Verizon still does it, except for in California.
I'm not sure if they still do this zero rating or not now that they no longer own the TV service.
Net neutrality as a policy concept was first specifically named in 2003, in direct response to actions beginning to occur at the time, and the FCC chair at the time adopted four network freedom principles that are the core of net neutrality as guiding principles (at the time for case-by-case action without general regulation) in 2004; the first action in which they were put into practice was 2005.
The regulatory debate kicked off in earnest in 2010 when the FCC lost a court case over its non-regulatory application of the principles against Comcast’s BitTorrent blocking.
I had some Nest cameras in addition to Streaming and ended up taking them down because I kept going over.
As inconvenient as it is, honestly I think data caps are fair pricing. The load difference between a light internet user and a heavy user is orders of magnitude of capacity for the ISP to deal with. Having a flat price for internet sounds similar to having flat price for electricity or water - where your grandma (who turns off all the light switches whenever she leaves a room) would pay the same for electricity as a frat house mining bitcoin in the cupboard.
Sure, customers pay for speed. But residential internet is overprovisioned based on 'reasonable' usage patterns. Thats a good thing - internet would be much more expensive, or forced to be much slower otherwise.
The difference is that to provide you with more electricity, the power company has to burn more natural gas, and pay more for that. When a data network is at less than 100% capacity, higher usage doesn't cost anything, the extra capacity is just lost. So to begin with, data caps that count traffic during off-peak hours are a pure scam; there is no reason for anyone to conserve bandwidth then.
Then you have the on-peak hours. Now, there are different ways to handle this. One is to set pricing that will deter usage, the other is to share the capacity. So you have a 1Gbps fiber connection but the uplink is oversubscribed and during peak hours you each get 800Mbps. People generally prefer this to paying more.
But some people want to have the 1Gbps per second all the time, so they should prefer metered billing, right? Still no. What you have instead is business service. If you want to be sure you have 1Gbps all the time, you pay a higher monthly fee and then get a higher class of service so that you do. Now the lower cost connection gets 1Gbps for 80% of the day and 500Mbps during peak hours -- which is a completely reasonable trade off for your grandma because she gets to save money and 500Mbps is still plenty enough. Whereas if you have some important need to always have the full speed, you can pay more and get it.
There is never any reason to meter it, and some pretty good reasons not to. It screws the people who actually need the guarantee if the metered pricing is ever insufficient to keep the network below 100% capacity. It also makes inefficient use of available capacity, because then you need to keep the network below 100% capacity, but that results in wasted capacity. And, of course, it creates a perverse incentive for the ISP when they can exempt their own services from the cap.
Though sometimes they do. Do you think the unmetered connection a data center buys is oversubscribed by their ISP? They pay for it not to be, and then they use the full capacity. It's still not metered.
Data caps are not fair pricing in a competitive environment but it seems that way when you have a duopoly of competition that collude on plans, pricing, and messaging.
PS: I live in a built-up suburb in a large metro area where the cities are all touching, not in the sticks.
So Sonic bundles in a voice line that no one uses - but that gives Sonic the right to get onto poles (owned by incumbents) at fair prices, and they can complain to the state and feds if they don't get that.
If we'd gotten classification right from the start (looking at you Michael Powell), that kind of chicanery would be unneccessary.
Still I'm paying $75 a month, fees and taxes included, for a 10Gbps symmetrical connection with no data cap. Happiest I've ever been with a broadband connection.
