Keep Internet costs as they are ? Pay as per use ?

[Hawk]

It is currently being debated, but I don't know much about it yet.

Net-Neutral I believe means we pay for it just like we do now.

The other side is that we pay according to how much we use it.

The first I heard about this was on Glen Beck, He was against net neutral. Today I heard Tom Hartman, he was for it.

Educate me.

What's your opinion.

[thebattle]

I feel that it has its pros and cons but i think the main issue would be for those kids that spend 15hrs+ a day playing video games im sure the parents of those kids would appreciate that factor.

[Colton]

If 'usage' = 'bandwidth', and not 'time', then those 'kids playing games 15 hours a day' will use less bandwidth than someone who watched a few youtube videos or visted a few image heavy sites (myspace), or listened to a song or two online,.

That would have to be it, because of regulation. If it was 'time', I'd just get the fattest pipeline you can get and download as much shit as possible in a few minutes, then people on standard cable or dsl who browse for a few hours could overpay since theyre not really using as much bandwidth.


Yeah, it would have to be bandwidth based. And most online games take less than 5k/sec to play.

Lets do some really shitty math here.

Lets say the game does take 5k/sec to play.
A normal youtube video is approx 15mb (4-5 minutes long)

15x1024 (kb per mb) =15360
15360/5 (at same rate, 5k/sec) = 3072
3072/60 (to get minutes) = 51.2
So it would take some kid almost an hour of playing video games to catch up to the bandwidth you used watching your youtube video


Hah, sorry, gamer defensive stance.

[timemoney0]

Why should we have to pay at all ? I think a bill should be introduced in Congress for Universal Internet Coverage, We , as Americans, should demand this of our govenment. After all, just think of the revenue they'd make on advertising. Legalize gonja, run the internet from the Oval Office, and no more econoomuc crisis. So there!

[bfoust]

we're lucky we can even access the internet, since it was originally invented for military use

[f.sciarrillo]

we're lucky we can even access the internet, since it was originally invented for military use

Don't let Al Gore hear you say that ..

[JackANSI]

Some heavy, some light, average it together, price the next customer to fit the average, pad your profits, and pay for upgrades. Revise your average every contract period. Ta-da! You're comcast

Turning to a pay-per-use for everyone system would increase the companies profits at first till people started watching their usage, but in the long run people would just use the internet less IMO. This would hurt everyone.

I blame cell phones (and the outdated long distance phone industry) for the internet providers wanting the internet to be more pay per use and under their control. Look at how much money you can make on pay per use vs. cost in the cell phone market. $1.99/MB on <$.03/MB cost.

Also I think most people would just do their browsing primarily at work (more so than now), which would hurt small businesses in lost production and higher costs (be it to block access with software or professional help, or in bandwidth charges).

It might also raise the prices on the internet goods since newegg and amazon would be paying a premium for bandwidth. And companies like AT&T want to be able to charge more to handle that traffic than say, looking through their AT&T wireless online store or the online stores they want you buy from.

They (being telecoms/ISPs) also want to be able to charge more for video vs text vs the location the data came from and block data they don't want to carry without anything the people who are using the data can do about it.

Think about it, these internet companies are carrying VOIP traffic instead of making a killing on the long distance charges, they want to stop that or at least make their money on it.

Now imagine that there isn't anything you can do about it except pay for it beyond what you are paying already...

[Ron]

The only good thing I can see happening with a pay per use system would be the dramatic drop in spam emails.

I'm not sure how a pay per use system would even be implemented. I can see how your local ISP could charge you for bandwidth, but what about remote servers?
In addition, if I send you an email, would I get charged or you? Wouldn't they have to charge the bandwidth to the sender who initiated the email? Then what if I send 80 bytes of data that initiates a remote machine to machine transfer of 100MB? It would end up being a major cluster****.

[JackANSI]

Good point there.. what if a SYN flood from a bot net causes your server to make a many GB in replies? What would the unsuspecting bot owner get charged with? These bot nets are where a good portion of spam comes from, and probably be the tactic the spammers would primarily use in a pay per use world.

Yes, there are a TON of bot clients out there that do this... If you download a crap load of .ISO and .EXE files from P2P and think its not infected, you might want to check your idle internet usage sometime

Might force everyone to be responsible about their internet usage and computer maintenance.

Could be a good thing to a point


But I know the backbone ISPs that are really heavily pushing for this don't want it that fine grained that they can directly charge you for each email. They would leave figuring that up to person they sold the big pipe to. Which if they want to stay in business would need to upgrade or increase their abilities to bill and monitor.

The backbone providers want to charge a premium to connect a place like youtube to the internet, they wouldn't directly charge the user, they would charge youtube.

They also really want to be able to block or reduce the priority of traffic they don't like. VOIP, P2P, competing media outlets, etc.


Being a free country and all, and a capitalist one, some might think that makes perfect sense that they should be able to use or not use their network how they want.

