How broadband pay-per-use will change web apps

http://gigaom.com/2010/12/12/predictions-2011-if-pay-per-use-comes-to-broadband-then-what/

by panarky • 16 years ago

23 27 16 years ago

Maakuth• 16 years ago

Some of these seem actually well thought out, but some of them feel pretty unrealistic. I don't think most of these are actually going to happen. My guess is that the bandwidth tiers will be somewhere pretty high so that it only causes problems for big downloaders. Most "Web 2.0" (think Google Docs) apps are already pretty modest with their bandwidth usage - you can use them pretty well even in mobile data networks, so I don't think that's going to affect people's behavior that much. I'd say streaming video and bittorrent would suffer the most from these caps.

warren_s• 16 years ago

I doubt much/any of this will come to pass, speaking as someone who has always had to deal with download limits, it's really not THAT big a deal.

We here in Australia have been subject to tiered broadband pricing since day 1 - I feel pretty comfortable in saying that whatever pricing US carriers come up with, it will be much lower than here in AU, simply because you don't need to haul most of your data thousands of KMs via undersea cables. My ISP has a range of ADSL2+ plans from AU$50/month for 150GB data through to AU$120/month for 1TB data. (There's also an entry level 30Gb for $30 plan for your grandparents)

Waywocket• 16 years ago

>(There's also an entry level 30Gb for $30 plan for your grandparents)

I managed to find a real unlimited connection (here in England) so I might be a little out of touch with broadband allowances, but I think 30GB is on or above the high end of what you can get here in most places without spending a mint. Of course, they all label it as 'unlimited', which apparently is legal despite being very blantantly fraudulent advertising.

Hell, T-Mobile recently sent me some blurb trying to persuade me to replace my ADSL with their 'unlimited'* mobile broadband.

* Fair use policy applies. Bandwidth is limited to 3GB/month.

SupremumLimit• 16 years ago

I think whether it's a big deal or not depends on the limits. In New Zealand I only get 30GB/month for $60, and that is quite annoying.

panarky• 16 years ago

Maybe the biggest effect of metered usage will be more emotional than rational.

Most people don't appreciate that 30 minutes editing Google Docs consumes 100x less data than a 30-minute Skype audio call. And the Skype call consumes 100x less than streaming a Netflix movie.

With flat-rate pricing there's no urge to conserve. But when there's a cap or penalty pricing people will almost certainly use less of everything.

bhickey• 16 years ago

There's a really easy solution to all the noise ISPs are making about bandwidth.

If a provider wants to sell me a 384kbps line, they should offer 120 gb per month. If they want to advertise a 20 mbps line, they should sell me 6.3 tb per month. If they can't provide the capacity, sell me a slower line and I'll be happy when I get bursts of speed. Regional monopolies should be compelled to have transparency in pricing.

wmf2• 16 years ago

That kind of "transparency" would likely require US ISPs to reduce advertised speeds 10x overnight, enraging millions of customers.

quanticle• 16 years ago

Isn't that a good thing? I mean, if the ISP can't actually satisfy the demands of every user at a given level of service, then why is it allowed to advertise that level of service at all? Its a bit like a sports stadium saying, "Yeah, we can seat 50,000 people, provided they don't all want to see the same venue."

InclinedPlane• 16 years ago

To a very close approximation ISP customers do not fully use their bandwidth. It seems silly to change pricing structures to cater to a tiny minority (less than 1%).

More transparency in regard to caps and utilization would be good, but I don't think metered billing would be the end of the world (provided that it generally approximated what people are paying today).

dedward• 16 years ago

There seems to be a large misconception about the nature of the internet. It's not a circuit switched network. When you buy "20mbps" - why on earth would you think you were buying 20mbps to EVERYWHERE - that's just not feasible.

There is not enough core bandwidth to maximize every edge connection out there -there never will be. That's the nature of packet switching and shared connections.

Should ISPs have to be more honest, and more flexible about what types of services they offer? Consumer expectations are changing, and ISP offerrings should reflect that.