Voice Federal Subscriber Line Charge Fee - STI-0555086-8/PAIR200 6.50 Voice Federal Universal Service Fund Fee - STI-0555086-8/PAIR200 2.62 Voice California 911 Emergency Surcharge - STI-0555086-8/PAIR200 0.30 Voice Oakland Utility Users Tax - STI-0555086-8/PAIR200 1.46 Voice California Public Utility Commission User Fee - STI-0555086-8/PAIR200 0.08 Voice FCC Interstate Telecom Service Provider Fee - STI-0555086-8/PAIR200 0.04 Property Tax Allotment Surcharge - STI-0555086-8/PAIR200 1.64 Voice Regulatory Recovery Surcharge - STI-0555086-8/PAIR200 1.29 Fiber Phone Service - 5103800838 - STI-0555086-8/PAIR200 0.00 Fiber - Fusion 10Gbps - STI-0555086-8 59.99 Fiber Information - STI-0555086-8 - Data $49.99 Voice $10.00 0.00 Voice California 988 Suicide Prevention Surcharge - STI-0555086-8/PAIR200 0.08 Voice California Public Purpose Program Surcharge - STI-0555086-8/PAIR200 1.11
You can certainly say using 100% of that is excessive and not many disagree.
The question is what is excessive? 50%? 10%? For me it is 0.4% without up charges.
Additionally on the topic of costs bandwidth is by definition free. Pretty much everybody is okay with $0/gb pricing for network traffic.
Capacity costs money. How much capacity does an excessive data user consume? Certainly not 10x as you surmise, they are only one user.
Just look at their pricing for the answer, I can pay 50% more for unlimited data which means it costs them at most 50% more (certainly less since this is a scheme to earn more revenue).
On the topic of provisioning residential is hugely under provisioned as a cost cutting measure. This isn't all bad as there is never a time where everyone wants all their bandwidth. But blaming slow downs on high bandwidth users is silly when no one bothers to track capacity in these situations.
The reality is they just throttle you to keep bandwidth evenly split during high traffic time (as they should, everyone should share the bottlenecked line equally). Which resolved any capacity problems as much as they care to.
Bandwidth caps have always been a charge that isn't technically a charge and nothing more.
If it does not affect other customers, and if it does not exceed the ISPs peering agreements such that they must spend extra to serve that bandwidth beyond what would pay normally...
Then how is it "excessive"? But even if it was, then the ISPs are ethically obligated to publish what they consider to be excessive so that its customers can avoid any penalties and/or animosity. Network bandwidth is by its very nature a commodity whose demand will only increase into the future, after all, and some people are "getting there first". They shouldn't be chastised as troublemakers or gluttonous or whatever.
The user who uses 10 000x the bandwidth should pay more than the person using 10kx less bandwidth. Not proportionally more - a lot of the cost of connection is fixed. But some of it isn’t. The ISP at some point needs to upgrade their network links to handle the extra bandwidth going through their network. And I think it’s reasonable the person who’s using all that bandwidth pay more for the upgrade than people who aren’t using the bandwidth.
The nice thing about having a financial model around bandwidth is we don’t need judgemental words like “excessive” and “gluttonous”. You just pay for what you need. Simple as that.
Peering costs are effectively zero and so your costs are hardware to peer and bandwidth to the site. They already split bandwidth so we will consider that unimportant for this discussion.
You have a 10 Gb connection to a peer and that connection costs around $10k and lasts 5 years give or take.
So given a per year rate of $2k and 10% maximum utilization the entire bandwidth cost is ~$200/year.
Since that is 4.6 Petabytes that means it costs 4 cents per Terabyte of bandwidth.
Sure I could be off by a bit but an order of magnitude puts it at 40 cents per Terabyte.
Now let's compare Cox's price of $10/50 GB or $200 per Terabyte.
Even inflating the costs by 10x you are looking at 99.8% profit margin on bandwidth fees.
Subscription fees should be set to cover the costs of bandwidth. Right now ISPs want to advertise unlimited service for a certain (already excessive) price and then complain when users actually use the service they're paying for as advertised. They've changed their ads many times over the years as a result of being called out for their word games (see for example https://consumerist.com/2010/03/02/comcast-unlimited-usage-d...)
If the ISP has a reasonably capable network the few users who are using tons of bandwidth will be more than made up for by the majority of users who barely use the service at all (the check email/weather/facebook/sports scores crowd)
If radio spectrum is so scarce, how are Mobile and Verizon selling unlimited 5g home internet service?
