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Is there any cost that an ISP company has related to the amount of data transferred? All the costs that I'm aware of are related to the bandwidth, not the total

Is there any cost that an ISP company has related to the amount of data transferred? All the costs that I'm aware of are related to the bandwidth, not the total transmitted data (eg.: IX connections and such). The ISP companies want to do this because they get more money, that's simple, and usually followed by awful things like exemption for certain services. In Brazilian Facebook IT groups it's already common to see people from Angola using the group to google things, because Facebook usage is out of the data cap. Some Brazilians even created groups specialized in this "facebook googling" for Angolans. It makes me sad knowing how far ISPs are being able to push such bad things. - edit to add more info about the current state in Brazil: Mobile internet plans all have data cap and most have exemption on WhatsApp and Facebook, while house data plans are forbidden to do so by Brazil's telecom regulator (ANATEL), unfortunately they are lobbying pretty hard to change that.

concert-gilled 7y ago
I remember someone writing a proxy that ran over Facebook, maybe it was specifically chat, in response to that. However, I am not able to find it right now. edit: I found it here[0]. > The idea of this project is to tunnel Internet traffic through Facebook chat (packets are sent as base64), the main component is tuntap and also the Google's Gumbo parser which does the interaction with Facebook (login, send/receive messages, etc.). [0] https://github.com/matiasinsaurralde/facebook-tunnel https://github.com/matiasinsaurralde/facebook-tunnel
sseveran 7y ago
Indeed there is. ISPs don't run a non-oversubscribed network. If they did your bill would be much higher. The costs are in building cables, maintaining cables, buying and maintaining local pop network equipment, building and maintaining whatever backbone they run, installing and maintaining network equipment in network meeting rooms where they connect with transit providers, etc...
- JustSomeNobody 7y ago
  I don't understand how this answers the question "Is there any cost that an ISP company has related to the amount of data transferred?". This all sounds like maintenance and they'd have that if I use 1GB or 1TB.
  - ubercow13 7y ago
    If every customer can use 1TB, it is more likely that many customers will be using more bandwidth at the same time, therefore requiring more infrastructure to ensure their connections still provide their advertised bandwidth
    - JustSomeNobody 7y ago
      I don't see how that would affect anything. If we assume that most people consume the most data in the evenings (streaming Netflix, etc), no matter the cap, you would see issues if bandwidth was an issue. If I'm downloading ISOs of Linux during the day at 100% everyday while people are at work, big deal, right? But, if everyone is streaming at the same time, if there was going to be an issue, it would happen if caps existed or not because at some point during the month you're going to have nearly all your customers with data to use.
      - stordoff 7y ago
        The way I've seen this handled in the UK (a while ago, but I think some ISPs still do it) is to have caps at certain times (either by having a limit or throttling bulk P2P downloads), but then allow unlimited downloads at other times, especially overnight
      - vlan0 7y ago
        > But, if everyone is streaming at the same time, if there was going to be an issue, it would happen if caps existed or not because at some point during the month you're going to have nearly all your customers with data to use. It's a giant bucket of 'it depends'. If the CDN network serving the content has placed hardware within the ISPs network, it's likely a non-issue. This was a major issue before folks like Netflix started moving their CDNs closer to the customer. You might have a hard time finding the articles, but I recommend looking at the pissing match Level 3 and Verizon got into years back. >it would happen if caps existed or not I'm not convinced. You are essentially arguing that scarcity of a resource has no affect on consumption.
- cmiles74 7y ago
  I don't think this directly impacts a cost per unit of data transferred, as the poster was wondering. I agree that maintaining the network and ensuring it can meet capacity is a cost that the ISP passes on to their customers, but I would point out that this is why people pay a monthly subscription to their ISP. To my mind the question would be "if an ISP has network with a fixed capacity, do their monthly operating costs differ between a month where they consistently utilize 50% of that capacity compared to another month where they utilize 80%?" I suspect the cost to the ISP is the same in either case: they have purchased the equipment and bandwidth to support the network and those costs are fixed, regardless of how much of that bandwidth they are actually using. If that is true, this idea that there is only so much data per month to go around and if you use more then your neighbor then you should be charged more money would be fundamentally dishonest.
  - kd5bjo 7y ago
    Consumer ISPs are effectively bandwidth resellers: they buy in bulk at wholesale rates, split it up, and sell retail quantities to individuals. Wholesale bandwidth is generally billed based on the peak transfer rate during the billing period, and not a fixed price.(1) You also can’t assume a fixed network capacity- ISPs will buy enough equipment to maintain service to their customers instead of having brownouts. This capex cost is directly caused by higher aggregate usage from new and existing customers, so it makes sense to charge them by usage as well. (1) This is overly simplistic; these are individually-negotiated B2B contracts, so details vary widely.
    - sseveran 7y ago
