Two Senators Propose Ban On Data Caps, Blasting ISPs For 'Predatory' Limits - Sl...
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Two Senators Propose Ban On Data Caps, Blasting ISPs For 'Predatory' Limits
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Data caps that don't comply with the exceptions would violate the Communications Act. "While certain broadband Internet access service networks may require practices to effectively manage congestion, those practices should be tailored to improve equitable access among consumers," the bill says. "Unnecessary data caps limit participation in the digital economy and are contrary to the public interest." The bill can be expected to attract fierce opposition from the broadband industry and would face long odds of passing through the Senate and House. If it does become law, it would likely prohibit the home Internet data caps imposed by Comcast and others, which clearly exist for financial purposes and not for any network management need.
While the Lujan/Booker bill leaves key details up to the FCC, it provides a comprehensive definition of what counts as a data cap under the proposed law. The bill says a data cap is "a limit on the amount of bits or other units of information a customer of a broadband Internet access service provider may download or upload during a period of time specified by the broadband Internet service access provider before the customer is charged a fee for additional usage; is subject to an increasing cost per bit or other unit of information; is charged for an incremental block of usage; or experiences a reduction of access speed; or that the customer is otherwise discouraged or prevented from exceeding." The proposed law would apply to home Internet services and mobile data plans, as it uses a definition of broadband service in US law that includes "mass-market retail service by wire or radio." But the FCC would be able to define different rules for different types of connections, Lujan's office told Ars.
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Regulate the ISPs as common carriers
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I'm not sure which demographic they are targeting this bill toward. In the bill it states that the "average" home now uses over 500GB of data per month, without actually stating what "average" means. (Two adults working from home, two school-age users, one Netflix account, two Xbox/Playstation accounts?)
Currently, most cable and fiber ISPs have either unlimited or 1TB data caps for their top-tier plans, with lower caps for other plans. https://www.highspeedinternet.... [highspeedinternet.com]
According to the background study [openvault.com] linked in the bill, only 18.8% of the "power users" they tracked exceeded 1TB of data usage. One unsurprising fact they reported is the faster the connection speed, the higher the data usage. It's almost like the people using the most data are already paying higher prices for it./s
If the intent of the bill is to remove data caps from those paying for only basic connectivity or getting subsidies for internet connections [fcc.gov], they should specify that. Otherwise, it looks like there really isn't a problem except for HUGE data users (over 1.2TB/month), not the "average" home.
Or leave the data caps in place, but prorate my bill for any online-hour where my average is less than 80% of the advertised speed. The ISPs would either need to market the connections with realistic speed expectations or increase bandwidth. (Their 1Gbs plan would be marketed as a realistic 800Mbs, and no proration unless it falls to below 640Mbs for a full hour.) I'm not holding my breath.
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To use a simple break down of how far 1280GB goes, Prime video using the "best" quality uses 6.84 GB per hour. That leaves 187 hours of usage before going over. Say you have 2 people watching different things because they can't or wont want to do anything else, or just use it as second screen content, which essentially leaves 3 hours per day, per person before going over. A lot of these plans are advertised for families with multiple screens being able to stream. How much is a family of 4, say dad watching
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How do you fairly share out a finite resource without some kind of metering or limiting?
If the ISP has an upstream link of say, 100 Gb/s and has 1000 customers, theoretically, it can only sustain 100 Mb/sec downlinks to each customer.
Obviously not everyone is going to be using 100Mb per second all the time, so it might be reasonable for the ISP to have 10000 customers, and reduce the cost per subscriber because now you have 10000 people to split the cost over, or offer 1 Gb/s for it's 1000 customers, knowing that not everyone actually will use that speed at the same time.
However if you have a small percent of customers that are constantly using the full capacity all the time, way in excess of the average, then it's going to have an impact on everyone else.
There has to be some way to limit that impact.What's the solution? Seems like the heaviest really should be paying more, or limited in some way.