That's an ideal example of the limitation. A single tower with a wide range can't handle the same volume of devices in the area. So by using 5G it's just closer and closer to home, with fewer people using it at each point.
No question that it solves the last mile problem for these companies though. It's a lot easier to run fiber to an access point at the edge of your neighborhood than it is to run it to every house in that neighborhood.
I'm somewhat dubious on the idea that their Cricket More plan is actually unlimited, but I'm pressed for time and can't read their more dense terms of service around the plan, but I'm assuming they have a congestion clause buried in there, despite what the linked FAQ claims
[0]: https://www.cricketwireless.com/legal-info/mobile-broadband-...
It works with video because all video sites automatically adjust quality based on throughput so they just figure out when you’re streaming video and then throttle. But most websites don’t automatically change image quality based on throughput and pages load more quickly and are harder to shape…
>Cricket compresses all images that are embedded in web pages in either of two industry standard formats (JPEG and GIF), regardless of the source or content of the web page or the application used to view it. Cricket strives to compress web page images to provide a high quality user experience where the average consumer should not notice a difference between the source image and the compressed image.
https://www.reddit.com/r/NoContract/comments/tn4733/qci_leve...
https://utilitiesone.com/comparing-mobile-virtual-network-op...
If a music streaming service participates to label its traffic, that data is zero rated for eligible users.
If a video streaming service participates to label its traffic and limit bandwidth (advertising says 480p, but I think it's really a bitrate cap), then data is zero rated for eligible users. On plans with a high speed data cap, users can opt out of the bandwidth limiting and get potentially higher quality streaming (depending on network conditions) but the data usage will be charged against the cap.
There's no charge for providers to participate.
I don't know how zero-rating music streaming helps with spectrum; that's probably more of an inducement to use data, but music streaming is low bandwidth, and maybe there's some magic to accumulate those packets and send as a batch rather than one at a time and therefore save some framing bandwidth.
For video it's clearly a bandwidth thing. If you can reduce to the target, that's good for their spectrum management, so you get a carrot. Also, it encourages bandwidth sensitive streaming (which many services were already doing), so that if the conditions are poor for a particular user/cell, video bandwidth will be responsive and reduce automatically.
There's a benefit to the video providers, the carrier, and users, if this is done in a reasonable way. And I think T-Mobile's approach is the most reasonable way I've seen (at least from what's been said publicly)
"If you are a streaming service provider click here[1], send us an email and we'll get back to you to begin the process. T-Mobile will review all submissions to ensure identification of video stream and technical requirements, including optimization for mobile viewing."
They do have a requirement that "Only lawful and licensed video content is eligible for the offering" And that you be capable of making the stream identifiable as video content and do adaptive bitrate streaming (target of 1.5 Mbps)
The only public documentation for service providers I found was in the consumer faq [2] under "I’m a streaming service provider – how do I learn more?"
It's quite probable that they won't engage with a home media server, because you're operating under fair use rather than an explicit license, or because there's too many individual home media servers and some home media servers serve media that's unlicensed and also not within the scope of fair user. But it doesn't hurt to ask and see what you get back.
Alternately, a paper from 2016 [3], suggests you could make your content available in a form that appears to be one of the supported services, and likely get mischaracterized as that service and have your data zero-rated as a result. Not sure if anyone is still running video over http in 2016, but it's worth a try. It should be apparent if it works, as when it does, T-Mobile will limit streaming bandwidth to 1.5 Mbps.
[1] bingeon@t-mobile.com
Fewer cell towers per user is surely cheaper assuming each user is consuming the same amount of content.
I'm limited to standard definition streaming, yet can stream 1080p just fine on mobile data.
If it's technically feasible not to limit the bandwidth for some services, it's technically feasible to at least reduce the throttling for everyone.
2) We're not in the NN system as it was repealed so the implicit idea in your post that the current system is from NN is false.
