Why should I not be allowed to saturate my connection? What difference does it make how I am doing that? I am paying for a connection; if I can only use it in bursts, don't advertise it as "gigabit," advertise it as "gigabit for a few moments at a time."
The Internet is not a network where some nodes have different capabilities from others, or at least it was not supposed to be. This is not some ITU standard that favors large monopolies on communications service. All nodes have the same capabilities on the Internet, as far as sending and receiving packets to other nodes is concerned. TCP does not discriminate between "business" and "personal" computers.
This, of course, is what makes the Internet such a fantastic system and the reason that the Internet overtook all those online services we used to use. I doubt that Google could have gotten started if the Internet were designed any other way.
I realize that this may be an attractive principle to adhere to, but I suspect you would not like the results in practice. Most likely, the only thing an average household would be able to afford is an incredibly small amount of bandwidth that can be fully saturated at all time. Of course, most people use the Internet in huge spikes throughout the day, so this would mean most bandwidth would still go unused, and during a person's peak usage it would be extremely slow.
>Of course, most people use the Internet in huge spikes throughout the day, so this would mean most bandwidth would still go unused, and during a person's peak usage it would be extremely slow.
This is exactly why it wouldn't be very expensive. Because almost nobody is actually going to use 324TB/month, so if some small minority does, it raises the average monthly bill by some small number of pennies. Conversely, if it turns out that large numbers of people are experiencing an unexpected pent up demand for massive amounts of bandwidth, prices go up until supply and demand meet, which is how the market is supposed to work.
And nothing stops the person who only wants email while 50% of the other users want to participate in some kind of P2P holographic video chat system from subscribing to the 10Mbps package rather than the 1000Mbps package and paying correspondingly less.
> This is exactly why it wouldn't be very expensive. Because almost nobody is actually going to use 324TB/month, so if some small minority does, it raises the average monthly bill by some small number of pennies. Conversely, if it turns out that large numbers of people are experiencing an unexpected pent up demand for massive amounts of bandwidth, prices go up until supply and demand meet, which is how the market is supposed to work.
But then you have monthly payments which vary, potentially wildly. I can move into your neighborhood and probably triple your bill within a month. This is bad for the vast majority of users. The demand for it would almost certainly be very low. Virtually nobody is going to want to share the bandwidth costs with their neighbors and virtually nobody is going to want 24/7 throughouts of any speed.
And speaking of markets, what about the demand for low-cost, high-burst but transfer-limited connections? I would guess that to be the product in the highest demand, based both on average non-tech-savvy users, and even bigger users like myself. And, lo and behold, that's what the vast majority of home Internet plans are (all the ones I've heard of). Note that I'm not suggesting that we truly have anything like a free market when it comes to telecoms, but in this case, I feel like supply is meeting demand quite well.
>But then you have monthly payments which vary, potentially wildly.
It doesn't make any sense to allocate costs by neighborhood. If you have single digit numbers of heavy users in the entire country then you can amortize that cost over millions of people and it will be minimal. If you have millions of heavy users then the all you can eat plan will cost more as it ought to.
> And speaking of markets, what about the demand for low-cost, high-burst but transfer-limited connections?
So we're getting back to the real problem here. The problem is that number of bits transferred is monumentally disconnected from the overall cost of operating a network. It costs the same amount to dig a hole to put a wire in regardless of the number of wires you put in it or the number of bits they ultimately carry, and that is the predominant cost of being able to transfer bits. Guys in trucks digging holes for wires and putting them back on the poles when the weather knocks them down. Paying for land taken through eminent domain. Employee compensation, property insurance, backup generators, idle power consumption, equipment depreciation. They're all fixed costs that don't change with the number of bits you transfer and they dominate the cost of operating a network.
So now you have a pricing problem. There are a couple of different "straight" pricing models. The first is you charge everybody a fixed monthly fee and let them transfer whatever they want. Someone who only transfers 50MB per month is still getting the benefit of men in trucks fixing downed wires 24/7 and access to the call center for support etc. etc., so they have to pay their fair share of that, which dominates the cost of the network and makes flat rate pricing sensible. The fact that they don't transfer very many bits doesn't make it any less expensive to dig up their street.
The second alternative is to charge exclusively by the byte. This is a preposterous failure. The problem is that, because the people who only transfer 50MB per month would be paying approximately zero dollars, but you still have to cover the cost of the line workers and accountants that service them, the cost per byte would have to be extremely high so that the heavy users pay enough to make up for the light users paying almost nothing. And this immediately snowballs because 90% of the heavy users aren't going to continue to be heavy users if they have to pay $2000/month to make up for twenty light users paying $5/month, so they turn into light users and then the price per byte has to go up to make up the revenue. Repeat until the price per byte is so high that even the light users are back to paying ~$50/month again but now you've destroyed the market for any services that require a significant amount of bandwidth and your customers hate you for charging a dollar for an email attachment.