      I would think that would mostly apply to DSL ISPs that are just using a telcos infrastructure. I suppose AT&T Fiber may be charged by AT&Ts backbone for traffic transiting their network or something like that. The major ISPs AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, etc... are building their own networks at least in part.
      - kd5bjo 7y ago
        Yes, the truly big backbone ISPs aren’t generally paying for interconnection to the others. Instead, they have the capital expenses of maintaining and extending that backbone to handle growing internet traffic in general. If they don’t keep up with demand, they’ll lose customers and potentially their settlement free agreements with the other backbone providers.
- nebulous1 7y ago
  I think the suggestion is more along the lines of you buy a set bandwidth with a certain contention ratio (or ratios) and then the ISP lets you contend for the bandwidth as you like. Having a bandwidth cap is basically the ISP punishing you for contending too often. That said, assuming the ISP wants to keep an average speed higher than the minimum their contention ratio would offer, people who download a lot would have a greater impact on that, and could therefore cause the ISP to have to invest in more hardware and back-haul. The counter is that the ISP isn't upgrading their network anyway, they're just juicing the market by charging some people more.
  - sseveran 7y ago
    I agree with what I think you are stating implicitly that bandwidth caps a blunt instrument. ISPs don't really have a lot of nobs to turn without setting off the network neutrality crowd. I wish there were more QoS nobs that could be turned to allow for lower latency and traffic prioritization as that would probably have some interesting applications. Most ISPs are constantly upgrading parts of their network. Earlier this spring AT&T came through my complex and installed fiber in every apartment. Average broadband speeds have increased significantly over the last decade, and for that to have happened significant network upgrades would have to have taken place.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
Pigo 7y ago
I think if it becomes a common problem for most of the USA, it could finally push the monopoly conversation to the forefront. People being frustrated with charges for a service that should have been next to free is what broke up Bell Systems.
TeMPOraL 7y ago
> Is there any cost that an ISP company has related to the amount of data transferred? Not sure if at a noticeable level, but I keep wondering: aren't there costs that are directly proportional to the amount of data transferred? Flipping bits costs energy, both at the level of fundamental physics and (more importantly) at the level of engineering - all the electric and optical signals aren't free, and packet processing isn't either. E.g. I'd expect my power bill to be larger if my Raspberry Pi saturated the network by streaming /dev/urandom than it would be if it was sitting idle. But aside that, I think that beyond the "we can charge you for data because you can", the per-data-transferred costs come from the overprovisioning ISPs do. The fraction of the advertised to actually supported bandwidth per user they can get away with is dependent on average amount of traffic users generate.
- magashna 7y ago
  If there weren't municipal companies with better service, faster speeds, no caps, all for cheaper, then I might agree. But these companies are greedy, and they keep crying wolf while increasing their profits.
  - kminehart 7y ago
    Yup. Ozark Electric Cooperative in Fayetteville, AR started a gigabit ISP for all of its customers. 1 gb/s internet with no caps for like $80/month. I was so sad when I had to move further north where there's only Cox.
- jgtrosh 7y ago
  Most networks are far from energy proportional; that is general usage barely affects consumption for cables which are “always on”.
- Goronmon 7y ago
  But aside that, I think that beyond the "we can charge you for data because you can", the per-data-transferred costs come from the overprovisioning ISPs do. The fraction of the advertised to actually supported bandwidth per user they can get away with is dependent on average amount of traffic users generate. How do data caps help with that though? People are still going to use most of their internet during peek hours, because...well, those are the times people use the internet the most, by definition. It's like trying to combat rush hour traffic problems by limiting the number of times people can use a highway. People are still going to use it during rush hour, they just are going to avoid using the highway during non-rush hour periods, which accomplishes nothing.
skocznymroczny 7y ago
Even more than that. Angolans are using free Facebook/Wikipedia data caps for illegal filesharing. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/nz7eyg/wikipedia-zero-facebook-free-basics-angola-pirates-zero-rating https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/nz7eyg/wikipedia-zero-fac...
- magashna 7y ago
  I really hate that there's some whiny wiki editor complaining that those Angolans are exploiting their fundamentally exploitative zero system. I'm all for it, good on them.
  - josinalvo 7y ago
    It is not exploitative at all to give people access to wikipedia (or even facebook) without giving them general internet access. I can accept that it would be better for the health of the internet as a whole to give people full access or not at all. But it cannot be exploitative to give something of value for free to someone, just because that someone wants something more/something else.
    - magashna 7y ago
      Facebook has no other reason to supply them with their zero service other than to get valuable data out of them. Unless FB is the most well disguised charitable organization ever
      - lordgrenville 7y ago
        No fan of FB, but it's not necessarily a zero-sum game.
    - lkbm 7y ago
      It seems akin to dumping. It's definitely not Wikipedia's goal to suppress telecom markets in Angola, but that could be the effect. Free stuff distorts markets. It's important to be cognizant of this providing aid.