3) We wouldn't need NN though if we actually had anti-trust enforcement; zero-rating is a monopolistic practice. It's akin to having preferential treatment on rail lines so consumers can't get other's goods as easily.
well i guess everybody is entitled to their own opinion but i personally prefer the one that lets me use more data even though ideally i would be able to use more data for any online service and not just some of them.
>We're not in the NN system as it was repealed so the implicit idea in your post that the current system is from NN is false.
I definitely did not say the "current system" is from NN, and neither did the OP i was replying to.
"pre-NN" system is having a datacap where any additional bandwidth usage beyond that datacap is throttled or outright denied.
"current system" is having a datacap but certain services are not counted towards that datacap, and all other services are throttled or outright denied once the datacap is exceeded.
>We wouldn't need NN though if we actually had anti-trust enforcement; zero-rating is a monopolistic practice. It's akin to having preferential treatment on rail lines so consumers can't get other's goods as easily.
rail lines are not equivalent to ISP zero-rating.
Datacaps are a policy adopted by ISPs of treating bandwidth as a consumable resource when it is in fact not a consumable resource. Datacaps are idiotic and arbitrary[1] but they predate the FCC's decision to repeal net neutrality by at least half a decade.
Offering an exception to a datacap for a given service would be akin to the train being able to carry additional cargo beyond its capacity with no increased fuel consumption or inertia but only for a specific class of cargo.
[1] if ISPs actually cared about their stated goal of reducing network congestion then they would weight traffic based on overall network congestion so that consumers are incentivized to download more data during non-peak hours but i digress.
The alternative is that everyone has data caps
> Bandwidth is finite and if you have a little more money, you should be able to pay for it.
That's fine, but there's a difference between paying for bandwidth and having different rates for bandwidth depending on the destination.
Misinformation.
Under all previously proposed NN rules, throttling is always allowed for network congestion and mobile actually does have a legitimate network congestion issue.
I personally would rather T-Mobile make a promise about the speeds for the first 25GB rather than say "UNLIMITED*" and make that asterisk any time they feel like it.
Likewise, they could always make allow-lists in throttling, they just couldn't make block-lists.
Nothing in your example would be better under NN rules as actually defined.
> Streaming Spotify and Apple Music won't count against that soft data cap. Streaming other music services will count against it. Video streaming over YouTube, Netflix, etc is capped at 480p levels. If you pay an additional monthly fee, you get upgraded to "Unlimited Plus" which will increase your soft cap to 40GB a month and your video streaming quality to 1080p. It'll also bundle in Netflix's basic level and give you 6 months of Apple+ for "free".
What they are saying is, even in times of low/no congestion, select services are not being counted against a consumer's data cap.
Data isn't being treated as just data.
> The anti-discrimination rule applied only to fixed broadband. Id. According to the Commission, mobile broadband warranted different treatment because, among other things, “the mobile ecosystem is experiencing very rapid innovation and change,”
I have to agree with the other posts. The disaster scenarios we were told would happen didn't happen. Now people are pointing to things completely unconnected to the repeal of net neutrality as evidence that it caused problems.
I uncritically trusted the claims of activists when the debate first started, but in the years since I've begun to feel foolish for doing so. It seems clear a lot of them are peddling misinformation. This whole thing has lead me to question some of the extreme doomsday scenarios people are pushing in other areas as well.
[1] https://www.cadc.uscourts.gov/internet/opinions.nsf/3F95E491...
Exempting services from data caps is not against net neutrality, and for example has been regular practice all across Europe (which has "net neutrality").
Isn't it just shifting the goal posts after the original claims of NN campaigners were discredited and never materialized in any remote fashion after NN was abolished?
Let us not forget that net neutrality campaigning was primarily pushed by Netflix, who refused to pay Verizon for infrastructure upgrades as per industry standard going back decades.
The standard is that the disproportionate data user pays to upgrade the ports, equipment and/or line infrastructure. This is absolutely fair. A parallel is electricity capacity for homes and businesses, if you require more electricity than the local street infrastructure can provide you pay the power company to upgrade it to accommodate you. Only fair, the heavy users pay.
