[heresy]

Pray that this mindset does not infect your ISPs and tempt them to introduce traffic caps.

Having your users be paranoid that they're going to go over their cap and get absolutely reamed for overage charges is not exactly how you build an advanced, high-bandwidth content delivery system.

Even less are going to be "data pigs" that use a trivial 1.5GB after such a change, high prices guarantee that.

Silly buggers.

[TeHCrAzY]

It doesn't have to work that way. Internode, an ISP in Australia (for consumer connections) will monitor your usage, send you notices on how close to the cap you are, and then shape you back to slightly faster than dial-up speeds. YOu then have the option of checking your email (slowly) and maybe chatting, or purchasing a datablock and becoming unshaped within the hour. (I semi-regularly purchase blocks during months of high usage when getting close to 90% of the cap to avoid slowness). It's fair, and everyone pays for what they use.

[heresy]

Internode is a bad example, they are the best of the lot in Australia/NZ, as I know from personal experience :)

I suspect how it will work out if it happens in the US is rather more like how Telecom NZ or Vodafone operate (Telecom used to be mainly owned by SBC/AT&T).

Where either you don't have the option of a data block past a certain upper bound, and get shaped to 64kbits for the rest of the month (Vodafone).

Or you have the option to remain full speed but the overage charge is out-of-this-world insane, something like 2c/MB. That's right, per MB. 10GB over cap is $200 added to your bill. Ouch.

[loewenskind]

Is their line running at near capacity at all times? If not it seems not only not fair, but silly to have their network lines sitting mostly idle for the last week of every month.

[snagage]

Rules and pricing needs to be simple and consistent. Even if it was possible to implement QoS to broadband, it would be awfully confusing for both the consumer and the telco. Why should someone in a busy area be capped when they reach the limit, while someone somewhere else can keep going? It might make sense from a technical perspective, but not at a consumer level.

If the telcos are not price gouging, there shouldn't be a problem with data caps. Stop being a cheapskate!

[loewenskind]

Your point seems to contradict itself.

>Even if it was possible to implement QoS to broadband

It most certainly is possible.

>Why should someone in a busy area be capped when they reach the limit

What limit? I'm arguing that there shouldn't be a limit. You just provide a guaranteed minimum bandwidth. When the line is under-utilized the connected clients can use as much as they can. When utilization goes up traffic is shaped down as far as needed to handle it.

With data caps then people in your less busy areas will find themselves completely offline toward the end of the month while the line sits idle. Why?

[TeHCrAzY]

You would have to ask them that question to get the full answer, however I have never experienced bandwidth issues in the 5 years+ I have been connected.re. Idle pipes at the end of the month, this is likely mitigated by each customers billing cycle starting when they first use the service.

[neilc]

Pray that this mindset does not infect your ISPs and tempt them to introduce traffic caps.

I don't think this would be such a bad thing -- just as you pay on a per-unit basis for the water and energy you use, paying per unit of bandwidth consumed seems entirely reasonable. In an unlimited plan, typical users effectively subsidize a small minority of heavy users.

Of course, the real problem is the outrageous charges for when the bandwidth cap is exceeded, as well as the lack of proper notification for when you run over your limit.

[loewenskind]

Bad analogy. If you waste 50,000 gallons of water by leaving your water hose on while you're on vacation, that's 50k gallons that the community no longer has [1]. The only way someone downloading e.g. 5gig of data in a month can cause anyone else to not be able to download is if the line is running at 100% capacity 24/7. The only possible impact the person could have is making communications take a little longer during the times he's bursting. But this is easily fixed by bandwidth caps and burst limits.

Do you have any evidence that lines are getting anywhere close to 100% utilization perpetually?

[1] I'm simplifying of course, but this is the basic idea.

[jsz0]

On big access networks you have to stay far away from 100% capacity. 60-75% is the minimum where you will start seeing the negative effects of channel contention. On a cellular network sharing data & voice you also have a good amount of bandwidth reserved for real time services (phone calls) to factor in along with all the PHY/MAC overhead. There's probably some QoS overhead to calculate in also. I'd say there's a very good chance AT&T is running into channel capacity problems (further evidence being dropped calls/failed calls when devices have good signal. That means they're requesting a real time service and there are simply not bits left over to grant it. Try again in 5 seconds and it works because bandwidth has been allocated/reserved for voice calls)

[loewenskind]

If they ever drop calls from capacity problems then something has gone horribly wrong (either tech wise or provisioning).

But my point was that bandwidth is (or should be) renewable. If you do a download when everyone else is doing one your traffic should be getting shaped down to the provisioned minimum until there is room for it. This will make the traffic slower during those times, but there are going to be times where nearly no traffic is on the line.

[heresy]

That's somewhat reasonable, but ISPs are not reasonable. They cannot say no to the free money from overage charges, and the rate-limiting "solution" lets them defer infrastructure spending almost indefinitely.

It hardly ever works out in a reasonable manner.

I've lived in 3 countries with traffic caps, and it almost always ended in tears, and made me rather bitter about the whole thing.

I still have a copy of my $900 internet bill somewhere.

And rate-limiting would be great if it was to something reasonable like oh, I don't know, minimum 512/1024Kbps? Surfing at dialup speeds is virtually impossible for a household in this day and age, and that's what the majority of them drop you down to.

Great, "20MBps" internet. That you can use for 5 days, and then its 64Kbps for the rest of the month, sucker.

[chc]

Metered usage would be fine as long as the price weren't usurious. $5/GB with tethering? Sure, meter my usage. But AT&T is charging $20 for literally nothing all — they don't provide anything extra for the tethering option — and that's on top of already high prices ($1/15MB with DataPlus). Metering should not be an excuse for gouging.