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FCC forced by court to ask the public again for feedback on net neutrality

theregister.co.uk

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Re: FCC forced by court to ask the public again for feedback on net neutrality

#41

Post by crooked-v »

Alupis wrote: post #25
csours wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could be Ok with data caps per tier, if that actually led to lower costs for lower tiers. As it is, I pay a huge amount of money for low quality internet service. Also, 3TB is not huge for a family, especially in the age of 4K streams.

Ya, 4k might be changing the math a bit, and ISP's might need to upgrade the caps, or offer different caps per tier like your idea. Either way, I don't want to subsidize the guy torrenting Blue-Rays and pushing 10TB a month when I'm only using 1TB.

'Subsidize' isn't really accurate, though. For every major ISP, if everyone was using their connection at the maximum throughput allowed by their plan 24/7... everything would still work fine. The data caps exist solely so they can squeeze people for money beyond what they actually need to maintain the network.

Re: FCC forced by court to ask the public again for feedback on net neutrality

#42

Post by gonehome »

Alupis wrote: post #35
gonehome wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My main complaint is that Comcast gives no insight into how they calculate your usage beyond a generic bar graph. I was using steadily 600-700GB of data a month on my gigabit plan. It suddenly spiked to 2TB - from what I could tell there was no change in behavior, my ubiquiti gear wasn't showing this amount of usage. This went on and used up my two 'courtesy' months of overages forcing me to pay the extra money to re…

> My main complaint is that Comcast gives no insight into how they calculate your usage beyond a generic bar graph Fair enough - but also in fairness, your electric utility provides about as much (which is also frustrating when you're trying to figure out why your bill went up 25% one month). I personally run a mikrotik router which tracks my usage too, so I have a reference to double check against and could wage a g…

Yeah - I think they’re inaccurate with how they calculate usage, but there’s nothing I can really do about it.

It’s not worth my time to argue with them and there are no other gigabit options.

Re: FCC forced by court to ask the public again for feedback on net neutrality

#43

Post by bashinator »

Alupis wrote: post #10
silverreads wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

.org is getting sold, all data plans have transfer caps, google is not even showing urls to mobile users anymore, yes things are going to hell.

I'm all for net neutrality, but 2 of the 3 things you listed were never going to be "protected" by net neutrality laws. Which highlights the problem with what Net Neutrality morphed into - it became something that meant everything and anything - not just "dumb pipes" like it originated as. Ask 3 different people what Net Neutrality means and you'll get 3 different answers. How do you legislate that and make everyone…

I'm not positive that this is an example, but it seems like it must be. Watching Netflix through Comcast's Xfinity box does not count against your data cap. Watching the same Netflix on the same TV over the same pipe using a computer instead, does.

Re: FCC forced by court to ask the public again for feedback on net neutrality

#44

Post by crooked-v »

Alupis wrote: post #34
kick wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(1 tb) / (1 (mb / s)) = 11.5740741 days Ah, I see. mbps v. MBps. Capitalization error! Also, you're arguing against the past point which is fine because I messed up the capitalization (though the point still holds, because I wasn't doing anything abnormal; it was a two person household with a game console), but not against present use-cases: 4k 24fps video for Netflix is 7GB, and 1080p 24fps video is over 3GB/hr (HD…

> Caps are only a thing because Comcast oversells every connection The caps are a thing because Comcast pays for ingress traffic into their network (they pay other providers from which the data comes from). At a point, you cost them more than you pay for. Which is where they charge you an overage. Seems more than fair to me - I pay currently $49.99 a month for 150Mbps connection with a 3TB cap (I'm aware they offer d…

> Comcast pays for ingress traffic into their network

Actually, in some cases, Comcast gets paid FOR it.

https://qz.com/256586/the-inside-story-of-how-netflix-came-t...

Re: FCC forced by court to ask the public again for feedback on net neutrality

#45

Post by crooked-v »

afiori wrote: post #36
anonsivalley652 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mostly correct, essentially all new plans have transfer caps. I still have a vintage Verizon data plan that's bonafide unlimited. Data overage is gotcha-capitalism robbery.

What I never properly understood is whether these caps appear anywhere on your contracts, if they don't then net neutrality should[1] not be necessary and if they do then it should not apply. [0] I guess I am wrong in believing this should is respected

Contracts with ISPs are whatever the ISP wants them to be at any time, because the US court system allows one-sided non-negotiable contracts that include "we can change this contract at any time" clauses. Also, if you want to sue over the changes in the contract... you can't, because the US court system allows those one-sided non-negotiable contracts to include "you can never sue us for anything and instead are required to go to arbitration with an arbitrator of our choosing" clauses.

Re: FCC forced by court to ask the public again for feedback on net neutrality

#46

Post by Alupis »

crooked-v wrote: post #41
Alupis wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ya, 4k might be changing the math a bit, and ISP's might need to upgrade the caps, or offer different caps per tier like your idea. Either way, I don't want to subsidize the guy torrenting Blue-Rays and pushing 10TB a month when I'm only using 1TB.

'Subsidize' isn't really accurate, though. For every major ISP, if everyone was using their connection at the maximum throughput allowed by their plan 24/7... everything would still work fine. The data caps exist solely so they can squeeze people for money beyond what they actually need to maintain the network.

> For every major ISP, if everyone was using their connection at the maximum throughput allowed by their plan 24/7... everything would still work fine

It wouldn't though - at least for most major residential ISP's. They oversubscribe the connections, knowing full well not everybody will use the connection at the same time, and even when they are - they won't be using the maximum at once.

A minor example would be bringing a single 100Mbps connection into a small building and selling 12 x 10Mbps connections. It's one of they ways they can, yes, make a profit and also offer the bandwidth at reasonable costs.

