Cable Groups Fight Data Cap Regulation With Restaurant Analogies (arstechnica.com) 125
Cable industry lobbyists have urged the Federal Communications Commission to avoid regulating data caps and overage charges, comparing broadband plans to restaurant menus in a filing last week.
NCTA - The Internet & Television Association argued that usage-based pricing benefits low-income consumers by providing cheaper options, pushing back against advocacy groups who say data caps disproportionately harm price-sensitive users. The group likened different pricing models to restaurants offering tasting menus, buffets, or unlimited soup and salad.
Consumer advocates, including Public Knowledge and Free Press, countered that low-income households often have no choice but to accept data caps since lower-priced plans typically include usage limits. They cited examples of users like Gloria Simmons, a Georgia retiree who pays $60 monthly for internet service plus $10 for every 50 gigabytes over her data allowance.
NCTA - The Internet & Television Association argued that usage-based pricing benefits low-income consumers by providing cheaper options, pushing back against advocacy groups who say data caps disproportionately harm price-sensitive users. The group likened different pricing models to restaurants offering tasting menus, buffets, or unlimited soup and salad.
Consumer advocates, including Public Knowledge and Free Press, countered that low-income households often have no choice but to accept data caps since lower-priced plans typically include usage limits. They cited examples of users like Gloria Simmons, a Georgia retiree who pays $60 monthly for internet service plus $10 for every 50 gigabytes over her data allowance.
Makes perfect sense (Score:5, Funny)
The group likened different pricing models to restaurants offering tasting menus, buffets, or unlimited soup and salad.
So, they're saying Verizon's 1's and 0's taste better than Comcast's 1's and 0's to my computer? Yea, makes perfect sense to me.
Comastic Re:Makes perfect sense (Score:1)
So, they're saying Verizon's 1's and 0's taste better than Comcast's 1's and 0's to my computer? Yea, makes perfect sense to me.
If one of those companies always sends its 1's and 0's with good-enough fidelity and the other one doesn't (thereby triggering resends when the error-correction is overwhelmed), then yeah, my computer might consider one of them to have "tastier" 1's and 0's.
As to which one is "tastier," I'll leave that to Verizon and Comcast customers to answer.
--
Non-humorous version: Signal quality is important.
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That's easy. Whichever one uses gold-plated Monster cables!
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"Whichever one uses gold-plated Monster cables!"
dammit, I was going to write that!
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They both taste like almonds.
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Spectrum keeps sending me 2's, which my computer keeps throwing up.
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The restaurant analogy for internet usage is stupid.
When someone with 100 dollars and someone with 1000 dollars are confronted with a $200 internet bill. The person with 100 dollars just doesn't pay it and you end up with 6 months of collections and harassment trying to collect $200 from someone who doesn't have it, and will rack up a $1200 bill before you cut off their service. The person with $1000 will balk at having to pay $200 for internet usage they're not using.
Data caps should not exist, only the pi
Better analogy (Score:3)
Glass of water. Never been to a restaurant where I have been refused a refill because I am drinking too much water and making it expensive for other customers.
Well, that helps (Score:1)
"Consumer advocates, including Public Knowledge and Free Press, countered that low-income households often have no choice but to accept data caps since lower-priced plans typically include usage limits."
So much better if we regulate it so that you can only offer plans they can't afford.
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The other option is to have rest of the users to subsidize those worst off.
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Maybe just don't allow companies to profit from worst off, so hard.
Maybe make internet service into essential infrastructure, like electrical power and water. The profit then comes from providing a service to the government, which then provides it to the citizens.
That way, profit is limited to costs plus a reasonable markup, instead of costs plus "as much as we can possibly get away with by dividing up the market while we confuse, gaslight, cheat, and outright lie to our customers".
Essential services should never be left in the hands of the private sector - especially when
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That way, profit is limited to costs plus a reasonable markup
The challenge is costs also include a fixed return on assets, so utilities have an incentive to capitalize all costs and return a fixed % for ever, or until they get rid of the asset. That old, unused fiber in the ground? Still making 8% since it is in the asset base.