TheSoftwareGuy 7y ago
>Is there any cost that an ISP company has related to the amount of data transferred? All the costs that I'm aware of are related to the bandwidth, not the total transmitted data (eg.: IX connections and such). the more data you have to transfer the more bandwidth you need to have available to be able to offer some desired throughput to your customers
kd5bjo 7y ago
> Is there any cost that an ISP company has related to the amount of data transferred? All the costs that I'm aware of are related to the bandwidth, not the total transmitted data Bandwidth is strongly correlated to total transmitted data, as the amount of time in a day isn’t changing any time soon. It may be reasonable to offer some kind of off-peak pricing for customers that can time-shift their internet needs, but the complexity is apparently not worth the benefits. In particular, if the usage over time of a high-data customer generally looks like a scaled version of the same chart as a low-data customer, there won’t be much effective difference in the two models, and consumers understand quantity billing much easier than bandwidth-percentile billing, which is how the wholesale market is priced.
- Wowfunhappy 7y ago
  > Consumers understand quantity billing much easier than bandwidth-percentile billing, which is how the wholesale market is priced. "Data used between the hours of 11pm and 9am do not count against your data cap." Not difficult to understand, cell phone companies used to do it all the time with minutes. (Times made up, adjust for real-world peek.) Personally, I think it's relatively obvious that data caps on cable internet connections are not related to the cost of service.
  - kd5bjo 7y ago
    >Personally, I think it's relatively obvious that data caps on cable internet connections are not related to the cost of service. They’re related, but there may not be a direct 1:1 correspondence. Offering unlimited anything at a fixed price is a terrible idea for any company because there will be at least a few outliers that throw their modeling out the window, and there is ample precedent for ill-advised promotions bankrupting companies (see the Hoover flight article that was on the front page a while ago). The issue isn’t with the existence of data caps, it’s with the laws that allow nominally unlimited things to be actually limited and the lack of competition that might produce the kinds of promotion you’ve suggested in the fight for market share.
jnbiche 7y ago
> Is there any cost that an ISP company has related to the amount of data transferred? Data caps allow ISPs to run oversubscribed networks, which are very profitable. If you're streaming 24/7, then that bandwidth isn't available to sell to your neighbor. In that sense, cost is indeed directly related to amount of data transferred.
zaarn 7y ago
There is some cost to transfer between ISPs or to higher tier ISPs, though generally that cost is negligible. They always pay for accepting traffic and generally they have agreements that only the difference between out-in is paid. At my current host, the peering cost of data is about 5€/TB outgoing transfer, though recently they removed this altogether and cover it from other profits. The real world cost of a TB of data is basically the cost of the energy moving it, which is increasingly cheap.
chewbacha 7y ago
Since infrastructure is the same initial cost to everyone; I would guess that electricity is the main cost. Driving continuous max bandwidth should require more energy and thus cost more. I say this without knowing too much about it; but I do know the cable line is separate from the power line... so the cable company needs to drive the bits through the coaxial with their own electricity, correct? A long, sustain, high bitrate seems like that would use more, no? Just speculating...
cm2187 7y ago
In all fairness AWS will charge you something like $90 for 1TB of traffic per month. I am all for cheap unlimited data plans but I can see why an ISP would create tiers of service and charge a premium to multi-terabyte users (and why non multi-terabyte users shouldn't pay for multi-terabyte users).
- l33tman 7y ago
  It's not a good comparision, AWS charges this to lock AWS users into their ecosystem. It's free from the internet into AWS and extremely expensive out to the internet. This is of course by design to make sure you can't have some services outside AWS.
esotericn 7y ago
This sounds like an opportunity for some sort of crazy Facebook-VPN. Can you encode data in facebook posts and tunnel over it?
- throwaway8941 7y ago
  I don't know about Facebook, but I use vk.com to share video files (~100 GiB/month) with a friend who only has access to a mobile plan with 10 GiB data per month and unlimited data to a few social networks. I put a directory into a multi-volume .7z archive (sliced into 200 MiB chunks, their per-file limit), upload the chunks through their API (solving a simple captcha every 5-10 GiB), and that's it. I believe I've read about people in Philippines (?) using Facebook for sharing files using a similar process.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
Joeri 7y ago
Yes, the costs are proportional to the bandwidth, but people want a fast connection at a low price, so ISP's sell a fast connection at a discount and limit how often you can use it through traffic shaping and/or data caps to still turn a profit on it. The business plans are often unlimited, and typically priced a multiple for what's the exact same technology as the home plans underneath. If you want to know what unlimited bandwidth really costs, look at the price of the business plans. I think ISP's are often undeservedly painted as the bad guys. Yes, some are profiteers, but most are just turning a normal profit, just like any business. The only way for them to compete on price with other ISP's is to also impose caps, because what they charge is just not enough to fund the infrastructure for a dedicated connection with guaranteed bandwidth.
- trepanne 7y ago
