Telecom Companies in India Want Tech Firms To Pay For Network Usage (techcrunch.com) 77
Telecom operators in India, the second largest wireless market, would like internet companies to compensate for using their networks, a recommendation they've made to the local regulatory body, echoing a viewpoint that is gaining some momentum in other parts of the world but also stoking fears about violation of net neutrality. From a report: Jio, India's largest telecom operator with more than 450 million subscribers, recommended to the local regulator that internet companies should be made to "contribute" towards telecom network costs based on the traffic they consume, their turnover and number of users.
"We suggest that TRAI [India's telecom regulator] should recommend for OTT providers contributing in the network development and building a backbone for the country. In this effort, the Other OTT service providers should also be required to pay their fair share," said the unit of Reliance, which is run by Asia's richest man Mukesh Ambani. Reliance, which carries 55% share of India's total data traffic, contends that requiring internet companies to compensate for network usage will ensure a level playing field. Jio said there is a "near consensus" among telecom operators across the globe on this subject.
"We suggest that TRAI [India's telecom regulator] should recommend for OTT providers contributing in the network development and building a backbone for the country. In this effort, the Other OTT service providers should also be required to pay their fair share," said the unit of Reliance, which is run by Asia's richest man Mukesh Ambani. Reliance, which carries 55% share of India's total data traffic, contends that requiring internet companies to compensate for network usage will ensure a level playing field. Jio said there is a "near consensus" among telecom operators across the globe on this subject.
Yeah, nup (Score:5, Insightful)
It's the same answer you get when any telecom anywhere in the world tries this flawed argument: your subcribers are the ones consuming the bandwidth, not the big tech companies, and the subscribers are the ones paying for connectivity.
If you think you need more money to upgrade your shitty networks (instead of paying massive dividends to shareholders) then try putting your plan prices up... and see what happens.
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How about they charge subscribers extra to access YouTube.
That would be against common carrier rules. Similar to censorship. Not a good idea.
Or just limit everyone to 1GB/month.
That would be stupid. Some people may want to transfer more and may be willing to pay for it.
there is no good solution that isn't unfair to some subscribers
There is a good solution which is fair. ISPs should charge a flat monthly fee for speed and an additional fee for number of GB transferred in the month.
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Right, so the government wants common-carrier rules in order to protect consumers from ISPs forcing them to pay extra for specific services, in order to maintain competition and stop subscribers being ripped off.
But when it comes to protecting consumers from price rises due to popular services consuming massive amounts of bandwidth, the government shouldn't get involved.
That doesn't seem very logically consisitent.
As for your idea of charging extra for data over a certain amount, that's what I mean with a 1
Re:Yeah, nup (Score:4, Interesting)
Netflix, YT said "alright, will you charge me less or not at all if we put a cache system inside your network?", so they did.
So, what ends up happening is that the most viewed videos get stored/cached on the internal servers of that ISP, and the bandwidth over the internet is reduced, which is where the ISPs complaint was. They had to pay more money to increase their pipe to the internet, so the customers could watch the same movie they were all pulling down.
Wonder why Indias ISPs dont do this, or are they complaining about something else I wonder.
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Caching helps with the backhaul to the internet, but not with the part between the cache and the local exchange where the individual subscriber lines come from.
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Re:Yeah, nup (Score:5, Insightful)
Its simple. They want part of your internet bill to be hidden inside your netflix subsctription.
Re: Yeah, nup (Score:2)
It already is. Netflix's internet costs, power bill, rent, etc. are already part of your fees.
All this would change is how connectivity costs scale with usage. So you already pay more, for more bandwidth. These services also do, so in theory, a larger amount of your Netflix bill already goes to covering their internet service costs, than your Spotify bill because they don't pay as much per-customer. This scheme would magnify that difference.
It might make sense? If we want moar faster internets, someone migh
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I assure you, that is NOT why the likes of Netflix and YT put cache servers at ISPs. It was never a thing for ISPs to charge those providers.
Re: Yeah, nup (Score:2)
There is no extra cost to the ISP for the bandwidth consumed. When you are connected with a gigabit switch and the wiring install is done, does your switch require more management once you break certain traffic limits? Does it require daily maintenance because you visit YouTube? Even at a larger scale, if they promised bandwidth in a contract, theyâ(TM)d better be able to deliver. What is happening in many of these cases is government-created monopolies are overcommitting and then asking governments fo
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That's not how ISPs work. They pay for backhaul from local exchanges, and then from their servers to the wider internet. They typically pay for a given amount of bandwidth, and have to keep increasing it to cope with demand or their server gets very slow.
