Former FCC Boss: Data Caps Not About Network Congestion 238
An anonymous reader writes "Broadcasting Cable reports on comments from Former FCC chairman Michael Powell (now president of the U.S. cable industry's trade association) confirming what many have long suspected: data caps on internet service aren't just about network congestion, but rather about 'pricing fairness.' 'Asked by MMTC president David Honig to weigh in on data caps, Powell said that while a lot of people had tried to label the cable industry's interest in the issue as about congestion management. "That's wrong," he said. "Our principal purpose is how to fairly monetize a high fixed cost." He said bandwidth management was part of it, though a more serious issue with wireless.' Powell went on to say that ISPs had huge up-front costs which had to be allocated out to consumers, and those consumers were familiar with usage-based fees from paying their power bill or buying food. He was part of a panel with three other former FCC chairs. Dick Wiley agreed with his cost argument, adding that the marketplace was responding better than new legislation could. Michael Copps thought the FCC could question data caps a bit more, but wasn't opposed in principle. Reed Hundt said he wants the FCC to focus on getting better, faster, cheaper internet to 100% of the population."
Large company trying to be "fair"? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, sure. All the ISP wants to do is be "fair" to its customers.
When a large company says it's trying to be "fair", you should hold on to your wallet tightly!!
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Fair means they'll leave the customer with some money for other corporations to fleece.
I don't think it means even that (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think it means even that. In fact, I don't think "fair" was ever meant to mean "for you".
From my subjective experience just means "we want more money". The idea is that what they're already getting is so incredibly unfair, when they could be getting more with just a little PR, disinformation and maybe a little collusion. Why, the CEO is probably still driving a Mercedes, while his neighbour is driving a Bugatti Veyron. Can you imagine how unfair that is?
Sarcasm aside... Not that it's necessarily a bad thing or evil. They're expected, and indeed the system is such that they have a legal obligation, to make as much money as possible for the investors. Not fleecing you as hard as physically possible, would be a breach of that obligation. Whether you have some money left after that, is more of a side-effect, than intended. Indeed, it would be a breach of trust if they actually intended to take less money for fairness sake.
I suppose the system just works. Might as well enjoy it. But the corollary is that whenever some large company is talking about something being for your own good in any way, better bring your own lube, they want to shaft you. They're supposed to, after all. Some just are more subtle than others.
Re:I don't think it means even that (Score:5, Insightful)
I suppose the system just works.
I'd allow that it functions, yes.
I remember the days when corps constantly worked at lowering their prices and increasing efficiency, all in order to compete for customers. Now, NorthAm telecoms is Balkanized into a few monolithic corps who don't need to care about competing; in many markets they have no competition to speak of. In Canada we have Bell, Telus, Shaw, Rogers, and they only tokenly try to appear to compete in each other's market area (territory). USA has AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile, and I've read lots of stories from people saying that in their area they have only one of them to pick from. Whole cities have tried to roll out their own municipal networks to fill the gap, and they end up in lawsuits attempting to prevent them from doing it. The Google GBit rollout has proved how possible it is. That's not the game the telecom monoliths want to play. They want to milk us for every penny they can get, not maximize fair service for a fair price in competition.
Compare Euro telecoms access and rates to NorthAm's, and it's pretty easy to say it's a rigged game. Our regulators have been helping them do it, not forcing them to compete on level playing fields.
Bait and Switch (Score:5, Interesting)
Why are you surprised?
There are a couple fundamental issues with capitalism that are failing to be addressed here: monopolies, and natural monopolies.
Capitalism really is less about competition and more about accumulation of capital. The competitive behavior is the goal, but it comes with the built-in problem of monopolies. You can't allow people to 'win' this particular game. Taken to an extreme, you might end up with one company that simply owned everything.
Capitalism in this sense is kind of a bait-and-switch. We're sold on the idea of an efficient competitive marketplace, but end up with monopolies and rent-seeking.
