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Who Pays for Rebuilding the Internet?
Posted by
samzenpus
on Wed Apr 09, 2008 09:54 PM
from the anyone-but-me dept.
from the anyone-but-me dept.
pcause writes "The Internet (physical as opposed to technical) was really not designed for applications that want to use maximum bandwidth all of the time, such as P2P and streaming video. Here in the US we've seen Comcast try to balance the demands of P2P traffic with other traffic and its backbone capacity. In the UK, a flame war has broken out between the BBC and ISPs about the same issue. So the question is who pays? Should the content owners who make the profits pay for the extra infrastructure, or should the consumer pay?"
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Duh - we all do. (Score:4, Interesting)
Obviously this has tremendous implications in terms of the additional work that routers would need to do to account for traffic, and how the costs are communicated to the customer. However, I think the end result would be something quite incredible, because what would happen is it would drive the development of smarter P2P protocols that keep traffic nearby, and widespread deployment of caches for static content and such. Right now there is very little incentive to do these things.
The end result, once everything has had a chance to adapt, would be a phenomenally efficient internet, with reduced costs and better performance all around. ISPs wouldn't give a hoot about this new class of "smart" P2P because the bulk of the traffic would stay among their local subscribers, the bandwidth to whom is free. Massive loads would be disappear from peering centers and long distance links. The cost of bandwidth would plummet.
I think all of this is feasible, and it's worth doing.
Re:Duh - we all do. (Score:5, Insightful)
Just think how people's lives would be different if international or long distance phone charges didn't exist. How many times have you heard of someone waiting until a certain time of day to make a really long distance call? Or using Skype or some other Internet-based replacement for phone calls to get around the fees?
What you're proposing is basically to bring that sort of thing to the Internet itself, and I can't say that I want to wait until 2AM to save on my bandwidth bill.
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But that does not pay the bills (Score:3, Interesting)
Consider all those folk choking up the internet with video downloads, P2P etc "because it's free" and they've got nothing better to do with their time. They're all choking up the pipes for everyone.
Pay-per-use is one way to get a free market into this and allow people to buy the QoS they want and the market decides the price points. It would also motiva
Re:But that does not pay the bills (Score:5, Insightful)
What is your basis for claiming that the internet is clogged and choked up? With few exceptions, the internet is working just fine, thank you very much. Moving to a consumption-based billing model is nothing more than an excuse for the telecommunications providers to extract more money and perform fewer upgrades. The notion that ISPs are buckling under the weight of P2P and YouTube is even more retarded when you consider that P2P protocols by their nature prefer to use fast, local peers and companies like Google use backhaul networks to deliver content to local peering points.
The current model is elegant in that the exchanges between ISPs are essentially free. If Comcast/AT&T/Time Warner/etc are suddenly able to charge me in KB/s or have a tariff for each Email/IM sent like the wireless carriers do, someday they'll wake up and say "Hey, let's charge Verizon for accessing our customers!" Then the whole system breaks down, and you time travel back to 1989 when you had Prodigy (the IBM/Sears version), Compuserve and GEnie.
I work in an organization that maintains a carrier-grade private network that connects about 25,000 locations. But since even carrier-grade equipment has a relatively short lifespan, routine infrastructure refreshes give us next-generation technology, automatically, whether we need it or not. In 2004, it would have cost millions for ISPs to implement metro Gigabit networks to connect customer nodes... but today, equipment swap-outs will essentially give them that capability for next to nothing. In 2012/2013 when today's new equipment is obsolete, 10G ethernet will be the norm.
When your local transportation department discovers that traffic patterns have changed, they don't start billing you for your time on the highways. They figure out what the problem is, re-engineer traffic signaling or change maintenance schedules to widen/pave/etc roads. ISPs need to do the same.
