5 ms·

There was no concept of 'zero-rating' before telecoms/ISPs established the concept of a 'rate-per-byte'.

mnx 12y ago
well, early residential connections were paid per minute, so I don't see how that was any better. There's nothing wrong with rate-per-byte, because some of the costs actually are per-byte.
- daveloyall 12y ago
  From memory: * Dial-up in the 28.8k era was per-minute. Occasional $700 AOL bill. Mom was pissed. * Dial-up in the 33.6k through 56k eras was flat-rate. Start a download before bed, enjoy it in the morning. * Broadband, pre 3mbps era. Flat rate. * Netzero: Back to dialup, but now free. (Especially if you replaced their dialer software with a pencil-and-paper key to the Caesar cipher they used for auth.) * Cellular. Sorta based on SMS rates. * Broadband, 10mbps. Some companies have caps. Only a subset of users notice them, nobody had their back. * Mobile. Smart phones! But the device is the limiting factor, not the network. * Broadband, every major provider has caps written into the contract, but few enable technical enforcement of the caps. I smell deception: "We've always had these caps, you must have increased your usage!" * Mobile, post 3g: pay per byte, period.
chime 12y ago
Precisely. I am trying to see the "complex" moral dilemma part of this issue that Wikipedia claims but I can't. For a fixed price, people should get a fixed speed - on wireless or broadband. That's it. Every byte of data should be treated the same. Disadvantaged consumers should not get free FB or Wiki. Instead they should get free 64kbps or 1mbps (or whatever the market can bear). "Zero rating" is harmful because content providers and telecoms get to decide what is worth providing for "free". It's never really free because in the end someone is paying for bandwidth. Voice calls, text, and IP are all just data. If I pay for 20/5mbps, give me that. If I have a fixed speed of 20mbps, I do not have "unlimited data" so there is no need to monitor and cap. It is 20mbps / 8 * 86400 seconds * 30 days = 6TB per month max. 64kbps is 20GB/month max. Nobody's browsing 24/7 at max. speed on mobile so there is very little chance a mobile user in free data plan of 64kbps is really going to use 20GB of data per month. Wikipedia should consistently support Net Neutrality throughout the world regardless of local deals. If they really want to help consumers in poor countries, fight for them to get a slow data plan that can be used not only for Wikipedia but also Khan Academy, MIT OpenCourseWare, or anything else the user wants to see.
amalcon 12y ago
While this is technically correct, it suggests a causation that just isn't there. Metered per-byte rates have existed since at least the 1990s. Datacenter bandwidth has historically always been metered, though typically on a 95/5 rate basis. This is also how mobile data has historically been billed: data packages really only took off with the relase of the iPhone, and before that most people just paid per-kb (which is why nobody actually used their mobile data capability).
- dingaling 12y ago
  > data packages really only took off with the relase of the iPhone Please, no more iPhone revisionism. T Mobile Web & Walk packages launched in 2005 with 1GB and 2GB monthly caps; the latter was the 'Pro' package IIRC. Other carriers quickly followed. Certainly my Nokia E smartphones of the pre-iPhone era all used such packages for browsing / e-mail / IRC.
- skuhn 12y ago
  95th percentile billing is not like the per-byte billing that ISPs and other parties try to enforce. 95th percentile billing uses your instantaneous bandwidth utilization, which directly correlates to how you have to size network equipment, and therefore to how much it costs to operate the service. Per-byte billing does not directly map to how much it costs your provider to transfer your data. I can utilize a link to send 1kbit/s for a month, which is 2.47Tbit of data transferred. That sounds like a lot, but what burden does 1kbit/s place on your provider? Virtually nil. And yet carriers with data caps will charge massive overage fees or heavily throttle usage because of usage like this. AWS bills per-byte for outbound data, so I'll use that for a concrete example. Lets say that I have a small service that uses 1gbit/s for 30 days. Commodity transit: billed at 95th percentile $2.00 / mbit $1000 circuit commit = $2000 / mo AWS: billed per-byte $0.05 / GByte (using their cheapest tier for simplicity) = $16,200 / mo There is no major difference here between what it costs the provider to transfer my packets. If anything, Amazon can get better deals on transit than a small startup can. Yet I would pay Amazon nearly ten times as much, simply because their billing metric does not bear any relation to their cost to serve. This is rent-seeking behavior and it should not be allowed to become the default way that ISPs and other service providers bill customers.