The problem of natural monopolies is even worse. Your ability to start a competing business is almost entirely a function of how much initial capital it takes to enter said market. It's far easier to start a restaurant or web company than to start a company that lays undersea fiber optic cable. This is why people talk about 'barriers to entry' as a bad thing: they reduce the efficiency of the market. Further, there are some services where competition would have negative utility -- no one really needs multiple companies laying water, power, or sewage lines to their home.
The answer to both of these problems is government. The government's purpose is to prevent or eliminate these market failures.
With natural monopolies, there is no real purpose behind allowing them to make a profit. It's a form of taxation, and can justly be called a theft from the public. These markets are the natural purview of government.
We have a slightly larger toolbox for dealing with large companies. We can break them up entirely, levy progressive business taxes, or subsidize potential competitors.
We need to start divorcing the idea of competition from the idea of capitalism: they're not synonymous. Yes, I am anti-capitalist -- but very pro-competition. Which side are you on?
Re:Bait and Switch (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll tell you up front, your and my viewpoints are polar opposites from each other. Where you see capitalism inevitably trending to larger and larger monolithic and fewer players, I see government meddling as the cause of that. Where government isn't interfering, smaller and more nimble outfits can run rings around the entrenched dinosaurs. Where government is allowed to interfere, those dinosaurs buy favours and protectionism and regulations from government, stifling those little innovators from interfering in the dinosaurs' turf.
I can accept that you likely need a government for things like WWII, the Manhattan Project, & etc. As for regulating food production and distribution & safety, it's idiotic. Informed consumers and competition can do that much better at a fraction of the cost.
It takes fifty miles for a supertanker to turn around. A cigarette boat can transport millions of dollars in illicit cargo far more nimbly and efficiently.
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This is untrue, or every time a corporation made a charitable donations its CEO would get sued and/or jailed.
But if you'll provide a link to the law that says so I'll admit I was wrong.
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that does increase profit, by lowering tax "burden".
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Corporations are not good or evil, they only want profit. And in this case, a fair pricing [wikipedia.org] is also more profitable.
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"Corporations are not good or evil, they only want profit."
Hahaha. That's funny.
Saying that good and evil don't apply is just so much nonsense. There are both good and evil ways to make a profit. For example, I think most people would agree that charging market price for a commodity is generally good, while selling children as sex slaves is evil.
And there is a whole spectrum of things in between.
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love of money placed before the love of God
I'd say "love of God" comes pretty high on my list of evils.
Christianity: murder count [truthbeknown.com] that makes Godwin cry, depriving billions of people of joys of life, robbing them blind of wordly possessions, setting back science and culture by ~1.5k years; being less evil recently not because of good will but because of the Western civilization shedding religion quickly.
Islam: denying the right to live to infidels (some religions being merely dhimmied), doing everything of the above.
Christianity went on their rampage
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Are you confusing love of God with hatred of those who love a different God, or who write his name differently?
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Don't like it? Don't deal with that company.
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So I have a choice of comcast or century link here in my apartment. Partly due to the city, and partly due to the apartment building. This means that I chose the lesser of two evils.
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But the problem with the fairness argument as they're making it is that their reaction does not indicate they're actually worried about fairness. If you're charging each customer $50/mo and see an inequality is use, you make it fair by raising your price on the guy slurping 500 GB/mo, and lowering your p
Who has data caps in the USA? (Score:4, Informative)
I have Tim Warner cable and have unlimited
Fios is unlimited too
And how much data is it to get past the cap? I stream all my TV. Only have Internet. And I use less than 200gb per month. So far I'm at just over 50 for this month
Re:Who has data caps in the USA? (Score:5, Funny)
I have Tim Warner cable...
Do you watch it on your Magnetbox TV?
Re:Who has data caps in the USA? (Score:4, Funny)
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/. and the high tech they have where you can't edit posts
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Re:Who has data caps in the USA? (Score:4, Informative)
so how much do you have to stream to use 250GB? i only ask because i stream all my TV. i have done it since september and i have used 450GB the whole time according to Time warner
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If you and your sister/brother/son/mother or whatever do it colaboratively you reach it quickly. Since seperate streaming does not use broadcast techniques in ip networks 3 people sharing the connection get 2 hours and 28 minutes each a day. I am still assuming you stream at atleast 2.5 mbit as I don't think you are interested in watching what looks more like lego.
