AT&T Begins a Trial To Cap, Meter Internet Usage 421
An anonymous reader writes "On the heels of Comcast's decision to implement a 250-GB monthly cap, and Time Warner Cable's exploration of caps and overage fees, DSL Reports notes that AT&T is launching a metered billing trial of their own in Reno, Nevada. According to a filing with the FCC (PDF), AT&T's existing tiers, which range from 768 kbps to 6 Mbps, would see caps ranging from 20 GB to 150 GB per month. Users who exceed those caps would pay an additional $1 per gigabyte, per month."
Cappings effect on net neutrality... (Score:2, Interesting)
... I wonder if this is an easy way of coming down on net neutrality, under the guise of being "rational".
Re:Cappings effect on net neutrality... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Cappings effect on net neutrality... (Score:5, Insightful)
True. But they won't meter all traffic the same way. Movies on "ATT Movies" won't count against the tier. They will partner with lets say Amazon for unmetered music downloads. In all practicality,, this is the end of net-neutrality.
Re:Cappings effect on net neutrality... (Score:5, Insightful)
So why don't we get together and start municipal fiber projects in our respective towns? I mean, municipalities can get cheap bonds to build out the infrastructure, and than let companies sell internet access over the fiber (similar to how Speakeasy/Covad can sell ILEC DSL lines). Are we not tired of this bullshit yet?
Re:Cappings effect on net neutrality... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Excuse we while I wipe the dripping sarcasm off your post =) On a serious note, I intend to pursue the muni broadband idea with my local town, as they already tried to do it once and got smacked by Comcast.
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Please keep up with current events. Your current Evil that threatens your way of life are Terrorists, not Communists. :)
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Because the local ISPs will throw money at city councils to have them kill the projects.
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I buy tons transit from Cogent and Hurricane Electric at dirt cheap prices (less than $10/Mb) for my business. On top of that, I can get to a POP such as Equinix in downtown Chicago or Elk Grove Village by leasing excess capacity on the Illinois Tollway's fiber loops, which they rent out at nominal charges.
I've done my homework.
Re:Cappings effect on net neutrality... (Score:4, Insightful)
Then you against net-neutrality. The whole point of non-neutrality is to force sites like hulu and itunes to pay Comcast and ATT. This is what the caps will end up producing as they continue to slide the caps downward.
Re:Cappings effect on net neutrality... (Score:4, Insightful)
Giving stuff for free to kill the competition is classic form of anti-competitive behaviour. It is not to the customer's benefit, any more than putting cheese into a mousetrap is to the mouse's benefit.
"Net neutrality" means that the network does not prioritize traffic based on its source or destination. And AT&T doesn't need to outright block itunes.com; it is quite simple to make it slightly slower or have traffic to and from it count against some limit traffic to AT&T's own competing site doesn't count against to give AT&T's site an unfair advantage.
It is also doable without anti-competitive behaviour: simply have multiple possible connection speeds available, so grandma can pick the slowest.
The issue here is not about charging per megabyte transferred; it's about charging per megabyte transferred from some IP addresses and not others.
Re:Cappings effect on net neutrality... (Score:5, Insightful)
Nothing to do with net neutrality as long as you meter all traffic the same way.
The next step is clearly going to be "free" downloads from paying partners.
Unless there is a radical change in direction, I give it no more than 2 years before we see the first such offering.
$1/gigabyte is just too prohibitive in a market where netflix and others are offering pseudo-HDTV movie downloads to anyone with a game console, the time is coming.
Re:Cappings effect on net neutrality... (Score:5, Insightful)
And if you think they are going to meter their partners (aka : people who pay them money), you should share what you're smoking. Barring regulation forcing them to meter everything, this is a direct path to the end of net neutrality.
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HELLO?? No, "normal content" is not "filtered/slowed/capped"-- it's BILLED TO YOU AT A DEAR COST. Gasoline isn't slowed or capped either but you have to pay for it by the gallon.
All they're doing is replacing the "degrading traffic that hasn't been paid for by both sides of the pipe" with "charging a lot of money for said traffic, after a token traffic 'allowance' which we could
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About 8 years ago, I had Time Warner (Road Runner) service in San Diego. I got about 800KBps download speeds for about $50 a month.
Then I moved to another area and had Cox High-Speed Internet for 6 years. I got about 800KBps for about $50 a month.
Now I'm back in Time Warner's area, and I get about 800KBps for about $50 a month.
