Metered Internet and Why you should be concerned

[Nosauz]

Man ever time I read crap from LynnieS I feel like I'm being given the corporate run around. Do you know what is the most profitable division of TW is? You bet your ass its High Speed Internet division. Do you know how much they update and upgrade their system? less than 1% of their revenue to maintain and update, yet WHY THE FUCK am I paying 50 dollars a month for a 1gb down and 750k up connection? Well they oversold their infrastructure and don't plan on upgrading. Look the point is, caps are meant to protect the content providers from services like hulu, netflix etc that have turned cable tv into a less profitable division. Also you have the issue of these oligiocoloplies that have cut the country up into protected areas where there is only one service providers. Well if your going to cap me, or charge me by my usage you better charge me a la carte per channels so I don't have to buy 5000 channels to get sports center.

The point is, internet should not be capped, it should not be in the hands of uncompetitive companies, it should not be controlled by content providers, it would be like toyota paving roads for cars and doing so in a way to only let toyota cars drive on them, any way packet freedom is key and if you want to find out more ways to fight this hydra that is the cable/telecom industry head over to stop the cap dot com. The thing is they are trying these caps out in a couple of states, and yet on tv they continue to market this service as guess what unlimited, and high speed.

[LynnieS]

I could not care less about what one company does in its justification of its pricing policy. Nor do I give a damn for what some people on either side want to turn the "network neutrality" debate into. One side will probably call me a "corporate lackey" for actually wondering about economics and any fall-outs. The other side will likely call me a "traitor" for not falling in line with the official policy. I couldn't care less for either side.

I have already mentioned why I, despite not liking the "capped" process that much, prefer it as it is simply easier for people to understand how it impacts them immediately. You pay for you eat. Simple. Easy to understand. To the point.

Edit: BTW, where is your data for Time Warner's profitability with respect to its High Speed Internet division? Hmm, and Time Warner Cable was split off from Time Warner in March 2009 also.... Its data is no longer being reported together with TW.

Edit: Removed rant 'cause I don't want to post while I'm in a bad mood.

Edit: Even though this thread topic wasn't about 1 single ISP but rather about the entire move/change in pricing model... Quickly looking at the latest TWC 10-Q filings as of 29 Jul 2009, it seems that subscription-related revenue for the 6-month period, 2009 vs 2008, is up 6% with Voice contributing the most. Data is the next highest, but it doesn't look to break out Consumer vs Corporate... Cost of revenue for Voice is up but down for Data; I wonder if they are shifting maintenance to grow VOD instead... TWC wants to grow all segments though, so I expect more PR on "unlimited usage" but a shift to "capping" in selected trials.

Time Warner's 10-Q, taking a quick look, doesn't include what had been its Cable division, which as mentioned, is no longer majority owned by TW.

[SaintessHeart]

Originally Posted by yezhanquan

So far, no such movements in Singapore. Like many other issues, Singapore's a greenhouse on this one.

They already did. By just pushing a fiber optic through your wall and claim that it is connected at the fastest speed : but you have to pay more. They have got fast penetration, but upload-wise, they are still quite slow.

The ISPs have already considered to push for that, but in such a small country, it could seriously damage the telecommunications infrastructure and industry, which is steadily growing and generating "moe" revenues for everyone. Singtel used to have all the monopoly, then we have Starhub, and now M1 is offering "cheap but good" broadband. In an economic sense, it is bloody pointless and could be seen as an avenue of profiteering in such a small country, because in the first place, they are not losing any profitability in such a small arena.

For a country that takes pride in its service and business acumen, it would be in the competitors' best interest not to tread anywhere into this area. Instead, they should spend their money restructuring their marketing departments and hotline services, which are in a total mess.

Spoiler for rant:

Have you called a CSC person to ask for the price of a 20m LAN cable, only to have that idiot send a tech to your home and almost paying $30 in service fees? Have you ever bought an Internet plan that aggressively markets a cable TV service you never use? And have you ever been asked to plug the phone cord into each slot on a 2wire modem "to test for connection" when there is only ONE phone slot? Obviously that person can't tell the difference between a LAN port and a phone jack!

The most important part of a telecom service, is STILL to staff the helpdesk with technically competent individuals, not some overeducated undergrad or fresh highschool graduate given a fixed set of replies. I am tired of switching over to another ISP and paying forfeit, these dollars are from my own pocket.

The biggest provider, though, has a wildcard which their marketing dept is oblivious enough not to play. If they license certain rights from Kakifly, then redesign limited editions of their 2Wire modems (inside and outside of the machine), they can score a really profitable coup, locally and overseas.

[chikorita157]

Originally Posted by Blitzfx

I dont think all (Australian) ISP's monitor usage very accurately. TPG for example seem to have a +10% offset on how many MB/GB has been downloaded that's displayed on their site (when you log in) compared to what client-side monitoring tools have recorded. If you go onto their forum, there's a lot of complaints about how much has been used.

