There’s no such thing as unlimited anything. If you use more, you pay more. If you find this notion ridiculous, imagine for a moment that a company offered unlimited gasoline for your car, or if your rental property advertised an unlimited number of occupants per bedroom. That’s bananas!
As a side note, I’m horrified by the idea that there are people whose Netflix watching habit runs afoul of their ISP’s data cap. Isn’t that sort of existence depressing as all hell? Imagine the degree of brain rot caused by this quantity of video content.
I think your argument is valid but there are other valid arguments too.
I work from home and drive very little. I still pay an equal (more than equal actually) share of taxes for road maintenance.
I have a cottage at the very end of a private road. I pay the same amount for 20km of road maintenance that the poor sap at the beginning of the road pays, and he only uses about 100 metres of it.
None of my kids go to school yet, but I pay for public schools.
Obviously this isn't a new debate, but I wanted to draw the parallel with pay-per-use vs. spooky socialism because I think internet access is no different.
Were these examples of other situations where people are forced to pay an unfair amount for services they don't need meant as a rebuttal? Because it seems to me that you're supporting maxaf's argument.
The objectionable parts of data caps are the arbitrary hard cutoffs and massively inflated overage fees. It's crazy that the second TB/month may cost 10x the standard monthly rate with a 1TB cap, especially since most ISPs don't provide any easy way to track or limit the amount used. It should be more linear. Really the bill should have two parts: a small fixed connection fee based on the provisioned peak bandwidth to cover last-mile equipment costs and basic unmetered, contention-free connectivity at perhaps 500kbps, and a charge for data transferred above that limit proportional to the product of data size and priority/weight. Priorities should be set on the CPE side of the link using the DSCP field according to whatever policies the subscriber chooses, with "unmetered" (weight=0) as the default classification for automated background traffic and low-priority/bulk (weight=1) as the default for anything initiated by the user.[1] Higher priority traffic would carry a higher weight in the bandwidth allocation when the link is under contention but would also cost more per MB. For example, if there are 100 subscribers using only bulk traffic and 50 subscribers using only priority-2 traffic on a 1Gbps shared link the available bandwidth (925Mbps after the reservation for "unmetered") would be divided into 200 shares (100 + 2x50) with bulk traffic getting one share (4.6Mbps) per subscriber and priority traffic getting two shares (9.3Mbps). Put another way, 1MB of priority-2 traffic costs twice as much as 1MB of bulk traffic but is delivered in half the time. Of course other priorities/weights are possible, including fractions.
[1] This part would require better interfaces for classifying traffic at the source, since almost everything looks like opaque TLS traffic to the router these days. The router has no concept of whether a human being is waiting for a given transfer to complete, or how much the subscriber (who may not be the end user) is willing to spend to speed up the process. I'd imagine an algorithm based on target speeds and a monthly budget could work reasonably well as an approximation, though, combined with some basic source- and destination-based rules.
The poor sap and you don't pay the same amount. Fuel taxes, which are levied as a percentage of what you spend on fuel, will be different for you and the poor sap who drives less. The more you drive, the more you pay in fuel tax, which (ostensibly) goes towards road maintenance.
If we wanted a pay to play model, fuel tax is a great idea. But based on the breakdown of my city's funding, basically none of the roads are paid for by it.
The poor sap at the beginning of the road absolutely pays an equal amount. It's actually an interesting problem I'll try not to tangent on. You've got a road and each person needs a certain fraction of it. How do you equitably fund the road?
This is actually a surprisingly terrible way to sell Internet, and it's amazing to me that so many people still argue that this is how it should be.
If you don't use the Internet much you should pay less for Internet, but you shouldn't be artificially restricted in how fast the Internet works! Throttling is terrible, and the fact that people literally wait for an hour for a Windows update to download because they have cheaper Internet is... kinda dystopian.
We should push ISPs to provide all customers the fastest possible speed their network can do at the time, instead of artificially throttling them, and then charge them for usage.
> As a side note, I’m horrified by the idea that there are people whose Netflix watching habit runs afoul of their ISP’s data cap
If he's sticking with UHD content on Netflix then 4-5 hours average per day per account per month would reach Comcast's 1TB monthly data cap.[1]
If there are multiple users on his account (e.g. him and his kids) then you're talking just 1-2 hours of Netflix streaming per person per day per month. The UHD subscription package for Netflix allows streaming on up to four devices simultaneously.
>If there are multiple users on his account (e.g. him and his kids) then you're talking just 1-2 hours of Netflix streaming per person per day per month.
How much TV does the average person watch? Around 4 hours daily. If you only watch Netflix then it's easy to get 1-2 hours a day. That's only 2 shows a day.
Imagine if your rental property advertised a fixed number of occupants but also a "step cap", charging extra for steps inside the property exceeding 100,000 per month.
Buy a car in the UK now have these special loans where it's not a lease, not a purchase but somewhere in the middle. You buy the car but you can't drive it more than X miles a year. And after a few years you have to pay a lump sum to have the car or give it back. So it's kind of like that.
I'm pretty sure that Tesla offered unlimited free use of their Supercharger network to some of their early buyers.
The natural limit on an ISP is the speed of your connection times 247 usage. The unnatural but obvious second limit is the actual speed of your connection times 247 usage.
Since I own my house, I can have as many people in it as I want, subject to the laws of physics. (My local fire marshal may or may not have something to say about that; I haven't checked.)
As a side note, I’m horrified by the idea that there are people whose Netflix watching habit runs afoul of their ISP’s data cap. Isn’t that sort of existence depressing as all hell? Imagine the degree of brain rot caused by this quantity of video content.