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Comment by ocdtrekkie | Hacker News Reader

Nobody was ever doing that. The image in question was a crafted example of what someone imagines is possible.

Data caps aren't necessary from a technical sense, no. But net neutrality supporters remain stubbornly ignorant of what they actually do: They raise prices for heavy users, rather than raising prices for everyone else. It's simply a fairer method of offering pricing brackets.

Artificially limiting network speed is intentional crippling of service. Rather than pay for "very slow service", "slow service", or "fast service", providers should give everyone the best possible service their network is capable of... and then charge us for how heavily you use it.

Basically, by fighting data caps, you're demanding that a grandma who only checks their email once a day has to pay as much as a family of four who streams Netflix in 4K every waking hour of the day.

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> Nobody was ever doing that.

It's immaterial to me whether ISPs had gotten around to creating their a-la-carte packages yet. I want it to be impossible for them to do so. Why leave the option open?

> Basically, by fighting data caps, you're demanding that a grandma who only checks their email once a day has to pay as much as a family of four who streams Netflix in 4K every waking hour of the day.

You do realize that ISPs already tier their offerings in such a way that this is a non-issue? Grandma would buy the 10Mbit/s package, the family would buy the 1Gig/s. I have no issue with that sort of tiered pricing. That's a perfectly fine division to make. But, slapping arbitrary data xfer caps on top of that is dirty double-dipping.

Exactly. It's double dipping to charge for the rate of flow and the amount. We don't do that for water.

The only reason the major ISPs want this is because the old content providers are desperate to maintain their positions in the market. They think they can squeeze out competitors by joining forces with the biggest ISPs [1] and implementing zero rating and data caps. That way no one will be able to compete with them. You won't want to pay for your overages on the next Netflix when the current one has a free-pass arrangement with your regional-monopoly broadband ISP.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acquisition_of_NBC_Universal_b...

> It's double dipping to charge for the rate of flow and the amount. We don't do that for water.

Well we do. A commercial user with a 3 inch water line pays more for the basic service than a house with a 3/4 inch line. And they both pay for gallons used.

Wouldn't that mean the 3-inch water line cost more to setup? You'd probably need to add bigger piping over the standard sized pipe.

The cost to setup broadband far exceeds the cost for varying amounts. If you use 1 TB and I use 1 GB, the cost to the ISP is basically the same. We already pay different amounts from tiers defined by the speeds we chose.

But you don't pay disproportionally more for your shower than your sink, which I'd argue is the point of network neutrality.

You shouldn’t preemptively set broad regulations based on some hypothetical boogeyman scenario because regulations have unintended consequences.

It’s entirely possible that there is a non-neutral ISP service that would benefit customers. Allowing Netflix to co-locate for free is one example. T-Mobile’s voluntary video slow down in exchange for zero rating is another.

It’s unreasonable to ban business models because it’s hypothetically possible AT&T would ban 99% of the Internet.

Indeed. In my case, I'd love to have some super cheap wireless service that can't access streaming video for some of my IoT devices. Larger manufacturers can negotiate contracts for this sort of thing, but for an individual, it's only really possible if I can get a really restrictive plan.

Your scenario is already covered by different speed tiers.

We're talking about total amount downloaded, not bandwidth. The amount of electricity ( read: cost ) used by Comcast is not affected whether I download frequently or infrequently. The reason it is affected, is because they oversubscribe their customers, so when everyone downloads at the same time it causes a bottleneck.

If I'm leased a 1 gigabit pipe, I want to be able to use the entire gigabit pipe for as long as I want. Limiting this with data caps is at best misleading to customers and at worse a scummy business practice.

And while we're here, lets do some math. An unmetered gigabit pipe downloading at the theoretical limit gives you 328.5 Terabytes of data in 1 month. Under Comcast's 1.2 Terabytes per month rule, that gigabit pipe you're leasing is equivalent to downloading 24/7, on a 4 megabit pipe!

Really should be billed on a combination of peak utilization and total consumption.