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ISPs pay for transit but so do their subscribers. It is definitely their fault if they oversell by too high a ratio. It does not matter what flows over the pipe if they're delivering data to their end customers. And really, transit is relatively cheap. There's plenty of capacity. And therefore they have to invent reasons to try to charge people more.
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Exactly, you pay for the bandwidth of the connections (eg. 10x10G) at the exchange (I worked at several large Internet Exchanges, Amsterdam, Brussels and Paris). However much or little you use of said bandwidth, the exchange does not care. There is no per-packet charge which is what a GB/month cap does.
What is happening is that ISPs are overcommitting their 10x10G (eg. you sell 100Mbps to 1M users, with an overcommit of 200:1) and instead of buying 500 Gbps they are adding usage caps and overcommitting 500:
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Almost no consumers want to pay for the same committed and peak information rates. They want a lot of throughput for a usually-small fraction of the time, and only want to pay for the infrastructure and carriage/transit costs for their average use. The ISP knows the peak usage tends to clump across users, so they overbuild a bit and use some combination of throttling, prioritization and overage charges to fit the demand to what they can supply.
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Why not just charge all data access by gb used and not for speed delivered. Give me the fastest internet you can and I'll just pay for how many bytes I actually use a month. Now we just incentivized providing faster connections.
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The issue is that when the ISP's backhaul gets overloaded, a lot of people's connections become unusable. Not just slow, they drop packets or delay them so much that services like gaming don't work. I've experienced it, some years ago, and it's hell.
Any kind of limit will discourage people from using services, especially new high bandwidth ones. India obviously wants the Indian tech industry to do well and develop its own services like video on demand and video games with 50GB day one patches. It's also a c
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Then they should be deploying FQ or RED or similar queuing discplines that allow for the games, etc. to still have low bandwidth while others have high-delay high-throughput stuff.
Failing to deploy FQ or similar will always result in this problem, and it is pretty stupid at this point.
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The problem is everything just looks like an HTTPS stream now.
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A lot of ISPs do charge for GB, at least in excess of some amount per month. However, peak traffic times tends to be similar for lots of users, and the cost to meet that demand is a function of rate rather than total volume.
Incentives would be aligned better with demand pricing for bandwidth, but it's somewhat hard for customers to predict how much bandwidth an episode of their favorite streaming show will use: most protocols have some mechanism to automatically throttle traffic in response to network cond
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Knowing how much you are going to use would quickly filter down to the content providers. You would open amazon video and see a 'this video is X amount of data'. Which sadly could drive more compression and worsen the experience.
In terms of peak rate, this is already a case of the ISP having it both ways. They limit your speed for peak rate and limit your use after peak rate with data caps. I'm just proposing we pick one or the other, but not both.
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Ooops, you just incentivized sending as much data as possible down the pipe, even if the customer didn't explicitly ask for it. Ad banners will practically pay for themselves, and so will analytics, spam emails, etc.
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Why not just charge all data access by gb used and not for speed delivered. Give me the fastest internet you can and I'll just pay for how many bytes I actually use a month. Now we just incentivized providing faster connections.
Because bytes aren't a consumable like water or gasoline. The cost for a given amount of bandwidth is the same regardless of what the utilization is. "Unused bytes" can't be saved to be used later.
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Yet comcast has data caps to stop 'abuse'....
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Who pays to connect YouTube to the Internet? Who pays to connect you to the internet? Why would YouTube pay twice, once for them and once for you?
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YouTube already pays twice. They pay for cache servers located at some ISPs and at CDNs. They pay a huge amount of money to make sure that YouTube is fast and a good experience for users.
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So you want them to pay 3 times?
What business are ISPs in? How does a consumer oriented ISP make money?
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Someone has to pay, and there is no good solution that isn't unfair to some subscribers or doesn't create undesirable and unpleasant bandwidth limits.
They certainly imply that they are nearing some sort of bandwidth limitation. But notice that they're not saying it. If they won't outright say it, you know they're not facing any such issue.
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How about we nationalize the local loop/easement provided to carriers or limit their investments to providing the infrastructure. No vertical markets. Local loop prices standardized with no preferential service. Improve the network or pay out profits to shareholders.
