On Monday, AT&T Customers Enter Era of Broadband Caps 537
theodp writes "The Age of Broadband Caps begins Monday, with AT&T imposing a 150 GB cap on DSL subscribers and 250 GB for UVerse users, and keeping the meter running after that. The move comes as AT&T's 16+ million customers are increasingly turning to online video such as Hulu and Netflix on-demand streaming service instead of paying for cable. With AT&T's Man in the White House, some fear there's a 'digital dirt road' in America's future. Already, the enforcement of data caps in Canada has prompted Netflix to default to lower-quality streaming video to shield its users from overage fees."
Truth in advertising? (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe the FTC should force them to add a "Not suitable for streaming" disclaimer to all of their advertisements unless their cap can support high quality streaming (2.3GB/hour) for as many hours that a typical household watches TV (6.75 hours/day), which would mean a cap of 465GB/Month.
Marginal pricing is good economics. (Score:4, Insightful)
Having a bandwidth cap per se is not a bad thing from a societal perspective; if there really is a marginal cost to carrying a GB of data you'll only get the socially optimal result if you price bandwidth at that marginal cost. From that perspective the Netflix degradation referenced in the article could be a good thing; if individuals value the higher video quality less than the price of transmitting it, the right outcome for society is for them to see lower quality video at lower cost.
Of course, the marginal price for a GB of data these days is near zero -- (one site [nerdboys.com] pegged it at $.03). AT&T has a fine idea, they're just pricing it 150x too high. The fact that they're able to do so screams market failure/monopoly to me.
Re:Vote with your Wallet (Score:5, Insightful)
oh thank you, I have never thought of that before, lets see here in my area there is
#1) ATT
#2) Comcast
well fuck me, that showed them
Re:Marginal pricing is good economics. (Score:2, Insightful)
When your use of bandwidth deprives your neighbor of his use of bandwidth at the same time, you've imposed an external cost on your neighbor. Flat rate bandwidth caps are a clumsy way of making you pay for this type of market failure known as a "negative externality".
A better solution is time-of-use pricing/bandwidth caps, because when you use your bandwidth when nobody else is, you aren't imposing any cost on anyone, other than the $.03 wholesale cost per GB of bandwidth that you mentioned.
So if you're really concerned about market failures, you would be in favor of time-of-use pricing/bandwidth caps.
Re:Vote with your Wallet (Score:4, Insightful)
YOU TOTALLY HAVE A CHOICE!
But you forgot:
#3) No internet at all
The amusing thing is that the free market libertarians argue very much like religious people (usually they're one in the same), in that the choices religious people present to you are:
#1) Bask in God's glory and accept Jesus Christ into your heart and be saved.
#2) BURN IN THE FIERY PITS OF HELL AND BE TORTURED FOR ALL ETERNITY
Doesn't sound like much of a choice to me, but for them, it is.
Back to the market for a second, the obvious excuse is "Well, if you feel that you cannot do without the service, that means having the service is worth whatever they're willing to charge and whatever you're willing to pay before you'll do without."
But me, I prefer to live in a more modern society, with an elected government body that represent the people. And I want laws that I know are good for *everyone*, not just for a *select few*.
Re:Marginal pricing is good economics. (Score:5, Insightful)
In the real world, you alone do not deprive bandwidth from another user (even in cable with shared medium environments it is rare, and if it does happen it is STILL the ISP's fault not the customers).
With that said, the real issue is that the ISPs don't want to pony up and order additional capacity to their providers, peers, or even within their own network. They've all increased subscriber counts, data rates, and expected to spend little to nothing on improving the network? That's crap. ISP's are just trying to convince us that we are the cause of congestion because we watch too much You Tube and Netfix while they neglect maintaining and improving the network. It is ok to oversell, every business does it, but if you neglect your own service to the point that customers service is being denied because you refused to invest in your own network, how could this be the consumers fault?
Clearly the internet market in the United States is flawed. It's ok, the free market is clearly worse than the guaranteed monopolies we have with our telecoms.
