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I think that data caps aren't a good solution simply because they don't have a good connection with network capacity. Many wireless carriers have started doing

by mdasen 7y ago

I think that data caps aren't a good solution simply because they don't have a good connection with network capacity. Many wireless carriers have started doing "deprioritization" after a certain amount of usage which is a lot more consumer friendly. If the network has capacity, heavy users see no difference in their connection. If the network is capacity constrained, it favors lighter users so that they get their money's worth. My school did this when I was an undergrad. The top 100 users on campus often used more than half the bandwidth. That was fine and the school was more than happy for them to use the internet heavily - the connection had already been paid for, might as well have it used. However, the school did put them at a lower priority when there was congestion. Most of the heavy users didn't even notice. I'm really hopeful that wireless technologies will improve competition over the next decade. If three wireless companies can provide home broadband competition in the future, we won't be beholden to the single provider that most of us deal with now. AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile all bought a bunch of millimeter wave spectrum in the latest auction (in addition to their current holdings). T-Mobile is gearing up for a big home broadband push. They're hoping to have 9.5M home broadband customers in the next three years which would probably make them the third largest after Comcast and Charter who have around 26-27M I believe (and around double Fios' customer base). Having even a little competition would mean that they'd have to compete for my business rather than being able to hike prices every year.

kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
T-mobile deprioritizes down to 2G speeds which makes web browsing nearly unusable.
- mdasen 7y ago
  That isn't true anymore. In the old days of limited data plans, they would throttle customers to 2G speeds after their allotment was used. Today, they deprioritize which simply slows speeds when there is network congestion in the area.
  - morpheuskafka 7y ago
    I have a T-Mobile plan with 5GB of "unlimited data" and it goes down to 256kbps when the data is used up. As I learned the hard way, there is no way to buy more data or restart the billing cycle earlier no matter how much you are willing to pay.
    - lonelappde 7y ago
      Data Pass doesn't work? www.t-mobile.com/support/plans-features/data-passes
      - kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
        Not for prepaid plans which are treated as steerage class by T-mobile. MVNOs are in the same doghouse.
PeterStuer 7y ago
You are assuming the ISP will act in a near altruistic mode, allocate all of the available capacity in a sort of 'fair' manner. Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, history has shown this not to be the case. In some countries ISP's have moved from data caps to 'unlimited' offers over a decade ago. 'Unlimited' always comes with an asterix, where you will find the 'good house-father' clause, meaning that they can decide to throttle your connection based on some vaguely or unspecified condition completely under their discretion. In practice network usage is unsurprisingly following a Pareto distribution. Every ISP wants to get the top 10% of bandwidth users off their network and dump them onto their competitors. So they use the 'good house-father' clause to try to do just that. At least with data caps you had a clear and verifiable criterium. The 'unlimited' plans just give the ISP carte-blanche in actively selecting and culling their users.
- lonelappde 7y ago
  What's wrong with charging more for people who use more?
  - PeterStuer 7y ago
