What Kind of Alternate Business Models Could ISPs Use?

esocid writes "After reading multiple stories over the past few months about the practices of ISPs within and outside of the US I have started to actually contemplate the benefits of the pay-per-use broadband service. Monopolistic practices have strangled broadband to the throttled money-draining cesspool that it is today. Would a pay-per-use option, or some other strategy, be better than the flat fee offered by companies today? When you think about it you are paying for an XMbps connection, when in actuality you get an 65-85%XMbps connection that you may or may not use all of the time. In addition to that, speaking as a Comcast customer, you get a throttled connection that limits your usage of certain protocols. Essentially you pay about $60-70 for a connection that you only squeeze maybe $35-45 worth of usage out of it. If a pay-per-usage option were implemented, how do you think the best way to charge for it would be? Is there some other scheme that would deliver customers the kind of QOS and value they seek?"

Not really the point...

[TripMaster Monkey (862126)]

I'm sure there are several alternate business models that ISps could employ that would result in fairer, more even-handed access and pricing.

However, this is not in the ISPs best interests. The ISPs interests are best served by the current business model...the promise-you-x-amount-of-bandwidth-but-give-you-only-0.4x business model.

Don't expect change anytime soon.

who cares about business models?

[jollyreaper (513215)]

I want to know where the April Fools articles are. So far, everything is boringly normal. Give me some funny shit! Microsoft debugs Vista, "Best Windows yet!" crows Richard Stallman. Bush finds exit strategy for Iraq. Catholic priest shoves fingers up own ass for a change.

Where's the A material? Even Poniez is looking good at this point.

Re:who cares about business models?

[nacturation (646836)]

Compared to the insanity of last year, having an all-normal day would be one hell of an April Fool's.
 

Re:who cares about business models?

[jollyreaper (513215)]

Compared to the insanity of last year, having an all-normal day would be one hell of an April Fool's.
 

But I'm ready for it now! This is like watching what's supposed to be a horror movie, you're all ready for the jump-scare, the woman is walking around in a dark house in her panties looking in all the creepiest rooms, opening cabinets, peeking behind shower curtains, and nothing! Not even a cat jumping and screeching from some impossible location no cat should be in.

Finally I'm ready to not get suckered on April Fools and they sucker me by canceling it. Bastards.

Re:who cares about business models?

[hey! (33014)]

OK, how about this for an idea:

Hooters founder Robert Brooks has started a new business: providing Internet services.

Jack-In Broadband [sm] will provide broadband installation and support services, with a twist. All installations will be performed by female technicians wearing brightly colored plastic miniskirts and crop-tops. On-line tech support will also be provided by "Jack-In Girls", via real time two way video link.

Women's rights groups are criticizing the planned service. "This is demeaning to women in technology," said Maria
Testicolo-Lattine, the Florida director for the National Organization for Women. "Not only are they being valued for their bodies over their skills, they are being paid only minimum wage."

A corporate spokesman for the company confirmed that the technicians would only be paid minimum wage, and would have to buy their own uniforms, tools and vehicle, however he denied that they were being exploited. "These girls will make plenty of dough, through gratuities and, uh, little side services they provide our customers." The spokesman asked that his name be withheld. [Ed. -- editorial policy does not allow for corporate PR officers to be quoted anonymously. The spokesman quoted was Anthony Testicolo, from the company's Miami office.]

The service is slated to begin in the Clearwater, Florida market, expanding to eight metropolitan areas in the southern US over the next two years. There are no plans to market the installation service in the north, due to the impracticality of the technicians' uniforms in that climate, although negotiations are under way to offer the on-line support services through cooperative agreements with several national ISPs.

Split Solution

[CheeseburgerBrown (553703)]

I think that even in a pay-as-you-go type solution, a certain base threshold of traffic would have to be free, and the customer would pay on top of that. Otherwise, the user is penalized for visiting a site that rams heavy multimedia ads down their throats or for downloading spam to be filtered.

Another idea may be a price ramp: if I usually only use 5% of my connection, the cost for a spike in my usage should be low. Similarly, if I'm a heavy user than my spikes (higher, more frequent) would carry a heftier price tag. In other words, occasional spikes should be discounted while habitually heavy users would have to pay more to accommodate their persistent digital lifestyles.