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Over that 2 month period, 1.15GB is my lowest day, and 15.4GB is my highest day.
Its not all video streaming.. but for sure a very high percentage of it is.
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I will be totally screwed if Time Warner follows suit on the data cap train. I take care of my father and kid sister, and we all use Netflix. My dad is disabled so he watches a LOT of Netflix from bed, and my router shows that our monthly usage fluctuates between 280 on a really good month and 340gb.
Re:Who has data caps in the USA? (Score:5, Informative)
They changed that last year. It's 300GB/month now, with 3 months overage without charge (you are warned whenever you get near the cap or go over), then on the 4th month that you go over they will automatically bill you +$10 for an additional 50GB
They set the pricing model (Score:5, Insightful)
So they can only blame themselves. I remember back when dial-up was the option, and there were packages with time-limits. But then a few ISPs started offering unlimited time, and as we moved to always-on, they continued to not set limits. 15 years later, they decide limits are what they want, and they're shocked people react negatively?
Re:They set the pricing model (Score:4, Insightful)
All they have to do is offer a pricing tier and be honest in their advertising.
People will pay for more when they know what they are getting. Cell phone companies do it.
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read your agreement, It's "up to 40mbps". They are giving you exactly what you paid for. Don't like it, get enterprise grade with an SLA and then you can bitch when it's to slow...
I agree with you however on the overselling and monthly data limits, and the data rates should be best effort, or they should be sold as "XXmbps minimum, faster speeds may be available at some times" Then when there is congestion (say 6:30PM), they randomly select and throttle some people. TBH, if i could trust my ISP to handle th
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Even if it is "up to" a set speed, that ends if the ISP throttles the connection.
Look at it this way, if I ask you to work for me and I say you can pick to widgets for your own each time you work a day for compensation but only put one widget out for you to chose from, and I honoring my agreement? Of course not, and if the ISP purposely restricts the bandwidth to 3 mbps instead of the 40mbps, they are purposely not offering the extra 37 mbps so there can be no up to anything at that point in time. If networ
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if I pay for a certain speed, I expect that speed as a minimum, with 24x7 maximum download and upload rate as my *limits* - in otherwords, unlimited.
Anything less is a lie, and a contract / agreement violation, period.
Then you must not read contracts before you sign them. The speeds quoted are "Up To" a certain speed, not Pipes Saturated at bandwidth X with Five Nines Uptime. I'm with you though. They need to be forced to advertise their minimum speeds for both up and down, or at least give us an average speed.
If the aim was to "fairly monetize a high fixed cost", then in no rational sense of fairness does overselling their bandwidth seem fair. Also, it doesn't really matter if folks are streaming traffic in off-p
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Then why is overuse 5x as expensive as in-band use (Score:5, Informative)
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everyone prices stuff like this in the 21st century
90% of your customers pay a fee and you find a way to gouge a small minority willing to pay a premium for that product or service
not much different than getting large fries and drink at a fast food place. they give you a few pennies worth of potatoes and water, the cheapest food products in the USA for $1 or some other huge profit margin price
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Wi-Fi (Score:2)
I have the t-mobile throttling plan on my Tab 10.1 it is horrible. 5GB cap which I usually hit around a week before my turnover.
Do you use Wi-Fi everywhere you can? What bandwidth-intensive actions do you usually do away from Wi-Fi, and in what specific locations away from Wi-Fi do you do them?
If the throttling was to half speed or even 1/3 speed it'd be fine. 120k is absurd though.
What that means is you're falling back to EDGE.
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If you drive for a living (Score:2)
At work, which is driving around all the day
Then your employer might be able to afford the 10 GB plan, or if you're self-employed, you could try buying music to store locally rather than relying on Pandora streaming. What bitrate do you use on Pandora, and how long do you keep it open each day?
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because that way they can get money out of the customers.
what did you think fair meant? it just means billing as much as they can. which kind of sucks since they aren't doing the right thing and getting as many customers on as many devices as they can..
