5 ms·

Not sure if this works as an analogy. Its like if you subscribe to netflix .. but if you want to share it with 4 family members, then get a family plan. You ca

by vjust 7y ago

Not sure if this works as an analogy. Its like if you subscribe to netflix .. but if you want to share it with 4 family members, then get a family plan. You can simultaneously consume multiple streams of content. Tethering allows you to share the internet connection with other people, as well as your other devices - which is essentially you consuming multiple streams of internet data simultaneously.

akersten 7y ago
It's all still limited by the throughout of the phone though. You could just as well open 4 streaming apps on the phone and pull the same data. To me, metering a "tethered" connection differently than the phone making the same requests is just as disgusting as an ISP charging you because you have a different number of computers connected to the internet on your residential connection. Or charging you more because you went to a streaming site. It's a blatant violation of net neutrality. If a cell phone company can't fulfill their advertised service of x mbit down / y mbit up, they shouldn't be offering it. Anything else is false advertising.
salamander014 7y ago
This is a better analogy, but still not quite right. This issue constantly comes up with keeping the internet free and open. Take the following: The customer pays for their connection, say 10mbps over Verizon's network. Under a free and open internet, the customer is allowed to use that 10mbps that they PAID for in whatever damn way they please. Why should I be subject to Verizon's idea of what my connection should be used for? Congestion happens, but a properly designed network means that the pipes are mostly free and available under normal circumstances to all customers for all the bandwidth they paid for. Doesn't matter how many devices I use on the other side of that connection, I bought 10mbps and I should be able to use that 10mbps the way I want. This is price gouging. Plain and simple.
- southerntofu 7y ago
  > The customer pays for their connection, say 10mbps over Verizon's network. That's typically not what happens with commercial ISPs. You pay for access to some parts of the Internet with asymmetrical speeds (often 20Mbit to 1) and most times without even a publicly routable IP address ("for your security"). Even if you pay that commercial ISP for higher speeds, you can read in the contract that they're actually not guaranteed and that anyway people exceeding "reasonable limits" (usually not defined with actual numbers) will have access shut off. So sure you can do that on a non-profit and/or professional ISP because those will be explicit in what service is brought to you for what prices (without surprises) and they will usually stay out of your way when it comes to how you use the network (public IP, no port blocking, no priority for Youtube traffic over important mail, etc). So if you find this situation as revolting as i do, welcome to the fight against the telecoms industry! We can do better, cheaper, and more intimate Internet.
southerntofu 7y ago
That's creating artificial scarcity. Paying for usage sort of makes sense, but paying for a license to share with other people? That's outrageous. Imagine if you had to pay an extra license on your water bills for sharing water with your guests.. The cultural industry from your first example has been unjustly profiting from artists and the public alike for decades. Now ISPs need to apply this model to survive because we don't pay for bandwidth usage or for guaranteed bandwidth. We pay for a mirage of advertised 28Mbit/s, 100Mbit/s, or even 1Gbit/s nowadays.. the cost of which bandwidth is actually shared among many clients. So it's specifically because of their own marketing lies that ISPs now need to find ways to restrict users from sharing their access. Good luck with that! In the meantime, we'll keep on building our own self-organized non-profit ISPs (such as NYCMesh or guifi.net) to overthrow their rule.
- salamander014 7y ago
  Paying for ACCESS makes sense. It costs the ISP to have the availability to connect you up. Paying for USAGE is disgusting. The way a network works, is that besides upkeep which is a small percentage of TCO, upfront cost scales with total bandwidth, not total number of packets one needs to move across a set of links. Meaning if the ISP buys enough network equipment for 100 users to each have 10mbps of available bandwidth, they no longer have costs besides upkeep (maintenance, support, and replacing broken hardware). This is a SMALL percentage of upfront buildout costs. This large lump sum in the beginning has the potential to deliver the same amount of bandwidth ad infinitum. Charging users for USAGE is DISGUSTING and is literally not fair. Price gouging. Plain and simple.
  - southerntofu 7y ago
    > Paying for ACCESS makes sense. In the context of a typical end-user paying a non-profit ISP, yes. We share infrastructure costs and that's about it. The problem is commercial ISPs only follow the money so you have the recurring cost of greedy shareholders to take into account in your equation. And that usually leads to not respecting net neutrality (as was the original subject of this thread). So if you are in control of your own infra, price for access should be in the range of 1-20€/month. If you do xDSL, it has to be (a lot) more expensive (+15-25€/line/month).. as long as you're small. When you're big enough you can do local-loop unbundling and be back on the first price-range. > Charging users for USAGE is DISGUSTING and is literally not fair. Depends. For typical end-users, it's not a good model (you want a fixed price). But for associations, hosting coops, companies.. That's the usual approach for guaranteed bandwidth billing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percentile#Applications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percentile#Applications That's a mechanism to make sure your friends and your small neighborhood association don't have bleed themselves to pay for the seedbox i want to setup in my garage :)
TeMPOraL 7y ago
The analogy doesn't work either. You get a Netflix family plan if you want four people to simultaneously and independently connect to Netflix, each consuming their own stream. You don't need a family plan if you plug Netflix to your TV and invite three other people to watch a movie together with you. Tethering is like the latter case. Your phone is still a single device consuming a single Internet connection. The concept of "multiple streams of internet data" you used exists only because phone companies violate net neutrality, refusing to become dumb data pipes they should be.
jjwhitaker 7y ago
More like I subscribe to Netflix but want to watch 2 shows at once which is permitted by my subscription. The provider/Netflix could restrict me to one stream to prevent sharing but doesn't or pushes a family plan to allow many streams. My cell provider used to restrict tethering but no longer does so. I'd be looking for a rate decrease if either company reduced my service below my current contract. The sharing with other people component may be specific to the service and with Netflix probably outweighs users actually watching 2 streams on 2 devices whereas with tethering I think it's more likely sharing a connection with another device the subscriber owns like work PC when traveling or a media device on the go like tablet or computer.