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Re:But that does not pay the bills (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Duh - we all do. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Duh - we all do. (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Duh - we all do. (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Duh - we all do. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Duh - we all do. (Score:5, Funny)
+5: Implication that Ubuntu is crappy software
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Re:Duh - we all do. (Score:4, Insightful)
The key problems are that:
1) The ISP should have to tell you what they say you are getting. If you connection is not unlimited at the max bandwidth they had better properly explain it before you buy the service. Many ISPs do not do this and it is a big problem. The free market won't work if you can't tell what you are buying.
2) ISPs oversell. They should be given a serious penalty when they fail to give the bandwidth they promised someone. This is not happening so they get away with not giving the service that they sold.
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Re:Duh - we all do-complain. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Duh - we all do-complain. (Score:4, Informative)
For the obligatory car analogy... If you bought a car using a 48 month loan (I've never financed a car, but I assume that may be a typical duration nowadays), by the time the loan is paid off, the value of the car is substantially reduced (perhaps down to your down payment depending on how many miles it was driven) and you paid both the principle and the interest over the primary useful life of the car.
Of course, ongoing maintenance (labor of repair and administration as well as cost of replacement parts) and operational costs such as power, cooling, insurance, also must be recovered. For example, it really does cost more to run 2N routers than to run N routers.
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Re:Duh - we all do-complain. (Score:4, Informative)
Knowing the costs involved the local Road Runner division, coupled with the number of accounts they hold, the proper analogy would be something like this:
Tell the customer it will take 48 months to recoupe the cost of this upgrade, regardless of the fact that it'll be paid off by half our subscribers next month, leaving the other half for pure profit.
2N routers does cost more than N routers, this is true. The problem is that they could manage 100N routers and fill them up with bandwidth and STILL make a fair profit.
You're completely ignorant if you think the cable/dsl providers aren't making a fortune. Even putting new fibre in the ground gets paid off when the first year in most cases, and once its there its just a matter of lighting it with the right bandwidth, think about the half million dollar router that gets implemented. If its only spread across 50k customers, thats $10/customer to pay it off. Thats less than 25% of a monthly bill in most areas. The UBR routers don't serve that many people of course, but they also don't cost half a million.
We ARE (the cable/dsl customers) already paying for the upgrades! We've been paying far more for service than we should have been for years. We've paid for the upgrades. The BBC pays for the bandwidth that is required to keep from filling up their own pipes. Our ISPs are not paying for the bandwidth required to serve their network, hence their pipes are full.
This is the way the Internet works. I pay for my pipe to the cloud. BBC, Yahoo, Google/YouTube, Microsoft, Apple, all of them, pay for their pipe to the cloud. I get my fair share of their pipe. If they want me to have more speed, they pay to make their pipe bigger, and assuming mine isn't overloaded, I get more. The Internet has always been a 'pay for your own pipe' type of network, the service providers would rather it be 'the other guy pays for the privledge of using the pipes I'm already charging my customers for' which is ridiculous to say the least. If the various countries of the world don't step up and enact network neutrality laws, I fear the Internet we know and love will not exist in the long term.
The problem is the cable and DSL providers have over sold their crappy bandwidth and don't want to pay for more. It has nothing to do with not having the money to pay for more, they are making an absolute fortune every month. If someone else wants to start another broadband provider in the area other than the massive initial investment that someone has to lay out, which wouldn't be a problem if the new provider could charge the same price as the monopilistic provider already in the area, the local monopoly can just drop their price. Go from $40 to $10, still turn a profit, although much smaller, and you've just made it a lot more difficult for the new guy to get funding. To the point that the funding won't want to risk it. Monopoly upheld, customers still get screwed.
The worst part is that my tax dollars funded half this crappy network which doesn't meet any of the things they said the funding would get me when begged congress gave them the money in the first place. Very frustrating
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Re:Pay per use. (Score:5, Insightful)
ISP A-20Gb per month for $40 and $1.50 per Gb for everything over, or ISP B at 35Gb for $40 with $1 per Gb over. And NEITHER bothers to give you any kind of way to tell how much you've used! Why? Because they know that by NOT giving you an easy way to tell that you will either overestimate badly which means you don't get what you paid for, or you underestimate badly and you connection will go up by a ton.
