[tpm] Usage Based Billing - What you should know..

[daniel at benoy.name]

 Peak hour usage does require infrastructure improvements, which 
 requires money which is best taken from the heaviest users.

 Charging per gig is not the answer, though.  A file sharer who pushes 
 50k upload at all times throughout a month will do about 130GB of 
 traffic per month.  Even though that's a trivial amount of bandwidth, it 
 still results in a massive charge.  On the other hand, someone who 
 watches netflix every day at peak hours might use only 30GB in the same 
 month, but would put a much bigger strain on the network than the 50k 
 file sharer.

 The billing method of '95th percentile' is what's most often used in 
 bigger backbone connections (fiber lan extensions and the like) takes 
 the bits per second of every given time period in a month, shave off the 
 top 5 percent, and charges you based on that.  That way you're charged 
 based on your speed usage, rather than your total transfer.  (And 
 shaving off the top five percent prevents you from being charged lots 
 just because you max out your connection for short times to download a 
 file here or there)  This billing method, while not perfect, is a much 
 better way of representing a user's actual cost to the infrastructure of 
 the network, since it's likely that their peak usage times will match up 
 to the provider's peak usage times.

 Also, I think the push by Bell/Rogers to charge UBB rates to third 
 party ISPs is just an attempt to harm their competitors ability to do 
 business, rather than trying to get a fair rate for network usage.  Bell 
 could have said 'Third party providers, we'll charge you a reasonable 
 95th percentile to cover the cost to our network, and it's up to you 
 whether you want to pay for that by charging UBB to your customers, or 
 give them unlimited access and pay with their subscription fees.' but 
 instead they're taking their own exorbitant UBB rates and charging 
 wholesalers 75% of that, giving them no recourse but to pass on the 
 costs in the same f'dup way that Bell and Rogers do things.

 On Mon, 31 Jan 2011 16:36:14 -0500, Jim Graham wrote:
> Water, electricity and natural gas are scarce resources. If I use
> some unit of electricity, water or gas, you are prevented from using
> it. That is not the case with Gb of "download" units. I download a
> copy of a file, you download a copy of the same file.
>
> There's some argument that infrastructure needs capacity to allow for
> more or larger downloads. However, the rates being set by Bell (and
> eyed by Rogers and Shaw) are completely out of whack with their 
> actual
> costs. The monopoly granted to Bell early in the telephone era is
> supposed to be offset by the CRTC; they are supposed to look out for
> consumers in this case. Unfortunately, they rolled over and screwed
> us.
>
> - Jim
>
> On 2011-01-31, at 4:22 PM [ Jan31], Neil Watson wrote:
>
>> The last mile monopoly in Canada is certainly a problem.  However, 
>> the
>> idea of usage billing is not a bad one.  It works for water, 
>> electricity
>> and natural gas.
>>
>> --
>> Neil Watson
>> Linux/UNIX Consultant
>> http://watson-wilson.ca
>> _______________________________________________
>> toronto-pm mailing list
>> toronto-pm at pm.org
>> http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/toronto-pm
>
> _______________________________________________
> toronto-pm mailing list
> toronto-pm at pm.org
> http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/toronto-pm