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Sorry, guys, but there really ain't no such thing as a free lunch. Eventually we'll all be paying metered fees, broadband or wireless. It's really the only fai

by cpr 16y ago

Sorry, guys, but there really ain't no such thing as a free lunch. Eventually we'll all be paying metered fees, broadband or wireless. It's really the only fair way, the same as we pay for water or electricity. Data is just another pipe/wire.

pinko 16y ago
I take your point -- especially in today's market -- but those are selective examples. We don't by and large pay for metered roads or sidewalks or bike paths, for example. There are plenty of other unmetered public services -- and whether you like that or not, there's no inherent reason bandwidth couldn't be one of them.
sethg 16y ago
A fiber-optic line connected to a cell-phone tower costs pretty much the same amount to maintain, regardless of how many bits happen to be flowing through it. By contrast, water and power companies actually have expenses that scale according to customers’ day-by-day usage. On the one hand, I understand that a plan that gives everyone a free lunch can lead to overconsumption by a few, and once they use up the pipe that they share with me, my performance suffers. On the other hand, I wouldn’t want to have to think before opening every YouTube video, “hmm, is this going to put me over the limit?”
- jsz0 16y ago
  Not so much so. Many cellular towers still use copper T1/DS3 uplinks but even if they are fed by fiber you're still paying for a committed level of bandwidth from a provider. Your circuit may have a 1Gbit/sec capacity but it can be provisioned at any speed. If the cellular provider was previously paying for 100Mbit/sec of bandwidth and now they need 300Mbit/sec that's an expense of scale.
Bud 16y ago
Apples and oranges. No, data is not just another wire. Using up 10x more electricity or water has very real, physical costs which are proportional to the amount consumed. Using 10x more data has only very tiny additional costs to the bandwidth provider. A few seconds of research can easily confirm this. Asserting that the levels of bandwidth charges we're seeing right now are "fair" is hilariously wrong.
- pohl 16y ago
  Using 10x more data has only very tiny additional costs to the bandwidth provider. Just out of curiosity, what sort of calculations went into your result of "tiny additional costs"? The reason that I ask is that bandwidth is finite and shared by all of the provider's customers. If one person consumes a lot of bandwidth, it will be to the detriment of the provider's other customers if the sum of all requested bandwidth is greater than the finite available bandwidth. Customers will eventually notice this, and the provider will lose those customers. How did you account for this in your estimate?
  - Bud 16y ago
    I'm talking about data caps kicking in at 200 MB per month, a cleverly chosen amount of data which just coincidentally happens to be hard to stay under with any serious usage of a smartphone, and then a big dollar jump to the next cap of (typically) a few GB a month, which most users who aren't uploading/downloading a lot of video can easily stay under. You'd also be right if the typical overage fees were within an order of magnitude of what it actually costs the provider to ship those extra bits over the wire. Or even two orders of magnitude. But from the figures I read (costs to the provider of circa a penny per megabyte or well under that), we're getting jobbed. Don't you find it a bit silly to constantly advertise "4G" networks and their supposedly blazing speeds, and in the same breath set up data plans which will only allow you to use your phone at full speed for circa 1 minute per month? Do the math yourself.
- cpr 16y ago
  I didn't mean to say that what we're paying now is fair; rather, that metered billing is fair. I agree that current data costs are astronomical due to an oligopoly situation (no real competition).
gte910h 16y ago
>Eventually we'll all be paying metered fees, broadband or wireless. I'm cool with that. The real cost of bandwidth is far far far far below what I COULD use over my current equipment and connection vs the fee I pay my end of line provider.
michaelbuckbee 16y ago
My concern is that it seems like telecos that offer metered fees do so as a wedge to extracting greater profits out of ALL of their users and not as a some sort of field leveling fairness action. Case in point: text messages. There are still many wireless plans that put a limit on the number of text messages that can be sent and crossing that limit brings about fees to the user far in excess of the costs of sending the text (10 to 15 cents per text would not be uncommon). Maybe at one point a decade ago those costs made sense (less bandwidth overall, more infrastructure needed, early adopter tax, etc.) but now we're trapped in a legacy rate structure for text messaging that simply won't go away. It's hard to predict the future, but I feel pretty secure in saying that the data caps we see today are going to seem laughably small a decade from now and I don't want the teleco's to "text messaging rate" my bandwidth from here on out. I think it hurts the industry as a whole and US competitiveness.
flashgordon 16y ago
See I have no issue with paying for how much I use as we do here in Oz (ok the prices to cost ratio may be a lot higher than for water companies for example). What I do have an issue with is for traffic to be treated unequally with no clear indication of this on the contracts.

