4 ms·

> Most of the cost is in building infrastructure, not delivering bits. But there's significant cost in building infrastructure that can deliver more bits. > F

by shasta 12y ago

> Most of the cost is in building infrastructure, not delivering bits. But there's significant cost in building infrastructure that can deliver more bits. > Further, I don't want to live in a nickel-and-dime world where every single thing I do has the cognitive overhead of worrying about metered usage. So stop worrying about it. How much cognitive effort do you spend factoring in the cost of electricity, gas and water when you're making spaghetti?

magicalist 12y ago
I think the argument is that there's nothing about that tradeoff that's "fair", because it doesn't reflect reality. Unlike electricity, gas, or water, they aren't creating bits, storing bits to ensure supply, or depleting their supply of bits by transmitting them to you. Charging by the bit would just be a good way to increase telco revenue. Now, if you think it would be a good bargaining chip for getting them to accept being dumb pipes, that might be a good argument, but we should call it what it is if that's the case.
- saurik 12y ago
  Electricity companies can only sort of store electricity: they produce electricity, and it is consumed at some rate by users; this is why electricity is priced differently in many areas during "peak usage hours": because electricity is more like bandwidth than you seem to realize. If you have a difficult time modeling this, try to model electricity in a world where everyone is using renewable energy sources like wind or solar (and if you find that "preposterous", hydroelectric is very common as a primary electricity source in many areas). I can see a strong argument for switching to some kind of billing based on the peak load you contributed to, but that turns into a pricing model almost as complex as Amazon Glacier ;P.
  - xxs 12y ago
    it's possible to export electricity unlike bandwidth.
    - saurik 12y ago
      Non-peak hours for one area are by-and-large non-peak hours for nearby areas. It would be awesome if we could efficiently transfer power halfway around the globe, but as we can't, the ability to export power is only a negligible change in the model.
- _greim_ 12y ago
  > they aren't creating bits, storing bits to ensure supply, or depleting their supply of bits by transmitting them to you Their value proposition is not "bits" per se, but capacity, which they do in fact deplete when they transmit bits to you.
  - nitrogen 12y ago
    Their value proposition is not "bits" per se, but capacity, which they do in fact deplete when they transmit bits to you. Capacity in this case is a rate, not a quantity. The same capacity is required to deliver a web page at 50mbits/s as to deliver video at 50mbits/s.
    - saurik 12y ago
      A video has a minimum viable rate (past which point it will no longer be real time), while a web page only sort of does. A video is a sustained download, while a web page is relatively instantaneous. If a thousand people are clicking links and browsing web pages even fairly quickly, they will likely not notice each other's usage of the network. The same cannot be said of a thousand people streaming a video over the same network. To model this another way: you are muddling together the capacity of something with its speed. These are highly related ideas, as past the latency of a link the bandwidth does manage to model the speed a single user can obtain over the connection. However, users are sharing that speed over a specific duration: it absolutely matters how much data is being transferred. The web page is simply fewer bits than a video, so more of them can be downloaded over the same capacity link per unit time. To make that time requirement more concrete: a thousand people who need to download a minute of video within the next minute requires more capacity than a thousand people downloading a minute of video who are willing to wait up to two minutes to watch it, both of which require more bandwidth than a thousand people downloading a minute of video who just need it to arrive before tomorrow. (Putting this all together, you hopefully see how flow control becomes relevant: peak load is informed by peak capacity, which causes the speed per user to automatically slow down as the bandwidth capacity is reached. But this is more of an advanced thought that is probably not needed to appreciate that a thousand people streaming video need larger pipes than a thousand people working at some email: that is hopefully intuitive.)
AnthonyMouse 12y ago
> But there's significant cost in building infrastructure that can deliver more bits. Here's the problem with that: You have to build capacity for the peak load you want to be able to support. But the reason peak load is peak load is that everybody is using bandwidth then. If you buy a fast connection and you expect that fast connection to be fast the one day a year when they're streaming the Superbowl, you're contributing at least as much to the need to build infrastructure as the guy who watches Netflix nine hours a day. Since everybody wants to use the internet when everybody is using the internet, everybody should pay the same amount. > How much cognitive effort do you spend factoring in the cost of electricity, gas and water when you're making spaghetti? You make spaghetti every week, it has roughly the same utility and cost every week, and there is no real risk that you could quadruple your electric bill by not paying enough attention to how much spaghetti you make. Bandwidth doesn't work like that. Most people have no idea how many bits it takes to do something on the internet, it's extremely difficult to determine whether something is worth seeing until after you've already seen it, and it's incredibly easy to sit down at a computer for "five minutes" only to realize you've been watching YouTube videos for 14 hours.
- saurik 12y ago
  The people who are insisting on watching the Superbowl during that peak load moment you are contributing to that load much more than someone browsing a few we pages or someone like me that decides to watch the game later (if at all). They are even contributing to peak load more than people who watch 100x as much Netflix if they happen to not be watching much Netflix at that exact moment. There is something unique in character to that Superbowl experience that is making it fundamentally more expensive to the world than other possible uses of bandwidth, and that needs to be modeled as a cost to someone. So, much like electricity (which is difficult to store and had to then be modeled as a real-time capacity), bandwidth needs to be priced differently during "peak hours". This is obviously much more complex as peak hours is defined by some decentralized notion of "what is popular right now", which is why the current approximation turns into something like "if you create this weird peak demand by offering the Superbowl on your website for coordinated live viewing, you should pay for this peak load increase, not the guy whose usage is small and distributed over time". Sadly, that approximate solution leads to seemingly-unfortunate consequences (hence all the arguments for net neutrality), so what we need is to really think through how to get users, as opposed to content providers, to pay for this in a content-unaware fashion. If you seriously don't want to address this and want to insist that bandwidth should be flat-rated like this you are not going to be able to achieve net neutrality :(. As for the spaghetti argument: you really really should be thinking about your bandwidth usage. The reason we don't have horribly wasteful electronic devices is partly because they would cause electricity bills to go up for the people using them. If you had a washer/dryer that used a thousand times more electricity than other appliances you owned, or you had a holographic television that used a thousand times more electricity than a lightbulb does, you would start to limit how often you washed clothes and watched holovision, and this would be a good thing: it would lead to market incentives to create similar devices that used less electricity. Effectively, someone has to pay for the increased electricity cost of the world as it transitions to holovision: either users need to pay more for their electricity bill each month or the holovision manufactures need to subsidize electricity for them. The latter is what we don't want (we want net neutrality), so either you increase everyone's flat rate or you bill just the users using the holovision. The former penalizes people who don't have a holovision unit and leads to inefficient electricity usage. To bill users, either you bill people who own holovision (which is largely equivalent to what we don't want) or you just bill by the actually-relevant metric: usage. The best option is billing users for usage of electricity.

