...no physical media is dead please stop

 

How many games do you download a month?  My ISP has an official cap of 500GB a month that they are officially not enforcing for the time being.  That's a lot of Xbox games if they ever decide to enforce it.  

In the rare event that you are buying 10 games a month, there are places outside the basement called "stores" that still sells physical copies.  Of course if you aren't feeling adventurous, the USPS will make the perilous journey for you and drop it off at your doorstep.  Just grab it when you go up for a hot pocket.  

I don't see the plans being normalized.

First, they would need to filter every spam and ad because people aren't paying for pop ups.

Second, they would need a fool proof method of tracking data and usage that holds up in court.

Third, they would need to be able to ensure data across the entirety of the metwork. I pay for 20 gig up/down speeds so I get that 24/7.


Right now providers can igor those, but the second they come under scrutiny from hard lining the charges they start to lose big.

As far as server/conduction costs I don't see much in the way of upkeep once the system is in place and the peak hits. The outlay is pretty large, but so was stringing Ma Bells and power authorities copper lines.

Lol.  This is a thing now.  I dont know how ISPs are going to charge in the future, but you better bet your ass you're going to be paying a per mb environmental tax.

www.salon.com/2013/08/19/your_netflix_habit_uses_more_energy_than_your_fridge/

See above.

If the fucking government keeps its nose out of this (highly unlikely ), the market will sort this shit out.

the market started to "sort this shit out" (peering bandwidth caps, pay to play, etc) AND THEN the government got involved.

ar-jedi

Ever look at the prices on the higher end cisco routers or the huge price of long distance fiber?  It most certainly does cost a lot more.  The company I work for doesn't use that much bandwidth, but we've spent more on routers this year than on servers.z

They do and put so little of it back into the network then whine they can't keep up.   F them.

Mobile providers generally get sent to mobile sites with less downloading (ie less ads/spam)

I think when little Suzie runs up a $150 internet bill on imigur and twitter parents will want to know everything in detail.

The "up to" only works when unlimited data is there. You now tell me I can only DL 50GB of data at low speeds because it says "up to" you will see lots of angry people

Mobile providers also provide far less data.  Verizon offers 3GB for a low-end plan.  My Podunk ISP offers 500GB.  People won't be eating up their data caps because of ads.  

If parents really want to know where the data goes, that information can be logged.  The ISP can do it if they feel compelled to do so, you can do it at home if you feel compelled to do so.  It really isn't that complicated.  Phone companies have been doing it for decades.  Mobile companies have been doing it for years.  Remember when they were supposedly throttling Netflix?  Do you think they can do that if they can't track where data is going to/coming from?

As for little "Suzie", her parents are going to have to restrict her data usage just like they probably already have to do on her phone.  They went through this with her text messages.  They went through this with her phone bills.  Now they'll go through this with the internet bill.  This is not a new problem that parents never had to deal with before.  They just have a fresh coat of paint.  

Besides, Suzie's imgur habits and Twitter posting aren't going to chew up 500GB no matter how many times she tweets about her bowel movements.  Her porn streaming might be a problem, but that's why we have parents - to limit how much fun we have.  Mom and Dad are going to have to peel her away from Netflix every now and then or pay for it just like their parents did with minutes and text messages.

As for the "up to", nobody will bitch about it that doesn't already bitch when their bandwidth nosedives after dinner.  And they probably won't have to, because the torrent & usenet users will be paying more or using less, the streamers will be paying more or using less, which means more money to increase data capacity or less demand bandwidth utilization.  Either way, you are more likely to get your maximum speed with metered data.  

None of those are obstacles for metered data.  They are either already issues or are already solved.  Verizon literally went through this less than a year ago when they replaced unlimited data with 2GB.  Everybody freaked out until they realized that it wasn't really that big a deal (for most).  As far as I know they are still in business with lots and lots of customers on what is considered one of the best networks available.

