Internet Data Caps

[leadeater]

 

Even more important, the notion of comparing Internet data usage to gasoline or electricity is deeply flawed. Oil and electrical companies incur costs for every gallon of gas and kilowatt hour of electricity generated. The same cannot be said of every gig of data provided by a broadband Internet service. The customer service script advised agents that they should never say the plan is about “congestion management” because “it is not,” Comcast acknowledged in the memo—which, again, wasn’t supposed to be seen by the public. The bandwidth provided by Comcast is not a scarce resource like gasoline; there’s plenty of capacity, and it’s not like Comcast is losing money on customers hogging the data.

 

 

“So reject the myth that Comcast is simply trying to cope with limited bandwidth,” Harvard Law professor Susan Crawford wrote last week at Medium in a brutal, comprehensive takedown of the company’s data-pricing scheme. “Even Comcast isn’t pretending that’s the case. This is a business strategy. It has no empirical relationship to the cost of delivering a megabyte or 500GB of data to your home.”

 

Source: http://time.com/money/4143682/comcast-data-caps-internet/

[braneopbru]

kWh and GB are amounts, Mbps and W are rates. Why should ISPs not charge for the amount when every other utility charges in that way?......

 

.....It's not a complicated argument. I honestly don't know why you are so convinced I am wrong.

 

A Watt is most definitely NOT a rate. If you want to speak about a rate when referring to electricity, you will refer to an Ampere. The literal definition of an Ampere is "one coulomb per second". When it comes to hydro, you are not billed for a quantity of electricity, you are billed for a quantity of "work done".

 

 

Watt is a measurement of power. There is no equivalent in networking that you could possibly compare it to. One watt is equal to a current draw of one Ampere at one Volt. When your hydro provider bills you for a 1000 kWh, they are billing you for [power used] over [time].

 

At periods of peak demand, hydro grids will run out of the capacity to generate more electricity FAR, FAR sooner than they would ever run out of the capacity to transmit it. On the other hand, bits can instantly be generated at will with an unlimited supply. Any ISP will run out of the capacity to transmit bits long before their supply runs out.

 

The hydro system and the internet are fundamentally opposite in their issues in regards to congestion. I don't see how you can reasonably make an argument that they should be billed the same way.

 

It is a simple argument, I don't see how you fail to see how you're wrong.

[leadeater]

A Watt is most definitely NOT a rate. If you want to speak about a rate when referring to electricity, you will refer to an Ampere. The literal definition of an Ampere is "one coulomb per second". When it comes to hydro, you are not billed for a quantity of electricity, you are billed for a quantity of "work done".

 

 

Watt is a measurement of power. There is no equivalent in networking that you could possibly compare it to. One watt is equal to a current draw of one Ampere at one Volt. When your hydro provider bills you for a 1000 kWh, they are billing you for [power used] over [time].

 

Thanks for pointing this out more clearly than I have. Trying to shoe horn in comparisons between electricity and networking is hard enough at 4am in the morning let alone them being fundamentally incomparable, should never have tried too.

 

If a reputable source as Time who state data usage has no cost is not convincing enough then I have no idea what is. If the people who own and operate internet networks say data has no cost and do not charge each other for it then the consumer should also not be charged.

 

A business is only allowed for charge for a good or a service. The internet connection and it's speed is the service, the data is not a good. Charging for data is very close to fraud. Because there is such a wide spread misunderstanding of data networks this practice has been allowed to continue, comparisons between other utility services is evidence of the misunderstanding.

 

Further confusion in the matter is that in other computer technology areas data is a good and has a cost, data storage being the prime example. Whether it is local storage or cloud storage data has a true and meaningful cost.

[skywake]

A Watt is most definitely NOT a rate. If you want to speak about a rate when referring to electricity, you will refer to an Ampere. The literal definition of an Ampere is "one coulomb per second". When it comes to hydro, you are not billed for a quantity of electricity, you are billed for a quantity of "work done".