The best word I can think of to describe broadband in my region is "stagnant." :-/
Do They Still Advertise them as "Unlimited"? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Do They Still Advertise them as "Unlimited"? (Score:5, Insightful)
The best part is they will probably raise their rates, since all that extra monitoring to bring you quality service costs money don'tchyaknow :-\
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Re:Do They Still Advertise them as "Unlimited"? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why not shape?
Because $1 per Gb is a lot less than it costs in Australia, which depending on the plan/carrier, still charges up to $10,000 per additional Gb...
Shaping/Policing is just a way of making people upgrade their accounts without the original infraction costing them the earth. It's a lot fairer, but it still leaves you unable to do a lot with your connection one it cuts in.
Actually, in the long run, just about all content will be accessible by net, but some will require serious bandwidth. Having caps works with the net as it is today, but it stifles innovation because it also limits what is commercially viable on the Internet and people adjust their usage to meet costs and available bandwidth levels and the carriers find it helps manage their bandwidth requirements, so they stop adding new capacity and find other ways to make their existing infrastructure go further.
Youtube? Myspace? Never would have happened in Australia. We're still working on models that were in place when modems were the dominant technology.
And a typical cap is around 5gb over here - Far less than the 250 Gb mentioned... Not enough to watch online movies even casually. 20Gb is considered a "Big" plan over here and pretty much no one can afford 250Gb for non professional (commercial) use.
Because the caps are so small, there is no business driver to keep upgrading infrastructure...
It's the same old story that we've seen forever. If a resource is essentially free and limitless, you can only make it commercially viable by restricting it's supply by some means. Music, Water, Electricity, Freedom, you name it. The less it's available, the more it costs you. Information is no different.
The reason they don't create new dams or build new ecologically friendly power stations isn't because they can't - it's because it's more commercially viable to retain limited availability of these resources.
GrpA
p.s. Most ISPs in Australia that "Shape" don't actually Shape - they Police - ie, drop packets that exceed the burst rate of the connection. That causes a much lower throughput than shaping does.
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Well if clean energy can be sold for so much more than the cost to produce, get together with a couple hundred friends and dam up the local river/build a solar plant/raise 1000 windmills. If there was money to be made, then somebody would be doing it. When there's competition, capitalism works beautif
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Re:Do They Still Advertise them as "Unlimited"? (Score:5, Informative)
That's correct, although it's written as 1c per Kilobyte in the contract.
People would freak out if they saw "0.5 Gb Included, $10,000 per Gb" in the contract, so it's written as "500Mb included, 1c per kb thereafter"
Yes, there are actually plans like that in Australia...
GrpA
Re:Do They Still Advertise them as "Unlimited"? (Score:5, Insightful)
What "Australia" are you living in?
5gig would be an entry level account, not a "typical" one. 20 gig would be a low end one.
I have a 50 gig plan [tpg.com.au] from TPG. I haven't paid more for internet for as long as I can remember and year after year my bandwidth cap has increased in a way that has been more than sufficient for increased usage.
Of course, but it's largely a factor of our geography. Data doesn't magically get from A to B and when you are as far away from pretty much everything (including the other side of the same country) the economics are inevitably different to places that are more centrally located and/or have high population densities of their own.
It isn't (entirely) a lack of imagination or drive to find a better alternative to "models that were in place when modems were the dominant technology." It's a reflection of physical reality.
I think that is fundamentally incorrect. The tiered cap approach means that demand increases justify infrastructure purchases with extra income.
Re:Do They Still Advertise them as "Unlimited"? (Score:5, Informative)
Of course, but it's largely a factor of our geography. Data doesn't magically get from A to B and when you are as far away from pretty much everything (including the other side of the same country) the economics are inevitably different to places that are more centrally located and/or have high population densities of their own.
That's bullshit. The population density of Australia's capital cities is way higher than that of America. People point at Australia's low population density and say "that's why we have slow internets!", but they fail to notice that most of our country is desert, and most of our population is clustered in a few cities (more than half of our population lives in just 4 cities).
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Why not shape rather than charge extra though?
Because then they wouldn't have as much revenue. If their bandwidth really were limited, they would shape to reduce congestion. But they've got plenty, so they impose an artificial limit and charge you extra for going over it.