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Why is it absurd? You got what you paid for, would you rather get billed like GP by the GB when going over? Or completely dropped from the net?
While I agree data cap sucks, fact is, you have a contract with them, like it or not, those are the terms.
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No wired connection for wireless Internet (Score:2)
It's easy to put your own cheap off the shelf router just before the ISP's device and flash it with your own firmware.
How so? A lot of these MiFi and similar devices have no Ethernet port to which one could connect an off-the-shelf router. Instead, users are expected to connect through Wi-Fi.
Fraud (Score:2, Interesting)
They underprice their services to get users (recurring!), then force users to switch to higher-tier plans when they consume more? This is classic bait-and-switch.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bait-and-switch
Re:Fraud (Score:4, Interesting)
no, they price a few users into paying more
lots of customers like my parents' generation only uses 10GB a month at most on their home internet
this is why i haven't run p2p in years. its cheaper to buy blu rays or pay for netflix and be on the cheapest internet plan or a cheaper tier than pay $100 a month for internet and the high electricity costs to keep your stuff on 24x7
you only need 5mbps for netflix. about the same for itunes streaming media. less for most youtube crap. i pay $50 a month for 20/1 to time warner cable and don't see a reason to pay more
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this is why i haven't run p2p in years. its cheaper to buy blu rays or pay for netflix
Provided what you want to watch is even available where you live. I'm aware of several films and TV series that aren't on DVD [1], Blu-ray [A], or Netflix VOD at all.
you only need 5mbps for netflix.
After streaming for four hours, you'll have eaten up nearly your entire 10 GB for the month [exede.com].
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High speed internet connection: $100/mo
Cost of electricity to run a PC 24/7: $25/mo
All the movies, music, games, and TV shows you could ever need: $0
Sticking it to the MAFIAA: Priceless.
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no, they price a few users into paying more
Seems reasonable to me. I don't want to pay more because other people just have to download the latest schlock from Hollywood in HD.
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now stream netflix to 3 devices and watch that 5mbps become 15mbps, before any other web traffic, or downloads. I'm at the point where anything under 20mbps, doesn't have enough bandwidth for typical evenings anymore. two tablets and a TV mean 15mbps is background data. Thats ignoring updates to the tables and the phones, and computers. All I can see is my bandwidth needs going up. I can't wait until my kids have some sort of video based lecture, or what not in 1080P, or start skypeing with friends, or gran
So who were these wrong people? (Score:5, Interesting)
"Powell said that while a lot of people had tried to label the cable industry's interest in the issue as about congestion management. "That's wrong," he said."
So who were these wrong people who said it was congestion management?
Oh, that's right, THE CABLE COMPANIES THEMSELVES.
And if they want to talk about "fair", then what about the salaries of these executives?
Buying the infrastructure (Score:2)
Up-front costs? (Score:4, Interesting)
Okay, I don't get it. The companies in question are showing record profits...and what he's saying makes it sound like the capital expenditures necessary to have built out the networks in the first place are on some other set of books that don't come into effect. Isn't it the case that companies usually finance capital expenditures, and then pay off the debt over time? Under those circumstances, if the price of connectivity had to stay high in order to pay off that debt, the level of profitability wouldn't be rising the way it is. His argument sounds like bullshit to me.
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the cable internet companies don't make much money which is what this article is about
for wireless, the wireless part of the company makes huge profits. for AT&T and Verizon. Sprint is losing money along with T-Mo. but AT&T and Verizon have lots of legacy stuff they still have to run and pay for. the wireless pays for the legacy crap.
then you have the operations costs. electricity, tech support, etc and it's different across markets. supporting people in the burbs is more expensive than the city.
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the cable internet companies don't make much money which is what this article is about
O, RLY?
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204792404577224844011375490.html [wsj.com]
That seems extremely profitable to me.
Paywall (Score:2)
[link to paywalled WSJ article]
Could you cite another source that won't charge me $21.99?
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It is bullshit. The real reason why they want to have data caps and usage-based pricing is that it's a way that they can drive up prices without incurring a huge backlash.
