funny that nobody argued opposite: all the new services are primarily streaming/hosted and otherwise “not here”. New crop of tech solutions requires crap-ton of bandwidth. So caps prevent those companies from doing ripping off customers in other areas. How un-Republican is that? They are getting in the way of enterprises making a living! So the most Republican thing to do would be to let foxes watch the henhouse. Ask ISPs to regulate themselves so that “everybody”'s (and I mean every enterprise) happy. In other words getting in the way of this proposal is very much just “polid’ticking” trying to undo what dems are doing regardless whether it’s actually a conservative thing to do or not.
Ironically, he picked a metaphor that doesn’t support his point at all
If you go to a Starbucks, it’s like you’re buying a set amount of data. You don’t expect unlimited refills, because that’s not how the transaction works - you buy the coffee by volume. It’s yours with no strings attached
If you go to a restaurant, you buy access to coffee. I do expect unlimited coffee, I would be livid if they charged by the cup. However, you do not get to expect to take any coffee with you - you’re using their “infrastructure” to hold your coffee, and you don’t get to walk out with the cup. You don’t get to share it with the restaurant or the table - you’re burying a personal “subscription” to coffee for the duration of your stay
Coffee, like data, is effectively free at a restaurant. They must pay for the infrastructure, but after that each additional pot only costs a few cents. They must make at least 1 pot a day, and a human can’t safely drink more than a couple pots in a day (which is an obscene amount only the heaviest caffeine addicts could tolerate). You get it one small cup at a time, if you bought a second cup you could double the rate of coffee delivery… They might even just give it to you for free, because it costs them so little and they want you to come back
You purchase access to coffee for a time, or you purchase coffee by volume. They shouldn’t be allowed to charge for both - maybe if you’ve drank 14 cups and others want coffee, they should be given priority during lunch rush as the rate of coffee production is limited by infrastructure
It’s actually a pretty decent metaphor, it just doesn’t support his argument at all
I completely disagree that it is a decent metaphor. Unlike coffee, internet data usage is entirely nebulous to mostly everyone outside of the tech sphere. The metaphor serves as a way of misrepresenting a widespread ignorance for a fundamental understanding.
If we wanted a decent metaphor we’d have to compare data usage to something like health insurance. Well you see, you pay for your rate of coverage at these visits per year but also have to pay your deductible that might or might not be used off routine…
In the end if we want to simplify internet expense it is this: ISPs charge way more than they need to and search for ways to charge more to maximize profits without improving service.
The problem with health insurance as a metaphor is they have real costs… The insurance company does pay out real money every time you use your policy, and that makes it easy to muddy the issue
Let’s take the coffee metaphor further. They say “you can drink up to 400ml of coffee, past that we’ll add an extra fee. But don’t worry, no one does that”. Then they refill your coffee without saying a word, they won’t tell you how much you’ve used unless you ask, and they won’t stop refilling it unless you tell them not to
The reason the coffee metaphor is great is because, while it’s a real thing, it costs them basically nothing. Just like the extra electricity to send your data costs basically nothing
The cost is the number of coffee pots, the labor, the restaurant - all things that don’t change in cost no matter how much coffee you drink
Coffee works because the nature of the transaction is the same
ISPs have real costs too
Infrastructure costs. Their costs don’t change with how much data you use, they change with how much data they can throughput
That simply isn’t true, the costs are small and arguably negligible but they do have increased costs on more data usage.
Like coffee. It might cost them 1¢ a pot… It might cost them $1200 up front and $60 a month for their coffee makers
Not like coffee. Your average person simply can’t consume coffee beyond the average at any meaningful rate. We both know that internet usage can go from close to nothing to 100TB of data depending on the user.
Internet isn’t like coffee, it’s not that simple.
You have data caps on your broadband connections in the US? Does your phones have rotary dials too?
I want what you have so badly, I hate our ISPs
It is insane. Even worse is we (taxpayers) gave them money to improve infrastructure and they put it in their pockets instead.
And also you know we INVENTED THE INTERNET AND PAID FOR THEIR CABLES.
What the fuck do they even do? Sell data? Like this should just be a section of the government but everyone is obsessed with the private sector holding shit
I pay double what I did in the city for half the speed, but thank fuck I’ve got no data caps or I’d not have moved here, and I’ve made a decent Internet plan a hard requirement on ever moving
The 6 TB of torrents I’ve uploaded in the last month appreciate it, I’m sure
Every place with free coffee refills knows there’s a reasonable upper limit to what one person can consume.
And if they exceed it, it’s coffee. It’s dirt cheap (just like landline data)
Yeah sure, then why is it that my entire bare metal server leased from OVH costs less than my Internet connection, and is fully unmetered access too.
I pay for a data rate and I should be able to use the full amount as I please. If we paid for the amount of data then why are we advertising speeds and paying for speeds?
If you’re fine with living in a datacenter where the direct connections to Internet backbones are available, then sure. It does cost money to install and maintain fiber/copper lines to individual residences. Of course running a new ethernet cable across an existing building designed for running cables is going to be dirt cheap.
Yes but that isn’t changed by the amount of data used. There is no cost to supply per kb supplied, only a cost to maintain the equipment that governs the speed of the connection.
Here’s an analog example. If the city you lived in started charging you more for the water to come into your house faster as well as charging you for the amount of water you use. Obviously you should pay for the amount of a finite resource you use but the speed at which you acquired that resource should be limited only by the physics of the water transportation system.
Data on the other hand, is not a finite resource. There is no limit to the amount of data one can acquire given endless time and energy. So the only way to bill for that becomes the speed at which you acquire the data. You pay for the data speed and that funds the infrastructure to supply that speed indefinitely. End of story. The only reason data caps exist is that they want to charge more money for you to use less bandwidth so they can sell that bandwidth to other people. When what should really happen is, they should invest in higher bandwidth capacity and sell that to their customers to return on that investment.
Either supply me infinite speed and bill me for the amount of data used or supply me infinite data and bill me for the bandwidth. Not both.
I’m not arguing against charging based on bandwidth speeds. You’re right the total data transfered doesn’t really make a difference.
My point is that even just charging per Mbps, internet will always be cheaper within a data center. Just like water utility service is going to be cheaper next to a freshwater river than in the middle of the desert. There’s millions of dollars in equipment you’re effectively renting to get the internet to your house from the nearest datacenter. Your OVH server in comparison only needs maybe 1 extra network switch installed to get it online, and you’re in a WAY bigger pool of customers to split the cost of service to the building.
My point was really that data can’t be that exensive even with including transit fees like Cogent and Level3, because I can use TBs of bandwidth every month and OVH doesn’t even bother measuring it.
If my home ISP gives me a gigabit link, yes I pay for all the cabling and equipment to carry that traffic. But that’s it, I already pay for infrastructure capable of providing me with gigabit connectivity. So why is it that they also want me to pay per the GB?
In Europe they can provide gigabit connectivity for dirt cheap with no caps, they don’t even bother with tiered speed plans there, how come my $120+/mo Internet in the US isn’t sufficient to cover the bandwidth costs? It’s ridiculous, even StarLink doesn’t have data caps.
But somehow communities with crappy DSL that can barely do 10 Mbps still have ridiculously low data caps. It’s somehow not a problem for most ISPs in the world, except US ISPs, the supposedly richest and most advanced country in the world.
Data caps would be fine if they weren’t colluding a monopoly.
Then everyone could freely switch to providers offering unlimited.
The pandemic exposed the lie that ISPs need to cap data because of infrastructure limitations. We all went to WFH with no issues on the infrastructure.
What an ass backwards take
