A horrible thing may happen to the internet in canada

In principle I understand the outrage, but 60GB a month is not a bad cap, is it? This is the problem though, when the government allows a private company to be the gatekeeper to things like this. In the end, the company gets greedy.

The flaw in your logic is that most services charge per unit. So by your rationale, if they offer cheap service and best quality, should they not also charge per unit (a cap on bandwidth basically charges you in this way)?

 

lol i have mts with unlimited!!!! lol that sucks indeed for everyone else but yeah 60 gigs is friggen lots it will get you by even if your a major pirate thats an average of 40-60 movies a month thats still lots who cares about all that! why.... just why cap it?

 

It is when you consider that caps and per-byte billing are absolutely unnecessary at any level. The internet is not a resource in the manner of water or electrical utilities, where you are paying for an amount of consumed material. There is no "consumption" by downloading data. The actual cost to ISP's and upstream providers is in electricity and equipment. While it is reasonable in my opinion to charge for speed of access, since this has a legitimate effect on equipment costs and service availability, caps and per-byte billing only serve to restrict service.

 

Well, some good news for Americans.
AOL Time Warner's new CEO decided to cancel their tiered service plans after complaints. Apparently, the people from Rochester NY (one of the "test" locations for the new plans) were so pissed off, they even got their senator to go visit Time Warner. Good for them.

I'm sure this isn't the end of it, but at least its something. It was pretty stupid of TM to try this in only a few areas. If you live in one of the "test" zones, you're going to naturally feel like "I'm getting fucked, but the rest of the country isn't".

Question: Do you think Internet service should be treated like other utilities, in the sense that price should be regulated? In my opinion yes, since it's become just as important in our lives as gas, water and electricity. It's practically a necessity. These day's it's quickly becoming a multi-opoly situation in many countries.

 

Why would there be a need for regulation?

 

That's only if you're comparing internet service to phone service. There's other analogies we could use, like say cable TV. Do they cut off cable if you watch too many movies? Do they kick you out of the library if you read too many books? And even phone service, really. Do they charge me more if I make too many local calls? And even if it were a better way to get service at the best price, then we need to up the limit way past a pathetic 1 GB for that.

I'll settle if I get 60 gb for the price I pay now ($45) instead of more than three times that price for less ($150 for 40 gb.) Thats what Time Warner wanted to do in my area.

Yeah I posted a link to that, excellent news. But yeah I'm sure this isn't the last we've head of it. Next time they try it though they might propose a better deal. Who says Democracy doesn't work?

I agree too. It's the nature of the service to have it divided up by area to companies that work like virtual monopolies. If you want to switch service you have very few options. So yes I think it should be regulated insomuch as phone, gas, or power companies are regulated, to prevent things like price gouging and such.

 

That allmost makes me want to cry :lol:

I work for bt, i dont get any download limits and get pretty much the full speed but were seriously in the dark when it comes to internet connections, and still will be for a long time till they put in the proper fibre networks which will take a long time.

I think it was a case of we'll see how long we can get away with it until we need to put some real money into it, and itl cost the customer a fortune for the same service as your getting yakumo because theyve had to invest a lot of money bringing the UK infrastructure up to speed.

 

In the beginings of the internet,esp in the UK you had to pay for the service and then pay for the time used on the internet. Going further back to the Prestel days, you also had to pay for special services too.

Although nowdays I do think that ISPs should be forced to stop using the phrase Unlimited (with the use "Fair Use Policy" in the tiny print). In Australia the ISP I had was awful as it stated 'Unlimited' although the small print said that there was a fair use policy of 10gb a month, I wrote them a letter and asked which dictionary defined 'Unlimited' as something that had a limit... although they replied saying it was unlimited but the 5mb service would drop to 64kbs....

In Japan, internet is fast, cheap and definately unlimited (in the last month alone I've had to download over 150gb of stufff for work...), the place I am renting has a video on demand system where all the TV is streamed.

 

Like I said, you poor buggers in the UK get shafted time and time again. NTT here in Japan had to put a lot of money in to getting the fibre optic network up and running but at least they don't try and pass on the cost to us as much as BT.

Yakumo

 

The thing is, most people don't have a clue about how much a GB is and how fast you can reach this limit, they don't have a sense for transfer speeds etc.

But if you write 6000K SPEED!!! - UNLIMITED DOWNLOADS! in your add, they will understand, because 6000 sounds FAST, and unlimited is, well, unlimited! (or at least it should be) its a confidence trick.

 

Thats true, I guess your from the UK originally yakumo? The UK is a nightmare when it comes to broadband access, the lines are crap, and the whole infrastructure is crap too, they should have put a lot more money into it, like the east have done a long time ago, but i work for them and it just seems like they would just sail along for as long as they think it would be ok.....were seriously lacking in technology with broadband and its not going to get better anytime soon, its quite a joke when they say that the UK is is one of the top nations, because its simple not true.

 

That's like selling cable TV and only letting customers watch 5 hours of TV every month and then disconnecting the TV broadcasts for the rest of the month.

 

There is a lot of speculation that the tiering plans are not because of overloaded networks, but due to the companies having a vested interest in other media distribution models. When I signed up cable internet service back in the US, it was:

$55 for internet only
$52 for internet + limited cable ($40+12)

What the fuck is that logic? They obviously want people to get hooked on their cable services. Hopefully becoming one of their digital cable subscribers and spending tons on overly compressed movies filled with artifacts. I posted way too many times in this thread, but it's because this stuff really pisses me off. I guess venting really in therapeutic.

 

It is --- in the US, it's regulated just like the phone (pay a flat fee, use it all you want to an extent). Turning people away from the internet is a retrogressive idea in general, and should be avoided.

Don't turn NTT into heros. They are just as despicable as BT if not worse. The original plan was to skip ADSL altogether and go straight to fibre, although not after using their well-dated ISDN infrastructure for another 5 years or so... resulting in per-minute charges to the end user. The *ONLY* reason that didn't happen was b/c of a mutiny. Forgot the guys name, but he quit the board at NTT, sued them so their lines had to be opened, and started Tokyo Metallic: The first ADSL provider in Japan. They then had to rush to get their ADSL network up to compete. I believe this outcome is what pushed Fiber onto the scene, mainly by Usen, and later other providers.

Cable is now a big player in Japan though. I wonder what would've happened had Tokyo Metallic never came to be. The point is the same though: NTT are pricks. ADSL infrastructure is basically laid down (phone lines) and requires less overead than something like fibre. Of course, they sat on it though.

 

Yep, Liverpool of all places. I don't have a really shitty scouse accent though but you can tell I guess.

Oh, I'm not. NTT are a bunch of money grabbing twats but if you've lived in the UK you'll find BT to be just the same PLUS F*ing awful reliability. At least NTT are fairly reliable in line service and house calls.

Yakumo

 

There may be similarities in how ISP's are treated and operated in certain jurisdictions, but it is far from being "regulated" like phone services.

 

They do this here in the UK as well. Its really getting on my nerves. Specialy on mobile phone deals. WTF is unlimited about 2gb before you start charging me.

 

I've found this a result of the sometimes annoying Japanese work ethic. When I moved to Hawaii, my internet would go out for hours at a time, and I could never get an answer.