Their marketing psychologists have told them, if you simply raise prices without improving services, then you'll anger your customer base. It's safer to maintain the same price while lowering the standard of service, and then offer to restore the standard of service at an increased premium price. It's just convoluted enough to confuse
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They also like it because they then can exempt their own YouTube/Hulu/Netflix service from the plan. And when people complain about getting huge bills by going to such places they say. tough luck you should of used X
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assets_owned_by_Comcast [wikipedia.org]
how did they acquire all of these items, in such a short period of time.
they fucking BOUGHT NBC
they bought the FLYERS
where did they get the money for that? (hint, profits)
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Looking at the 2011 data, looks like comcasts gross income was down 33% over 2010. They had a pretax income (after expenses) of $8.25B, paid $3.05B in taxes out of that, and then also paid $1.00B in minority interest expenses, for a net profit of $4.16B.
Thats on $55.84B in total revenue, so in actual fact their profit margin is apparently only 7.45%. Now they may have set records in the past with such a
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Does not compute.
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how did they acquire all of these items, in such a short period of time.
Probably by borrowing. Companies rarely buy other companies out of operating profit. Almost never, in fact. They borrow money, either by getting a loan from the bank or (more likely) they floated some bonds. You can't know whether their asset purchases mean anything without looking at the entire balance sheet.
Last mile vs. backhaul (Score:3)
of course its bullshit the cost per gb these days is so cheap it would take terabytes of data to start hurting there pockets. they also proved this fact with cell phone company's when they claimed there bandwidth was expensive.
How so? The more customers you want to serve at a given level with a given amount of spectrum, the more towers you need to put up. It costs money to put up towers, and this last-mile cost dwarfs the cost of backhaul transit.
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If one single company has been paying about $3B/year in taxes, then a single refund of $7.2B for two entire industries (both broadband AND wireless) that this one company is only a part of, well the $7.2B doesnt look so significant after all.
We have the highest corporate tax rates in the world before the government gives the money back in the various ways that it does so. We can argue about
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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It's also about protecting cable TV and the DVD/Blu-Ray movie market. Many ISPs are also media and cable TV companies as
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Many ISPs are also media and cable TV companies as well.
Many ISP's are not media companies.
I can only think of 2, those being Comcast and Time Warner.
If big media actually had a meaningful portion of the ISP share, then your ISP would be playing copyright cop instead of how it currently is.
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The common ground/interests aren't necessarily always copyright-related, but also "the enemy of my enemy is my friend", where enemy==customers.
Strat
By this logic (Score:5, Interesting)
shouldn't we also have usage-based pricing for the TV they sell us? So that we pay "fairly" for for the fixed cost of establishing the network? Why would that model be different, since it's not really about congestion, as admitted in the article?
The electric bill and buffet examples in the article are terrible: when we pay for electric usage, we actually are paying for utlization/generation; use more and something (coal, natural gas, etc.) actually gets consumed more. And most buffets are all-you-can-eat; if you're paying by weight or something, the analogy is the same — you're actually consuming something. But both bandwidth and TV channels are there no matter how much they're "consumed." Bandwidth can be saturated (the congestion problem) but it can't be actually consumed.
If we're going to talk about "fairness", let's talk about:
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the food costs different amounts
on a buffet the fat people will actually eat more of the cheap foods if you watch. pasta, white rice, potatoes. the meat and veggies aren't eaten as much.
when i eat buffet i go paleo style and make out
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If a very small percentage of people are using-up a rather large percentage of the available bandwidth, then yes, that's unfair. The average prices across the board must be higher to subsidize those few, while others who want modest service have to pay higher prices.
Now, once the price of a megabyte of data gets cheap enough, the cost of all that equipmen
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Use it or lose it ! (Score:2, Interesting)
Bandwidth can't be stockpiled. Any bandwidth not used is lost forever.
So while it's fair to sell priority access but it's not fair to block traffic from empty lines.
That's obstructionist.
Eminent domain exists to seize private assets for the public good.
