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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 tot

by 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.

by kd5bjo 7y ago

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.