Re:I know he was trolling (Score:4, Insightful)
Real wages have been stagnant since the 70s
Great, but why would you use that statistic? A lot of people talk about real wages in order to deceive you, because it matches the narrative they want to push. Forget it: it leaves out portions of compensation. Measuring real compensation is hard of course, but it gives a better measurement of what the average employee is getting [wikipedia.org]. And it's been going up. Look at the graph.
I know keep bringing this up in my posts, but there is a sleeping bag factory making 2 MILLION bags a year with a total workforce (including salesmen, marketing, accounting and all other non-manufacturing jobs) of JUST 120 people.
Where did you learn history? Really, do you even think? Do you realize how many people were employed in the farming sector just a hundred years ago? When tractors got introduced, people were complaining about the same things you are complaining about. They even made movies about it (check out Gene Autry, The Old Barn Dance [google.com] as an example). These are things people manage to adapt to.
And we do adapt. We've already adapted to the robotics revolution. For example, there is a sleeping bag factory that produces millions of sleeping bags with only 120 employees. All this stuff happened years ago. Some people moved to other industries, some people retired early, and for some people who had trouble adapting, it was quite painful. But you'd have to be braindead to think this is going to cause 70% of the population to die in the streets when the manufacturing industry only employs around 10million people? Even if all those people exploded, it would only be ~4% of the population dead. Really, 70% of the population is not going to die in the streets because of robotics. Anyone who told you that is lying.
A free, inexpensive Internet is seen by a lot of progressives as the only hope
They are idiots.
China is starting to see some progressive movements
Please never use China as an example of what we should do, unless you have extremely smart, solid, amazing reasoning backing up why we should copy them. They jail dissidents, disallow many types of public gatherings, and prohibit free speech, you know. We don't want to copy them. People who hold up China as an example of what we should do are typically just propagandaists.
Re:What is so bad about it? (Score:2, Insightful)
The way to fix this, is government regulation.
Uh, do you think there isn't government regulation in the US telecom industry? There's tons of it. In fact, in some places, the problem is exactly government regulation: there are regulations making it illegal for any other operator to enter into a geographical region (for cable). Really.
Saying "Regulation will fix this" is like saying, "someone else will fix this." Regulation can either fix a problem or make it worse, and unless you have a specific regulation, you're admitting you have no clue how to fix it.
Re:What is so bad about it? (Score:5, Insightful)
We need to separate the service providers from the people who are building the infrastructure. That way, people who are building infrastructure will be competing against those who are building infrastructure, and they will have no way to differentiate themselves except on price and capacity. This will have the effect of driving up the capacity and driving down the cost.
What about online education, etc.? (Score:4, Insightful)
The telcos have done *everything* they can to cripple expansive growth, so that *they can save infrastructure investment dollars*. In the offing, they have paid off our legislators and others who are supposed to be looking out for us. Their actions are nothing short of criminal, and are legal only because they pay for the laws that are supposed to "protect" the consumer.
In a word, these capping policies are UNAMERICAN (and, I'm not a nationalist, by any means.) What do these caps do to things like scientific research, education, legal artistic sharing, etc. etc. They *cripple* those innovations, thus crippling the forward promise of Americans, and America. Something HAS to be done; the pure profit motives at any cost of the grotesquely greedy telcos must be legislated. It's time to nationalize these companies, or else slap them upside the head so hard that they will start *serving* their customers instead of crimping their futures.
What's more, we need to start with the people who run these companies; we need to see them for what they are, and the large-scale harm that they do. They may be scions of their individual communities, and good parents, and all that, but they are literally putting us on a path that will disadvantage this country for decades, if someone doesn't put a stop to this egregious insult to information access, invention, and innovation.
Bandwidth is (theoretically) unlimited; we don't need to meter it; we need to *make it accessible*, and let 1000 ideas bloom. From now on, we must *insist* on nothing less - our future depends on it!