NNSquad - Network Neutrality Squad
[ NNSquad ] Re: NYT: Differing views on Time Warner'sBandwidth Cap Experiment
K
Now we get squarely into core Network Neutrality issues. For example, when you order a PPV movie from your cable company, it's just bytes being pumped down the line on the same physical cable as your cable Internet connection. However, you can be sure that the bytes used to send you that film from your cable company servers won't be counted against your monthly allocation of Internet data.
So, if you had a choice of paying N dollars to your cable company to get a movie without affecting your Internet usage totals, or alternatively paying the same amount to a cable company competitor for the film, but using up a significant fraction of your monthly Internet allocation in the process, which would most people presumably choose?
--Lauren-- NNSquad Moderator
---
If qualifying traffic by throttling certain types of traffic is unacceptable - then shouldn't a strategy that quantifies cumulative traffic be unacceptable too? I mean, ISP's already charge differently for access speeds (tiers of down/upload speed), how can another layer of costs be put on top of that without creating mass confusion, not to mention anger on the part of the end user/consumer?
Content providers already pay for bandwidth charges to web hosting firms who pay handsomely for their own connectivity. Why should end users also be charged simply for downloading an excess of the same content that the content provider has already paid to deliver. This would be like the post office charging receivers of mail a fee if the quantity of mail exceeded a certain arbitrary level (I know - not the best analogy).
Also - will Time Warner charge people who exceed the cap when they are downloading content exclusively from Time Warner sites? Or will TW privilege their own offerings - thus discouraging users from seeking content from outside providers (for whom TW receives no advertising revenue).
It all raises more questions than answers . . . none of them good.
Michael
Fred Reimer wrote:
This need not be a case of wealth transfers only - there can be value creation as well. In one simple world with a zero-sum-game, for every penny charged for over-usage, the average bill for others should go down commensurately.
A first Q to me is to what extent is or isn't this a zero-sum game?
In the US companies have a fiduciary responsibility to make as much money as they can for their stockholders. If you think Time Warner, or any ISP, will reduce the price for Internet access for the "average Joe" who uses minimal bandwidth to something that is comparable to India (even with exchange rates and cost of living calculations included) you are mistaken. The ONLY reason why Time Warner is doing this is because it is a chance for them to make more money.
You can have your opinion of what SHOULD and should not happen, but realistically this is not how business in the US works. Especially not in the telephone / cable / DSL markets. I have no special knowledge of this, it is common knowledge.
Fred Reimer, CISSP, CCNP, CQS-VPN, CQS-ISS
Senior Network Engineer
Coleman Technologies, Inc.
954-298-1697
-----Original Message----- From: nnsquad-bounces+freimer=ctiusa.com@nnsquad.org [mailto:nnsquad- bounces+freimer=ctiusa.com@nnsquad.org] On Behalf Of Rahul Tongia Sent: Friday, January 18, 2008 12:59 PM To: Barry Gold Cc: Lauren Weinstein; nnsquad@nnsquad.org Subject: [ NNSquad ] Re: NYT: Differing views on Time Warner'sBandwidth Cap Experiment
As someone who's spent lots of time internationally, there are many tiered pricing plans for DSL. All you can use are often MUCH more expensive. BUT, the entry plans are dramatically cheaper, e.g., $2-6/month in India.
So, if only a few percent of people are using up "too much" bandwidth perhaps a solution would involve congestion pricing and/or graceful degradation only for those who go above reasonable fair use caps. Is there too much complexity in this? If I want to download something huge, there should be ways for the system/network to signal "off-peak" pricing. I think we need some new protocols/tweaks/out-of-channel signalling for that. Given these are all happening on the last mile, it shouldn't be hard to program that in (in a layered, scalable, manner).
There are parallels in the power industry, where I use kWh any time of day (as a retail consumer) for the same price. If I knew, with minimal effort or better, automatically, when things were not only peak but expected to peak, I and my appliances could behave a little better (to the extent there's a win-win). Everyone can benefit if there is less peak capacity required. Of course, I need to see the numbers more (and we don't have transparency on this). This need not be a case of wealth transfers only - there can be value creation as well. In one simple world with a zero-sum-game, for every penny charged for over-usage, the average bill for others should go down commensurately.
A first Q to me is to what extent is or isn't this a zero-sum game?
