11 ms·

California Introduces Its Own Bill to Protect Net Neutrality

291 points by MilnerRoute 9y ago

staunch 9y ago
Comcast and AT&T set data caps at 1 TB per month, knowing that we will all soon be doing much more traffic than that. Every year bandwidth requirements go up and it's accelerating. Home internet access in the US went from unlimited usage to capped with $200 overage fees overnight. We need an "Effective Sustained Rate" law that says something like: If you sell internet access with a 1 terabyte cap, you have to market it as a 3 megabit connection. The effective sustained rate. Or preferably, just outlaw data caps entirely.
- noncoml 9y ago
  Net neutrality doesn’t have to do with caps.
  - jdavis703 9y ago
    It actually kind of is related to data caps. There's many telcos who use a cap, but make it so certain websites (HBO, Facebook, etc) won't count towards your cap. This means that traffic is no longer being treated equally. It also means you're more likely to use services that don't count towards your data cap, so entrenched players are going to stay entrenched longer.
    - squarefoot 9y ago
      I wonder if this will lead to capped content providers to mask their data as online gaming or other different traffic. A mod on the protocol both at servers and clients side would allow that just fine.
    - noncoml 9y ago
      That’s different. The GP was referring to global caps. What you mention is treating data differently(count vs non-count) which is exactly what NN is all about.
- pitaj 9y ago
  I'm sure you didn't mean to imply this, but I'd like to note that IIRC Title II regulations did not prevent data caps or threshold throttling.
  - aceoflulu 9y ago
    Data caps have nothing to do with net neutrality.
    - TheCoelacanth 9y ago
      Right, but it does prevent zero-rating, which they need to make some of the more restrictive data caps not seem too onerous.
      - pitaj 9y ago
        Title II doesn't prevent zero-rating either.
- rayiner 9y ago
  > If you sell internet access with a 1 terabyte cap, you have to market it as a 3 megabit connection. The effective sustained rate. Or preferably, just outlaw data caps entirely. That's like saying that laptops must be marketed with their "effective sustained" battery life. The MacBook Pro can't be marketed as having 10 hours of wireless web, but rather just 2 hours of "effective sustained" performance. Regardless of whether it's a sensible measure for your typical user, who is actually likely to get the 10 hours because they're using their laptop for office and web browsing. Residential ISPs are selling burst connections, which is an entirely sensible thing to do in a world where the top use case for a home internet connection is sucking down a 5MB Facebook page as quickly as possible then going idle. It's not like they're hiding the data cap in fine print: https://dataplan.xfinity.com https://dataplan.xfinity.com. Note that outlawing data caps doesn't address the phenomenon of companies with market power being able to charge monopoly prices. It just redistributes the burden of that upcharge away from heavy data users to ordinary users. E.g. consider if you outlawed Apple's practice of charging $100, $200, etc., more for $15-20 worth of flash memory on an iPhone. Do you think Apple would just lower those prices and leave it at that? No, they'd raise prices on the base model. All you'd do is hurt the users who keep everything in the cloud in order to favor those who store a lot of data locally. (Unsurprisingly, price discrimination tactics that benefit ordinary users at the expense of power users are unpopular among power users.)
  - taf2 9y ago
    So then all the measurements are relative but at least there is an equal and measurable baseline? I’m not for regulating technology though because it’s by definition not set in stone. What might have been reasonable to measure in the 80s is out of touch with how it might be measured today. Ideally we outlaw deals that restrict competition that allows monopolies in the first place
    - rayiner 9y ago
      > So then all the measurements are relative but at least there is an equal and measurable baseline? But the baseline measure may not be useful to the customer. In the laptop example: much of the advance in "web browsing battery life" in the last several years has come from lower idle power usage, or being able to reach idle more quickly. An Ivy Bridge Core i5 laptop and a Kaby Lake Core i5 laptop may actually get similar "full load" battery life, but the Kaby Lake model might last twice as long for web browsing or general office use. Reporting the "full load" battery life will actually mislead the consumer about the typical battery life of the two laptops. Likewise, if you sell a gigabit cable connection with a 1 terabyte cap as a "3 mbps" connection, then you're misleading the customer about whether that's fast enough to do things like download an iTunes movie in a reasonable time, use a VPN into their work network, etc. Ironically, you might do more consumer harm by effectively upselling consumers to buy "faster" connections than they need.