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95% usage billing is the solution (give everyone the max download and upload, and charge for actual usage). It is used in many data centers (i.e. business customers). However, consumers are claimed to not be able to understand it (even though it works for consumers for water, electricity, and gas (both natural and automobile)). Anyone who claims bits are free has never paid for transit and bisection bandwidth.
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That is common for hosting but makes little sense for consumers.
Nothing that you listed is billed based on 95% usage.
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95th percentile billing is just another method of usage billing and would probably work OK for consumer data billing, it would be much better than most of the current methods that penalize usage. I think a better method, would resemble the rural electric CoOp. You pay a monthly flat fee just to have electricity, that covers the infrastructure, then pay for your actual usage.
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Data transfer can be effectively free, it's the RATE that costs actual resources.
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Water, electricity (at least generally for now), and gas are all consumables; anything that isn't used today is available to be used tomorrow instead. Bandwidth doesn't work that way.
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There's a reason for that. It would make budgeting impossible, and most people — particularly those living on limited income — depend on services costing a fairly consistent amount of money from month to month, year to year.
Consumers can easily control how much water they use by showering less or whatever. They use a pretty consistent amount of water every month, so their bill doesn't change, and the same is usually true for power and natural gas for any given month of the year from year to ye
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Water is a good example, for a long time where I am, it was unmetered, pay a flat rate and use as much as you want with people refilling swimming pools, doing endless lawn watering, washing their driveway daily and having leaky pipes.
Now water is metered, you're wealthy enough not to care or take care not to use too much and now and again the local news has a story with someone getting a huge bill due to leaky pipes. People learned to adjust and get their pipes fixed.
Internet is the same, people will adjust
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Someone still has to set the rates. With utilities, it is some government entity, which in short order succumbs to regulatory capture, thus bilking the ratepayer anyway.
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It's in the summary:
A broadband Internet access service provider shall not impose a data cap except when tailored primarily for the purposes of reasonable network management or managing network congestion
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The summary pffft, ain't got time for that.
Everyone's already cut'n'pasting their net neutrality talking points as soon as they saw "ISP" in the heading.
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You don't manage congestion with data caps. They lie about it to justify data caps now, so even if this were to pass, it wouldn't change a thing.
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Who decides what is reasonable? A new government bureaucracy? The courts?
The best solution to this problem is competition.
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No, and you only think this because your mindset greedy to a fault. The real solution is that overbooking the network like that should be illegal. Don't advertise 100 Gb/s per customer then cram an order of magnitude more customers on the line than would make that feasibly possible. Just because most the customers aren't smart enough to realize you're doing it even at the point it negatively impacts their service quality doesn't mean it's okay.
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This would mean you have to be happy to pay 10x your current internet charges, to get dedicated guaranteed bandwidth - a lot of which would be wasted because it wouldn't be used most of the time.
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Like highways? Do you think highways are at full capacity at 2 AM? Or roads in general? For large stretches of the day, highways/roads are empty. What a waste.
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If that were an apt analogy, highway usage would be at 1% of capacity during rush hour. That's the kind of "wasted" bandwidth Vivian is talking about. All networks are oversubscribed to some degree, by necessity. There's an entire field of study called "queueing theory" about it. Peak time congestion is a failure to provide the advertised service, but the solution is not to never oversubscribe a network.
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Not at all. You just need to have truth in advertising. Instead of advertising that it is a gigabit connection because its peak speed is one gigabit, you advertise that it is a 25-megabit connection (because it is oversubscribed 40:1), and you advertise that it can provide peak speeds of up to a gigabit. Then you make sure you can reliably deliver 25-megabit service at all times of day, and people are happy when they get faster speeds, rather than being angry when they don't get gigabit speeds.
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So ISP's should be required to have exactly the total upstream bandwidth as the sum of all their customer's maximum speed? That means you would have to keep everyone's speed capped to a much lower rate, to meet the guarantee, or charge much more, to increase the guaranteed uplink bandwidth.
