Assuming that for most consumers the end price averages to be the same, the benefit of metered is it puts an incentive on the data provider to make their speeds as high as possible. Higher speeds will result in more bandwidth usage (i.e. Youtube/Netflix will default to a higher data rate), which will result in more profit for the company. The desires of the customer and the desires of the provider are the same - faster and more stable internet leads to better customer experience and more profit.
One of the issues I see with fixed-speed-unlimited-data options is that providers are incentivized to oversell the fixed speed bandwidth, leading to "up to 100mbps" type connections where it's a theoretical max, not the average. Under this model the desires of the customer are misaligned with the desires of the provider. The provider wants the customer to use as little data as possible - the less they use the more they can sell plans on the same infrastructure. This can be addressed with rules and regulations, but I prefer a situation where I know both the customer and provider have aligned desires.
But caps are different and don't work the same.
IP transit costs per GB are a fraction of a hundredth of a penny.
It barely makes any sense to bill consumers per GB on any terrestrial network.
In Northern Europe a typical 4G SIM with a monthly data quota is $9 per month. An unlimited 4G SIM with all you can eat data is $18. How many price points do you need in between?
Heck, international 4G/5G data roaming fees are capped at $2/GB and by 2027 the cap will be $1/GB.
> Network congestion arguments in this debate operate on an unsubstantiated and uncontextualized assumption of scarcity — there is only so much bandwidth, and a few people are going to use it all. Yes, some network congestion arguments have prevailed with wireless broadband because of the atmospherical and technical limitations of the medium. However, congestion is not as consequential for fixed broadband. Broadband providers reason that instead of limiting these internet “super-users” (which would be discriminatory and litigated accordingly), they need to implement data caps for all consumers, which they claim is fair and unbiased. However, scarcity is not a reality for broadband providers, even with super-users. Internet functions by “statistical multiplexing” meaning that bandwidth is dynamically allocated and reused without a limit “[u]nlike other utilities such as water, electricity, gas or oil.”
> This means that no super-user is consuming bandwidth at the expense of other users; you’re not going to receive less internet because your neighbor runs a Twitch channel, for example. Rather, super-users are simply using more internet more often, and the “super-user discount” (the fact that broadband providers aren’t able to charge them, specifically, for this “above normal” usage) angers providers more than anything else. This brings us to the real reason broadband providers apply data caps to consumers: money. Applying data caps to all of us, therefore, enables broadband providers to pat themselves on the back for devising clever “overage” fees.
As time goes on the same will become true for the majority of wireless usage, if it isn't true already.
Sending twice the data at a time doesn't cost the ISP twice the money. But large ISPs with regional monopolies continue overcharging you [2] while committing subsidy fraud [3] and subsidy obstruction [4] at every opportunity (sometimes with help from corrupt legislators [5]).
[1] https://publicknowledge.org/no-cap-the-truth-about-data-caps...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38105873
[3] Pick any one of these links. https://www.techdirt.com/2020/10/06/mississippi-says-att-too... https://www.techdirt.com/2023/02/15/report-shows-comcast-con... https://www.techdirt.com/2023/02/16/verizon-t-mobile-oversta...
[4] Pick any one of these links. https://communitynets.org/content/monopoly-providers-mire-nt... https://www.techdirt.com/2023/02/15/report-shows-comcast-con... https://www.techdirt.com/2015/04/16/alec-threatens-to-sue-cr...
[5] Ditto. https://www.techdirt.com/2021/02/19/new-bill-tries-to-ban-co... https://www.techdirt.com/2022/04/11/illinois-missouri-and-ne...
My home internet has no data caps.
Location, location, location.
I do agree the over the cap costs imposed by residential ISPs are many, many multiples of their true cost, but they're mostly there to discourage use not be a reasonable price. If you want business level usage hop on their business networking where pricing models are more designed for more average load.
So cell service, internet, trains, and cheap flights are all easier to provide there.