- shmerl 9y ago
  Better, the law should ban these fleecing data caps.
- ploxiln 9y ago
  If the caps apply equally to any and all data, I really have no problem with them, and neither should you. We're just asking for a content-agnostic utility. Not "as much as you can eat". Consider if electricity was "unlimited". "Unlimited" is part of what got us into this mess in the first place. Delivering lots of data to each of many subscribers is just not that easy and cheap. At least with explicit caps companies can compete by offering higher caps. Instead of mysterious limitations on "unlimited".
  - staunch 9y ago
    There's no "mess" with unlimited bandwidth. Bandwidth is not like electricity itself. It's a fundamentally cheap thing to flash LEDs down glass pipes. There's no technical or financial reason why every major American city shouldn't have unlimited gigabit for $50/mo per household. The only expensive part is running conduit and it's a one-time cost. It's disappointing how many people buy into the talking points of these shitty corporations as they work hard to fleece and permanently damage an entire country.
    - rayiner 9y ago
      > There's no "mess" with unlimited bandwidth. Bandwidth is not like electricity itself. It's a fundamentally cheap thing to flash LEDs down glass pipes. Electricity is actually a lot like Internet. Sending electrons down a wire isn't as cheap as sending flashes of light down optical fibers, but in both cases variable costs are vastly lower than the fixed costs.[1] In both cases, there is a total system capacity you can achieve for a given fixed cost. And in both cases, usage is such that what you're really trying to manage is the amount of fixed capacity in relation to usage peaks. It's fundamentally about managing congestion rather than delivering units of a product. > every major American city shouldn't have unlimited gigabit for $50/mo per household Other than the fact that it's not economically possible? Chattanooga charges $60 for 100 megabit and $70 for gigabit, and its just about breaking even. And Chattanooga is a very favorable city for fiber buildout: power lines are overhead, not buried (the same reason Google built in places like Kansas City, not San Francisco), and its a southern city with relatively low cost of labor. New York, D.C., etc., are all going to be more expensive. Nor is $50 for gigabit common in western countries for fiber, at least in places where fiber isn't subsidized. Gigabit fiber in the U.K. is $70-100/month. In Sweden and Denmark it's $120+/month (and typically have multi-thousand up-front install costs). [1] The typical American pays 12 cents per kilowatt hour for electricity. The fuel cost for a fossil fuel plant is about 2.5 cents per kilowatt hour, while for nuclear it's less than 1 cent. Almost all of the cost of electricity, just like with broadband, is operations and maintenance of the infrastructure, and fixed cost recovery.
- wmf 9y ago
  Note that the cap used to be ~300 GB and around the time people started hitting it they raised it to 1 TB. So history is kind of against your theory.
- kstrauser 9y ago
  I want a law requiring ISPs to post how much time per month you're allowed to use a connection at full speed. For instance, if you have a 100Mbps connection and a 100GB cap, then you're only allowed to use it for 10,000 seconds ~= 3 hours per month. Does your cell phone's LTE give you 50Mbps for up to 10GB? They're really selling you about 2000 seconds ~= 33 minutes per month. I think any advertisement that doesn't include this basic fact is misleading to the point of being a lie.
  - StillBored 9y ago
    And, my own metric, of how many 56k modems do you need to get the same amount of data (@~14GB/month download rate). AKA, most cell phone plans this year, can't even download as much in a month as my 56k modem could in the late 1990's. In the end, the big scam here is that if anything netflix/etc traffic is probably less expensive per packet than most other services because netflix is more than happy to scatter their little caching boxes everywhere, so the ISP's backhaul/peering arrangement has less traffic...
- Osiris 9y ago
  I bought a business line from CenturyLink at 140/20 for $65/mn with no cap because it's a business line.
Pilfer 9y ago
Before anyone gets ahead of themselves, this bill only protects net neutrality and does not enforce net neutrality as defined here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality . ISPs are still allowed to discriminate traffic under this bill. They are allowed to block and throttle content such as illegal streaming downloads, some torrents, spam, and other traffic that degrades network performance. For example, this bill does not prevent Comcast, At&t, Verizon et al. from blocking port 25 as they have been for the past decade. The bill also does not preclude zero-rating. This bill is a good thing yes, but let's not get ahead of ourselves and call this net neutrality.
- will_hughes 9y ago
