Binge On! - get your umbrellas out, stuff's hitting the fan.

Mon Jan 11 21:54:42 UTC 2016

On 10 January 2016 at 20:12, Owen DeLong <owen at delong.com> wrote:
>
>> On Jan 9, 2016, at 08:01 , Jeremy Austin <jhaustin at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> On Sat, Jan 9, 2016 at 5:06 AM, Mike Hammett <nanog at ics-il.net> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> The best solution for everybody is the solution most consumers are adverse
>>> to, which is usage based billing. Granted, many times the providers have
>>> shot themselves in the foot by making the charges punitive instead of based
>>> on cost plus margin. Reasonable $/gig for everybody! :-)
>>
>>
>> I'm tempted to make an analogy to health care, insurance, and universal
>> coverage, but I'll abstain.
>>
>> Usage based billing alters the typical hockey stick graph: the 10% of users
>> using 80% of the bandwidth are otherwise subsidized by the long tail.
>>
>> As an ISP, usage-based billing is more sensible, because I would no longer
>> have to stress about oversubscription ratios and keeping the long tail
>> happy. But usage-based models are more stressful for the consumer; I think
>> I disagree that it's the best model for everybody.
>
> As much as I love to criticize T-Mo for what they do wrong (and there’s plenty),
> this is one area where I think T-Mo has actually done something admirable.
>
> They have (sort of) usage-based billing.
>
> For $x/month you get Y GB of LTE speed data and after that you drop to 128kbps.
>
> You don’t pay an overage charge, but your data slows way down.
>
> If you want to make it fast again, you can for $reasonable purchase additional
> data within that month on a one-time basis.
>
> I would like to encourage other carriers to adopt this model, actually. If
> Verizon had a model like this, I would probably switch tomorrow assuming
> their prices weren’t too far out of line compared to T-Mo.

Since you're bringing up 128kbps and Verizon, let me mention that a
company by the name of RokMobile appears to be offering an unlimited
256kbps throttling over on Verizon network, with 5GB of
(non-throttled?) 4G LTE, for 52,24 USD/mo after the 2,25 fees over the
49,99 list price (the fees appear to be identical regardless of the
ZIP Code, go figure!).

http://RokMobile.com/
http://reddit.com/r/RokMobile

I haven't tried them yet, but I'm getting kinda sick of paying ~79$/mo
for my 70$/mo Unlimited 4G plan with T-Mobile US, all the while they
keep throttling my hotspot at 128kbps after 5GB now, all whilst
effectively offering unlimited 1,5Mbps for all those chosen video
providers.

With the average web-pages being in the 3MB these days --
http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm -- it takes a whole lot
of time to load up anything over 0.128Mbps (0.016MB/s).  The unlimited
128kbps part gets less and less useful these days.

There's now really little technical reason they can't bump 0.128Mbps
to 1.5Mbps if you're on LTE.  Nowadays, even 1.5Mbps is already slow
enough that people will still notice that their connection is
throttled.  And it'll also be an incentive to move up to LTE -- right
now, I have none, and I might as well be using as much spectrum at
128kbps on non-LTE as 1Mbps would cost on LTE.

BTW, with the minimum transmissions sizes on airtime and such, I'm
actually curious whether offering something like 256kbps, 512kbps or
even 1Mbps over LTE might in reality cost exactly the same amount of
airtime/spectrum as 128kbps over LTE.  Anyone knows?

Cheers,
Constantine.SU.