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Deutsche Telekom kills fixed line IP flatrates
- klaustopher 14y agoWorst part is that they are excluding their own services from that traffic. So you can watch Telekom IP TV without buying a traffic extension, but for movies from the iTunes store you have to pay iTunes for media and Telekom for traffic. Nice one!
- Idioteque 14y agoThis is why we need net neutrality regulation in Germany.
- klaustopher 14y agoThis is why we need the state to take back the phone network it paid for in the first place, manage it and rent it out to the Telekom like any other ISP ...
- Karunamon 14y agoHaving the state own that infrastructure introduces its own concerns though, especially re: privacy and anonymity.
- jevinskie 14y agoIt hasn't been an issue in the US. The telecoms voluntarily provide sensitive customer info to the government.
- mpyne 14y agoIronic then that if you had sent those same communications through the government-organized postal service that it would be much more difficult to legally divulge that info to other parts of the government.
- klaustopher 14y agoI kind of agree. But I get the opinion that provision of basic infrastructure like water supply, electricity, roads, railroad tracks and telecommunications should be handled by a democratic government instead of a profit-oriented enterprise... And additionally, I tend to trust an elected government more than any enterprise that can basically do whatever they want
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- zapdrive 14y agoTry saying that to a conservative. You'll be branded a commie, as if being one is shameful or anything.
- pyre 14y agoI think it's less about needing 'net neutrality' regulation and more about separation of priorities. Basically ISPs shouldn't offer media delivery services.
- zero_intp 14y agoPlease s/ISPs/Common Carriers/ An NSP should be permitted to deliver vertical content, please don't stifle the free market. The monopoly on access should not be permitted to impose a tariff on competition.
- eru 14y agoWhat about stiffling a free market? What's hard about forming two separate companies?
- pyre 14y agoIIRC, phone companies are common carriers, but your Internet service provider is not. That's part of the reason for the Safe Harbour provisions in the DMCA. Basically, the person providing you with access to the Internet, should not also be trying to provide you with other services that compete with 'the Internet.' It provides incentive for them to violate net neutrality to boost their bottom line (e.g. What if we charge people more for access to YouTube, while our service is free? What if we change to a metered bandwidth model, but put in an exception for our service?).
- rayiner 14y agoWhy should bandwidth be charged for on anything other than a per-gigabyte basis, perhaps with congestion rates for peak hours?
- wmf 14y agoBecause almost all of the cost of the network does not depend on usage?
- rayiner 14y agoSo what? There is certainly a capital cost to building and maintaining the network, which scales with the provisioned capacity. That fixed cost can be apportioned on a per-GB basis. It's not different than the electric grid. Power plants are pretty much binary creatures--they're either on or off. Each incremental kWh doesn't really cost any more once the plant is up and operating at design capacity, except to the extent that sufficient extra kWh might necessitate more capacity and thus more fixed costs.
- lmickh 14y agoThose extra kilowatts can be sold to other areas. That is exactly what is happening in most instances. You can't sell the left over bandwidth of an infrastructure you provide to a consumer.
- eru 14y agoThat depends on the power plant type. Gas fired power plants are very much variable. Nuclear not so much.
- zero_intp 14y agowhat metric would you use instead? Statistical multiplexation of the service rate (bandwidth) is the inflection for cost to the consumer. On most SP networks, if aggregate user constant load utilization increases past 10-15% committed rates, the cost model must bear service load into account.
- rmoriz 14y agoThis is the introduction of the end of net neutrality. It's only a matter of time that Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon have to pay directly to Deutsche Telekom to exclude DT customer's traffic from the volume limits. It's like a medieval toll road…
- josh2600 14y ago... On the consumer internet. The Enterprise will exist without Net Neutrality just as it exists without the unreasonable tariffs we suffer as consumers. Google wil lhave to pay money to get around CONSUMER traffic and volume limits, but I don't think you'll see volume limits on business circuits in the foreseeable future.
- freehunter 14y agoI paid for a business line from Comcast even though I am residential for this very reason.
- mtowle 14y agoHow much does that run you? Has the monthly changed much over time? For residential at least, Comcast is known to give you a sweetheart deal for the first 12 or 24 months, then balloon your monthly.
