What Kind of Alternate Business Models Could ISPs Use? 360
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... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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This is essentially the model used in OZ now, only you prepay for a block of GB as part of your monthly stipend, then your either capped or pay an excess useage charge depending on your ISP. It hasn't helped and didn't lead to lots of investment in infrastructure - we still have some of the worst broadband facilities and the most con
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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.
That's only true in the absence of competition. Some people are fortunate enough to be able to choose between cable modem service, DSL (where they can choose between multiple ISPs [qwest.com]), 3G wireless [vzw.com] from their cell phone provider, satellite [hughesnet.com], and other wireless services [sprintbroadband.com], and maybe even broadband over powerlines [wikipedia.org].
who cares about business models? (Score:5, Funny)
Where's the A material? Even Poniez is looking good at this point.
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Re:who cares about business models? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:who cares about business models? (Score:5, Insightful)
Finally I'm ready to not get suckered on April Fools and they sucker me by canceling it. Bastards.
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Re:who cares about business models? (Score:5, Funny)
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A. The joke is that there are no jokes, and the joke's on us for debating on every story whether it is a joke or not
or
B. The joke is all the Anastasia 'Russian bride' dating service ads all of a sudden (given the large number of AdBlock users, that joke would be lost on most).
If the latter is not a joke, then I do fear Slashdot's new ad policy
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my guess is that either...
:>
A. The joke is that there are no jokes, and the joke's on us for debating on every story whether it is a joke or not
or
B. The joke is all the Anastasia 'Russian bride' dating service ads all of a sudden (given the large number of AdBlock users, that joke would be lost on most).
If the latter is not a joke, then I do fear Slashdot's new ad policy
You think that the Reiser story might put geeks off the whole Russian romance bit?
Split Solution (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Re:Split Solution (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Why go back to rental? (Score:2)
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$/MB (Score:5, Informative)
What customers want. (Score:2)
People want to be reworded for using less and not punished for using more. So if you have a Fixed Price internet Raise it up only a small amount a few dollars a month and set the point so 80% of the customers are paying less or equal per month and 20% are paying the same and perhaps a bit more, but not so much that it will put a shock to their budgets.
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I want flat rate. But then again I'm the only customer that matters to me.
how about "focus on quality not market cap" (Score:2)
How about invest in infrastructure to help your long term business increase? Spend a little more to make something better to get an exponential benefit out of it in the long run. I seem to remember somewhere saying that to retain 10% more of your current customers will be more profitable than adding 25% new customers due to all the additional managerial and other costs invol
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Basically, why not bundle (OMG) ponies for free with each broadband subscription too? Sounds great to me!
I doubt it would work (Score:2)
As soon as a change is made, the laws of eqaulibrium will kick in and what is sure to happen is the ISP's will adjust their pricing to either maintain (or probably increase) their take.
That won't happen if people start paying less.
Pay as you go (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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This is really about one of two things. Either people just want to pay less for internet access. Or this is about people who don't utilize their connection getting annoyed that those who do so are getting more value than they are.
As for those who want unrestricted access, how about switching ISPs? Its not a perfect wor
Plenty of case studies... (Score:5, Interesting)
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? (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:3, Insightful)
Deliver Promises. (Score:4, Insightful)
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ISP can't say one thing and deliver another (Score:2, Insightful)
If they can't deliver at the speed they sell it as, then they shouldn't be allowed sell it as the higher speed.
The fact is that they want to be able to promise one thing and then reneg on the delivering the goods. Why do we let them get away with this?
Graham
Taxes (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
-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 (Score:3, Interesting)
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 (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Profit = Profit either way (Score:2)
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?
Well, it depends who you ask. If you're the provider (ISP) and you've established your business model getting $X profit on an "unlimited" setup, you'd probably set up your pay-per-use option to end up getting you the same. It sounds like I'm being sarcastic, but I'm not.
