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Comment by Naac | Hacker News Reader

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!

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> 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.

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.

>> 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?

> 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.

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.

>> 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.

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.

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