Whereas here in the much more sparsely-populated North America, those things are all pricier, and it’s easier to accommodate big trucks, big highways, giant Costco’s, etc.
asymmetrical is as antiquated as dial-up. there's no reason for it in 2023.
Thankfully synchronous gigabit fiber came this year.
If "good definition of minimum broadband speed", then "applies to the majority of people". The converse is not true. It is not the case that if "applies to the majority of people", then "good definition of minimum broadband speed."
1. Whether a speed applies to a majority of people is necessary but not sufficient.
2. You are unknowingly accepting being ripped off. It's not reasonable for big ISPs like Comcast to offer me 300 megabits download 15 megabits upload for $70 a month (might've been $90, but assume $70) while EPB of Chattanooga [1] offers 1 gigabit symmetrical for $67.99 a month. What speed any individual actually needs doesn't have to come into the picture. In matters of consumer protection, the principle of the thing matters just as much as actual consumer needs.
Today's internet technology (particularly optical fiber [2], paired with hardware implementing DOCSIS 3.1 or 4 [3]) is fully capable of providing 1 gigabit symmetrical for "the majority of people", even in rural areas. Moreover, in the long term, transitioning to fiber would be less expensive to the big ISPs like Comcast [4], but Comcast keeps raising prices on broadband over decades-old copper wires and committing subsidy fraud [5]. Don't let big ISPs define "good enough" to be much lower than technology and the price of the technology allow.
Going by the Chattanooga metric, 100 mbps symmetrical should cost no more than $10, and anything lower is not a good definition of minimum broadband speed for the present (never mind the future).
[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/why-fiber-vastly-super...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOCSIS#Versions
[3] https://epb.com/fi-speed-internet/gig/
[4] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/06/why-slow-networks-real...
[5] Pick any one of these links. https://www.techdirt.com/2020/10/06/mississippi-says-att-too... https://www.techdirt.com/2023/02/15/report-shows-comcast-con... https://www.techdirt.com/2023/02/16/verizon-t-mobile-oversta...
--------Everything below this line is bonus.--------
The following excerpt is from an article about data caps [6] but applies equally well to the state of broadband pricing in general.
> Network congestion arguments in this debate operate on an unsubstantiated and uncontextualized assumption of scarcity — there is only so much bandwidth, and a few people are going to use it all. Yes, some network congestion arguments have prevailed with wireless broadband because of the atmospherical and technical limitations of the medium. However, congestion is not as consequential for fixed broadband. Broadband providers reason that instead of limiting these internet “super-users” (which would be discriminatory and litigated accordingly), they need to implement data caps for all consumers, which they claim is fair and unbiased. However, scarcity is not a reality for broadband providers, even with super-users. Internet functions by “statistical multiplexing” meaning that bandwidth is dynamically allocated and reused without a limit “[u]nlike other utilities such as water, electricity, gas or oil.”
[6] https://publicknowledge.org/no-cap-the-truth-about-data-caps...
>It is not the case that if "applies to the majority of people", then "good definition of minimum broadband speed."
I don't see why this wouldn't be the case. This isn't a physics problem with a right/wrong answer, it's a balance of the wants/needs of corporations vs. individuals. You're only talking about half of the equation to begin with, so forming logical statements on it is incomplete to begin with.
And yeah, I could go for a gigabit minimum.
Please stop spreading such misinformation as its an unnecessary expense. It costs zero dollars for upload stop cucking it because you don't understand its use.
There are technical reasons for offering asymmetrical speeds when it comes to coax connections. There's only so many channels on the wire, a lot are still dedicated to television, people mostly only care about download, so they prioritize it. PONs don't carry television and are just fundamentally different in design, so its easier for them to support symmetrical bandwidth.
ISPs that evolved from cable companies might still be using cable hubs with a common collision domain, but only a relatively small number of subscribers will be riding the same copper — it’s just cheaper these days to convert the signal to fiber as early in the signal path as possible. Plastic wires are cheaper than metal wires, and you need fewer of them (and so fewer switches.)
