This is exactly what I've been fearing for a while. As soon as we go soft on the net neutrality issue, ISPs are going to take advantage. Favoring some traffic over others because they are part of an ISPs product line is ridiculous and anti-competitive.
With practices like these it will become increasingly rare for startups to be able to compete with large companies because customers won't want to spend extra money to use a startup's service.
There is a distinct difference between capping a customer's traffic after a certain point (which I don't agree with either) and favoring some traffic over another.
But some traffic is favored over others, by sheer network topology. Internet traffic costs money or peering agreements (which is ultimately just money that happens to cancel out). Traffic from the network you are currently connected to is much, much cheaper for the ISP.
I offer the opposite argument, which is that charging you for data sourced within the same network the same as external traffic is what would be the bizarre, anti-consumer behavior. If you want force anything on the ISPs, force them to allow others to home their services directly on their network for some reasonable fee, and then treat it also as uncharged traffic.
(I'm not sure it carries the day, so debate away. It should be put out there, though.)
Traffic from the network you are currently connected to is much, much cheaper for the ISP.
That's not always true. Eyeball networks are often spectrum-constrained and congested on the last mile. When a DOCSIS network becomes congested, the most common relief is a node-split, and those are very expensive.
This is slightly different since the company you rent the server from is paying an ISP for internet traffic. If you don't use that bandwidth, the server company isn't charged and they pass the savings to you.
With this issue, you're still using the network bandwidth you paid for, it's still going on the internet, but its end point is a server owned by the ISP. You are not accessing a special subnet IP - you're using internet DNS and internet infrustructure to pass this "free" data. I would even bet that if there was damage to the network and there was no direct route to the server, your packets may end up routing outside of the ISPs inrastructure.
Anyone remember posting to USENET with 'rn' and you'd get a stern lecture that your post would "cost the network hundreds or thousands of dollars" are you sure you want to do this (Y/N).
There is a lot more complication and loophole-ability in forcing ISPs to allow others to home their services than there is in forcing net neutrality in its traditional definition.
That's not how the Internet business model works. Receiving data is effectively free. Transit providers charge the sender for the bitrate (high for the web host, low for the web user) and a fixed fee for the connection, which you will have to pay regardless. Peering is paid for per connection and often by the web hosts who want to avoid transit and get better latency to the ISPs customers. In terms of traffic, there is effectively no difference in cost between sending traffic internally or receiving it from an external source. The reason for data caps is that ultimately networks are capacity constrained, but mostly at the last mile, not at the peering and transit links.
This is totally false. Inter-AS traffic is often priced using bandwidth in peered connections. In a bandwidth discrepency situation one isp will usually have to pay a lot more for the inter-AS traffic.
Right, and that's the sender, which is what I said. Note that the amount of traffic is effectively irrelevant since the connection is supposed to be dedicated. The only reason why the amount of traffic matters is that you need to decide which side pays what.
No. Generally the agreement works like this: "we'll set up a peering agreement between us. As long as the traffic differential is within 3%, peering is free. Beyond that point, the exceeding party will pay an excess penalty of x/GB."
I really do think ISPs should operate based on some sense of duty cycle. Part of the problem with the word "unlimited" is that it's still a holdover from the dial-up days.
For example... Guarantee me "unlimited" 5Mbps internet at a 20% duty cycle. That's 300GB a month. The cap is there by convention, but the internet is still "unlimited". Alternatively, give me 8640 "Bandwidth minutes" a month with the option to auto-throttle if I might go over, or disconnect for the month at 8640.
Unfortunately, most customers are in fact stupid, and a data cap is often the best way to say "We let you use our internet resources at up to NN% duty cycle per month"
Customers are not stupid for not knowing about duty cycle in the slightest. The scheme you described above is completely incomprehensible. Perhaps if you tried to explain it in more engaging and inclusive ways, "most customers" would not be "stupid". Defining "20% duty cycle" and "bandwidth minutes" and "auto-throttle" in non-technical terms would probably be a good start.
Until then, stop being patronising and calling people outside of your area of expertise "stupid". It's not going to win you any arguments.