Me I'd much rather pay for a slower unlimited line than deal with this crap. But thanks to the lack of competition I don't get a choice in the matter. So enjoy having to throttle your downloads to 10k to keep enough overhang for videos and surfing. Trust me it is REAL fun. IMHO this is just another excuse for the big telecos to sit on the butts and enjoy their huge profits rather than doing what a sensible company would do which is reinvest some of it into upgrades to their business. But don't worry, I'm sure you'll all get a taste of it REAL soon. But this is my 02c my exp,YMMV
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Re:Duh - we all do. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Duh - we all do. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Duh - we all do. (Score:5, Insightful)
It will never be. Companies do not lower price points on services still in high demand, even if it is cheaper to produce.
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Re:Duh - we all do. (Score:5, Insightful)
If we had a real market, I would agree with you about competitiveness in pricing and all. Unfortunately, we don't have one. Even when there is an appearance of an open market in the Internet service business, it all becomes fixated on leased lines and certain other dependencies on a few providers who have built their infrastructure by neccesity of other services they have a monopoly on.
If ATT/SBC or time warner or cox would be forced to spin off their infrastructure and offer flat rate charges to competitors for the same prices as themselves, it might be a free market. But we have to remember that they got their lines and infrastructure as an ancillary to their long time protected monopoly and government help in getting right of ways and so on. They are basically benefiting by their roles in other areas as to this point which makes or gives them an unfair advantage and closes the idea of a free market.
We have attempted to negate this advantage by requiring them to lease the lines and infrastructure to other companies at costs but we all know how costs can be manipulated. This doesn't even cover all avenues of infrastructure either, take time warner for example, they are under no obligation to lease their lines for Internet usage except for their conditions to purchasing AOL back in the 90's. Aol has since been spun off and they are free to mark up their "cost" significantly to their advantage. Cox and Covad networks are relatively the same with cable Internet. DSL on the other hand is heavily regulated as far as the infrastructure goes with a caveat of requiring a certain amount of investment capabilities which makes it easier to gain access if you are a large organization. But if your attempting to work with Cable access, your not really going to get anything unless your a very large organization like Earthlink or are partnering with the cable company to supply re-branded service at a dictated cost. You don't really get big over night and hence the problem of not being able to provide the service needed to get big enough to provide the service.
In short, there are too many limitations and non-natural barriers to the market to even consider the internet infrastructure a free market that could allow a perfect competition. Look at Verizon with their FIOS, they are using their utility right of way and telco business to run fiber and replace their out dated copper infrastructure with the fiber needed to provide the FIOS which we have read about plenty of times. Almost all other last mile deployments without this utility protection have failed for several reasons but mainly because of all the hurdles that non utility companies face.
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And as a further optimization... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:And as a further optimization... (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know where you get this from. As an engineer for an ISP, our low point is only from approx 2-4 am. Bittorrent and other P2P clients left running all night still consume constant traffic in both directions.
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Re:And as a further optimization... (Score:5, Informative)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
While this sounds smart, that's exactly the model for water and right now there is a bit of a crisis for the home owners conserving their water around the Toronto area where I live... all of a sudden they are not taking in enough money to maintain infrastructure because it's ba
Re:Duh - we all do. (Score:4, Insightful)
Think of your cell phone service, you pay for the company to maintain antennas to talk to YOUR phone. Your friends 2 states away pay for their company to maintain antennas in their towns. The cost is in maintaining the equipment for a given level of usage, not the per call cost. The particulars of how your call gets from your phone to your friends phone at a different phone company really aren't important and the companies should work that out.