Finally, I would only consider such a scheme if my account were discounted for every second of downtime during each billing cycle, whether it affected me directly or not. If have to pay for what I use, they have to pay for what they don't deliver.

Re:Split Solution

[Spy Hunter (317220)]

The problem with most charge for usage schemes is that people might get stuck with huge overage fees and not understand why, because people have no idea how much bandwidth different things take. Or, your computer could get infected with a trojan and use terabytes of bandwidth to send spam and you'd get stuck with the bill.

However, charging for usage *is* a better solution, for many reasons. The most important is that it aligns the ISP's interests with those of its customers. Right now an ISP's best customer is one who doesn't use the product at all; heavy users are their least profitable customers. This is the root cause of all the problems people have with their ISPs (port blocking, BitTorrent blocking, not upgrading infrastructure, cooperating with RIAA subpoenas, terrible customer service, outspoken opposition to bandwidth-using services like online video); it all stems from the fact that ISPs have a huge incentive to *discourage* use of their product! Under a charge-for-usage scheme, that's all *reversed*. ISPs would make the most money from the heavy users, and so would encourage usage by eliminating all blocking and filtering, upgrading infrastructure, telling the RIAA to get lost, improving customer service, and encouraging bandwidth-using services like online video.

In addition to making ISPs the friends of their customers, charge-for-usage would also solve some of the Internet's big problems. Suddenly people with trojaned Windows zombie machines would be charged for all the crap they spew, giving them an incentive to secure their machines. P2P users, instead of being subsidized by the majority who use less bandwidth, would see the real costs of their traffic in their bill. If there's any truth to the "bandwidth crisis" the ISPs keep whining about, charging for usage would solve it.

So charging for usage is desirable, but how can we do it without huge overage fees? It's easy. Instead of paying for bits transferred directly, we should pay for the *speed* of transfer, almost like we do now, but with one addition: each bit transferred lowers your speed cap slightly. This cap is explicit with a big speed gauge and graphs showing your usage (it is important that this graph be very user friendly so people can figure out what is using their bandwidth). Here's the key: at any time (not necessarily monthly) you can press a "speed boost" button that charges your account and raises the cap, but it's not automatic. Under this scenario there are no explicit tiers and not even a fixed monthly payment. You pay exactly the amount you want, when you want, and get service commensurate with your payment; blazing fast or just enough for email, it's up to you. There are never overage fees; instead your service just becomes slow. If your computer gets trojaned your service will slow to a crawl, you'll look at your graph and see a giant spike of traffic from the computer in question, and you'll know to fix it *before* you press the "speed boost" button.

I hope someday ISPs and ISP customers alike will come around and see that some method of charging for usage is the only sensible way to do things. With this scheme we get all the advantages of charging for usage, but none of the drawbacks. No overage fees and no hard caps.

$/MB

[fred fleenblat (463628)]

in terms of $ per megabyte broadband is the best deal going. taking into account the throttling and limited upstream pipes...it's still a screaming deal. go price T1's, or try to live with satellite broadband, dialup, or 3G. all these alternatives have profound limitations.

Pay as you go

[jockeys (753885)]

honestly, internet access is very nearly a commodity, why not bill it as such?

Assuming all my ports are equal, and I can xfer upstream and down at whatever the physical rate of the device is:
bill me by the megabit-hour. Just like txu bills me by the kWatt-hour. I can use whatever I want, but pay accordingly.

Alternately, bill me at the end of the month for gigs xferred, which is already done for hosting in some cases.

Plenty of case studies...

[JustinOpinion (1246824)]

This question is not nearly as theoretical as the question suggests: there are many countries where various forms of metered or tiered access are the norm. You just have to look at what these countries offer (and how consumers react) to get an idea of what works and what doesn't.

Here's an example: Videotron cable internet [videotron.com] (Montreal, Canada)*. They have packages that run from $30/month to $80/month, depending what you want. They all have usage limits (2 GB/month to 100 GB/month), and charge a fee per additional GB beyond this basic usage.**

Does it "work"? Of course. Customers buy the package they want. If they are routinely going over their monthly limit, they either cut back on usage or upgrade their package. Yes, it is slightly more complicated for the customer than just having a single "unlimited!" package, but then again it's also more honest. In fact the unlimited packages have hidden terms and limits, which makes them more complicated... or at least more annoying.

