News - Pay for broadband per megabyte says Verizon CTO

[watercooled]

Yeah exactly!

[badass]

It seems to me that the only objectors here are the ones that hammer their connection.

[rushholme]

I am against metered paying for a number of reasons, some selfish, some as a matter of principle.

For me, Virgin's policy seems to be a fair compromise and I have no problem with heavier downloaders being forced to do so at night (but for no extra cost).

[Georgy291]

there was a thread earlier that was, how much do you download a month before on hexus, look for it your self and a average hexus user if i remember correctly was over 100gig and some even in to terrabites

[pp05]

I was reading an article on cnet that said if US wanted (from scratch) to upgrade its infrastructure nationwide it would cost $300bn. So you can see why they would want to push cost over to the end user.

[watercooled]

It seems to me that the only objectors here are the ones that hammer their connection.

Not at all, and that's an unreasonable conclusion to make for a number of reasons - one of which is you don't know how much any of us download. The point I was trying to make is that even if it worked out at £5pm for PAYG, I'd still rather pay £10pm for the freedom of not watching what I download.

[TheAnimus]

We already have a graduated pricing structure which incorporates lower charges for lighter users, it just doesn't meter them.

But its not *that* fair is it?

Whilst bandwidth is often traded like electricity forwards, lets just pretend its a simple commodity, it will make my analogies simpler for me! </caveat>

There is a Fixed Rate, been exchanged for a Floating Rate. This is a classic trade. However there is Risk involved, this means getting the fixed rate (ie £10 pcm for 10GB) is actually cost of providing service + profit margins + RISK

They have to be competitive, if ISP A assumes their users only use 50% and so forth...

So, with things like wireless broadband, which is becoming more and more the norm, why not charge for precisely what is used, as it is commercially viable to meter?

This would let people who are really cost conscious better control themselfs, and as half of the idoits who are botnet members, are probably the type who would go for the cheapo internet, it might even help solve that problem too!

[watercooled]

I think it could work, but only alongside current unlimited plans? Why punish the millions of heavier downloaders by charging them by the MB? As mentioned, things like iPlayer, Youtube, Steam, etc etc would never have worked without so many people on unlimited plans!

[aidanjt]

Uh, who seriously thinks bandwidth is an infinite resource?.. More bandwidth requires bigger optical carriers, that means purchasing more fibre lines, hiring experts to plan and deploy the lines. There is also a limit to the number of carriers which can be run (Earth occupies finite space, and only has finite resources to make them). And then when they're in place, even the transmission of 'on' bits requires power between each node between the lines. No, bandwidth is very much a finite resource. And like any finite resource it should be paid by consumption.

Light bandwidth users shouldn't be 'taxed' to supplement the usage of heavy bandwidth users. And I say this as a relatively heavy bandwidth user myself.

[watercooled]

No of course it's not infinite but as far as we are concerned it's not a consumable resource and won't run out - I strongly disagree about having to pay by consumption partly because you're not actually consuming anything... As the old saying goes it's not broken so don't fix it - ISPs make plenty enough money out of us to keep the equipment going, they don't need an excuse to make more. This is a topic which is highly debatable but I'm strongly on the side of leave it the way it is and as mentioned plenty of times before it would be commercial suicide - let's call them ISP A starts charging by the MB so ISPs B,C,D,E,...... start advertising things like 'no limits like other companies - download what you want, when you want with no extra charges' and 'why watch what you download, you can relax on our network' which would draw customers away from ISP A leaving them 3 choices -
1) Offer ridiculously low prices for each MB which would draw a lot of light users in which case they wouldn't make much money so they'd need to raise prices again, turning them away.
2) Carry on as they are and go bust because they don't have enough customers.
3) Go back to charging a fixed rate like all the other companies and do the best to get rid of a dented reputation, like go under new management or change their name or something.
With the ever-increasing reliance on the Internet in out day-to-day lives I don't think charging this way could ever work mostly because of what I've said. And even if all the big ISPs started charging that way you would get some new smaller ISPs offering unlimited access which would attract lots of customers - charging by the MB just wouldn't be accepted into society.

Edit: just wanted to add: people are saying it's like xGB per month packages which are already in place but with them you still know you can download whatever you want up to a limit and still pay the same flat rate. I don't know if you understand what I mean when I say this but knowing you will pay the same regardless gives you more freedom on the net and as I've said, with metered access you'd be compulsively watching everything you did which would just be horrible. VM's idea of capping after a set limit is great because it keeps the networks from getting jammed up during peak times while allowing people to do their heavy downloading later on when the networks are less busy and again gives the freedom of knowing you won't ever pay more - the most that can happen is you get your speed capped for a while.

Another thing, with the model of having LLU in the UK, you are guaranteed to get a number of companies like Be offering unlimited access - any entrepreneur with knowledge of ISPs would jump at the chance of stealing customers from the big companies by offering unlimited access and there would be BIG money in it. In Britain, the ISPs would surely know that but things are a little different in the US which is where this article is about and over there they don't have all the smaller ISPs like what we have...

[aidanjt]

If you run out of power, you run out of bandwidth. And you can only have 'n' bits transmitted for a given interval. Trying to say bandwidth is non-consumable is like saying water is non-consumable. You can only fit a finite amount of water through the pipes without having to add more pipes to the network, and you can't add pipes ad infinitum, nor can you purify water ad infinitum to keep the pipes filled. It doesn't matter if you could reclaim 100% of waste water and put it back in the loop, it's consumption is still finite.

[watercooled]

Yeah but the point I'm trying to make is that they don't lose anything if you download something - the bandwidth isn't gone forever and even if the lines were saturated with traffic it wouldn't effect the ISP. Yeah things might get a bit slower for the consumer but as it stands things are fine - stop offering faster speeds if you're struggling so much to keep up ie don't offer what you can't provide and stop being greedy. Besides, as I've already said countless times they get enough money out of us the way things are now, if they weren't making enough money then they wouldn't upgrade - if there's such a big problem with not being able to keep up with the bandwidth then start capping speeds or something. It's just another excuse for ISPs to needlessly con people out of more money. That's the only reason they would do this - more money! They say it as if they would be doing us a favour but think about it - why would they do it to save us money - they'd lose money that way and I can't see them shooting themselves in the foot like that.

[aidanjt]

You don't lose anything by 'downloading' water either. But it still costs money and man power to produce it.

[Georgy291]

i installed a network card monitoring gadget for vista, it tracks how much data has gone through my network card. As i only use it for internet i think its fair to assume all that is internet usage.

When i turn my computer on, and it finishes loading up etc
with all the auto logins for msn, steam etc, its already 6mb

[watercooled]

Yep, along with auto update and not to mention the updates themselves!! Service packs aren't exactly small either and they're not really an option or a luxury are they?

[Arthran]

You don't lose anything by 'downloading' water either. But it still costs money and man power to produce it.

Don't know about you, but i'm on a fixed cost use as much water as you need package, same as i am for bandwidth.

you also don't technically have to pay for water, sure you'll get sued and get in debt, but they cant legally cut your water off ever. 1 positive of our human rights laws lol