Having the ability to download at 1Gibps for a few minutes a day is a lot less strain than downloading 24x7 at 1Gibps.

Such complex billing models are pretty common with electrical utilities. With many industrial consumers even installing Flywheels to reduce their utilization spikes.

IP transit in data centers etc is often a combination of a base rate + extra fees based on the 95% percentile (if that value is over the base rate). E.g. you might buy a 500Mb/s base rate over a 1 Gb/s link, and then end up with a 95% percentile value of 600Mb/s at the end of the month, so you pay an extra fee for the 100Mbit difference. Whereas if you use the link fully for 2 % of the time, but then stay under the base rate the rest of month, you only pay the base price.

I imagine that model would work really well for a lot of data usage too: Downloading updates for applications and games could be scheduled for off-peak times, and users might even be incentivized to pre-cache streaming content they want to watch during primetime hours if they can save by doing so.

>> Really should be billed on a combination of peak utilization and total consumption.

Why?

>> Having the ability to download at 1Gibps for a few minutes a day is a lot less strain than downloading 24x7 at 1Gibps

It's not a strain on the hardware, its that the ISPs have to give you a dedicated pipe, which is what they're already selling.

>> Such complex billing models are pretty common with electrical utilities

That's false. For example, you do not get billed by how large your water pipe is, only how much water you use.

> If I'm leased a 1 gigabit pipe, I want to be able to use the entire gigabit pipe for as long as I want. Limiting this with data caps is at best misleading to customers and at worse a scummy business practice.

You must understand that they can only sell you a 1gig pipe because they know not everyone will use it at the same time.

EVERY ISP in the world operates by oversubscribing their capacity. EVERY. ONE.

You want 1gig and removed data caps by law? Ok, get ready to be introduced to “boosted” bandwidth. You’ll get 1gig for the first 30 seconds of a connection then they will throttle you back. Already exists in some places including mine.

Okay? So they have to actually provide what they advertise, and holding them to it means they have to be honest up front. That doesn't strike me as a bad thing.

I don’t think you’re getting it.

I’m telling you that literally not one ISP out there can actually provide the service to all customers that they are advertising concurrently.

Every. One. Over. Subscribes.

Your wish to not only not make that so. But also to increase the rating per customer is beyond unrealistic. You aren’t asking for a 10-20% bump, you’re asking for 150-170%. The economic model is not there, no one will pay it for what will appear to them to be a 10-20% bump or the same thing they have now but cap-less.

>> Every. One. Over. Subscribes.

The post you're referring to is getting it. As per their reply:

"So they have to actually provide what they advertise"

Do you think they do that to be jerks?

It makes sense. Financial, practical, environmental. They aren’t going to stop it, because it’s literally the right thing to do.

If you think you are being charged too much for too little now, what do you think would happen if the ISP had to guarantee you bandwidth they know will never fully saturate?

I admit I may have phrased that poorly. My intended point was that I object to them lying about their service. I'm perfectly happy for the end result to be that they admit the real level of service they can provide and don't actually alter their offerings at all.

> If I'm leased a 1 gigabit pipe, I want to be able to use the entire gigabit pipe for as long as I want

A guaranteed not-oversubscribed connection would be a terrible consumer product.

And there is a reason for that -- it costs about the same to provide that service.

Nearly the entire cost of operating an ISP is getting the wires on the pole, keeping them there against weather and drunk drivers, answering customer support phones, paying for staff and buildings and electricity etc. None of which costs any less for the person who uses 1/1000th as much data.

Charging the amount actually attributable to additional data usage would cause the difference to be so small that basically everybody would just pick the unlimited plan so they don't have to worry about it. But they don't charge the actual cost, they charge more. Because the point is to suppress usage of Netflix et al (the main reason nearly anyone would exceed the cap) in favor of cable TV and zero-rated partners.

Until that infrastructure no longer handles the demand and they have to build out again. So no, bandwidth isn’t free

There is no "build out again" -- they use the same wires, which was the expensive part. They just replace the cards in the box. The upgrade itself is a tiny fraction of their costs.

