounts of those who use excessive bandwidth (remember ISPs are not obliged to provide you with service) but the single simplest and to my mind fairest way is by pay-per-use.
There is a second consideration which is a little more subtle. If the ISPs have to stick with a free access solution for whatever reason they will be required to implement some other solution to free up capacity. Traffic shaping and its relatives are not dear to my heart because they expand the ISPs role from ‘carry my bits to the destination I specify’ to ‘look at the bits I am sending and make a decision about how quickly and indeed whether to carry them’. My preference is for ISPs to restrict themselves solely to bit carrying and not to enter into content filtering.
Can you for example imagine not being allowed to use your home phone to call whoever you wanted, would you not consider that an intrusion into your life? The reason you can do that is because the phone companies charge by use and structure their charges to be attractive enough for consumers without being open to abuse (for example if phone companies charged like ISPs, people would always be on the phone to Australia etc and you would not be able to get through when you really did need to talk to someone on another continent unless the companies built a vast amount of un-needed fiber (which would quickly be filled by people opening a second phone call to Australia anyway.
Another way that ISPs can make money is by rerouting your requests to paying business customers. For example the only reason www.google.com takes you to google and not microsoft’s search engine is because the ISPs generally don’t game the system this way (although they do in similar but more subtle ways).
Thus if the companies move to a pay-per-use model they are able to make an honest profit to which they are entitled without being open to the abuse of resources the current model allows and also without having to become the internet traffic police o worse
I do agree with an earlier poster about contention ratio’s effect on your advertised vs actual bandwidth being something the advertising boards should look at. People should get what they pay for.
This is a complete red herring if the MB usage per customer is going up at a greater rate than the cost is going down (which is the case)
Which is exactly my point. I don’t think Comcast will be able to make this stick.
If that was your point it didn’t come across well.
if comcasts cost/MB is 5 and their customers use 50Mb. They charge 300 in fees (total). They make 50 profit
Next year the cost/MB goes down to 4, but their usage goes up to 80Mb. That same 300 now no longer even covers costs.
Current trends in web traffic (youtube, internet TV etc) mean that many ISPs are experiencing exactly this situation. One solution is to keep adding more and more fibre and raising everyone’s bills to pay for it. The other is to move to a saner pricing structure.
I wasn’t even thinking about the patches but you are correct. I was thinking about the actual gameplay, data is always going back and forth to the servers.
Consider every bit of software on the average, non-techie computer, then consider how often it “needs” to call home for updates, patches etc. What’s going to happen is a lot of regular consumers who don’t monitor their usage are going to hit that cap in the first 15 days if you’re comparing packets to packets. If Vista is anything like XP, or, FSM forbid, like ME, there will be a constant stream of data between those users and Redmond. That’s not even counting the game geeks and fanboys.
I’m calling bullshit on TWC. If you want slower/less access, get DSL from the phone company and be done with it.
That stuff is small beans, unless your cap is < 1 Gb you won’t notice it.
That’s like ISDN speeds, or twice dial up, if I’m not mistaken. I hope you aren’t paying cable or DSL prices for that.
Actually, 768 is about 13X normal dial-up (56k).
Anyway, on the issue of charging for bandwidth use, i can see the logic behind it. My main problem with it, which has already been mentioned in this thread, is that i’ll bet there won’t be any price break for those who use very little. The current rates will be kept as the floor price, and people who use more will get charged more on top of that.
The article linked by the OP notes that 5% of users account for about half of the bandwidth used. I wonder if the fee structure they’re implementing will reflect that balance, and charge those extremely high users accordingly, or whether they will make a grab for extra cash from everyone else as well.
I probably qualify as a moderate to high (but not exceptionally high) user, based on the sort of numbers that have been thrown around for high users. There’s no way i’ve ever downloaded 200 Gig in a month, and i’d be very surprised if i’d ever gone over 100. I’ll bet there’s quite a few months, though, where i’ve hovered in the 50-60 range.
The interesting thing is that this talk of caps and metered internet is coming in right as speeds increase and the types of services available encourage regular users (i.e., people who don’t use torrents, etc.) to consume more bandwidth. For example, Netflix’s relatively new streaming movies service for its customers. At the same time as speeds of over 12Mbps become available, allowing streaming of high quality video and rapid downloading of other large files, bandwidth caps and metering threaten to stifle the use of these things. Hell, even regular webpages, with all their embedded flash and other crap, are starting to take time to load on the slower broadband connections (<1.5Mbps). The days of the 35kb HTML homepage are just about gone.
Dialup is around 33.6Kbps, ISDN is 128Kbps.
So, nowhere near.
-Joe
Are you sure you’re on a "."768 line? How fast are your downloads?
(The rule of thumb is that your line number describes in Kbits, while your download stream is described in KBytes, and a bit is 1/8 of a Byte, so your download speed should be 1/8 of your line capacity, i.e. 768/8(x0.9*)=86,4KB/s. That equals to around 5mb per minute, which is slow this day and age.)
And considering you downloaded HL2 in around 45 minutes (i.e. 225mb with the above, uniform formula) that doesn’t sound quite right.
(Sorry if I seem like a condescending jerk or anything, I’m just really tired and trying to stay awake, and my brain jumped at the maths involved to keep itself occupied)
*You can usually shave off 10% capacity for overhead.
I think you mean TWC?
Not to mention a lot of new software clients use torrent-sharing systems to help take loads off of their own servers for updates and other service downloads. If your cap includes both download and upload, you could get doubly screwed in this equation.
Luckily, I have Comcast not Time Warner. If Comcast goes to this plan, I’ll drop them like a hot potato. Right now I have my phone, internet and TV with them. I’ll move all 3. The only reason I’ve kept my cable TV and phones with them is the convenience of having 1 company & I love my high speed internet.
I have 4 computers (sometimes 5 when I boot my other machine) on my home lan. My wife watches streaming TV from Korea. Not sure on the bandwidth of that, but it has to be at least a couple hundred K. Then my one daughter is constantly watching stuff on YouTube. My other daughter just plays kids games, so not a high bandwidth user.
Then there’s me. I signed up and paid for MLB.TV. The games stream at 800K a second. If my math is right, that’s about a Gig for a 3 hour game. I paid to watch any game live (barring occasional blackout restrictions) and any archived game. I also like to listen to streaming audio when I’m not watching baseball. I also use bittorrent occasionally. Just downloaded the new Nine Inch Nails album legally.
All legitimate uses, and I’d blow through their 40gig limit easily.
Legitimate, sure, but you can’t expect to have that kind of usage and expect to pay the same as someone who just gets email and browses the SDMB for too much longer, I suspect.
True that. But if they don’t want to supply me with the bandwidth, I’ll find a company who will. And if I can’t find any company who will, well I can at least save a lot on my phone & TV bills, because Comcast won’t be getting my money anymore.