All natural monopolies should be co-ops.
what infrastructure build-out? (Score:5, Interesting)
the phone company here runs DSL off copper at least a generation old and refuses to build-out to serve customers past 3 miles from a CO.. even though it's possible to bring the per-subscriber cost of extending DSL down to as little as $100.. and even though they charge nearly double the 'in town' rate for a fraction of the speed past about 1.5 miles.
the cable company hasn't upgraded anything outside of its headend since they moved into town in the 80s, except for dropping a neighborhood node on each end of town for data. cable internet rates go up at least once per year even though it's a small town with a big fat, underutilized uplink.
each wireless company has exactly one tower here, and when one is down (happens a few times a year) there's not even an agreement between them to carry calls on the other company's tower. towers are well under capacity but data rates go up and caps go down. what was a reasonable $50 for uncapped unthrottled data no longer exists thanks to verizon's buyout of alltel and the fcc for allowing that to happen.
and oh yea.. all four companies receive federal funds to provide service to this rural area....... it just never makes it here.
"huge up-front costs"? (Score:3)
Is "huge up-front costs" a euphemism for payments to maintain their legal monopoly in most of the neighborhoods that they "server"?
One reason for suspecting this is the recent stories (most recently from a study in Canada that was discussed here on /.) about the actual cost of running an Internet service being less than 1/000 of the money charged the customers. If that's not the explanation of the "huge costs", it must be something else. The obvious guess is the, uh, "campaign contributions" and other related costs of all those zillions of local monopolies that the comms industry has relied on since the development of the telegraph and telephone to prevent any actual competition from arising.
What other sorts of payouts could the phrase "huge up-front costs" refer to? It might be interesting to get a detailed accounting of all this, though I suppose a lot of it would be similarly buried behind a pile of euphemisms.
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Buy a stock of them (yes, one suffices), go to their annual stockholders meeting and ask them where they spend their money.
Duh? (Score:3)
If it were about congestion, they could simply use QoS with classification by quota to slow you down as you reach higher percentiles of bandwidth consumption.
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But then if I want more bandwidth (unthrottled) and I'm willing to pay for it, can I do so? If so, we're right back to the fee for bandwidth model. If I can't, then it rapidly becomes an example of the tragedy of the commons [wikipedia.org].
Unmetered late nights (Score:2)
economics (Score:2)
Tiered pricing is nothing new, no is it anything sinister. When you have some customers deriving vastly more utility from your fixed-cost service those customers are understandably willing to pay more for it. So you charge them more. You'd be a fool not to. Charging every customer the same price means the base price has to go up in order to cover the fixed costs. The base price going up means some customers at the margins (of low use) will simply not bother to pay for your service, i.e. fewer overall c
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They may have initially chosen all-you-can-eat, but it's entirely their prerogative to change that at any point in time (barring regulation by the FCC). If they think they can increase profits by going to a tiered model then I applaud them for doing so. Certainly their shareholders do. At the end of the day, the heavy users derive more utility from the service being provided, so I don't have much sympathy when they're required to pay more for it. They are, after all, getting more out of it. From the pr
The wireless analogy (Score:3)
Powell went on to say that ISPs had huge up-front costs which had to be allocated out to consumers, and those consumers were familiar with usage-based fees from paying their power bill or buying food.
In the case of wireless, I couldn't agree more. I negotiate with my local grocery store and set a fixed price for the maximum amount of groceries I might need each month. It works great most of the time, except when unexpected company shows up at the end of the month and I wind up paying an extra $70/egg in overage charges.
Of course it isn't (Score:3)
Of course this isn't about congestion, if it was other countries with far higher bandwidth allocations wouldn't be charging a fraction of what we charge. Our national broadband is an international embarrassment and is holding back the economy. Hell, even China is starting to deploy Fiber directly to new construction - and - letting you pick your ISP.
Network lines need to be declared a critical infrastructure, turned over to a third party and let consumers truly have a choice of ISP's. There is no competition for broadband in this country outside of a select few areas and the results are overwhelming. If your lucky enough to live in an area with competition you get /much/ better deals.
The free market is a wonderful thing that work around almost any problem. However the free market can't work if competition isn't allowed and monopolies can corner the market. We need another trustbuster like Teddy Roosevelt.