Perhaps a better option would to either require ISP's to state the customer ratio or guarantee a minimum speed, so there is more transparency and truth in advertising - eg. 100Mbit peak, guaranteed 10Mbit.
Even with that t -
Please don't comment assertively on things you don't understand. It's rude.
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Yes, in practice uplinks will almost always be lower capacity than the local customers. (This is perfectly normal).
And ISPs oversubscribe, that is also perfectly normal (not everyone torrents 24/7).
So,
On a Friday night, 100 "gigabit" users currently active on a 10gbit connectionThere are three ways to fix this:
1) Limit bandwidth equally = everyone gets 100mbits
2) Limit total transfer (data caps): Force users to self regulate, use fast speed now, to not use it later, or vice-versa
3) Do nothing: Let them "fig-
2) Limit total transfer (data caps): Force users to self regulate, use fast speed now, to not use it later, or vice-versa
This does nothing to solve the "Friday night problem". That's why data caps are nothing but a cash grab.
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So market the connection as 100mbps guaranteed, burstable to 1000mbps.
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Too bad caps totally fail to address your reasonable scenario. The correct answer is fair queuing. Everyone gets a hard minimum they will be granted no matter what (not oversubscribed) and then a soft limit above that that they will get if there is enough unused capacity on the line unless granting that would violate a hard minimum. When all minima are met and capacity remains, it is granted in proportion to each customer's soft limit.
Note how all of the above is based on data rate which is the actually sca
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The method that I would suggest, which I think T-Mobile started doing a few years ago, is dropping the priority of your traffic when you exceed your monthly "limit". Your bandwidth only gets lowered when the network is congested; if there's bandwidth available, you can keep using as much as you want. Hopefully this practice would be considered "managing network congestion".
The primary goal of the bill should be to eliminate the extra charges that some ISPs have, since the markup is insane. -
Back when cell phone talk time was all metered by minutes, I worked for a telco equipment manufacturer. Cricket Wireless, back when they were a regional carrier, did an analysis of their customer's call patterns and figured out the average call was just under 5 minutes long. Based off of this, they became pretty much the first carrier to offer "Unlimited Talk".
They advertised the hell out of it and rapidly picked up customers. That's when our team was called in to figure out WTF was going on when their equi
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In the US, Gov subsidies were used to build the infrastructure and the Cable Companies (esp COMCAST) ignored the regulations and much of those subsidies went to bonuses and shareholders.
Nevermind they have been advertising unlimited (and still do).
So yes, the gov should force them to provide everyone with unlimited bandwidth and force then to upgrade their service without charging more.
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It's pretty simple. If there's no contention you don't do anything. If there is contention, then people who hit certain "high water" marks get de-prioritized vs. people who haven't. And when that happens, the choke points get augmented. Notice at no point does any of this result in someone getting charged more for total monthly usage. Charging "over cap" fees serves no purpose beyond making more money, this is well known and has been publicly stated by several ISPs.
As for "Industry Opposition" to rules, it
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The bill isn't talking about bandwidth - it's talking about data usage.
For those of you playing at home...
Bandwidth has to do with the size of the pipe - soda straw, garden hose, fire hose, municipal water main.
Data usage (what the bill is about) is did you fill up a teacup, bathtub, swimming pool.Yes, the two are related, but are orthogonal and to each other.
As others have pointed out, sustainable bandwidth over a given period of time is the limiting factor for data usage.