Dedicated bandwidth is expensive. Think of your old-school T1's and your typical business class connection. You pay a lot for having that bandwidth reserved for your use alone. And majority of the time you aren't using it... and when you do use it, you use very little of it at once. Debating on HN doesn't take 1Gbps... so it goes unused. Residential users prefer lower costs vs. dedicated bandwidth.

> The data caps exist solely so they can squeeze people for money beyond what they actually need to maintain the network

Yes and no. You seem to be tip-toeing around the municipality-run ISP argument - which is a fair argument to have (although I'm concerned a city can maintain this network long-term and keep it as good as a for-profit company). There's no problem with an ISP charging customers more for the connection than the ISP pays to provide it. That's the incentive to run the network in the first place - let alone spend millions building it out.

I don't think data caps are bad so long as they don't impact "normal" use. Normal as being defined perhaps by the 95th percentile of use or something. The remaining users should be obligated to pay for their usage so that the ISP isn't forced to spread that costs onto other customers - that's simply not fair.

Re: FCC forced by court to ask the public again for feedback on net neutrality

#47

Post by FireBeyond »

Alupis wrote: post #35
gonehome wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My main complaint is that Comcast gives no insight into how they calculate your usage beyond a generic bar graph. I was using steadily 600-700GB of data a month on my gigabit plan. It suddenly spiked to 2TB - from what I could tell there was no change in behavior, my ubiquiti gear wasn't showing this amount of usage. This went on and used up my two 'courtesy' months of overages forcing me to pay the extra money to re…

> My main complaint is that Comcast gives no insight into how they calculate your usage beyond a generic bar graph Fair enough - but also in fairness, your electric utility provides about as much (which is also frustrating when you're trying to figure out why your bill went up 25% one month). I personally run a mikrotik router which tracks my usage too, so I have a reference to double check against and could wage a g…

> could wage a good argument with evidence that I didn't use the data they claim

Let us know how that works out for you. My guess?

"We can waive this month as a courtesy, but we can't use your router as evidence".

Re: FCC forced by court to ask the public again for feedback on net neutrality

#48

Post by icebraining »

epanchin wrote: post #32
jasonlfunk wrote: post #5

It’s been over two years since Net Neutrality was repealed. I remember at the time there was a lot of talk about how the internet was going to be ruined by throttling, paid “fast lanes”, etc. Have any of these things happened? Or did that turn out to mostly be fear-mongering?

Fast lanes benefit established players at the expense of start ups. Consequently, if there has been detrimental effects, I doubt you would notice them. When you think to yourself, why do I put up with youtube, why isn't there an alternative... that's the 'thing happening'.

Yeah, but there wasn't an alternative two years ago either.

Re: FCC forced by court to ask the public again for feedback on net neutrality

#49

Post by Alupis »

crooked-v wrote: post #44
Alupis wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Caps are only a thing because Comcast oversells every connection The caps are a thing because Comcast pays for ingress traffic into their network (they pay other providers from which the data comes from). At a point, you cost them more than you pay for. Which is where they charge you an overage. Seems more than fair to me - I pay currently $49.99 a month for 150Mbps connection with a 3TB cap (I'm aware they offer d…

> Comcast pays for ingress traffic into their network Actually, in some cases, Comcast gets paid FOR it. https://qz.com/256586/the-inside-story-of-how-netflix-came-t...

That's not the complete story.

They started charging Netflix (or threatened to deprioritize or drop Netflix traffic) because Netflix traffic to Comcast customers starting making Comcast customers unprofitable.

Comcast does pay for ingress traffic. They are not a Tier 1 provider and do not peer with other Tier 1 providers - bits flowing in cost money. They either had to charge Comcast customers more per month, or get Netflix to subsidize the ingress traffic costs from their service.

This ultimately led to Netflix making the Open Connect boxes and offering them for free to ISP's as a way to mitigate the ingress costs. (this is why ISP provided video services don't have this problem - their traffic originates in-network and doesn't cost them anything additional to provide, fair or not)

Unless we're going to change how the 3 Tier provider system works and who gets to charge who for ingress traffic - I don't see this changing anytime soon. Unless you want to regulate our way into doubling your monthly Comcast bill... I sure don't.

Re: FCC forced by court to ask the public again for feedback on net neutrality

#50

Post by superkuh »

Alupis wrote: post #9
superkuh wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

T-mobile has been throttling and creating paid fast lanes pretty heavily and I now pay as much in data overage fees to comcast per month as half my total bill.

How much data are you using monthly? My comcast "cap" is 3TB monthly... which is a HUGE amount of data for a residential user. I've never even broken 1TB... If you're hosting something, might be worth upgrading to a business connection, which doesn't have data caps and comes with static ip's and a SLA. As an aside - I'm personally OK with data caps so long as they don't impact most users (80/20, 90/10 or something li…

$10 per 10GB threshold over 1 TB on a 80/10 connection that's $95 month including the now $14 modem rental fee. Sometimes $50 in fees. I refuse to monitor my data usage or change my behavior.

I am a single person but I host my personal non-business website from home and participate in as many peer to peer distributed and federated protocols as I can. I also do watch a bit of video media. My usage isn't only bursty, it's a steady 100-200 KB/s 24/7 up with bursts down on top.

I contacted Comcast Business two times over the last 2 years, the most recent just last week. If you want a business 100/10 account then it is $156/mo with a 2 year contract (do not believe their promotional lies). If you move away to an area without service you have to pay 75% of the remaining contract. If you have your own modem they charge you a fee more than twice the fee for renting their modem.

Frankly, it's insulting.

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