I think so - net neutrality is important (for the internet as a global community in and of itself - not just for the "consumer"). The internet grew to what it is based on cooperation - lets' not stop now.

whiletruefork• 16 years ago

The problem with metered internet billing is that the service isn't treated as a utility like power and water are. There would be no restrictions on service providers violating customer rights - and they generally have a defacto monopoly wherever they operate (a single provider to a building, etc).

toast76• 16 years ago

Almost the entire article is BS.

We've ALWAYS had tiered broadband in Australia, and none of these things have happened. The one exception is Peak/Off-Peak usage. Yes, we schedule downloads after hours...but now with every ISP offering fairly healthy download caps, even that is a non-issue for most of us.

It hasn't made me want to "buy" instead of "rent" video content. Peer to Peer is not sending us all broke. We aren't all caching our data at our front door. We don't expect every website to suddenly start compressing their JS scripts. We don't all project our monthly usage. And I most certainly aren't concerned about streaming.

Most of the article is nonsense. The only REAL implication is that people who don't need to 500Gb of data, don't pay for 500Gb of data. Everyone else can.

Probably the only side-effect of the limited downloads is certain ISPs offering "quota free" downloads. E.g. Bigpond customers can download Bigpond movies without being charged for the data. IINet has streaming TV, also without data being counted. But these are nothing more than "value adds".

Dramatize2• 16 years ago

You said it better than me :)

greendestiny• 16 years ago

The other important quota free value add that is fairly unique to Australia is ISP run game servers. Most of the major ISPs run large numbers of free game servers. These are historical benefits though, I think we're reaching the kind of bandwidth costs where people are less concerned with whats on the quota free list.

Dramatize2• 16 years ago

Here in Australia we've always had data caps. You have to take this in to consideration every time you use a streaming service (still never stopped us).

jdvolz• 16 years ago

Am I the only person who thinks we're getting screwed in the US? I mean, I keep reading about how Asian countries have internet that is 100x faster than ours after we dumped billions of dollars into helping them upgrade their networks (which they didn't do), and now the big internet companies want to put restrictions on our use of broadband, or in effect, charge us more for the same crappy thing we've always gotten.

Maybe I'm being emotional, but maybe it's just bullshit.

pmjordan• 16 years ago

I don't know about broadband, but as far as I can tell, you are absolutely getting screwed on mobile phone and internet rates. They're so much cheaper in much of Europe, and probably even more so in Asia. Competition is so fierce that calls here tend to be cheaper than the termination fees the network operators pay each other for routing the calls to one another. And they're still making massive profits.

I don't know why this is, by the way. A big problem is that the frequency bands are a finite resource which rarely makes it back onto the market once sold. The other issue is that a network with limited geographical coverage isn't as competitive; these two facts caused the "land grabs" when the GSM and 3G frequencies were being sold in various European countries. New players haven't joined the fray outside those periods; LTE doesn't seem to have introduced any new players, probably because the markets are now oversaturated and well served. The infrastructure investment would be immense. There are new resellers who rent access to the big networks, though.

Still, most countries seem to have 3-5 national operators, and competition among them is alive and well in many cases. No idea why it's stagnated in the US. You'd think one of the operators would slash prices to try and eat away market share from the others.

trafficlight• 16 years ago

Density plays a big role in the cost of the last mile deployment. In urban Japan you can reach thousands of customers in a square mile as compared to a few hundred (or less) in typical suburban America.

Though that still doesn't account for places like New York costing just as much.

Groxx• 16 years ago

There's a small amount of legitimate drain for US communication companies: the US's long-tail of users (for getting any / fast access) is extremely long because people are so much more widely distributed than in Europe / Japan. China tends to go all or nothing, it seems, so they simply cut off their tail.

But yes. We're getting screwed. Because we keep paying for it. How could enough people boycott it to actually force a change?

danw• 16 years ago

One place where this is the case is when developing Kindle apps using the SDK. From https://kdk.amazon.com/:

"Active content applications that are smaller than 1MB and use less than 100KB/user/month of wireless data may be offered at no charge"

How apps are priced takes into account their data usage over their lifespan.

te_chris• 16 years ago

I pay $120 a month for 40 gigs of admittedly quite fast internet here in NZ. WTF is this guy talking about. Bloody americans

How broadband pay-per-use will change web apps

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