

Dear ISP: Here's why your pricing is unfair - logn
http://www.slideshare.net/ThisIsCalledFreeSpeech/dear-isp

======
gabemart
This is really dumb.

Firstly, I'd bet dollars to donuts that his ISP advertises "up to" a certain
speed and includes language in the T&Cs that specifies speeds may vary based
on a variety of factors.

Secondly, is this even taking network overheads into account?

Thirdly, saying "kids in Africa might have 14kB/s for their whole connection,
therefore that amount of bandwidth is worth fighting for" is dumb because it
assumes constant marginal utility of bandwidth when that's obviously not the
case. Going from 0kB/s to 14kB/s is a hell of a lot more valuable than going
from 14kB/s to 28kB/s, and going from 14kB/s to 28kB/s is many orders of
magnitude more valuable than going from 882kB/s to 896kB/s.

~~~
ktsmith
His ISP also likely only guarantees 70% of the advertised speeds be available
and that the advertised speeds are theoretical maximums. This is what
companies like AT&T and Charter do.

~~~
tovmeod
Last I lived in brazil they needed to guarantee only 10% of advertised speed,
if I got 70% I would be happy

------
dsr_
For what it's worth, most of the cost of providing a net connection is in the
delivery to your endpoint ("last mile") and customer service. If all you want
is X Mb/s and you can accept it at a place convenient for the ISP, prices are
well under $10 per Mb/s per month. That is, a 100Mb/s bidirectional handoff
will cost you significantly less than $1000.

Now, a 7Mb/750Kb connection? The return bandwidth can't be shared, so that
gives you an idea of the contention ratio: about 1:10. The ISP is overselling
their bandwidth ten times. This is probably reasonable for a consumer ISP. On
the other hand, their cost for that bandwidth will be substantially under
$7/month. The rest of the cost is going towards actually getting it to you,
running a few services, customer interaction, and keeping everything repaired.
Those other costs are relatively fixed -- it doesn't matter how many megabits
you're buying, it costs the same per person -- but over-differentiating the
prices seems to make sense to the marketing departments.

Pray for a sensible fiber provider, and in the meantime, don't let your local
government abdicate its role in regulating telecom services.

------
drkevorkian
He's getting worked up over 2%? I would expect the rates to fluctuate on the
order of at least 2% due to normal traffic variations.

------
Qantourisc
2% ? that requires testing, information on TCP stacks used, computer used,
distance, ping, network card, network drivers ... And most importantly tested
twice, and all other services on the computer have to be stopped. No
messengers, no browsers, no updates zip nada nop.

------
rogerbinns
My car has a top speed of about 100mph, but I usually only go at up to 70% of
that. I think they should refund 30% of the purchase price.

------
JensenDied
OP: This is your ISP.

Per your methodology we have adjusted your rate based upon services rendered.
We are also adjusting your bill based upon exemplary upload performance.

((6.89/7)+(0.78/.75))/2 * 80

Amount Due: $80.97

~~~
logn
Thanks. I guess you'll then take into account the variable bandwidth and
charge me accordingly each month? Perfect.

-Your customer

~~~
JensenDied
That is what having an SLA ought to be for. OP paying for "up-to" service
doesn't really have grounds here for either of these.

------
JulienSchmidt
No sorry, I don't trust you. You might be an engineer, but you don't seem to
know how networks work.

98,4% in a speed test which highly relies on the destination server and the
routing is a perfect result.

------
Spooky23
He must be a train engineer.

I work at a place that provides dedicated bandwidth on fiber owned by the
company. We would probably get results worse than he did. When you're trying
to get to 100% theoretical utilization, you need to do alot of tuning, and
then at best you'll pick up another 1%.

------
dmckeon
format error: unclosed </sarcasm> tag.

What would ISP pricing look like if the market were heavily competitive (5+
alternatives) and the pricing was more like an electrical utility: $N just for
the wired connection, and $B/gigabit after that?

------
tnuc
Sounds like the usual state of affairs with most ISP 's in the world.

------
BruceIV
Yeah, he'd be justifiably pissed if he got 50% of the maximum advertised
bandwidth, but 98% - Who's his ISP, and do they have service in my area?

------
ibudiallo
2% really that's not a big deal. Some company charge 30 for 3Mbits while
another charges 30 for 30Mbps, now that's unfair.

------
jsnk
This is rather embarrassing. If OP had dedicated BW of 8MB I wouldn't be
surprised if ISP started charging $200+/month for it. The whole reason why we
share BW is because it's way cheaper and resources become more efficiently
delegated as we have changes in network usage by different people.

Just go with the argument that $80/month is too expensive and explain why.
Don't trifle with notion that we don't get dedicated BW.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
Who said anything about dedicated bandwidth? There is nothing wrong with the
ISP putting more than 1000 8Mbps users on an 8Gbps uplink. That's just basic
network engineering.

But there is a difference between shared bandwidth and _insufficient_ shared
bandwidth. If your network's uplink is at in excess of 80% of capacity during
peak usage periods, it's time to expand capacity. Follow that simple rule and
all your 8Mbps customers will get at least 8Mbps, notwithstanding that they
don't each have 8Mbps of dedicated bandwidth.

Obviously that doesn't include the rare outlier demand spikes, e.g. what
happens to the network during a sudden disaster when many people all at once
want to communicate with loved ones, but even there you won't have literally
100% of your customers using their full allocation at once. Which means that
as long as you can predict within an order of magnitude the peak usage during
such events, you can install capacity sufficient to carry it, which will be
less than 100% dedicated bandwidth for everyone. And let's face it: We want
the network to keep working during a disaster if at all possible; that's
pretty important from a national security perspective (and therefore if
nothing else from a public relations perspective for the carrier).

Granted installing capacity based on expected peak demand means that if people
start using more bandwidth then more capacity will have to be installed and
prices will have to increase. But so what? Isn't that how the market is
supposed to function? Demand goes up, price goes up. If you don't need a
specified amount of bandwidth then don't pay for it and subscribe to a slower
package. But if you pay for it then you should be right to expect to get it.