  > the costs are proportional to the bandwidth That's not how statistical multiplexing works. If it was some sort of a natural law that shipping 1 byte cost $x on the margin, then the PSTN never would have survived the shift to unmetered long distance service. Somehow ISPs have been making big profits selling unmetered internet service during a period of hypergrowth. How is it possible that they didn't go broke during this process? The real story here is that "power user" is a proxy for "cord cutter". If a residential user downloads 1TB per month, then they're a thoroughgoing "over the top" video consumer. The traffic patterns are different for streamers vs. pirates, but it's still people watching TV and not paying cableco for the privilege. They're just doing price discrimination, rolling out bandwidth caps with punitive fees for violations, and waiting for the 4K frog to boil. Roll it forward, and you're back in the world of all you can eat at a higher price point. Cablecos don't really have to care how you split your bill between internet and video, as long as ARPU stays in the $70-$100 range. "Dumb pipes" are higher margin than cable channels, and don't need contract renegotiations with steely-eyed squeezers like Disney. Let DIS roll their price increases out directly to consumers with their streaming channels, while you just sitting there running a toll road. It's like a regulated natural monopoly, without the burden of appropriate regulation. This is a nice business. > If you want to know what unlimited bandwidth really costs, look at the price of the business plans. The premium there is for uptime guarantees, better service, and a certain amount of legislative corruption (without which no discussion of telco/cableco practices would be complete). They are allowed to discriminate between commercial & residential customers, and refuse residential service to commercial addresses.
deleted 7y ago
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ryanmercer 7y ago
>Is there any cost that an ISP company has related to the amount of data transferred? I mean, there's a physical limitation to how much data a given amount of cable can transfer at any time. Some of bandwidth caps are likely to prevent people from streaming as much data as they can 24/7 otherwise considerably more cable would have to be run, not unlike adding more pipes when more housing additions are added to an area (think of Sim City when you'd need to add more water infrastructure when you'd have more buildings). Data usage is actually increasing at a mind-boggling rate, there are plenty of good articles about this on the internet. If we look at Wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_traffic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_traffic We see in 2000 1.008 EB of IP traffic, in 2010 it jumps to 241.812 EB, 2017 jumps to 1,464 EB! Mobile traffic went from 86.412 EB in 2016 to 144 EB in 2017!!! (those above numbers are taken from Cisco whitepapers cited in the Wiki entry) Ericcson has a good one here about mobile data increase: https://www.ericsson.com/en/mobility-report/future-mobile-data-usage-and-traffic-growth https://www.ericsson.com/en/mobility-report/future-mobile-da... If you look at the numbers you see that at the current growth rates, there really is a valid reason to limit data usage as much as possible by providers via datacaps. While their current cabling can likely handle the demand, they're almost certainly going to reach a point in the near future where they simply can't deploy cable enough to keep up with the annual increases.
toast0 7y ago
> Is there any cost that an ISP company has related to the amount of data transferred? If the data is coming from outside the ISPs network, it might be on a paid connection. Although I think it's less popular today, it was common for paid connections to be billed based on the physical capacity as well as the amount of transfer (95th percentile billing used to be ubiquitous). Within the ISPs network, or on unpaid connections, the marginal cost per byte is discontinuous: most of the time it's so low it's probably hard to measure, but when you hit the capacity of a link, the cost can be high to increase capacity. An ISP, especially a residential ISP is not expected to have capacity for all its users to transit data across the internet at the full speed of the last mile connections at all time. There is oversubscription, and it's ok and reasonable. To the extent that someone is using a residential connection at full speed all day every day, that's not really reasonable, and they should be in a different account type. However, ISPs play a large part in this: they should make this more clear, their data caps should be sized to bandwidth, they should offer transfer rate capping in case of overage, and the overage fees should be more reasonable.
post_break 7y ago
Since no one answered your question even remotely, no there is no cost to the ISP related to the amount of data transferred. It's basically how much pipe do you want, not how much water are you going to flow. So at the ISP I worked at we'd buy a fiber connection from say sprint, and it would be 10 gig speed. There were no costs involved with how much we transferred. 0 bytes or hit that line 100% saturation 24x7, costs the same.
- parliament32 7y ago
  What are you talking about, basically every tier 1 carrier is going to charge you based on usage. Usually per average mbps or gbps with a minimum commit (so you'd buy, say, a 100G link with a 10G commit, then you pay $x per gbps using 95th percentile[1] with a minimum of 10gbps). The only exception is if you peer and have a bilateral agreement, in which case you pay nothing anyway. If the ISP you worked at used other ISPs (tier 2 or 3) as upstreams then yeah, you get the same service as business class internet (flat rate for a capped link speed) but once you're one of the big boys it's absolutely metered and charged by usage. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burstable_billing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burstable_billing
  - post_break 7y ago
    The ISP used other ISPs for upstreams.

