Hacker News Reader

Comment by southerntofu | Hacker News Reader

That's creating artificial scarcity.

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.

View on HN

Come on man. Bandwidth is not that expensive. Also I believe that phones consume more bandwidth than laptops. You tether your laptop for work stuff. That’s close to nothing. Then you might watch a video, but it’s the same on your phone. Actually the resolution is higher than on non-retina laptops. It’s simply charging bc they think it’s of value to you. You need your laptop for work. So we charge, bc it’s work related.

Oh.. and I have an ad blocker that saves a ton of network

Paying for ACCESS makes sense. It costs the ISP to have the availability to connect you up.

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.

> Paying for ACCESS makes sense.

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 :)

You are saying it's okay for ISPs to charge per packet rather than per pipe size. It is possible for ISPs to set up their network for guaranteed bandwidth (at least as far as the NOC you are connected to). But not doing so means they can continually squeeze more money out of their customers without added infrastructure costs.

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.

> 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.

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.

> You are saying it's okay for ISPs to charge per packet rather than per pipe size.

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).

>technically unfeasible to guarantee "pipe size" bandwidth to all routes on the internet to all your clients

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.

> 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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com