They have increased the channel allocation for upstream in recent years and DOCSIS 4.0 allows symmetric connections, but the demand is for downstream, and the fewer channels they allocate to upstream the bigger number they can advertise.
It really was just the odd teenager torrenting here and there.
I'd obviously rather have a useful 500/200 than a 100/100 or 50/50, even though the latter is symmetrical. (I think my service now is around 400/20. I'm way happier with that than I would be with 50/50.)
WFH workers likely pay more per mile travelled in taxes than someone who super-commutes.
It's not without its faults though. Fuel usage isn't directly related to cost of road maintenance, it's just a very rough approximation. Fuel usage has mattered less and less over the past couple of decades with hybrids and EVs – though this is addressed in some places by imposing an extra EV tax (since EV drivers would pay no fuel tax but would still cause wear on the roads).
[^1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_taxes_in_the_United_State...
The additional problem with this is that road wear scales a lot faster than fuel usage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law
Similar thing probably goes for internet access.
Right now we have this weird sunk cost and lack of obvious incremental charges to driving, that encourages driving when there are other better options for some trips.
We'll set up electronic tolls on your cul-de-sac and every light and stop sign, or toll you by mile driven using an odometer beaconing out to the tax authorities per drive and registered to your tax ID number (US) or equivalent. And then cap you on the number of miles you're allowed to drive per year on all cars unless you pay an additional fee.
Older cars must be retrofit at the driver's expense.
Also the auditing and anti-fraud infrastructure must be instituted for all of this.
---
Or we can just do flat taxes and chill.
The streets in my neighborhood cost way less per mile for maintenance than giant highways with massive bridges and interchanges. It makes sense they'd cost more to use.
Showing the real cost of these things to consumers might make them change their minds about riding the train. These days a lot of people don't even think about the cost of driving their car across town, but gosh that metro day pass is $5? How expensive!
Nah, metro day pass should cost as much as howevermany miles the buyer traveled. Otherwise people who buy the passes for just one stop would be subsidizing the costs for people who travel from one end of a line to the other.
It'd be pretty shit to meter one and not the other.
This partly why gas tax is even a thing.
They over-subscribe because they know not every customer is going to be using up that full 2gbps 24/7.
Now, you can argue that an ISP SHOULD provision that way, with the expectation that their customers are going to be using the full connection 24/7, but that would raise the cost per customer a LOT, and I don't think people want to be paying for an ISP that provisions like that. It would be a lot more expensive per customer, and it would end up with a lot of the bandwidth going unused most of the time.
If the average bandwidth used by customers goes up, it will require the ISP to pay for and maintain more circuits and cost more money. We can argue there are better, fairer, ways to limit usage, but it is simply not true that every customer downloading a lot more doesn't cost the ISP more money in the long run.
A pure cap that counts all traffic the same wouldn’t be, though.
Say your ISP gives you 100mbit/s = 1.08TB/day ≈ 30TB/mo. On gigabit that’d be 300TB. While you do have some heavy torrenters they are outliers.
Now I assume everything but TV/movie streaming is a rounding error for average Joe. Netflix says 1-7GB/h depending on quality. Average user watches ~3.2h/day (wtf is wrong with people!) but that’s ~100-700 GB/mo. Now that’s between 0.033%-2.3% of downstream bandwidth.
Of course, people generally watch TV at the same time of day, so it gets more complicated to provision resources. But there’s also no question that pooling bandwidth (over-provisioning) makes sense to reduce costs. The question is more about how much congestion is acceptable, and I wouldn’t trust shitty monopolistic companies to behave. But if you can handle eg Super Bowl or a World Cup final without degradation you’re probably good the rest of the year?
That's only true in a very abstract sense. If everybody went from using 1MB/day to 1TB/day there would be massive congestion issues and costs would increase as ISPs rush to install higher-bandwidth equipment. Put a different way: It is cheaper to construct a network where all subscribers consume only 1MB/day than a network where all subscribers consume 1TB/day, because the former can be done with much lower end equipment.