> There is a distinct difference between capping a customer's traffic after a certain point (which I don't agree with either)
Why do you not agree with it? Is it because you feel that you have no choice in the matter, or because you think it is somehow wrong to charge for some things and not others. Once again, this is the ISP's house, and their rules. They can charge $10 billion per byte. You don't have to pay of course.
The big problem I see with this is if they deliberately slow down services like Netflix. Or if by providing their own streaming service, they are exhausting the bandwidth, thus effectively throttling services like Netflix. Otherwise, they have a natural advantage: they are transmitting data from a much closer location. Otherwise, it would be like requiring that your water company deliver you water sourced in the Alps for the same price as from your local reservoir.
EDIT: Back to data caps issues: I love them. Because now if there is any question on what I can or cannot do, there is no fuzzy wording about "appropriate network use", etc. I get 100GB a month or I do not. Anything "unlimited" is evil. My big issue is that companies like Verizon, AT&T, etc. only sell plans that are capped very low: 2GB a month is nothing for the way I use data. Give me 200GB a month and I'll pay $30-45/mo for the privilege. And while you are at it, drop the silly minutes notion. Just provide data.
I think the reason why people hate caps is because there is nonobvious how much data you have used or even are currently using at any moment. Sure you can typically log in and discover how much you have used but that workflow is well beyond what the average consumer is willing to do, even if they are technologically aware enough to know to do so.
This, combined with borderline draconian pricing schemes, makes for horror stories where someone had a $30/month plan and they end up getting charged $300 for using 2x their rate.
When you decide to use your hair dryer, you don't have to wonder if it's going to cost you $0.15 or $15.00. Electricity or water utilities are billed generally flat per-usage, the pricing schemes that come with bandwidth caps are not. So you paid $30 for X amount of data, which should indicate that the cost per data is $30/X, but if you use Y amount of data you have no idea what the price of it will be; it depends on your historical usage (and that of your teenage kid or neighbor who was on your open wifi or ...)
Bandwidth caps are a perfectly reasonable concept; higher usage actually does cost the company more to provide. But it is simply not the case that sending 1000 texts costs the company $10 but sending 2000 texts costs the company $100. It seems extremely likely to me that the plans are deliberately obtuse so that they can fleece customers of their money without any way of the user knowing until very far after the fact.
ISPs easily could redirect users to a page that says "You have used your quota for the month, would you like to continue at our per-byte rate of XXXX?" and block all their traffic until the user sees the page in the browser and click yes. I'm fairly certain that anyone who actually uses a capped plan would greatly prefer having the choice. They do not do this because they don't actually care about overages, they are being underhanded to trick people into using an expensive service without their knowledge.
When you decide to use your hair dryer, you don't have to wonder if it's going to cost you $0.15 or $15.00.
If you are a commercial customer, you actually might. Often times big consumers will have tiered rates based on time of day or caps that trigger punitive rates when they are exceeded.
Not just big customers. Here in Toronto (not in Shaw's jurisdiction, but if Shaw isn't slapped hard on this very soon, Rogers and Bell will do the same), we have Time-Of-Usage rates with smart meters. Our usage is still fairly predictable because there's three time bands, but we pay 5.9c/kWh at low price, 8.9c/kWh at mid price, and 10.7c/kWh at high price (http://www.torontohydro.com/sites/electricsystem/residential...).
That is interesting; I was aware of day/night variable rates but not punitive usage caps. I suspect that even in places that have them, the punitive caps 2-3 orders of magnitude higher than the original per-watt usage rate like they are with text message caps.
Perhaps it is just me, but I have heard many instances of people getting charged 10x as much as their base plan for data overages, and I've never heard someone complain about power overages (though I have heard people complain about getting a higher bill than they original expected because they were loose with their power usage across the whole month).
> "They can charge $10 billion per byte. You don't have to pay of course."
This would be true if there was competition in the marketplace, or if the internet is a substitutable good.
If Evian decided to raise the price of their bottled water to $50 a bottle, I don't have to play - there are many other brands out there. Not only that, even if all the bottled water manufacturers out there decided to price fix, I can substitute bottled water for tap water, or melted snow from my front yard, etc etc.