The movement carried water for deadbeat corpos. Netflix wanted to saturate internet links and balked at paying Verizon for new switches and pipes -- so they got their subscribers to complain.
What, in your perspective, is the difference between "I'll charge you more for A than for B" and "I'll charge you less for B than A"? Or a difference between "Charging more for a 'website' such as Yahoo" vs "Charging less for a 'service' such as Netflix"?
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Further, all the utility analogies you provide feel inapplicable to the point of being disingenuous. The "Heavy users pay" is "I need a bigger pipe" and is the segregation of internet service tiers by bandwidth ($10 for 100mbps, $100 for 1gps, or whatever). The "I will then, on top of that, charge you extra for arbitrary content that I don't produce, and you will have no choice as I have an effective government approved monopoly", has limited parallel that I'm aware of.
A person using more electricity will pay more. A person needing more bandwidth will pay more. Those are valid analogies in my mind. Other shenanigans such as IPSs blocking certain websites, injecting ads or weird stuff into your pages, asking more money for certain websites (or less money for other, which is equivalent), imposing their own DNS, spying on you, etc, are fairly unique to this industry I think.
It has limited parallel because it's nuts. It'd be like BMW/Toyota/whoever charging you an extra monthly fee if you want to drive your car to work and otherwise the car just refuses to go there. For a slightly closer analogy, the car would be leased rather than owned, but it's an extra clause in addition to the mileage limit.
UPS doesn't care if it is a Nike shirt or a Gucci shirt in a box, They just deliver the box where it is meant to go. Why should it be any different for an ISP?
While I like NN there is a strict different between an ISP and UPS because of the digital/physical realm.
When UPS delivers a Nike shirt they have to deliver that specific shirt to that specific person. An ISP needent deliver a specific shirt that originated from Nike Factory to that specific person; they can give a "locally" stored copied of the shirt. This means that the ISP could locally store say the top 4 million songs and so the expense of delivering those songs is practically zero while transporting a song from LA to NYC covers significantly more miles of fiber.
An ISP that wishes to store a "local copy" of t-shirts or songs, in order to make more money, can store a Nike t-shirt just as easily as a Gucci t-shirt, and can store a Nikki Minaj song just as easily as a Gucci Mane song. Thus, nothing actually blocks the ISP from treating the two equally.
Alternatively, the ISP can store nothing, and just be a basic ISP. Nobody is forcing them to store anything, much less do so preferentially depending on brand. And if they personally choose to, to make more money, it's their responsibility to make sure they don't differentiate between brands, because that violates net neutrality.
So, opt-in versus required. Net neutrality certainly allows special pipes and protocols to be set up where desired, if you desire to stretch the analogy beyond its intent.
If you can make a reasonable argument that one kind of data or another creates a meaningful hazard for the pipe that carries it, please do.
UPS does not care what what they're carrying unless it shits or explodes. Anything meeting most of your criteria, they simply will not ship in the first place. Net neutrality specifically mitigates rent-seeking behavior, implying if UPS knew there was something expensive in the box, they'd shake you down for more money to ship it. The only time they do this is in handling hazmat.
They sort of do this in reverse though when it comes to damage claims. They'll first try to find a reason not to pay out, but once they know what's in the box, they angle to reimburse you the least possible amount of money for it. I can't tell you how many times we would lose/destroy priceless stuff like a signed baseball from some World Series and write a check...for the $3 it cost to buy a new baseball (TBF, especially with prototypes/historical artifacts, many such claims are dog-ate-my-homework fraudulent).
Here's an actual case: a container ship carrying designer leather products from Italy took on water and a claim was made for $100k worth of retail losses. We were never going to pay that, since there's no guaranteeing any amount of it would have sold at that price, and anybody that makes money from loss is either profiteering or committing fraud (see: coffin ship). The most we would have paid out was at the price the factory sold it to the designer for ($2-$10 per diem), but IIRC we denied it since no damage was reported along the way. They didn't insure anything, on paper $100k worth of product was lost, and they didn't give a shit-- in reality they lost $2k in drop-shipped crap stamped with an expensive logo. Designer goods are inherently worthless.
