Your argument that peak loads are critical to planning and capacity management is correct.
But it's freaking impossible to tell customers where/when to use data, and when not to. It's freaking impossible to tell them that data is more expensive for these hours, not those hours, etc. So, caps are a blunt took to reduce the peaks. It also puts that "cognitive load" that Masnick talks about...and that's a good thing. Consumers that are forced to recognize that bandwidth isn't free will start being more selective about the apps they install and their use of data. This will reduce peak demand.
Also, you may not be fully aware that the peak load patterns have changed dramatically the past decade. In the cellular world, rush-hour commute times used to be the busiest by far for mobile voice. Data started on a similar schedule, but now, data use has flattened out a great deal. This is because much of the aggregate use is background connections by apps, and associated signaling traffic. Mobile video use also takes place all day, not specifically during commutes.
Yes. The current usage meters suck. They are embarassingly bad tools, that don't meet my definition of a usage meter. As provided by ISPs and cellular companies, they are "estimates of how much you used up until last night...but don't hold us to it." Meters. Almost useless.
I make no apologies for telcos and ISPs sucking. But I believe that caps are not to blame for lousy implementations of caps. No ISP should implement a metered solution until they can provide working, real-time usage meters and reliable outbound warnings.
As for the "bigger issue" of the cognitive load: tough shit. I don't get you're blind spot on this. Usually, you apply economic models to all arguments. Why not on this one?
It is not the job of suppliers of Oranges to enable the innovative use of oranges without any cognitive load. Oranges are scarce, they cost money. If people use more, they must consider the cost of their increased use of oranges. Think of all the orange-based paint, scent, and insecticide solutions we'll never see because oranges have a cost. But isn't that just supply and demand at work?
Also, there would be a lot of innovative users for flash memory, if it just were free. But it's not. So think of all the lost inventions we'll never see using free flash memory. But c'est la vie, right? We don't complain that the flash makers don't offer an "unlimited" plan for buying their memory. Why are data suppliers held to some other standard?
Cuz we likes our Interwebz? Not a good enough reason to throw the law of supply and demand out the window.
And as I argued in prior comments, bandwidth IS a scarce demand. The cost per bit is not free. Not even close. This is because demand keeps growing. So we are not talking about an old, fully amortized physical network with steady data traffic. We are talking about carriers facing a demand tsunami, and needing to invest Billions upgrading their networks and devices to handle it. Customers, of course, are the ones who end up paying. Now, the ISPs are asking people, through their pricing: "If you use more, please either contain your usage, or pay more so we can build more capacity for users like you." Of all the crappy things, false arguments, and cash grabs I see carriers to, this is just one one of them.
Before 2004, you and I complained that plans marketed as "unlimited" were, in fact, limited. The carriers switched gears a little, and now sell plans as "limited" with caps. I think this is, finally, honest. You are still angry about it.
OK, the cognitive load is a pain. I know it. I feel it too, especially on international travel where they really rob you. But that cognitive load you feel is just the reality of needing to correctly allocate scarce resources, i.e. economics. And usually you can spot that kind of thing. You don't complain here about the cognitive load when you go to the store and buy hundreds of other scarce goods. Why just this one?
If you assume that the meter works like crap, and is not granular enough, and is not real-time, then yes, you are correct.
Sadly. You are correct. This is the way most celcos and ISP meters currently work - they are not real-time and the ISPs have to weasel out of the meter information "these data are just indications, represent estimated usage at midnight last night, etc. etc."
I make no apologies for telcos and ISPs sucking. But I believe that caps are not to blame for lousy implementations of caps. No ISP should implement a metered solution until they can provide working, real-time usage meters and reliable outbound warnings.
I never suggested there is no value in learning what a MB is. I just said there is no NEED.
Just as there is value in knowing what a pound of steak looks like when you go to the butcher, or what a gram of coke looks like when you go to your pusher. Knowledge is power, and people who know more will do a better job of planning their use of products and services, and how they spend their money.
But charts, graphs, and pro-active notification about caps can go a long way towards helping ISP customers understand their consumption without ever NEEDING them to understand what a MB is. And you know, what? Little by little, some of them will learn what a MB is.
When you were four, did you know how much candy you could buy for a dollar? Nope. But you bought candy a few times, and you learned, right? Masnick's article falsely assumes that people MUST know what a MB is, then also falsely assumes that people won't learn.
PS, I've been debating him for about 9 years on this subject. It's one of the few on which we disagree.