You know I can't take what you guys are saying with any seriousness if these are the points you're trying to make. Watts and Amps are both rates and the equivalent in networking would be Mbps. There's no argument here. In terms of energy the Joule is the one that's equivalent to Mbps. Utilities charge you for the amount of Joules you consume, not the rate. And Joules = Watts * Time. Being pedantic about the difference between Amps and Watts is a moot point, especially when V is relatively constant.

 

J = W * s = A * V * s

MB = MB/s * s = Mbps * 1/8 * s

 

And the the comment earlier about treating ISPs as if they're utilities? Then sure, I have no issue with that. What makes you think that I have an issue with that? If ISPs don't like the rules that would come with that then maybe they shouldn't be charging per unit. But personally I think they should. I'll also add that I'm not ok with Comcast's approach of which I'm only now reading. I've said from the start that it should be a bandwidth cap after which you are shaped to a slower speed. With my ISP that's 256k on ADSL and 8Mbps on Fibre.

[Donut417]

@skywake, I get your point. However, what about services like Netflix, Steam and many others. This would destroy their business models. Who would be responsible for regulating ISP's? The Feds? The State? Are they going to have to put a physical meter on your house? Maybe its time for those useless guys in DC to pass laws outlawing any bans on Municipal broadband. 

 

The only reason they are capping connections is because they bend you over a F you on the TV portion of your bill. Companies like Netflix give the people what they want and for a much more competitive price. There this little thing called being innovative, maybe they should start doing that. 

 

I would also like to say, that part of the issue is the consumer. I remember Fox and Cablevision battled it out a few years back. When Fox wanted double what Cablevision was paying them. They told Fox to go pound sand. Then Cablevision customers started whining and crying. When they should have stood behind Cablevison. Too many of consumers are idiots. If enough TV providers told the networks to F off, then they could possible negotiate better rates and give us lower prices. 

[braneopbru]

You know I can't take what you guys are saying with any seriousness if these are the points you're trying to make. Watts and Amps are both rates and the equivalent in networking would be Mbps. There's no argument here. In terms of energy the Joule is the one that's equivalent to Mbps. Utilities charge you for the amount of Joules you consume, not the rate. And Joules = Watts * Time. Being pedantic about the difference between Amps and Watts is a moot point, especially when V is relatively constant.

 

J = W * s = A * V * s

MB = MB/s * s = Mbps * 1/8 * s

 

And the the comment earlier about treating ISPs as if they're utilities? Then sure, I have no issue with that. What makes you think that I have an issue with that? If ISPs don't like the rules that would come with that then maybe they shouldn't be charging per unit. But personally I think they should. I'll also add that I'm not ok with Comcast's approach of which I'm only now reading. I've said from the start that it should be a bandwidth cap after which you are shaped to a slower speed. With my ISP that's 256k on ADSL and 8Mbps on Fibre.

Watt is not a rate of electricity USAGE, nor is it a rate of anything. Watt is a derived unit used to indicate an amount of work done. That is inarguable. I'd expect better from an Australian, considering that all your vehicles have their engine output numbers listed in kW. Are you also going to argue that horsepower, which is use to indicate the exact same specification, is also  a rate?

 

There is no way to even begin to compare hydro and data. It is, at it's core, impossible. If you take a rate of X Mb/s over Y time, you have Z usage. Simple. With electricity, there is not just the variables of rate over time; it is rate x pressure over time. There is no equivalent to voltage in networking, so it's a comparison that simply won't work.

 

But in the end that's all irrelevant. We're talking about usage caps as a solution to network congestion.

 

What you're ignoring and has been pointed out to you is that data caps do NOTHING to prevent congestion. Congestion doesn't happen at the end of the month when all of the customers on a node have used up most of their cap, it happens any time that there are too many users with high bandwidth connections trying to use their full available bandwidth at once.

