CRTC rejects Bell usage-based internet billing plan

[woob]

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/stor...n.html?cmp=rss

Great news. I'm sure it'll be appealed or a new proposal brought forward, but good victory for now.

[mykalberta]

I am very split on this issue.

One one hand I dont want to get a in a per GB charging scenario in Canada.

Yet I may or may not know someone with the 100mbps Shaw unlimited account who last month went over 650GB being part of some dodgy underground file sharing (GPL License files of course) group.

[Hack&Lube]

Originally Posted by mykalberta

I am very split on this issue.

One one hand I dont want to get a in a per GB charging scenario in Canada.

Yet I may or may not know someone with the 100mbps Shaw unlimited account who last month went over 650GB being part of some dodgy underground file sharing (GPL License files of course) group.

How is that a split? Both your statements are in favor of a non-usage based billing plan.

[Azure]

I have no problem with them charging a reasonable fee for people who go over, provided the limit is very much reasonable a well. Low-tiered plans should start with 250GB, and go up from there.

If people download more than 2x their plan, start charging them a reasonable fee.

[Vulcan]

Well if my neighbours downloading is why my extreme high speed goes from around 25Mbps download to around 2.5 Mbps between the hours of 4 to 11 every evening, I won't mind a reasonable limit being enforced.

[Rathji]

Originally Posted by Azure

I have no problem with them charging a reasonable fee for people who go over, provided the limit is very much reasonable a well. Low-tiered plans should start with 250GB, and go up from there.

If people download more than 2x their plan, start charging them a reasonable fee.

While I totally agree with your sentiment, that people who abuse should be charged for their usage, why does it need to be 2x? Wouldn't it make more sense for the limit they have set to be the actual limit, so things are straight forward?

Life shouldn't always be a game where need to guess how far you can push the boundaries before you get dinged.

[Flames89]

Originally Posted by Rathji

Life shouldn't always be a game where need to guess how far you can push the boundaries before you get dinged.

Why not? Seems like a good carpe diem way to live.

[Hack&Lube]

Originally Posted by Flames89

Why not? Seems like a good carpe diem way to live.

So you seize each day by driving as fast as you can until you get caught? You stream internet radio on your phone while roaming all day to see how much you can rack up before you get surprised by the bill?

[Old Yeller]

My stance has always been that if ISP's were to adopt some sort of UBB, then it has to go both ways. So the guy who's on torrents 24/7 should be paying big bucks where as the Grandma who turns on her computer once a week to check her email should be paying essentially a small maintenance fee every month.

Because ISP's are never going to agree to charge Grandma $5 a month for her internet usage, then I'll never be able to support the current forms of UBB.

[MaDMaN_26]

I donate monthly to this group... so that's my stance.

http://openmedia.ca/

[Flash Walken]

Originally Posted by Old Yeller

My stance has always been that if ISP's were to adopt some sort of UBB, then it has to go both ways. So the guy who's on torrents 24/7 should be paying big bucks where as the Grandma who turns on her computer once a week to check her email should be paying essentially a small maintenance fee every month.

Because ISP's are never going to agree to charge Grandma $5 a month for her internet usage, then I'll never be able to support the current forms of UBB.

Or, if I am paying for 250 gigs a month, and use 100, well, next month, I have 400 gigs!

[La Flames Fan]

Data is not a utility.

[Azure]

Originally Posted by Rathji

While I totally agree with your sentiment, that people who abuse should be charged for their usage, why does it need to be 2x? Wouldn't it make more sense for the limit they have set to be the actual limit, so things are straight forward?

Life shouldn't always be a game where need to guess how far you can push the boundaries before you get dinged.

Well, I would hate it if Shaw started billing me every single time I went 1GB over my limit.

But I do agree with what you're saying. I just think they should be lenient with most people, and just charge those that are extremely excessive.

If someone is maxing out his connections with torrents 24/7 and going way beyond his limit, warn him and then charge him if he doesn't stop.

But if someone goes 10GB over their limit one month, don't automatically charge him for it.

[Tinordi]

Yeah data isn't electricity persay. If you had no growth in data consumption and you had built ample capacity then the variable cost of provisioning 1 kb a data is nothing. For electricity you had to use fuel and had to pay for line losses, not so with data if you assume the capacity is always there.

So it's a false analogy to compare data with other consumable utility provisioned goods like water and electricity.

Now, data is growing, and companies need to add new capacity so therefore people should be charged on their uplink bandwidth or on their peak consumption but that's considerable different from what ISP's like Bell proposed.

[Super Nintendo Chalmers]

Originally Posted by Hack&Lube

How is that a split? Both your statements are in favor of a non-usage based billing plan.

I think he's saying that the person he may or may not know should have his usage curbed somehow. By usage-based billing, perhaps?

[sclitheroe]

Originally Posted by Tinordi

Yeah data isn't electricity persay. If you had no growth in data consumption and you had built ample capacity then the variable cost of provisioning 1 kb a data is nothing. For electricity you had to use fuel and had to pay for line losses, not so with data if you assume the capacity is always there.