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Every quarter, Verizon, AT&T, Comcast, etc., have to report a fat profit to their Wall Street overlords. That fat profit rewards shareholders, quarter after quarter. It does not reward ratepayers.
Utilities were once charged with high reliability, security, and reasonable amounts of return. This isn't the case any more, and hasn't been for a long time.
Dark fiber? Nah, that's no fun to light up. Constant consolidation with the ruse of third party carriers means they are constantly trying to lock up the ma
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But then who will artificially limit supply, so as to keep prices inflated, thus transferring the maximum amount of wealth to the investor class? Think stock buybacks!
"AT&T plans to put at least $40 billion of cash toward dividends and buybacks over the next three years, with those share repurchases representing a new part of the equation"
https://www.morningstar.com/ne... [morningstar.com]
Corporations are going pretty nuts with the stock buybacks in the last 10 years. I seems to me like setting cash on fire and throwing
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The biggest investors win the biggest. Everyone else (ie labor) gets zero, nothing, zilch.
You say that like it's a bug, not a feature.
Corporations are going pretty nuts with the stock buybacks in the last 10 years.
I'm sure all that money we're pumping into them in the form of subsidies and tax breaks will start trickling down any day now. Any. Day. Now.
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Corporations are going pretty nuts with the stock buybacks in the last 10 years. I seems to me like setting cash on fire and throwing it out the window.
Only if the corporation in question is circling the drain. Otherwise it reduces the number of (still viable) shares in circulation and thus drives up the stock price.
But it's really better than dividends for the investors.
Better as in not immediately taxable, so yes.
The biggest investors win the biggest. Everyone else (ie labor) gets zero, nothing, zilch.
A good company pays a fair wage to its employees. Whatever is left in the bank after that (and other expenses) belongs to the shareholders. The employees can become shareholders if they wish, by purchasing the company stock. Many companies have stock purchase plans that allow them to purchase at a di
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You might be onto something here, but this needs refining.
Here's what's happening in a 3rd world country, as far as infrastructure goes: https://www.net-city.ro/en/ [net-city.ro]
The services themselves are still provided by the private sector, but the infrastructure isn't.
With that being said, of course, like everything else managed by the City Hall (public sector), some areas are delayed and some are not even planned as of yet.
Much to my surprise, they started working on laying Netcity underground cable sheaths as well
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That is a lie.
Publicly owned utilities with a monopoly eventually get management bloat, but ultimately (See the post office) they provide a high quality service at all times, to everyone, equally.
Privately owned utilities outsource everything (Either by spinning off, or hiring consultanting firms who demand their own pound of flesh) until they own no part of their core business and eventually die from the debt they take on.
The only businesses that should be government owned:
- Health Care (Hospitals, Clinics
Re: Well, that helps (Score:2)
Reality has shown that municipal electricity utility rates in California are about 1/3 the rates of the 3 large private investor owned utilities.
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I don't buy they can't offer plans low-income houses can afford without data caps.
I moved 3 years ago from Comcast to Metronet. I pay $127 5gb/5gb internet with no data caps and I used to spend $109 for 1gb/20mb internet from comcast. I could easily drop to 500mb/500mb for $70 or even go down to a still perfectly usable 150/150 if I was very price-conscious. I see no reason why a reasonably priced unlimited data plan can't exist.
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And that $109 comcast had data caps!
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You actually can't get the same service from comcast. Comcast does not offer even a 500mb/500mb plan. They are asymetric. Even their 1gb/20mb plan costs more before the 'unlimited cap fee' than then 1gb/1gb plan offered by my provider. My real point however is that at each tier my provider offers higher quality service for less. The 5gb/5gb service I currently have costs almost the same as comcast's 1gb/20mb service when you account for the data cap removal.
I loved the day metronet came to town. The number
So we already know they can (Score:2)
I haven't looked in a while but the last time I looked they could charge $20 a month for unlimited internet and still come out ahead. It's probably going on 10 years so let's double that. So they can charge $40 a month for completely unlimited high speed internet and they'd be making a solid profit.