  > does not prevent Comcast, At&t, Verizon et al. from blocking port 25 as they have been for the past decade Are you really that suprised they block it? It's an exceedingly effective anti-spam measure.
  - Pilfer 9y ago
    I'm not surprised at all. I bring it up because it's an example of a blatant net neutrality violation that many people agree is acceptable. Same goes for IP ingress filtering.
    - will_hughes 9y ago
      Net Neutrality doesn't prevent network operators from stopping malicious activity on their network. Blocking Port 25 to specific providers unless they pay up would be a problem, but blocking port 25 globally (except, say, to their own SMTP servers) is perfectly okay.
      - derefr 9y ago
        What the parent is talking about is the more generalized "net-neutrality violation" of assuming that users on residential plans have no legitimate reason to be hosting any public-routable services. It's the ~30-years-back ISP coup of dividing the flat space of Internet "peers" into separate categories of "servers" and "home PCs", where default-deny policies are enforced on "home PCs" to prevent them from doing most of the things "servers" can do. Theoretically, true "net neutrality" (in quotes because it's not really the same thing that the law that got struck down protected) would require that ISPs not discriminate what types of traffic a customer can use their pipe for, any more than a bank is allowed to discriminate what you use your checking account for. Under this true-Scotsman net neutrality, ISPs should be required to let people host web servers, or mail servers (if they're not open relays), or whatever-else servers, on their residential Internet. If that causes uplink saturation, then price uplink bandwidth in your plans to match your costs! (Which basically would eliminate the difference between residential and business Internet plans anyway.)
jancsika 9y ago
> However, state laws can only restore network neutrality for some Americans, and only a federal rule can ensure that everyone in the country has access to a neutral net. To accurately reflect the scope of the problem that should read "some Americans some of the time," no? I doubt California businesses and residents restrict their internet traffic to stay within the state.
thaumaturgy 9y ago
Relevant anecdote: I've recently switched to full-time hotspotting with Verizon, and I'm still adjusting my Netflix habit to match. Verizon, as usual, sent me my "you're at your last 10% before we throttle you" notice just as I went over my limit, and at the exact same time, DNS stopped working for netflix.com. Everything else worked just fine, but none of the netflix.com properties would resolve. I had lazily been using Verizon's DNS for my hotspot. Changing to 8.8.8.8/8.8.4.4 immediately brought it back online. I can't prove it wasn't just a glitch, but it was pretty damn suspicious anyhow, and exactly the sort of underhanded behavior I'd expect from today's telecoms.
- misiti3780 9y ago
  I do full-time hotspotting on verizon, always max out over my limit, and have never experienced this. What specific configuration did you change from 8.8.8.8/8.8.4.4 - i would like to know for future reference if it does happen.
  - webkike 9y ago
    They changed their DNS to point to Google's servers, which have the static IPs 8.8.8.8/8.8.4.4
  - thaumaturgy 9y ago
    It was set to "auto" before, so whatever Verizon was giving me over DHCP.
  - thaumaturgy 9y ago
    Oh! I thought I had lost this terminal session due to another recent forced restart (there's a VERY annoying bug in udev, Debian Stretch, or KDE Plasma 5 ... but another rant for another day). But I haven't! The server was fe80::188e:1b74:da0:42e9%3. Here's some of my terminal output from when it happened. I was on Netflix when the notification came in and Netflix stopped loading less than a minute later. $ dig www.netflix.com ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: SERVFAIL, id: 53897 ;; flags: qr; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0 ;; QUESTION SECTION: ;www.netflix.com. IN A ;; Query time: 5 msec ;; SERVER: fe80::188e:1b74:da0:42e9%3#53(fe80::188e:1b74:da0:42e9%3) ;; WHEN: Sat Jan 06 01:25:55 PST 2018 ...huh, that's weird. I doubt this is a Netflix issue. What does Google say? $ dig www.netflix.com @8.8.8.8 ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 48982 ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 10, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 1 ;; QUESTION SECTION: ;www.netflix.com. IN A ;; ANSWER SECTION: www.netflix.com. 824 IN CNAME www.geo.netflix.com. www.geo.netflix.com. 1314 IN CNAME www.us-west-2.prodaa.netflix.com. www.us-west-2.prodaa.netflix.com. 28 IN A 52.25.169.106 www.us-west-2.prodaa.netflix.com. 28 IN A 52.39.122.191 www.us-west-2.prodaa.netflix.com. 28 IN A 52.35.217.11 www.us-west-2.prodaa.netflix.com. 28 IN A 52.26.64.50 www.us-west-2.prodaa.netflix.com. 28 IN A 52.33.220.134 www.us-west-2.prodaa.netflix.com. 28 IN A 52.33.159.26 www.us-west-2.prodaa.netflix.com. 28 IN A 