Rahul
************************************************************************ Rahul Tongia, Ph.D. Senior Systems Scientist
Program in Computation, Organizations, and Society (COS) School of Computer Science (ISR) / Dept. of Engineering & Public Policy
Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA 15213 USA tel: 412-268-5619 fax: 412-268-2338 email: tongia@cmu.edu http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rtongia
Barry Gold wrote:
Lauren Weinstein wrote:and-you-might-pay-30-a-movie/?ref=technology
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/17/time-warner-download-too-much-
This is beyond stupid, and I hope TW gets smacked down by its customers if and when they try this. See my earlier post on what customers want.
Item 1: No surprises. A $30 surcharge on their bill is going to result in a very unhappy user. I know what Time Warner is thinking: when the user sees a $30 surcharge on his cable bill, he'll buy a higher service tier and we make more money. Well, it's a lot more likely that the user will a) Switch to satellite, DSL, or any other competitor he can find, b) Write his city councilman about turning the city into a hotspot (some small cities already are) c) write his congressman about regulating cable prices.
So the *best* likely scenario is that TW loses a customer. Other possibilities include losing a whole city of customers, or being turned into a regulated utility like phone and electric service used to be (and natural gas still is). That's a nice niche, you always make a guaranteed profit -- but your profits are pretty strictly limited.
I hope TW and Comcast wise up, because frankly I *like* the current (nearly) unregulated market. But if they keep trying stunts like this, they will feel like Wile E. Coyote when the anvil falls on him.
I can hear Brett and others asking, so what _should_ we do when we have one customer who uses 100 times as much as our average. Answer: graceful degradation. Slow him down. This can be done manually -- you notice that user X is using more than most, so you re-program his cable modem to a lower bit rate, and/or drop some of the packets destined for him. Or you can just make it automatic - the system notices when a customer is using a large amount of bandwidth over a period of time, and takes steps.
And as I said elsewhere, I would favor allowing ISPs to modify the TCP headers to reduce the window, even though strictly speaking it's a violation of the protocol -- that header is supposed to be for communication between the end-points. But until we get protocol stacks that actually _pay attention_ to Source Quench, I think this would be a good way to limit bandwidth consumption.
--------------020803070801070307050905 Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> <html> <head> <meta content="text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1" http-equiv="Content-Type"> </head> <body bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000"> If qualifying traffic by throttling certain types of traffic is unacceptable - then shouldn't a strategy that quantifies cumulative traffic be unacceptable too? I mean, ISP's already charge differently for access speeds (tiers of down/upload speed), how can another layer of costs be put on top of that without creating mass confusion, not to mention anger on the part of the end user/consumer?<br> <br> Content providers already pay for bandwidth charges to web hosting firms who pay handsomely for their own connectivity. Why should end users also be charged simply for downloading an excess of the same content that the content provider has already paid to deliver. This would be like the post office charging receivers of mail a fee if the quantity of mail exceeded a certain arbitrary level (I know - not the best analogy). <br> <br> Also - will Time Warner charge people who exceed the cap when they are downloading content exclusively from Time Warner sites? Or will TW privilege their own offerings - thus discouraging users from seeking content from outside providers (for whom TW receives no advertising revenue).<br> <br> It all raises more questions than answers . . . none of them good.<br> <br> Michael<br> <br> <br> <br> Fred Reimer wrote: <blockquote cite="98B7739FB65BF04F9B3233AB842EEC9501A4479A@EXCHANGE.ctiusa.com"">mid:98B7739FB65BF04F9B3233AB842EEC9501A4479A@EXCHANGE.ctiusa.com"; type="cite"> <blockquote type="cite"> <pre wrap="">This need not be a case of wealth transfers only - there can be value creation as well. In one simple world with a zero-sum-game, for every penny charged for over-usage, the average bill for others should go down commensurately.
A first Q to me is to what extent is or isn't this a zero-sum game? </pre> </blockquote> <pre wrap=""><!----> In the US companies have a fiduciary responsibility to make as much money as they can for their stockholders. If you think Time Warner, or any ISP, will reduce the price for Internet access for the "average Joe" who uses minimal bandwidth to something that is comparable to India (even with exchange rates and cost of living calculations included) you are mistaken. The ONLY reason why Time Warner is doing this is because it is a chance for them to make more money.
You can have your opinion of what SHOULD and should not happen, but realistically this is not how business in the US works. Especially not in the telephone / cable / DSL markets. I have no special knowledge of this, it is common knowledge.
Fred Reimer, CISSP, CCNP, CQS-VPN, CQS-ISS
Senior Network Engineer
Coleman Technologies, Inc.