The internet doesn't work like that - there is no easy substitute for internet access, and in modern life is downright a necessity. Exclusivity agreements with both municipal and federal governments (exclusive operating zones/bandwidth allocation) means they own a monopoly over the market.
When you have a service that is a life necessity (or damn near it) and a monopoly, bad things happen.
Where do you live? Chances are if it's in the US, I could name at least six alternatives to your current ISP for you- just as you could name six other bottled water brands.
Oh boy. I am not talking about any political agenda. All I am saying is that (1) it costs the ISP less to transmit data between their servers and your house than between Netflix to their servers to your house and (2) the ISP can charge almost whatever it wants. The only reason why they do not, is because they actually want to make money.
Also, it's not quite right: the tax payers did not pay for the infrastructure. The local government did, based on lobbyist pressure from the ISP. While you and are are shooting shit on HN companies like Time Warner Cable do this: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/05/op-ed-north-...
Municipalities are also funded by the monopolists. Most people aren't aware of this but for example when Comcast goes into Centerville, USA and is granted an exclusive cable franchise they kickback some money to the local government, called a franchisee fee, as part of the agreement. It's all perfectly legal and publicly documented. Here's an example from Comcast:
My point is that there is a difference. The local government is a nice centralized place where the ISP can go to lobby for subsidies. Of course, it's the tax payers' money, but individual tax payers do not directly decide where it goes. Some shady person who years ago went door to door campaigning and has been running unopposed is now in charge of who gets the subsidies.
Trust me, I understand how taxes work. I also have seen how, despite great opposition from the people, the bill that basically guarantees Time Warner Cable a monopoly in NC was passes through all the hoops and not a single politician stepped up and said "WTF is this?"
It does not matter very much, so far as I see it. My point is this: you pay your taxes. The money all goes into one large fund. It is then divided accirding to the planned budget. If I wanted a cut of that money I would look for the easiest spot to do that: where the budget is defined. Here the issue is that, while you, as a tax payer and a citizen, have a direct say in who decides on the budget (you elect them), you have no direct control over how the money is distributed. If you do not like what is happening, all you can do is vote for the other guy /gal at the next election. However, your local ISP can affect the budget. They can, for example, say that it is too expensive to serve some areas and that without government subsidies, they will not do it. That is how they get the subsidies. At least in some cases this also goes together with making generous contributions to the campaign fund of the politician who helped push through the bill that allowed the subsidy.
So my point is that the individuals making the decision to give an ISP money, at least theoretically do not always represent your interests. This is clearly what happened with TWC in North Carolina, as mentioned in the post I linked.
Re-read my comment. You seem to labor under the impression that I don't know how taxes work. That is not the case. I was simply pointing out that there is a difference between who provides the funds and who decides where they go.
If you have to write this, it means your previous comment needs editing.
No-one "labor[s] under the impression that [you] don't know how taxes work", they simply dismiss your comment, or downvote it, as someone who doesn't know what they are talking about, unless you are some kind of celebrity, which you are not.
I don't understand the furore over unlimited data. Over here, in Greece, our Internet plans are unlimited at 24 mbps and nobody has so much as hinted towards capping, ever.
One big issue (fear?) with caps that I have, when companies switch to capped pricing and get comfortable with it, they will be extremely opposed to the idea of increasing the cap at a future date. As the internet has grown over the years so has our consumption of bandwidth.
I have seen many monopolistic behaviours of the ISP's over the years and it seems that this will just be another tool to inflate the cost of the internet. It almost seems that we are slowly moving towards a bandwith model where only the rich will be able to fully utilize the internet, which is somewhat sad seeing as how libirating of a tool it can be.
Unlimited isn't evil, it's the lack of definition that's evil. Define it better and everything is fine. For example, Unlimited internet at 20% duty cycle works the same as an arbitrary 300GB cap at 5Mbps.