- freehunter 14y agoI pay for the very basic speed, 16mbps down 3mbps up. I get pretty close to that most days. It costs me a bit over $70/mo after taxes for just Internet access. Comcast does offer phone and TV bundles that include limited-time deals, but I didn't go for that and this price hasn't changed on me in 3 years. There's no monthly data cap and the connection speed is more reliable, which is why I'm happy. I did have to pay a significant amount of money to get it set up. I don't remember exactly what the price was, but I believe it was in the neighborhood of $200 setup fee.
- derda 14y agoTheir objective is clear: Promote their own cloud-services and make deals with cloud-service providers, since those services are not metered. They already have a deal with Spotify in place for their mobile network ( bandwidth throttling, after a certain volume is already common practice for all providers ). So effectively their are killing net neutrality. I hope that plan strikes back and they loose money and customers over this.
- klaustopher 14y agoThe only problem is that they OWN most of the cables and most other providers need to rent at least the "last mile" or maybe even other parts of their infrastructure (i.e. 1&1 uses Telekom DNS services) so there is a big chance, that others will follow :/
- rootinier 14y agoThey'll HAVE to follow because Deutsche Telekom will hand on the limitations to their resellers.
- klaustopher 14y agoTo be picky ... Most other providers aren't resellers of Telekom plans. They own their own infrastructure and only have to rent the cables going from the distribution box to the customer's house. And this line is not charged by the traffic or bandwith. And Telekom can not change the way how they charge this line. There are federal regulations for that.
- aikn 14y agoAnd to be specific, as customer of 1&1 I seem to be having a VDSL connection (50M) like any other T-Online customer. My host is some *.t-ipconnect.de and Youtube is as throttled as it is for a direct contract. If they now add bandwidth caps on top of that, they can go screw themselves.
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- DasIch 14y agoThe Pirate Party, Social Democrats and the Greens already want net neutrality. Nice of the Telekom to play the bad boy who will cause a net neutrality law.
- onemorepassword 14y agoThis is exactly what happened in the Netherlands. Net neutrality wasn't particularly high up on the political agenda until the country's largest telco arrogantly announced their traffic filtering plans and started a public shitstorm. Politicians may not give a flying fuck about net neutrality, but they have a good nose for popular measures that don't cost them anything. Pissing all over the already hated telco's party is an easy way to score points.
- aluhut 14y agoWell two of them won't make it into any decision making position after the next election and we know what happens to the Social Democrats in a big coalition... "Wer hat uns verraten..."
- skrebbel 14y agoNo, we don't know. This is HN, not forum.discussgermanpoliticsinenglish.com. Care to elaborate?
- dualogy 14y agoHere's another idea, let's not even go there... German politics is just as stale a topic as anywhere really..
- fosap 14y ago"Wer hat uns verraten... Sozialdemokraten" is a rhyme and means "Who betrayed us? Sozialdemocrates!" originally used by communist because the Sozialdemocrates never where revolutionary or anti-capitalist. The slogan is used right now to say the SPD is very weak on all their positions and a fan of half hearted compromises.
- transfire 14y agoTime to evolve those mesh networks!
- jauer 14y agoWireless mesh technology can't touch the capacity and latency profile of traditional last-mile access networks even with bandwidth caps.