mnx 12y ago

well, early residential connections were paid per minute, so I don't see how that was any better. There's nothing wrong with rate-per-byte, because some of the costs actually are per-byte.

daveloyall 12y ago
From memory: * Dial-up in the 28.8k era was per-minute. Occasional $700 AOL bill. Mom was pissed. * Dial-up in the 33.6k through 56k eras was flat-rate. Start a download before bed, enjoy it in the morning. * Broadband, pre 3mbps era. Flat rate. * Netzero: Back to dialup, but now free. (Especially if you replaced their dialer software with a pencil-and-paper key to the Caesar cipher they used for auth.) * Cellular. Sorta based on SMS rates. * Broadband, 10mbps. Some companies have caps. Only a subset of users notice them, nobody had their back. * Mobile. Smart phones! But the device is the limiting factor, not the network. * Broadband, every major provider has caps written into the contract, but few enable technical enforcement of the caps. I smell deception: "We've always had these caps, you must have increased your usage!" * Mobile, post 3g: pay per byte, period.

chime 12y ago

Precisely. I am trying to see the "complex" moral dilemma part of this issue that Wikipedia claims but I can't. For a fixed price, people should get a fixed speed - on wireless or broadband. That's it. Every byte of data should be treated the same. Disadvantaged consumers should not get free FB or Wiki. Instead they should get free 64kbps or 1mbps (or whatever the market can bear). "Zero rating" is harmful because content providers and telecoms get to decide what is worth providing for "free". It's never really free because in the end someone is paying for bandwidth. Voice calls, text, and IP are all just data. If I pay for 20/5mbps, give me that. If I have a fixed speed of 20mbps, I do not have "unlimited data" so there is no need to monitor and cap. It is 20mbps / 8 * 86400 seconds * 30 days = 6TB per month max. 64kbps is 20GB/month max. Nobody's browsing 24/7 at max. speed on mobile so there is very little chance a mobile user in free data plan of 64kbps is really going to use 20GB of data per month. Wikipedia should consistently support Net Neutrality throughout the world regardless of local deals. If they really want to help consumers in poor countries, fight for them to get a slow data plan that can be used not only for Wikipedia but also Khan Academy, MIT OpenCourseWare, or anything else the user wants to see.

amalcon 12y ago

While this is technically correct, it suggests a causation that just isn't there. Metered per-byte rates have existed since at least the 1990s. Datacenter bandwidth has historically always been metered, though typically on a 95/5 rate basis. This is also how mobile data has historically been billed: data packages really only took off with the relase of the iPhone, and before that most people just paid per-kb (which is why nobody actually used their mobile data capability).

dingaling 12y ago
> data packages really only took off with the relase of the iPhone Please, no more iPhone revisionism. T Mobile Web & Walk packages launched in 2005 with 1GB and 2GB monthly caps; the latter was the 'Pro' package IIRC. Other carriers quickly followed. Certainly my Nokia E smartphones of the pre-iPhone era all used such packages for browsing / e-mail / IRC.
skuhn 12y ago
95th percentile billing is not like the per-byte billing that ISPs and other parties try to enforce. 95th percentile billing uses your instantaneous bandwidth utilization, which directly correlates to how you have to size network equipment, and therefore to how much it costs to operate the service. Per-byte billing does not directly map to how much it costs your provider to transfer your data. I can utilize a link to send 1kbit/s for a month, which is 2.47Tbit of data transferred. That sounds like a lot, but what burden does 1kbit/s place on your provider? Virtually nil. And yet carriers with data caps will charge massive overage fees or heavily throttle usage because of usage like this. AWS bills per-byte for outbound data, so I'll use that for a concrete example. Lets say that I have a small service that uses 1gbit/s for 30 days. Commodity transit: billed at 95th percentile $2.00 / mbit $1000 circuit commit = $2000 / mo AWS: billed per-byte $0.05 / GByte (using their cheapest tier for simplicity) = $16,200 / mo There is no major difference here between what it costs the provider to transfer my packets. If anything, Amazon can get better deals on transit than a small startup can. Yet I would pay Amazon nearly ten times as much, simply because their billing metric does not bear any relation to their cost to serve. This is rent-seeking behavior and it should not be allowed to become the default way that ISPs and other service providers bill customers.