concert-gilled 7y ago

I remember someone writing a proxy that ran over Facebook, maybe it was specifically chat, in response to that. However, I am not able to find it right now. edit: I found it here[0]. > The idea of this project is to tunnel Internet traffic through Facebook chat (packets are sent as base64), the main component is tuntap and also the Google's Gumbo parser which does the interaction with Facebook (login, send/receive messages, etc.). [0] https://github.com/matiasinsaurralde/facebook-tunnel https://github.com/matiasinsaurralde/facebook-tunnel

sseveran 7y ago

Indeed there is. ISPs don't run a non-oversubscribed network. If they did your bill would be much higher. The costs are in building cables, maintaining cables, buying and maintaining local pop network equipment, building and maintaining whatever backbone they run, installing and maintaining network equipment in network meeting rooms where they connect with transit providers, etc...

JustSomeNobody 7y ago
I don't understand how this answers the question "Is there any cost that an ISP company has related to the amount of data transferred?". This all sounds like maintenance and they'd have that if I use 1GB or 1TB.
- ubercow13 7y ago
  If every customer can use 1TB, it is more likely that many customers will be using more bandwidth at the same time, therefore requiring more infrastructure to ensure their connections still provide their advertised bandwidth
  - JustSomeNobody 7y ago
    I don't see how that would affect anything. If we assume that most people consume the most data in the evenings (streaming Netflix, etc), no matter the cap, you would see issues if bandwidth was an issue. If I'm downloading ISOs of Linux during the day at 100% everyday while people are at work, big deal, right? But, if everyone is streaming at the same time, if there was going to be an issue, it would happen if caps existed or not because at some point during the month you're going to have nearly all your customers with data to use.
    - stordoff 7y ago
      The way I've seen this handled in the UK (a while ago, but I think some ISPs still do it) is to have caps at certain times (either by having a limit or throttling bulk P2P downloads), but then allow unlimited downloads at other times, especially overnight
    - vlan0 7y ago
      > But, if everyone is streaming at the same time, if there was going to be an issue, it would happen if caps existed or not because at some point during the month you're going to have nearly all your customers with data to use. It's a giant bucket of 'it depends'. If the CDN network serving the content has placed hardware within the ISPs network, it's likely a non-issue. This was a major issue before folks like Netflix started moving their CDNs closer to the customer. You might have a hard time finding the articles, but I recommend looking at the pissing match Level 3 and Verizon got into years back. >it would happen if caps existed or not I'm not convinced. You are essentially arguing that scarcity of a resource has no affect on consumption.
cmiles74 7y ago
I don't think this directly impacts a cost per unit of data transferred, as the poster was wondering. I agree that maintaining the network and ensuring it can meet capacity is a cost that the ISP passes on to their customers, but I would point out that this is why people pay a monthly subscription to their ISP. To my mind the question would be "if an ISP has network with a fixed capacity, do their monthly operating costs differ between a month where they consistently utilize 50% of that capacity compared to another month where they utilize 80%?" I suspect the cost to the ISP is the same in either case: they have purchased the equipment and bandwidth to support the network and those costs are fixed, regardless of how much of that bandwidth they are actually using. If that is true, this idea that there is only so much data per month to go around and if you use more then your neighbor then you should be charged more money would be fundamentally dishonest.
- kd5bjo 7y ago
  Consumer ISPs are effectively bandwidth resellers: they buy in bulk at wholesale rates, split it up, and sell retail quantities to individuals. Wholesale bandwidth is generally billed based on the peak transfer rate during the billing period, and not a fixed price.(1) You also can’t assume a fixed network capacity- ISPs will buy enough equipment to maintain service to their customers instead of having brownouts. This capex cost is directly caused by higher aggregate usage from new and existing customers, so it makes sense to charge them by usage as well. (1) This is overly simplistic; these are individually-negotiated B2B contracts, so details vary widely.
  - sseveran 7y ago
    I would think that would mostly apply to DSL ISPs that are just using a telcos infrastructure. I suppose AT&T Fiber may be charged by AT&Ts backbone for traffic transiting their network or something like that. The major ISPs AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, etc... are building their own networks at least in part.
    - kd5bjo 7y ago
      Yes, the truly big backbone ISPs aren’t generally paying for interconnection to the others. Instead, they have the capital expenses of maintaining and extending that backbone to handle growing internet traffic in general. If they don’t keep up with demand, they’ll lose customers and potentially their settlement free agreements with the other backbone providers.
nebulous1 7y ago
I think the suggestion is more along the lines of you buy a set bandwidth with a certain contention ratio (or ratios) and then the ISP lets you contend for the bandwidth as you like. Having a bandwidth cap is basically the ISP punishing you for contending too often. That said, assuming the ISP wants to keep an average speed higher than the minimum their contention ratio would offer, people who download a lot would have a greater impact on that, and could therefore cause the ISP to have to invest in more hardware and back-haul. The counter is that the ISP isn't upgrading their network anyway, they're just juicing the market by charging some people more.
- sseveran 7y ago
  I agree with what I think you are stating implicitly that bandwidth caps a blunt instrument. ISPs don't really have a lot of nobs to turn without setting off the network neutrality crowd. I wish there were more QoS nobs that could be turned to allow for lower latency and traffic prioritization as that would probably have some interesting applications. Most ISPs are constantly upgrading parts of their network. Earlier this spring AT&T came through my complex and installed fiber in every apartment. Average broadband speeds have increased significantly over the last decade, and for that to have happened significant network upgrades would have to have taken place.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