But that's true of almost every industry. Your bank advertises that you can withdraw your money at any time, but if everybody withdrew their money simultaneously there would be issues. A store advertises next-day shipping, but if everybody ordered simultaneously there would be issues. A house might have 100A power service, but if every house started burning 100A simultaneously there would be issues.
Put another way, what you're proposing is dramatically slower speeds for most users. ISPs are profitable, but they're not that profitable. Actual average usage on most lines is probably sub one percent. I just checked my line - my average use is about 300kB/s (for a total of about 800GB per month), or about 0.3% of my speed cap. I'm a heavy user, most people are probably below 0.1% of their speed cap.
If you want to know how much more expensive the connection would be if you expect to use the full bandwidth 24/7, just look at the cost you pay for transit in a datacenter. It is multiples of the cost home consumers pay at a per-bit level.
Most users are best served by being told the speeds they will usually get if they stay within average usage patterns, because that is what most people do.
Go to a grocery store in Florida before a hurricane and try to buy bread.
No, but bandwidth is. Particularly wireless where you can't just lay down another cable or fiber.
They either have infrastructure that can handle 1gbps per user, and then they have bandwidth available, and data caps are nonsense... or they don't have the infrastructure, and are banking on their service being idle 90% of the time for most users, and this is why after 5 oclock, my internet goes to crap when everyone is getting home and starting to use the internet. And now suddenly Im drastically overpaying for non-broadband internet because my ISP underprovisioned way too much.
This goes back to the point that everyone is making that ISPs shouldn't be able to underprovision to the point that it degrades performance during high usage times.
My ISP saw $800 million in profits on $2 billion in revenue in 2019. That's an AMAZING profit margin. They can afford to not underprovision, and when they don't under provision, then no, bandwidth isn't a limited resource.
Which is why they already charge for bandwidth
I cannot believe how anyone with a straight face can claim that the infrastructure and maintenance required to serve "n times 1MB" is exactly the same as the costs for "n times 1TB". This is so obviously not the case that I genuinely don't even know how to explain it.
You can serve your thousand subscribers on a dingy Pentium 1 if they're using 1MB, because it adds up to just 1,000MB. You wouldn't be able to serve just a single customer with the same hardware. Never mind the cabling etc.
While I agree that grandma doesn't need 1Gbps, neither do I and neither do most people. So why mandate such a high speed for the label anyway? It seems like a way to disqualify things like Starlink that will have difficulty providing extreme speeds to large numbers of users at once.
The only time I'll use such a speed is when downloading some data - an ISO file or something similar. Streaming video does not require such (gbps) speeds even for multiple streams in the same house.
If I drink less water than you, am I subsidizing your water usage. I'd say so!
Not the hill you want to die on, trust me.
It’s sad seeing people on a forum called hacker news having no idea how networking infrastructure works.
This is actually relevant to my ISP day job, we have a pipe to a well known backbone provider, and dual pipes to a statewide provider. We ran on the dual pipes for a long time before pushing our ISP traffic over the single backbone provider. These days, if that main ISP pipe goes down, it fails over to the dual pipes to keep everything running. But now that we are offering packages higher than 25/3 for DSL, terrestrial wireless, and cable, the dual pipes don't have enough bandwidth to keep up.
If we offer gigabit service over fiber (and we do) just a couple of customers actively using their whole pipe is an enormous chunk of the network compared to the 40 or so customers that same gigabit of bandwidth would serve on previous 25/3 packages. We don't have data caps or even contracts (small town benefits :P ) but there is a lot more to it for smaller ISPs than adjusting the rate limiting and packages we allow people to use.
Also - just look at LTE operators. They're also no-cap at this point (though subject to QoS at certain breakpoints, but they're typically reasonable breakpoints ime?). And that's in a SIGNIFICANTLY more capital intensive market - you have most of the concerns with terrestrial fiber, plus the joy of having to own RF spectrum and maintain towers etc.