954-298-1697
</pre> <blockquote type="cite"> <pre wrap="">-----Original Message----- From: <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:nnsquad-bounces+freimer=ctiusa.com@nnsquad.org";>nnsquad-bounces+freimer=ctiusa.com@nnsquad.org</a> [<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="mailto:nnsquad";>mailto:nnsquad</a>- <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:bounces+freimer=ctiusa.com@nnsquad.org";>bounces+freimer=ctiusa.com@nnsquad.org</a>] On Behalf Of Rahul Tongi a Sent: Friday, January 18, 2008 12:59 PM To: Barry Gold Cc: Lauren Weinstein; <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:nnsquad@nnsquad.org";>nnsquad@nnsquad.org</a> Subject: [ NNSquad ] Re: NYT: Differing views on Time Warner'sBandwidth Cap Experiment
As someone who's spent lots of time internationally, there are many tiered pricing plans for DSL. All you can use are often MUCH more expensive. BUT, the entry plans are dramatically cheaper, e.g., $2-6/month in India.
So, if only a few percent of people are using up "too much" bandwidth perhaps a solution would involve congestion pricing and/or graceful degradation only for those who go above reasonable fair use caps. Is there too much complexity in this? If I want to download something huge, there should be ways for the system/network to signal "off-peak" pricing. I think we need some new protocols/tweaks/out-of-channel signalling for that. Given these are all happening on the last mile, it shouldn't be hard to program that in (in a layered, scalable, manner).
There are parallels in the power industry, where I use kWh any time of day (as a retail consumer) for the same price. If I knew, with minimal effort or better, automatically, when things were not only peak but expected to peak, I and my appliances could behave a little better (to the extent there's a win-win). Everyone can benefit if there is less peak capacity required. Of course, I need to see the numbers more (and we don't have transparency on this). This need not be a case of wealth transfers only - there can be value creation as well. In one simple world with a zero-sum-game, for every penny charged for over-usage, the average bill for others should go down commensurately.
A first Q to me is to what extent is or isn't this a zero-sum game?
Rahul
************************************************************************ Rahul Tongia, Ph.D. Senior Systems Scientist
Program in Computation, Organizations, and Society (COS) School of Computer Science (ISR) / Dept. of Engineering & Public Policy
Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA 15213 USA tel: 412-268-5619 fax: 412-268-2338 email: <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:tongia@cmu.edu";>tongia@cmu.edu</a> <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rtongia";>http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rtongia</a>
Barry Gold wrote: </pre> <blockquote type="cite"> <pre wrap="">Lauren Weinstein wrote: </pre> <blockquote type="cite"> <pre wrap=""><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/17/time-warner-download-too-much";>http://bits.blogs.nytimes .com/2008/01/17/time-warner-download-too-much</a>- </pre> </blockquote> </blockquote> <pre wrap="">and-you-might-pay-30-a-movie/?ref=technology </pre> <blockquote type="cite"> <pre wrap="">This is beyond stupid, and I hope TW gets smacked down by its customers if and when they try this. See my earlier post on what customers want.
Item 1: No surprises. A $30 surcharge on their bill is going to result in a very unhappy user. I know what Time Warner is thinking: when the user sees a $30 surcharge on his cable bill, he'll buy a higher service tier and we make more money. Well, it's a lot more likely that the user will a) Switch to satellite, DSL, or any other competitor he can find, b) Write his city councilman about turning the city into a hotspot (some small cities already are) c) write his congressman about regulating cable prices.
So the *best* likely scenario is that TW loses a customer. Other possibilities include losing a whole city of customers, or being turned into a regulated utility like phone and electric service used to be (and natural gas still is). That's a nice niche, you always make a guaranteed profit -- but your profits are pretty strictly limited.
I hope TW and Comcast wise up, because frankly I *like* the current (nearly) unregulated market. But if they keep trying stunts like this, they will feel like Wile E. Coyote when the anvil falls on him.
I can hear Brett and others asking, so what _should_ we do when we have one customer who uses 100 times as much as our average. Answer: graceful degradation. Slow him down. This can be done manually -- you notice that user X is using more than most, so you re-program his cable modem to a lower bit rate, and/or drop some of the packets destined for him. Or you can just make it automatic - the system notices when a customer is using a large amount of bandwidth over a period of time, and takes steps.
And as I said elsewhere, I would favor allowing ISPs to modify the TCP headers to reduce the window, even though strictly speaking it's a violation of the protocol -- that header is supposed to be for communication between the end-points. But until we get protocol stacks that actually _pay attention_ to Source Quench, I think this would be a good way to limit bandwidth consumption.
</pre> </blockquote> </blockquote> </blockquote> <br> </body> </html>
--------------020803070801070307050905--