That's how the internet was started from the beginning. The current high-bandwidth places like Google pay so much for bandwidth they by stock in Fiber. They are paying, considerably more than customers for all the packet they send out to their provider. And consumers are "legally" paying for the packet they accept...Which if you think about phone service or any other situation like mail is totally silly that IPS want to charge for "incoming call" packets.
The real problem is that ISPs traditionally discouraged being part of the real internet and were established as pure consumer leachers. They grew up their structures based on how fast they could "broadcast" web pages while severely limiting any kind of hosting between hosts or to the general internet. In a peer-sharing network, they have nothing to actually share. The structure forced means that all of the traffic for all of AT&T's customers in a given state go thru just a few actual internet connections, and no routes go thru. It's like car traffic thru all the "closed" subdivisions that all dump into one main road instead of providing alternate routes thru the countryside for the increased traffic.
I agree that P2P and caching would be good, but the telcos want big bucks for that... they are still thinking client-server. They want Viewers, not Customers... trying to monetize those under-priced DSL customers by selling expensive services found elsewhere on the internet.
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Better question (Score:5, Interesting)
The consumer always pays (Score:4, Insightful)
Obviously, this isn't going to happen.
If the content providers pay, and can still squeeze a profit out of the deal, they will *still* pass the cost along to consumers, for two obvious reasons: 1) they want to maximize their own profit margins, 2) they will get sued by their own shareholders if they don't try.
The cost will be passed on to consumers one way or another...perhaps in the form of a direct infrastructure tax, perhaps in the form of tax incentives/subsidies specifically for ISPs, perhaps in the form of higher cost service to the consumers, most likely as a combination of all three (and maybe other common means of paying that I haven't thought of).
Remember...the workers generate wealth while the organizers skim off the top. There is no more universal principle.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm ready to take up cutlass and musket against those who are against Net Neutrality - I think it's that important.
But there is, indeed, a more nuanced side. The trick is that the big content companies and the ISPs have to, uh, to quote McCain, "cut the bullshit". Miro, Bittorrent and P2P in general have to be accepted. Because it saves them (and everyone) shitloads of money. If the broadband providers - worldwide, this is
Re:Better question (Score:5, Interesting)
The solution is fiber to every building as public infrastructure.
Then we can have a proper free market for Internet services over that fiber.
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Cui bono? (Score:5, Insightful)
Who gets the maintenance contracts? How much do we pay for the maintenance contracts? How much maintenance should be spent on all fiber or should only dense populations get it? How dense do the populations have to be? How do we pay for it, do we inflate the currency through debt or do we increase tax?
Who gets to use the fiber? How much do we charge companies to use this fiber? How do we ensure its being used for the right purposes and companies aren't bidding for contacts and locking in those customers? Who is responsible for faults in the network? How are costs allocated?
The market is fine, the solution is to deregulate so companies are forced to compete, as opposed to the more segregated systems that we are used to now a days.
I don't recall anyone ever saying "To have a free market, it must be provided by public Government services", a free market can never have any Government regulation or intervention, else it is not a free market.
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Re:Cui bono? (Score:5, Insightful)
A free market [wikipedia.org] is one in which participants are fully informed and free from force or fraud. While the goal is as little regulation as possible, it is not anarchy. Only what level of regulation is required to achieve the ideal free market is debatable, not whether there should be regulation at all. Many people confuse free market above with strict lassez-faire [wikipedia.org], which is what you are describing. This is an easy mistake to make.
In this example, there is a case for government provided last-mile as it consists of a natual monopoly [wikipedia.org]. There is also a case against it as well. Arguing about the questions you raised would be a wonderful use of government, rather than deciding whether we should boycott some gaming event (for example).
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Whoever pays, owns (Score:5, Interesting)
If the telecoms pay for the infrastructure, they get to say what happens to it. Within whatever terms they negotiate for the use of public land to build on. And if they continue the false advertising of their services, they can expect that at some point a class action lawsuit will be made and will break them.