52.35.162.191 www.us-west-2.prodaa.netflix.com. 28 IN A 52.39.27.188 ;; Query time: 50 msec ;; SERVER: 8.8.8.8#53(8.8.8.8) ;; WHEN: Sat Jan 06 01:26:00 PST 2018 ...ok. And Verizon? $ dig www.netflix.com ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: SERVFAIL, id: 31554 ;; flags: qr; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0 ;; QUESTION SECTION: ;www.netflix.com. IN A ;; Query time: 7 msec ;; SERVER: fe80::188e:1b74:da0:42e9%3#53(fe80::188e:1b74:da0:42e9%3) ;; WHEN: Sat Jan 06 01:27:10 PST 2018 ...Okay. What about YouTube, Reddit, HN, Google, Slashdot, my servers? Can I reach those? (Yes.) Okay, let's try reconfiguring this connection's DNS then to use Google public DNS. $ dig www.netflix.com ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 45369 ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 10, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 1 ;; QUESTION SECTION: ;www.netflix.com. IN A ;; ANSWER SECTION: www.netflix.com. 704 IN CNAME www.geo.netflix.com. www.geo.netflix.com. 1194 IN CNAME www.us-west-2.prodaa.netflix.com. www.us-west-2.prodaa.netflix.com. 26 IN A 52.39.175.187 www.us-west-2.prodaa.netflix.com. 26 IN A 52.40.134.13 www.us-west-2.prodaa.netflix.com. 26 IN A 52.37.33.45 www.us-west-2.prodaa.netflix.com. 26 IN A 52.40.109.21 www.us-west-2.prodaa.netflix.com. 26 IN A 52.39.98.186 www.us-west-2.prodaa.netflix.com. 26 IN A 52.37.69.124 www.us-west-2.prodaa.netflix.com. 26 IN A 52.40.112.84 www.us-west-2.prodaa.netflix.com. 26 IN A 52.39.34.178 ;; Query time: 33 msec ;; SERVER: 8.8.4.4#53(8.8.4.4) ;; WHEN: Sat Jan 06 01:27:40 PST 2018 ...Neat. (edited to shorten it up.)
jokoon 9y ago
I don't want to be a bummer, but video streaming might stress the hell out of the internet infrastructure. Before YouTube and Netflix, video broadcasting meant that you send data once, but a per view service sends a copy each time. I'm all for net neutrality, but to be honest I think that some use cases might add a little pressure to the whole network when you compare them to more classic uses (HTML, images). I don't think that Snapchat, YouTube and Netflix can really be sustainable models if they keep growing and growing forever. At some point, transmitting video online, on a large scale, at a good resolution, at peak hours, is going to be expensive. Netflix is popular because the real cost is on the ISP, and there never are any guarantee of quality of service, it's not up to Netflix.
- Analemma_ 9y ago
  Netflix is already paying their fair share of bandwidth usage and infrastructure upgrade costs via their peering agreements. Ending net neutrality is double-dipping.
  - DrScump 9y ago
    Where they are paying for peering agreements, aren't they already assured of equivalent performance regardless of any neutrality rules expiring?
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- ploxiln 9y ago
  If you pay for 250 GB of data from your ISP, then they're on the hook for the cost of delivering that 250 GB. That's what they sold you - or actually what you should be able to buy. The problem is when they'll deliver 250 GB of $PARTNER_SERVICE but not 250 GB of Netflix or YouTube, and none of the 1 or 2 ISPs in your area will give you a reasonable deal on your GBs from Netflix. (And to be clear, Netflix is not charging them anything.) (The other problem is when they say "unlimited" but of course it's never really unlimited.)
  - 9y ago
velodrome 9y ago
I wish ISPs billed like a utility. Something like $10 connection fee + 10-15 cents per GB. This will force bandwidth hogs to self-regulate. If you have the ability to purchase 4k/8k TVs, then you should be responsible for the associated streaming costs and not have others subsidize it. Also, NN does nothing to foster competition - the real problem. All we have are a bunch of local monopolies/duopolies.
- gregmac 9y ago
  That's not actually what bandwidth costs. The cost to the ISP is based on the connection speed (eg, bits per second) not on how much is transferred. The ISP needs to size for peak usage, and they over-subscribe because that's the only way to be profitable. This is why your speed will often be slower at night than during the day. It also means when you pay for data transferred at non-peak times, you're not actually costing anything since the bandwidth was sitting there unused anyway.
  - thomastjeffery 9y ago
    > your speed will often be faster at night Fixed that for you
    - gregmac 9y ago
      Sorry, poor wording on my part. I meant slower in the evening (peak time), and you're right: late at night is typically the least busy and thus fastest time.
BrainInAJar 9y ago
Why not just solve the problem once and for all and build out a statewide public ISP?
bb88 9y ago
This is my simple proposal. Regulate the use of the term "internet service" to include network neutrality principles. If the provider violates these principles, they cannot call themselves an "internet service provider". They can all themselves "network provider" or "mobile data provider" but they can't use the term "internet" anymore.

