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I am paying around 50$/month for my broadband and is pretty much connected 8hours a day. Does that mean someone else is paying for me? I.E. most people surf le

I am paying around 50$/month for my broadband and is pretty much connected 8hours a day. Does that mean someone else is paying for me? I.E. most people surf less and there for don't use the 50$ dllars they pay? I mean how is this actually working, internet used to be expensive like 10 years ago when you paid per hour and had a modem. I thought it was so cheap now because it is cheap to let people have the bandwidth. I don't really get this issue with wanting to control what people access. Why don't the broadbandproviders charge you for how much bandwidth you use instead?

shimon 18y ago
ISPs charge consumers a monthly fee for theoretically unlimited usage because that's the way most people are comfortable paying for their internet usage. Even a geek like me doesn't have a clear idea of how much bandwidth I use in a month, so for most people a per-byte-transferred pricing scheme would be totally unclear. Contrast this with something like per-minute phone usage pricing. Bandwidth certainly is cheap, and constantly getting cheaper, but the average consumer's bandwidth usage is also increasing. A few years ago, as filesharing became mainstream, broadband ISPs found it much more costly to provide unlimited service. Their ways of managing this extra cost include some throttling but also, interestingly, a proliferation of local peering. Local peering is when two small ISPs, say in a single city, notice they are both paying their ISPs in order to send traffic to each other, and decide to instead run a line between themselves and exchange traffic on that line instead of paying their ISPs. There was never any reason to do this sort of peering on a local level until we all started sharing music and movies with other folks in our neighborhoods; the increased demand has led ISPs to make a lot of the bandwidth we use less costly for them.

shimon 18y ago

ISPs charge consumers a monthly fee for theoretically unlimited usage because that's the way most people are comfortable paying for their internet usage. Even a geek like me doesn't have a clear idea of how much bandwidth I use in a month, so for most people a per-byte-transferred pricing scheme would be totally unclear. Contrast this with something like per-minute phone usage pricing. Bandwidth certainly is cheap, and constantly getting cheaper, but the average consumer's bandwidth usage is also increasing. A few years ago, as filesharing became mainstream, broadband ISPs found it much more costly to provide unlimited service. Their ways of managing this extra cost include some throttling but also, interestingly, a proliferation of local peering. Local peering is when two small ISPs, say in a single city, notice they are both paying their ISPs in order to send traffic to each other, and decide to instead run a line between themselves and exchange traffic on that line instead of paying their ISPs. There was never any reason to do this sort of peering on a local level until we all started sharing music and movies with other folks in our neighborhoods; the increased demand has led ISPs to make a lot of the bandwidth we use less costly for them.