I would like to have the billing w
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At least not in any meaningful fashion. A handful of QoS implementations to lower speeds is more than enough to keep Network congestion under control and has been for some time. The government gave internet companies over a trillion dollars to build out infrastructure and then let them keep the infrastructure. You paid for it and so did I. It's not like we're going to run out of bits and bytes. It's just a question of bandwidth and there's plenty of other ways to manage that bandwidth and keep everybody hap
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"How do you fairly share out a finite resource"
Here you're accepting the ISPs' scarcity argument for imposing data caps (not speed limits). that premise has in reality never been true
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Data caps are bullshit. If my speed is reduced because a lot of people are using the service and its oversubscribed, yeah ok that makes sense. But to cap how much I can download/upload because I'm using the service I'm paying for is simply a way to squeeze more money out of customers. If I'm saturating my link after hours when relatively no one is online, who cares? Its not like its a well you pump the bits out of to be stockpiled for sale when people are active...
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For over a decade the elite ISP have oversold their Internet backbone threshold and protected their "Internet time share" by creating an imaginary data cap. These same overlords tried to charge Netflix more for their bandwidth because of so many people accessing their site. AT&T, Verizon, Comcast/Xfinity, etc. need to be thrown over someone's knee and have the tar beat out of them!
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Both the democrats and republicans have sold out the US to the WEF (World economic forum) "You will own nothing and be happy"!f you support either party you are not a patriotic American! I will stand with patriotic Americans over globalists until the day my Lord calls me home!
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This is not a party issue as you have framed it, Both parties have deceived you!
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Now you know why they proposed it now instead of when they have the majority.
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The point is to give them a super majority plus two extra votes so that no two senators can't hold up a bill and so that the right wing senators can't hide behind the filibuster say gosh darn I sure would like to help people like I said I would but this darn filibuster.
It forces them to put up or shut up territory and if they don't put up they know they'll just get primaried. If you're not familiar with the time it means they're losing their primary elections to a candidate that will act.
Do that, an
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I don't think the timing is a coincidence. This close to the August recess, there's pretty much no chance this comes up for a vote - and, during an election year, pretty much nothing of consequence happens in Congress between the August recess and Election Day.
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Yeah, this is nothing more than virtue signalling. Calling for price controls on a non-essential service is a massive overreach. It's part of the left's ever growing list of things that are supposedly a human right.
The language of the bill is vague, allowing for managing of network resources but ensuring 'equitable' access to consumers. Caps typically start in then hundreds of gigabytes. The bill paints Internet access as a necessity, and I'd agree. Where it breaks down is in imagining that unlimited bandwidth is essential. Being able to stream Netflix at 4K each night is not a human right. The other uses they cited (education, work, healthcare, socialising) aren't heavy on bandwidth. I could see an argument for subsidised usage for education, but I guarantee most of that bandwidth is going on entertainment.
Yep. It's lefties virtue signalling redistributive policies that a child could see are morally wrong that will benefit the public good little more than sending a monthly bottle of government vodka to every home.
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>Unlimited bandwidth and no data caps are not the same thing. You are either ignorant or you are purposefully trying to conflate the two.
Being able to stream Netflix at 4K each night is not a human right.Or maybe I just used the wrong term? Yeah, this concerns caps, not bandwidth.
>Perhaps not, but it is quite reasonable in this day and age.
So is owning a smartphone or a car. That doesn't justify price controls. Unlimited data isn't a necessity, nor is it a right.
>It's lefties virtue signalling
No, i
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Yep. I mean I'd like to "ban" pricey gas, but...
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He didn't have a supermajority for very long. If you look at how Congress worked and how senators were being replaced due to retirements and in a couple of cases death he really only held Congress for about 2 months and he used that time to pass the affordable Care act (stick with me I'm going somewhere with this)
So after that couple of months he was basically a lame duck president. The Republican Party made it a point to block anything and everything he did that he couldn't do via executive order and th
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let weights and measures cert the meter and maybe then ISP will not cap as they will have to install an meter at the home like the power one.
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I wrote a quite detailed comment, but was forbidden from posting as AC.
In logging in, despite being a programmer, I copy-pasted password reset codes and lost my copied comment.To briefly reconstruct my comment:
1) Exceptions to data caps are absurd; the cost of delivering bandwidth has drastically fallen (in the many thousands of percentage points) compared to the rising prices that ISP's charge. Data caps are an artificial limit to implement a sense of artificial scarcity; bandwidth is not so scarce as wate-
Probably most of us have done things like that. I've often wondered about some kind of multiple (array) clipboards.
