My point is that data transfer caps and bandwidth caps are equivalent. They really are, just compute the number of gigabytes it’s possible to transfer per month by multiplying the MB/sec rate by 1000*60*24*30.

A little overselling is good business and not an issue. The ISPs can manage how much each customer can transfer by limiting their speed in MB/sec. If they only have capacity for 3GB/sec for a neighborhood with 500 customers, then they can sell 6MB/sec unlimited service and never utilize it all, or sell it as 8/10MB service like they actually are and occasionally a few people might not get the full 10MB if everyone’s using their lines at once.

Everyone’s happy and nobody has to worry about how much they’ve downloaded that month, or if using YouTube that day is going to lead to service being cut off.

Data transfer based caps retard the evolution of the web, while bandwidth based caps, as long as they’re in the broadband range, have much less of an effect.

Yeah, I’m aware that is how it works in reality.

So thinking about this a little bit more. Is it the ISP’s who pays for 10lines but sell 20lines worth of access, hoping that at any one point in time there will only be 10lines worth of utilisation, is the real issue?

I get that the amount of data going over a network costs the same as none. And that what is being paid for, is the physical hardware in buildings and in the ground. There is a practicality part of this that starts to pop up though. If the sum of ISPs customer connections bandwidth = 10,000 and the ISP made sure their network could handle 10,000, that would be a large bill and completely impractical to implement.

So then ISPs came up with another way to make it cost effective, give people a data limit. That way they don’t need to supply 100% bandwidth 100% of the time and are able to offer a great product at significantly reduced costs.

Now combine my previous post with this one :)

There is nothing wrong with the US ISPs or any other offering “unlimited” plans, as they are only unlimited up to a certain speed they offer. That’s the same as they’re being billed, it makes perfect sense to bill the customer that way. $x/mo cost to run a 1000GB/sec line becomes a $y per customer charge for each 8MB/sec portion of it. It doesn’t matter how many gigabytes are pushed over it over the course of the month, only that there’s enough capacity for each customer to use it when they want it.

Your 24MBPS line should cost $150 per month because you’re getting a 24mbps portion of their network which has a certain capacity in bits per second, not because you won’t transfer more than 100GB over that line per month. The cost is the same to everyone involved if you transfer 100GB, 200GB or 0GB.

I think somewhere along the line people are forgetting the fact that it costs money to host your site. If you want dedicated 100Mbps connection that you can utilise 100% of, that is going to cost you a fair amount of coin. The network providers are going to supply it if you pay for it.

Then we go to the other side, the consumers of these sites. If I want to have highspeed/lots of data, then I pay for it. The telco supplying me figures out how much to charge and works everything out so the network is able to deliver what they are selling.

Everywhere in the network someone is being charged. The network doesn’t have “free spots”. The only problem that I see is the US model of $xx / month = unlimited internet downloads at as fast as you can get, this is what isn’t sustainable and going to cause issues. The problem is the revenue generated from customers is not greater then the cost to supply the service. AU’s data limits make sense, I’m paying for data+speed – ISP needs to make sure it is operating properly to maintain the product.

It is all about supply and demand. I want 100GB @ up to 24Mbps, then I pay $149 / month. Now if the ISP is counting on me not to use what I pay for, then it is not going to work out in the long run. Products will be revised and the ISP do what it needs to, to fit with what is sustainable.

Internet usage has increased steadily but not at an amazing rate each year, and the backbone has grown with capacity at an even faster rate. Everything but the last mile has been fiber for a long time, and that fiber is capable of pushing data at far faster rates than we’d ever need.

And the edges are fine too. The big cable operators have finished rolling out DOCSIS 2.0 in most major areas of the country, and are already rolling out DOCSIS 3.0. The upgrades cost them something like $20-120 per customer on average, which is nothing when they make that back in a month or two in subscriber fees. With DOCSIS 2 and 3, they’ve got more capacity on the edge than any of the plans they sell, no issue there.

All the while, the ISPs’ costs are pretty much fixed as far as transit. Most of it is peered with other ISPs anyway.

There’s simply nothing to worry about here…

Sounds like we’ll be able to finally go into web 3.0, ROCK ON!