The only real questions are whether or not metered data will really decrease peak bandwidth usage, will people get a break for data during off-peak times (they should), and will the extra money really go towards increasing capacity.

ummmmm this is a pretty horrible example. apples to oranges type of business. A company such as Comcast for example has peering agreements with tier 1 providers so more bandwidth through their pipes doesn't cost them anymore money except the electricity used in the routers/switches. Monetary transit agreements account for less than 1% of their total bandwidth so it's irrelevant.

Paying for the interconnect at an IX is cheap, but building their networks from those locations to all the way out past the last mile with enough bandwidth to support the massive increase in demand due to the rise of streaming video is not.  If you think you can do better, then why don't you get into the ISP business?

What if that Granny is the ARFcommer?

People seem to be missing the point that you are already paying for what you use. You want to download an hd movie? Well, the time it takes is relevant to the bandwidth you pay for. Why should they charge you usage? What difference does it make if you download during peak times or non peak times? Want it faster? Buy more bandwidth. Otherwise you have an Internet connection which isn't being used.

this scenario, which everyone seems to want will cost businesses money because they need it during prime times. Cell phone providers have moved away from this because of competition. But I guess there's not much competition in Internet in mos areas, so gouge away. Grandma will also be paying more since she is in bed by 7pm

Ok, so please explain why he is wrong, we are here to learn. (I'm being serious, so don't misunderstand me. Btw, what does your small company do? How many clients do you have? And how do you compete with the larger ISPs?)

My understanding is you pay for a speed. You want more, pay more. During low usage, they are earning the same money while they have more open/unused bandwidth.

The only way they are losing money is if you figure how much more they could  be making more money. And since most providers are monopolies, they probably always feel this way.

preface:
practically everything around you is predicated on a concept called "oversubscription". take the gas station(s) in your town. how many people live in the town? how many pumps are there? clearly not everyone can get gas at the same time. how did this happen? market forces create a situation where an "acceptable wait time" is traded off against the costs of running the business (real estate, number of pumps, etc). problems arise because of the "bursty" nature of people behavior. for example, more people want gas during commuting hours. hence, wait times go up. it's the same for highway capacity. if as an alien you arrived on earth on a Sunday, you would look at a major city arteries, and you'd ask, "why do earthlings build such wide highways for so few cars?". the answer of course is that the highway was sized to (hopefully) keep congestion to a minimum during peak travel hours -- AT HUGE COST, by the way. but even the widest highway succumbs to holiday traffic, and lengthy jams result. telecom and data networks are engineered the same way, because again it is not economically feasible to have a network which allows every [call | download | stream | etc] at the same time. so, on occasion -- mother's day is a good example -- you may receive the dreaded "all circuits are busy" message. in practice on the internet, oversubscription works well because of the "bursty" nature of typical web user behavior. for example, you click on an ARFCOM thread, data gets transferred, and then you spend a minute or so reading the thread. then click, data transfer, pause. click, data transfer, pause. while you are paused, others are transferring data, and so on.

problem statement:
in contrast to traditional web surfing, actually streaming video (e.g., sourced at Netflix etc) to a lot of customers requires A LOT of constant bit rate network bandwidth -- for the entire duration of the video, and ISP's such as verizon/comcast are now in a quandary: continually upgrade their network with additional capacity or face customers that complain that their streaming video performance experience is poor. but, as you can see, there is no correlated upside for verizon and others in terms of revenue. they don't make any more money by providing service FOR MORE PEOPLE AT THE SAME TIME -- all they end up doing to providing a better pipe from Netflix (etc) to Netflix customers. how does verizon benefit here? if they meter or cap Netflix they just move the problem to another ISP (comcast gains a customer; comcast has to upgrade their network; comcast gets complaints; comcast caps Netflix; comcast loses customer to verizon; rinse, lather, repeat...).