So I think no-caps-and-required-speed requirements would just make sense and be required to keep ISPs from trying to backtrack on being forcibly dragged into the modern area like balky calves.
Of course that's not all that different from restricting bandwidth, just that you are restricting average bandwidth while allowing for some burst. Still violates the spirit of having fast bandwidth, unless the caps are quite generous.
The cost to track and bill people for caps and let them pay overages though..
Some combination of caps, overage charges, traffic shaping, and edge CDN appliances is needed (Netflix, Akamai, etc). Off peak unlimited is also a potential strategy to drive low priority transfer to low utilization periods. Pick your poison. There is a reason most of Netflix global infra is monster CDN boxes closest to customers.
Because it would be ridiculously expensive to egress video streams directly from AWS. They've determined that it's cheaper to pay ISPs for rack space.
If you want to learn more, lurk on the NANOG (North American Network Operators' Group) mailing list. It is common to monitor AS traffic flows to understand whether you can offload with CDN appliance relationships or how to improve your network architecture (which networks to peer to directly or which internet exchanges [IXs] to meetup at). These agreements sometimes happen at a bar over beers during NANOG events. Call Verizon and ask them how much a 1Gbps circuit is. Consider why Comcast built their own national backbone.
Also, some important history to remember. Fast.com measures your speeds to Netflix servers because some ISPs wanted to charge their customers and Netflix for that transfer (or to upgrade peering points) because of the revenue destruction from cable customers fleeing for streaming (net neutrality debate).
https://archive.nanog.org/meetings/nanog45/presentations/Nor... (Peering 101, Bill Norton [Equinix cofounder], NANOG 45)
https://drpeering.net/white-papers/Video-Internet-The-Next-W... (Video Internet: The Next Wave of Massive Disruption to the U.S. Peering Ecosystem (v1.7))
https://drpeering.net/HTML_IPP/ipptoc.html ("The Internet Peering Playbook")
https://arstechnica.com/features/2008/09/peering-and-transit... ("How the ‘Net works: an introduction to peering and transit")
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/07/how-c... ("How Comcast became a powerful—and controversial—part of the Internet backbone")
https://openconnect.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/3600361636...
> How much does the appliance cost my organization?
> Appliances, including replacement appliances, are provided to qualifying ISPs at no charge when used within the terms of the license agreements.
Aren't we effectively arguing CapEx versus OpEx?
Sure, an ISP's OpEx is tiny. But CapEx is huge, especially when you've got an old neighborhood that's all wired up with copper and you gotta replace it all with fiber going into the house.
To think otherwise is to falsely believe they support unlimited throughput. Furthermore the bandwidth itself literally is a function of the transmission material and infrastructure, which also isn’t free…
Bandwidth caps not only have a weak fiscal basis but also clash with net neutrality tenets, go against what made the internet successful in the first place.
I had to live under an ISP that charged something on the order of $10+/GB after a certain amount and after they were forced to offer unlimited internet it was an actual breath of fresh air just to be able to use the internet and not worry about literally everything in the house, or if I could update my OS, or play this game, or watch this Netflix show, etc.
i'm honestly curious. why not a standard margin on your 'per second' allowances (100/100Mbps, etc) or other 'addon' services?
why should someone with a ring doorbell (or a homekit secure video whatever) be punished over someone who doesn't?
Which is algebraically identical to a monthly charge and data cap with overage charge. The main issue is the overage charge is too high, it should be like 1 cent per GB.
I don't think the actual cap really matters if the per-GB and base pricing reflects the true costs. If it's low it means heavy users pay more, if it's high, light users pay more.
The average US residential customer uses a bit over 500GB/mo in data. You're doing 2x that in 1/15th the time.
https://www.allconnect.com/blog/report-internet-use-over-hal...
I think somewhere in fine print they claim they get to round up to the nearest KB or MB every minute or some asinine made-up scale that only benefits them.
I believe it's false advertising when ISPs claim their price is $X per month if it's only for 1/240th of a month. I understand and support the idea of overprovisioning, but a 240x ratio is insanity.