I'm a heavy internet user (as most Slashdotters probably are). I don't mind paying a premium to get the speeds and usage limits I need: as long as that service level is actually delivered! This isn't rocket science: just provide a variety of packages and let the customers pick. Importantly, price the packages so that you won't go out of business if a sizeable percent of your customers actually use the service you sold them.

[*] Note that I was a Videotron customer when I lived in Montreal. I'm not endorsing their service; merely using them as an example.
[**] Note also that if you really want unlimited usage, you can upgrade to business class service [videotron.com]. Again, you pay a premium if you want that level of service, which is fine.

Is this a serious question?

[carnivorouscow (1255116)]

I know I'm risking what little karma I have as a new poster but this question seems bizarre. Throttled connection speed is primarily a US problem and has a lot to do with the telecoms not keeping their promise to Congress to create a fiber optic network across the nation. Now they're reaping what they've sown and are trying to create an excuse to pass the buck to their customers rather than fulfilling their obligations.

I could see a tiered system for connection speed that billed based on KB transfered being reasonable if the telecoms were doing everything in their power to meet increasing capacity demands but they're not.

Summary is not quite right

[NeutronCowboy (896098)]

Essentially you pay about $60-70 for a connection that you only squeeze maybe $35-45 worth of usage out of it./blockquote.
From my understanding, you actually pay $60 for a connection that ought to cost you about $600. For what real usage costs, compare the home pricing with business pricing. Speakeasy offers symmetric T1 for $400. That gets you 1.5 Mbit both ways. Get a home connection, and they charge you $50 for a basic DSL connection of 1.5 Mbit down, 384Kbit up. And that's if your connection is good and noise free.

This idea that the actual cost of a connection is $60 is ludicrous. Yes, companies played a dangerous numbers game that didn't account for all the new ways that end users can saturate connections, and they're trying to play catch-up now through questionable methods. But some end-users are also using far more than what they're paying for.

That said, this is no excuse for the sorry state that broadband is in. Monopolies (or, at best, duopolies) are killing the American broadband market. My connection has stagnated at 1.5Mbit (actually ~800 Kbit due to line noise) for the last 8 years, with prices regularly going up for unfettered access. When looking at how connections improved in the rest of the world, I can only believe that a complete lack of market forces could lead to this stagnation.

Deliver Promises.

[headkase (533448)]

How about they give you what they promise, set their price against what they actually think it costs and let competition work its magic. Promising what they don't deliver fscks up Adam Smith's invisible hand.

Taxes

[ahfoo (223186)]

There's your business model.

I'm dead serious. Telecoms is a "natural monopoly". (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly) A monopoly is not something you build a business around, it's something you regulate. Thus, it is best funded by a regulatory regime AKA, a government.

And, for the practical example. I'm in Taiwan where the telecom is state owned. I am using the state owned telecom DSL service at 8M/640K for about thirty bucks a month although we just got a slight reduction in fees this month. Yeah, imagine that, a reduction. We have no throttling and the service, which I've had for about five years at that level is excellent.

Sure, there's a monthly fee for use, but the service is provided by a government monopoly which is obviously derivative of taxes.

Re:Taxes

[sm62704 (957197)]

At the risk of getting into the same tired argument with the same slashdotters I argued with yesterday about health care*, I have to agree with you. I don't believe natural monopolies like roads and electricity should be left to the private sector. Here in Springfield [wikipedia.org] our power company is owned and run by the city government. Our rates are the lowest in the state, and our electricity is the most dependable.

-mcgrew

* there are some here who believe that the huge problems we have financing our health care are, believe it or not, caused by overregulation rather than the fact that the customer has no choice, nor can have any choice. I have to agree to disagre with these folks.

Dual-tiered

[Tyler Eaves (344284)]

Have a two level plan. Users would pay for however many gigabytes of high speed service at the wanted, which would be ultra-fast, 10Mbit at least, preferably higher.

They'd also have access to a baseline service in unlimited amount, but highly throttled...512Kbit say. Plenty useable for basic stuff, even MMOs and the like, but not for mass pirating. The user could toggle between the modes so as not to waste high-speed bandwidth checking e-mail or whatever.

