6 comments

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  Christopher

  3 years ago

  A better thing to do would be for the government to step in and say "One price for 20GB, 40 GB, so on".
  That would solve the problems of bandwidth leeches of which I am admittedly one (download 20 gb of stuff a month or more).
  But if the government were to do that, I would cry foul UNLESS they lowered the prices dramatically as compared to unlimited access plans.
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  Jonathan Tregear

  3 years ago

  It's arguable whether there really is such a thing as bandwidth scarcity in landline broadband capacity. Even if there is, it's nothing like radio spectrum scarcity where price differentiation is somewhat more defensible.
  
  
  However, the issue is not whether metered service would be more efficient or a more rationale way to pay for bandwidth, the issue is whether price differentiation will result in different types of application bits being priced differentially. Will my file download bit cost me less than my VoIP bit? That is what price differentiation is about; it is not about metered service.
  
  
  Price diffentiation is a real threat, since BSP's could and are attempting to use it to inflate user costs for non-BSP provided services.
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  Coises

  3 years ago

  Three decades ago there was already a model for computer resource allocation: timesharing. (I presume something like it must be used by today's pre-emptive multitasking PC operating systems, such as any 32-bit version of Microsoft Windows.) In timesharing, the priority of a user's tasks decreases as the user's recent resource consumption increases and as the time since the last user action (e.g., a terminal keystroke) increases. A similar principle in TCP would say that you divide the available bandwidth among everyone who wants it, weighting recent requests higher than continuing service of older requests and weighting users who haven't used much bandwidth recently (we're talking seconds or minutes here, not hours or days) higher than those who have been taking a lot. The net effect would be to prioritize short, simple tasks (like getting an ordinary web page) so that their response time remains rapid while slowing higher bandwidth activities (and letting real-time high-bandwidth activities fail) during times when the system is struggling to meet demand... but slowing them only as much as is needed to maintain the chosen target response time for simple tasks.

  This should keep typical users happy and encourage high-bandwidth users to do their big tasks at times when the overall system load is low, without imposing arbitrary punitive measures or engaging in the practice of trying to determine just what users are doing (something I think should be avoided like the plague it could become).

  The next step in this business model would be to sell priority: e.g., if you pay more, the parameters used to compute your priority relative to other users would be changed so that you could take more bandwidth at busier times before being slowed (all relative to what others are paying, of course; hmmm... this could turn into bidding for priorty: perhaps a good thing, perhaps not).
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  Julien Boyreau

  3 years ago

  As said above, bandwidth scarcity is a myth in wired-based network ; Switches&TransmissionMedium; Capacities grow much faster that bandwidth usage ; in a pure IP network, it's much less costly to perform over provisionning than administrate the complexity of artificial scarcity.
  
  The real problem is that the IP Technical Model and the Unmettered use create a commodity (IP Transport) that has no other diffenrentiation than Price and Performance i.e exactly the same market structure as Intel in the CPU Market (just replace IP Packets by instructions and ADSLx.x by Pentium)
  
  After having reused Cable and Copper, the next Step to fight on performance is Copper Subsitution by Fiber thus Infrastructure Investment such as Railways, Roads...
  So the fascinating question for free-market supporters (like me). Can market freedom find incitations to finance big naked fibers infras or will public/state money be unfortunately necessary ???
  
  Could we find an "Broadband Intel" world-sized in the Cellular/Fixed telecom crew ??
  I am quite pessimistic...what do you think about ??
• 

  bago

  3 years ago

  Most ISP's I know of just charged for overage.
• 

  Jeff Licquia

  3 years ago

  (Seriously, if anyone knows of a bandwidth hog being cut off, please send me info because I try to keep track of these things).
  
  That would be me, sorta. The effect was the same, at least.
  
  This was back in the dialup age. I had a relationship with my ISP, they knew I was a "high-volume customer", and they promised to contact me if I started getting to be a pain.
  
  Then they were bought. My next monthly bill was for something like $1800.
  
  The final agreement we reached was that they would only charge me the normal "unlimited" rate for that bill, and in return I would no longer be their customer, effective immediately. I suspect that was the intent of their abnormally high bill.
  
  I recall looking over my contract at the time, and not seeing any exceptions to the "unlimited" language, so I expect I could have fought it and remained their customer if I had really wanted to. At the time, though, there were plenty of other options, and I was thinking I would soon get this new-fangled DSL thing anyway once it came to my neighborhood.
  
  Of course, all this predates P2P, streaming video, widely-available broadband, and the dominance of national ISPs.