ISP economics don't scale to drive down prices nor neutrality. ask yourself, why aren't there 10 gas stations in the small town you live in? there isn't because it's profitable for 4 stations to each serve 250 customers every day, but it is not profitable for 10 stations to each serve only 100 customers every day. market forces drive the number of gas stations towards an equilibrium point where they are each making enough money to stay in business, and but not enough to be raking in money because that attracts competition. ISPs are no different, they are beholden to the same laws of economics that gas stations are. in fact, the cost of ISP "plant" (last mile delivery and upkeep) is SO expensive that it usually is the case that only 1 or 2 ISPs can operate profitably. this is in principle why ISPs sometimes lobby municipalities to "protect" their "turf"; given too many competitors, they all will fail.  you can't have 10 ISP's -- each with 10% of the customers in the given area.  it doesn't work.

let's say you get your new ISP off the ground, the basic problems detailed above ALWAYS apply. you get started, everything is going great. but then customer N calls, "my Netflix is slow." customer N+1 calls, "my Hulu is slow." these are subscribers paying flat rate pricing for internet service. so, you now have to make capital asset purchases (faster/bigger routers, higher capacity optical gear, and the like) to increase capacity, otherwise you will lose these customers to competitors. don't forget, your customers are still paying the same amount of money per month. soon thereafter, customer N+2 calls, "my Netflix is slow." customer N+3 calls, "my Hulu is slow." you investigate. the problem is not in your internal network, instead it has to do with your peering arrangements (IX) with other backbone ISPs. so, you upgrade those connections to faster interfaces (n x 100GbE etc) AND pay more for peering connections/capacity. that means even more CAPEX and additional OPEX. don't forget, your customers are still paying the same amount of money per month. this cyclic problem, and the mitigation thereof, NEVER STOPS. as more and more of your customers subscribe to Netflix and Hulu (etc), you need to provide more and more constant bit rate capacity in your network and peering arrangement.

ar-jedi

It's never been available where I live.

The first "high speed" internet (and still only) available here was a wISP.

It's always been metered internet.  80 bucks for 150 gigs a month.  2 bucks per 10 gigs over that. Speeds typically 6 to 10 mbps.

It doesn't exist where I live anyways. Likely you will see service providers charge for bandwidth/speed, or give you all the bandwidth and speed you want in exchange for access to information (a la Google). You will not likely get it upgraded forever for free, either way.

go on now.  

tell me some capital numbers...
a 100GbE port on a (JNPR/CSCO/ALU) backbone router is how much?
a 100G or 400G lambda on a DWDM optical system is how much?
etc etc etc

do you think the hardware connecting to/from the meetme room is free?

ar-jedi

Yeah, we're on a 'high speed' line that was granted as a monopoly to our local POS ISP by our local public utilities commission, and the fastest I've ever seen was 1.2 Mbps, slowest is 0.07 Mbps. It averages around 0.5 Mbps. They've been promising upgrades for 10 years now. Just last summer, they put cards in everyone's mailbox on my road advertising that you could upgrade your service to 10 Mbps for an additional $30 per month. Turns out the upgrade didn't speed anything up at all, according to neighbors who apparently fell for it.

I do so love it when the government picks the winners, don't you?

you should be a fan of granny.  

it's a flawed system. not every subscriber can reach all of their constraints (throughput, cap) at the same time. packet networks are not circuit switched networks. the consumer has voted out the bell heads and voted in the net heads; the result is "best effort", oversubscribed data networks. we got exactly what we wanted to pay for -- finite access to a finite network resource for a fixed price. it happens to work well because of the bursty nature of human behavior and data transport characteristics.