Nobody, never, ever, ever, would build a network to handle the peak load, as you suggest with lolcats at noon. That investment is then wasted all the rest of the day.
Look at highways that are congested at rush hour.
Phone networks that are jammed during emergencies.
Generators that are sold out at Home Depot during power outages.
Power outages during the hottest days of summer.
The ISPs could build a network to handle those spikes. Do you really want them to? OK, your monthly ISP bill will be $500, as it is for enterprise customers who want guaranteed service levels. Enjoy.
Well, whatever the speed is, it's gonna be arbitrary, right? So, I take a stab and say 164Kbps. You could say something else. It could change over time. The key, for me, is that it is not overly "punitive", as AT&T's wireless caps proved to be. You notice it, it prevents the most data hungry of services (streaming media) but it doesn't affect most data services.
I picked that number simply because:
- users will feel it, but it is not overly punitive
- you can still do VoIP
- you can still Tweet, E911 GPS locate yourself, Facebook, mediocre web browse, check-in, Google Map, traffic update, health monitor, etc... Hundreds of thousands of apps still will work.
- you will have a hard time streaming video, and perhaps audio
But you will notice the throttle if you are the kind of heavy user who hits your cap, and you will either have to buy up to a higher tier, tolerate the throttle, or alter your usage pattern.
That is an effort to constrain an every-growing demand. Yes, it limits people. That's what it is intended to do. You can pay more for more, or be limited at the price you pay. I've wrote it above already, but it is the law of supply and demand in action. It's not personal, just econ.
"Data is different than other utilities as it is an infinite commodity."
A common notion among tech-savvy, heavy Internet users, and one promoted by my friend here, Masnick. Also one I think is patently incorrect.
I see AT&T (make fun of them at will) investing $19 Billion per year on network improvements, all for the goal of increasing capacity. I, thus, find it hard to accept the argument that capacity is free.
A bit on a deployed network has a marginal cost that approaches zero. This is true. And this is where your misunderstanding takes root.
That "Bits are free" argument would be fine...so long as you are satisfied using a dial-up connection to log into "the Well" to share ideas with your buddies, and use your Pine email client or AOL to sent email to your friends.
If, however, your Internet needs have changed, and your demand for bandwidth has increased over the years, then the bits are not free. You are demanding increased capacity, and that, my friends, cost billions.
Yes they do. For carriers with capacity constraints trying to match the capital they must spend to extent capacity with increased revenues, they solve the problem quite surgically. People either reduce their consumption, or pay more for more.
You'll find it in the encyclopedia under Supply and Demand. It is obvious from comments like yours that people still do not understand the role that economics plays in the market for braodband services. Economics doesn't care that you are "always on the net talking to people, streaming video or music, playiung online games, doing research, etc." Economics only cares that, if the impact of users like you pushes the demand curve to the right, either the equilibrium price will need to rise, or you will need to be constrained.
The Internet is not a charity. Even if "it's a large part of life", that would mean that you want it more, and will pay more for more. Consider a parallel:
Gas stations don't give me unlimited gas for each time I pay to fill up! Putting a limit on how much gas I can pump "greatly interferes with many aspects of what I do on a daily basis. I then have to choose do I give up [commuting] for a week or more so I can [pay my mortgage]?"
Life has costs and trade-offs. Tough. Economics is the study of allocation of resources under scarcity. I think, good sir, that it is not I that fail to "get" these here Interwebs, but rather you that fails to "get" them thars economics laws.
Your first point: They will know how much "stuff" they've done thus far that month, and therefore how much more of that stuff they can do. If they are 9/10 into the month and at 90%...well, they can pretty much carry on as before. People are stupid, but not completely. To Lobo Santo's point, if they don't get %ages, then then can at least see the pie chart and get a feel for areas. If they can't handle that, how do they buy meat at a butcher shop, gas from a gas pump, electricity from a meter, or anything else that's measured?
To your second point on competition. That is completely correct.
Ridiculous premise. Nobody needs to know what a MB is. They simply need to be given a good usage meter that shows their usage as a percentage of their cap.
This can be a bar chart, a pie chart, etc. That's easy to understand. People understand proportions, don't they. Problem solved.
The cognitive load you discuss can be reduced greatly by proactive notifications. Caps done correctly would include sufficient outbound notifications to users when they hit thresholds (50, 80, 90, 100%), or are off-pace with their caps: "Hey, you've used 50% of your month's allotment in just 8 days." Users at the cap should be throttled to respectable speeds (164Kb/s or so) or offered an up-sell to the next higher plan.
The problem isn't caps. It's that carriers are terrible at implementing them well.
