"The problem is that bandwidth is a finite shared resource (much in the way that clean, potable water is). For most of us, there's more than we would ever want or need."
Hm, the problem I think is that ISPs are over-selling their bandwidth and refusing to upgrade their lines. Even when they're allowed to have a monopoly.
ALSO! There is another problem! The ISPs are being extremely secretive about how they're throttling, the article says,
"And speaking of transparency, most of the important information in the filings was provided on a "confidential" basis and is not currently available to anyone but CRTC staff. This includes link utilization thresholds, detailed traffic growth numbers, and (most) vendors of the DPI gear involved in the throttling."
"They just need to upgrade their lines those greedy bastards!"
It sounds nice, but it doesn't solve things in the long run. Yes, ISPs should upgrade their lines and I think the government should sit on them a bit given their oligopoly or monopoly status.
So, let's say that you want to download a TB each month. Let's say that the majority of people want to download 10-50GB per month. If the ISP has no limits or tiered pricing, all of those small users subsidize your large usage since the ISP would need to get multiple T1 connections to cover your personal bandwidth usage. So, most people cost the ISP $13/mo and you cost the ISP $543 (fake numbers, but proportional calculation). Shouldn't the people using less get to pay less? Should we likewise subsidize people who want bigger homes or fancier cars?
"But they already charge less for lower speeds!" Yeah, I might not download much in terms of quantity (with my connection being idle most of the time), but I want to be able to burst to 15Mbps whenever I am actually using it. That's the wonder of a shared resource like broadband. We don't all use a lot at the same time so we can get a lot when we need it.
Would you object to usage charges in the way that electricity is metered out? Say, a connection fee of $10/mo plus $0.30/GB? That seems reasonable. It accounts for ISP costs and users that use more, pay more.
Would you support an all you can use electric plan or an all you can drive gasoline plan? Should the electric company just add more generators to accommodate me on a $40/mo plan that gives me unlimited electric as I make my house an igloo in the summer?
Yes, broadband companies should increase their capacity and we should be sitting on them to do that, but they currently have little incentive to do that since they don't get more money from more usage. Maybe do like wireless companies have for voice: usage charges at the lower levels coupled with an unlimited plan for $100 for users that know they'll need it.
> Say, a connection fee of $10/mo plus $0.30/GB? That seems reasonable
Do you realize this is three times the current cost of storage ? Metering could work if there was some actual competition. But if there was competition, we probably wouldn't be too worried about what methods specific ISPs were using.
The cities and towns (by virtue of owning the right-of-ways and not wanting ten copies of fiber) should mandate that companies laying wires provide only bulk access in terms of committed/burstable bit rate, which the actual ISPs would then use to provide consumer internet access.
First, electric companies have no competition in most places.
Second, $0.30/GB of transfer is a pretty reasonable amount. If you have a dedicated server you can get down to around $0.10/GB, but even Amazon charges $0.17/GB and that isn't expensive. And your home isn't a data center.
Storage and bandwidth have nothing to do with each other.
Electric rates are highly regulated. Also, note that electricity is split up exactly the way I described - transmission (local delivery) and generation (internet transit) are billed separately, with competition happening at the generation level.
Storage and bandwidth are related in that they show the tradeoff between local storage and streaming. 3x the price of storage doesn't feel right to me. If that's the actual cost, I certainly can't disagree. But with the price of bandwidth continually dropping, I don't think regulation or other arbitrary pricing will reflect anything like the true cost, and will be more akin to mobile text messaging prices.
I recall seeing usage metering based on something like $40/mo for 200GB, and then $0.50/GB thereafter. With an apparent fixed cost of -$60, it seems their goal is to punish heavy users, rather than selling them what they want for a fair price.
ISPs are over-selling their bandwidth and refusing to upgrade their lines.
Given that some customers have effectively infinite bandwidth demand, upgrading the network just allows them to download more without paying more. I think there's a diminishing marginal utility at work here.
The ISPs are being extremely secretive about how they're throttling
Yes, this is a problem. If ISPs adopted fair and incentive-compatible bandwidth management policies there would be no way to game the system and thus no need to keep the details secret. Unfortunately, most of the bandwdith management products on the market are crap or ISPs configure them wrong.
Hm, the problem I think is that ISPs are over-selling their bandwidth and refusing to upgrade their lines. Even when they're allowed to have a monopoly.
ALSO! There is another problem! The ISPs are being extremely secretive about how they're throttling, the article says,
"And speaking of transparency, most of the important information in the filings was provided on a "confidential" basis and is not currently available to anyone but CRTC staff. This includes link utilization thresholds, detailed traffic growth numbers, and (most) vendors of the DPI gear involved in the throttling."