I think ISP's are often undeservedly painted as the bad guys. Yes, some are profiteers, but most are just turning a normal profit, just like any business. The only way for them to compete on price with other ISP's is to also impose caps, because what they charge is just not enough to fund the infrastructure for a dedicated connection with guaranteed bandwidth.
That's not how statistical multiplexing works.
If it was some sort of a natural law that shipping 1 byte cost $x on the margin, then the PSTN never would have survived the shift to unmetered long distance service. Somehow ISPs have been making big profits selling unmetered internet service during a period of hypergrowth. How is it possible that they didn't go broke during this process?
The real story here is that "power user" is a proxy for "cord cutter". If a residential user downloads 1TB per month, then they're a thoroughgoing "over the top" video consumer. The traffic patterns are different for streamers vs. pirates, but it's still people watching TV and not paying cableco for the privilege.
They're just doing price discrimination, rolling out bandwidth caps with punitive fees for violations, and waiting for the 4K frog to boil. Roll it forward, and you're back in the world of all you can eat at a higher price point. Cablecos don't really have to care how you split your bill between internet and video, as long as ARPU stays in the $70-$100 range. "Dumb pipes" are higher margin than cable channels, and don't need contract renegotiations with steely-eyed squeezers like Disney.
Let DIS roll their price increases out directly to consumers with their streaming channels, while you just sitting there running a toll road. It's like a regulated natural monopoly, without the burden of appropriate regulation. This is a nice business.
> If you want to know what unlimited bandwidth really costs, look at the price of the business plans.
The premium there is for uptime guarantees, better service, and a certain amount of legislative corruption (without which no discussion of telco/cableco practices would be complete). They are allowed to discriminate between commercial & residential customers, and refuse residential service to commercial addresses.
The ISP needs to build infrastructure to support peak instantaneous load. If the current network is at 50% capacity and I turn on Netflix there's basically no cost to the ISP, even if I've already used my 1TB of data for the month. If they are at 95% capacity then things start to matter a lot more.
If the ISPs were interested in fair pricing, they should offer pricing like the power companies these days, charging more during the day/evening and less during the night when less people are generating traffic. You should be throttled during the afternoon when everyone else is on or pay for the "fast lane".
But they don't operate like that, because $, making them the bad guys.
Just looking at Biz service vs home and assuming that's because of unlimited bandwidth is 1:1, there's more going on there that's different between the two.
You can get gigabit fiber throughout Asia and Europe for as low as $20 a month with no cap. There is no "discount" for fast connections in the US. The ISP cartel price gouges the whole country and because of their regional monopolies have no incentive to invest in actually having the provisioning to support the speeds they advertise.
Bandwidth is strongly correlated to total transmitted data, as the amount of time in a day isn’t changing any time soon. It may be reasonable to offer some kind of off-peak pricing for customers that can time-shift their internet needs, but the complexity is apparently not worth the benefits.
In particular, if the usage over time of a high-data customer generally looks like a scaled version of the same chart as a low-data customer, there won’t be much effective difference in the two models, and consumers understand quantity billing much easier than bandwidth-percentile billing, which is how the wholesale market is priced.
"Data used between the hours of 11pm and 9am do not count against your data cap." Not difficult to understand, cell phone companies used to do it all the time with minutes.
(Times made up, adjust for real-world peek.)
Personally, I think it's relatively obvious that data caps on cable internet connections are not related to the cost of service.
They’re related, but there may not be a direct 1:1 correspondence. Offering unlimited anything at a fixed price is a terrible idea for any company because there will be at least a few outliers that throw their modeling out the window, and there is ample precedent for ill-advised promotions bankrupting companies (see the Hoover flight article that was on the front page a while ago).
The issue isn’t with the existence of data caps, it’s with the laws that allow nominally unlimited things to be actually limited and the lack of competition that might produce the kinds of promotion you’ve suggested in the fight for market share.
Not sure if at a noticeable level, but I keep wondering: aren't there costs that are directly proportional to the amount of data transferred? Flipping bits costs energy, both at the level of fundamental physics and (more importantly) at the level of engineering - all the electric and optical signals aren't free, and packet processing isn't either. E.g. I'd expect my power bill to be larger if my Raspberry Pi saturated the network by streaming /dev/urandom than it would be if it was sitting idle.