Pigo 7y ago

I think if it becomes a common problem for most of the USA, it could finally push the monopoly conversation to the forefront. People being frustrated with charges for a service that should have been next to free is what broke up Bell Systems.

TeMPOraL 7y ago

> Is there any cost that an ISP company has related to the amount of data transferred? Not sure if at a noticeable level, but I keep wondering: aren't there costs that are directly proportional to the amount of data transferred? Flipping bits costs energy, both at the level of fundamental physics and (more importantly) at the level of engineering - all the electric and optical signals aren't free, and packet processing isn't either. E.g. I'd expect my power bill to be larger if my Raspberry Pi saturated the network by streaming /dev/urandom than it would be if it was sitting idle. But aside that, I think that beyond the "we can charge you for data because you can", the per-data-transferred costs come from the overprovisioning ISPs do. The fraction of the advertised to actually supported bandwidth per user they can get away with is dependent on average amount of traffic users generate.

magashna 7y ago
If there weren't municipal companies with better service, faster speeds, no caps, all for cheaper, then I might agree. But these companies are greedy, and they keep crying wolf while increasing their profits.
- kminehart 7y ago
  Yup. Ozark Electric Cooperative in Fayetteville, AR started a gigabit ISP for all of its customers. 1 gb/s internet with no caps for like $80/month. I was so sad when I had to move further north where there's only Cox.
jgtrosh 7y ago
Most networks are far from energy proportional; that is general usage barely affects consumption for cables which are “always on”.
Goronmon 7y ago
But aside that, I think that beyond the "we can charge you for data because you can", the per-data-transferred costs come from the overprovisioning ISPs do. The fraction of the advertised to actually supported bandwidth per user they can get away with is dependent on average amount of traffic users generate. How do data caps help with that though? People are still going to use most of their internet during peek hours, because...well, those are the times people use the internet the most, by definition. It's like trying to combat rush hour traffic problems by limiting the number of times people can use a highway. People are still going to use it during rush hour, they just are going to avoid using the highway during non-rush hour periods, which accomplishes nothing.

skocznymroczny 7y ago

Even more than that. Angolans are using free Facebook/Wikipedia data caps for illegal filesharing. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/nz7eyg/wikipedia-zero-facebook-free-basics-angola-pirates-zero-rating https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/nz7eyg/wikipedia-zero-fac...

magashna 7y ago
I really hate that there's some whiny wiki editor complaining that those Angolans are exploiting their fundamentally exploitative zero system. I'm all for it, good on them.
- josinalvo 7y ago
  It is not exploitative at all to give people access to wikipedia (or even facebook) without giving them general internet access. I can accept that it would be better for the health of the internet as a whole to give people full access or not at all. But it cannot be exploitative to give something of value for free to someone, just because that someone wants something more/something else.
  - magashna 7y ago
    Facebook has no other reason to supply them with their zero service other than to get valuable data out of them. Unless FB is the most well disguised charitable organization ever
    - lordgrenville 7y ago
      No fan of FB, but it's not necessarily a zero-sum game.
  - lkbm 7y ago
    It seems akin to dumping. It's definitely not Wikipedia's goal to suppress telecom markets in Angola, but that could be the effect. Free stuff distorts markets. It's important to be cognizant of this providing aid.