I'm not the OP, but here's why I disagree with it. Functionally, there's no way for you to appeal overage charges. Very few consumers have the ability to measure their bandwidth usage, and those that do do not have the legal firepower to challenge ISPs in court. I mean, even if you manage to get a day in court, who are the jurors going to believe - the ISP with the $50,000 traffic measurement box, or you with a BSD router lash-up? In practice, bandwidth caps mean that ISPs just get to either drop or drastically throttle your service towards the end of the month by saying you've exceeded your limit.
I won't accept bandwidth caps unless a) usage is determined by an open, transparent and verifiably accurate method and b) there exists an appeals process by which one can appeal erroneous cutoffs. Without that, the power inequality between ISPs and regular consumers is an invitation for abuse.
My ideal ISP: Providing internet access is their only business. They thrive at providing as fast service as they can. If they have to have data caps that's fine; but they don't advertise unlimited unless that's what they provide. They don't inspect packets.
It seems that few of my ideal ISPs exist. My question is: why? Does the market not favor this type of ISP? Or does the other type have a competitive advantage that prevents my ideal ISP from thriving (and if so, what is it?)?
i used to work for an ISP like that. there were tons of independent ISPs back in the dial-up days. ADSL killed most of them that hadn't already been gobbled up by the bigger national ISPs, because the infrastructure build-out was too expensive. we tried our own SDSL service by ordering alarm circuits to customers houses and co-locating our own DSLAMs in telco offices. it was expensive and couldn't be done everywhere we wanted to.
in order to remain competitive, my ISP had to resell ADSL service straight from at&t/sbc (they provided the line and terminated them over our fiber connection, so we would be the actual data provider and route customers out to the internet). they only allowed us to do this because they were forced to by the government as part of the AT&T re-merger. however, the rate that they sold us a DSL connection was higher than what they were advertising to customers in the same market, so even if we broke even on a customer, we'd still be more expensive than what at&t was offering. we couldn't compete on price and by then, cable speeds were already much higher than what ADSL could do, so many customers went from a dialup connection with us to ADSL with at&t or cable with comcast.
we started our own wireless service to avoid the middlemen, putting up big antennas on water towers in nearby suburbs and backhauling the traffic to us over t1s, t3s, and point-to-point heavy duty wireless connections. it was much more labor intensive, having to do directv-style truck-roll installations instead of just remotely activating a toggle on a customer's phone line like with adsl. maintenance costs were high, having to send technicians out all the time to realign wireless antennas. other ISPs would pop up and other equipment on water/cell tower antennas would suddenly degrade our wireless signal quality.
they're still in business, but i haven't worked there in 5 years so i don't know what their books look like. looking at their website, their cheapest ADSL plan is $27.95, and the same speed plan on at&t's website is $14.95. when internet service is a commodity, people just want whatever works for whatever is cheapest. they don't care about expert, local customer service, or high quality datacenters.
when internet service is a commodity, people just want whatever works for whatever is cheapest. they don't care about expert, local customer service, or high quality datacenters.
We had Cruzio in Santa Cruz, and from what I gathered they just resold AT&T ADSL. However, after the horrific experience with SBC / AT&T as an ISP, I gladly paid whatever extra they charged just to actually be able to talk to a person (which wasn't much anyway.)
When all you do is provide a dumb pipe, you're a commodity. When you're selling a commodity, and there is any competition at all, your margins will race down to virtually nothing pretty damn quickly. No one wants to invest billions of dollars to build up the infrastructure for a barely profitable ISP.
Does it matter? If consumers want the commodity won't someone step forth to take the small margins? So is it ultimately that consumers don't want this particular commodity badly enough to force the market to exist?
Selling a commodity is not automatically a bad idea. Chilean miners have been doing very well for the last ten years by selling copper, moly, silver, gold, at huge margins. (Before 2003 they merely did OK).
There is plenty of room for premium ISPs (such as bethere) as long as they aren't locked out by the cost of running cables. The pipe might be dumb but latency, bandwidth caps, traffic shaping, filtering and blocking/censoring all contribute to quality. I'm totally happy to pay an extra $10 a month for a solid connection. I suspect gamers would be a big market for bethere if they had any advertising at all.