1) understand oversubscription.
2) read the fine print on your contract.

of course, if we shift gears here there is another option available:

you could pay your ISP per byte of transport. consider it. consider if you would benefit from it. consider how it would change your network usage profile.
my 84 year old mom sends 3 emails a month, and downloads 7 pictures of her grandkids a month.  maybe some funny cat memes as well.

versus the $50/month flat rate she is paying verizon now, perhaps she would only pay $0.87/month for the sum of her traffic on a per byte basis.

how much would you pay?

maybe you are MUCH better off now given that my mom (etc) is subsiding your Hulu/Amazon/Netflix content delivery...

ar-jedi

lol, pretty much.

I lived in San Antonio for a year.   I feel your pain.   City Public Services was the only place you could legally buy electricity or water from.  

I'll try guru...this is simply off the top of my head.

Folks think bandwidth is free.  Now my prices are PER PORT!!!!!!!!!!!

They don't understand how any of this works, all they know is "I paid 1/100 the market price for my speed, they can just buy more bandwidth!"

No, that's not how this works.  That's not how any of this works!  What they don't understand that all those ports have to be connected over hundreds of ports throughout the entire network.  It's not one big pipe and it's not one big dumptruck!  It's a series of tubes.

Thanks for the detailed response, and I'm sure you know more about this subject, so don't take it that I'm trying to pick apart your response.

I understand the economics with your gas station example, but ISPs are different because, like railroads and phone companies, you can't have the infrastructure of 20 ISPs in one city. In contrast, people can open up more and more gas stations until that equilibrium is found. I'm not suggesting ISPs should be declared public utilities, because I truly believe that no competition will make the situation worse. Now that I'm half asleep with a kid crying, I'm not sure I can come up with an answer, but it seems, just like healthcare, we involve the government, then when it doesn't work we call for more govt. but this is a difficult situation when there is little copetition in the market (my city had one ISP until several years ago, which coincidentally forced the first one to improve.)

... And now I'm rambling. Good night

Comcast already does that.....300gb cap per month, $10 for each additional 50gb.

http://time.com/money/4143682/comcast-data-caps-internet/

2016 will be the testing grounds for data caps with ISP's. Funny how most new big name Smart Phones (& feature phones) no longer have the option for micro SD cards.......no SD card slot, means you use more data!

I want a weapons mounted tunable laser

This lack of competion angle is pure bullshit. There's plenty of competition. You whiners just don't like the price of a premium product.

Bandwidth isn't cheap.  Building a network isn't cheap. Operating and continually upgrading a network isn't cheap. It's not fucking free!

If you want all you can eat then pay for it.

Serious question, and I'll have to read it all tomorrow, but does the provider pay for the usage on those ports or the bandwidth?
(If bandwidth, it shouldn't matter for this topic, but it sounds like they are paying for the data, so I can kinda understand the move to charging customers for their data usage.)

But isn't broadcast tv using the same lines? And phone (prob small data usage)? So why does it matter if I stream from Netflix, YouTube, or even a broadcast network's website versus watching cable?

Is it because they are all coming from the same server source, and that causes a jam at that end? (Jedi, I'm trying to understand, but it's late and the force is weak)

Bandwidth not usage. Juniper or Cisco will sell you a switch with SFP+ form factor ports, where you can use either 1Gig SFP optics or 10G SFP+ optics. To activate 10GB compatibility, you have to pay tens of thousands in licensing fees. Now the 40G and 100G (and now some 400G with ALU) stuff uses coherent optics and completely different hardware, but costs hundred thousand+ per line card, that's because instead of just On/Off signaling like 1G and 10G Ethernet, these optics use polarization to fit more information in, similar to how cable modems do electrically.

Phone and TV and Cell backhaul usually run through the same links (or at least fiber sheaths) as core internet links. What the NWO/beast system is trying to do with net neutrality and bandwidth caps is price internet out of the reach of normal people, and instead sell you a package of for instance Google and Netflix and Youtube, where to browse the internet you have to go through google which becomes a national firewall.