Accountability? (Score:3, Insightful)
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: (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Hmm.. (Score:2)
Raise the contingence ratio to 50:1
Then claim BS things like "We provide the pipe, not that the pipe can be filled". and
"We reserve the right to do anything to the downstream and upstream as we see fit. We wrote the contract, so bend over."
Oh... Thats what they do now.
Just give us honesty (Score:3, Interesting)
Why not go over to 95th? ... (Score:3, Interesting)
Overpriced to begin with. (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
They dont NEED an alternate business model... (Score:2)
Like for example, the concept that if you advertise a certain amount of internet bandwidth, you deliver that bandwidth... not just the amount of bandwidth for the kind of protocols that THEY feel appropriate.
Peak vs. off-peak (Score:2)
My electric company offers something like this. I'm not doing it, because most of my electricity usage is relatively constant throughout
Business models are useless (Score:3, Interesting)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
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??
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A flat rate may be the more economic solution for some of us.
Re:first post (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:first post (Score:4, Insightful)
Fixed that for you.
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Re:first post (Score:4, Interesting)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Or pocket the money (Score:3, Insightful)
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
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That might not hold true if they can only charge for the number of gigs that they have actually supplied and there was demand that couldn't be met because of insufficient infrastructure. The problem under the current system is that the ISPs aren't losing potential sales because of thier failure to keep pace with demand. They get the same flat rate regardless of what they supply, tie the money directly to the am
Re:first post (Score:5, Interesting)
Why screw around with all the 'consumer' level stuff and the headaches that go with it?
Re:first post (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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 (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Very simple solution (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:first post (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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
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What about the option of borrowing wireless from a neighbor? I am a light browser who would be more than willing to go without Internet at home (with knowledge that I can go to a coffee shoppe if I *really* need something online). However, my neighbor pays for his access and doesn't mind that I utilize the connection a little bit at night or on the weekend. And the price is *much* more reasonable than paying Comcast $30-50 per month for "premium access".
Which -- I think is the entire point. $50 per m
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Nevermind... the parent was right. Slashdotters would be the major bandwidth users.
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Pay per use just disinclines people to expose themselves to culture and knowledge that they might have investigated out of curiosity but will not pay for sight unseen. This hurts society in profound ways.
The entire "pay per use" mechanism needs to go away forever. We're never going to move from a rationed society to a so
But that would mean... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:But that would mean... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Where the hell are the April Fool's Stories? (Score:2, Funny)
Has slashdot gone too corporate for April Fools stories now?? Not even one OMG Ponies story??
Geez...I usually look forward to April 1st just to see what kind of stuff shows up on /., but, this year...what happened?
Secret April Fools Joke secrets revealed (Score:2, Insightful)
CbNeal: Let's be subtle. If we don't do anything, the joke's on everyone who likes pink ponies. I hate pink ponies.
CmTaco: Ingenious. I like it.
CbNeal: Bwuahahahahahaha
CmTaco: Bwuahahahahahaha
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I guess there are still plenty of killjoys out there with no sense of humor.
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One day without the usual "discussion" on Slashdot is not that big of a deal. You really should learn to relax and enjoy, or at least tolerate, it.
Re:first post (Score:5, Funny)
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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. (Score:5, Informative)
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. (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:3, Interesting)
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
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Emergent phenomena always breaks the statistical estimates, which is what we are currently seeing with the growth in popularity of P2P sharing and so on. It's not terribly surprising that Comcast a
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Too true! Pay as you go models are better simply because they encourage the service provider to work diligently in improving its service so that you have every reason to maximize your usage of it, thus increasing the company's profit accordingly. Flat rate system work the other way, making the provider profit from providing as little as service possible, or if possible none at all.
My web hosting provider, NearlyFreeSpeech.net [nearlyfreespeech.net], is pay
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
If
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You have GOT to be kidding! You think your ISP should pay me for my dreck when you read it? Should pay a newspaper for their ad-filled dreck? What's the word I'm looking for? [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:3, Informative)