On Aug 22, 2012, at 17:06, Bacon Zombie wrote:

An ISP with a 5GB cap that is charging the end user more then 5$ total {including line rental} a month should not be allow to operate.

I agree entirely. The US is not exactly known for great broadband access, particularly where I live in the midwest (unless one is in a lucky pocket with FiOS, Google Fiber, or the like), yet I could easily host 200 512kbit/sec subscribers off my residential cable connection without even thinking about caps much less throttling on top of caps. It'd be oversubscribed, sure, but most users don't max out the line regularly so I don't think I'd have a problem. My mobile phone is through Sprint, known for being the slowest of the national 3G carriers, yet I can exceed 1mbit/sec in the middle of a corn field miles from anything resembling civilization and again do not have any monthly cap. A 5GB cap on 512kbit/sec service could be blown through in under a single day. That's absurd. If a 256k user maxed out their line all month, they'd have transferred just short of 80GB. Why in the world would it make sense to limit someone to 1/16th of that just for the "privilege" of double speed which is still so slow it's beaten by any 3G service? Wired internet providers should not even be thinking about caps below the 250GB/mo point. Neither of these example speeds can even reach that level, so if you feel the need to cap you are doing it wrong and should rethink your business model. Wireless carriers get a bit more leeway due to spectrum limitations, but even there a 5GB cap is barely reasonable for an entry level offering. --- Sean Harlow sean@seanharlow.info

On Wed, Aug 22, 2012 at 2:17 PM, Sean Harlow <sean@seanharlow.info> wrote:

On Aug 22, 2012, at 17:06, Bacon Zombie wrote:

...

An ISP with a 5GB cap that is charging the end user more then 5$ total {including line rental} a month should not be allow to operate.

I agree entirely. The US is not exactly known for great broadband access, particularly where I live in the midwest (unless one is in a lucky pocket with FiOS, Google Fiber, or the like), yet I could easily host 200 512kbit/sec subscribers off my residential cable connection without even thinking about caps much less throttling on top of caps. It'd be oversubscribed, sure, but most users don't max out the line regularly so I don't think I'd have a problem. My mobile phone is through Sprint, known for being the slowest of the national 3G carriers, yet I can exceed 1mbit/sec in the middle of a corn field miles from anything resembling civilization and again do not have any monthly cap.

On a slow connection, "all you can eat" is effectively all "you can sip" Nonetheless, it appears there are now 2 camps forming where (AT&T + VZW) want to clamp down access (Facetime?) and increase price And, in the other camp, unlimited offerings from T-Mobile, Sprint, and Metro http://www.pcworld.com/article/261247/tmobile_metropcs_roll_out_unlimited_da... These 2 camps also cleanly break into Ma'Bell vs Other CB

A 5GB cap on 512kbit/sec service could be blown through in under a single day. That's absurd. If a 256k user maxed out their line all month, they'd have transferred just short of 80GB. Why in the world would it make sense to limit someone to 1/16th of that just for the "privilege" of double speed which is still so slow it's beaten by any 3G service?

Wired internet providers should not even be thinking about caps below the 250GB/mo point. Neither of these example speeds can even reach that level, so if you feel the need to cap you are doing it wrong and should rethink your business model. Wireless carriers get a bit more leeway due to spectrum limitations, but even there a 5GB cap is barely reasonable for an entry level offering. --- Sean Harlow sean@seanharlow.info

On Wed, Aug 22, 2012 at 2:35 PM, Owen DeLong <owen@delong.com> wrote:

...

And, in the other camp, unlimited offerings from T-Mobile, Sprint, and Metro

Well...sort of. To be fair, the T-Mo version of unlimited is unlimited up to a certain amount (that you paid for) and then all-you-can-sip at incredibly low speed thereafter.

(At least that's what their marketing literature says... If Cameron knows different, it would be nice to know.)

Cameron* does know different.

From the link i posted, here again http://www.pcworld.com/article/261247/tmobile_metropcs_roll_out_unlimited_da...