What makes you think you're only getting $35 worth

[Overzeetop (214511)]

The issue is primarily one of convenience and plant cost. To get you 10Mb/s is mostly capital costs, so you pay a fixed rate. Overselling is done because average users don't saturate their channels. Businesses, otoh, do and they pay for the luxury. Pay per bit service would be difficult to structure without a fixed cost. Once you cover billing, tech support, and plant, you're up to nearly what everyone is already paying. Adding per-bit charges will only make it more expensive. Sure, you can pay more for a guarantee but the value of that guarantee is far less to the consumer than to the operator. And if you put your guaranteeds on the same line as your basic oversold, you're going to have to actively sort them out.

BTW - how much data does $35 buy you? Maybe you're getting $100 worth of data for the $70 you pay Comcast, and you just don't realize it. I would venture to guess that if you divided the entire data stream by the revenue, most slashdotters are getting more bits per dollar than the overall system average. Even if you just camp on the throttled ports, you may still be getting more bits than a dollar of Comcast plant depreciation.

Accountability?

[jc42 (318812)]

One major problem is: How would I know that I'd been charged fairly?

In my experience, when I get details of my net usage, there's a lot of stuff there that I can neither control nor account for. Thus, most browsers honor a page's request to refresh it every N minutes, and don't give me a way to turn it off. Any browser that's running can be using bandwidth without most users being aware of the fact. This is especially true for pages that include advertising.

For a while, I had a smartphone with wireless net access. Even when I didn't use it, it ran up packet charges. When I asked, I was simply told that the networking software sends packets on its own. "That's how it works." It's not obvious how a customer can challenge something like this, except via extremely expensive lawsuits.

And what about that advertising? I didn't want it, but it comes "free" with the content that I wanted. Would I be charged for downloading the ads? Of course, I would; what a silly question. Even (or especially) the flash ads. Yeah, I have flashblock installed, but not all browsers honor it, and not all users are aware that it's possible, so this is a potential source of large charges by the ISP.

But the fundamental question is: When my ISP tells me I used X gigabytes last month, how do I know they're not just making up a number? What tools are available that will tell a customer exactly how many bytes of bandwidth they actually used? And if this number differs from the ISP's number, would the accounting tools' data stand up in court?

Unless you can answer this, a pay-per-byte scheme is merely an way for an ISP to charge customers whatever they like, and the customers have no recourse other than to terminate the service entirely.

Alternate business model:

[NeutronCowboy (896098)]

Here's a truly alternate business model: screw the incumbent telecom carriers. Nationalize the grid that was built out with the help of public funds, and where the public has seen close to no returns. Turn everyone into a CLEC. Everyone plugs into an existing grid that is officially tax-payer funded with zero restrictions on what passes through. All the intelligence - traffic shaping, filtering, content - will be at the edges. Carriers compete based on service, what kind of pipe they can put into the home/condo/dorm and how much traffic they can exchange with the national grid.

Far-fetched? Not really. It's similar to what's going on with the electric grid already. Considering how much the economy is impacted if/when major trunks or local exchange points go down, the internet is also a similarly critical infrastructure. I don't see why lessons learned from the electric grid can't be applied to solving the mess that is the telecom industry.

Just give us honesty

[Tweaker_Phreaker (310297)]

All I want from any ISP is the honest truth of 1) what the maximum throughput from my house to the first hop is and 2) what the minimum guaranteed rate is when things get congested locally. In effect I want to know how shitty things will be when everyone in the neighborhood is on and how great they'll be when people aren't. Don't nickle and dime us because we're using more bandwidth, just make sure we know how much it'll be throttled when your pipes can't handle it.

Why not go over to 95th? ...

[lordsilence (682367)]

Hey. What most private customers dont seem to realise is that bandwidth is very expensive. Some expects DEDICATED bandwidth from your ISP. That's entirely unrealistic. Maybe it's time to start charging private customers by the 95th percentile? if they want dedicated.. Private internet connection is not dedicated and will never be if customers expects prices to go down. It would increase tenfold if you were to pay the actual prices isp's pay for peering , transit et al.

Overpriced to begin with.

[v(*_*)vvvv (233078)]

The problem with pay-as-you-go being optional is that the people who use less will opt for it, while others will go with the unmetered plan. This gives no upside for the ISP. Either one or make the pay-as-you-go a premium rate, in which case it won't be cheap anyway (like prepaid phones). Also, there is the whole measuring infrastructure that adds to the things they need to do and will mess up on.