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I'm just as happy to pay a bit more per month for a company that only does Internet, especially since they also have a competent tech support. Hell I'd much rather drop $200 a month for a fractional T1 than put up with that crap from a phone or cable company.
speaker wire (Score:5, Interesting)
Speaker wire is the reason "unlimited" will never exist in pure form. The same people who purchase $8,000 speaker wires are quite convinced that even if they were capped at 1TB/hour for their holographic porn, it would still be a curly hair shy of the real thing.
I'd have no problem with capped download if the cap decayed at a sensible exponential rate, the same way that gmail's free storage ticks ever upward. If the cap doubled every two years (corresponding to a 40% annual cost reduction in the cost of carrying traffic, which I'm certain the optical portions of the backbone achieve), then ten years from now, the current monthly cap would have evolved into the daily cap. At that rate, you're already watching a three hour HD movie every day of your life, or multibooting every Linux distro that every existed at the same time onto your 256 core processor.
Depending on the cost of your speaker wire, this might or might not suffice.
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Hell, I wish that Gmail's free storage grew at a sensible exponential rate. Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure it grows at a logarithmic rate...
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It's not consumer fraud, it's misleading, but it's not fraud.
Unlimited is a hold-over from the dial up days.. when you only had, say, 300 minutes a month.
Think of it as a cellphone that has unlimited minutes, but a bandwidth cap.
Re:Do They Still Advertise them as "Unlimited"? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not consumer fraud, it's misleading, but it's not fraud.
No, it's fraud. Unlimited, meaning no limit is applied. A cap is a limit. They would be directly claiming something that is not true in order to inflate the perceived value of a product or service.
Markets require a strict enforcement of truth in order to function effectively. Had ISPs been jumped on for their lies earlier in the game, nobody would dare to implement caps now.
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Maybe they could add "with extra virus blocking features", because technically caps/limits would lower the number of viruses you could download, assuming that was all you were downloading the entire time.
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It would be if you were cut off after the cap. According to TFS, you'll be charged $1/GB after hitting the limit. So they're charging you to get infected, not blocking the files that would do it. Double-dose of douchebaggery.
$1 per GB? (Score:4, Informative)
And driving away customers to a better paying deal is not a good thing in any market, much less a harsh modern market in the post-speculator market of today.
Idiots. They should be making sure they are making a reasonable profit without shoving off your potential customers.
Software updates (Score:5, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Software updates (Score:5, Insightful)
You *poor dears*. Really. I can manage to make it through every month on 40GB... But then Americans aren't typically known for exercising restraint, are they?
You wasteful slob! I managed to make it through most of my life in the 1970s and 80s on less than 40GB total! But then people from whatever country you are from aren't typically known for exercising restraint, are they?
But seriously, bandwidth isn't a finite resource like food or water or oil. There's no reason to restrict ourselves to the stone-age because a handful of media-corporations wish to control the flow of information while raking in boatloads of cash. Your attitude only helps them.
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You're right, though the grandparent's point still makes sense: If you're thinking something like Netflix, then ok, a 100 gb cap is nuts. But in general? Until recently I had a -20- gig plan (Canada), and usually a would go through a month on less than 10 gigs... Thats using the internet heavily on 4 computers. Just, no netflix, no torrents, and not too many legit software downloads (like MSDN or Xbox Live Marketplace demos). I eventually upgraded to a 100 gb plan because with the things in parenthesis, I'd
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.
and this is a problem for Time-Warner, because?
The Dark Knight (+ Digital Copy and BD Live) [Blu-ray] (2008) [amazon.com] $24
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$1 per GB? I wish I could get broadband that cheaply. I doubt it will drive people back to anything -- not at those prices.
Just don't put it in the fine print (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Just don't put it in the fine print (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm fine with schemes like this provided the ISP makes it perfectly clear and obvious when you sign up what your download limitations are and the costs of running over. This allows consumers to make an educated choice about which provider they want to use. Unfortunately, I see this being shoved in the fine print while still advertising "unlimited" internet access. I mean, we are dealing with telecom companies here. I know my bill is a surprise about every other month after all the "taxes and fees" are tacked on to the advertised base price...
That's all well and good in markets where customers actually have a choice. In the markets where the options are Cable Company A or dial-up, the heavy internet-usage customers lose out and end up paying the exorbitant price of $1 per gigabyte.
Re:Just don't put it in the fine print (Score:4, Insightful)
Most customers have no idea what 50GB or 150GB monthly caps would mean. I definitely wouldn't expect my mom to be able to make an educated choice about usage caps.