by shasta 12y ago

magicalist 12y ago

I think the argument is that there's nothing about that tradeoff that's "fair", because it doesn't reflect reality. Unlike electricity, gas, or water, they aren't creating bits, storing bits to ensure supply, or depleting their supply of bits by transmitting them to you. Charging by the bit would just be a good way to increase telco revenue. Now, if you think it would be a good bargaining chip for getting them to accept being dumb pipes, that might be a good argument, but we should call it what it is if that's the case.

saurik 12y ago
Electricity companies can only sort of store electricity: they produce electricity, and it is consumed at some rate by users; this is why electricity is priced differently in many areas during "peak usage hours": because electricity is more like bandwidth than you seem to realize. If you have a difficult time modeling this, try to model electricity in a world where everyone is using renewable energy sources like wind or solar (and if you find that "preposterous", hydroelectric is very common as a primary electricity source in many areas). I can see a strong argument for switching to some kind of billing based on the peak load you contributed to, but that turns into a pricing model almost as complex as Amazon Glacier ;P.
- xxs 12y ago
  it's possible to export electricity unlike bandwidth.
  - saurik 12y ago
    Non-peak hours for one area are by-and-large non-peak hours for nearby areas. It would be awesome if we could efficiently transfer power halfway around the globe, but as we can't, the ability to export power is only a negligible change in the model.
_greim_ 12y ago
> they aren't creating bits, storing bits to ensure supply, or depleting their supply of bits by transmitting them to you Their value proposition is not "bits" per se, but capacity, which they do in fact deplete when they transmit bits to you.
- nitrogen 12y ago
  Their value proposition is not "bits" per se, but capacity, which they do in fact deplete when they transmit bits to you. Capacity in this case is a rate, not a quantity. The same capacity is required to deliver a web page at 50mbits/s as to deliver video at 50mbits/s.
  - saurik 12y ago
    A video has a minimum viable rate (past which point it will no longer be real time), while a web page only sort of does. A video is a sustained download, while a web page is relatively instantaneous. If a thousand people are clicking links and browsing web pages even fairly quickly, they will likely not notice each other's usage of the network. The same cannot be said of a thousand people streaming a video over the same network. To model this another way: you are muddling together the capacity of something with its speed. These are highly related ideas, as past the latency of a link the bandwidth does manage to model the speed a single user can obtain over the connection. However, users are sharing that speed over a specific duration: it absolutely matters how much data is being transferred. The web page is simply fewer bits than a video, so more of them can be downloaded over the same capacity link per unit time. To make that time requirement more concrete: a thousand people who need to download a minute of video within the next minute requires more capacity than a thousand people downloading a minute of video who are willing to wait up to two minutes to watch it, both of which require more bandwidth than a thousand people downloading a minute of video who just need it to arrive before tomorrow. (Putting this all together, you hopefully see how flow control becomes relevant: peak load is informed by peak capacity, which causes the speed per user to automatically slow down as the bandwidth capacity is reached. But this is more of an advanced thought that is probably not needed to appreciate that a thousand people streaming video need larger pipes than a thousand people working at some email: that is hopefully intuitive.)