291 points by MilnerRoute 9y ago

Comcast and AT&T set data caps at 1 TB per month, knowing that we will all soon be doing much more traffic than that. Every year bandwidth requirements go up and it's accelerating. Home internet access in the US went from unlimited usage to capped with $200 overage fees overnight. We need an "Effective Sustained Rate" law that says something like: If you sell internet access with a 1 terabyte cap, you have to market it as a 3 megabit connection. The effective sustained rate. Or preferably, just outlaw data caps entirely.

noncoml 9y ago
Net neutrality doesn’t have to do with caps.
- jdavis703 9y ago
  It actually kind of is related to data caps. There's many telcos who use a cap, but make it so certain websites (HBO, Facebook, etc) won't count towards your cap. This means that traffic is no longer being treated equally. It also means you're more likely to use services that don't count towards your data cap, so entrenched players are going to stay entrenched longer.
  - squarefoot 9y ago
    I wonder if this will lead to capped content providers to mask their data as online gaming or other different traffic. A mod on the protocol both at servers and clients side would allow that just fine.
  - noncoml 9y ago
    That’s different. The GP was referring to global caps. What you mention is treating data differently(count vs non-count) which is exactly what NN is all about.
pitaj 9y ago
I'm sure you didn't mean to imply this, but I'd like to note that IIRC Title II regulations did not prevent data caps or threshold throttling.
- aceoflulu 9y ago
  Data caps have nothing to do with net neutrality.
  - TheCoelacanth 9y ago
    Right, but it does prevent zero-rating, which they need to make some of the more restrictive data caps not seem too onerous.
    - pitaj 9y ago
      Title II doesn't prevent zero-rating either.
rayiner 9y ago
> If you sell internet access with a 1 terabyte cap, you have to market it as a 3 megabit connection. The effective sustained rate. Or preferably, just outlaw data caps entirely. That's like saying that laptops must be marketed with their "effective sustained" battery life. The MacBook Pro can't be marketed as having 10 hours of wireless web, but rather just 2 hours of "effective sustained" performance. Regardless of whether it's a sensible measure for your typical user, who is actually likely to get the 10 hours because they're using their laptop for office and web browsing. Residential ISPs are selling burst connections, which is an entirely sensible thing to do in a world where the top use case for a home internet connection is sucking down a 5MB Facebook page as quickly as possible then going idle. It's not like they're hiding the data cap in fine print: https://dataplan.xfinity.com https://dataplan.xfinity.com. Note that outlawing data caps doesn't address the phenomenon of companies with market power being able to charge monopoly prices. It just redistributes the burden of that upcharge away from heavy data users to ordinary users. E.g. consider if you outlawed Apple's practice of charging $100, $200, etc., more for $15-20 worth of flash memory on an iPhone. Do you think Apple would just lower those prices and leave it at that? No, they'd raise prices on the base model. All you'd do is hurt the users who keep everything in the cloud in order to favor those who store a lot of data locally. (Unsurprisingly, price discrimination tactics that benefit ordinary users at the expense of power users are unpopular among power users.)
- taf2 9y ago
  So then all the measurements are relative but at least there is an equal and measurable baseline? I’m not for regulating technology though because it’s by definition not set in stone. What might have been reasonable to measure in the 80s is out of touch with how it might be measured today. Ideally we outlaw deals that restrict competition that allows monopolies in the first place
  - rayiner 9y ago
    > So then all the measurements are relative but at least there is an equal and measurable baseline? But the baseline measure may not be useful to the customer. In the laptop example: much of the advance in "web browsing battery life" in the last several years has come from lower idle power usage, or being able to reach idle more quickly. An Ivy Bridge Core i5 laptop and a Kaby Lake Core i5 laptop may actually get similar "full load" battery life, but the Kaby Lake model might last twice as long for web browsing or general office use. Reporting the "full load" battery life will actually mislead the consumer about the typical battery life of the two laptops. Likewise, if you sell a gigabit cable connection with a 1 terabyte cap as a "3 mbps" connection, then you're misleading the customer about whether that's fast enough to do things like download an iTunes movie in a reasonable time, use a VPN into their work network, etc. Ironically, you might do more consumer harm by effectively upselling consumers to buy "faster" connections than they need.