So it's a false analogy to compare data with other consumable utility provisioned goods like water and electricity.

Now, data is growing, and companies need to add new capacity so therefore people should be charged on their uplink bandwidth or on their peak consumption but that's considerable different from what ISP's like Bell proposed.

Wrong. There is enormous ongoing expense in delivering broadband to a premise. The bytes are not free once the network is in place, they are just quite cheap. Your natural gas bill carries a charge for both the gas, as well as delivery, and that's the same way I think Internet should be billed.

[Tinordi]

What are the big variable expenses of delivering say 500 kbps versus 750 kbps when your capacity is 800 kbps?

In electricity it's actual fuel use or the opportunity cost of selling the electricity somewhere else.

In water, it's the cost of pumping, and cleaning the water.

In data transfer all of that capacity is already installed. There may be some slight variable expenses of say energy to power your routers if you aren't running them all at full capacity, ie you turn some routers off. But in this case, you could assume that all of their capacity is fully powered and that the energy input costs per marginal unit of data are trivially small.

So again, what's the big variable cost that makes me wrong?

Fixed costs are fixed costs. Maintenance is likely the same if you're running full or half capacity. The cost of the capacity is the same no matter how much or little you're using it.

So anyway, in that hypothetical scenario I think my argument holds that data is not a rivalrous good.

Now when you start needed to add capacity then yes there are variable costs, namely the cost of buying new machinery and bandwidth. But then that brings you to a much different billing model then trying to charge customers for a total data volume where the costs are incredibly small.

[sclitheroe]

Originally Posted by Tinordi

What are the big variable expenses of delivering say 500 kbps versus 750 kbps when your capacity is 800 kbps?

Because there isn't a fixed 800 kbps capacity to every node. We know with absolute certainty that the pipes are bigger than what the plant can deliver on a sustained basis.

So there is more expense - heavy users exact a greater toll on a scarce resource (even resources like bits, that are free or super-cheap in your model, can be scarce), which means they either have to spend more money to deliver the promised levels of performance, or reduce the number of customers in either a specific geographic area, or at large, to reasonably meet the performance levels people are paying for.

It's not the per-bit cost we're really paying for, its for the portion of a scarce resource that we consume.

[MaDMaN_26]

Originally Posted by sclitheroe

Wrong. There is enormous ongoing expense in delivering broadband to a premise. The bytes are not free once the network is in place, they are just quite cheap. Your natural gas bill carries a charge for both the gas, as well as delivery, and that's the same way I think Internet should be billed.

Originally Posted by sclitheroe

Because there isn't a fixed 800 kbps capacity to every node. We know with absolute certainty that the pipes are bigger than what the plant can deliver on a sustained basis.

So there is more expense - heavy users exact a greater toll on a scarce resource (even resources like bits, that are free or super-cheap in your model, can be scarce), which means they either have to spend more money to deliver the promised levels of performance, or reduce the number of customers in either a specific geographic area, or at large, to reasonably meet the performance levels people are paying for.

It's not the per-bit cost we're really paying for, its for the portion of a scarce resource that we consume.

I love how you can be so incredibly wrong but yet be so absolute in telling others how wrong they are...

http://openmedia.ca/blog/stop-cap-ne...reasing-demand

*****
“Traffic-related costs are a small percentage of the total connectivity revenue, and despite traffic growth, this percentage is expected to stay constant or decline,” claims the report, commissioned by the British Broadcasting Corporation, Britain’s Channel 4, and Skype. “Studies in Canada and in the UK put the incremental cost of fixed network traffic at around €0.01-0.03 per GB.”
*****
"As broadband traffic increases, the technology to sustain that traffic has improved, and brought unit costs for broadband traffic to an all-time-low."
*****

[Rathji]

Originally Posted by MaDMaN_26

I love how you can be so incredibly wrong but yet be so absolute in telling others how wrong they are...

http://openmedia.ca/blog/stop-cap-ne...reasing-demand

*****
“Traffic-related costs are a small percentage of the total connectivity revenue, and despite traffic growth, this percentage is expected to stay constant or decline,” claims the report, commissioned by the British Broadcasting Corporation, Britain’s Channel 4, and Skype. “Studies in Canada and in the UK put the incremental cost of fixed network traffic at around €0.01-0.03 per GB.”
*****
"As broadband traffic increases, the technology to sustain that traffic has improved, and brought unit costs for broadband traffic to an all-time-low."
*****

Maybe you don't understand what he said then, because nothing you have quoted contradicts it.

I don't want to repost something I have posted many times before, but if all this bandwidth is very cheap since there is no real scarcity then why has Shaw's network performance suffered greatly in some areas since they drastically increased speeds and monthly bandwidth allotment this past spring/summer? Because the network is nearing capacity in those areas, which by definition, means that the resource truly is scarce.

If it wasn't, then network congestion would never exist.

If you show me a network that never has congestion and never has a slowdown, then I will 100% agree with your claims, but until then, you are only considering half of the picture.