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I haven't looked in a while but the last time I looked they could charge $20 a month for unlimited internet and still come out ahead. It's probably going on 10 years so let's double that. So they can charge $40 a month for completely unlimited high speed internet and they'd be making a solid profit.
That may be true, in specific markets, but it's not a universal truth. I'm not trying to defend the major ISPs, but it just isn't that simple overall. I've brought it up in other stories, but that wouldn't even cover the wages for my employer, let alone maintaining and improving infrastructure.
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I am a modest eater and I know I am ripped off when someone passes me with a big pile of food on their plate.
When I subscribe to internet service, it is offered at various 'speeds'. When I pick an item off a restaurant menu, I get a certain amount of food.
ISP want to then charge you extra for finishing the full plate they've served you. Yes, you ordered that off the menu, but you're only allowed to eat, say, 25% of it.
If you're a modest consumer of data, then get a lower speed, and get a lower rate. But letting ISPs charge double for bandwidth, first in the monthly fee for the data rate, and then on usage for actu
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And if you don't use much data but want that data fast?
The real problem is selling speed without mentioning how much data, they should both be advertised up front, or at least when you sign up given various clear choices, speed and data.
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Pro and Con (Score:1)
I'm generally against data caps as they seem somewhat useless to me.
However, in our house of four, with a 1.5TB monthly data cap, the only time I've seen us get anywhere near the cap is when the whole house was sick for several weeks, and someone was staying home streaming 4K movies and TV shows for a good chunk of the day. Even then, we didn't go over the cap, but got within a hundred GB or so. I think Xfinity's cap is 1.2TB, which seems a bit low to me.
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Does your ISP offer a reasonable overage plan?
"Reasonable" would be that overages are billed pro-rata or less, so if you go 10% over, your bill is increased by 10% or less.
WOW (Score:2)
We have WOW. The overage charge is $10 per 50GB over. 1.5TB averages out to around 50GB per day, so it's $10 per extra day of data, I guess. Not great, but again, as a household of four, under normal conditions, we never come near the cap.
Wait, they are like restaurants? (Score:5, Funny)
Wait, they are like restaurants? So I can choose any restaurant I want to eat from? That's great news! I thought they'd have wanted to keep their monopolies going!
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More like restaurants in a hotel that doesn't have any places to eat nearby. You can eat at any restaurant you like as long as it's the hotel's.
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s/hotel/cruise chip/g; # and that's dead on
Allergies (Score:2)
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Restaurants are not without rules either. They have to provide allergy information upon request and they better not lie about it. This openness should be a good rule for cable companies as well.
Where I am restaurants simply list a bunch of allergens that may be present, even if they aren't, to be safe. Completely truthful and totally useless.
Airport restaurants (Score:2)
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Wait, they are like restaurants? So I can choose any restaurant I want to eat from? That's great news! I thought they'd have wanted to keep their monopolies going!
Yeah... When I go to a restaurant and want chicken, I have to buy the entire meat package which contains chicken, pork, beef and turkey even though I don't like pork (and not the biggest fan of Turkey either). Just want some fries... forget it... because that's how restaurants work, right? guys? right?
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You got your funny, but I think you missed the joke. They only want you to have ONE restaurant, whichever one the "they" in question are running. Like Microsoft offering different versions of Windows rather that allowing different competing companies to offer competing OSes based on a 'Windows standard' negotiated in public.
F'n auto play videos (Score:5, Insightful)
Data caps wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't for the goddamned auto-play videos on half the news and informational websites out there.
And the 'free games' that download a ton of ads to show you... can they just do some caching? How the hell are you sucking down a GB in an hour to show the same 4 ads repeatedly?
(In about 2017, I switched over to just using phone tethering, capped at 100GB/month... but when T-Mobile bought Sprint, they dropped it to 50GB/month, which is tight even when you're NOT streaming movies these days because of all of the bloated crap out there)
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Ublock origin, solving ISP (?!) problems since... it was first introduced?
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You want data caps? Fine, as long as you install a NIST calibrated meter on the internet line. Just like my power and water have calibrated traceable meters installed on them.
This way the definition of traffic gets to be properly defined - are we talking about the IP packets themselves or are we going to include all the headers.