shmerl 9y ago
Better, the law should ban these fleecing data caps.
ploxiln 9y ago
If the caps apply equally to any and all data, I really have no problem with them, and neither should you. We're just asking for a content-agnostic utility. Not "as much as you can eat". Consider if electricity was "unlimited". "Unlimited" is part of what got us into this mess in the first place. Delivering lots of data to each of many subscribers is just not that easy and cheap. At least with explicit caps companies can compete by offering higher caps. Instead of mysterious limitations on "unlimited".
- staunch 9y ago
  There's no "mess" with unlimited bandwidth. Bandwidth is not like electricity itself. It's a fundamentally cheap thing to flash LEDs down glass pipes. There's no technical or financial reason why every major American city shouldn't have unlimited gigabit for $50/mo per household. The only expensive part is running conduit and it's a one-time cost. It's disappointing how many people buy into the talking points of these shitty corporations as they work hard to fleece and permanently damage an entire country.
  - rayiner 9y ago
    > There's no "mess" with unlimited bandwidth. Bandwidth is not like electricity itself. It's a fundamentally cheap thing to flash LEDs down glass pipes. Electricity is actually a lot like Internet. Sending electrons down a wire isn't as cheap as sending flashes of light down optical fibers, but in both cases variable costs are vastly lower than the fixed costs.[1] In both cases, there is a total system capacity you can achieve for a given fixed cost. And in both cases, usage is such that what you're really trying to manage is the amount of fixed capacity in relation to usage peaks. It's fundamentally about managing congestion rather than delivering units of a product. > every major American city shouldn't have unlimited gigabit for $50/mo per household Other than the fact that it's not economically possible? Chattanooga charges $60 for 100 megabit and $70 for gigabit, and its just about breaking even. And Chattanooga is a very favorable city for fiber buildout: power lines are overhead, not buried (the same reason Google built in places like Kansas City, not San Francisco), and its a southern city with relatively low cost of labor. New York, D.C., etc., are all going to be more expensive. Nor is $50 for gigabit common in western countries for fiber, at least in places where fiber isn't subsidized. Gigabit fiber in the U.K. is $70-100/month. In Sweden and Denmark it's $120+/month (and typically have multi-thousand up-front install costs). [1] The typical American pays 12 cents per kilowatt hour for electricity. The fuel cost for a fossil fuel plant is about 2.5 cents per kilowatt hour, while for nuclear it's less than 1 cent. Almost all of the cost of electricity, just like with broadband, is operations and maintenance of the infrastructure, and fixed cost recovery.
wmf 9y ago
Note that the cap used to be ~300 GB and around the time people started hitting it they raised it to 1 TB. So history is kind of against your theory.
kstrauser 9y ago
I want a law requiring ISPs to post how much time per month you're allowed to use a connection at full speed. For instance, if you have a 100Mbps connection and a 100GB cap, then you're only allowed to use it for 10,000 seconds ~= 3 hours per month. Does your cell phone's LTE give you 50Mbps for up to 10GB? They're really selling you about 2000 seconds ~= 33 minutes per month. I think any advertisement that doesn't include this basic fact is misleading to the point of being a lie.
- StillBored 9y ago
  And, my own metric, of how many 56k modems do you need to get the same amount of data (@~14GB/month download rate). AKA, most cell phone plans this year, can't even download as much in a month as my 56k modem could in the late 1990's. In the end, the big scam here is that if anything netflix/etc traffic is probably less expensive per packet than most other services because netflix is more than happy to scatter their little caching boxes everywhere, so the ISP's backhaul/peering arrangement has less traffic...
Osiris 9y ago
I bought a business line from CenturyLink at 140/20 for $65/mn with no cap because it's a business line.