The cables running to my house haven't been updated in 20 years. The last ISP investment in my neighbourhood was provided by tax dollars. I can purchase the same service for less in less developed countries. There is always an excuse why it can'
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That's similar to what happened in much of Europe. Local loops, if not already state owned, were split off from ISPs and made to offer everyone the same access for the same price. It certainly helped increase competition in the markets - most Europeans have a choice of many ISPs.
The downside is that the companies that owned the local loops sometimes didn't invest much in them. Around here I was stuck with slow ADSL on an ancient copper, or possibly aluminium, line. Fortunately we are starting to get a new f
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In reality it has played out really well. While there is little chance of the prices going down and the roll out for some has been slow, the reality is the country has upgraded to a high speed fibre service for almost all people in a fairly short time fra
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"Or just limit everyone to 1GB/month."
Charging subscribers and *not* providing service sounds pretty dumb., but I'm in favor of it.
It will not take much effort to inspire real competition in urban areas, and only slightly more to unleash lower band 5G for fixed service. Even the illusion of competition might improve things...
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"there is no good solution that isn't unfair to some subscribers"
Charge by the byte. How is that unfair to anyone? I get people want "unlimited" data for cheap, but nothing is free and the fairest is to have everyone pay for what they consume.
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Paying by speed, instead of data used is m
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Paying per byte doesn't have to be "per byte" exactly. If 75% of people use less than X GB/month, then make that the A tier plan. And if 95% use less than Y GB/month, make that the B tier and charge more. Then charge an extra amount for large enough increments that people can see where they fall in and budget accordingly. Light users pay one rate, medium pay a little more, and heavy user pay more as their consumption grows. That extra can cover the extra infrastructure demands those heavy users generate.
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Here in New Zealand the norm, for fibre connections, is to have different tiers of bandwidth, with all users having 'unlimited' data. So a slow 100Mbs connection is cheaper than a medium speed 1Gbs connection. It means if you are more able to consume more of the limited upstream bandwidth y
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You don't understand. It's obvious that they will make the subscriber part free. We'll have free Internet from then on, it's a good deal!
Woo hoo! (Score:2)
And then peer-to-peer protocols take off.
Build once, sell many (Score:2)
It's the same the world over. Telecoms "invest" in building infrastructure.
THEN they want consumers to pay more to ACCESS that same inrastructure bot NOT TO USE it. Think 0Mbps and 0GB/mo.
THEN they want consumers to pay to USE that data (think 100Mbps and 5GB/mo)...
AND they want that same data paid for by the other side of that pull/push transsaction.
and as if that's not enough
if it's your business model to have data people want, then you're "big tech" and should totally reimburse them for having built th
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Spot on.
I used to work in telecom and this was basically the reasoning. The so called "Over The Top" big tech companies were seen as raping the telcom operators of their lucrative business and in the end someone had to pay for the brand new infrastructure investments.
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They should be viewing big sites as suppliers, not customers.
They sell data to customers. They get that data from the tech companies. You don't bill your suppliers for moving their product.
They already do (Score:4, Informative)
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Imagine if you shipped a package and paid the shipping fees, but when the recipient goes to pick it up, they have to pay again to receive the package - this is how our Internet fees work as of today. But then the receiving company says "Hey, we should be getting some of that 'shipping' money, too, as our customers
Re: They already do (Score:1)
They do, they pay a differential based on up/down ratios.
The telecom companies are fully compensated for the data already today. They'd have all gone out of business otherwise a long time ago.
The current set up doesn't let them play too many games with the backhaul rates, so the executives don't get one-off bonuses that they can game the shit out to get every year.
Free Internet in India (Score:2)
corner (Score:1)
So the guys have driven themselves into a corner with flatrate offers and price wars, and now expect that someone bails them out, yes?
Tell me again how we don't like socialism. When companies have stopped being bailed out, and rescued with taxpayer money constantly, or like these bastards, essentialy try to run a protection racket - "nice website you've got there. Would be such a shame if nobody could visit it anymore..."
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Yes, in economic terms, they're seeking rent. Contrary to your assertion, they're not seeking a bailout from public funds.
You missed the "or". Because that's exactly what I was saying.
We do not like socialism because it adds even more rent seekers.
