Re: Net Neutrality and Your Internet Bill

On Fri, Dec 3, 2010 at 2:24 PM, Peter T. Chattaway
<petert-LOVM4QxV+tDq6eQxt3vRmLDks+cytr/[email protected]> wrote:
> On Fri, 3 Dec 2010, nicholas a. evans wrote:
>>
>> I don't see why my cell phone and internet bills should be so very
>> different.
>
> I'd rather not have to think that each phone call or e-mail is costing me a
> particular amount of money.  I'd rather just pay a flat rate for a certain
> range of service and then enjoy the freedom within those limits.

When you pay 20¢/GB or less, you don't sweat the small stuff.
Rackspace cloud servers charge a flat 22¢/GB.  Amazon S3/EC2 charges
less as you use more: 15¢/GB for the first 10TB, 8¢/GB after 150 TB.
Slicehost (now owned by Rackspace) charges $20/month for 150GB
($100/month for 900GB, etc) and charges 30¢/GB after you've gone over
your limit.  These are all outbound traffic prices, downloading is
generally about 2/3 to 1/3 the outbound price.  You pick the plan and
provider that works best for your needs and budget.

The fact of the matter is that bandwidth is not free for any co-lo or
ISP, wireless or wired.  My estimation is that most customers would
pay far *less* if they paid per GB.

>> It's a more honest and more easily audited business transaction than
>> "unlimited" service that gets mysteriously cut off or throttled when you hit
>> the unpublished limits.
>
> Unpublished?  Wouldn't it be specified in your contract and elsewhere?  I
> check my cell phone provider's website all the time to see how much
> bandwidth I've used, and that's why I've never been caught off-guard by my
> data usage.

Cell phone companies are much more up front about it, both because
they have more competition and because bandwidth is more scarce.

Comcast is wired, and I was unable to find out what my limits are from
their website.  When I originally signed up, they even advertised
their service as "Unlimited Internet", although I knew people who had
their service shutdown for excessive use during that period.  It looks
like they've removed that from the advertising by now, which is good.
But I still don't know where I stand as far as how much I've used and
what my limits are, which is not so good.
http://consumerist.com/2010/03/comcast-unlimited-usage-doesnt-mean-unlimited-usage.html

> (I've only had this phone for a few months, and I had to be
> very careful in September because of my special trip to Alberta for my
> sister's wedding, and I had to be very careful in October because I spent so
> much time out-of-the-house at the film festival ... but in November I wasn't
> "careful" at all, because I wasn't out of the house for any unusual
> stretches of time, and it turned out I never came anywhere *close* to using
> up my bandwidth limit, but I did monitor my usage just to be sure.)

Some of my internet hosts that offer a limit with overage fees will
send me emails if I've gone halfway through the month and used more
than half of my bandwidth, or whenever I hit 80%, 90%, 100% of my
bandwidth, etc.  This is much nicer than the cell companies, but at
least I can find out from the cell companies via an app on my phone,
which is more than I can say for Comcast.  I use so few cell phone
minutes that all of the pre-paid minutes would be cheaper for me than
the cheapest voice plan.  I would much rather buy 1000 minutes once
every several months and pay for my data per MB every month.
Unfortunately, pre-paid data plans are either non-existent or very
clunky.

-- 
Nick

-- 
dadl-ot mailing list
http://mail.thehood.us/mailman/listinfo/dadl-ot_thehood.us
http://news.gmane.org/gmane.music.dadl.ot