Cellular providers often include headers in their data calculations, which bumps up the consumption by around 10%.
Because right now, it's just a number, and there's no way to guage t
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Data caps wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't for the goddamned auto-play videos on half the news and informational websites out there.
You're touching on a very important point- The internet, the way you connect to the internet, the content you receive from the internet, the way your machine utilizes the internet... etc NONE of that was built with metering in mind. Period. There was never a thought about, 'scarcity of data', simply the rate of data transfers.
Not only does that mean there's no fucking way it's possible to fairly bill for that sort of usage, it also means any attempts to make it work that way are opaque to the customers.
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The internet, the way you connect to the internet, the content you receive from the internet, the way your machine utilizes the internet... etc NONE of that was built with metering in mind.
Every single interface on my system keeps track of the amount of data which has been transferred.
It's not difficult at all for a router to track how much data went to a given address.
you cannot verify the ISP's metering is accurate
This is only true if you are using the ISP's router and you have no access to the WAN interface. If you put your own router in between them, it's simple to log how much you transfer. Every phone does it!
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Yes, we all know computers can track data. What I said was it wasn't designed with metered use in mind. For example- Does your device go into a low-bandwidth mode at night? Do you get a heads up when your usage exceeds a threshold? What about when an ISP plays games with video you're streaming, can you do an audit that takes shit like that into account? I think you'll have a good solid answer to most if not all of those questions, afterall this isn't about whether or not the tech is up to it. But we
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I was addressing the claim that "there's no fucking way it's possible to fairly bill for that sort of usage". Of course there is: Bill everyone either the same, or based on what they can afford, depending on who you ask.
Whether the non-savvy relatives can audit their bandwidth use is a good question. I suspect the answer is no on most platforms, same as whether the device goes into a low-bandwidth mode at night. My phone can do both things, but I'd have to do some research to see if there's convenient featu
Re:F'n auto play videos AMEN! (Score:2)
I use my mobile hotspot for working remote and I have to ONLY use mine for work and I get within a 1 GB of hitting my 50GB cap and that is cutting usage where I can. We have to use my wife's if we want to do anything on the Internet outside of my work.
F! T-Mobile and the horse they ro
Re: F'n auto play videos (Score:2)
grocery stores / others has weights and measures t (Score:2)
grocery stores / others has weights and measures testing that meter and the customer gets to see the meter live no delay, also they are not allowed to add overhead to your bill.
Someone has got to pay for the internet (Score:1)
The reality is that the more data you get, the more you do cost your ISP. I'd be interested to know what proportion of an ISP's costs are hardware maintenance, and what proportion does arise from data transfer.
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Data transfer is almost free once hardware is in place. Costs are upfront - planning inteconnect capacity between each point, installing relevant routers and such, configuring everything.
Once it's done, it's basically free power, in the same way that once solar is installed it's free power. Except it's way harder to design a proper ISP network layout than a solar power plant, and a chance of overinvesting or underinvesting in a node because you guessed the needed speed for this or that interconnect wrong is
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Please explain this assertion. I manage a few different networks, and no matter how little or how much data is flowing through them, the cost per year varies only by pennies (for the slight difference in electricity caused by the load).
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I'm not on the ISPs' side in this, but: it costs in the sense that it costs you nothing to push more data over existing infrastructure up to the point you run out of bandwidth. Then you have 2 choices: cap usage so you can distribute available bandwidth amongst your endpoints, or expand your infrastructure at great cost. That potential future cost has to be amortized over the prices you charge now so you can afford it when the time comes. Hence the "cost" of bandwidth. It's recouping past infra spendin
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When the network inevitably becomes saturated, you will have to spend money to upgrade it. The amortized cost of the upgrade is the incremental cost of each unit of data flowing through the network.
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Oh boo hoo. They all received tens of billions in federal subsidy to build out high speed data networks that we never got.
I'll start playing the sad violin for them when they actually deliver what they were paid for decades ago.
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That money is gone, there's no point in bringing it up now.
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Easy solution. Get rid of the ads. How many Gbs per day would be saved if ads weren't around? How much would that reduce your bill?