    That is not the point. Consumption based charging would be fine and which is exactly what we had before. These 'unlimited' plans are not that. These are a free pass to ditch your more 'undesirable' customers onto your competition. Yes, that can be because they use more, but also because they use less of your 'value-added' high margin services, because they use 'non-mainstream' data (less edge-cached), less data for which you receive kickbacks, consume not more but at peak times, or simply because you do not like them for whatever.
  - olyjohn 7y ago
    When I pay for bandwidth to my house, I should get that bandwidth, and be able to use it for whatever I want. I don't care if they oversold their network. It's not my problem. I should not get punished for using the bandwidth I paid for. If people who barely use the internet are paying the same as me, that's not my problem either. If ISPs are suffering congestion, that's because they did a bad job designing their network for the amount of demand they have. Throttling is just a way for them to cheap out on their network, but sell "gigabit" internet to everybody. If they can't serve me 1 gigabit, they are selling shitty service. If they want to charge for X amount of bits per month, that should be the up front pricing scheme. I should not be paying for a "1 gigabit" plan, but have the amount of bits that I can use be buried in the fine print. Especially when bits per month is the REAL indicator of what they are selling.
osrec 7y ago
A lot of UK broadband is advertised as "unlimited" but subject to a fair usage policy. I guess they must use a similar system to the one you described. It's pretty decent, and I'm never really thinking about my usage, which is what I like (I don't want to feel like I'm going to run out of bandwidth). Interestingly, my ISP gave me a breakdown of my data usage, and I was under a meager 30gb/mo ever since my contact started. That surprised me as I watch a fair bit of YouTube etc, however, I guess it just doesn't add up to all that much.
- mcny 7y ago
  > Interestingly, my ISP gave me a breakdown of my data usage, and I was under a meager 30gb/mo ever since my contact started. That surprised me as I watch a fair bit of YouTube etc, however, I guess it just doesn't add up to all that much. My hypothesis (could be wrong, very anecdotal, no evidence): 1. YouTube does some pretty heavy compression to begin with (as several popular YouTubers have complained over the years) 2. YouTube in its default settings switches to the lower resolution when it detects you are not actively watching the video I think this one two punch means that you sip on data even when you think you use YouTube a lot.
  - frosted-flakes 7y ago
    > when it detects you are not actively watching the video How? By its very nature, watching video is passive. Unless they watch you through the camera. It actually infuriates me when YouTube auto-lowers the resolution (usually because I have slow Internet). I almost always set it to 720p or 1080p, but I have to do it every time because it doesn't remember my setting.
- ksec 7y ago
  Assuming Good intention and Faith from ISP, I really do like and enjoy Fair Use Policy. There are some bad actors on the network that uses Terabytes of Data per month. They should just be throttled. I hope the trend worldwide would be Speed based Price Plan with Fair Use policy and throttling. I hate the idea of Data Caps, especially when Apple is sending hundreds of MB of Data every month for whatever reason. ( Calander, Syncing etc.. )
woah 7y ago
Your scheme sounds suspiciously similar to... a data cap.
londons_explore 7y ago
Deprioritization can be pretty technically hard to achieve, especially when you don't want every edge node to have to do connection tracking... Even if you solve that, you still have to set up queuing rules at every node in your very diverse network, and deal with the fact most routes will be seeing packet loss most of the time on some queues at least. Managing that is possible, but harder. Some network architectures involve fragmenting and reassembling packets, and there it can become nearly impossible to implement 'priority' correctly. "We limit you to 10Mbps at just one bottleneck location if you use more than 50 gigs" is far far easier to implement, not to mention easier for the business managers, and customers, to understand.