 

Nobody is saying that there shouldn't be high bandwidth options available, we're saying that offering lower priced options with lower bandwidth with do more for controlling network congestion than data caps will. 

[leadeater]

@skywake

Refer back to my post with the quotes from Time magazine website and the original source link. It both states you can't compare electricity companies and internet service providers and that data caps are not for bandwidth control. In those amounts of high data caps it is purely revenue generation, nothing more than that.

 

Your point about many users watching Netflix, which is relatively low bandwidth usage, adds up to a very large amount of bandwidth is true. Nothing wrong with saying this and no one is going to disagree on this point. The problem is this type of usage shows a trend very quickly and lets the ISP know how much local bandwidth they require, their own equipment, and how much international higher tier traffic they also need. If every user watching Netflix only had ADSL2+ 8-16 then the average load is the same and there is no cost difference, what is different is the maximum possible.

 

What a contention ratio means is that for every Mbps sold to a consumer there will always be a certain amount of of real bandwidth that actually costs the ISP money. They will always make sure the capacity is there as they on sell this. It is the bandwidth that costs money, causes congestion and is the figure used for capacity planning. You will never see any talk of total data usage written down or talked about in network planning meetings.

 

Going back to the business internet plans, the reason why these cost more is they have lower contention ratios compared to the consumer connections so for each connection sold there must be a higher amount of real bandwidth required to service them, this by its nature cost more money as it requires more of what costs money.

 

Bandwidth is planned for and provisioned in advance, it must already exist to be used. Data usage is a reflection of used bandwidth after the fact, this is why it is not useful as it does not give enough information as to how much bandwidth is required over the network as a whole. If you add up all the consumers monthly data usage and translate that down to a Mbps figure it will be astronomically different to the actual bandwidth they require and have.

 

The problem we are seeing now is the real usable bandwidth capacity is being over sold and each single consumer connection is too high in relation network uplink bandwidth. These two things are the real cause of network congestion and significant reduction is service quality to the consumer. As contention ratio decreases the margin for error decreases with it.

 

By limiting the highest bandwidth plan offering to a lower figure and also offering more plans of different speeds with no data caps there is less incentive to by the highest possible plan if the ISP works with the consumer to help give them an informed purchase. There is no profit loss in doing this and actually gives a higher quality of service and customer satisfaction.

 

As infrastructure is upgraded the ISP can start to offer higher speed plans to those that actually need it or are prepared to pay for it. What should not happen is over selling of high speed plans they cannot actually service, which is happening now as nobody knows what they actually need so go for bigger numbers because that is better right?

[braneopbru]

.....The problem we are seeing now is the real usable bandwidth capacity is being over sold and each single consumer connection is too high in relation network uplink bandwidth. These two things are the real cause of network congestion and significant reduction is service quality to the consumer. As contention ratio decreases the margin for error decreases with it......

My ISP (cable company) just started offering gigabit down, 50 up over DOCSIS 3.1.

 

Recently I was getting about 80% packet loss, so I called to report an outage and the tech I was speaking to told me that there around 200 houses on my node. Granted, they have fiber to the node, but how fast it that fiber, actually? What's going to happen when myself and two of my neighbors get the gigabit service and the three of can use up more bandwidth than every other house on the node combined?

 

Spectacular things are what's going to happen.

 

I just have one last comment before I give up on this topic. This one point should be enough to make the real point of data caps painfully obvious. If data caps had anything to do at all with fair usage and keeping congestion down, then ISPs wouldn't offer to increase or remove your data cap for a "small fee".

[leadeater]

@skywake, @braneopbru (in case your interested)

 

Food for thought to illustrate why data usage is completely useless. Take an example of 1 million users using 300GB in a month and equate that down to a Mbps. Just to be clear there is not even close to 1 million users in Australia that would use 300GB in a month, some do use more but the overwhelming majority don't break 50GB.

 

300GB/m = 0.981 Mbps

 

0.981 x 1,000,000 = 981Gbps.