- mtowle 14y agoThis translation leaves a lot to be desired. Some people in the comments look like they could benefit from a better job of it, so here you go: After the information was initially leaked, Deutsche Telekom has officially confirmed that they plan to introduce volume restrictions (throttling?) for all landline broadband connections from here on out. Starting May 2nd, the performance specs for all new contracts will include a fixed bandwidth restriction dependent on total upload/download volume. For the time being, the new restrictions won't affect existing customers. Till now, Deutsche Telekom had only ever introduced such stipulations on VDSL ("very-high-bit-rate DSL") - and fiber-optic connections with download speeds between 25 and 200 Mbps. After reaching a monthly download limit of 400Gb for customers with 200 Mbps connections and 75Gb for customers with up to 16 Mbps, the throttled data rate drops down to a uniform 0.384 Mbps - regardless of previous connection speed. (50 Mbps and 100 Mbps connections, if you're curious, are restricted to 200 and 300 Gb per month, respectively, before throttling.) For now, however, connection throttling, while practical, is not expected to be implemented yet - Deutsche Telekom is merely securing for itself the right to do so. When exactly the implementation will be introduced depends on how "traffic on the internet grows and develops." "As of yet, it's been our expectation that we won't introduce the limitation in a technical manner until 2016," said Michael Hagspihl, Director of Marketing at Deutsche Telekom. Once the throttle is actually implemented, customers should still be able to purchase unlimited monthly transfer volume as an "add-on" option. But that possibility is not set in stone. The use of IPTV (internet protocol television), Telekom's VOIP communications, and the sharing of connections via "WLAN To Go" will not count against the monthly traffic limit. Reason being, according to Deutsche Telekom, that customers pay separately for these services. Civil liberties activists and consumer advocates alike criticize such practices as violations of net neutrality. Deutsche Telekom justifies their move with the ever-growing volume of traffic, which requires continuous development/expansion of their network. A nationwide fiber-optic infrastructure for all of Germany would cost €80 Billion, Deutsche Telekom says. And that's just for residential connections. But bottlenecks develop on the backbone of the network, irrespective of whether DSL or fiber is used on the "last mile." Internet connections with higher data rates would only squeeze those bottlenecks even tighter.
- mschuster91 14y agoThe real plan of the DTAG is something no one has thought of yet. Because this will only affect new customers, the new customer-base will drop, if not vanish entirely. Now, the DTAG can complain at the BNetzA (regulatory body) that they don't get new customers and that they can't maintain the infrastructure because of missing money, and so can increase the amount they charge of resellers. At the same time, though, they will lower their own pricing, so that they have a massive competitive advantage again.
- jpollock 14y agoThis is charging per byte. They're implementing an amount of traffic bundled with the base package, throttling when it's exceeded and the ability to purchase additional full speed traffic blocks. Charging per byte is a "good thing". It encourages carriers to go after the top 1% of their bandwidth users. Otherwise, they treat them as a cost. Even better, it places a lower bound on the value of a piece of media. Here in NZ, I'm paying US$1.20/GB. That means that 720P torrent of Game of Thrones would cost me US$1.70 to download. All of a sudden, people can compare torrenting something with getting Sky (HBO provider). Even better, if the total value is around the cost of traffic, it encourages the provider to do a deal with the telco for cheap transit and revenue splits. That typically results in better performance for the end customer - such as Google's YouTube caches.
- rallison 14y agoThe problem with this is that the actual transit cost per GB never seems to come close to what the ISPs charge. $1.20 per GB could very well be 100 times what the ISP ends up paying to actually move the GB. The basic problem is that the up-front infrastructure and maintenance costs are expensive, but the transit is extremely cheap. So, unless the ISP charges a base minimum amount, a heavy user just ends up heavily subsidizing the infrastructure and maintenance costs of the light users. Not to mention that charging by byte is a great way to stifle innovation on the web. Basically, I would disagree with your assessment.
- jpollock 14y agoYes, you are correct about minimum account fees being required to avoid a subsidy in the other direction (large->small). NZ packages typically work out to about US$24 + $US1.20/GB, although the per GB price is dropping. We're getting fiber in the next couple of years, and at least one ISP is already offering TB/mo data bundles for US$144 (incl 100/50 fiber). I don't see how it stifles innovation at all. It does stop a cross subsidy from the ISP to the company attempting to implement a new, even higher, usage service.
- rallison 14y ago
- gphreak 14y agoIf you look at their current conditions, for Call & Surf VDSL and fiber contracts there is already a cap in place [1]. It is not enforced, though, but certainly will be in the future. Entertain contracts on the other hand do not mention this for VDSL, only fiber [2]. From my basic understanding they cannot change that, so I switched to Entertain for the next two years. I currently costs the same as my old contracts for 24 month. [1] http://www.telekom.de/dlp/agb/pdf/40569.pdf http://www.telekom.de/dlp/agb/pdf/40569.pdf [2] http://www.telekom.de/dlp/agb/pdf/40926.pdf http://www.telekom.de/dlp/agb/pdf/40926.pdf
- klaustopher 14y agoIMHO throttling to 6Mbit/s is a lot different than throttling to 384kbit/s
- gphreak 14y agoAgreed, but it still hurts. Also, the upload goes down from 10mbit to 0,5, which is quite severe.