"Starting Sept. 5, T-Mobile will offer a new Unlimited Nationwide 4G data plan that doesn’t have any data caps or speed limits. T-Mobile’s other so-called unlimited data plans do have caps (2/5/10GB), but once you go past the threshold, your speed is throttled. The new plan, T-Mobile says, won’t have such limitations." And to be "fair and balanced" (TM): "MetroPCS also joined the unlimited data plan party, but only for a limited time offer. " CB *Works at T-Mobile. Marketing literature: http://newsroom.t-mobile.com/articles/t-mobile-unlimited-nationwide-4g-data

On Aug 22, 2012, at 17:35, Owen DeLong wrote:

Well...sort of. To be fair, the T-Mo version of unlimited is unlimited up to a certain amount (that you paid for) and then all-you-can-sip at incredibly low speed thereafter.

The new plans being brought out are supposedly true unlimited, but are not allowed to tether. The previous unlimited but throttled to 2G after X amount of transfer plans remain available for those who tether. --- Sean Harlow sean@seanharlow.info

Yeah, totally can't be done. It especially can't be done profitably. http://fiber.google.com/ http://gigaom.com/2012/07/26/the-economics-of-google-fiber-and-what-it-means... On Aug 22, 2012, at 5:41 PM, Jimmy Hess wrote:

On 8/22/12, Bacon Zombie <baconzombie@gmail.com> wrote:

...

I how you are talking about 3G or there is a typo. An ISP with a 5GB cap that is charging the end user more then 5$ total {including line rental} a month should not be allow to operate.

I don't believe $5 even covers an ISP's typical cost of having a line, let alone getting data through it, maintaining, supporting it, and providing upstream networking. Last I checked you can't even buy dial-up services from national ISPs for that low a price, before the per-Hour usage charges, and those require simpler less-costly infrastructure to maintain for the ISP.

With residential broadband, if there is not a heavy degree of oversubscription, the ISP will either go broke, or the cost of residential service will be so high that the average person would not buy it. "I want my line speed 24x7" is a technical argument, it is a numbers game, and the average subscriber does not make that argument, or at least, rather, the average res. subscriber is not willing to bear the actual cost required to actually pay what it would cost their ISP to satisfy that for every user trying to utilize so much.

Why should the end users who transfer less than 1GB a month, with only basic web surfing, have to suffer periods of less-than-excellent network performance or pay increasing costs to subsidize the purchase of additional capacity for users at the same service level expecting to use 100GB a month?

There is a certain degree of fairness there.

Even if the metric is wrong -- the idea of metering bytes transferred is broken, because it does not positively reinforce the good behavior.

It's like trying to reduce congestion during rush hour on the freeway by imposing a "40 miles of travel per day" limit on each vehicle owner.

That gives no benefit for those effected by the limit to adjust what time of day they travel those 40 miles, however.

A "X=10 gigabyte per 4 hours" rolling average limit would make more sense.

Where "X" is varied, based on the actual congestion of the network between other users of the same service level.

...

And if your infrastructure and handle 25% at a minimum maxing out their connect them don't advertise " unlimited " since you can't provide it and it is false advertising.

There's no such thing as unlimited, period. Even if the provider wanted to, there will be some physical limits.

I agree the use of the word is confusing... when they say unlimited what they are often indicating is "You are not limited by the provider in the number of hours a day you can be connected to the service".

...