by mdasen 7y ago

kevin_thibedeau 7y ago

T-mobile deprioritizes down to 2G speeds which makes web browsing nearly unusable.

mdasen 7y ago
That isn't true anymore. In the old days of limited data plans, they would throttle customers to 2G speeds after their allotment was used. Today, they deprioritize which simply slows speeds when there is network congestion in the area.
- morpheuskafka 7y ago
  I have a T-Mobile plan with 5GB of "unlimited data" and it goes down to 256kbps when the data is used up. As I learned the hard way, there is no way to buy more data or restart the billing cycle earlier no matter how much you are willing to pay.
  - lonelappde 7y ago
    Data Pass doesn't work? www.t-mobile.com/support/plans-features/data-passes
    - kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
      Not for prepaid plans which are treated as steerage class by T-mobile. MVNOs are in the same doghouse.

PeterStuer 7y ago

You are assuming the ISP will act in a near altruistic mode, allocate all of the available capacity in a sort of 'fair' manner. Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, history has shown this not to be the case. In some countries ISP's have moved from data caps to 'unlimited' offers over a decade ago. 'Unlimited' always comes with an asterix, where you will find the 'good house-father' clause, meaning that they can decide to throttle your connection based on some vaguely or unspecified condition completely under their discretion. In practice network usage is unsurprisingly following a Pareto distribution. Every ISP wants to get the top 10% of bandwidth users off their network and dump them onto their competitors. So they use the 'good house-father' clause to try to do just that. At least with data caps you had a clear and verifiable criterium. The 'unlimited' plans just give the ISP carte-blanche in actively selecting and culling their users.

lonelappde 7y ago
What's wrong with charging more for people who use more?
- PeterStuer 7y ago
  That is not the point. Consumption based charging would be fine and which is exactly what we had before. These 'unlimited' plans are not that. These are a free pass to ditch your more 'undesirable' customers onto your competition. Yes, that can be because they use more, but also because they use less of your 'value-added' high margin services, because they use 'non-mainstream' data (less edge-cached), less data for which you receive kickbacks, consume not more but at peak times, or simply because you do not like them for whatever.
- olyjohn 7y ago
  When I pay for bandwidth to my house, I should get that bandwidth, and be able to use it for whatever I want. I don't care if they oversold their network. It's not my problem. I should not get punished for using the bandwidth I paid for. If people who barely use the internet are paying the same as me, that's not my problem either. If ISPs are suffering congestion, that's because they did a bad job designing their network for the amount of demand they have. Throttling is just a way for them to cheap out on their network, but sell "gigabit" internet to everybody. If they can't serve me 1 gigabit, they are selling shitty service. If they want to charge for X amount of bits per month, that should be the up front pricing scheme. I should not be paying for a "1 gigabit" plan, but have the amount of bits that I can use be buried in the fine print. Especially when bits per month is the REAL indicator of what they are selling.

osrec 7y ago

A lot of UK broadband is advertised as "unlimited" but subject to a fair usage policy. I guess they must use a similar system to the one you described. It's pretty decent, and I'm never really thinking about my usage, which is what I like (I don't want to feel like I'm going to run out of bandwidth). Interestingly, my ISP gave me a breakdown of my data usage, and I was under a meager 30gb/mo ever since my contact started. That surprised me as I watch a fair bit of YouTube etc, however, I guess it just doesn't add up to all that much.

mcny 7y ago
> Interestingly, my ISP gave me a breakdown of my data usage, and I was under a meager 30gb/mo ever since my contact started. That surprised me as I watch a fair bit of YouTube etc, however, I guess it just doesn't add up to all that much. My hypothesis (could be wrong, very anecdotal, no evidence): 1. YouTube does some pretty heavy compression to begin with (as several popular YouTubers have complained over the years) 2. YouTube in its default settings switches to the lower resolution when it detects you are not actively watching the video I think this one two punch means that you sip on data even when you think you use YouTube a lot.
- frosted-flakes 7y ago
  > when it detects you are not actively watching the video How? By its very nature, watching video is passive. Unless they watch you through the camera. It actually infuriates me when YouTube auto-lowers the resolution (usually because I have slow Internet). I almost always set it to 720p or 1080p, but I have to do it every time because it doesn't remember my setting.
ksec 7y ago
Assuming Good intention and Faith from ISP, I really do like and enjoy Fair Use Policy. There are some bad actors on the network that uses Terabytes of Data per month. They should just be throttled. I hope the trend worldwide would be Speed based Price Plan with Fair Use policy and throttling. I hate the idea of Data Caps, especially when Apple is sending hundreds of MB of Data every month for whatever reason. ( Calander, Syncing etc.. )

woah 7y ago

Your scheme sounds suspiciously similar to... a data cap.

londons_explore 7y ago

Deprioritization can be pretty technically hard to achieve, especially when you don't want every edge node to have to do connection tracking... Even if you solve that, you still have to set up queuing rules at every node in your very diverse network, and deal with the fact most routes will be seeing packet loss most of the time on some queues at least. Managing that is possible, but harder. Some network architectures involve fragmenting and reassembling packets, and there it can become nearly impossible to implement 'priority' correctly. "We limit you to 10Mbps at just one bottleneck location if you use more than 50 gigs" is far far easier to implement, not to mention easier for the business managers, and customers, to understand.