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Imagine how good our network technology policy would be if the Senate weren't run by septagenarians and octogenarian. I fear that data caps for home internet w

Imagine how good our network technology policy would be if the Senate weren't run by septagenarians and octogenarian. I fear that data caps for home internet will become standard. There is no technological reason for these caps. For wireless, they could be defended by arguing that companies only get to use so much spectrum because of FCC laws. But the only limit for home internet is the ISP's willingness to deploy equipment and install cable/fiber runs. That's exactly what customers are paying them to do.

deleted 6y ago
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dmos62 6y ago
This statement could be made about a lot of things: > Imagine how good [most policies] would be if the Senate weren't run by septagenarians and octogenarian.
ChrisLomont 6y ago
> Imagine how good our network technology policy would be if the Senate weren't run by septagenarians and octogenarian. The ages of the senators proposing this are 76 (Joe Manchin), 76 (Angus King), 65 (Rob Portman), and 56 (Michael Bennet). 3 of the 4 are older than the median Senator age. None of the 4 are in the youngest 25%. Image how good our opinions of the Senate would be if we based them in facts.
- relaxing 6y ago
  The comment was about who runs the senate, not the proposers. Of the individuals you named, only Manchin has any chairmanships.
  - ChrisLomont 6y ago
    Nearly every single bill in Congress is introduced by non-chairmen, so this is an odd misdirection. Bills in both the entire session and in each subcommittee are voted on by members. And again, this demonstrates that mocking old people as somehow the problem is factually unsupportable by the facts.
    - relaxing 6y ago
      Again, “runs the senate.” The process of bringing a bill to vote in committee or in session is not nearly as democratic as you imagine.
lagerstedt 6y ago
Flatrate models usually means that a large majority of users actually covers the costs for a the minority high consumers. It is true that the marginal cost for more transmitted data is almost zero, but the overhead costs of running (and expanding) networks are certainly not. Cost has to be covered and you could very well argue that it makes sense that the large consumers pay more.
- KingMachiavelli 6y ago
  Besides maybe above the 98th percentile, data peering costs are very low that the physical infrastructure dominates the cost of service for residential users. Since residential connects are over subscribed anyway, it is trivial to make users throttle during peak demand based on their current/historical usage. If you use Cloudflare's costs and peering:transit ration from 2014 (which is almost certainly cheaper now); 1Mbps/month costs $8. [1] 1 Mbps/month is ~329GBytes. A 1TB data cap would be just ~3.1 Mbps/month costing $24.8. I'd estimate that a last mile ISP could probably get an effective rate of half or less since connecting to end users/consumers is an advantage. And in a lot of cases, the same ISP offering residential service is also selling transit to other networks so in a way the data is already paid for by the time it reaches your local ISP. [1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-relative-cost-of-bandwidth-around-the-world/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-relative-cost-of-bandwidth-a...
- lazerpants 6y ago
  I checked Comcast's 10k report and their margin for the segment including broadband is over 40%, which is crazy but about what you would expect from a de facto monopoly. I don't think forcing them to invest in capex to benefit customers is asking so much when they are making those kinds of margins.
  - SpaethCo 6y ago
    Those margins are misleading because they're _multi_ service operators, and accounting standards require that you can only list direct costs. Revenue is easy: how much did you take in for video? phone? Internet access? Costs are harder because you can only include business line direct costs. Since the cable plant is used by voice, video and data services it's not a direct cost of any of them. Same thing with the service vehicle fleet, call centers, etc. Most things get saddled in "administration" categories and obscure the true cost of providing the service. As a company overall, their margins been hovering around 8-12%.
viraptor 6y ago
There is one reason for some caps, which is that you'll always get oversubscription in the cities, and the caps could reflect that to prevent 100% utilisation. They don't have to be so small that people actually think about them. Basically set it at 1TB for residential for the lowest plan and forget about it.
- mfkp 6y ago
  I don't think you realize how fast 1tb of data goes when you have a family of 5 all doing zoom calls and remote learning all day, then streaming video (youtube, live tv, netflix) at night.
- nikanj 6y ago
  1TB goes by shockingly fast with 4k video streaming (5-10 gigs per hour) and game updates that weight in at tens of gigs each.
  - viraptor 6y ago
    That's why I mentioned lowest plan. Sure, bump it up for higher levels. But if you want 100h of 4k content a month... just pay for the higher quality to subsidize network development which can handle it? This is totally out of the minimum requirement area.
    - benlivengood 6y ago
      The 4K content is probably coming from a rack in the local ISP's DC or nearby colo in a peering agreement with the video streaming operator, and barely costing the ISP anything. The place where ISPs skimp is between the home and the DC where the monopoly is.
  - mfkp 6y ago
    I downloaded a MS Flight Sim 2020 update yesterday and it was north of 100gb lol.
  - v7p1Qbt1im 6y ago
deleted 6y ago
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rayiner 6y ago
Are millennials any different? Outside tech, I don’t know anybody who cares about broadband as an aside, except when pushing a different political angle such as inequality.
- greedo 6y ago
  My kids sure now what a high speed Internet connection is, and they're as far from "tech" as you could imagine. Ask any gamer too...
  - aksss 6y ago
    Yeah I think in many cases it’s taken for granted by the youngest generation. My youngest nephews have never known a time when you were unable to see live video of the person on the other end of a phone call. My cell phone (on cell net) just clocked 82/7Mbps. I still remember getting my first cable modem at a whopping 1Mbps nominal dl. XD
- buffet_overflow 6y ago
  I genuinely wonder about the effects of later generations growing up in these conditions. It feels ripe for learned helplessness. "Well it's just always been bad" is a common, if ineffective response.
- noahtallen 6y ago
  People who have terrible internet care quite a bit, especially if they use it a lot. Many, many people I know living in rural areas of the US get 3-6mbps max. The only hardwired option is DSL, since cable companies often don’t service these areas. Everyone who uses internet a lot for things like streaming is very frustrated by the situation, and that’s often younger generations.
spamizbad 6y ago
I dunno there's a handful of millennial politicians in congress and they're hit-or-miss. I would focus less on the age of the Senators and more on the fact that your median voter is 50 years old. And your median primary voter is 58 years old. They also consume significantly more television (and less Internet) than people under 40 (Millennials and Gen-Z).
- totalZero 6y ago
  There's only one senator under 40 and he's pretty supportive of an open internet. AOC seems like she understands the massive reach and power of the internet...she chided Dems for under-spending on online ads and went after Zuckerberg for not deleting false content. She's not even a technologist and she "gets" technology more than many who have much more experience. Don't get me wrong, I'm not particularly in awe of her or anyone else in Congress...just clarifying that it does indeed seem that the young ones understand technology's impact on society far better than the old ones.
- beauzero 6y ago
  Most people under 65 in our rural area are dropping ATT u-verse ($200+ per month) and keeping only DSL + Roku + a few select channels because of cost. Cable television is too expensive.
shmerl 6y ago
Data caps should be simply illegal on anti-trust grounds for incumbent ISPs most which also own video / TV businesses. You don't even need to invent any new laws for that, just make competition law actually functional and not toothless.
betterunix2 6y ago
To be fair, it is not the senators themselves who come up with policy proposals. Their staff do most of the leg work, and the staff I have personally met were all pretty young and seemed pretty comfortable with technology (in fairness, I was meeting them specifically to talk about a technology-related bill and they were probably chosen for their expertise). As for data caps, those are basically unnecessary in a 5g world and were never necessary for wireline service. The necessary of caps prior to 5g is debatable. Data caps were always just an excuse for ISPs to charge more.
KirillPanov 6y ago
> if the Senate weren't run by septagenarians and octogenarian. Dude that would be such a nightmare-world. Imagine life without techno remixes of Senator Ted Stevens. Teh horror! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8XSo0etBC4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8XSo0etBC4
- aksss 6y ago
  Tubular

