I will cut back on my usage before I pay exorbitant rates for broadband. All of the providers are making good money now with flat rates, there is no call for metered rates except for price fixing within the industry.

Just look at cell phones, they use to hand out big, thick notebooks with rates for when you call and where you call. I avoided cell phones as long as possible until I could tell what it was going to cost when I made a call without consulting a book.

Overtaxed…?

Seriously? The infrastructure is overtaxed instead of already paid for and needing to be used?

This pisses me off. I went with Teksavvy because they had no contracts and it was $32/month for 200GB of bandwidth. Two days ago i got an email saying that because of this CRTC decission, the 200GB plan and the unlimited plan are being scaled down to 25GB/month but you can buy 120GB “insurance” blocks for an extra $15/month.

Their tone seemed like they didn’t want to do this to us but they have no choice, and they also provided some online petitions and automated emails to be sent out to the higher ups to voice our disdain with them forcing this on the others because clearly they can’t keep up and compete with the smaller providers

I don’t think is about preserving anything, since big studios and labels will have to pay for it too.

The ISP’s are just asking to stall all innovation on the internet.

This is a blatant money grab plain and simple.

I do want to remind you that you’re also paying for lower latency than the shipped flash drive.

If they can charge for going over, then we should get prorated for being under.

$1/GB

200GB cap, Only use 100GB, then they should pay me $100.

If I sign up for their service and I use 0GB, then they should pay me $200.

I can see making a business model out of this.

“How about throttling the speed of users who hit their caps, instead of outright charging for every bit?”

As mentioned earlier by another poster, here in Australia every ISP uses metering. However, almost every ISP does as you suggest which is throttle the connection when the cap is reached, normally to 64Kb/s, with no extra charges.
It stops you doing practically everything except email and casual surfing, but at least you don’t get bills of $500+ at the and of the month (I’m looking at YOU, Telstra).

> As long as there is competition and choices

…of which there aren’t really any.

$62/month for 265GB isn’t that bad a deal.

That may seem okay to you, but in Europe and Asia it’s ludicrously expensive. I’m in the UK and I pay ?18 (~$29) for 24mbit. It’s unlimited, subject to a FUP and isn’t traffic shaped or throttled in any way. I don’t know what the FUP is because I’ve never reached it. At most I’ve downloaded several terabytes in a month.

I have friends in other European countries who think my connection is abysmal and insanely expensive. They probably wouldn’t believe you guys pay as much as you do for so little.

But then, I guess price goes down when you can choose from hundreds of providers…

I would say that the credibility of someone with 20 years of experience and a great deal of expertise (I’ve been working on Internet engineering since it was called the ARPAnet) is much greater than that of someone who won’t even sign his name.

well said

Thank goodness for that. Hopefully they’ll all come to their senses before it’s too late.

By the way, the word you use for failing to keep something is spelled “lose”. If you “loose(n)” something you make it “less tight” or “less confined”. HTH.

I wont sign my name because I work for a MAJOR national provider here is the US and I can assure you that the ISP’s we provide connections to, do NOT pay ‘per Mbps of bandwidth’ at all. I deal with fiber customers every day who have 100M to 10Gig connections and I can assure you they pay one price each month no matter if they use it for an hour or run it full steam 24/7.
You must be getting gouged by your provider or you just like the thought of being able to gouge your customers.
Go blow smoke up someone else pipe.

No, I’m quite sure Metered Bandwidth doesn’t protect Netflix.

Swing and a miss.

That is until you hit your cap…

All wholesale Internet connections are billed by capacity – that is, monthly according to the number of megabits per second they can carry. And the rates are often quite high, even for the big guys. (Cellular providers, for example, may pay as much as us – $100 per Mbps per month – to reach a tower, especially in a rural area.) Folks, don’t let these liars deceive you. Being an ISP is tough work, and bandwidth isn’t cheap except in major urban centers. We would really like to charge a flat rate, but it’s getting to the point where those flat rates would have to be more than most users will pay. So, we may be forced to usage based pricing simply to give consumers a reasonable monthly charge.

presidents* and thanks for the info

@10 your right in short term, but in canada since 2006 when this began 3 million have dropped using net accounts.
at HUGE high costs already of say 50$ per account you get the hint, it’s nto making them money it’s losing them a lot and this will kill more then 3 million it will erode it down even further they know this. ITS what they want and if you think poor people will buy your cable offering BCE your stupid to retarded.

you can only restrict a highways use so muchbefor epeople just stop paying the toll and either go around that toll highway or just stop using it. When your flight over it is already too expensive ( cable tv lets pretend) they do not return to the old model.