The world would be a better place if ISPs that either throttled, cut off or added on extra charges to the end users bill were fined to hell for false advertising and repeat offenders were named and shamed on a public website. [snip]

There might be no residential ISPs left

-- -JH

Google can afford to start almost any project they want, and they are in a unique position to negotiate peering and access to a ton of bandwidth,

... kind of like all the other major incumbents like at&t, Comcast, and all those. Of course, the difference is that at&t, Comcast, etc., all have cable TV offerings, and these companies can all see that inexpensive high speed Internet access has the potential to destroy the lucrative existing TV subscription model that they enjoy. Claims that the US is somehow magically different than other countries sound pretty feeble at this point; service providers like Sonic.net are doing FTTH, and municipal broadband projects are sufficiently scary to incumbents that they've spent years fighting them in court, rather than just letting them get built and then collapse - so apparently the incumbents are pretty certain that these projects would be successful. 250GB/month isn't a whole lot of data when you look at high-def movies. You can exceed 250GB/mo by running a flat 1Mbps. Comcast apparently has a 305Mbps tier (at quite a steep price). Coupled with a 250GB/mo cap, that's what, a few hours of 100% use? :-) Comcast fans need not beat me up, I know there've been some "changes" recently, but I don't know exactly what... It would be nice to see some useful options. I mean, we all hate frame relay, right, but the idea of a CIR with an ability to make use of extra capacity the network might happen to have available makes a certain amount of sense. I don't expect to see anything like that anytime soon for all the obvious reasons. Heh. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net "We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.

I just wish that someone...Google or ANYONE else would do something like Google Fiber in the technological wasteland where I live instead of focusing only on hotbeds of high-speed internet and well-connected customers like Kansas City, parts of North Dakota, Minnesota, etc. Here in my bandwidth ghetto, TPC can't do better than 1.5Mbps/384kbps and Cable has different limitations (ridiculous fees for static addresses, for example[1]), extremely variable performance (most days, I do pretty well getting 50-70Mbps/10-30Mbps on a line where I pay for 30/10, but often enough to be annoying, I get 7Mbps/3Mbps for 8-10 hours at a time...Just long enough to go through the trouble report process but not long enough to still be a problem when the tech shows up to address the issue.), etc. I'd love to ditch the DSL line and relegate the Cable circuit to backup status (and move to a lower pricing tier on it) with my primary on FTTH. [1] I _HAVE_ business class cable service, but I find the idea of $5+/month for an address that costs them less than $0.001/year ridiculous. Where is this barren wasteland of bandwidth you may ask? It's in San Jose, California. Capitol of Silicon Valley. If I stand on the top of my roof, I can see 55 South Market Street on a clear day. (but I have to stand in just the right spot and look through just the right piece of the 280x680x101 interchange). If anyone wants to do a fiber build in my neighborhood ala Google, I will happily go door to door soliciting my neighbors on their behalf. Owen On Aug 22, 2012, at 18:46 , Benjamin Krueger <benjamin@seattlefenix.net> wrote:

A unique position? Unlike those poor residential ISPs who only have literally millions of subscribers to use as leverage in peering negotiations. Perhaps more accurately, rather than saying "Google can afford to start almost any project they want" we should say "Google doesn't suffer the temptation of wringing every last penny out of their aging infrastructure to ensure maximum profits from minimal investments".

I don't want to turn this into a long-drawn debate, so I'll simply say that I take Google at their word when they say this is profitable from Day 1 and I surely take their product offering at its word. I'm not sure who proposed we require anything, but I suppose we can let the market decide what ISPs are "required" to do. I can say that I don't know anyone who wouldn't drop any existing residential service for what Google is selling. Perhaps they will succumb to some unforeseen boogeyman as you allude to, but to be honest that sounds a whole lot like the wishful thinking of an industry that has been deftly out-manueverd at its own game and now finds itself dramatically behind the curve. Frankly, if I were in the ISP business I would be shitting my pants.

On Aug 22, 2012, at 6:05 PM, Jimmy Hess wrote:

...

On 8/22/12, Benjamin Krueger <benjamin@seattlefenix.net> wrote:

...

Yeah, totally can't be done. It especially can't be done profitably.

Google can afford to start almost any project they want, and they are in a unique position to negotiate peering and access to a ton of bandwidth, with their Youtube, Google Search et al. As to whether it will be profitable, well, obviously, that is their claim. It's yet to be demonstrated.

I gotta reject the idea that broadband providers should be required to follow in Google's footsteps though.