The bottom line is there needs to be more competition, and better infrastructure. The infrastructure needs to be public property and cable companies should be able to compete over shared cables.

I am not satisfied with my cable service or their internet service, but I have no alternative.

Business models are useless

[bjourne (1034822)]

The premise of the question is wrong. There doesn't HAVE to be a business model at all for ISP:s. Currently, no matter what connection you have, what you pay for is NOT for your big fat pipe, it is for the ISP to run the billing. It costs ISP:s a lot more to employ accountants, collect user data, keep customer databases, marketing and send bills than it costs them to deliver traffic. A tiered internet, or a pay-per-megabit system would just add to the overhead as ISP:s would need to employ more accountants and implement more monitoring systems to track exactly how many megabits their users transfer.

Kind of similar to how Nike shoes doesn't cost many Euros to produce using the Chinese child labour they employ, but are marked up hundredfold. But the case with ISP:s is even more egregious because they are all 100% government sponsored institutions. Governments either built all the infrastructure or heavily subsidized telecom companies to do it. The net is public property and companies really have no moral rights to charge money for it.

Pay as you go is being blind to the future

[edmicman (830206)]

Come on, what is wrong with a lot of you?!? Sure, at this point in time a minority of users might be using the majority of the pipes. "Tax the heavy downloaders!" you say. Have you forgotten that Microsoft (X-BOX Live and Marketplace), Sony, Apple (HD movies), Joost, Tivo, Netflix, Amazon, etc. etc., all want to push more and more bandwidth intensive apps and uses?? Sure, Joe average may only use 5GB now with occasional YouTube videos. Maybe $15/mo would be good for him. But if the big players have their way, and they will, Joe will be watching, buying, and streaming HD video and games in the near future. 5GB ain't gonna cut it. The ISP's would love to knock everyone up to a "high tier" service that's $100/mo, but that sucks if that's the entry point just because the ISPs have milked this cash cow as long as they could.

ISPs creating tiered service levels is only them trying to prevent the inevitable - that they are being pushed into only providing an on-ramp to the Internet, and that's all. We're in the middle of a revolution in how content will be delivered, this crazy notion of tiered service levels is only going to mess that up. Of course, it will be steamrolled by innovation in the field.

It's like a small town experiencing a population growth, and wanting to turn Main St. into a toll road to discourage new citizens. Tiered pricing isn't designed to make things more fair; it's designed to discourage those at the top end and make those at the bottom end feel like they're getting a good deal.

We're already seeing mobile phone service becoming a commodity, with carriers offering true unlimited service after years of nickel and diming you for each partial minute you use. Are the cell carriers going to start complaining that everyone is actually talking constantly 24/7 and using up their lines? No, they'll build out more infrastructure to meet the demand. Why would the ISPs go the opposite route??

Re:first post

[spun (1352)]

Well I think ISPs should use the "Turn them upside down, shake them, and keep whatever falls out of their pockets" business model. Because I don't wear pants.

Re:

[EvilRyry (1025309)]

Maybe he's a news anchor.

Re:

[sm62704 (957197)]

I prefer flat rate. Considering that the cell phone companies are now offering flat rate pricing like the old wired telcos did, I think I'm in the majority here.

I want to know how much my bill is going to be, and I don't want to have to meter myself. I don't want to have to ask "can I afford to log into slashdot today? Can I afford to download that new distro today?"

And I don't see how "pay per view" is going to stop the ISPs from throttling; if their pipes get full they're going to turn your data flow down

Such a great deal.

[Spazmania (174582)]

I am myself in favor of a "you only get charged for what you actually get".

High-end commercial bandwidth is sold on a 95th percentile basis. The way it works is this: every 5 minutes they measure how many bits you sent and received in the preceeding 5 minutes. At the end of the month they throw the top 5% of the samples away. The next highest sample is your 95th percentile usage.

Are you still in favor of that payment model if I tell you that commercial bandwidth today costs between $20/megabit and $300/megabit with the average price around $100/megabit? In other words, you can have your 15-meg FiOS line, but if you nail it at 15 megs for more than 36 hours in a month, you'd pay $1500.

Still sound like such a good deal?

Re:Such a great deal.