Don't forget that many taxpayer dollars went into the development of that system and now private companies want unregulated control of that system. If they get it, they should at least pay back (with interest) the government for all the grants, bonuses, and tax breaks they got...

[timemoney0]

Yeah.......Kinda like the drug companies

[f.sciarrillo]

I can also see comcast charging through the nose for this. They will probably just throttle the bandwidth more than normal *Glad I am using opendns with them*.

I wonder how this would affect voips as well ?? Look out prices, they are rising.

[JackANSI]

I can also see comcast charging through the nose for this. They will probably just throttle the bandwidth more than normal *Glad I am using opendns with them*.

I wonder how this would affect voips as well ?? Look out prices, they are rising.

Prices would rise while costs wouldn't move at all.

And if you think these big companies would turn it around and invest in larger infrastructure, you'd more than likely be wrong. The miles and miles of dark fiber out there tells me this. And the fact they wouldn't have to invest because usage would level off or drop

opendns won't do anything for you. Except allow opendns and marketing firms they choose to monitor what sites you go to

[JackANSI]

The FCC is moving in the net neutral direction for sure, thankfully.

I just hope they don't screw it up and try and make some compromises to keep big ISPs happier.

[f.sciarrillo]

opendns won't do anything for you. Except allow opendns and marketing firms they choose to monitor what sites you go to

Actually I have unlimited bandwidth with them. Where was with comcast there is a limit. That is what is nice about not using the comcast dns servers

[JackANSI]

opendns won't do anything for you. Except allow opendns and marketing firms they choose to monitor what sites you go to

Actually I have unlimited bandwidth with them. Where was with comcast there is a limit. That is what is nice about not using the comcast dns servers

You're not getting how this internet thing works, unless opendns is also selling broadband connections... Then your physical connection is maintained by comcast and opendns leases it from them. but I just checked their website and couldn't find any broadband packages.

DNS servers don't regulate traffic directly, or carry it. DNS is for resolving a name to an IP address, nothing more. Basically just tells your computer where to look to get information using a human readable form for us humans and a machine readable form for the machines.

The information is transferred over your ISPs network and thats where you would get charged. For the delivery of data.

Think of it like your cell phone, you can talk about anything you want (like opendns, dns, http), but you pay for minutes while you use them to talk.

unless there is some seriously funky stuff going on with comcast limiting the number of dns request per host.

[Ron]

Exactly. You can use any available public DNS server, Windows networking setup allows you to specify a specific DNS IP address and an alternate. Like Rob said, a DNS server is just a big lookup table that tells your machine what IP address a particular domain name resolves to.

Verizon has quite a few public DNS servers and Cisco does too, (at least Cisco used to).
If you are paying opendns just because you don't want to use Comcast's DNS servers, you're wasting your money.

Comcast doesn't have a hard bandwidth cap, but does loosely enforce a 250GB/month limit. They will contact you first and tell you to get a real life and quit downloading so much porn.

[f.sciarrillo]

it is a free service .. No money involved. I found that with comcast my speeds aren't all there and I am limited. Ie; when I download torrent files, with comcast I am not able to download more than five or six at a time and they are throttled in bandwidth. With opendns I am able to download as many as I want and my bandwidth isn't limited ...

going through comcast dns servers, they can control what you use and how you use it. Which is the point I am getting at .. I just find this to be an easy alternative what I do. Plus it is free, so how can I complain ?

[hicksjd9]

Pay per MB/minute would be such a step backward.

I get so angry at the cell phone company for their pay per MB service. Dumbest thing ever. The unlimited service is overpriced as well, so I protest by not purchasing (or using) either service on my phone.

In addition, TAXES on cell phone and land land-line service are outrageous. I HATE THE PHONE COMPANY AND SCREW THE GOVERNMENT FOR THEIR 13% (or more) tax on my phone bills.

I wish I could live without that stuff, but it's like air to me now.

[Naga]

All it boils down to is that the internet companies are probably gonna give their politicians of choice a few bucks out of their pockets to double and triple up on the money their interests are paying for

It's just another idea to put money in their own pockets. A lot of people would probably keep a better watch over their internet usage, but you can still bet your buck that there are a lot of people out there who will be paying more for internet if they go to pay per than what they pay on a monthly scale. Course then again, for those old folks who barely use the internet, it'll actually be a good idea

The only thing I wonder is, if a company decides to offer both a monthly plan and a per-use plan, how much would they increase the monthly plan's fees over what they currently are? Think that one over

[Ron]

it is a free service .. No money involved. I found that with comcast my speeds aren't all there and I am limited. Ie; when I download torrent files, with comcast I am not able to download more than five or six at a time and they are throttled in bandwidth. With opendns I am able to download as many as I want and my bandwidth isn't limited ...

going through comcast dns servers, they can control what you use and how you use it. Which is the point I am getting at .. I just find this to be an easy alternative what I do. Plus it is free, so how can I complain ?

That has nothing to do with DNS.