For now, Google fiber is another risky experiment, that could have a great payout if successful, or could be shuttered within a year or so, or fees/rate incs tacked on, when they figure out just what a mess they have gotten into.

...

http://fiber.google.com/ http://gigaom.com/2012/07/26/the-economics-of-google-fiber-and-what-it-means...

-- -JH

On Aug 22, 2012, at 17:41 , Jimmy Hess <mysidia@gmail.com> wrote:

On 8/22/12, Bacon Zombie <baconzombie@gmail.com> wrote:

...

I how you are talking about 3G or there is a typo. An ISP with a 5GB cap that is charging the end user more then 5$ total {including line rental} a month should not be allow to operate.

I don't believe $5 even covers an ISP's typical cost of having a line, let alone getting data through it, maintaining, supporting it, and providing upstream networking. Last I checked you can't even buy dial-up services from national ISPs for that low a price, before the per-Hour usage charges, and those require simpler less-costly infrastructure to maintain for the ISP.

I agree that $5 is low. Should be more like $30.

With residential broadband, if there is not a heavy degree of oversubscription, the ISP will either go broke, or the cost of residential service will be so high that the average person would not buy it. "I want my line speed 24x7" is a technical argument, it is a numbers game, and the average subscriber does not make that argument, or at least, rather, the average res. subscriber is not willing to bear the actual cost required to actually pay what it would cost their ISP to satisfy that for every user trying to utilize so much.

Agreed.

Why should the end users who transfer less than 1GB a month, with only basic web surfing, have to suffer periods of less-than-excellent network performance or pay increasing costs to subsidize the purchase of additional capacity for users at the same service level expecting to use 100GB a month?

Here we disagree -- somewhat. If you are selling an unlimited product, then you take on the obligation of making it effectively unlimited. If you are selling the same unlimited product to the 1GB/Month user and the 50GB/day user, then you are not doing a good job of pricing your products in a manner that is fair to your subscribers and you will lose in one way or another: + Your product is too expensive and your lower-end customers depart and you're left with only the few high-end customers. + Your product is not expensive enough and everyone gets poor service because you do not have adequate upstream bandwidth to service all of your customers. The way you achieve fairness is to provide different products at different price points to meet different customer needs. For example: Metered products for low-tier users: 1GB/month $x 2GB/month $2x 5GB/month $4x 10GB/month $8x Over $0.9x/GB Flat rate products for power users: 10Mbps/1Mbps $y 30Mbps/5Mbps $2y 50Mbps/10Mbps $3y 100Mbps/20Mbps $5y etc. Note that there's no unlimited product in the list, but, the flat rate products present limitations in terms of wire speed while the metered product allows low-utilization customers to take advantage of high wire speeds for short bursts of transfer. That way the customer can choose the pricing model and service that best meets their needs and all you have to do is make sure that the values of x and y are sufficient to allow you to upgrade your capacities as needed to meet the demands of increasing customers and/or customers moving up the usage tiers.

There is a certain degree of fairness there.

Not really. It assumes a single one-size-fits-all pricing model which is bound to be inherently unfair.

Even if the metric is wrong -- the idea of metering bytes transferred is broken, because it does not positively reinforce the good behavior.

While there is truth to this, the bottom line is that selling bandwidth based on time of use billing to residential customers results in a product that the consumer simply can't/won't understand and you can't make any money.

It's like trying to reduce congestion during rush hour on the freeway by imposing a "40 miles of travel per day" limit on each vehicle owner.

That gives no benefit for those effected by the limit to adjust what time of day they travel those 40 miles, however.

A "X=10 gigabyte per 4 hours" rolling average limit would make more sense.

Where "X" is varied, based on the actual congestion of the network between other users of the same service level.

Try explaining that to the average residential user... It's just not going to work. The incentive won't affect the behavior because they just won't understand.

...

And if your infrastructure and handle 25% at a minimum maxing out their connect them don't advertise " unlimited " since you can't provide it and it is false advertising.

There's no such thing as unlimited, period. Even if the provider wanted to, there will be some physical limits.