[ncryptd (1172815)]

Are you still in favor of that payment model if I tell you that commercial bandwidth today costs between $20/megabit and $300/megabit with the average price around $100/megabit? In other words, you can have your 15-meg FiOS line, but if you nail it at 15 megs for more than 36 hours in a month, you'd pay $1500.

Based on this, I assume that the US is different than Europe (or at least Germany.) I currently have a couple servers in a datacenter in Germany, and I pay _way_ less than $100/mbit -- more like $15.xx/mbit (after conversion from Euros). And it's not bottom-of-the-barrel bandwidth either -- I have reliable, very low latency (around 10-20ms) pings to most of Europe too.

Bandwidth seems to be _far_ more expensive in the US, both for residential lines, and for servers. (I could be wrong on this, as I haven't bought bandwidth in a US datacenter in a couple years.)

As for what business model should the ISPs use... well... for starters, adopt the business model of clearly stating exactly what your accounts do and do not provide. If you say "unlimited", make sure you really are selling unmetered connections. Don't say "fair use policy applies" -- say "customers on this plan may transfer up to ___ GB per month." Don't manipulate people's traffic -- that includes faking RST packets to hurt BitTorrent, but it also includes manipulating DNS queries to point unused domains to your "parking" (read: spam) pages. Don't prevent outbound access on any port -- in the US I was shocked to find that the ISP that serviced the building I was staying in blocked all outbound connections on ports 25, 587, and 2500. If you start blocking ports, you're not providing an Internet connection -- you're providing a limited form of Internet access. Basically, the ISPs should adopt the model of actually providing what they claim, and not treating their customers like children.

"Pay for what you get" - I agree

[Nerdposeur (910128)]

In general, it seems like the point of "package deals" is to screw the customer. If I buy X amount of bandwidth or cell phone minutes per month and don't use them all, I wasted money. If I use any more than that, they charge me a hefty premium.

On the other hand, consumers should see "unlimited" as a good thing only if they expect to use more than the average person, whose usage the price reflects. If I think I will eat $15 worth of food and the buffet costs $10, it's a good deal for me.

In short: "pay fo

Re:first post

[by Anonymous Coward]

If you're getting charged because you're using more, you're exactly the kind of person that is overusing current resources. Switch ISPs, go to a hosting company, or find another way. You're making the experience less for the rest of us that only moderately use our connection and raising our rates. The low-use users are subsidizing you.

Re:first post

[calebt3 (1098475)]

No, the low-use users are simply not using all that they paid for, and Comcast takes advantage of that fact.

Re:first post

[shentino (1139071)]

"No, the low-use users are simply not permitted to use all that they paid for, and Comcast takes advantage of that fact."

Fixed that for you.

Re:first post

[electrictroy (912290)]

Since Comcast is finding it necessary to throttle connections, that indicates they are running out of bandwidth. i.e. They need to lay more cables but lack the money to do so. Therefore:

Rather than throttle P2P, youtube.com, or itunes.com, Comcast should identify their customers who download tons of information, impose a limit on those people, and then tell them, "If you go over 100 gigabytes, you will need to pay $100 a month to gain unlimited downloads." i.e. a Tier system:

$15 == 20 gig
$30 == 50 gig
$45 == 100 gig
$100 == unlimted

The more you desire to download, the more you will have to pay. Vice-versa, the less you download (me), the less you have to pay. That is entirely fair to charge customers based upon actual usage.

Re:first post

[NerveGas (168686)]

It's not a problem of cables, it's all about pricing.

Go out and find out how much it costs to buy, say, 100 megabits of real, honest, unlimitted, *guaranteed* bandwidth. Divide that by 17, and look at just how much you would have to charge users taking up a full 6 megabits just to break even. Then factor in the cost of your network and maintaining it.

Whether their business practices are honest or not (often, they're not, as they don't tell you what they're going to do) is irrelevant. People who think that it's their right to max out a multi-megabit connection for the cost of a couple of lunches need to wake up and join reality.

If broadband companies don't limit user's use, then there are only three eventualities: Either service will suck for everyone, everyone's prices will rise greatly, or prices will rise for those who use the most. There's no other way for the company to stay in business without something subsidizing them. When you look at countries with ultra-cheap broadband prices, they're subsidized.

Or pocket the money

[tlambert (566799)]

Or pocket the money and not lay any new cables anyway, which is the most likely thing to happen.

