Isn't paying for tethering the digital version of buying apples, but I have to pay a premium if I want to use them in a recipe?
Whereas with data, there is no limit intrinsic to tethering vs in-phone.
More to the point, in practice, people can easily use as much data in-phone as on a laptop, due to streaming video. Think, for example, of someone streaming music via YouTube for hours on end.
Here's a different analogy that might work better: I can shop at Costco as much as I want, and I can even buy things for other people, but I cannot literally give my Costco card to someone else and let them shop at the store on their own.
People also deal with various data caps when tethering, they just now also deal with an extra bill for a service provided by their phone not the phone company.
There are actually several tricks to make video streaming efficient for phones. The top sites are aggressively throttled [1]. This is harder to do for laptops, where users are typically connecting to corporate VPNs and stuff.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-04/youtube-a...
And anyone who uses a VPN can get themselves limited, just like they were using a laptop, because the carrier thinks you're trying to hide something from them.
It's why I like Google Fi. I don't have any of these arguments. I'm just fully metered and there aren't any restrictions.
it was based on the same argument that multiple devices would be used by multiple people and hence create more traffic.
i don't know if this was common in the US, but it certainly was in some countries in europe.
Tethering is problematic in many ways with devices that don't expect to be metered. A Windows PC or Mac will sop up data sitting idle at a prodigious rate.
For every informed consumer who understands that, there are 8 who are going to go crazy when they end up with a wacky bill.
Thankfully, Windows finally offers a "This is a metered connection" option. Do you know how to get the equivalent functionality on a Mac? I've looked, but can't figure it out.
The fine-grained control is nice but still seems like a glaring omission that the Mac still isn’t “tethering-aware” with regard to conserving data — especially since it’s so seamless to connect to an iPhone that shares the same iCloud account.
the tethered devices use the same "gas tank" and would have to be directly connected at all times for that to work.
so maybe
"you get unlimited diesel for this car, but you'll have to pay extra if you want to charge your phone or laptop from the electricity generated from our diesel"
Its like if you subscribe to netflix .. but if you want to share it with 4 family members, then get a family plan. You can simultaneously consume multiple streams of content.
Tethering allows you to share the internet connection with other people, as well as your other devices - which is essentially you consuming multiple streams of internet data simultaneously.
Paying for usage sort of makes sense, but paying for a license to share with other people? That's outrageous.
Imagine if you had to pay an extra license on your water bills for sharing water with your guests..
The cultural industry from your first example has been unjustly profiting from artists and the public alike for decades.
Now ISPs need to apply this model to survive because we don't pay for bandwidth usage or for guaranteed bandwidth. We pay for a mirage of advertised 28Mbit/s, 100Mbit/s, or even 1Gbit/s nowadays.. the cost of which bandwidth is actually shared among many clients.
So it's specifically because of their own marketing lies that ISPs now need to find ways to restrict users from sharing their access. Good luck with that!
In the meantime, we'll keep on building our own self-organized non-profit ISPs (such as NYCMesh or guifi.net) to overthrow their rule.
Oh.. and I have an ad blocker that saves a ton of network
Paying for USAGE is disgusting. The way a network works, is that besides upkeep which is a small percentage of TCO, upfront cost scales with total bandwidth, not total number of packets one needs to move across a set of links.
Meaning if the ISP buys enough network equipment for 100 users to each have 10mbps of available bandwidth, they no longer have costs besides upkeep (maintenance, support, and replacing broken hardware). This is a SMALL percentage of upfront buildout costs. This large lump sum in the beginning has the potential to deliver the same amount of bandwidth ad infinitum.
Charging users for USAGE is DISGUSTING and is literally not fair.
Price gouging.
Plain and simple.
This isn't really true for wired networks, and it's extremely untrue for wireless networks. There is only so much total aggregate bandwidth available in a given area's spectrum allocation. If every device at a given base station was downloading as fast as it could, performance for all users would collapse. Wireless ISPs need to get users to limit their usage. In the past they did this by charging the byte. This confused users, and got them angry, so now they've migrated to "unlimited" plans where you effectively pre-pay for (say) 30GB per month and then get slower downloads beyond that. They've also added tricks on top of that to make it harder to use a lot of bandwidth. This includes making it harder to tether, and throttling music/video streaming services.
In the context of a typical end-user paying a non-profit ISP, yes. We share infrastructure costs and that's about it.
The problem is commercial ISPs only follow the money so you have the recurring cost of greedy shareholders to take into account in your equation. And that usually leads to not respecting net neutrality (as was the original subject of this thread).
So if you are in control of your own infra, price for access should be in the range of 1-20€/month. If you do xDSL, it has to be (a lot) more expensive (+15-25€/line/month).. as long as you're small. When you're big enough you can do local-loop unbundling and be back on the first price-range.
> Charging users for USAGE is DISGUSTING and is literally not fair.