FOUR of the 10 routers offer what they call a "guest network" (under the "Security" heading). This is actually a security feature that allows users to segregate guests from their own LAN.
The guest networks are normally separate SSIDs and login credentials, which allow guest and public access to the Internet, but not the users's computers or Internet traffic.
And, yeah, I have one and leave it open. Before this was an available feature, I had a separate wifi router that I used for guests.
This police policy is stupid, misguided, and bucks 2 general trends towards securing one's personal wifi, and overall more available open wifi.
If I beat someone with two punches to the gut, that is a crime.
If I kill the same person with two stabs to the gut, that is a crime.
Since they are both illegal, are they both murder? No. There is some difference between the two crimes, and thus we have created language to remove the ambiguity: the former is an assault, and the latter is a murder.
Don't call an assault a murder, because it isn't. Even if you are really, really, really angry at me for the assault, it's still not murder. The correct word exists...why not just use it?
I have young kids. I tell them every tree is a "tree" and that's all. But some are maples and some are elms. I hope that by the time their 10 years old, they'll understand that, although both are trees, elms are not maples. I wish the debater here understood the same thing.
And when he calls a pine an elm, I'm not using "weasel words" when I tell him he's wrong.
Words matter. People try to deliberately use words that serve their needs. Techdirt tries to use the correct words, and dispel the bias that is being *deliberately* inserted by the consistent incorrect word choice.
On the post: The Stupidity Of Data Caps: No One Knows What A Megabyte Is
Re: Re: The reason for limits is simple:
But it's freaking impossible to tell customers where/when to use data, and when not to. It's freaking impossible to tell them that data is more expensive for these hours, not those hours, etc. So, caps are a blunt took to reduce the peaks. It also puts that "cognitive load" that Masnick talks about...and that's a good thing. Consumers that are forced to recognize that bandwidth isn't free will start being more selective about the apps they install and their use of data. This will reduce peak demand.
Also, you may not be fully aware that the peak load patterns have changed dramatically the past decade. In the cellular world, rush-hour commute times used to be the busiest by far for mobile voice. Data started on a similar schedule, but now, data use has flattened out a great deal. This is because much of the aggregate use is background connections by apps, and associated signaling traffic. Mobile video use also takes place all day, not specifically during commutes.
On the post: The Stupidity Of Data Caps: No One Knows What A Megabyte Is
Re: Re: Nobody Needs To Know
I make no apologies for telcos and ISPs sucking. But I believe that caps are not to blame for lousy implementations of caps. No ISP should implement a metered solution until they can provide working, real-time usage meters and reliable outbound warnings.
As for the "bigger issue" of the cognitive load: tough shit. I don't get you're blind spot on this. Usually, you apply economic models to all arguments. Why not on this one?
It is not the job of suppliers of Oranges to enable the innovative use of oranges without any cognitive load. Oranges are scarce, they cost money. If people use more, they must consider the cost of their increased use of oranges. Think of all the orange-based paint, scent, and insecticide solutions we'll never see because oranges have a cost. But isn't that just supply and demand at work?
Also, there would be a lot of innovative users for flash memory, if it just were free. But it's not. So think of all the lost inventions we'll never see using free flash memory. But c'est la vie, right? We don't complain that the flash makers don't offer an "unlimited" plan for buying their memory. Why are data suppliers held to some other standard?
Cuz we likes our Interwebz? Not a good enough reason to throw the law of supply and demand out the window.
And as I argued in prior comments, bandwidth IS a scarce demand. The cost per bit is not free. Not even close. This is because demand keeps growing. So we are not talking about an old, fully amortized physical network with steady data traffic. We are talking about carriers facing a demand tsunami, and needing to invest Billions upgrading their networks and devices to handle it. Customers, of course, are the ones who end up paying. Now, the ISPs are asking people, through their pricing: "If you use more, please either contain your usage, or pay more so we can build more capacity for users like you." Of all the crappy things, false arguments, and cash grabs I see carriers to, this is just one one of them.
Before 2004, you and I complained that plans marketed as "unlimited" were, in fact, limited. The carriers switched gears a little, and now sell plans as "limited" with caps. I think this is, finally, honest. You are still angry about it.
OK, the cognitive load is a pain. I know it. I feel it too, especially on international travel where they really rob you. But that cognitive load you feel is just the reality of needing to correctly allocate scarce resources, i.e. economics. And usually you can spot that kind of thing. You don't complain here about the cognitive load when you go to the store and buy hundreds of other scarce goods. Why just this one?
