Why don't ISPs bill by the gigabyte and be done with it?
- Does this guarantee that you get the speed that you pay for? If not, then should the price during heavy congestion cost less per GB? I’ve had the unfortunate luck of having lived in areas where the internet is unusable for anything other than email and light browsing during peak hours. Bonus: Do you know why this happens? If not, I encourage you to research this.
- How will this affect the advertising model of the entire internet economy? If you, like me, have lived your whole life on a mobile data plan that is priced based on data usage, you’ll realize just how much bandwidth is consumed by advertisements (worst are the video/audio types that auto play).
- How will this affect “future” technology such at smart homes? Most devices send data back (Amazon Echo devices) and the growing security camera ecosystem that sends recordings to the cloud would suddenly cost users a ton more.
- Speaking of cloud, what will happen to the gaming industry that is heavily cloud based? Many games don’t even ship in a completed state anymore. Instead, part of the install requires downloading a ton of additional updates. Not to mention online play, DLC, etc.
There a many many more everyday examples like this that would be heavily affected by pricing per GB. Your question sounds like a simple solution but like many things in life, that is rarely the case.
Furthermore, even in places where you do have some sort of choice for internet service, it is almost certainly limited to choosing between a cable monopoly and a phone monopoly as your ISP.
Personally I understand the economics around it, but still don't like the idea of paying per GB. I would end up skipping some Netflix and would get mad at kids for playing Netflix to an empty room (much like I currently get mad when they leave the lights on in an empty room). It's nice on a personal level to avoid that.
But I think it would considerably change the Internet landscape. No more listening to the same exact song multiple times on Youtube or Spotify or whatever. No more downloading then deleting the same stuff over and over again. I think about it often, what a massive waste of bandwidth, I don't even know why. It's a lot of electricity used, I guess?
Even though I've got unlimited fiber, I'm looking for some sort of local "Internet cache" solution that would store everything so it would be re-downloaded from my home instead of across the ocean. Would be great for outages, too.
Is it though? How much electricity is used to serve a 1080p Netflix movie several times vs. playing the same movie from a local storage medium?
If you asked me, I'd rather burn Bitcoin mining rigs if I wanted to get rid of electricity waste.
Pretty sure I use more than that in a day.
Seriously, why would you use that much data per day for? Even getting full blu-rays you wouldn't be able to watch that many.
95/8 = 11.875 (Mbit to MByte)
11.875 * 3600 = 42750 (MByte/s to MByte/h)
42750 / 1000 = 42.750 (MByte/g to GByte/h)
42.750 * 24 = 1026 (GByte/h to GByte/d)
1026 / 1000 = 1.026 (GByte/d to TByte/d)
In a two month period I uploaded about 50TB according to the tracker so my calculations seem about right.
It's easy to reach these numbers in a country where net neutrality is a thing.
Luckily it was over fiber and through a corporate VPN and I barely noticed it. But I was shocked when I saw the usage on my router later that month.
that's because you benefit from it. You're not currently paying the cost of that 1080p stream - netflix (and the ISP/peering networks) are paying. Netflix recoups the cost from your subscription, and the ISP/peering arrangement is mostly cost neutral to them (save for a small amount i presume).
But it's still not "free".
Unless that's what you meant...
Just open another tab; problem solved. :|
I would bet this is already the most efficient way of it working.
You can setup a proxy service to cache internet requests too, but they're getting less useful due to greater use of HTTPS.
To use the power analogy, when I was young the price of power was relatively high but in recent times it has now dropped to 0.6 NOK / kWh so even charging the car from 10-80% (~61 kWh) cost 40 NOK or $4. I do not get mad at the kids leaving the light on like my mother did to me.
I (or rather my job) currently pays about 1000 NOK/ month for unlimited 500 MBit synchronous fiber internet. I transfer maybe 500 GB/month so for it to be cheaper for me it would be under 2 NOK/GB or $.2 which sounds really high but that is what I currently pay with my usage.
the price was competitive too. other ISPs charged $70 per month, and had a limit of 50gb (that was 15 years ago) my ISP charged $20 as base fee and $1 per gb of usage. if i used less than 50gb, i saved money, if i used more then i could...
Is it a normal connection or a business connection perhaps?
Your peering will only scale to your (combined) interface speed regardless of your SLA. Our 2x 40G peer with level 3 serve far more than 40 1G devices (I personally have 600 in one building alone, and that sets aside the rest of the users), but it’s rare it’s more than 30% utilised.
Clearly that’s not going to be a domestic isp architecture, so a reasonable question is what does uncontended actually mean.
I very much doubt an isp with 10,000 customers has 10TB of peering physically available. Linx public peering is less than half that for the entire UK, and while private peering will likely increase that, the suggest is it’s welll under tenfold, so the 50 million plus internet users in the UK only use at peak times 1M each, and that ignores all the non-domestic use.
Even a 100:1 contention ratio seems enough at a core level, so any isp spending money on improving on 10:1 ratios seems that they are just burning cash.
Clearly as you go the the edge contention ratio needs to drop - but 40G, or maybe even 20G uplink for 48x1G users would be reasonable to me.
Wow really interesting to see such high (assume Mbps) bandwidth guarantee for consumer service. Is the guarantee really work?
Because they can get away with it.
Why wouldn’t you want to pool bandwidth with your neighbors so you could all get faster speeds when you were using it instead of rate limiting everyone?
I can't sell you a pony made out of diamonds because that's impossible. Consequently, there is no legitimate reason for me to be advertising the sale of a diamond pony!
So, the defense of using a misnomer to name your service is because the service warranted is actually impossible to supply given the margins?
Call me a fool, but that still seems like a company that is getting away with lying to the vast majority of people that don't bother reading the asterisk ( like T-mobile style "Unlimited" plan that gives X amount unthrottled, and some arbitrarily low rate after).
Criminal issue? Of course not, that's why the companies present such things this way.
Dishonest? You bet.
It's gigabit speeds until all your neighbours suddenly want to download something too.
When Xtra came out at $2.50 per hour, it was a complete game changer.
It changed our internet browsing habits so much. With hourly charges, you would try to plan out what you would do before connecting and instead of reading webpages, you would save them to disk for reading later.
With unlimited, you could just sit there and browse. Or leave it on overnight to download files.
At some point we got a second phoneline and I was downloading torrents on dialup all day and night for years before we finally moved somewhere with ADSL in 2006.
Looking at pricing for Spark (one of the largerproviders). [1]
For each of the fibre speed plans you can get 60GB/month, for another $10 you get 120GB/month and for a further $10 you get unlimited traffic.
BTW: "Mb" = Megabits, "MB" = MegaBytes
[1] https://www.spark.co.nz/shop/internet/plans-and-pricing/
In addition, it gives people a solid measure over which to sue you. If you aren't delivering, you're headed to court.
The ISPs like all the vagueness.
I've used 15 TB in the last 5 weeks with my torrent client alone (and considering my Backblaze backup size, that's not nearly all of my traffic), but how many people like me are there in the general public?