Hell, I'm good with PCs and I don't know how much bandwidth I would need in a month. How many people would really know how much bandwidth they use when you consider flash advertisements, youtube, etc.?
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Most customers have no idea what 50GB or 150GB monthly caps would mean. I definitely wouldn't expect my mom to be able to make an educated choice about usage caps.
Hell, I'm good with PCs and I don't know how much bandwidth I would need in a month. How many people would really know how much bandwidth they use when you consider flash advertisements, youtube, etc.?
I've used exactly 98.01 GB in the past month.
That's with 4 Debian servers, 2 XP , 1 2K, 1 Debian desktops, an old NT4 fax server, and a pile of customer machines, many of which had the full gamut of Windows updates done. Although I've got service packs on my fileserver, so only the hotfixes get downloaded every time.
This is also with a completely unsecured wireless hotspot. Yes, the wireless is firewalled off from anything on my network, but I have no idea who's used it besides me. Although the wireless
The last time providers tried this... (Score:4, Informative)
Was in the age of Dial-Up. I remember that there were a few ISPs back in the mid '90s that charged $20/month for a limited amount of time online...somewhere between 30 to 50 hours per month. But when other ISPs offered unlimited time online for the same price (or $25 to $30 per month), it was a no-brainer.
Of course, this was also back when even a mid-size municipal city (80,000+ population) could have three or four local ISPs to choose from.
Now, if you live in a place like Minneapolis, your only choices are Comcast or Qwest. If both decide to switch to a capped bandwidth, you're screwed.
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Was in the age of Dial-Up. I remember that there were a few ISPs back in the mid '90s that charged $20/month for a limited amount of time online...somewhere between 30 to 50 hours per month. But when other ISPs offered unlimited time online for the same price (or $25 to $30 per month), it was a no-brainer.
My first ISP was well, like $7.50/month unlimited. They went tits up. My second ISP didn't, it was either $15 or $20. They didn't meter but they had a policy of 2hrs on 2hrs off, or was it 4hrs on 4hrs off. A little e-mail reminded you if you exceeded their recommendation. It worked out pretty well actually since they had little objection to being excessive at night, which was in the spirit of their agreement. While I stuck with them, the "other guys" were either offering unlimited, or more for the sa
60gigs in Canada (Score:3, Informative)
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Telebec's limit is 35 GiB (Quebec, Canada).
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Re:60gigs in Canada (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes,
Let's all compare the price of bandwidth technology and services to South Africa, which is clearly similar in terms of technology, development, architecture, services, service density, e-tailers, and so forth. Makes a whole lot of sense. Maybe in 10-15 years time when you've got used to unlimited broadband and cable and your ISPs start throttling your traffic, dropping packets, killing connections, imposing caps and raising prices someone from another developing nation can ask you to cry them a river.
Back to the US: It's ridiculous that the ISPs can't/won't upgrade their infrastructure to cope with rising demand for bandwidth and instead degrade service and (likely) increase prices. $1/GB is unreasonable. I hope the government investigates the cost to industry growth and development in terms of limiting the adoption of services like Netflix online and other high bandwidth services. Of course, some of these ISPs have a vested interested in making services like Netflix less likely to succeed, just as they had an interest in shutting down their usenet services completely unrelated to protecting children.
In the interest of protecting competition and consumer choice I'd like to see regulation preventing these kind of caps and/or charges in areas where two or fewer ISPs constitute a regional monopoly on internet services.
Lack of competition (Score:3, Insightful)
Personally I'm supportive of published caps. We know hidden ones have existed for some time. It's far better if you know you're buying 20GB of bandwidth or 100GB and it's fair if those using 100GB aren't subsidised by those using 20.
Don't whine that you bought an unlimited connection for $30/month and you should get to use it without penalty. I do agree connections should never have been sold as unlimited (indeed this addresses that very point) but you're an idiot if you think current networks to the home in the US can deliver that sort of bandwidth at that sort of cost.
The problem in the US is the lack of competition. This should allow prices to be driven down. Our parents and grandparents should be able to buy uber cheap 2GB/month packages.
Look at the UK where almost everyone with a phone line can pick from dozens of DSL providers. Competition helps keep prices in check. More expensive providers offer better customer service etc.
But there's so little competition in the US market that there's serious potential for this to be almost all negative.