Consider this too.
I have already downloaded enough that i could live without the internet. Yea same old shows a bit would get boring but i have thousands a books and novels too. Many like me just dont see a 25GB cap as any value and would just leave so you get massive net losses in revenue. BCE whom ever had this idea your fired….even rogers allows teksavvy ten megabit unlimted….

I’ve had discussions with friends and made some comments on blog posts that posit a similar idea, but with respect to piracy. The content providers, having grossly missed the boat, are essentially forcing consumers to make up for their failure to recognize the potential of the internet, pushing upon consumers the responsibility for protecting their products on the industry’s behalf, and desperately trying to stave off irrelevance. The industry is in the decline phase of its life cycle, but is kicking and screaming to push the end point out indefinitely.

Written by Brett Glass in 2008
“Some parties claim that we should meter all connections by the bit. But this would be bad for consumers for several reasons.”
http://www.brettglass.com/FCC/remarks.html

Capitalists, Corporatists, out for a cash grab! They sit in Ivory Towers, and dream up Shiite like this to justify their very existence, while the arm-pits of the world suffer their indignations. The famous example is the French revolution. Now we see Egyptians in the streets, suffering from the same capitalist, imperialist mentality. As the number of unemployable – an uncounted factor in the U.S. mounts, the danger of the same sort of revolt grows. The proletariat, the peon, the patriot, the plebs, are strapped now, and their pockets are only so deep! As the natural resources dwindle, the Capitalist cannot make the dramatic kind of gains he is accustomed to, so he turns in his great greed, and inflicts austerity on the proletariat!

I think this is what they mean by stifling innovation.

Math to the rescue. $100+ for 1Mbps. Let’s get ambitious, and say it’s $200 for a 1 Mbps. That’s $20,000 for 100 Mbps.
60 seconds * 60 * 24 * 30 = 2,592,000 seconds per month.

2,592,000 * 100Mbps = 259,200,000 Mbits of data, or 32,400 GB’s of bandwidth for 20K.

32,400 GB’s * $32/25GB = $414,720 profit, assuming you have enough subscribers (1000 ish). That’s not bad, even if we go for your hyper-inflated $200 per Mbit, and take out infrastructure maintenance. It doesn’t sound like you are going broke any time soon.

Flat rates assumes all users are average. We know this is not true. Why should I subsidize large bandwidth usere (or vice verso)?

agreed….not many economists on the board

I can use the phone while watching cable 24 hours a day and the bill will remain a flat rate.

Let’s be careful that we’re all using the same terminology.

MBPS is a datarate. ISPs and such do tend to buy lines by capacity per second. That’s exactly what 100Mbit or 10Gigabit lines are and why they’re described as such.

Those lines cost no more or less to operate if they are 1% utilized or 99% utilized.

Paying ‘per Mbps’ is not the same as paying per megabyte of data transferred and we shouldn’t confuse the two.

Just ran into this article: What is a fair price for Internet service?

“To find out what is a fair price, I contacted several industry insiders. They informed me that approximately four years ago, the cost for a certain large Telco to transmit one gigabyte of data was around 12 cents. That?s after all of its operational and fixed costs were accounted for. Thanks to improved technology and more powerful machines, that number dropped to around 6 cents two years ago and is about 3 cents per gigabyte today.”

I’m actually a bit surprised. As I said in this thread, data transfer has no marginal cost in itself, only the cost for the capacity plus other operational costs. But at $0.03/gig when all factors are averaged out, the fixed and operational costs are even lower than I was expecting (I was thinking along the lines of $0.05-0.15/gig).

For the record, I’m not truly against metered billing in itself. I simple have exactly 0 faith in ISPs to use it fairly, as they never have in the past. Were one of two conditions met, metered billing would be tolerable:
1. There is a free market in ISPs with strong competition to keep rates low. In the US 15% of the country has exactly 1 (broadband) ISP to choose from, and another 75-80% has exactly 2, which is not sufficient to guarantee strong competition.
2. Data rates are regulated by a neutral organization lacking regulatory capture. As it is now, rates are entirely unregulated; yet I can’t say I’m inclined to trust people like the FCC or CRTC to be unbiased even if they did regulate rates.

It’s great to hear from you and see what you’ve been up to. In your blog I feel your enthusiasm for life. thank you.