Re:Netflix’s biggest bingers get hit with higher internet costs
by toast0 on Wednesday August 14, 2019 @10:28AM
(#20695884)
> Is there any cost that an ISP company has related to the amount of data transferred?
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.
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.