What makes even less sense is the varying of both bandwidth and capacity. If you're metering the connection, there's no reason at all that everyone shouldn't get the fastest connection available. That's also how it works in the UK.
What's the point of artificially slowing down data for those on the 20GB tariff who in fact are paying more per byte for the data?
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You are for published bandwidth caps that are substantially lower than the 'artificial' unknowns of yesterday? I know I've transfered more than 100GB a month...in fact I've transfered 455 GB this past month have have heard NOTHING from my ISP. (btw thats BYTES not bits, and which do you think the telco's will use?)
You also say not to whine about bandwidth caps for $30 a month. Well lets think about this. If you can find $4 per mb/sec connectivity from Cogent...so yea lets
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They should do it right (Score:5, Insightful)
When your bandwidth cap is exceeded your ports are all shut except 80. Your web browser can only get AT&T's page. You have options to (a) pay for another XXX GB of transfer or (b) upgrade your plan.
It ain't all that hard to do this. Making people pay a dollar-per-gigabyte without giving them notice that they've exceeded their limit is clearly not informing the user.
Tag this story lawsuitwaitingtohappen, whatcanpossiblygowrong, goodluckwiththat, monopoly, luserunfriendly and !cool.
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New Zealand implements a system that seems to work well although the prices are still a little too high for my liking...
You have a published cap, and if you exceed that, you either pay for additional traffic or are throttled to dial-up speed for the rest of the billing period (usually month).
Prices vary a lot for additional traffic and some ISPs do gouge quite deep...
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Australian ISPs give you a live display of how "download" you've used for the current month (via XMLRPC services, you you can see it in a Firefox add-on or a Dashboard widget). Also, they don't charge you when you exceed the cap - they just slow down you're Internet access until the end of the month or when you pay for more.
Cost effectiveness (Score:5, Interesting)
So now they will need to monitor the amount of bandwidth you use, set up a database to keep track of it, change their billing software so it can deal with variable billing, and verify that the customer actually paid the (variable) correct amount. All to collect a few bucks from a few customers.
There's a reason the phone companies go to unlimited calling plans. It means they save big bucks on the hardware and software needed to keep track of your usage. Those systems are not cheap and they eat into the computing power that could be used for routing calls. So instead they jack up your bill by the average amount you would spend, and let you go to town. They still get the money, but they don't have to maintain (as much of) a billing system.
AT&T will try this for a while, realize it's a losing proposition that annoys their customers, and go back to the way it was.
(This assumes rational behavior, of course. That is definitely not a given)
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Ah, but the software modifications are a one-time cost. And the additional metered usage is a revenue source.
They may size the caps so everyone exceeds it a little, thus a subtle price increase to pay for it.
It's not particularly expensive to have software automatically add fees.
Historically, the manual human work required in usage billing was costly.
Now the telcos have it down to an art: due to the advent of cell phones.
Nickel and diming customers for things like $0.10 a text message and $.20
Re:Cost effectiveness (Score:4, Insightful)
So how much data is that (Score:2, Interesting)
If you could sustain 1Mbyte per sec that's not a bad rate. One would think that if the system was overloaded, you would fall below that. So what technical purpose can such a limit have? It doesn't seem like it has anything to do with demand management. Realistically its for creating tiered pricing structures - that's the only purpose for which it makes any sense.
Re:So how much data is that (Score:5, Informative)
At 1Mbyte per sec, its 250000 seconds worth, or about 30 days worth.
Nice try, but you're off by, oh, an order or two of magnitude...
At 1Mbyte/sec, you're looking at less than 3 days until you hit the 250GB cap.
At the same rate, it would be less than 6 hours until the 20GB cap would be hit (although presumably plans with that much bandwidth would have higher caps.)
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Methinks you meant 1Mbit/sec, and 2.6Msec (Score:2, Informative)
2,592,000 seconds hath September, April, June, and November.
A "slow" DSL connection of 1 million bits/sec would chew up 2.592 trillion bits, or 324 billion bytes, a bit above the 250GB cap of one ISP and a bit over twice that of another.
That's American trillions and billions and millions for you Brits out there.
Upside: Incentive for botnet cleanout. (Score:5, Interesting)
One upside to a unilateral application of bandwidth billing by the ISPs: The implications for Botnets and other malware.
- It provides a financial incentive to users to get their machines cleaned out and keep them that way.
- It provides an easily measurable cost of the traffic imposed by malware, which can then be used in prosecutions against those who deploy and use it.