The problem with these companies is that the infrastructure should be publicly owned. Then if Comcast doesn't want to provide the service you want, you can fire them and hire someone who will.

The problem comes from municipality granted monopolies for payola from the companies who want the monopolies. The municipality gets a chunk of money that it can spend on something other than the service, and the company ge

Re:first post

[cayenne8 (626475)]

Heck...it is easy. Just get a business connection and be done with it. I get one from Cox cable, I get static IP, I can run any servers I want to, no blocked ports, no caps, no limits...only about $70/mo. Heck, I even have a low level SLA with them. I only had to do it once, and I called the number, left a message, and in like 3 min, they called me back and started working the issue, and it was fixed in minutes.

Why screw around with all the 'consumer' level stuff and the headaches that go with it?

Re:first post

[yuna49 (905461)]

Parent speaketh the truth here.

I pay Verizon $99/month for a 20/5 MBit FiOS business connection with essentially no limits. Sure it's about double what I might pay for a residential account with limits and dynamic addressing, but it's still an incredibly good deal compared to other business ISP services. I have a client with a T1 from AT&T; it costs about four times what Verizon's charging me and has about one-fourth the upstream bandwidth.

Re:

[electrictroy (912290)]

I like how ye use the term "only" when talking about over $1000 a year for a net connection.

Although I am well-paid I still prefer the $15 a month service.

Of course that service doesn't do much good if Comcast decides to block Bittorrent or Itunes.com, and therefore I think Comcast should be disallowed from doing that. If Comcast feels their pipes are full, let them add a higher tier, collect more money, and use that money to invest in more bandwidth. (That may mean every house has two cables running into

Re:first post

[Wavebreak (1256876)]

It's exactly this kind of thinking that the ISPs use to justify filtering p2p and whatnot, and it's completely wrong. You pay for a speed of X, then X is the amount of bandwidth you should be allowed to use. If you're not, that's fine, but doesn't change the fact that those that do are perfectly within their rights to do so. If your ISP doesn't want you to use the bandwidth, they shouldn't be selling it to you. What you use it *for* is irrelevant, they shouldn't even *know* what you do on the interwebs, that's your problem, the RI/MPAA's, and the law enforcement's if it comes to that. Not theirs.

Re:Very simple solution

[Wavebreak (1256876)]

If they throttle you, and CLEARLY tell you so before you buy, then that's fine. I wouldn't buy a service from them if I had a choice, but it's fine. What I have a problem with is selling you bandwidth and not delivering. And resorting to the "you're degrading other people's service" bullshit. You use what you pay for, it's that simple, and if it hurts others then it's the bloody ISP's fault for making promises they can't keep. Not yours.

Re:first post

[XenoPhage (242134)]

If you're getting charged because you're using more, you're exactly the kind of person that is overusing current resources. Switch ISPs, go to a hosting company, or find another way. You're making the experience less for the rest of us that only moderately use our connection and raising our rates. The low-use users are subsidizing you.

Overusing resources? Wait a minute here.. Last time I checked, Verizon is selling me a DSL connection capable of 3 Mbps down, 1 Mbps up. They advertise it as such, and I am billed for this service. Am I not allowed to use the service I'm paying for? Should I only be using 1 Mbps down and maybe 100 Kbps up? Or, perhaps I should only be using it in bursts, 3-5 seconds per burst with a suitable wait interval in between. Kind of how the typical web browser works.

Unfortunately, I can't seem to come up with a good car analogy for this.. Hrm..

At any rate, my point is this. If you're going to advertise the connection as 3 Mbps, or 10 Mbps, or even "Up to" XX Mbps, then I should be allowed to use it. I am, after all, paying for it.

That said, let's look at the pay for play model. Once upon a time, the industry decides to move to a pay for play model. So, the masses move to this new model and continue using the Internet as they always have. The "normal" users are happy to see their $60-70 per month bill drop to $45-50. The "barely use it" crew drops down to $20 per month, the base fee that covers the first few gigs of transfer per month. And then there's the hard-core crowd. The jump from $60-70 per month to well over $100 a month. And, after realizing it's costing them an arm and a leg, they either find a new provider, or curb their habits.