[f.sciarrillo]

it is a free service .. No money involved. I found that with comcast my speeds aren't all there and I am limited. Ie; when I download torrent files, with comcast I am not able to download more than five or six at a time and they are throttled in bandwidth. With opendns I am able to download as many as I want and my bandwidth isn't limited ...

going through comcast dns servers, they can control what you use and how you use it. Which is the point I am getting at .. I just find this to be an easy alternative what I do. Plus it is free, so how can I complain ?

That has nothing to do with DNS.

Then what is it? That is the only thing I can think of .. And before you say it is my settings on the sofware, it is not. They are the same as it was for comcast

[JackANSI]

it is a free service .. No money involved. I found that with comcast my speeds aren't all there and I am limited. Ie; when I download torrent files, with comcast I am not able to download more than five or six at a time and they are throttled in bandwidth. With opendns I am able to download as many as I want and my bandwidth isn't limited ...

going through comcast dns servers, they can control what you use and how you use it. Which is the point I am getting at .. I just find this to be an easy alternative what I do. Plus it is free, so how can I complain ?

That has nothing to do with DNS.

Then what is it? That is the only thing I can think of .. And before you say it is my settings on the sofware, it is not. They are the same as it was for comcast

Try going back to the comcast DNS once and see if it returns. I remember not too long ago seeing an article in the news that comcast was going to give throttling a shot on a market-by-market basis (as a trial only). Maybe they had your area under their thumb for that trial..

The other explaination is the torrent hosters found a way around comcast throttling (by mixing up what ports are used more than likely) right around the time you switched DNS servers.

DNS is for name resolution only. Thats it, no more. The only speed improvements you can possibly get are quicker responses to a name resolution. But once you have the resolved name, you don't need to ask for it again.

Comcast's routers are what handle all the throttling and quota stuff. They determine, based on a multitude of factors, what traffic goes where, how fast, and if it makes it there at all. Usually at the point your traffic hits the router, the name you typed in your browser is only encapsulated in the packet header for use at the server end (since the IP address was already found using DNS).

Most P2P network tools I've been able to look at closely (granted it was 5 or 6 years ago) don't even use named addresses and use IP addressed top to bottom so DNS isn't involved at any stage. I know torrents do sometimes, but thats a one or couple time deal depending on how many sources (and once those address are stored in your local cache there is no need to ask the DNS server again).

But if what you say is true, comcast has one wicked screwy setup that is scary insecure.

[lonewolf]

I'd like to see the internet remain as free trade/unregulated as possible. There was a similar debate about this topic around the turn of the millennium.

Translated: If an ISP wants to charge by bandwidth usage, its their business to grow or kill. Although it may show short-term gains, the market would sort itself out and resolve into more competition. It may make the true cost of bandwidth more transparent to the general public and result in yet more competition between ISPs. With more predictable profit margins, more companies may enter the ISP business, creating yet more competition.

As long as Moore's Law still applies to communication tech, the "production" cost of bandwidth will always decrease. With the prospect of losing customers, the ISP will need to pass some savings on to the consumer. The ISP will agressively seek ways to cut bandwidth costs and the process would self-perpetuate.

On the down side, I would be concerned about local monopoly and/or collusive price-fixing between ISPs. This is the only area where there should be any regulation or criminal penalties. Also, if most ISPs changed over all at once, there would be a certain amount of fee shock from customers for a period of time. There would eventually be a backlash.

As far as DNS? That's usually provided by the ISP and has no effect on bandwidth costs.

[f.sciarrillo]

That has nothing to do with DNS.

Then what is it? That is the only thing I can think of .. And before you say it is my settings on the sofware, it is not. They are the same as it was for comcast

Try going back to the comcast DNS once and see if it returns. I remember not too long ago seeing an article in the news that comcast was going to give throttling a shot on a market-by-market basis (as a trial only). Maybe they had your area under their thumb for that trial..

The other explaination is the torrent hosters found a way around comcast throttling (by mixing up what ports are used more than likely) right around the time you switched DNS servers.

DNS is for name resolution only. Thats it, no more. The only speed improvements you can possibly get are quicker responses to a name resolution. But once you have the resolved name, you don't need to ask for it again.

Comcast's routers are what handle all the throttling and quota stuff. They determine, based on a multitude of factors, what traffic goes where, how fast, and if it makes it there at all. Usually at the point your traffic hits the router, the name you typed in your browser is only encapsulated in the packet header for use at the server end (since the IP address was already found using DNS).

Most P2P network tools I've been able to look at closely (granted it was 5 or 6 years ago) don't even use named addresses and use IP addressed top to bottom so DNS isn't involved at any stage. I know torrents do sometimes, but thats a one or couple time deal depending on how many sources (and once those address are stored in your local cache there is no need to ask the DNS server again).

But if what you say is true, comcast has one wicked screwy setup that is scary insecure.

I'll do an experiment here and let you know the out come

[songsmith]

Comcast doesn't have a hard bandwidth cap, but does loosely enforce a 250GB/month limit. They will contact you first and tell you to get a real life and quit downloading so much porn.

From experience, I take it? --->JMS