Which brings up other issues:
- Will AT&T bill for incoming packets? Even those not solicited?
- If you're charged for all incoming packets how do you STOP somebody's botnet from sending you packets? DDoS attacks could become Distributed Denial of Funds...
- Will they charge for ICMP packets?
- How about the packets they use to communicate with and control their modem (which don't even get to the customer's interface)?
Re:Upside: Incentive for botnet cleanout. (Score:5, Funny)
Which brings up other issues:
- Will AT&T bill for incoming packets? Even those not solicited?
- If you're charged for all incoming packets how do you STOP somebody's botnet from sending you packets? DDoS attacks could become Distributed Denial of Funds...
- Will they charge for ICMP packets?
- How about the packets they use to communicate with and control their modem (which don't even get to the customer's interface)?
From extensive research on the behavior of modern ISP's, I can answer all of your questions with 100% certainty, including the one you didn't type out:
- Yes, Hell yes.
- You can't.
- They will.
- Of course.
- Lube will cost extra.
If you don't qualify for the faster packages there (Score:3, Interesting)
If you don't qualify for the faster packages there should be no higher then the next level bill. as if you only qualify for 768k and you do 80GB of usage ($80) over instead of the $5- $20 more for the higher levels. They should make it line max with prices levels for how much download that you want. As well having roll over like there cell phone plan has.
$1/GB seems a bit excessive (Score:2, Insightful)
At least it's in the right order of magnitude.
Really fair pricing would be like some electric companies: A small "account charge," say, $3/month, and a per-GB or even per-MB fee with no minimum.
If ISPs did this, the "fair" price would probably be somewhere between $1 and $5 for the "account charge" and between $0.05 and $0.50/GB for traffic. A 60GB user might pay $35, a 240GB user might pay $125. It would break the economic model for things like "Netflix online" unless they used really tight compression,
ADSL Quotas - Standard Practice in Australia (Score:2, Insightful)
Many plans also count traffic in both directions toward your quota, so the uploads generated by P2P software can result in a significant reduction in your download traffic.
The uncapped charges can be EXTREMELY nasty - for example the Telstra BigPond plans
I wonder... (Score:4, Interesting)
I wonder if I could sue my town or state in so limiting my internet choices through government granted monopoly. Given that all of the major players (who get the government granted monopolies) all seem to be moving towards usage caps it would be nice if it was easier for competitors to enter the market. Particularly with download and upload speeds comparable to cable and without the lag of satellite services.
Is it time to go back to BBS's? (Score:4, Funny)
Seriously, billions of dollars in taxpayer-funded subsidies and all I got was this lousy duopoly.
It's still 1000x cheaper (Score:2, Informative)
Now, take your current Internet access bill and multiply it by 1000. So stop complaining.
(Yes, yes, get off my lawn, too.)
Welcome back to paying by the bit..... (Score:2)
Woo hoo!
I'll just go have a T1 dropped now. I'll be cheaper in the long run.
New Entrants? (Score:5, Informative)
I noticed that here in Pittsburgh, we have a relatively new entrant into the DSL space (Cavtel) who are offering the maximum possible speeds(up to 8 Mb/s, depending on line quality) with no caps and no tiers and they advertise a price lower than Verizon's 3 Mb/s service. Basically, they set themselves up as a CLEC and have access to the last-mile copper and their own backbone (probably transit) links.
I wonder if the caps will make it profitable for more of this type of activity to take place? Could we see some alternative DSL providers open up shop?
Luckily... (Score:2, Funny)
...my AT&T DSL service is so slow I don't think I could reach those caps anyway.
I hosted a torrent in Reno... (Score:2)
...just to watch it die.
unexpected bills often worse than dead datalinks (Score:3, Interesting)
Will the users have the option to choose between paying for the extra bandwidth or cutting off or slowing the data link when the cap is exceeded?
Some users prefer to know that in no event they are going to pay more and would prefer a dead datalink to an unexpected bill.
Actually many of these users prefer this because they don't trust the ISPs to do correct billing: there are many stories of companies around the world, both private and state-owned, that send massive bills at random just to collect more revenue whenever their stock price goes down and want to show better results for the next quarter investor's report.
This thing happens regularly around the world with water utilities, power utilities, telephone operators, mobile phone companies, and Internet providers, primarily in countries where political corruption is high and the law doesn't work.