by vjust 7y ago

akersten 7y ago

It's all still limited by the throughout of the phone though. You could just as well open 4 streaming apps on the phone and pull the same data. To me, metering a "tethered" connection differently than the phone making the same requests is just as disgusting as an ISP charging you because you have a different number of computers connected to the internet on your residential connection. Or charging you more because you went to a streaming site. It's a blatant violation of net neutrality. If a cell phone company can't fulfill their advertised service of x mbit down / y mbit up, they shouldn't be offering it. Anything else is false advertising.

salamander014 7y ago

This is a better analogy, but still not quite right. This issue constantly comes up with keeping the internet free and open. Take the following: The customer pays for their connection, say 10mbps over Verizon's network. Under a free and open internet, the customer is allowed to use that 10mbps that they PAID for in whatever damn way they please. Why should I be subject to Verizon's idea of what my connection should be used for? Congestion happens, but a properly designed network means that the pipes are mostly free and available under normal circumstances to all customers for all the bandwidth they paid for. Doesn't matter how many devices I use on the other side of that connection, I bought 10mbps and I should be able to use that 10mbps the way I want. This is price gouging. Plain and simple.

southerntofu 7y ago
> The customer pays for their connection, say 10mbps over Verizon's network. That's typically not what happens with commercial ISPs. You pay for access to some parts of the Internet with asymmetrical speeds (often 20Mbit to 1) and most times without even a publicly routable IP address ("for your security"). Even if you pay that commercial ISP for higher speeds, you can read in the contract that they're actually not guaranteed and that anyway people exceeding "reasonable limits" (usually not defined with actual numbers) will have access shut off. So sure you can do that on a non-profit and/or professional ISP because those will be explicit in what service is brought to you for what prices (without surprises) and they will usually stay out of your way when it comes to how you use the network (public IP, no port blocking, no priority for Youtube traffic over important mail, etc). So if you find this situation as revolting as i do, welcome to the fight against the telecoms industry! We can do better, cheaper, and more intimate Internet.

southerntofu 7y ago

That's creating artificial scarcity. Paying for usage sort of makes sense, but paying for a license to share with other people? That's outrageous. Imagine if you had to pay an extra license on your water bills for sharing water with your guests.. The cultural industry from your first example has been unjustly profiting from artists and the public alike for decades. Now ISPs need to apply this model to survive because we don't pay for bandwidth usage or for guaranteed bandwidth. We pay for a mirage of advertised 28Mbit/s, 100Mbit/s, or even 1Gbit/s nowadays.. the cost of which bandwidth is actually shared among many clients. So it's specifically because of their own marketing lies that ISPs now need to find ways to restrict users from sharing their access. Good luck with that! In the meantime, we'll keep on building our own self-organized non-profit ISPs (such as NYCMesh or guifi.net) to overthrow their rule.

salamander014 7y ago
Paying for ACCESS makes sense. It costs the ISP to have the availability to connect you up. Paying for USAGE is disgusting. The way a network works, is that besides upkeep which is a small percentage of TCO, upfront cost scales with total bandwidth, not total number of packets one needs to move across a set of links. Meaning if the ISP buys enough network equipment for 100 users to each have 10mbps of available bandwidth, they no longer have costs besides upkeep (maintenance, support, and replacing broken hardware). This is a SMALL percentage of upfront buildout costs. This large lump sum in the beginning has the potential to deliver the same amount of bandwidth ad infinitum. Charging users for USAGE is DISGUSTING and is literally not fair. Price gouging. Plain and simple.
- southerntofu 7y ago
  > Paying for ACCESS makes sense. In the context of a typical end-user paying a non-profit ISP, yes. We share infrastructure costs and that's about it. The problem is commercial ISPs only follow the money so you have the recurring cost of greedy shareholders to take into account in your equation. And that usually leads to not respecting net neutrality (as was the original subject of this thread). So if you are in control of your own infra, price for access should be in the range of 1-20€/month. If you do xDSL, it has to be (a lot) more expensive (+15-25€/line/month).. as long as you're small. When you're big enough you can do local-loop unbundling and be back on the first price-range. > Charging users for USAGE is DISGUSTING and is literally not fair. Depends. For typical end-users, it's not a good model (you want a fixed price). But for associations, hosting coops, companies.. That's the usual approach for guaranteed bandwidth billing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percentile#Applications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percentile#Applications That's a mechanism to make sure your friends and your small neighborhood association don't have bleed themselves to pay for the seedbox i want to setup in my garage :)

TeMPOraL 7y ago

The analogy doesn't work either. You get a Netflix family plan if you want four people to simultaneously and independently connect to Netflix, each consuming their own stream. You don't need a family plan if you plug Netflix to your TV and invite three other people to watch a movie together with you. Tethering is like the latter case. Your phone is still a single device consuming a single Internet connection. The concept of "multiple streams of internet data" you used exists only because phone companies violate net neutrality, refusing to become dumb data pipes they should be.

jjwhitaker 7y ago

More like I subscribe to Netflix but want to watch 2 shows at once which is permitted by my subscription. The provider/Netflix could restrict me to one stream to prevent sharing but doesn't or pushes a family plan to allow many streams. My cell provider used to restrict tethering but no longer does so. I'd be looking for a rate decrease if either company reduced my service below my current contract. The sharing with other people component may be specific to the service and with Netflix probably outweighs users actually watching 2 streams on 2 devices whereas with tethering I think it's more likely sharing a connection with another device the subscriber owns like work PC when traveling or a media device on the go like tablet or computer.