by cpr 16y ago

pinko 16y ago

I take your point -- especially in today's market -- but those are selective examples. We don't by and large pay for metered roads or sidewalks or bike paths, for example. There are plenty of other unmetered public services -- and whether you like that or not, there's no inherent reason bandwidth couldn't be one of them.

sethg 16y ago

A fiber-optic line connected to a cell-phone tower costs pretty much the same amount to maintain, regardless of how many bits happen to be flowing through it. By contrast, water and power companies actually have expenses that scale according to customers’ day-by-day usage. On the one hand, I understand that a plan that gives everyone a free lunch can lead to overconsumption by a few, and once they use up the pipe that they share with me, my performance suffers. On the other hand, I wouldn’t want to have to think before opening every YouTube video, “hmm, is this going to put me over the limit?”

jsz0 16y ago
Not so much so. Many cellular towers still use copper T1/DS3 uplinks but even if they are fed by fiber you're still paying for a committed level of bandwidth from a provider. Your circuit may have a 1Gbit/sec capacity but it can be provisioned at any speed. If the cellular provider was previously paying for 100Mbit/sec of bandwidth and now they need 300Mbit/sec that's an expense of scale.

Bud 16y ago

Apples and oranges. No, data is not just another wire. Using up 10x more electricity or water has very real, physical costs which are proportional to the amount consumed. Using 10x more data has only very tiny additional costs to the bandwidth provider. A few seconds of research can easily confirm this. Asserting that the levels of bandwidth charges we're seeing right now are "fair" is hilariously wrong.

pohl 16y ago
Using 10x more data has only very tiny additional costs to the bandwidth provider. Just out of curiosity, what sort of calculations went into your result of "tiny additional costs"? The reason that I ask is that bandwidth is finite and shared by all of the provider's customers. If one person consumes a lot of bandwidth, it will be to the detriment of the provider's other customers if the sum of all requested bandwidth is greater than the finite available bandwidth. Customers will eventually notice this, and the provider will lose those customers. How did you account for this in your estimate?
- Bud 16y ago
  I'm talking about data caps kicking in at 200 MB per month, a cleverly chosen amount of data which just coincidentally happens to be hard to stay under with any serious usage of a smartphone, and then a big dollar jump to the next cap of (typically) a few GB a month, which most users who aren't uploading/downloading a lot of video can easily stay under. You'd also be right if the typical overage fees were within an order of magnitude of what it actually costs the provider to ship those extra bits over the wire. Or even two orders of magnitude. But from the figures I read (costs to the provider of circa a penny per megabyte or well under that), we're getting jobbed. Don't you find it a bit silly to constantly advertise "4G" networks and their supposedly blazing speeds, and in the same breath set up data plans which will only allow you to use your phone at full speed for circa 1 minute per month? Do the math yourself.
cpr 16y ago
I didn't mean to say that what we're paying now is fair; rather, that metered billing is fair. I agree that current data costs are astronomical due to an oligopoly situation (no real competition).

gte910h 16y ago

>Eventually we'll all be paying metered fees, broadband or wireless. I'm cool with that. The real cost of bandwidth is far far far far below what I COULD use over my current equipment and connection vs the fee I pay my end of line provider.

michaelbuckbee 16y ago

My concern is that it seems like telecos that offer metered fees do so as a wedge to extracting greater profits out of ALL of their users and not as a some sort of field leveling fairness action. Case in point: text messages. There are still many wireless plans that put a limit on the number of text messages that can be sent and crossing that limit brings about fees to the user far in excess of the costs of sending the text (10 to 15 cents per text would not be uncommon). Maybe at one point a decade ago those costs made sense (less bandwidth overall, more infrastructure needed, early adopter tax, etc.) but now we're trapped in a legacy rate structure for text messaging that simply won't go away. It's hard to predict the future, but I feel pretty secure in saying that the data caps we see today are going to seem laughably small a decade from now and I don't want the teleco's to "text messaging rate" my bandwidth from here on out. I think it hurts the industry as a whole and US competitiveness.

flashgordon 16y ago

See I have no issue with paying for how much I use as we do here in Oz (ok the prices to cost ratio may be a lot higher than for water companies for example). What I do have an issue with is for traffic to be treated unequally with no clear indication of this on the contracts.