But aside that, I think that beyond the "we can charge you for data because you can", the per-data-transferred costs come from the overprovisioning ISPs do. The fraction of the advertised to actually supported bandwidth per user they can get away with is dependent on average amount of traffic users generate.
How do data caps help with that though? People are still going to use most of their internet during peek hours, because...well, those are the times people use the internet the most, by definition.
It's like trying to combat rush hour traffic problems by limiting the number of times people can use a highway. People are still going to use it during rush hour, they just are going to avoid using the highway during non-rush hour periods, which accomplishes nothing.
In Australia the bandwidth caps used to be specifically set up with a different peak and off-peak cap to help with this even more.
In the UK most ISPs will instead perform traffic shaping where they will slow down your connection during peak times after a certain small amount of data transfer. This still seems to be disliked by consumers just the same.
I was so sad when I had to move further north where there's only Cox.
You send 1gbit across the link. Does the power consumption increase appreciably?
The Internet at scale is just that but larger. Perhaps there are 50 switches/routers between you and your destination.
The issue comes about when you have a 10gbit bottleneck and customers want to send 15.
Having a bandwidth cap is basically the ISP punishing you for contending too often.
That said, assuming the ISP wants to keep an average speed higher than the minimum their contention ratio would offer, people who download a lot would have a greater impact on that, and could therefore cause the ISP to have to invest in more hardware and back-haul.
The counter is that the ISP isn't upgrading their network anyway, they're just juicing the market by charging some people more.
Most ISPs are constantly upgrading parts of their network. Earlier this spring AT&T came through my complex and installed fiber in every apartment. Average broadband speeds have increased significantly over the last decade, and for that to have happened significant network upgrades would have to have taken place.
To my mind the question would be "if an ISP has network with a fixed capacity, do their monthly operating costs differ between a month where they consistently utilize 50% of that capacity compared to another month where they utilize 80%?"
I suspect the cost to the ISP is the same in either case: they have purchased the equipment and bandwidth to support the network and those costs are fixed, regardless of how much of that bandwidth they are actually using. If that is true, this idea that there is only so much data per month to go around and if you use more then your neighbor then you should be charged more money would be fundamentally dishonest.
(1) This is overly simplistic; these are individually-negotiated B2B contracts, so details vary widely.
Based on this article, I suspect that ISPs like Comcast and Charter are not extending their backbone to handle growing internet traffic. It seems they are charging exorbitant fees to discourage increased usage instead (in this article, the subscriber canceled their Hulu account and lowered the resolution of video supplied by Netflix).
If there is truly demand for unmetered internet someone will step in and fill the void. Some ISPs also use total transfer as a way to discriminate between business internet and residential internet.
See also: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tier_2_network , https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tier_1_network
It's a giant bucket of 'it depends'. If the CDN network serving the content has placed hardware within the ISPs network, it's likely a non-issue. This was a major issue before folks like Netflix started moving their CDNs closer to the customer. You might have a hard time finding the articles, but I recommend looking at the pissing match Level 3 and Verizon got into years back.
>it would happen if caps existed or not
I'm not convinced. You are essentially arguing that scarcity of a resource has no affect on consumption.
Data caps allow ISPs to run oversubscribed networks, which are very profitable. If you're streaming 24/7, then that bandwidth isn't available to sell to your neighbor. In that sense, cost is indeed directly related to amount of data transferred.
edit: I found it here[0].
> The idea of this project is to tunnel Internet traffic through Facebook chat (packets are sent as base64), the main component is tuntap and also the Google's Gumbo parser which does the interaction with Facebook (login, send/receive messages, etc.).
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/nz7eyg/wikipedia-zero-fac...
I can accept that it would be better for the health of the internet as a whole to give people full access or not at all. But it cannot be exploitative to give something of value for free to someone, just because that someone wants something more/something else.
One of the (many) criticisms of Nestle is that they went to 3rd-world countries and gave new mothers free supplies of bottled formula. Then after the mothers switched to formula and stopped lactating, they took away the free milk offer and forced them to pay out the nose for a life-essential product that their bodies would have otherwise produced naturally.