TheSoftwareGuy 7y ago

>Is there any cost that an ISP company has related to the amount of data transferred? All the costs that I'm aware of are related to the bandwidth, not the total transmitted data (eg.: IX connections and such). the more data you have to transfer the more bandwidth you need to have available to be able to offer some desired throughput to your customers

kd5bjo 7y ago

> Is there any cost that an ISP company has related to the amount of data transferred? All the costs that I'm aware of are related to the bandwidth, not the total transmitted data Bandwidth is strongly correlated to total transmitted data, as the amount of time in a day isn’t changing any time soon. It may be reasonable to offer some kind of off-peak pricing for customers that can time-shift their internet needs, but the complexity is apparently not worth the benefits. In particular, if the usage over time of a high-data customer generally looks like a scaled version of the same chart as a low-data customer, there won’t be much effective difference in the two models, and consumers understand quantity billing much easier than bandwidth-percentile billing, which is how the wholesale market is priced.

Wowfunhappy 7y ago
> Consumers understand quantity billing much easier than bandwidth-percentile billing, which is how the wholesale market is priced. "Data used between the hours of 11pm and 9am do not count against your data cap." Not difficult to understand, cell phone companies used to do it all the time with minutes. (Times made up, adjust for real-world peek.) Personally, I think it's relatively obvious that data caps on cable internet connections are not related to the cost of service.
- kd5bjo 7y ago
  >Personally, I think it's relatively obvious that data caps on cable internet connections are not related to the cost of service. They’re related, but there may not be a direct 1:1 correspondence. Offering unlimited anything at a fixed price is a terrible idea for any company because there will be at least a few outliers that throw their modeling out the window, and there is ample precedent for ill-advised promotions bankrupting companies (see the Hoover flight article that was on the front page a while ago). The issue isn’t with the existence of data caps, it’s with the laws that allow nominally unlimited things to be actually limited and the lack of competition that might produce the kinds of promotion you’ve suggested in the fight for market share.

jnbiche 7y ago

> Is there any cost that an ISP company has related to the amount of data transferred? Data caps allow ISPs to run oversubscribed networks, which are very profitable. If you're streaming 24/7, then that bandwidth isn't available to sell to your neighbor. In that sense, cost is indeed directly related to amount of data transferred.

zaarn 7y ago

There is some cost to transfer between ISPs or to higher tier ISPs, though generally that cost is negligible. They always pay for accepting traffic and generally they have agreements that only the difference between out-in is paid. At my current host, the peering cost of data is about 5€/TB outgoing transfer, though recently they removed this altogether and cover it from other profits. The real world cost of a TB of data is basically the cost of the energy moving it, which is increasingly cheap.

chewbacha 7y ago

Since infrastructure is the same initial cost to everyone; I would guess that electricity is the main cost. Driving continuous max bandwidth should require more energy and thus cost more. I say this without knowing too much about it; but I do know the cable line is separate from the power line... so the cable company needs to drive the bits through the coaxial with their own electricity, correct? A long, sustain, high bitrate seems like that would use more, no? Just speculating...

cm2187 7y ago

In all fairness AWS will charge you something like $90 for 1TB of traffic per month. I am all for cheap unlimited data plans but I can see why an ISP would create tiers of service and charge a premium to multi-terabyte users (and why non multi-terabyte users shouldn't pay for multi-terabyte users).

l33tman 7y ago
It's not a good comparision, AWS charges this to lock AWS users into their ecosystem. It's free from the internet into AWS and extremely expensive out to the internet. This is of course by design to make sure you can't have some services outside AWS.

esotericn 7y ago

This sounds like an opportunity for some sort of crazy Facebook-VPN. Can you encode data in facebook posts and tunnel over it?

throwaway8941 7y ago
I don't know about Facebook, but I use vk.com to share video files (~100 GiB/month) with a friend who only has access to a mobile plan with 10 GiB data per month and unlimited data to a few social networks. I put a directory into a multi-volume .7z archive (sliced into 200 MiB chunks, their per-file limit), upload the chunks through their API (solving a simple captcha every 5-10 GiB), and that's it. I believe I've read about people in Philippines (?) using Facebook for sharing files using a similar process.
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Joeri 7y ago

Yes, the costs are proportional to the bandwidth, but people want a fast connection at a low price, so ISP's sell a fast connection at a discount and limit how often you can use it through traffic shaping and/or data caps to still turn a profit on it. The business plans are often unlimited, and typically priced a multiple for what's the exact same technology as the home plans underneath. If you want to know what unlimited bandwidth really costs, look at the price of the business plans. I think ISP's are often undeservedly painted as the bad guys. Yes, some are profiteers, but most are just turning a normal profit, just like any business. The only way for them to compete on price with other ISP's is to also impose caps, because what they charge is just not enough to fund the infrastructure for a dedicated connection with guaranteed bandwidth.