Next election vote for zombie Teddie Roosevelt - dammit.
Define Fixed Costs (Score:3)
QUOTE... for a business that requires "enormously high" fixed costs -- digging up the streets, put the wires in -- and operational expense, "it is a completely rational and acceptable process to figure out how to fairly allocate those costs among your consumers who are choosing the service and will pay you to recover those costs.UNQUOTE
To me -- "digging up the streets, put the wires in" - are start-up costs. And I would be willing to agree that they are "enormously high" However; operational expenses plus depreciation, insurance, etc. are recurring or "fixed" costs. My understanding is that operational "fixed" costs are very much, lower.
I have no problem with conspicuous consumers of bandwidth paying more. My problem is with costs not dropping for all consumers!
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"[D]igging up the streets, put the wires in" is considered a fixed costs because the cost doesn't change whether you have one customer or a million. It's not a recurring fixed cost, but it is a fixed cost.
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Wasn't MOST of the fixed cost for building the infrastructure part of that $500 Billion Al Gore go the government/taxpayer to pony up?
So if their business model is paying for all these fixed costs -- when do we get our check in the mail?
We missed the boat on the infrustructure.. (Score:4, Insightful)
The US should have been building the fiber lines based around a munipal/county model much the way most water/sewer systems work where the city/county government installs and maintains the lines and then leases out that line to whatever ISP the customer wants. Then we would have been allowed actual competition. Charter offers you the best package, fine you sign up for Charter for $X per month and they pay the city/county $y per month to lease the line. Want Mom&Pop ISP that charges $Z per month, great, they still pay the city/county $y per month to lease the line.
That is something at the local level I would have voted a bond issue, sales tax increase, or property tax increase for without a problem.
Instead we have the system we have now...
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Two words: eminent domain (Score:2)
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I used to live in a town that brought up such a measure to a referendum. Leading up to the vote, there was so much disinformation (coming in scary, B/W postcards) coming from the entrenched phone and cable companies that they never stood a chance. Something along the lines of "DID YOU KNOW THAT YOUR TOWN WILL STICK YOU WITH A SIX MILLION DOLLAR BILL FOR A RISKY VENTURE?" I don't th
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Water and sewer line technology hasn't changed in centuries. But over a decade ago, before fibre really took off, you would have been advocating municipalities develop cities' data infrastructure with coax lines or regular analog phone lines, and we'd
High upfront costs? (Score:3)
Like the BILLIONS some of these providers were paid BY THE GOVERNMENT and WITH OUR TAX MONEY for the development of broadband?
You know, all that money they frittered away?
disclosure, false advertising, etc. (Score:3)
Wrong principle. (Score:3)
If you ignore congestion (which he is arguing that this is not about), then eating bandwidth doesn't cost the ISP significantly more. There's no real incrimental cost difference between a pipe being 10% full and 20% full. Bandwidth caps, so far, have mostly been about directing customers to services that make the ISP more money -- "Skype bandwidth will cost you, but using my home phone service will be a lot chaper".
We're looking at this backwards. (Score:2)
I think it's the same with bandwidth.
Back as far as the mid '80s people had long been complaining that the '
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Netflix wouldn't have survived 15 years ago when the last mile for 99% of the public was a 33Kilobit/second modem, and downloading a 50 megabyte short film took about 4 hours. That's the main reason why it didn't exist back then.
2013-15=1998.
quoth the wikipedia [wikipedia.org]
Netflix was founded in 1997 in Scotts Valley, California by Marc Randolph and Reed Hastings, who previously had worked together at Pure Software, along with Mitch Lowe. Hastings was inspired to start the company after being charged late fees for returning a rented copy of Apollo 13 after the due date. The Netflix website launched in April 1998 with an online version of a more traditional pay-per-rental model (US $4 per rental plus US $2 in postage; late fees applied). Netflix introduced the monthly subscription concept in September 1999, then dropped the single-rental model in early 2000. Since that time the company has built its reputation on the business model of flat-fee unlimited rentals without due dates, late fees, shipping or handling fees, or per title rental fees.
Inflation (Score:2)