Coronavirus could force ISPs to abandon data caps forever

I have a T-Mobile plan with 5GB of "unlimited data" and it goes down to 256kbps when the data is used up. As I learned the hard way, there is no way to buy more data or restart the billing cycle earlier no matter how much you are willing to pay.

That is not the point. Consumption based charging would be fine and which is exactly what we had before. These 'unlimited' plans are not that. These are a free pass to ditch your more 'undesirable' customers onto your competition. Yes, that can be because they use more, but also because they use less of your 'value-added' high margin services, because they use 'non-mainstream' data (less edge-cached), less data for which you receive kickbacks, consume not more but at peak times, or simply because you do not like them for whatever.

When I pay for bandwidth to my house, I should get that bandwidth, and be able to use it for whatever I want. I don't care if they oversold their network. It's not my problem. I should not get punished for using the bandwidth I paid for. If people who barely use the internet are paying the same as me, that's not my problem either.

If ISPs are suffering congestion, that's because they did a bad job designing their network for the amount of demand they have. Throttling is just a way for them to cheap out on their network, but sell "gigabit" internet to everybody. If they can't serve me 1 gigabit, they are selling shitty service.

If they want to charge for X amount of bits per month, that should be the up front pricing scheme. I should not be paying for a "1 gigabit" plan, but have the amount of bits that I can use be buried in the fine print. Especially when bits per month is the REAL indicator of what they are selling.

> when it detects you are not actively watching the video

How? By its very nature, watching video is passive. Unless they watch you through the camera.

It actually infuriates me when YouTube auto-lowers the resolution (usually because I have slow Internet). I almost always set it to 720p or 1080p, but I have to do it every time because it doesn't remember my setting.

Packet counts are a poor estimate of cost or usage. They might as well charge customers by the minute with variable rates based on how many hops are required or which companies' "web partners" you visited for all the sense it makes.

Do you know how many 'broadband' customers you can get out of a 1000/1000 strand of fiber? Way more than you'd guess. And at our monopoly rates, you could pay off everything you needed to serve it to them in less time than Comcast's and AT&T's CEOs will spend caring about actually providing service that meets the definition of broadband.

Until the ISPs decide that all freelancers and any VPN are "business use" and then the legislators don't do anything about it.

Who said anything about costs at the margin, i.e. 95th percentile?

You've just 'moved the goalposts' across the field :)

Bandwidth is a commodity like anything else and has underlying structural costs - it's far from free in any sense of the word. Even at the 95th percentile, as you say, there's no guarantee that there's unused bandwidth at all.

Video conferencing is not the only thing people do with their residential internet.

I have a five person household that includes three teenagers. They stream a lot, and my oldest plays X Box games where installing a game can eat 100GB. We run perilously close to the 1TB cap each month.

From a WFH perspective, downloading, updating, and uploading big Docker containers and other big packages can be bandwidth heavy. My work laptop also has online backup software that continually pushes new files back to the cloud, and that's bandwidth heavy as well.

When I signed up for internet, I asked the representative for unlimited data because I was aware of this option. The representative flat out denied that it existed and refused to even tell me the price for such a thing.

I don't think that's really what we're talking about? Anyway, it's incorrect, because backhaul is cheap. The whole reason we have to deal with Comcast etc. is the many barriers to competition over the "last mile".

You dropped a zero. There are 1000 MB in a GB, so your cost of running a Gbps line at full tilt is more like 3.6 cents per hour.

In other words, bill everybody a dollar per month for bandwidth and worry about it only if average usage per subscriber goes over 10 TB per month.

They waive that in a lot of cases, as they're trying to build out their network of xfinitywifi hotspots you see everywhere. I still ran my own modem, but it's a point to keep in mind.

It has to be on the whitelist, and they require that they control the software running on it.

That has nothing to do with what he said. At the very least, you can leave their modem also set as a router and just put your router behind it (double NAT). More likely, you can turn off all of the "router" functions of their modem and still put your own router behind it.

There is no way for them to differentiate whether the device behind the modem is a router or a computer.

The grandparent’s comment still stands.

Upgrading backhaul is a fixed cost. There is no incremental cost for usage.

Very much different than power generation.

I enjoy how you edited this from "Did anyone ask you?"

No. Why the hell would the time of a disaster be a good time to increase prices for people who rely on these services.

Go away.

After we the taxpayers paid them $400B to cover that expense, and the telecomms pocketed it, I have the world's smallest violin to play for this particular argument.

https://nationaleconomicseditorial.com/2017/11/27/americans-...

I have thought about that problem a -lot-, actually. It used to be my job; determine the best route from a cost standpoint, draw it up, and then convince everyone to let you do it. (And thus began my love for LISP...)

You don't dig 50m into the ground, unless you were referring to the length and not the depth. But if you did mean depth, I've done designs where the dig depth was under 4 feet. Usually this involved either special products for purpose (Look up Vertical Deflecting Conduit) or literally just a straight trench along a state highway. (Not gonna comment on the security of that practice...)

But if you meant 50m in distance off the backbone, you're right. because that last 50M to a residence -is- the hard part in a lot of cases. That's why one of the things negotiated in a lot of franchise agreements (which range between a permission to build all the way to a locally sanctioned monopoly) includes is a 'minimum homes passed per mile'. Which basically states that if a route passes at least X homes in Y distance, the Cable co cannot charge a prospective customer for the buildout to their residence.

Doing the 'last mile' is the most expensive part of any network.

One might start to ask if this is part of why these Cable cos are so hyped on the 5G; It makes it possible for 'fringe' customers to still be offered wireless products.

What the Tele/Cable cos did with all of that federal grant money in the early 2000s and with the stimulus packages resulting from the 2008 recession was build up their backbone structure substantially. Many of the projects I did were designed to specs along the lines of 'Go up to the next 48 count interval, then double that.' So if we needed 28 fibers to feed a system, we'd put 96 in the ground in that case.)

Which means that rather than use that stimulus money to build out more of those last miles, in most cases it instead went into revenue stream of fiber leasing. Many of the projects I worked on involved Cable companies leasing that dark fiber they built up to the cell carriers for capacity in the rollout to 4G.

Bonus points because in most cases they weren't even doing any multiplexing on the fiber (something that could be done by adding additional equipment but not having to replace any fiber.)

It can be a lot easier than digging trenches. Where I lived I've watched various google & TW contractors running fiber on existing utility poles. It surprised me how fast those guys can move, I'm talking a couple guys and a truck can probably do a few miles a day. Last time I saw it, they had a couple trucks doing some prep work ahead of a guy literally walking along under the cable pulling that spinner thing. They had wired from the office building I was in, down the road a couple miles, by lunch.

(random youtube video) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUMjCvMxp-M