Being more of a gamer than anime watcher (which is expensive entertainment internet-wise) a lot of online games take up a lot of cap as well as having to download patches. Even streaming videos kills it quite rapidly along side various other things. Downloading windows 7 Beta would have drained a lot of Australian's internet cap.

In an age where there is a larger shift towards digital distribution and moving away from buying software off the shelf, adding a cap would undeniably halt this advancement. Purpose of buying digital is to avoid having to pay for a box (and save the environment :P), the delivery and manufacturing costs of the middle man and in turn pay a lot less.

If American net becomes capped/metered, then I guess all hope for Australian broadband to go unlimited will fall through despite Telscum recently being told to split into two or gtfo, which was supposed to give way for a fairer competition between all the ISPs.
And for everyone else who doesn't know about the situation in Australia, Telstra is the one and only communications giant which partly owns the Australian communications infrastructure and rents out it's lines to other ISPs. The only reason they haven't upped the price to $1000000000 or something ridiculous is because the government owns 50% of it's shares. Many years back, John Howard proposed to sell some shares in Telstra to fund a project and he got shot down very fast. Probably a good thing it didn't happen because otherwise making a single phone call to my friend would probably make me a bankrupt.

Yeah, that makes no sense either. That's like thinking that limiting how many miles people drive a month will reduce rush hour traffic.

I'm totally against caps simply because there's absolutely no need for caps. Caps do not reduce congestion when it is most needed during peak hours. That is handled by QoS.

People need to differentiate between usage and consumption. Unlike natural, finite resources, you do not "consume" bandwidth. The capacity, once built, is always there no matter how much you use it since the transfer of information is fundamentally free. So while creation of bandwidth is not free, its usage actual is.

I have to agree with this, because bandwidth is not a limited source and QoS (Quality of Service) should be the solution of handling congestion problems when more users are online. I have explained before that bandwidth grows with improvements in capacity.

I have always been against the ISPs use of Caps and also bandwidth throttling/traffic shaping for awhile now and I highly doubt caps can do anything for the growing usage of people using the internet, ISPs are just milking what they have instead of upgrading and improving their networks and monopolies are to blame for caps. If there is competition, there won't be any caps.

For metered internet to ever work, the ISP cannot nix their unlimited plans or make it too expensive. If they want to make it work, they should charge a low fee for a reasonable amount of bandwidth, 40 GB for $20 and keep the unlimited plan at the same price, like $45 a month so it will benefit people who don't use the internet that much instead of forcing it on everyone since bandwidth is infinite. Metered internet will never solve the problems with growing usage, just consumption which does not equal to congestion.

Also, you got to realize that not only ads, downloading and browsing the internet can account to the bandwidth you use. Devices that are on standby can use bandwidth to update their firmware or updates. Spyware and Malware that a user don't have knowledge of can take alot of bandwidth and can easily take most of the cap without the user realizing it. The problem is, metered internet is not practical if things like malware can take bandwidth easily away. Also, not only streaming, VoIP and gaming can take bandwidth away, but cloud computing will be hindered by metered internet since it uses a sizable amount of bandwidth usage.

[0utf0xZer0]

Originally Posted by LynnieS

1. It's not easily visible to the average user. Say you have a contract with your ISP for video streaming, and one night, while happily watching the latest Hollywood blockbuster, the stream became choppy. You call up Customer Service, and they explain that someone else had priority and was allowed to take over more bandwidth. Is the average person going to accept that as a real answer?

And do you expect they're going to accept "we oversold out network" as a legitimate answer? Bandwidth caps do nothing to guarantee that you won't have peak loads - particularly since nothing I've seen proposed in the US so far differentiates between peak and off peak hours. Which would be an extremely logical step if this actually was about network congestion.

Second, let's take a look at those bandwidth caps that Time Warner Cable proposed. According to Ars Technica, the originally proposed bandwidth limits ranged from 5GB a month for $30 to 40GB a month for $55:
http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2...aps-arrive.ars

After customer complaints, the proposed 40GB a month tier was boosted to 60GB a month and a 100GB tier was added for $75:
http://a.longreply.com/109511

So for an extra $20 over the 60GB tier, you can get 40GB a month. So 50 cents per GB.

Now, let's compare this to the plans I can purchase from Shaw Cable in Vancouver, Canada:

For $44 a month, I can get 60GB. For $54, I can get 100GB. Both those prices drop $9 if I bundle with a TV cable package. But the important thing to note here is that I can get 40GB a month extra for $10. 25 cents a gig. In Canadian money. Which is worth less that its American counterpart.

In other words, TWC was originally planning to charge four times as much for bandwidth as my ISP does, and even after complaints wanted to charge twice as much. Still think this is just about making people pay for what they use?

[yezhanquan]

Originally Posted by SaintessHeart

They already did. By just pushing a fiber optic through your wall and claim that it is connected at the fastest speed : but you have to pay more. They have got fast penetration, but upload-wise, they are still quite slow.