Does it? The largest amount of rent seeking in history was not under socialism, but feudalism. Specifically, the Ancient Regime in late medieval France. Rent seeking is a function of economy, largely present in zero-sum economies with little to no growth where it is the better individual option over investment.
But you seem to have a...
socialism tries to ensure a stable environment where customers pay more to get less.
...specific definition of socialism. You mean Soviet-Style communism and you are right in that. Full-on communism
Make it work both ways (Score:2)
No problem! (Score:1)
The right method (Score:2)
They have it backward. On one side you have content consumers, on the other side content providers. In between telecom providers transporting content and making profit from this transaction. Presently both content providers and consumers pay fees to telecom providers largely exceeding the transport costs.
In an ideally regulated world, what would be correct and better for all is that telecom providers charge the effective transport costs plus reasonable margin (20%), while content consumers pay a reasona
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Exactly. They should be viewing content providers as their suppliers. They supply the product that the ISP is selling to the customer.
Hilarious (Score:2)
Asia's richest man, with 55% of the market, promises to level the playing field.
trucking (Score:2)
Would you expect Walmart to start charging every delivery truck that delivers goods to their store? I mean, Walmart has to have a receiving dock and staff to handle deliveries. Walmart's customers can't be responsible for all of these shipping costs. Certainly, there cannot be any cost of doing business for Walmart, so trucking companies must pay.
Yeah, it is as dumb as it sounds.
For India, I suspect it's more complicated. (Score:2)
At the risk of treating a vast populace like Indians with a single brush, India's per capita annual income is... $2400? With 450M subscribers, a significant portion of the population is accounted for, so perhaps this generalization isn't totally flawed.
Champagne tastes on a beer budget. How much more do you think can be extracted from folks falling in the middle? Probably not a lot. So asking the users to pay for it not generally helpful even if it makes logical sense. Given that the providers of these stre
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Wouldn't the profits that the streaming service providers (SSP) are making in India, have to come out that same $2400 as well? Either ways, Indians have to pay for what they consume. ISPs are merely saying, who ever is at the other end of the pipe making money by what ever means, that money belongs to us.
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The user already pays for all of it. If you assume the user's costs will not increase, then it's a push-pull over dividing that revenue. The ISP is saying, "If you want this gravy train to stay on the tracks, help us out."
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Think about it, the service providers are only sending data that the ISP's customer asked for, so that data usage is the
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You have a very narrow definition of "business". It's perfectly normal for parties "around" the purchaser to make deals. Especially when actions by all parties are necessary for the purchaser to relinquish their money.
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"There is no business relationship between the tech service providers and Indian telcos.
But there is. It's a dependent one. The telcos have to keep pace with the population growth and rising user base, and maintain services levels that allow the streaming services to continue to add users without saturating the networks. If they don't do that, the users may find their streaming is unreliable or disrupted, and not only would the streamers not grow their user base, they could see it shrink.
Not all business r
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Just make them pay for advertising bandwidth (Score:2)
End users don't actually want their money to pay for advertising traffic, so it seems fair for tech companies to pay for any end user bandwidth they use for ads. That probably accounts for 90% of bandwidth anyway!
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use an ad block.
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If only it were that easy. Web sites these days are getting more insistent that you turn off your ad blocker software to access their content. And they are also writing additional code to work around ad blockers. I use AdBlockPlus, and there's still a whole lot of stuff that gets through.
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That sounds like a lot more work than just ignoring ads.
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None of what said justifies charging tech companies a second time to send the data. The tech companies paid their ISP to send those ads so what you are saying is pure and simple double dipping.
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Ha! Different website! As if you could just exchange one site for another. "Gee, too many ads on facebook, I think I'll switch to...uh...instagram, or maybe TikTok, or...oh wait, they ALL have ads.
By the way, I don't mind a reasonable amount of static ads. But when you have videos everywhere, that autoplay, and start playing sound if you so much as hover over them, or jiggle and dance trying to get you to look at them...there are limits.
None of what said justifies charging tech companies a second time to send the data. The tech companies paid their ISP to send those ads so what you are saying is pure and simple double dipping.
I disagree. I don't buy bandwidth so advertisers can send me their vide
Near concensus for a pay hike too (Score:2)
Jio said there is a "near consensus" among telecom operators across the globe on this subject.
Well, their is "near consensus" among software developers too, that they all badly need a 100% pay hike.
As the philosopher Jagger once said (Score:2)