Excluding some services from bandwidth cap is perhaps slightly less extreme than throttling specific services, which is itself less extreme than blocking those services outright. All are violations of net neutrality. The job of the ISP is to provide network connectivity, not decide how I use it.
They do that.
If your plan has, say, a 1 TB cap with no services that are exempt from the data cap you can pick any 1 TB from any mix of services you want without hitting your cap.
If your plan has 1 TB cap but say Netflix is exempt from the cap you can still pick the exact same 1 TB from the exact same mix of services without hitting your cap.
If my ISP gives me 10GB from any service that isn't big_video_streamer but unlimited data from big_video_streamer it's immediately obvious that while they're not 'deciding' how I use their connectivity they're definitely 'coercing' me into going with big_video_streamer if I want to stream videos, which isn't their job as - ideally - a neutral conduit for traffic.
That's obviously and blatantly them putting their thumb on the scale. It'd be like if Burger King were to pay car manufacturers to make it so that the second half of the gas tank only works for driving to Burger King drive-throughs. That's not how cars should work and ISPs shouldn't pull the same kind of shit.
You said that "The job of the ISP is to provide network connectivity, not decide how I use it".
My point is that if you have paid for a fixed amount of data per month, and you are going to use under that amount when you decide entirely on your own how to use it, then whether or not the ISP also gives you some free data with usage restrictions doesn't change that.
If your ISP does not have any exemptions and then adds some and you miss the announcement you would never even notice, except maybe if you track your usage throughout the month to make sure you aren't going to go over and you notice they are reporting lower usage than you expect.
Yes, it is putting a thumb on the scale, but I don't see how this is really different than any of the other ways companies often give free access to third party products to try to make the company more attractive to customers.
That may be anticompetitive, but if so it should be dealt with under antitrust. Network neutrality should just cover things that restrict what you can do with the network.
...but with inducement to use a particular service.
>Network neutrality should just cover things that restrict what you can do with the network.
But that's what this is. It's restricting every kind of traffic except Netflix. All other traffic is limited to a monthly quota.
Exempting your own and partner services from a data cap that effectively limits use of other services is functionally the same thing, but with only one package available that is mandatory for purchase.
> Exempting services from data caps is not against net neutrality,
IIRC, it would have on generally violated the most recent set of US net neutrality regulations and violates the broad principles articulated for net neutrality, whether or not it violates specific regulatory franeworks existing in Europe.
It's also largely outlawed in Canada, the EU, and California.
Why should Verizon, Comcast and others demand payment from Netflix?
They are connecting customers to the internet, and should be peered to IXs that can feed what their customers need. Netflix even offers to put caches on the ISPs network to lighten the burden on their IX uplink.
It will get untenable if every random ISP charges each content provider.
Netflix should have either demanded their middleman pay, moved to a different middleman, or offered to sign an agreement with the companies directly.
Let's put it another way. Let's say Netflix's bandwidth middleman hosts both Netflix and a critical telehealth operator. Should Verizon shake down or throttle the telehealth service, potentially putting health at risk, in order to prop up entertainment content streams for a deadbeat company? Of course only Netflix gets throttled, they're degrading the rest of the internet and not paying for upgrades.
Netflix being able to degrade the internet for other services traversing the same lines while refusing to pay (again, industry standard) is greed.
>Netflix even offers to put caches on the ISPs network
We don't want to pay, but give us free rack space to solve this problem?
But if Netflix connects directly to Verizon, Comcast, etc, it's not inheriently unreasonable for Netflix to pay for that connection. Verizon, Comcast and many other telcos and cablecos are national transit ISPs as well as residential ISPs, and paying a transit ISP to get packets to the ISP's customers (and peers) is totally normal.