True... I object to the use of the term unlimited as well.

I agree the use of the word is confusing... when they say unlimited what they are often indicating is "You are not limited by the provider in the number of hours a day you can be connected to the service".

Which is meaningless if being connected doesn't mean you can transfer data at some reasonable speed throughout those hours as well.

...

The world would be a better place if ISPs that either throttled, cut off or added on extra charges to the end users bill were fined to hell for false advertising and repeat offenders were named and shamed on a public website. [snip]

There might be no residential ISPs left

I doubt it. I think that if they had to, residential ISPs would, in fact, find a way to develop pricing models (like the one I mentioned above) that fit that criteria, still allow them to profit, and also pull in enough revenue to build out capacity as needed to meet demand. Owen

On Aug 22, 2012, at 21:25, William Herrin wrote:

Works for the electric company, the gas company, the water company, etc. Metering I mean, not a use cap. The notion of a cap is pretty broken.

The difference is that gas, water, and electricity are all resources that have actual costs relevant to consumer and SMB-level users. A fiber-optic line costs the same to operate regardless of if it is carrying no data or entirely maxed out. Higher-capacity optics at each end of course cost money, but they're fixed cost items which are deployed once and don't often need replacement during their useful life (especially given the growth rate of network traffic). Longer runs obviously need repeaters capable of handling the data rates in use, but the same applies. As far as I can tell, the actual cost of the bits being transferred is so minuscule as to be practically irrelevant for anyone who's not at the scale to be dealing directly with Tier 1 carriers. Capacity costs money, but once it's there utilization is nothing. --- Sean Harlow sean@seanharlow.info

On Wed, 22 Aug 2012, Sean Harlow wrote:

As far as I can tell, the actual cost of the bits being transferred is so minuscule as to be practically irrelevant for anyone who's not at the scale to be dealing directly with Tier 1 carriers. Capacity costs money, but once it's there utilization is nothing.

The problem the OP is probably dealing with is an incumbant who they are buying capacity from at hugely inflated prices, so all of a sudden the cost of capacity is a significant part of total operating cost. There are still markets in the world where a megabit/s of capacity can cost hundreds of dollars per month (even when buying tens of them). This is usually due to politics and/or law and thus regulatory problems, but it's still a situation some have to operate in. -- Mikael Abrahamsson email: swmike@swm.pp.se

On Thu, Aug 23, 2012 at 9:21 AM, Shahab Vahabzadeh <sh.vahabzadeh@gmail.com> wrote:

Thanks about every ones speech in this topic but I think I can not describe my problem clearly, let me explain it some how more: You know I have two kind of ADSL services, Limited and Unlimited. Limited Like: 512Kb-4GB-3Month 1024Kb-4GB-3Month 2048Kb-6GB-3Month 4096Kb-8GB-3Month

Unlimited Like: 128Kb-1Month 256Kb-1Month

and etc. But when a customer is in our sales department they do not know he will download more or he will have a normal usage? Is he heavy peer-to-peer service downloader or not he is a doctor that he want to check his emails only, and he want this service always. Our problem cause midnights because in the middle of the night in 2:00 AM till 8:00 AM and at this time we do not have any traffic counting for users. Means they can download free at this time, and if we buy more bandwidth only for this time for users it will be unusable in other times like mornings. I want a logical way to solve this problem technically or sales techniques, We must control users usage and I can not do any thing to them they love free-times and they want to download, but they are going to make me ran out of bandwidth that time, so what about that doctor? and his emails? You know no manager will accept increasing bw only for nights :D

You can put the paying ones with a data cap in a guaranteed queue with precedence, and leave the rest to download as much as possible in another queue without any guarantees but with fair queuing enabled so that everyone gets access more or less equally. When your management or sales department chose the "all you can download between 02:00-08:00" they should have thought about what happens to the rest of the customers in this time interval. Or should have brought you in to hear your technical point of view and the possible problems this scheme may induce. my 2 eurocents :)