The reality is companies would find another excuse to charge their exorbitant rates. There is no excuse too far fetched for them to charge you more. Witness Verizon increasing one of their fees [theverge.com] . . . just because.
If you claim to be a buffet... (Score:2)
...you ought to BE a buffet.
It goes both ways.
It's rather simple really:
JUST DO NOT LIE.
Wow, Gloria must be (Score:1)
Gloria must be watching a lot of porn...
Caps are differential pricing (Score:2)
Imagine you have a plane that holds 100 passengers and it costs $10,000 to operate a flight. If you could sell all the seats for $100 you wouldn't make any profit so you wouldn't do the flight. Now if you charged $110 you might only sell 60 seats so you still can't operate the flight. There might even b
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Oh come on, 50 GB is plenty (Score:5, Funny)
That covers at least 12 hours of Windows telemetry.
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Data caps don't need to exist! (Score:2)
How much soup do you need? (Score:2)
Let's say you have 1M customers and each customer wants 1 bowl of soup per day. You know some will eat a little more or a little less but you need around 1M bowls of soup per day. Even though your customers ultimately pay for all of the soup they eat, you find it expensive to invest in the equipment to provide 1M bowls of soup per day. So you decide to cheap out and only make 900K bowls of soup and charge more for people that want more than 1 bowl while counting on many to have none. When people complain th
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To continue their analogy... (Score:2)
I ought to be able to go into the CableCo "restaurant" and pay for INDIVIDUAL television channels!
As it stands now, to continue their analogy, If I go into CableCo's "restaurant" and just want a side of fries and nothing else, they'll tell me "sorry, can't do that. You have to buy three burgers, two steaks, five drinks, six sides, fifteen desserts and four adult beverages, that's our only option to get fries."
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well the law did come in forced just the adult beverages (HBO) to be offered with all plans even the very basic service / line fee.
It is like a restaurant for the ISPs (Score:2)
Stupid analogy to distract from tech argument (Score:5, Insightful)
I only wish . . . (Score:2)
I only wish that my "unlimited" data plan with T-Mobile still worked like an "all you can eat" salad bar. I can eat a helluva lot more data in one sitting, please.
About 13 -14 years ago it was actually unlimited. I could watch streaming videos, play streaming audio, and work . . . all at the same time from anywhere in the city - no need to find a hotspot because it was in my pocket. I absolutely loved it. Then they changed the rules and I had to get the least crappy cable service at home even though it wasn
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Well . . . I was in NYC in 2010 and T-Mo had great coverage all over the city as long as I wasn't in a train tunnel. 4G, I think. I was using it (as a hotspot or dongled to it) to watch Netflix at home, among other things.
Shouldn't you be drawing swastikas or something equally useful instead of questioning reality?
Throttled data (Score:2)
What's wrong with unlimited data but throttled after certain amount?
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They do this to force people to pay for cable and not use streaming by making streaming unusable.
Don't forget Comcast used to charge a $54.99/month "no-tv" fee; effectively making you pay for television if you didn't want it.
what US$43 gets you in NZ (Score:3)
The ISP don't want fiber to win (Score:2)
$60/month doesn't sound "low cost" (Score:3)
The idea of low cost involving data caps would make sense if the cost was actually LOW. Where are the $20/month plans in the USA?
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Not profitable so they won't do it.
The businesses are not in the business of providing affordable service; any company that uses that excuse is flat out lying. Business are in the business to provide value for shareholders.
No one in government cares about the poor. Plain and simple. No one is going to make the companies care.
Profits first, people last. That is the American way....and it's only going to get worse.
Don't take it (Score:2)
All these things telecoms says about "data caps". It's all BS. All of it.
Internet is not water or food. It is not a limited resource. it's a service, an an mostly automated one. Thus it's in fact unlimited. It has been made to be like that.
What you US really need for a better internet is one thing only: competition.
I'll give the example of what happened here in Brazil. Yes, Brazil, South America, corruption, poverty, corruption, violence, corruption, yadda yadda yadda, but it seems for the stories here in /
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Offering unlimited 600+ Gb/s
My mistake, it's 600+ MB/s.
