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Comment by totalZero | Hacker News Reader

Imagine how good our network technology policy would be if the Senate weren't run by septagenarians and octogenarian.

I fear that data caps for home internet will become standard. There is no technological reason for these caps. For wireless, they could be defended by arguing that companies only get to use so much spectrum because of FCC laws. But the only limit for home internet is the ISP's willingness to deploy equipment and install cable/fiber runs. That's exactly what customers are paying them to do.

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I dunno there's a handful of millennial politicians in congress and they're hit-or-miss.

I would focus less on the age of the Senators and more on the fact that your median voter is 50 years old. And your median primary voter is 58 years old. They also consume significantly more television (and less Internet) than people under 40 (Millennials and Gen-Z).

There's only one senator under 40 and he's pretty supportive of an open internet.

AOC seems like she understands the massive reach and power of the internet...she chided Dems for under-spending on online ads and went after Zuckerberg for not deleting false content. She's not even a technologist and she "gets" technology more than many who have much more experience. Don't get me wrong, I'm not particularly in awe of her or anyone else in Congress...just clarifying that it does indeed seem that the young ones understand technology's impact on society far better than the old ones.

Most people under 65 in our rural area are dropping ATT u-verse ($200+ per month) and keeping only DSL + Roku + a few select channels because of cost. Cable television is too expensive.

Flatrate models usually means that a large majority of users actually covers the costs for a the minority high consumers. It is true that the marginal cost for more transmitted data is almost zero, but the overhead costs of running (and expanding) networks are certainly not. Cost has to be covered and you could very well argue that it makes sense that the large consumers pay more.

Besides maybe above the 98th percentile, data peering costs are very low that the physical infrastructure dominates the cost of service for residential users.

Since residential connects are over subscribed anyway, it is trivial to make users throttle during peak demand based on their current/historical usage.

If you use Cloudflare's costs and peering:transit ration from 2014 (which is almost certainly cheaper now); 1Mbps/month costs $8. [1]

1 Mbps/month is ~329GBytes. A 1TB data cap would be just ~3.1 Mbps/month costing $24.8.

I'd estimate that a last mile ISP could probably get an effective rate of half or less since connecting to end users/consumers is an advantage. And in a lot of cases, the same ISP offering residential service is also selling transit to other networks so in a way the data is already paid for by the time it reaches your local ISP.

[1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-relative-cost-of-bandwidth-a...

I checked Comcast's 10k report and their margin for the segment including broadband is over 40%, which is crazy but about what you would expect from a de facto monopoly. I don't think forcing them to invest in capex to benefit customers is asking so much when they are making those kinds of margins.

Those margins are misleading because they're _multi_ service operators, and accounting standards require that you can only list direct costs.

Revenue is easy: how much did you take in for video? phone? Internet access?

Costs are harder because you can only include business line direct costs. Since the cable plant is used by voice, video and data services it's not a direct cost of any of them. Same thing with the service vehicle fleet, call centers, etc. Most things get saddled in "administration" categories and obscure the true cost of providing the service. As a company overall, their margins been hovering around 8-12%.

That was margin derived from operating revenue, it includes SG&A for the entire division.

Do you have a source stating otherwise?

They report all of the services using the cable as a single segment of their business. Of course they are attributing operating costs to that segment.

Like 40% of the segment cost is "programming" (TV), so the internet part of the service likely has even better operating margin than the segment overall (basically, slightly higher revenue than TV with considerably lower costs).

Does the cost of running a network depend on network utilization? Does a network that is more heavily used require more maintenance?

Yes.

If the network is more heavily used, it will require more capacity where it connects to other parts of the network or other networks. More ports and more wires means more failures of ports and wires and more diagnosis of ports and wires and more replacement of ports and wires.

Or, if capacity is not increased to meet demand, you need more people at the callcenter to ignore customer complaints.

That sounds like a fixed cost to build the network, not the cost of running the network. I agree, building a higher capacity network is more expensive, but how does the cost of running a network change with utilization? If a network is underutilized does it somehow cost less to operate?

More capacity is more things to break and fix.

If it's underutilized, you can save money by delaying replacement.

Let's keep things simple and say in one interconnect you'e got 4x 10G ports. If your utilization peaks at 5 Gbps, you way overbuilt that connection, but if one port breaks, you don't need to fix it until another port breaks; you can wait until three out of four ports are broken if you feel lucky. That delays hardware replacement and eliminates service trips and probably reduces technician time. If that connection peaks at 35 Gbps, you should fix any issues ASAP. (And start planning for capacity increases).

Of course, if the connection is to another network, they may bill for usage too; although I'm pretty sure US dominant ISPs are not paying for usage on most of their connections.