Re:Whoever pays, owns (Score:4, Insightful)
We are rapidly getting to the point in the developed world that Internet access is as important as telephone access, it not more so. Reliable 'net access is more and more becoming like electricity and roads - a basic service.
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Tag article: flamebait (Score:5, Insightful)
Look, it's simple: Google pays Google's bandwidth bill. I pay mine. Both of them go towards building the infrastructure. If it's not enough, raise taxes to pay for it, I don't care.
What you do not get to do is raise the bar for the next Google, and continue to let ISPs deceptively advertise "unlimited" Internet access. Yes, technically, the advertising is truthful, but it is intentionally misleading, and we are all paying the price for it.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
How is it any more misleading than your phone company telling you you can use your phone any day, any time of the day, despite the fact that if too many people try to use it at once, you start hitting limits on the number of simultaneous active circuits? One can even argue it's less misleading, because an
Re:Tag article: flamebait (Score:5, Insightful)
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Uh, (Score:5, Interesting)
Dumbest question evar! (Score:5, Insightful)
Should the content owners, who make the profits pay for the extra infrastructure or should the consumer pay?
The consumer will pay. PERIOD. Even if the content owners pay, the costs STILL get passed down to the consumer.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
FTP? (Score:4, Insightful)
The question has a false premise (Score:5, Insightful)
This is wrong. If the content owners are forced to pay, then the consumers will have to pay for the bandwidth when they pay for the content.
Here is the correct question: Should consumers pay for bandwidth when they pay for bandwidth? Or should consumers pay for bandwidth when they pay for content?
When phrased correctly, the answer becomes obvious. Consumers should pay for bandwidth when they pay for bandwidth. Any other answer has negative consequences, both to the economy and to the current nature of the Internet.
Huh didn't we pay already? (Score:5, Insightful)
The last I checked most of these ISPs either had monopolies granted to them, and/or had existing infrastructure handed to them by Governments.
Some even had billions of _public_ money handed to them by Governments to build their _future_ networks.
So now they want us to pay again?
This is like the power and water companies asking us to pay extra just because they went "Oops, oh yeah forgot about this reinvesting into infrastructure for the future thing".
Compare how much ISPs charge and how much power and water companies charge, and what you get for it. While small ISPs have to pay per bit (like water and power companies which have to pay per unit of gas/coal/water), AFAIK large ISPs have cushier arrangements with each other, since the incremental costs of sending bits isn't high once the network capacity is paid for - if nobody uses the bandwidth, the ISP still has to pay about the same for the network.
Let me get this straight (Score:5, Insightful)
And you're asking how you're going to pay for building out to be able to provide more?
(1) Raise your prices. Use the extra revenue to pay for buildout. Sell more service. Profit.
(2) Get investment. Use it for buildout. Sell more service. Return profit to investors.
I understand that the peering agreements make things more complicated, but the basic issue is that people on the ends of the network have demands for the services, and it really seems like there's fairly transparent economic solutions to that problem without trying to do anything particularly complicated like having ISPs shake down content providers who don't have points of origin on their networks.
In short: bill the people you provide service to. Don't try billing the people you don't provide service to.
Consumers. Period. (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't want my ISP trying to get money from any entity or content provider, period. That's just wrong. That's a broken, old, distribution based model, and we don't want it coming back. Ever.
There is a simple forumla, and ISPs desperately want to avoid it. The simple model is to segment your customers, as appropriate, take the actual costs for those segments, divide it by customer count, add in a reasonable profit, and charge that number.
What ISPs want to desperately is to oversell capacity, segment the market like airlines do, getting each individual customer to pay as much as possible, and to effectively punish the heaviest users, without actually meeting their needs. Then, they want to get it from both ends, and take payoffs from content providers for the "other end" of the connection, to give them a "superior" experience.