The ISPs have already considered to push for that, but in such a small country, it could seriously damage the telecommunications infrastructure and industry, which is steadily growing and generating "moe" revenues for everyone. Singtel used to have all the monopoly, then we have Starhub, and now M1 is offering "cheap but good" broadband. In an economic sense, it is bloody pointless and could be seen as an avenue of profiteering in such a small country, because in the first place, they are not losing any profitability in such a small arena.

For a country that takes pride in its service and business acumen, it would be in the competitors' best interest not to tread anywhere into this area. Instead, they should spend their money restructuring their marketing departments and hotline services, which are in a total mess.

Spoiler for rant:

Have you called a CSC person to ask for the price of a 20m LAN cable, only to have that idiot send a tech to your home and almost paying $30 in service fees? Have you ever bought an Internet plan that aggressively markets a cable TV service you never use? And have you ever been asked to plug the phone cord into each slot on a 2wire modem "to test for connection" when there is only ONE phone slot? Obviously that person can't tell the difference between a LAN port and a phone jack!

The most important part of a telecom service, is STILL to staff the helpdesk with technically competent individuals, not some overeducated undergrad or fresh highschool graduate given a fixed set of replies. I am tired of switching over to another ISP and paying forfeit, these dollars are from my own pocket.

The biggest provider, though, has a wildcard which their marketing dept is oblivious enough not to play. If they license certain rights from Kakifly, then redesign limited editions of their 2Wire modems (inside and outside of the machine), they can score a really profitable coup, locally and overseas.

Oh. Don't get much of this crap since I go for the slowest speed, not the fastest.

[npcomplete]

Originally Posted by LynnieS

I get the feeling that we are talking about the same thing, but at different points in the "lifetime". "Quality of Service" theoretically allows the provider to provide bandwidth based on different factors like "Application", "User" and etc.; it can also guarantee a threshold for a type of data flow (e.g., video streaming) below which performance will not fall.

There are more sophisticated schemes to allow for better fairness like when someone is doing a long FTP session, transferring GBs. And the network is saturated and someone else just wants to view a webpage. That person making making short http requests and transfers is normally going to get stuck in a very deep queue of packets from all the rest of the people. But a more intelligent Qos policy could bump the priority up for short bursty traffic when compared to long, sustained traffic in the queue so as to not starve out small requests.

I see several issues with the actual implementation.

1. It's not easily visible to the average user. Say you have a contract with your ISP for video streaming, and one night, while happily watching the latest Hollywood blockbuster, the stream became choppy. You call up Customer Service, and they explain that someone else had priority and was allowed to take over more bandwidth. Is the average person going to accept that as a real answer?

Well that happens right now except you're not told so For example TW has a residential and business class plan (twice the cost per month even without the optional SLAs). Both have the same max bandwidth 15/2. But business class is given higher priority. In fact, the person who might have been given higher priority and interrupted your video stream can also be using much less traffic overall. Or it can be inverted: where you might just be using 10GB a month but the time when you decide to try out Netflix DVD online is right when a business class user decides to download a DVD iso.

2. Quality of Service also doesn't address the possibility of ever growing usage, I feel. You mentioned that bandwidth is a resource with "infinite use" and "limited capacity", and I agree with you in both. However, capacity usage has not dropped that I know of, and with (i) more people going on-line and (ii) more services to send content down to users becoming available, usage will continue to go up.

I see that a limited capacity resource will be sliced into smaller chunks to be sold, given supply and demand, at higher prices. Are consumers going to accept that, or would people (or at least, the average person) want to have a "pay what you eat" model instead?

The alternative is an investment in extra capacity so they can control (but not likely to stop) price increases. Usage of capacity trends upward - although if there is proof otherwise, please post. Capacity in terms of infrastructure, esp. for high demand areas or in major connectivity trunks, is, IMHO, in high demand, and will not be too cheap. Investing in building new infrastructure is also not cheap and runs risks (e.g., Global Crossing) if plans don't pan out.

I am not a huge fan on "capping" based on usage, but I see it as being fairer to consumers - (i) paying for exactly what you use without subsidizing someone else's DL and movie habits and (ii) being much more visible with less "wriggle" room. My thoughts anyway.

You're right there's only so much Qos can do. And if every single person is pounding the network then everyone's going to feel the pain. Qos just makes sure that pain is evenly distributed So as you already know, that's why you must grow capacity.

Now, as far as it being cheap or not I'm not expert. But it seems that if you do not have to go through the politics and especially if you don't have to use someone else's infrastructure where you can get as close as possible to the backbone, then it actually can be less costly than what people expect. If you can lay fiber down on a new development so that you don't have to tear up roads and deal with city ordinance, that also makes things cheaper.

Paxio is a good example of just how affordable it can get (because of all of what I just mentioned) with 100/100 mbps unmetered fiber for $95 a month (and 1/1 Gbps for $245). Compare this to TW's best plan in select cities only of 15/2 mbps for $55 a month.