I've learned to open "notepad" (or notepad++ or whatever fine text editor you like) and paste to it immediately, and sometimes save it temporarily. Of course I have a folder of misc. text snippets that I sometimes prune out...
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It took me a few minutes to understand why this is a problem, and then it occurred to me that you don't have a clipboard manager. I've gotten so used to it under KDE that I frequently forget that it's not a standard in Windows.
Even some ISP's have spoken up about data caps being nothing more than a money-making scam that have absolutely no use in managing networks. They exist solely as an excuse to squeeze more money out of customers while providing absolutely no benefit to the customer.
The way the bill is
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If you have genuine competition (not a monopoly and not a situation where all the players in the market have done an under the table deal to not actually compete) then there is an incentive for ISPs not to do bad things since customers can switch to someone else that isn't as bad.
We have genuine competition here in Australia and basically every ISP out there offers unlimited data on home NBN internet plans across the board these days.
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Ah, land of sanity. So do your ISPs own the wire (fiber)?
I see wire (fiber) ownership as part of the problem here in the USA. Right now we have for-profit companies running and owning the wires they run. You may only have one available, or many. I have two available: Comcast (copper, which is really mostly fiber now) or Verizon fiber. Some areas near me have several others. In other words, there are many parallel wires strung on the utility poles, so there's wasteful redundancy (as opposed to coordina
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In Australia the ISPs don't own the infrastructure (for the most part), its open access and any ISP can sell services over it.
In the US, the best way forward would be to end laws, exclusivity agreements and anything else that artificially limits competition. Pretty much anywhere in the US that new players (be they for-profit companies, non-profit operations, governments or otherwise) have come in and offered an alternative to the last-century dinosaur cable companies and phone companies, things have gotten
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Yes, philosophically I agree. But, again, the problem is the few mega-corporations own the wires and pretty much act as monopoly. I wonder if they collaborate (illegally) and set prices.
I think, I might be wrong, that for competition to work, some kind of 3rd-party non-profit needs to own the wires. So how do we get to that point, when the wires are in place, and owned by the mega-corporations? They're not going to give up easily. Big money -> powerful lobby groups -> corporations get what they w
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What services do they sell, though? Why not just connect directly to the (I assume publically held) infrastructure?
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Yeah same here in Singapore. We got a few ISPs, some who are also telcos.
All on fibre (owned by another 3rd party who is NOT an ISP). Used to be cable / dsl, dial up, etc earlier on, but now it's all fiber.
All the ISPs are pretty cheap, most of them offer public IP v4 addresses by default (at least one offers Carrier-grade NAT, with a public IP4 if you pay a few bucks for a static address), and I think most, if not all also offer IPv6 as well. I think the slowest speed is 200mbps, with most common is 1gbps
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Those democrats who have never worked outside of government sure have a lot of ideas how businesses should run.
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I live in a market where I have a choice of ISPs. I can pick either Comcast or Verizon FiOS. I can also do DSL. Nowhere in this area are there any data caps. And my price is significantly lower than what some of coworkers pay. I have a triply play (home phone, Internet and TV) for bi-directional gigabit FiOS and my bill is only $129.00 a month. And that includes a CableCard rental.
You can continue to try to regulate ISPs, which is only as good as the next election cycle, or you can foster actual free-mark
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Seriously, Slashdotters: is there a functional reason for datacaps, or is it just profiteering by the ISPs? Personally I think it's just the latter; ISPs in the U.S. price-gouge mercilessly, charge for anything and everything they possibly can, giving as little value for the money as possible. To add to that, there's only a few players in the game who functionally speaking monopolize it, and all the apparent 'competition' has to lease bandwidth from them, 'rebranding' it. Pure late-stage capitalism in actio
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