The problem is, the ISP suddenly realizes, to their horror, that profits have gone down! Well then, time to increase the rates we charge customers. And over the course of the next few months, or even the next year or two, the normal crowd returns to $60-70 per month and the hardcore crowd gets totally screwed and starts to diminish. The only ones really saving here are the "barely use it" crowd that really doesn't need the connection in the first place. And, the normal users end up getting royally shafted when they suddenly get infected, or have to download SP12 for Vista..

So be careful what you ask for. Per-bps payments are great... For the ISP.

Re:

[SleepyHappyDoc (813919)]

If you wanted a car analogy, I bet there's one in people complaining that their car doesn't complete trips in the least possible time given the distance (55mph should do 550 miles in ten hours exactly, never mind red lights, gas stops, bathroom breaks, etc.).

Re:

[RobBebop (947356)]

What about a car that has a speedometer which goes up to 75 mph, but really alternates between 120 mph for 2 minutes and 30 mph for 8 minutes throughout your trip, so that the effective MAX speed is 48 mph?

Highway travel (analogous with video streaming/downloading) would be downright impossible because the minimum speed would be insufficient for that route.

Re:first post

[shaitand (626655)]

'And that, of course, is why most Slashdotters don't want pay-as-you go pricing: They'd be at the top of the usage list and so would pay accordingly.'

You make it sound as if it is some sort of crime to actually use the connection we pay for. We already pay a fair rate for the bandwidth we use. If you don't want to pay the price of your connection because you fail to fully utilize it you should downgrade.

Re:

[Matimus (598096)]

You make it sound as if it is some sort of crime to actually use the connection we pay for. We already pay a fair rate for the bandwidth we use. If you don't want to pay the price of your connection because you fail to fully utilize it you should downgrade.

I don't know about your provider, but mine only offers the option to downgrade the bandwidth. If I could downgrade the amount of data transfered per month, it might work for me. Unfortunately, that isn't an option.

It isn't a crime to use the connection, b

Re:

[MobyDisk (75490)]

Maybe, maybe not. I bet the porn/music/pirate software downloaders use way more than that average Slashdotter.. Oops, wait, did I just describe the average Slashdotter? I thought they all bought indie music on CDs, used open-source, and wrote code all day?

Nevermind... the parent was right. Slashdotters would be the major bandwidth users.

Re:But that would mean...

[zappepcs (820751)]

I was going to ask what the hell they were thinking to ask that question. Flat rate is the only way to make the Internet usable. If you go back to the $2/min charging scheme, the use of the Internet will drop to nothing again. The things that makes the Internet useful are:

1 - cheap pc hardware
2 - flat rate ISP charging
3 - net neutrality

If you change the balance of any of these, usage will drop followed shortly by usefulness of the Internet. If say you want to try tiered pricing, ok, take today's bandwidth usage for heavy users, call that standard rate. Add usage weighted tiers to that. Reasoning is this: ISPs are NOT going to downgrade or upgrade infrastructure just to add pricing games. The tier would have to be based on aggregate usage, so you pay current rates up to a standard max. throughput cap, after which you are charged a per/GByte tax. If the tier kicks in too quickly, people will stop using it. Metering must be verifiable, and in the end, no matter what you do it will turn out to be the same mess for billing and sales that wireless phones are now.

If you want to throttle people down on bandwidth and charge them less, go ahead. Some won't care, and will take it quickly. If you want to charge more for bandwidth that you have already sold at a given price... well, good luck with that.

Re:

[Shados (741919)]

My ISP does partly that right now (I'm not in the US though). I pay something like 35$ a month, I get 20 gigs at 7mb, with an explicit warning that since its a shared cable, during peek hour I may go down. When it is not peek hour, I cap out my 7mb if the place I'm connected to can output it (which obviously makes sense), during peek hour the worse I've seen (from a reliable server... let say downloading something from java.sun.com) its like 350kbyte/s. If I go over my 20 gig, like 1 cents per megabyte.).

If

Re:

[Overzeetop (214511)]

Sorry, but people cost money. Lots of money. That's why tech support sucks. Think about it, a good tech support person who knows his/her stuff will run you $80k+ per year including overhead if you live outside of a major metro area. So for 80k you're going to be in for about $20 for each 1/2 hour help desk call. If you price your service competitively, the low end will be $20/month baseline charge and 80% of your customers will never use more (my unlimited 768k at home is $17.99, fwiw). Since your help de