Bill Ready To Ban ISP Caps In the US 439
xclr8r writes "Eric Massa, a congressman representing a district in western New York, has a bill ready that would start treating Internet providers like a utility and stop the use of caps. Nearby locales have been used as test beds for the new caps, so this may have made the constituents raise the issue with their representative."
Re:sounds like an (Score:3, Interesting)
i would rather take a slower speed with no cap then a super fast speed and 250gb month cap. what is the point of say 20mbit download if you can only avg 8gb a day, and max speed dl speed that is only 1 hour and its used up.
Re:Has it occured to anyone else. . . (Score:5, Interesting)
Gaming of a deregulated energy system by crooked companies like Enron played a major part in those rolling brown-outs.
Gaming a badly/partially deregulated system, which IIRC they were involved in determining the structure of the not-quite-deregulation (I think it was something like, fixed retail prices and deregulated wholesale prices, because they (incorrectly) predicted that wholesale prices would drop significantly). There were other states that did things properly and it worked fairly well, or at least didn't cause problems like in CA.
This article [csmonitor.com] from 2006 indicate that deregulation doesn't actually lower prices like it "should", apparently because providers don't want to compete and don't bid to serve the same areas.
low latency is very hard (Score:4, Interesting)
Getting latency down is very hard especially when modems are involved. Often modems need to keep a moving "sample window" of the signal before they can decide what bits were sent. That "window" = latency.
FWIW the distance between the east and west coast of the USA is about 13 light-milliseconds (following the surface of the earth) - assuming speed of light in vacuum.
But light travels slower in optical fibres. A naive calculation just using the index of refraction gives me about 20 milliseconds. Round trip time then becomes 40ms.
The fibre isn't taking a "great circle route" and there's some modulation and demodulation involved, so round trip time is likely to be higher than 50ms.
Re:sounds like an (Score:3, Interesting)
They Aren't the ISPs Bits to Sell (Score:4, Interesting)
Comcast doesn't produce the bits they deliver to me, they simply transfer them from someone else who I might be paying for the bits. If they can actually deliver the 16Mb/s they claim they can to me at any time of day regardless of "congestion" (of course they can't), then the cost difference to them of delivering nothing for a month and maxing out that connection for a month is negligible. Their routers might draw slightly more power, but the total cost of delivering an additional bit (or 100GB) is next to nothing compared to the cost of making the network available to me.
The idea behind ISP transfer limits is totally different than paying per unit for water or electricity. With water and electricity you pay per unit (usually - in my hometown of Anchorage, AK water is actually a fixed rate I think) because it costs the company to sell you a unit. With ISPs, they want to limit your use because the speeds they charge you for aren't actually the speeds they can deliver if everyone actually uses their connection. So instead of telling you realistic speeds, they just make sure people can't actually use their connection, making it more likely that you will be able to use yours (until you too hit the cap).
Of course there is the totally separate issue of most ISPs also selling content that they would much rather you get via pay per view, etc than via the Internet...
Re:sounds like an (Score:3, Interesting)
I only have one broadband option available to me (that I know of). Unless I want to go back to dialup or get some ridiculously expensive air card or satellite link, I'm stuck with just one service provider: our local cable company.
The cable company decides to implement a cap or traffic shaping/policing to reduce throughput? I've got no choice other than drop them and go with some other even worse option. I suspect many people are in the same boat.
Re:sounds like an (Score:1, Interesting)
Right. Like Comcast has supposedly 25M subscribers, and their C*O's claim they only make $10 profit per customer.
I'd like an explanation from them on where the other $22.25 billion dollars in profit came from if by their math they should only be making $250M.
It seems like bandwidth caps and bullshit tiered price raping is yielding almost $1000 annual profit per customer. Fuck bandwidth caps, let's see them explain this discrepancy and outrageous profits in the context of a complete lack of physical infrastructure upgrades for the last 5 years.
Common Carriers, anyone? (Score:4, Interesting)
A recent study by the Pew Institute demonstrates that Internet access is a "must have" service. That makes it a utility. Treating all ISPs as utilities brings them one step closer to common carrier status.
You may have noticed that I tend to harp on this idea. Here's why: a common carrier cannot refuse service and cannot discriminate. Once those two requirements come into view, just watch the content providers get out of the business, in a hurry.
The current debate in public discourse and with respect to pending legislation seems to exhibit a logical progression of taking a new service that was a luxury and turning it into a utility. I'm happy to help it progress.
if they become a utility, (Score:3, Interesting)
as they should, that'll be possible
No they should not be regulated as a utility. Instead what we need is to foster competition. And a duopoly is not competition. Add fiber and wireless then you may have competition.
Falcon
I'm sure there will be a loophole somewhere. (Score:5, Interesting)
There always will be. The difference is that, with regulation, there is a loophole somewhere. With deregulation, there are loopholes everywhere.
With deregulation there are no loopholes, there are only loopholes when there are regulations.
Falcon