Just like with Nestle, giving away limited Internet that can only access Facebook/Wikipedia has the effect of forcing those services to become critical architecture. It denies nations the autonomy to decide how their own networks should be run, and puts them at a massive disadvantage when competing on those networks or building their own services.
In exchange for giving away access to their product (and only their product) for free, Facebook gets a monopoly-level stranglehold on how information is transmitted across those regions -- and that's not just bad for the Internet as a whole, it's bad for the countries and their citizens.
I agree it could be on the national interest of a country to forbid nestle formula given like that (or, for that matter, basic internet given by facebook). Also, the nestle case seems more clearly exploitative to me, because they meant to deprive women of something by giving them the formula.
Free stuff distorts markets. It's important to be cognizant of this providing aid.
If the data is coming from outside the ISPs network, it might be on a paid connection. Although I think it's less popular today, it was common for paid connections to be billed based on the physical capacity as well as the amount of transfer (95th percentile billing used to be ubiquitous).
Within the ISPs network, or on unpaid connections, the marginal cost per byte is discontinuous: most of the time it's so low it's probably hard to measure, but when you hit the capacity of a link, the cost can be high to increase capacity.
An ISP, especially a residential ISP is not expected to have capacity for all its users to transit data across the internet at the full speed of the last mile connections at all time. There is oversubscription, and it's ok and reasonable. To the extent that someone is using a residential connection at full speed all day every day, that's not really reasonable, and they should be in a different account type. However, ISPs play a large part in this: they should make this more clear, their data caps should be sized to bandwidth, they should offer transfer rate capping in case of overage, and the overage fees should be more reasonable.
I mean, there's a physical limitation to how much data a given amount of cable can transfer at any time. Some of bandwidth caps are likely to prevent people from streaming as much data as they can 24/7 otherwise considerably more cable would have to be run, not unlike adding more pipes when more housing additions are added to an area (think of Sim City when you'd need to add more water infrastructure when you'd have more buildings).
Data usage is actually increasing at a mind-boggling rate, there are plenty of good articles about this on the internet.
If we look at Wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_traffic
We see in 2000 1.008 EB of IP traffic, in 2010 it jumps to 241.812 EB, 2017 jumps to 1,464 EB!
Mobile traffic went from 86.412 EB in 2016 to 144 EB in 2017!!!
(those above numbers are taken from Cisco whitepapers cited in the Wiki entry)
Ericcson has a good one here about mobile data increase:
https://www.ericsson.com/en/mobility-report/future-mobile-da...
If you look at the numbers you see that at the current growth rates, there really is a valid reason to limit data usage as much as possible by providers via datacaps. While their current cabling can likely handle the demand, they're almost certainly going to reach a point in the near future where they simply can't deploy cable enough to keep up with the annual increases.
the more data you have to transfer the more bandwidth you need to have available to be able to offer some desired throughput to your customers
The real world cost of a TB of data is basically the cost of the energy moving it, which is increasingly cheap.
The only exception is if you peer and have a bilateral agreement, in which case you pay nothing anyway.
If the ISP you worked at used other ISPs (tier 2 or 3) as upstreams then yeah, you get the same service as business class internet (flat rate for a capped link speed) but once you're one of the big boys it's absolutely metered and charged by usage.
I say this without knowing too much about it; but I do know the cable line is separate from the power line... so the cable company needs to drive the bits through the coaxial with their own electricity, correct?
A long, sustain, high bitrate seems like that would use more, no?
Just speculating...
I put a directory into a multi-volume .7z archive (sliced into 200 MiB chunks, their per-file limit), upload the chunks through their API (solving a simple captcha every 5-10 GiB), and that's it.
I believe I've read about people in Philippines (?) using Facebook for sharing files using a similar process.
The ISP companies want to do this because they get more money, that's simple, and usually followed by awful things like exemption for certain services.
In Brazilian Facebook IT groups it's already common to see people from Angola using the group to google things, because Facebook usage is out of the data cap. Some Brazilians even created groups specialized in this "facebook googling" for Angolans.
It makes me sad knowing how far ISPs are being able to push such bad things.
- edit to add more info about the current state in Brazil: Mobile internet plans all have data cap and most have exemption on WhatsApp and Facebook, while house data plans are forbidden to do so by Brazil's telecom regulator (ANATEL), unfortunately they are lobbying pretty hard to change that.