When a link reaches 50% it's time to upgrade. Heavier utilization and faster traffic growth means shorter intervals between capital expenditures. $10 per 50GB is a monopoly windfall but it does theoretically hold down demand. People don't BitTorrent 24/7 or leave video chat running while they sleep if there's punitive overage fees.

Well just think about the backhaul or middle mile costs - the more the network is utilized, the higher the middle mile cost commitments will be. There’s a direct relationship there, assuming your oversubscription targets stay basically constant.

> Imagine how good our network technology policy would be if the Senate weren't run by septagenarians and octogenarian.

The ages of the senators proposing this are 76 (Joe Manchin), 76 (Angus King), 65 (Rob Portman), and 56 (Michael Bennet). 3 of the 4 are older than the median Senator age.

None of the 4 are in the youngest 25%.

Image how good our opinions of the Senate would be if we based them in facts.

The comment was about who runs the senate, not the proposers.

Of the individuals you named, only Manchin has any chairmanships.

Nearly every single bill in Congress is introduced by non-chairmen, so this is an odd misdirection. Bills in both the entire session and in each subcommittee are voted on by members.

And again, this demonstrates that mocking old people as somehow the problem is factually unsupportable by the facts.

Again, “runs the senate.”

The process of bringing a bill to vote in committee or in session is not nearly as democratic as you imagine.

To be fair, it is not the senators themselves who come up with policy proposals. Their staff do most of the leg work, and the staff I have personally met were all pretty young and seemed pretty comfortable with technology (in fairness, I was meeting them specifically to talk about a technology-related bill and they were probably chosen for their expertise).

As for data caps, those are basically unnecessary in a 5g world and were never necessary for wireline service. The necessary of caps prior to 5g is debatable. Data caps were always just an excuse for ISPs to charge more.

Are millennials any different? Outside tech, I don’t know anybody who cares about broadband as an aside, except when pushing a different political angle such as inequality.

My kids sure now what a high speed Internet connection is, and they're as far from "tech" as you could imagine. Ask any gamer too...

Yeah I think in many cases it’s taken for granted by the youngest generation. My youngest nephews have never known a time when you were unable to see live video of the person on the other end of a phone call. My cell phone (on cell net) just clocked 82/7Mbps. I still remember getting my first cable modem at a whopping 1Mbps nominal dl. XD

I genuinely wonder about the effects of later generations growing up in these conditions. It feels ripe for learned helplessness. "Well it's just always been bad" is a common, if ineffective response.

People who have terrible internet care quite a bit, especially if they use it a lot. Many, many people I know living in rural areas of the US get 3-6mbps max. The only hardwired option is DSL, since cable companies often don’t service these areas. Everyone who uses internet a lot for things like streaming is very frustrated by the situation, and that’s often younger generations.

Data caps should be simply illegal on anti-trust grounds for incumbent ISPs most which also own video / TV businesses. You don't even need to invent any new laws for that, just make competition law actually functional and not toothless.

This statement could be made about a lot of things:

> Imagine how good [most policies] would be if the Senate weren't run by septagenarians and octogenarian.

There is one reason for some caps, which is that you'll always get oversubscription in the cities, and the caps could reflect that to prevent 100% utilisation. They don't have to be so small that people actually think about them. Basically set it at 1TB for residential for the lowest plan and forget about it.

I don't think you realize how fast 1tb of data goes when you have a family of 5 all doing zoom calls and remote learning all day, then streaming video (youtube, live tv, netflix) at night.

1TB goes by shockingly fast with 4k video streaming (5-10 gigs per hour) and game updates that weight in at tens of gigs each.

That's why I mentioned lowest plan. Sure, bump it up for higher levels. But if you want 100h of 4k content a month... just pay for the higher quality to subsidize network development which can handle it?

This is totally out of the minimum requirement area.

The 4K content is probably coming from a rack in the local ISP's DC or nearby colo in a peering agreement with the video streaming operator, and barely costing the ISP anything.

The place where ISPs skimp is between the home and the DC where the monopoly is.

I downloaded a MS Flight Sim 2020 update yesterday and it was north of 100gb lol.

Yep. I used like 2TB last month. And that‘s with 2 people in the household. Granted, I‘m certainly a fringe user. But with 4K streaming, YouTube/Twitch, PS5 downloads, Steam, server stuff, usenet, video conferencing, WFM, etc. it kind of stacks up.

I‘m so glad I have a local fiber provider.

> if the Senate weren't run by septagenarians and octogenarian.

Dude that would be such a nightmare-world. Imagine life without techno remixes of Senator Ted Stevens. Teh horror!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8XSo0etBC4

Tubular

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