On the post: The Stupidity Of Data Caps: No One Knows What A Megabyte Is
Re: Re: Nobody Needs To Know
Sadly. You are correct. This is the way most celcos and ISP meters currently work - they are not real-time and the ISPs have to weasel out of the meter information "these data are just indications, represent estimated usage at midnight last night, etc. etc."
I make no apologies for telcos and ISPs sucking. But I believe that caps are not to blame for lousy implementations of caps. No ISP should implement a metered solution until they can provide working, real-time usage meters and reliable outbound warnings.
On the post: The Stupidity Of Data Caps: No One Knows What A Megabyte Is
Re: Re: Nobody Needs To Know
I never suggested there is no value in learning what a MB is. I just said there is no NEED.
Just as there is value in knowing what a pound of steak looks like when you go to the butcher, or what a gram of coke looks like when you go to your pusher. Knowledge is power, and people who know more will do a better job of planning their use of products and services, and how they spend their money.
But charts, graphs, and pro-active notification about caps can go a long way towards helping ISP customers understand their consumption without ever NEEDING them to understand what a MB is. And you know, what? Little by little, some of them will learn what a MB is.
When you were four, did you know how much candy you could buy for a dollar? Nope. But you bought candy a few times, and you learned, right? Masnick's article falsely assumes that people MUST know what a MB is, then also falsely assumes that people won't learn.
PS, I've been debating him for about 9 years on this subject. It's one of the few on which we disagree.
On the post: The Stupidity Of Data Caps: No One Knows What A Megabyte Is
Re: Re: Nobody Needs To Know
Nobody, never, ever, ever, would build a network to handle the peak load, as you suggest with lolcats at noon. That investment is then wasted all the rest of the day.
Look at highways that are congested at rush hour.
Phone networks that are jammed during emergencies.
Generators that are sold out at Home Depot during power outages.
Power outages during the hottest days of summer.
The ISPs could build a network to handle those spikes. Do you really want them to? OK, your monthly ISP bill will be $500, as it is for enterprise customers who want guaranteed service levels. Enjoy.
On the post: The Stupidity Of Data Caps: No One Knows What A Megabyte Is
Re: Re: Nobody Needs To Know
I picked that number simply because:
- users will feel it, but it is not overly punitive
- you can still do VoIP
- you can still Tweet, E911 GPS locate yourself, Facebook, mediocre web browse, check-in, Google Map, traffic update, health monitor, etc... Hundreds of thousands of apps still will work.
- you will have a hard time streaming video, and perhaps audio
But you will notice the throttle if you are the kind of heavy user who hits your cap, and you will either have to buy up to a higher tier, tolerate the throttle, or alter your usage pattern.
That is an effort to constrain an every-growing demand. Yes, it limits people. That's what it is intended to do. You can pay more for more, or be limited at the price you pay. I've wrote it above already, but it is the law of supply and demand in action. It's not personal, just econ.
On the post: The Stupidity Of Data Caps: No One Knows What A Megabyte Is
Re: Re: Nobody Needs To Know
A common notion among tech-savvy, heavy Internet users, and one promoted by my friend here, Masnick. Also one I think is patently incorrect.
I see AT&T (make fun of them at will) investing $19 Billion per year on network improvements, all for the goal of increasing capacity. I, thus, find it hard to accept the argument that capacity is free.
A bit on a deployed network has a marginal cost that approaches zero. This is true. And this is where your misunderstanding takes root.
That "Bits are free" argument would be fine...so long as you are satisfied using a dial-up connection to log into "the Well" to share ideas with your buddies, and use your Pine email client or AOL to sent email to your friends.
If, however, your Internet needs have changed, and your demand for bandwidth has increased over the years, then the bits are not free. You are demanding increased capacity, and that, my friends, cost billions.
On the post: The Stupidity Of Data Caps: No One Knows What A Megabyte Is
Re: Re: Nobody Needs To Know
I'm defending caps, tiers of service and metering as viable economic pricing models in a market with scarcity of resources (network capacity).
I'm not defending the BS carriers sometimes promote, nor the services they end up offering, nor the clumsy way they deliver them.
On the post: The Stupidity Of Data Caps: No One Knows What A Megabyte Is
Re: Re: Nobody Needs To Know
Yes they do. For carriers with capacity constraints trying to match the capital they must spend to extent capacity with increased revenues, they solve the problem quite surgically. People either reduce their consumption, or pay more for more.