It's also something you benefit from regardless of how much data you use, because when they go from DOCSIS 2.0 to DOCSIS 3.0 you get 1000Mbps downloads instead of 40Mbps whether you're downloading 40GB or 40TB.

> There is no "build out again" -- they use the same wires, which was the expensive part

Who told you that? ISPs run new fiber all the time.

The bandwidth of fiber is astronomical. Once you have it somewhere, that's pretty much it.

They'll install it in places where it isn't, but that's a one-time cost, not a recurring upgrade cost. Amortized over the "indefinitely" that it will then be sufficient for, it's still negligible.

> The bandwidth of fiber is astronomical.

The bandwidth of a multi mode line is high. The bandwidth of the modems, switches, routers and data centers is much more finite.

You don’t really seem to understand the concurrency of transmissions, redundancy, and how much copper there still is. ISPs are adding fiber all the time.

> The bandwidth of the modems, switches, routers and data centers is much more finite.

Those are all the things they can upgrade without expensively replacing the wire on the pole.

The dominant cost of an ISP is not replacing their switches every five years. That often saves them money when newer equipment uses less power per unit data. And is typically necessary regardless because the older equipment falls out of support.

> Nobody was ever doing that. The image in question was a crafted example of what someone imagines is possible.

This is precisely how it works in many countries without net neutrality. Here's a classical example: https://twitter.com/RoKhanna/status/923701871092441088/

That's Portugal, a country with Net Neutrality.

So, no it's not. Side note, Ro Khanna has been paid an obscene amount of money by Google. He claims "No PAC $$" on his profile, but Google is his top donor, and Google's top law firm is his second top donor: https://www.opensecrets.org/races/contributors?cycle=2020&id... He is basically a paid advocate for Google's political positions, not the public interest.

The service pictured in that screenshot solely is offering zero-rating packages on top of an existing metered data package. Additionally, this is for a mobile carrier, not a home ISP. And finally, Portugal has net neutrality!

Snopes fact checked this claim as "mostly false": https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/portugal-net-neutrality/

> Nobody was ever doing that.

Zero-rating + data caps means you're paying more for some websites than others. Comcast/XFinity gives you unmetered "free" access to NBC, for example, while charging you for overages caused by your Netflix traffic.

In an ideal world, all of our clients would use RFC 2474 DSCP values to mark the QoS/Traffic Class IP header fields in order to voluntarily participate in traffic shaping prioritization with ISPs. Exceed your monthly quota at high priority, and all of your traffic gets dropped to base priority.

Though, realistically, nobody is properly incentivized to make use of QoS/ToS (except internally to some networks), because ISPs aren't incentivized to implement anything until application developers label traffic, and consumers won't pressure application developers to implement anything until ISPs provide incentives to consumers.

Also, OS/API support isn't great at present, and application developers in most cases would just always label traffic as high priority. At least for phone apps, tagging traffic as high priority could be a an app permission that could be flagged/denied to the app at installation time (or later granted/revoked).

Yes, that is what we are demanding. And it's fine.

What you are referring to is "the freerider problem", like you, for example, have with public transportation or any publicly available good or service.

From the experience that public services in Europe had, it is fine to tolerate some amount of freeriders, since it makes most services run leaner and more efficient.

> But net neutrality supporters remain stubbornly ignorant of what they actually do: They raise prices for heavy users, rather than raising prices for everyone else. It's simply a fairer method of offering pricing brackets.

Ridiculous.

Bandwidth is no different than electricity. Hell, it mostly is electricity.

Meter it by the megabyte and let the customer decide. A flat connection fee per month just like your electrical service, and then you pay for whatever you use. If you stream from the time you get up until the time you go to bed, you'll pay for it. If you stream three movies a week, you'll pay for that.

I'd be totally on board with a flat connection fee per month plus by-the-megabyte metering. I've advocated for it many times before.

But in lieu of that, charging a 600 MB a month user one fee, and a 1.4 TB a month user a higher fee seems entirely legitimate to me.

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