I don't know whether such things happen in the US, but in other countries it is as regular as rain in the winter and many users specifically try to find fixed-price plans in order not to let providers do this to them.
So, if a company wants to attract those users who are cautious, then it should offer an option to either switch off the datalink until the next month or slow it down to 64 or 128kbps when the cap is exceeded, until again next month (or other billing period).
This is starting to get out of hand. (Score:3)
The Internet is out there waiting for us to use it. The ISPs are trying to stifle our use of it.
I use legal services on the Internet to consume media.
Tivo
Hulu
Netflix instant
Xbox Live
gaming both PC and Xbox
downloading Linux updates
amazon unbox
itunes
amazon mp3
pandora radio
revision3 TV
Steam store
EA online store
I use all of these services and depending on the month, usage may be more than 250GB.
Not only is it not consumer friendly, but it's a step in the wrong direction.
This should set off alarms at apple, amazon, netflix, nbc, microsoft, and other media conglomerates.
If we don't have the transfer available, we can't consume these services.
I expect the ISP's are dreaming of 'partnerships' (Score:3, Insightful)
I think all of this is a prelude to the ISP's trying to squeeze extra revenue from content providers, by setting up 'partnership' deals where the bandwidth cap doesn't apply to the partnered content providers.
E.g. Amazon pays the ISP some amount of money per month for the privilege of getting truly unlimited bandwidth to the customers.
If the content providers are smart, they will all band together to 'educate' consumers about this, and setup a website with information about competing ISPs which are availabl
What are they getting payed for? (Score:4, Insightful)
I mean seriously, you pay your ISP to constantly upgrade their equipment. It doesn't cost much to run it so much of the money should go to upgrades. If they don't manage to be able to do that, they should go out of business.
I mean it's not like you have to dig up the road and lay new fibers. You can use wavelength multiplexing to get more and more data onto those.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wavelength-division_multiplexing [wikipedia.org]
If nothing is done, the US will fall even further behind the rest of the world when it comes to internet access.
Furthermore, there is a lot you can do against this by yourself. Of course you probably cannot change your ISP in most regions as they often have local monopolies, but what you can do is to build your own networks. There's software around like OLSRd which you can install onto computers or routers. It implements a meshed routing protocoll. Essentially you turn your wireless network cards into ad-hoc mode. Assign IP-Addresses and start OLDRd. This programm (availiable for preety much all OSes, even Windows) negotiates routes with all the other nodes it can reach. This way you can easily build up large networks which configure themselves automatically. If a node fails, and there is still another way, the network will find it.
This way you can build an additional network, free of any greedy big ISPs. You can use it wherever you want for whatever you want.
http://www.olsr.org/ [olsr.org]
Adjusted Cap based on Connection...... (Score:5, Insightful)
wow. just wow (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Jews did 9/11. (Score:5, Funny)
Next month: Slashdot meters trolls posts. Only one per day, or you get charged $4/troll.
Re:Jews did 9/11. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Jews did 9/11. (Score:5, Funny)
...or charged with a couple hundred thousand volts across their testicles?
Re:Jews did 9/11. (Score:5, Funny)
charged with a couple hundred thousand volts across their testicles?
I'm a female troll, you insensitive clod!
Re:What does this have to do with 9/11? (Score:2)
Re:Jews did 9/11. (Score:5, Insightful)
Honestly, can't we just get rid of anonymous posting? Let logged-in users check the checkbox and post 'anonymously', but keep ramifications for people's actions. It would solve this BS troll problem once and for all, since persistent trollers could eventually end up with such negative karma that they couldn't post for a month.
Everyone wins.
you must be (Score:2, Funny)
You must be knew hear.
10...9...8...7...6...5...4...3...2...1... HAPPY KNEW HEAR!
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You could just adjust your filters in the preferences. Why force your choice on me?
Re:Jews did 9/11. (Score:5, Funny)
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time.
And I thought you were just saving bytes to avoid the cap.
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The cost of laying and maintaining a cable across the ocean is a lot more than it is to lay and maintain a cable across land.
NZ is the former, US, Canada, etc. are the latter.
As far as me, $60/month for 2Mb/256Kb with no cap. If I was in the nearest city, I could get 10Mb/1Mb, also without a cap, for the same price. or 25Mb/1Mb in select places with a 150GB cap for $93/month.
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I get 20GB here in New Zealand, for $40 USD~ per month... where do i sign up
In the US.
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You see, a good portion of the world doesn