In the end it's going to hurt consumers and the ISPs. When Google starts getting hit up for cash to pad AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast's bottom line they suddenly will use their incredible market power and clout to take over distribution.
It's time to start thinking about actual regulation to enforce legitimate pricing models on ISPs, equal access to content, and consumer privacy. It's also time to think about dis-entangling the distrubution and content channels now, before Google or another big player tries to elbow into that market, and to stop the current hybrids (Time Warner, Comcast, etc) from further damaging the market.
I will. (Score:5, Funny)
Consumers pay ISPs (Score:4, Informative)
The idea of this approach seems to be that the money given to the ISP goes towards paying other higher-level providers for traffic, and upgrading the network where/when necessary. If the ISP doesn't think they have enough money to support traffic, they should either bump up consumer prices, or alter their accounting system. Both consumers and providers of products are already paying the ISP for the traffic and infrastructure maintenance.
It should be the ISPs (Score:3, Insightful)
We did all this in Australia years ago; the most common form of Internet we get is on tiered monthly plans (3gb/month, 12gb/month, etc). Our international bandwidth is still (apparently) really expensive, so the volume of data ISPs feel comfortable giving us is relatively small to what I'd expect US ISPs to offer.
All yall other countries need to just play catchup on this issue and stop those douchebags from selling unlimited plans and then acting all surprised when people actually expect them to have no limits. People that use 200gb a month shouldn't be paying the same as people that use 5gb a month, and that should be reflected by ISP pricing.
How about we do this? (Score:5, Funny)
Also charge the spyware and adware companies fees for infecting a majority of the Internet and affecting bandwidth, and use those fees to pay for the new Internet.
My plan is to get the money from companies and people that abuse the Internet via taxes or fees and use that to build the new faster Internet.
Maybe it will cut down on spam, adware, spyware, and popup ads? Just a thought.
What a Stupid Fscking Question (Score:5, Insightful)
It has been obvious since dialup-to-BBS days that bandwidth demands were only going to go up, and go up fast. Every new, faster modem was snapped up immediately, until the bandwidth of voice lines was saturated. And those of you with longer memories may recall the RBOCs/ILECs bitching along the lines of, "Oh noes! Our trunks and switches, they are overloaded! We can haz data tax?" Proposals to surcharge data traffic were floated, which were all greeted with hearty, derisive laughter.
Fast-forward not-at-all-many-years to the broadband age, and the RBOCs/ILECs are saying, "Oh noes! Our switches and routers, they are overloaded. We can haz content tax?" The only real difference between then and now is that now the cable television providers are joining in the chorus. This, however, does not make the argument any more valid.
Now, whether or not heavy users of the network should be surcharged, and how much they should be surcharged -- while a subject worthy of some discussion -- is nevertheless completely swamped by the Actual Point. Here is the Actual Point:
YOU SHOULD HAVE BEEN BUILDING OUT YOUR NETWORK IN THE FIRST DAMNED PLACE!
Really, after watching dialup explode in popularity, after watching broadband explode in popularity, after watching other nations build out their digital infrastructure to some amazing levels... There is no fscking excuse for any RBOC/ILEC to be whining about overloaded networks!
You had plenty of warning, you had more than plenty of money, you even got $200 billion in handouts from the Fed... I mean, what the fsck have you been up to the last fifteen years?
The floor of your monthly fee structure should be covering not only maintenance, but also aggressive buildout. If they aren't, then you've deliberately kept your head in the sand this whole time (and you suck at math).
Tweak everyone's base rates, build out the network to the required capacities like you should have been doing, and stop trying to propogate this self-serving pathetic meme that some network users are more equal than others.
Schwab
Re:What a Stupid Fscking Question (Score:4, Insightful)
It's ridiculous, This is like a hotel overbooking rooms because people don't turn up, then telling the people staying in the rooms they have to pay to have the rooms built so they can give them the service. No.
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Re:If anything should be tax money (Score:4, Insightful)
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