Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AT&T Learns Exactly the Wrong Lesson About Data Usage

designbygravity.wordpress.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 114 posts

Re: AT&T Learns Exactly the Wrong Lesson About Data Usage

#41

Post by loewenskind »

TeHCrAzY wrote: post #24
heresy wrote: post #4

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.

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…

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.

Re: AT&T Learns Exactly the Wrong Lesson About Data Usage

#42

Post by loewenskind »

batiudrami wrote: post #20

Here's the thing: tiered data usage makes sense. Otherwise people who hardly use much data are supporting the people who use a lot, and are paying more than they should. This is like charging a flat price for petrol, say $50 a week, and expecting people who only drive occasionally to the shops to pay the same amount in fuel as people who make regular interstate trips. For the 98% of people, their iPhone service just…

You may be right about the result but the gas analogy doesn't work. To make it work you would have to image customers all getting gas from the same tank. While they're filling their vehicles the tank is getting lower but the instant they stop the tank is full again. Not slowly filling up with gas, instantly full capacity again.

Re: AT&T Learns Exactly the Wrong Lesson About Data Usage

#43

Post by acqq »

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #22

I am a data pig. I average between 1.5 and 2 gigabytes a month over the last 6 months. AT&T hates me, apparently, though they are happy to take my money. I'm not sure how that helps the point the author is trying to make, as he/she will actually be paying less now than they were before, even as a self-proclaimed "data hog". A few more random points that I thought were misguided: 1. Not everyone should be attached to…

I agree with you.

The truth is, there's simply not enough bandwidth, especially not to stimulate "unlimited" data use and motivating people to become "data hogs." And it's not easy at all to increase the resources. There are real physical and technical limitations for providing more bandwidth which are hard to overcome in many areas.

The unlimited data plan was designed for much less devices in the wild.

Re: AT&T Learns Exactly the Wrong Lesson About Data Usage

#44

Post by heresy »

TeHCrAzY wrote: post #24
heresy wrote: post #4

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.

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…

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.

Re: AT&T Learns Exactly the Wrong Lesson About Data Usage

#45

Post by heresy »

neilc wrote: post #21
heresy wrote: post #4

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.

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 f…

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.

Re: AT&T Learns Exactly the Wrong Lesson About Data Usage

#47

Post by jsz0 »

tensafefrogs wrote: post #26
ryanwaggoner wrote: post #22

I am a data pig. I average between 1.5 and 2 gigabytes a month over the last 6 months. AT&T hates me, apparently, though they are happy to take my money. I'm not sure how that helps the point the author is trying to make, as he/she will actually be paying less now than they were before, even as a self-proclaimed "data hog". A few more random points that I thought were misguided: 1. Not everyone should be attached to…

I think you are missing the key point: Apple wants people to use their fancy devices more , not less. You spend this money on this awesome device that does awesome things, Apple makes money when you use it (via iAds, via google searches, via many things) and AT&T is saying to their customers "don't use your device too much!" I'm betting Steve is totally pissed off at AT&T right now.

Wouldn't poor 3G speeds also be a good reason for someone to use their iPhone less? If AT&T's policy changes skim off the top 2% of heavy users the remaining 98% are going to end up with a better experience and possibly use their iPhone more. It's hard to frame it only in terms of bandwidth too. Apple must make more revenue off the person who buys a $10/20MB game than they do from another user downloading the free Netflix app and streaming 1GB/month of data.

Re: AT&T Learns Exactly the Wrong Lesson About Data Usage

#48

Post by jsz0 »

loewenskind wrote: post #38
neilc wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

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 duri…

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)

Re: AT&T Learns Exactly the Wrong Lesson About Data Usage

#49

Post by batiudrami »

blueben wrote: post #39
batiudrami wrote: post #20

Here's the thing: tiered data usage makes sense. Otherwise people who hardly use much data are supporting the people who use a lot, and are paying more than they should. This is like charging a flat price for petrol, say $50 a week, and expecting people who only drive occasionally to the shops to pay the same amount in fuel as people who make regular interstate trips. For the 98% of people, their iPhone service just…

It makes sense now, riding on the back of years of growth fueled by demand. Bandwidth is cheap! Sure, I'll pay for a few extra gigabytes. But without the years of "unlimited" plans, we would still be living in an age of glacial bandwidth speeds at extravagant prices. The demand for bandwidth drives the cost of providing that bandwidth down. Tiered usage charges slow growth. That's great for AT&T, but bad for consumer…

I'm not so sure that it does. I live in Australia, where we've always had limited downloads and speeds. When I first got ADSL (about 6 years ago), my AU$60 bought me 2GB quota at 256kbps. Now it gets me 120GB and I sync at 19Mbit (the fastest my phone line will allow).

The lack of competition in the US broadband and phone market is the cause for slow growth, not download limits. You can say that Australian broadband is still expensive and slow (in comparison to some countries) but that is at least partially due to the low population density and the massive distances between cities. Australia has 219 ISPs offering ADSL (source:broadbandchoice.com.au), and as a result the value for money offered has increased significantly in past years, and will continue to.

Re: AT&T Learns Exactly the Wrong Lesson About Data Usage

#50

Post by batiudrami »

loewenskind wrote: post #42
batiudrami wrote: post #20

Here's the thing: tiered data usage makes sense. Otherwise people who hardly use much data are supporting the people who use a lot, and are paying more than they should. This is like charging a flat price for petrol, say $50 a week, and expecting people who only drive occasionally to the shops to pay the same amount in fuel as people who make regular interstate trips. For the 98% of people, their iPhone service just…

You may be right about the result but the gas analogy doesn't work. To make it work you would have to image customers all getting gas from the same tank. While they're filling their vehicles the tank is getting lower but the instant they stop the tank is full again. Not slowly filling up with gas, instantly full capacity again.

I'm not sure what difference this makes. I understand that bandwidth is limited by transfer rate and not data transferred, but there is still a limit which the company does not wish to reach.

Even if such a fuel tank existed, would it be unreasonable for BP to charge by the litre of fuel removed? I think it'd be the most sensible way to avoid demand overriding supply, rather than charging everyone increasing amounts for access to the fuel source.

Post reply on HN