 

The cables that service Australia and their bandwidths are:

• Southern Cross Cable: 3.6Tbps (12Tbps capable)
• Pipe Pacific Cable: 2.56Tbps (10.24Tbps capable)
• Telstra Endeavour: 80 Gbps (1.28Tbps capable)
• SEA-ME-WE 3: 960Gbps (Not stated but likely ~9Tbps)

http://www.submarinecablemap.com/

 

I know I have missed some cables but this more than illustrates my point. If 981Gbps represents much more than what is actually happening and using your data used over a month mentality then why are these much higher bandwidths required? Also this is only for international bandwidth, traffic internal to Australia is much more common due to content distribution networks which are used by most websites (Youtube, Google) and Steam. Only bandwidth matters, data is just a by-product of the process.

 

Edit: Remember getting these bandwidths cost money, to upgrade these bandwidths it cost money. To use these cables you are charged for bandwidth. See how it all comes back to bandwidth and not data usage. By not pushing data across these cables it is equivalent to wasted expenditure. Once an ISP has paid for something they have an invested interest in recouping the cost. They do this by selling faster plans to attract new users and then turn around and discourage you from using it with a data cap because they over sold it.

[leadeater]

Recently I was getting about 80% packet loss, so I called to report an outage and the tech I was speaking to told me that there around 200 houses on my node. Granted, they have fiber to the node, but how fast it that fiber, actually? What's going to happen when myself and two of my neighbors get the gigabit service and the three of can use up more bandwidth than every other house on the node combined?

 

My best guess would be either a 4/6 core fibre using OC-48 or 2/4 core fibre using OC-192. It could even be an Ethernet type. I don't know much about US ISP infrastructure and it is quite different to what is used here and how it is setup. I'd say what ever is used it's more likely OC-48 as it is cheaper but I have no idea how many cores per cable are there and lit.

 

I don't get to see the specifics of what cables are laid etc and I'm more interest in the technology of what is used. Also my experience is in corporate networking and setting up the customer side of internet connections.

 

4 x 2405 Mbps = 9620Mbps or 6 x 2405 Mbps = 14430 Mbps

2 x 9511 Mbps = 19022 Mbps or 4 x 9511 Mbps = 38044 Mbps

 

I have to say 80% packet loss must have hurt, did they say it was caused by too much utilization from the 200 connections? If so your node sucks and RIP when 1Gbps connections go live.

[skywake]

I'm going to make my last post here because it's clear this is going nowhere.

 

@braneopbru

1. Watts are a rate of power transfer. Literally Joules per second where Joules are an amount of work. When you have a car of a certain amount of kW it means it can transfer chemical energy into kinetic energy at that rate. If Watts are equivalent to anything in a data network it would be bps not B.

 

2. Who said anything about all at the same date? For quotas to work properly everyone's quota should reset on different dates. My ISP sets the quota reset to be on the end of your billing period. A billing period that is set to a particular date of the month when you sign up. I signed up on the 20th, my quota resets on the 20th. Other people have their quota reset on different dates. With a lot of users this evens out to the point where it's not an effect at all. There will always be someone on the first day and last day of their billing period.

 

@leadeater

You seem to be under the impression that I'm saying everyone will use a flat rate over the month. People don't use their data like that so obviously you're deriving those numbers incorrectly. Of course there's more capacity in overseas links than there is "quota". That's because people use their data during peak times and even then not all of the time. You're also ignoring the other traffic that is sent down these links, redundancy for when a link goes down etc, etc. It's not as simple as adding it all up and dividing.

[Donut417]

My ISP (cable company) just started offering gigabit down, 50 up over DOCSIS 3.1.

 

Recently I was getting about 80% packet loss, so I called to report an outage and the tech I was speaking to told me that there around 200 houses on my node. Granted, they have fiber to the node, but how fast it that fiber, actually? What's going to happen when myself and two of my neighbors get the gigabit service and the three of can use up more bandwidth than every other house on the node combined?