Depends. For typical end-users, it's not a good model (you want a fixed price). But for associations, hosting coops, companies.. That's the usual approach for guaranteed bandwidth billing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percentile#Applications
That's a mechanism to make sure your friends and your small neighborhood association don't have bleed themselves to pay for the seedbox i want to setup in my garage :)
Without firsthand experience, it's difficult to explain to someone that once I configure an access layer switch with 48 1gbps ports on it, and 4 10gbps SPF+ uplinks, it only costs me the price of electricity and physical storage to move 1 packet over it, or an infinite number of packets over it.
My problem with that is that once the pipe is installed and working, it only costs maintenance. I'm not sure what you are trying to say with your seedbox example.
This really isn't true, as you do have to pay someone to sit somewhere nearby the switch in case it goes down. And you have to maintain a space indoors for the switch so that it doesn't get wet. Such space has to be built on land that you own or lease, and you can't just buy a wiring closet-sized piece of land. You also will have to eventually replace the switch, as it will fail after a certain period of time.
There are recurring costs to all of these things, and it absolutely costs more to send an infinite number of packets over the switch. In fact, you can only send so many packets over the switch before it fails, because bandwidth and packet size are limited.
You'll also find that if you're selling bandwidth on this switch you'll need to pay people to administer and enforce contracts, and you'll need a building for those people, and you'll probably want to market your switching service so people know they can buy bandwidth on this switch from you.
It's pretty dismissive to call all that "maintenance" as if it's a paltry sum. In fact I would argue that paying the company to maintain the network is the bulk of what you're paying for here, and it's a lot more complicated than just plugging some wires in and calling it a day.
Not my intention, sorry. Per-packet pricing would be ridiculous indeed.
> not sure what you are trying to say with your seedbox example.
"Per pipe size" pricing doesn't mean you only have maintenance costs. Because it's technically unfeasible to guarantee "pipe size" bandwidth to all routes on the internet to all your clients. So if i keep "my" pipe filled, you may have to add new cables/switches or maybe upgrade some transit plan.
So i can understand that with a 10Gbit/s uplink you may never reach these limits because your network is already oversized for your needs. But many people (even actual ISPs) don't have 10Gbit/s uplinks. Or at least not 10Gbit/s of transit (although they may have 1-10Gbit/s peering links with other local entities).
Yes I agree. But if I pay an ISP for a 10mbps link, I should be able to get 10mbps to their NOC at all times, and then each ISP would be able to vary prices based on peer connectivity. This is where competition would strengthen the internet backbone.
This issue constantly comes up with keeping the internet free and open. Take the following:
The customer pays for their connection, say 10mbps over Verizon's network. Under a free and open internet, the customer is allowed to use that 10mbps that they PAID for in whatever damn way they please.
Why should I be subject to Verizon's idea of what my connection should be used for? Congestion happens, but a properly designed network means that the pipes are mostly free and available under normal circumstances to all customers for all the bandwidth they paid for. Doesn't matter how many devices I use on the other side of that connection, I bought 10mbps and I should be able to use that 10mbps the way I want.
This is price gouging. Plain and simple.
That's typically not what happens with commercial ISPs. You pay for access to some parts of the Internet with asymmetrical speeds (often 20Mbit to 1) and most times without even a publicly routable IP address ("for your security").
Even if you pay that commercial ISP for higher speeds, you can read in the contract that they're actually not guaranteed and that anyway people exceeding "reasonable limits" (usually not defined with actual numbers) will have access shut off.
So sure you can do that on a non-profit and/or professional ISP because those will be explicit in what service is brought to you for what prices (without surprises) and they will usually stay out of your way when it comes to how you use the network (public IP, no port blocking, no priority for Youtube traffic over important mail, etc).
So if you find this situation as revolting as i do, welcome to the fight against the telecoms industry! We can do better, cheaper, and more intimate Internet.
To me, metering a "tethered" connection differently than the phone making the same requests is just as disgusting as an ISP charging you because you have a different number of computers connected to the internet on your residential connection. Or charging you more because you went to a streaming site. It's a blatant violation of net neutrality.
If a cell phone company can't fulfill their advertised service of x mbit down / y mbit up, they shouldn't be offering it. Anything else is false advertising.
You get a Netflix family plan if you want four people to simultaneously and independently connect to Netflix, each consuming their own stream. You don't need a family plan if you plug Netflix to your TV and invite three other people to watch a movie together with you.
Tethering is like the latter case. Your phone is still a single device consuming a single Internet connection. The concept of "multiple streams of internet data" you used exists only because phone companies violate net neutrality, refusing to become dumb data pipes they should be.
The sharing with other people component may be specific to the service and with Netflix probably outweighs users actually watching 2 streams on 2 devices whereas with tethering I think it's more likely sharing a connection with another device the subscriber owns like work PC when traveling or a media device on the go like tablet or computer.
If you want the ability to give apples to friends to eat, then it will costs extra.
Maybe have an app or webpage where you push a button and some contracted delivery person brings you an apple.