If Netflix connects to Comcast in Los Angeles and wants to deliver traffic to Comcast customers in New York, they're using Comcast as a transit network. If Netflix connects to Comcast in Los Angeles and wants to deliver traffic to Comcast customers in Los Angeles, they're not, and getting the traffic between their house and the IX in Los Angeles is what Comcast is charging their own customers for.
Do you or your customer get a discount when you're both only connected with a transit ISP? No, both parties pay for connection to the transit ISP (even if it's the same).
Traditional wired telephone networks are almost always caller pays (although cellphones in the US are caller pays toll, callee pays for wireless segment), but IP networking has always been both end points pay. It's not some new thing Comcast (or whoever) invented in 2006 or whenever.
If you want to connect to customers behind ISP A, you typically need to pay an ISP that's connected to ISP A, or pay ISP A, or qualify for peering with ISP A. If you and ISP A are both paying ISP B for that data, then there's motivation for you an ISP A to peer; if not, ISP A says we're happy to take your traffic through peering with these ISPs or you can pay us for a direct connection. Maybe a bit less cost for 'paid peering' vs a full transit connection.
In the old days of dial-up, all you needed to start an ISP was two T1s, one for your uplink, one for your modem pool. Once you got a little bigger, you'd look to see what content networks you could peer with to reduce your transit budget. After the move to broadband which has a bias towards only two, maybe three companies running wires to homes, and the FCCs abandonment of mandatory line sharing from the telecom act of 1996, we run into the situation where there's a handful of residential ISPs nationwide, and they almost all run transit networks, and there's no longer an economic incentive for them to peer with content networks --- they can justify peering with most other transit ISPs, so there's no cost savings from peering; and they have no competitive need to offer better service.
The solution isn't mandating 'neutral treatment', it's mandating competitive local access markets via mandatory line sharing[1], and splitting up the national transit business from the last-mile business, ala 1984 AT&T.
[1] But with tighter regulations, so that incumbents can't cross-subsidize retail prices to be lower than wholesale pricing as was common in the early 2000s before mandatory line sharing ended; building out new wiring where line sharing was infeasible was another common loophole. It'd be way more competitive if the wiring providers weren't permitted to offer retail services, but that might be a bit too meddlesome.
You don't need transit for local traffic, the destination network is already in the same IX as you are. Transit is the thing that carries traffic from one IX to the others.
> Do you or your customer get a discount when you're both only connected with a transit ISP? No, both parties pay for connection to the transit ISP (even if it's the same).
If you and your customer are both in the same IX you don't use a transit ISP at all.
> If you want to connect to customers behind ISP A, you typically need to pay an ISP that's connected to ISP A, or pay ISP A, or qualify for peering with ISP A. If you and ISP A are both paying ISP B for that data, then there's motivation for you an ISP A to peer; if not, ISP A says we're happy to take your traffic through peering with these ISPs or you can pay us for a direct connection.
Paying Cogent (or Comcast) to carry traffic from one IX to another is normal; otherwise you would need to run your own fiber or have a presence in the other IX and it allows you to avoid that cost.
But if you do have a presence in the other IX, what are you paying them for? It's just a monopoly rent because they control the only network path to their residential customers.
You can't find or subscribe to a zero rating plan in the EU any more.
Except in Portugal where the equivalent of the FCC has so little power the telecoms do what they want without any fear.
It certainly sounds exactly as if it is. It is preferring one service's data over another.
Erm... Exempting a service's traffic from a restriction is the literal textbook definition of 'against net neutrality'
Weird misinformation here.
Just to clarify for the benefit of the audience:
Net Neutrality is when a carrier treats all data packets as equal, without regard to origin, destination, or provider.
I believe 'fair' QoS is exempted (you're allowed to prioritise low-latency traffic such as VOIP) but only if you throw all VOIP packets into the same 'high priority' queue regardless of software, provider, destination, etc.
If you charge on a per-byte basis but exempt some traffic from those charges, you're absolutely violating net neutrality.
If you have a data cap but exempt some traffic from that cap, you're absolutely violating net neutrality.