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Please, if you're going to bury my comment, point out what I've misstated. If you're sitting there in your chair, disagreeing with me, but you can't figure out

Please, if you're going to bury my comment, point out what I've misstated. If you're sitting there in your chair, disagreeing with me, but you can't figure out why, you're just lying to yourself. If I've made a mathematical error, or misstated a fact, I'm happy to concede the point.

wtallis 15y ago
You say that metered, per-byte billing will impose a significant overhead. For ISPs that already have caps, they are already counting the bytes, so the only overhead would be in the variable billing. Half of the ISPs already do that for their non-IP services. You also haven't said how much it costs a company like Comcast to pay for transit of their customers' data. You haven't given anyone reason to believe that transit actually is the dominant cost to a residential ISP.
- bradleyland 15y ago
  You make a good point about already counting the bytes. That fact flew right past me when I was considering the overhead. I can't answer the second question because I can't see Comcast's peering agreements. I do know that they're not always comfortable (see last year's Comcast/Level 3 dispute), but as the FCC pointed out, peering agreements are a private matter. I'm playing devil's advocate here to some degree. I get that everyone wants to see an improvement in the availability and cost of broadband in the states. No question about it, but this article is about a person who used 250 GB of data in a month on a residential connection. I'd love too see a histogram that shows the distribution of data transfer usage per customer, but Comcast doesn't publish that information, so I'm left to assume that the fact that very few people encounter that limit is proof that it's pretty far above the norm. Feeding the sense of entitlement that this type of usage should be allowed is not how we'll make progress here.

wtallis 15y ago

You say that metered, per-byte billing will impose a significant overhead. For ISPs that already have caps, they are already counting the bytes, so the only overhead would be in the variable billing. Half of the ISPs already do that for their non-IP services. You also haven't said how much it costs a company like Comcast to pay for transit of their customers' data. You haven't given anyone reason to believe that transit actually is the dominant cost to a residential ISP.

bradleyland 15y ago
You make a good point about already counting the bytes. That fact flew right past me when I was considering the overhead. I can't answer the second question because I can't see Comcast's peering agreements. I do know that they're not always comfortable (see last year's Comcast/Level 3 dispute), but as the FCC pointed out, peering agreements are a private matter. I'm playing devil's advocate here to some degree. I get that everyone wants to see an improvement in the availability and cost of broadband in the states. No question about it, but this article is about a person who used 250 GB of data in a month on a residential connection. I'd love too see a histogram that shows the distribution of data transfer usage per customer, but Comcast doesn't publish that information, so I'm left to assume that the fact that very few people encounter that limit is proof that it's pretty far above the norm. Feeding the sense of entitlement that this type of usage should be allowed is not how we'll make progress here.