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

dmos62 6y ago

This statement could be made about a lot of things: > Imagine how good [most policies] would be if the Senate weren't run by septagenarians and octogenarian.

ChrisLomont 6y ago

> Imagine how good our network technology policy would be if the Senate weren't run by septagenarians and octogenarian. The ages of the senators proposing this are 76 (Joe Manchin), 76 (Angus King), 65 (Rob Portman), and 56 (Michael Bennet). 3 of the 4 are older than the median Senator age. None of the 4 are in the youngest 25%. Image how good our opinions of the Senate would be if we based them in facts.

relaxing 6y ago
The comment was about who runs the senate, not the proposers. Of the individuals you named, only Manchin has any chairmanships.
- ChrisLomont 6y ago
  Nearly every single bill in Congress is introduced by non-chairmen, so this is an odd misdirection. Bills in both the entire session and in each subcommittee are voted on by members. And again, this demonstrates that mocking old people as somehow the problem is factually unsupportable by the facts.
  - relaxing 6y ago
    Again, “runs the senate.” The process of bringing a bill to vote in committee or in session is not nearly as democratic as you imagine.

lagerstedt 6y ago

Flatrate models usually means that a large majority of users actually covers the costs for a the minority high consumers. It is true that the marginal cost for more transmitted data is almost zero, but the overhead costs of running (and expanding) networks are certainly not. Cost has to be covered and you could very well argue that it makes sense that the large consumers pay more.