Pilfer 9y ago

Before anyone gets ahead of themselves, this bill only protects net neutrality and does not enforce net neutrality as defined here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality . ISPs are still allowed to discriminate traffic under this bill. They are allowed to block and throttle content such as illegal streaming downloads, some torrents, spam, and other traffic that degrades network performance. For example, this bill does not prevent Comcast, At&t, Verizon et al. from blocking port 25 as they have been for the past decade. The bill also does not preclude zero-rating. This bill is a good thing yes, but let's not get ahead of ourselves and call this net neutrality.

will_hughes 9y ago
> does not prevent Comcast, At&t, Verizon et al. from blocking port 25 as they have been for the past decade Are you really that suprised they block it? It's an exceedingly effective anti-spam measure.
- Pilfer 9y ago
  I'm not surprised at all. I bring it up because it's an example of a blatant net neutrality violation that many people agree is acceptable. Same goes for IP ingress filtering.
  - will_hughes 9y ago
    Net Neutrality doesn't prevent network operators from stopping malicious activity on their network. Blocking Port 25 to specific providers unless they pay up would be a problem, but blocking port 25 globally (except, say, to their own SMTP servers) is perfectly okay.
    - derefr 9y ago
      What the parent is talking about is the more generalized "net-neutrality violation" of assuming that users on residential plans have no legitimate reason to be hosting any public-routable services. It's the ~30-years-back ISP coup of dividing the flat space of Internet "peers" into separate categories of "servers" and "home PCs", where default-deny policies are enforced on "home PCs" to prevent them from doing most of the things "servers" can do. Theoretically, true "net neutrality" (in quotes because it's not really the same thing that the law that got struck down protected) would require that ISPs not discriminate what types of traffic a customer can use their pipe for, any more than a bank is allowed to discriminate what you use your checking account for. Under this true-Scotsman net neutrality, ISPs should be required to let people host web servers, or mail servers (if they're not open relays), or whatever-else servers, on their residential Internet. If that causes uplink saturation, then price uplink bandwidth in your plans to match your costs! (Which basically would eliminate the difference between residential and business Internet plans anyway.)

jancsika 9y ago

> However, state laws can only restore network neutrality for some Americans, and only a federal rule can ensure that everyone in the country has access to a neutral net. To accurately reflect the scope of the problem that should read "some Americans some of the time," no? I doubt California businesses and residents restrict their internet traffic to stay within the state.

thaumaturgy 9y ago

Relevant anecdote: I've recently switched to full-time hotspotting with Verizon, and I'm still adjusting my Netflix habit to match. Verizon, as usual, sent me my "you're at your last 10% before we throttle you" notice just as I went over my limit, and at the exact same time, DNS stopped working for netflix.com. Everything else worked just fine, but none of the netflix.com properties would resolve. I had lazily been using Verizon's DNS for my hotspot. Changing to 8.8.8.8/8.8.4.4 immediately brought it back online. I can't prove it wasn't just a glitch, but it was pretty damn suspicious anyhow, and exactly the sort of underhanded behavior I'd expect from today's telecoms.

misiti3780 9y ago
I do full-time hotspotting on verizon, always max out over my limit, and have never experienced this. What specific configuration did you change from 8.8.8.8/8.8.4.4 - i would like to know for future reference if it does happen.
- webkike 9y ago
  They changed their DNS to point to Google's servers, which have the static IPs 8.8.8.8/8.8.4.4
- thaumaturgy 9y ago
  It was set to "auto" before, so whatever Verizon was giving me over DHCP.
- thaumaturgy 9y ago
  Oh! I thought I had lost this terminal session due to another recent forced restart (there's a VERY annoying bug in udev, Debian Stretch, or KDE Plasma 5 ... but another rant for another day). But I haven't! The server was fe80::188e:1b74:da0:42e9%3. Here's some of my terminal output from when it happened. I was on Netflix when the notification came in and Netflix stopped loading less than a minute later. $ dig www.netflix.com ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: SERVFAIL, id: 53897 ;; flags: qr; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0 ;; QUESTION SECTION: ;www.netflix.com. IN A ;; Query time: 5 msec ;; SERVER: fe80::188e:1b74:da0:42e9%3#53(fe80::188e:1b74:da0:42e9%3) ;; WHEN: Sat Jan 06 01:25:55 PST 2018 ...huh, that's weird. I doubt this is a Netflix issue. What does Google say? $ dig www.netflix.com @8.8.8.8 ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 48982 ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 10, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 1 ;; QUESTION SECTION: ;www.netflix.com. IN A ;; ANSWER SECTION: www.netflix.com. 824 IN CNAME www.geo.netflix.com. www.geo.netflix.com. 1314 IN CNAME www.us-west-2.prodaa.netflix.com. www.us-west-2.prodaa.netflix.com. 28 IN A 52.25.169.106 www.us-west-2.prodaa.netflix.com. 28 IN A 52.39.122.191 www.us-west-2.prodaa.netflix.com. 28 IN A 52.35.217.11 www.us-west-2.prodaa.netflix.com. 28 IN A 52.26.64.50 www.us-west-2.prodaa.netflix.com. 28 IN A 52.33.220.134 www.us-west-2.prodaa.netflix.com. 28 IN A 52.33.159.26 www.us-west-2.prodaa.netflix.com. 28 IN A 52.35.162.191 www.us-west-2.prodaa.netflix.com. 28 IN A 52.39.27.188 ;; Query time: 50 msec ;; SERVER: 8.8.8.8#53(8.8.8.8) ;; WHEN: Sat Jan 06 01:26:00 PST 2018 ...ok. And Verizon? $ dig www.netflix.com ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: SERVFAIL, id: 31554 ;; flags: qr; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0 ;; QUESTION SECTION: ;www.netflix.com. IN A ;; Query time: 7 msec ;; SERVER: fe80::188e:1b74:da0:42e9%3#53(fe80::188e:1b74:da0:42e9%3) ;; WHEN: Sat Jan 06 01:27:10 PST 2018 ...Okay. What about YouTube, Reddit, HN, Google, Slashdot, my servers? Can I reach those? (Yes.) Okay, let's try reconfiguring this connection's DNS then to use Google public DNS. $ dig www.netflix.com ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 45369 ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 10, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 1 ;; QUESTION SECTION: ;www.netflix.com. IN A ;; ANSWER SECTION: www.netflix.com. 704 IN CNAME www.geo.netflix.com. www.geo.netflix.com. 1194 IN CNAME www.us-west-2.prodaa.netflix.com. www.us-west-2.prodaa.netflix.com. 26 IN A 52.39.175.187 www.us-west-2.prodaa.netflix.com. 26 IN A 52.40.134.13 www.us-west-2.prodaa.netflix.com. 26 IN A 52.37.33.45 www.us-west-2.prodaa.netflix.com. 26 IN A 52.40.109.21 www.us-west-2.prodaa.netflix.com. 26 IN A 52.39.98.186 www.us-west-2.prodaa.netflix.com. 26 IN A 52.37.69.124 www.us-west-2.prodaa.netflix.com. 26 IN A 52.40.112.84 www.us-west-2.prodaa.netflix.com. 26 IN A 52.39.34.178 ;; Query time: 33 msec ;; SERVER: 8.8.4.4#53(8.8.4.4) ;; WHEN: Sat Jan 06 01:27:40 PST 2018 ...Neat. (edited to shorten it up.)