You'll find it in the encyclopedia under Supply and Demand. It is obvious from comments like yours that people still do not understand the role that economics plays in the market for braodband services. Economics doesn't care that you are "always on the net talking to people, streaming video or music, playiung online games, doing research, etc." Economics only cares that, if the impact of users like you pushes the demand curve to the right, either the equilibrium price will need to rise, or you will need to be constrained.
The Internet is not a charity. Even if "it's a large part of life", that would mean that you want it more, and will pay more for more. Consider a parallel:
Gas stations don't give me unlimited gas for each time I pay to fill up! Putting a limit on how much gas I can pump "greatly interferes with many aspects of what I do on a daily basis. I then have to choose do I give up [commuting] for a week or more so I can [pay my mortgage]?"
Life has costs and trade-offs. Tough. Economics is the study of allocation of resources under scarcity. I think, good sir, that it is not I that fail to "get" these here Interwebs, but rather you that fails to "get" them thars economics laws.
On the post: The Stupidity Of Data Caps: No One Knows What A Megabyte Is
Re: Re: Nobody Needs To Know
To your second point on competition. That is completely correct.
On the post: The Stupidity Of Data Caps: No One Knows What A Megabyte Is
Nobody Needs To Know
This can be a bar chart, a pie chart, etc. That's easy to understand. People understand proportions, don't they. Problem solved.
The cognitive load you discuss can be reduced greatly by proactive notifications. Caps done correctly would include sufficient outbound notifications to users when they hit thresholds (50, 80, 90, 100%), or are off-pace with their caps: "Hey, you've used 50% of your month's allotment in just 8 days." Users at the cap should be throttled to respectable speeds (164Kb/s or so) or offered an up-sell to the next higher plan.
The problem isn't caps. It's that carriers are terrible at implementing them well.
On the post: Feds Tried To Destroy All Evidence Of Memo Saying They Were Committing War Crimes With Torture
The "Deny" Checkbox
What exactly is the "Deny" check box for??
And "Excise"...isn't that a.k.a. destroying evidence?
Freedom of information. Ha!
On the post: Publishing Isn't A Job Anymore: It's A Button
Add Curation To The Services That Still Add Value
"Editing, we need, desperately. Fact-checking, we need. For some kinds of long-form texts, we need designers."
"publicity, improving the product, monetizing"
On the post: Australian Police To Go Wardriving, Telling People To Lock Up Their WiFi
Re: Re: Re: Re:
On the post: Australian Police To Go Wardriving, Telling People To Lock Up Their WiFi
Re: Re: Re:
The issue is silly. In this review of the top ten wifi home gateways:
http://wireless-router-review.toptenreviews.com/
FOUR of the 10 routers offer what they call a "guest network" (under the "Security" heading). This is actually a security feature that allows users to segregate guests from their own LAN.
The guest networks are normally separate SSIDs and login credentials, which allow guest and public access to the Internet, but not the users's computers or Internet traffic.
And, yeah, I have one and leave it open. Before this was an available feature, I had a separate wifi router that I used for guests.
This police policy is stupid, misguided, and bucks 2 general trends towards securing one's personal wifi, and overall more available open wifi.
On the post: Lindsay Lohan's Lawyer's Loopy Legal Argument Laced With Lifted Language?
Re: Re:
Lawsuit
Lobo Santo
On the post: Guess What? Copying Still Isn't Stealing
Re: Assault of the Language
ugh. I mean "they're".
On the post: Guess What? Copying Still Isn't Stealing
Assault of the Language
If I kill the same person with two stabs to the gut, that is a crime.
Since they are both illegal, are they both murder? No. There is some difference between the two crimes, and thus we have created language to remove the ambiguity: the former is an assault, and the latter is a murder.
Don't call an assault a murder, because it isn't. Even if you are really, really, really angry at me for the assault, it's still not murder. The correct word exists...why not just use it?
I have young kids. I tell them every tree is a "tree" and that's all. But some are maples and some are elms. I hope that by the time their 10 years old, they'll understand that, although both are trees, elms are not maples. I wish the debater here understood the same thing.
And when he calls a pine an elm, I'm not using "weasel words" when I tell him he's wrong.
Words matter. People try to deliberately use words that serve their needs. Techdirt tries to use the correct words, and dispel the bias that is being *deliberately* inserted by the consistent incorrect word choice.
On the post: Guess What? Copying Still Isn't Stealing
Re:
If you set up a script to do it non-stop, he will starve overnight, turning to dust like vanquished monsters in horror films.
On the post: Guess What? Copying Still Isn't Stealing
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: It can be.
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