AnthonyMouse 12y ago

> But there's significant cost in building infrastructure that can deliver more bits. Here's the problem with that: You have to build capacity for the peak load you want to be able to support. But the reason peak load is peak load is that everybody is using bandwidth then. If you buy a fast connection and you expect that fast connection to be fast the one day a year when they're streaming the Superbowl, you're contributing at least as much to the need to build infrastructure as the guy who watches Netflix nine hours a day. Since everybody wants to use the internet when everybody is using the internet, everybody should pay the same amount. > How much cognitive effort do you spend factoring in the cost of electricity, gas and water when you're making spaghetti? You make spaghetti every week, it has roughly the same utility and cost every week, and there is no real risk that you could quadruple your electric bill by not paying enough attention to how much spaghetti you make. Bandwidth doesn't work like that. Most people have no idea how many bits it takes to do something on the internet, it's extremely difficult to determine whether something is worth seeing until after you've already seen it, and it's incredibly easy to sit down at a computer for "five minutes" only to realize you've been watching YouTube videos for 14 hours.

saurik 12y ago
The people who are insisting on watching the Superbowl during that peak load moment you are contributing to that load much more than someone browsing a few we pages or someone like me that decides to watch the game later (if at all). They are even contributing to peak load more than people who watch 100x as much Netflix if they happen to not be watching much Netflix at that exact moment. There is something unique in character to that Superbowl experience that is making it fundamentally more expensive to the world than other possible uses of bandwidth, and that needs to be modeled as a cost to someone. So, much like electricity (which is difficult to store and had to then be modeled as a real-time capacity), bandwidth needs to be priced differently during "peak hours". This is obviously much more complex as peak hours is defined by some decentralized notion of "what is popular right now", which is why the current approximation turns into something like "if you create this weird peak demand by offering the Superbowl on your website for coordinated live viewing, you should pay for this peak load increase, not the guy whose usage is small and distributed over time". Sadly, that approximate solution leads to seemingly-unfortunate consequences (hence all the arguments for net neutrality), so what we need is to really think through how to get users, as opposed to content providers, to pay for this in a content-unaware fashion. If you seriously don't want to address this and want to insist that bandwidth should be flat-rated like this you are not going to be able to achieve net neutrality :(. As for the spaghetti argument: you really really should be thinking about your bandwidth usage. The reason we don't have horribly wasteful electronic devices is partly because they would cause electricity bills to go up for the people using them. If you had a washer/dryer that used a thousand times more electricity than other appliances you owned, or you had a holographic television that used a thousand times more electricity than a lightbulb does, you would start to limit how often you washed clothes and watched holovision, and this would be a good thing: it would lead to market incentives to create similar devices that used less electricity. Effectively, someone has to pay for the increased electricity cost of the world as it transitions to holovision: either users need to pay more for their electricity bill each month or the holovision manufactures need to subsidize electricity for them. The latter is what we don't want (we want net neutrality), so either you increase everyone's flat rate or you bill just the users using the holovision. The former penalizes people who don't have a holovision unit and leads to inefficient electricity usage. To bill users, either you bill people who own holovision (which is largely equivalent to what we don't want) or you just bill by the actually-relevant metric: usage. The best option is billing users for usage of electricity.