trepanne 7y ago
> the costs are proportional to the bandwidth That's not how statistical multiplexing works. If it was some sort of a natural law that shipping 1 byte cost $x on the margin, then the PSTN never would have survived the shift to unmetered long distance service. Somehow ISPs have been making big profits selling unmetered internet service during a period of hypergrowth. How is it possible that they didn't go broke during this process? The real story here is that "power user" is a proxy for "cord cutter". If a residential user downloads 1TB per month, then they're a thoroughgoing "over the top" video consumer. The traffic patterns are different for streamers vs. pirates, but it's still people watching TV and not paying cableco for the privilege. They're just doing price discrimination, rolling out bandwidth caps with punitive fees for violations, and waiting for the 4K frog to boil. Roll it forward, and you're back in the world of all you can eat at a higher price point. Cablecos don't really have to care how you split your bill between internet and video, as long as ARPU stays in the $70-$100 range. "Dumb pipes" are higher margin than cable channels, and don't need contract renegotiations with steely-eyed squeezers like Disney. Let DIS roll their price increases out directly to consumers with their streaming channels, while you just sitting there running a toll road. It's like a regulated natural monopoly, without the burden of appropriate regulation. This is a nice business. > If you want to know what unlimited bandwidth really costs, look at the price of the business plans. The premium there is for uptime guarantees, better service, and a certain amount of legislative corruption (without which no discussion of telco/cableco practices would be complete). They are allowed to discriminate between commercial & residential customers, and refuse residential service to commercial addresses.

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ryanmercer 7y ago

>Is there any cost that an ISP company has related to the amount of data transferred? I mean, there's a physical limitation to how much data a given amount of cable can transfer at any time. Some of bandwidth caps are likely to prevent people from streaming as much data as they can 24/7 otherwise considerably more cable would have to be run, not unlike adding more pipes when more housing additions are added to an area (think of Sim City when you'd need to add more water infrastructure when you'd have more buildings). Data usage is actually increasing at a mind-boggling rate, there are plenty of good articles about this on the internet. If we look at Wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_traffic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_traffic We see in 2000 1.008 EB of IP traffic, in 2010 it jumps to 241.812 EB, 2017 jumps to 1,464 EB! Mobile traffic went from 86.412 EB in 2016 to 144 EB in 2017!!! (those above numbers are taken from Cisco whitepapers cited in the Wiki entry) Ericcson has a good one here about mobile data increase: https://www.ericsson.com/en/mobility-report/future-mobile-data-usage-and-traffic-growth https://www.ericsson.com/en/mobility-report/future-mobile-da... If you look at the numbers you see that at the current growth rates, there really is a valid reason to limit data usage as much as possible by providers via datacaps. While their current cabling can likely handle the demand, they're almost certainly going to reach a point in the near future where they simply can't deploy cable enough to keep up with the annual increases.

toast0 7y ago

> Is there any cost that an ISP company has related to the amount of data transferred? If the data is coming from outside the ISPs network, it might be on a paid connection. Although I think it's less popular today, it was common for paid connections to be billed based on the physical capacity as well as the amount of transfer (95th percentile billing used to be ubiquitous). Within the ISPs network, or on unpaid connections, the marginal cost per byte is discontinuous: most of the time it's so low it's probably hard to measure, but when you hit the capacity of a link, the cost can be high to increase capacity. An ISP, especially a residential ISP is not expected to have capacity for all its users to transit data across the internet at the full speed of the last mile connections at all time. There is oversubscription, and it's ok and reasonable. To the extent that someone is using a residential connection at full speed all day every day, that's not really reasonable, and they should be in a different account type. However, ISPs play a large part in this: they should make this more clear, their data caps should be sized to bandwidth, they should offer transfer rate capping in case of overage, and the overage fees should be more reasonable.

post_break 7y ago

Since no one answered your question even remotely, no there is no cost to the ISP related to the amount of data transferred. It's basically how much pipe do you want, not how much water are you going to flow. So at the ISP I worked at we'd buy a fiber connection from say sprint, and it would be 10 gig speed. There were no costs involved with how much we transferred. 0 bytes or hit that line 100% saturation 24x7, costs the same.

parliament32 7y ago
What are you talking about, basically every tier 1 carrier is going to charge you based on usage. Usually per average mbps or gbps with a minimum commit (so you'd buy, say, a 100G link with a 10G commit, then you pay $x per gbps using 95th percentile[1] with a minimum of 10gbps). The only exception is if you peer and have a bilateral agreement, in which case you pay nothing anyway. If the ISP you worked at used other ISPs (tier 2 or 3) as upstreams then yeah, you get the same service as business class internet (flat rate for a capped link speed) but once you're one of the big boys it's absolutely metered and charged by usage. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burstable_billing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burstable_billing
- post_break 7y ago
  The ISP used other ISPs for upstreams.