 

Spectacular things are what's going to happen.

 

I just have one last comment before I give up on this topic. This one point should be enough to make the real point of data caps painfully obvious. If data caps had anything to do at all with fair usage and keeping congestion down, then ISPs wouldn't offer to increase or remove your data cap for a "small fee".

 

Are you on Comcast's Docsis 3.1 trials? Because thats the only cable company I heard of doing upgrades to Docsis 3.1 

 

Also its a well known fact that all ISP's over sell their nodes. They expect that most people will not use the bandwidth they are paying for. 

[braneopbru]

Are you on Comcast's Docsis 3.1 trials? Because thats the only cable company I heard of doing upgrades to Docsis 3.1 

 

Also its a well known fact that all ISP's over sell their nodes. They expect that most people will not use the bandwidth they are paying for. 

 

No, I'm in Canada. I'm with Rogers. It's not available in my area right now, but I was told that it should be in a few weeks. I'm in a fairly new subdivision so it's should be fairly simple and quick for them to do the upgrade.

[leadeater]

You seem to be under the impression that I'm saying everyone will use a flat rate over the month. People don't use their data like that so obviously you're deriving those numbers incorrectly. Of course there's more capacity in overseas links than there is "quota". That's because people use their data during peak times and even then not all of the time. You're also ignoring the other traffic that is sent down these links, redundancy for when a link goes down etc, etc. It's not as simple as adding it all up and dividing.

 

Well yes clearly I am aware of that and as I said it was an illustration. Your assumption of large usage of Netflix causing the most amount of traffic on an ISP network and the total data usage over a month being evidence of this is not correct, or large amounts of data usage over a month at all. Netflix only added to what was already there when it was introduced, there was very little capacity left when Netflix went live which was the real cause of the problem. These cables are also shared with New Zealand so what we do has a direct impact on Australia too.

 

Unless there are significant numbers of home users using 10TB+, in the thousands, their total data usage has no meaningful impact on the available bandwidth on the network compared to someone using 50GB. A 10Mbps connection used 24/7 can transfer just over 3TB in a month. There is absolutely no way a 'heavy' data user in Australia costs the ISP any more than a 'light' user, people with high connection speeds actually do. 

 

Most people only use the internet for an hour or two a day. This by its very nature is burst traffic so the higher their data connections the high the bursts are. Each individual data link and networking equipment can only handle so much bandwidth. Much less than you seem to be aware of. Going out and giving huge data connections to every home in Australia or New Zealand that is significantly more than what they truly need is counter productive and worse for everyone.

 

I only want you to understand how internet bandwidth is actually charged so you can demand better levels of service from your ISP's and start to abolish the idea of data caps being used just like we are here in New Zealand. You should not be paying more money per month for a higher data cap, you should not have data caps at all.

 

You are ignoring every top ranked country in the world who don't charge for data usage.

You are ignoring a whole sale data bandwidth purchaser who explains exactly how charging works, CloudFlare who deliver this very site to you.

You are ignoring a Time article telling you that data doesn't cost money and doesn't do anything for bandwidth management (with high data caps).

You don't have to believe anything I say, this is the internet after all.

 

I am not interested in anything other than making sure you are informed so you can demand better from your ISP's. Australia is one of the worst countries in the world for internet bandwidth pricing and fair market competition. This will never change if you continue to accept that status quo.

[Donut417]

The real point here is this. Data caps are in place to get back the revenue from Cord Cutters. Plain and simple. Comcast does not want to compete with Netflix, Amazon, hulu and others. So they cap the data so you will buy a TV subscription. 

 

The reason for the cord cutting? Well Media companies keep raising prices. Then your cable company raises prices as a result. Its simple economics when you think about it. If it costs Comcast more money to provide Fox content then they will charge you more money to make up the difference. Because of Netflix and services like it, many are getting the content at a lower cost. As a result they have decided paying for a TV subscription is not worth it.