It's a Cournot game, and it does work - you invest in infrasx up front that will get you a fixed capacity (bandwidth). The airline industry is the same way- an airline buys a number of airplanes up front which get them a fixed # of seats to sell.
Huh? Last time I checked Google was a advertising giant who collects data on people's data/details (be it internet usage or whatever and be it "anonymised" or not). Google is not a charity.
My theory is that even the "ideal" ISPs will sell out to a behemoth if they offer enough money. It's the best way to make your question irrelevant and keep Behemoth's revenues and profits up.
It's not bold or dumb in Canada. Expect to see similar plans from Rogers and Bell very soon. The Canadian telecom industry, backed by the CRTC, has operated as a public cartel for a very long time now. These are the same folks responsible for giving us the highest cell phone rates in the world, no such thing as nation-wide long distance plans, maximum data caps that dropped from 95GB to 80GB over the past 5 years (at least on Rogers), and basic cell phone plans don't even come with call display or voice mail (those are extra features).
Unless a government rolls in and breaks the ISP portions off into independent companies I don't see anything on the horizon stopping this syndicate.
For as long as I remember, Australian linux users have been able to download isos from their ISPs own mirrors, without it counting against their cap. Which makes total sense, because it's internal to the ISPs network, so it costs them zero in peering fees.
It's hard to argue that this is a bad idea.
Now Shaw do the same thing, and it's .. awkward. It smells anticompetitive & self-serving. But it's essentially the same thing.
iinet (at least) also gives free quota to 3FL gaming servers, as well as a large portion of Steam downloads. Which I've definitely never had a problem with it (still being able to play games when capped = :D)
This is what data caps have been about all along, at least in Canada - I sincerely hope no one is surprised. I'm just a bit surprised to see Shaw leading the charge, and not Rogers or Bell.
This is what happens when all the major ISPs in a country also happen to be the major TV companies. There's no reason to expect them to just roll over and die while the Internet eats their lunch.
Comcast appears to be aware of the net neutrality concerns since they don't give their Xfinity streaming service any preference[1]. Their VOIP, however, doesn't count against your quota. They claim that is because it uses different infrastructure.
This is actually an interesting point - Shaw's VOIP service similarly doesn't count towards cap. As mentioned in the update to the ArsTechnica article, the movie service not counting is apparently because it is delivered via different infrastructure -
"Shaw's existing video-on-demand QAM cable infrastructure. When users access Movie Club through a computer, they will access an IP-based version of it delivered over the Internet—and this will affect monthly data caps."
but surely the VOIP phone data is delievered over the internet...
The VOIP data is probably not delivered over the internet for local calls. The calls probably come out of the cable network and hit a softswitch in the same city. For local calls, they probably have a TDM interface (T1s/DS3s etc) to the incumbent carrier and possibly other CLECs too.
This has been happening in Australia for a little while now. 2 of the biggest providers have struck deals with all sorts content providers (IPTV, music, etc) to provide unmetered access. Most people see this as a good thing (data caps are pretty high here, reasonably priced for 100GB/month), but as more and more content starts coming via the internet, 100GB won't last very long.
At college I worked close to the networking department. It was common knowledge that whenever a computer went to do a speed test, the user would get more bandwith, thus showing a higher speed. It was also the case that faculty got more bandwith during the day. The internet was shoddy and this was just 2 years ago..
Taking this even further, what if an ISP partnered with Google/Facebook/Twitter/whatever to expose their services on an "internal" box, and thusly provide an extreme "basic internet" ISP package that didn't allow you to leave the ISP's network?
Alternatively, should ISPs be charging for P2P traffic that stays within the network?
There are already "basic packages" like that where I live: free access to Facebook using Facebook Zero. Also BlackBerry access packages that only give you email & chat / Facebook access only, without web browser access to the entire Web.
Multicast doesn't (currently) work in the Internet due to router state cost, and is orthogonal from IPv6. In a hypothetical Internet where multicast works and is free, I could see pirates adopting it but anybody who can afford to pay would probably stick with unicast — bandwidth isn't that expensive these days.
If you watch shows through their set top box it doesn't count towards any limit. So, kind of like standard cable going to a TV, where the TV channels are on a dedicated 'connection' to the provider and watching TV doesn't utilize the broadband connection.