So you can't charge solely by the byte, why not come up with some hybrid of the two and try to thread the needle? Charge a fixed monthly fee for turning on the pipe and then charge a "reasonable" amount for transfer on top of that. The fail is how much. The cost of putting twice or ten times as many strands of fiber in the ground when you already have the hole open is negligible compared to the other costs of operating the network. If you allocate based on that cost then the price per GB is going to be in the fractions of a penny. The pricing model ends up being de facto equivalent to a fixed monthly fee because the additional cost per byte would be so low.
But this is looking at all of this like a regulator -- someone who wants to maximize social utility. That's not what ISPs actually want to do. They don't want to put a hundred stands of fiber in the ground, even if it only costs 1% more in total than putting ten, because it eliminates "valuable" scarcity and reduces their ability to engage in price discrimination. Enterprise customers are willing to pay a lot more for the exact same piece of wire than a residential customer because the enterprise gets more value out of it and has more money. That has nothing to do with the cost of providing the service and everything to do with who has deep pockets. So they come up with a pricing model that will stick it to the enterprise and extract the $XXXX/month the enterprise is willing to pay, hence "no servers" and transfer caps etc. etc. because enterprises want to run servers and transfer a lot of data. Not because it costs the ISP that much more, but because that class of customers is expected to have more money.
That isn't what you want from a policy perspective at all, because the price discrimination is too blunt. Small businesses are less able to pay the "enterprise" rates so you drive them out of business in favor of larger companies. Software developers who want to encourage end users to run things that would be considered "servers" or would transfer a large amount of data get pushed out of the market because their customers on residential connections aren't allowed to do it. Meanwhile users are uselessly encouraged to "conserve" bandwidth even though unused hardware capacity can't actually be saved for use later, which wastefully reduces the benefit users receive from their connections. (The fact that not using unused transfer capacity is wasteful is hard for some people to wrap their heads around, but think about it. It's like "saving" perishable food by not eating it before it expires.)
Even if you like the idea of enterprises paying more than residential customers, distorting the market like this is not the way to do it. You could get a much better result by e.g. taxing telecommunications usage by corporations with more than 1000 employees and then using the money to subsidize connections for everybody else.
>All nodes have the same capabilities on the Internet, as far as sending and receiving packets to other nodes is concerned.
This is clearly untrue. Just look at DOCSIS (Cable Internet). If everyone on your block is streaming netflix at the same time you all suffer, which is why some people complain about speed during peak hours.
This is simply the case that the architecture being laid out to consumer is designed for specific use cases.
None of that has anything to do with the capabilities of Internet connected computers. Regardless of your connection speed or latency, you can communicate with any other computer that is connected to the Internet. That was the vision and thankfully it remains the reality of the Internet (despite the increasing threat).
It has everything to do with the capabilities of Internet connected computers. Your previous post asked why you couldn't saturate your connection. While we would all like to believe every node on the internet is equal, there are physical engineering limits and cost constraints we have to adhere to.
Simply put, the economics simply don't make sense to give everyone in the neighborhood the ability for 24/7 1Gbps. It doesn't make sense because your grandma, won't max the connection 24/7, however she would still like for her Netflix movies to download quickly. So its been decided upon that ISP-x will only put $10 million rather than $20 million so that everyone can enjoy 1Gbps internet, just not 24/7 and all at the same time. If you do need this type of connection, then get a business class connection where you do have these guarantees, and the extra money you pay goes into making sure the infrastructure can meet your demands.
However, at the end of the day it doesn't make sense to charge everyone more, for the needs of what must be 1% of the population. Remember for the most part this isn't used to stop you from SSHing into your home computer. This is stop people from using the connection in a perverse way from how it was designed. Its a simple engineering tradeoff.
If everyone on your block (and the rest of your ISP) is streaming Netflix at the same time it's more likely to be slow either because your ISP has effectively capped Netflix traffic upstream by not adding more peering connections [0] and/or is not taking advantage of Netflix' freely provided cache[1] system.
I don't think you have an accurate picture of how the nuts and bolts work for networking and the internet. You seem to think of your connection as (1Gbps -> Internet) when in reality there are several switches/routers in between you and your ending destination each with significantly less bandwidth than the total number of customers they serve. Bandwidth is oversold by an extremely large margin (rightly so). If you saturate your connection it has downstream effects that can degrade service for other users.
The Internet is not a network where some nodes have different capabilities from others, or at least it was not supposed to be. This is not some ITU standard that favors large monopolies on communications service. All nodes have the same capabilities on the Internet, as far as sending and receiving packets to other nodes is concerned. TCP does not discriminate between "business" and "personal" computers.
This, of course, is what makes the Internet such a fantastic system and the reason that the Internet overtook all those online services we used to use. I doubt that Google could have gotten started if the Internet were designed any other way.