KingMachiavelli 6y ago
Besides maybe above the 98th percentile, data peering costs are very low that the physical infrastructure dominates the cost of service for residential users. Since residential connects are over subscribed anyway, it is trivial to make users throttle during peak demand based on their current/historical usage. If you use Cloudflare's costs and peering:transit ration from 2014 (which is almost certainly cheaper now); 1Mbps/month costs $8. [1] 1 Mbps/month is ~329GBytes. A 1TB data cap would be just ~3.1 Mbps/month costing $24.8. I'd estimate that a last mile ISP could probably get an effective rate of half or less since connecting to end users/consumers is an advantage. And in a lot of cases, the same ISP offering residential service is also selling transit to other networks so in a way the data is already paid for by the time it reaches your local ISP. [1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-relative-cost-of-bandwidth-around-the-world/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-relative-cost-of-bandwidth-a...
lazerpants 6y ago
I checked Comcast's 10k report and their margin for the segment including broadband is over 40%, which is crazy but about what you would expect from a de facto monopoly. I don't think forcing them to invest in capex to benefit customers is asking so much when they are making those kinds of margins.
- SpaethCo 6y ago
  Those margins are misleading because they're _multi_ service operators, and accounting standards require that you can only list direct costs. Revenue is easy: how much did you take in for video? phone? Internet access? Costs are harder because you can only include business line direct costs. Since the cable plant is used by voice, video and data services it's not a direct cost of any of them. Same thing with the service vehicle fleet, call centers, etc. Most things get saddled in "administration" categories and obscure the true cost of providing the service. As a company overall, their margins been hovering around 8-12%.

viraptor 6y ago

There is one reason for some caps, which is that you'll always get oversubscription in the cities, and the caps could reflect that to prevent 100% utilisation. They don't have to be so small that people actually think about them. Basically set it at 1TB for residential for the lowest plan and forget about it.

mfkp 6y ago
I don't think you realize how fast 1tb of data goes when you have a family of 5 all doing zoom calls and remote learning all day, then streaming video (youtube, live tv, netflix) at night.
nikanj 6y ago
1TB goes by shockingly fast with 4k video streaming (5-10 gigs per hour) and game updates that weight in at tens of gigs each.
- viraptor 6y ago
  That's why I mentioned lowest plan. Sure, bump it up for higher levels. But if you want 100h of 4k content a month... just pay for the higher quality to subsidize network development which can handle it? This is totally out of the minimum requirement area.
  - benlivengood 6y ago
    The 4K content is probably coming from a rack in the local ISP's DC or nearby colo in a peering agreement with the video streaming operator, and barely costing the ISP anything. The place where ISPs skimp is between the home and the DC where the monopoly is.
- mfkp 6y ago
  I downloaded a MS Flight Sim 2020 update yesterday and it was north of 100gb lol.
- v7p1Qbt1im 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

rayiner 6y ago

Are millennials any different? Outside tech, I don’t know anybody who cares about broadband as an aside, except when pushing a different political angle such as inequality.

greedo 6y ago
My kids sure now what a high speed Internet connection is, and they're as far from "tech" as you could imagine. Ask any gamer too...
- aksss 6y ago
  Yeah I think in many cases it’s taken for granted by the youngest generation. My youngest nephews have never known a time when you were unable to see live video of the person on the other end of a phone call. My cell phone (on cell net) just clocked 82/7Mbps. I still remember getting my first cable modem at a whopping 1Mbps nominal dl. XD
buffet_overflow 6y ago
I genuinely wonder about the effects of later generations growing up in these conditions. It feels ripe for learned helplessness. "Well it's just always been bad" is a common, if ineffective response.
noahtallen 6y ago
People who have terrible internet care quite a bit, especially if they use it a lot. Many, many people I know living in rural areas of the US get 3-6mbps max. The only hardwired option is DSL, since cable companies often don’t service these areas. Everyone who uses internet a lot for things like streaming is very frustrated by the situation, and that’s often younger generations.

spamizbad 6y ago

I dunno there's a handful of millennial politicians in congress and they're hit-or-miss. I would focus less on the age of the Senators and more on the fact that your median voter is 50 years old. And your median primary voter is 58 years old. They also consume significantly more television (and less Internet) than people under 40 (Millennials and Gen-Z).

totalZero 6y ago
There's only one senator under 40 and he's pretty supportive of an open internet. AOC seems like she understands the massive reach and power of the internet...she chided Dems for under-spending on online ads and went after Zuckerberg for not deleting false content. She's not even a technologist and she "gets" technology more than many who have much more experience. Don't get me wrong, I'm not particularly in awe of her or anyone else in Congress...just clarifying that it does indeed seem that the young ones understand technology's impact on society far better than the old ones.
beauzero 6y ago
Most people under 65 in our rural area are dropping ATT u-verse ($200+ per month) and keeping only DSL + Roku + a few select channels because of cost. Cable television is too expensive.

shmerl 6y ago

Data caps should be simply illegal on anti-trust grounds for incumbent ISPs most which also own video / TV businesses. You don't even need to invent any new laws for that, just make competition law actually functional and not toothless.

betterunix2 6y ago

To be fair, it is not the senators themselves who come up with policy proposals. Their staff do most of the leg work, and the staff I have personally met were all pretty young and seemed pretty comfortable with technology (in fairness, I was meeting them specifically to talk about a technology-related bill and they were probably chosen for their expertise). As for data caps, those are basically unnecessary in a 5g world and were never necessary for wireline service. The necessary of caps prior to 5g is debatable. Data caps were always just an excuse for ISPs to charge more.

KirillPanov 6y ago

> if the Senate weren't run by septagenarians and octogenarian. Dude that would be such a nightmare-world. Imagine life without techno remixes of Senator Ted Stevens. Teh horror! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8XSo0etBC4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8XSo0etBC4

aksss 6y ago
Tubular