jokoon 9y ago

I don't want to be a bummer, but video streaming might stress the hell out of the internet infrastructure. Before YouTube and Netflix, video broadcasting meant that you send data once, but a per view service sends a copy each time. I'm all for net neutrality, but to be honest I think that some use cases might add a little pressure to the whole network when you compare them to more classic uses (HTML, images). I don't think that Snapchat, YouTube and Netflix can really be sustainable models if they keep growing and growing forever. At some point, transmitting video online, on a large scale, at a good resolution, at peak hours, is going to be expensive. Netflix is popular because the real cost is on the ISP, and there never are any guarantee of quality of service, it's not up to Netflix.

Analemma_ 9y ago
Netflix is already paying their fair share of bandwidth usage and infrastructure upgrade costs via their peering agreements. Ending net neutrality is double-dipping.
- DrScump 9y ago
  Where they are paying for peering agreements, aren't they already assured of equivalent performance regardless of any neutrality rules expiring?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
ploxiln 9y ago
If you pay for 250 GB of data from your ISP, then they're on the hook for the cost of delivering that 250 GB. That's what they sold you - or actually what you should be able to buy. The problem is when they'll deliver 250 GB of $PARTNER_SERVICE but not 250 GB of Netflix or YouTube, and none of the 1 or 2 ISPs in your area will give you a reasonable deal on your GBs from Netflix. (And to be clear, Netflix is not charging them anything.) (The other problem is when they say "unlimited" but of course it's never really unlimited.)
- 9y ago

velodrome 9y ago

I wish ISPs billed like a utility. Something like $10 connection fee + 10-15 cents per GB. This will force bandwidth hogs to self-regulate. If you have the ability to purchase 4k/8k TVs, then you should be responsible for the associated streaming costs and not have others subsidize it. Also, NN does nothing to foster competition - the real problem. All we have are a bunch of local monopolies/duopolies.

gregmac 9y ago
That's not actually what bandwidth costs. The cost to the ISP is based on the connection speed (eg, bits per second) not on how much is transferred. The ISP needs to size for peak usage, and they over-subscribe because that's the only way to be profitable. This is why your speed will often be slower at night than during the day. It also means when you pay for data transferred at non-peak times, you're not actually costing anything since the bandwidth was sitting there unused anyway.
- thomastjeffery 9y ago
  > your speed will often be faster at night Fixed that for you
  - gregmac 9y ago
    Sorry, poor wording on my part. I meant slower in the evening (peak time), and you're right: late at night is typically the least busy and thus fastest time.

BrainInAJar 9y ago

Why not just solve the problem once and for all and build out a statewide public ISP?

bb88 9y ago

This is my simple proposal. Regulate the use of the term "internet service" to include network neutrality principles. If the provider violates these principles, they cannot call themselves an "internet service provider". They can all themselves "network provider" or "mobile data provider" but they can't use the term "internet" anymore.