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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

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 13y 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 13y ago
  it's possible to export electricity unlike bandwidth.
  - saurik 13y 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_ 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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.)

saurik 13y 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 13y ago
it's possible to export electricity unlike bandwidth.
- saurik 13y 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_ 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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.)