More distraction (Score:3)
Once again, US government refuses to plug the hole in the boat and throws the engine and life-boats overboard, to prevent sinking. If you think the US government is gutless now, wait until every news outlet is arse-kissing a gang of billionaires in Washington, DC (and its Department of Greedy Entrepreneurs). Putting a salad on dog-shit is still eating dog-shit. Do you need more metaphors?
The problem is, townsfolk can't choose between a Thai restaurant and a Chinese restaurant, there's only one restaurant in town and it puts the same ingredient, dog-shit, in every meal.
Internet isn't a right (Score:2)
While it would be significantly cheaper if the government owned and operated the telecommunications infrastructure and defended it from foreign countries, the people who charge you too much to connect your home to a switched network have paid off all the politicians they need to to keep themselves rich.
Most Caps (Score:2)
Are in the 1500 to 2000 GB per month range.
A family of four that streams will consume this in television alone in a month.
They need to explain why this arbritary number seems to line up with wanting to protect business. They're doing this to protect another side of their business because they got themselves in to a conflict of interest.
They need to be cable, or internet; but not both. If they want to be both; then they need to have stronger scrutiny to make sure they're not fucking customers over as they've
comcast makes you pay more to have your own equipm (Score:2)
comcast makes you pay more to have your own equipment with unlimited vs renting with unlimited
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This is actually becoming common even in EU, through mostly through backdoor means. For example I have an acquaintance household with EURODOCSIS 3.1 cable. Cable modem this ISP offers (Chinesium Sagemcom F-3896) has a known flaw where it burns itself out in about 2 years (which incidentally equals its warranty). Pretty much everyone I know who is even marginally knowledgeable (small minority of customers of this ISP) just gets Fritzbox 6660 for about the same price for a much better device, then registers i
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Neither are cheap (KPN 200 MB symmetrical at €65, Yousee for €47), they include Email and in Holland also a News server but they are not throttled and you are free to use any modem, I'm happy with a Fritzbox.
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Yeah, most places are still free to use your own modem. But they're clearly experimenting with how to get more people to buy from ISP only.
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Never happen. Nobody but maybe some legacy DSL guys even offer speeds that slow for the most part. Why? Because it would destroy their bottom line.
70% of households probably would be fine with ~25Mbps down, and >5Mbps up. With contemporary codecs there are 2 HD video streams there comfortably or one person working and others consuming media.
I am certain if ISPs were offing $30 for 30 or $60 for 100, they'd find a good deal of trouble getting $60 outa people.
I know I know, games DLC but my *paystation*
OT your sig (Score:1)
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY!
I'd be interested in what you propose to replace the income we get from the income tax, but having that discussion is wayyyy off-topic for this thread on ISP data caps - unless your plan is to tax internet data usage :). If you've already written this up, please reply with a link. If you write this up later, consider changing your .sig to point to the writeup, I'll see it the next time I read one of your messages.
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I'd be interested in what you propose to replace the income we get from the income tax
That's the 16th. The 17th is the direct election of Senators.
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Any discussion of "we need to provide cheaper options for low-income people" is incomplete without a discussion of lower-capacity pipes.
Any such discussion is incomplete without a discussion of monopolies and oligopolies and their effect on competition. Sure, it's like a tasting menu or whatever the heck their absurd example was, but only in a Demolition Man future where every restaurant is a Taco Bell. You don't have to move to a new house to get food from a different restaurant. You do have to move to a new house to get Internet service from a different ISP, typically, unless you include prohibitively expensive options like Starlink or
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100% this.
I dream of a future where my only possible internet option isn't Comcast or Starlink. I can't even do LTE because LTE is "geographically challenged" where my house is. DSL isn't even an option because when my 8-house subdivision was built, they didn't even install PSTN copper - there's no phone jacks in the house, no demarc on the side, and no phone service in the utility vault.
To extend their deeply flawed restaurant metaphor, it's as if I live in a walled community that I cannot leave, and the
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ISPs don't really charge customers to supply them with bandwidth. They run a toll scam. They charge customers to stop throttling and rationing them.