I'd like to know if their set top box utilizes the same pipe and throughput going to your house, and if watching a show through their set top box would diminish throughput speeds for others on the line. If it does, then that's bogus. If their box utilizes a separate dedicated connection to Shaw, then that's fine and I say fair.
However, in practice, it's hard for average folks to understand why Shaw's box doesn't count towards a limit when the Apple TV, Netflix-enabled Blu-ray box or whatever DOES count towards the limit. But I'm not sure Shaw is in the wrong here if their box has a dedicated 'line' to them.
It utilizes the same pipe insofar as it uses the same cable HFC plant/infrastructure to deliver the signal to your home. On the wire however typically VoD services on set tops do not use the same DOCSIS channels as cable modems delivering IP video via Netflix, Hulu, etc. Cable VoD typically is just a block of regular video channels. Your set top requests a program and one of those video channels is allocated for this program. It's a bit old fashioned but it works. It is however possible to do this over DOCSIS which starts to blur the lines.
This varies. Virgin TV (UK) has true on-demand, it's streamed over their cable to their box in your living room when you request it, rather than Sky who can do things like show a three hour film at 8/9/10pm.
No, it isn't. Whether they've modified their announced plans due to backlash remains to be seen, but the information came from Shaw Communications president Peter Bissonnette, who justified it by saying, "There should be some advantage to you being a customer."
as much as i hate defending shaw, my isp, the news here is factually incorrect.
this is direct from their facebook page [1], specifically the last line:
Also, we wanted to clarify a couple of things:
Shaw Movie Club is intended to be watched through your set-top box. You can order your movies online through vod.shaw.ca and send it to your set-top box for viewing - watching movies on your set-top box won’t affect your included Internet data. However, you can also stream your Movie Club movies online to your computer – this WILL contribute to your Internet data.
I understand the argument that traffic from your current network is cheaper and therefor enables cap-less ISP services but I think it's nieve to believe these ISPs don't intend to control as much of your purchase and viewing activity as possible. Cable companies do this now with traditional cable and telephony services and it makes them a fortune. Any ISP owner worth their salt would always prefer to have an unfair advantage instead of an even playing field. Capping your competition is an unfair advantage and too good to pass up if legal.
First it's the direct media (movies, music, etc), then it could be gaming networks, VOIP services, cloud file storage and so on. It's entirely conceivable that we would be financially forced to use the lower quality services of an individual ISP instead of a higher quality alternative. Then the real competition would be ISPs fighting over physical turf while online services look to parter with those ISPs instead of focusing on innovative products.
I’m afraid this demonstrates how ad-hoc the definition of net neutrality is. No packets are being blocked; none are being slowed down. The ISP is not charging any content provider a special rate.
(If having the content “homed” on the ISP’s network is a problem, then any CDN would be a problem.)
I am not saying that the ISP isn’t taking advantage for their own benefit. I am not saying it’s not shady.
I am saying that the behavior is not a violation of any previous technical definition of neutrality – maybe the “spirit” of it, but technologists don’t believe in spirits, one hopes.
No packets are being blocked; none are being slowed down.
Sure they are. If I try to watch n GB of movies on NetFlix, then the last n-m GB get blocked, whereas on the ISP's service, none do (where n > m = data cap).
maybe the “spirit” of it, but technologists don’t believe in spirits, one hopes.
How is this not a violation of Sherman anit-trust legislation?
Sometimes metaphors for the internet/cyber world don't map well to real worl past examples. But this instance aligns very well to Standard Oil's transport rebates for their own oil. Oil is to content as railroads are to networks.
IANAL but until the US starts enforcing anti-trust legislation this kind of thing will continue to happen. Net neutrality doesn't stand a chance against these kinds of behemoth ISPs and their lobbyists.
With practices like these it will become increasingly rare for startups to be able to compete with large companies because customers won't want to spend extra money to use a startup's service.
There is a distinct difference between capping a customer's traffic after a certain point (which I don't agree with either) and favoring some traffic over another.
This is bad for everyone.