Oh for fucks sake. You started off so well with great understanding of the tubes and then went full derp with the last few.

these are all good questions.

on the topic of the IX (exchange or internet traffic), it is very dependent on the business relationship between the providers.  in some cases, it's basically "you take X from me and i take X from you and we call it even".  so they hook up a few (or a couple of dozen) 100GbE ports to each other and go back to work.  in other cases there are per port or per bit charges, and these can get somewhat complicated.  for example, you can contract for a 100GbE port with a 50Gb/s CIR (committed information rate).   so, you are guaranteed 50Gb/s and you get anything that is "available" (from a network capacity standpoint) over that, up to 100Gb/s.   you can also get a 10, 40, or 100GbE port with a 0 CIR.  basically, with this approach you get (unspecified) capacity on this port when the overall network is under-utilized.  in some cases, this can be a good deal, especially if you know a little bit about the habits of your customer base.  for example, if you serve primarily business customers, network traffic can actually be higher in the wee hours as databases etc are backed up among corporate sites between 2AM and 4AM.  

for all intents and purposes, video = constant bit rate data.  the video is delivered via TCP/IP the same way your email is, but instead of little bursts it is a constant flow for the duration of the program.  a HD (1080P) "stream" of The Walking Dead from Netflix to your house requires about 4-8Mbps of network capacity, end to end.   the Netflix end is "complicated"; they use Amazon's huge AWS farm for content storage and distribution, and the storage itself is geographically diverse and monstrously replicated.   the stream you are watching is delivered to your house from a (hopefully) "network-routing-advantaged" Amazon AWS location.  and in some cases, it is delivered from a Amazon AWS location which is "cost-advantaged" to Netflix; that is, they pay less via one way than the other.  

eta
https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/netflix/

ar-jedi

ar-jedi

I, for one, can't wait for my 66.6 mbps plan priced at only 66.66 per month.

Oh and 100G DQPSK coherent lamdas running OTU4 with EFEC can take thousands of picoseconds per nanometer of chromatic dispersion as opposed to the 800 or so that OTU2 11g can take, dramatically reducing the need for DCMs on SMF28 fiber when you have a purely 100G system!

what, you don't like the math for spec'ing DCM's?  

ar-jedi

Remember back in the day when you could get different phone companies at your house on lines that I assume Ma Bell ran? Will that ever happen with cable Internet? Or is it already?

Yes. I followed you there for a bit.

Still costs shit ton of money to route it and light it. Ps. I smell about 5 bullshit acronyms

Fucking optical guys

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competitive_local_exchange_carrier

ar-jedi

we have one in the lab -- with a key switch on it.  

sorta man-portable.

ar-jedi

Definitely.  Whoever said it's like gasoline... it isn't.  Yes, there's infrastructure in place to provide a certain service level, but to the equipment as long as it's fit for purpose it has no bearing on how much data is transferred.

It's only an issue because they over-subscribe the service, but that's probably in their TOS.

Interesting, thanks!

Bullshit. It's a series of tubes, literally. Pipes of data. The gear has absoluty the most bearing on how much data is being moved over time.

Aka the very definition of bandwidth.

Every network is oversubscribed.

As a compromise they can include a basic GB amount. Those who exceed this limit are charged extra



 

Cable can just increase their monthly rates and have multiple tiers



 

Wasn't tiered plans specifically mentioned as verboten in the FCC regulatory proposal?

everything in everyone's life is oversubscribed.  
it's the only way the economics work out.

gas stations, restaurants, roadways, college frat parties -- all oversubscribed.

not everyone in town can get gas at the same time.
not everyone in town can get food at the same time.
not everyone in town can drive down the highway at the same time.
not everyone at the frat party can get laid at the same time.  <-- YOUR MILEAGE MAY VARY.  SOME SETTLING MAY HAVE OCCURRED.  NO USER SERVICEABLE PARTS INSIDE.  IF ERECTION LASTS LONGER THAN 4 HOURS, CONSULT A DOCTOR.

ar-jedi

But but bandwidth is an infinite resource!  They already paid for it!