News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Countries With Zero Rating Have More Expensive Wireless. Parent comment

Re:Countries With Zero Rating Have More Expensive Wireless by rayiner on Thursday February 07, 2019 @06:42PM (#19109827)
What exactly is “anti-competitive” about data caps? They’re just a form of congestion pricing. Congestion pricing is now widely considered desirable for things like roads. Now, ideally, we would have fine grained congestion pricing with fees kicking in based on tower occupancy level. But customers would probably find that too unpredictable.

Moreover, congestion isn’t the only cost to account for. Take the total number of dollars of capital and maintenance costs of the network over it’s useful life and divide by the total number of bits sent during that useful life. That produces a cost per bit that seems quite reasonable to apply to customers based on how many bits they send.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Countries With Zero Rating Have More Expensive Wireless by bb88 on Thursday February 07, 2019 @07:01PM (#19109938)
If an ISP is the only game in town, and they zero rate their streaming service but put a cap on Netflix it is anti competitive.

The problem with your roads analogy is that there's more than one road to take. Not all roads are tolled.

And the cure isn't getting rid of data caps, the cure is increasing competition on a local level.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Countries With Zero Rating Have More Expensive Wireless by toomuchtodo on Thursday February 07, 2019 @09:46PM (#19111053)
The physical RF spectrum is the local road. There are no more roads to take. No amount of economic policy supporting competition is going to bend the laws of physics, unless you're willing to shovel herculean amounts of resources into microcells (even smaller than 5G cell sites) to reduce contention (essentially replacing fiber and wifi).
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Countries With Zero Rating Have More Expensive Wireless by Retric on Friday February 08, 2019 @04:20AM (#19112651)
Cell companies can more or less directly translate $ = bandwidth with no meaningful limit.

You have effectively unlimited RF bandwidth assuming ever smaller cell locations. Bluetooth is the equivalent of a new cell in under every 10 meters. And that’s with a tiny slice of the RF spectrum.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Countries With Zero Rating Have More Expensive Wireless by bb88 on Saturday February 09, 2019 @03:14PM (#19124330)
> The physical RF spectrum is the local road.

But how does that affect the anticompetive argument? I don't think it does. It still holds if you're the only game in town.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Countries With Zero Rating Have More Expensive Wireless by dzhiurgis on Thursday February 07, 2019 @11:18PM (#19111487)
National network + eSIM. Retailers compete on providing better internwtional traffic (pretty much as it is now with broadband in many countries).
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Countries With Zero Rating Have More Expensive Wireless by toomuchtodo on Thursday February 07, 2019 @11:23PM (#19111506)
Your suggested solution does not address the local cell network contention issue zero rating attempts to mitigate.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Countries With Zero Rating Have More Expensive Wireless by Firadeoclus on Friday February 08, 2019 @06:29AM (#19113257)
How does zero rating "attempt to mitigate" local contention issues? Zero rating does not reduce local network traffic.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Countries With Zero Rating Have More Expensive Wireless by toomuchtodo on Friday February 08, 2019 @10:40AM (#19115182)
Forcing lower bandwidth versions of video and audio streams reduces local spectrum use. Do I really need anything above 480p on my iPhone? Probably not, so the carrier incentivizes me with zero rating.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Countries With Zero Rating Have More Expensive Wireless by gsich on Friday February 08, 2019 @03:45AM (#19112482)
And how do you know there is congestion? The ISP won't tell you.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Countries With Zero Rating Have More Expensive Wireless by shmerl on Thursday February 07, 2019 @07:36PM (#19110165)
What's anti-competitive is zero rating and violation of net neutrality. Data caps are driving it. But to go one step further, all this sickening situation is caused by lack of competition between ISPs themselves. That's oligopoly for you.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Countries With Zero Rating Have More Expensive Wireless by gsich on Thursday February 07, 2019 @07:11PM (#19110004)
And how do you know the congestion level of the cell? With LTE you can deduce it from RSRQ, but that won't tell you if congestion is happening at the next hop.
[ Parent | on HN ]