A Netflix tax?

[pcostanza]

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cg....DTL&tsp=1
http://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/Net...36978.html

2 similar stories that I just knew would happen sooner or later.
Everyone pushes internet streaming but in the states, ISP's are crying, "we don't have enough bandwidth" yet we're sucking it up. Either someone is lying or stretching the truth or they just want to make more money. Now that we've been sucking on the teet for so long, they figure we won't give it up and will pay more. I think they know we will.

[JonnyCam]

AT&T, based in Dallas, charges digital subscriber line, or DSL, customers who exceed a monthly limit of 150 gigabytes in three consecutive months $10 extra for every additional 50 gigabytes of data they use.

We in NZ can dream of those of caps & cost :-)
(not that we actually have enough online video (legally) to use that much data)

[ShiningDragon]

Everyone pushes internet streaming but in the states, ISP's are crying, "we don't have enough bandwidth" yet we're sucking it up.

Well, the neverending story of lying isps. Same story here in germany. Deutsche Telekom AG is reducing bandwith, if you're connected to youtube.com and similar videohosters (even my beloved pr0nsites!).
They are blaming the others for consuming too much bandwith and don't paying for it.
I think, the whole story is just to earn more, more and more money. I can not accept this behaviour. All the cables are laid, the infrastructure is available and strong enough. There's no need to get the same money since 10 years ago.
~15 years ago i paid DM 3,60 (EUR 1,84/USD 2,41/NZD 3,13) for one minute internet (64 kbps/ISDN). Today i can get a full flatrate (fon/dsl) for just EUR 19,95/month.
The ISPs do not consider that their income today is not achieved by a few Internet users, but by a veritable army of Internet users. It's the multiplicator which makes the money, but the isps just don't get enough.

[gEd]

We have seem similar debates in the UK with the BBC's iPlayer providing extremely popular content that now accounts for a very high % of all UK internet traffic. The ISPs (mainly BT) claim that they have to pick up the tab for building the infrastructure to deliver all this bandwidth-consuming video content without getting anything "extra" for it.

Surely it is not unreasonable to suggest that we should pay for data consumption like we pay for electricity, gas (and in some cases water)?

[ShiningDragon]

Surely it is not unreasonable to suggest that we should pay for data consumption like we pay for electricity, gas (and in some cases water)?

Mhm, i think it's not easy to compare. If you're using energy, then there's not only an infrastructure needed, they need resources too (gas, coal, nuclear), water and gas are resources too.

But what resources do you really need for traffic? Once the infrastructure is available, you just need to maintain those. Perhaps researching new stuff and adding new infrastructure, but you don't need "resources" like water, gas, coal and other stuff. Ok, the isps for sure have energy consumption, but this one should be covered by a "flatrate" too.

Did you ever paid in the past (not pay-tv) for tv consumption based on viewed hours? It's more similar to the situation with data traffic on internet.

[gEd]

yes but they don't have to "just maintain it", they have to keep upgrading the infrastructure to provide more capacity and speed mainly because some (not all) people (myself included) want to use bittorrent and stream movies from an increasing number of content providers. If everyone was happy with email and browsing, they wouldn't have to keep spending money on new high speed switches, digging up the roads to install fibre cables etc.

To use the water analogy, it would be like the water company having to upgrade all the water pipes to support a greater water pressure because of an increase in demand for people wanting more powerful showers or hose pipes in their garden.

I am not complaining. ~9 years ago I had 512k uncapped ADSL that cost £25-30/month. Today I have 18MB uncapped for £20/month and can download from BT at about 1.5Mb/sec. If I want to spend less on my ISP for a capped connection or lower speed, I can do this.

[HarryH3]

A lot of the problem stems from the way movies are currently live-streamed. Most everyone within a given geography watches at the same time. This drives the peak bandwidth use up quite high. If Netflix and other providers would come up with a way for users to pre-cache a few shows on their local system then the downloads could happen overnight and not need to be at real-time speeds. It wouldn't be that difficult to pick out a few movies during the week that you'd like to watch tomorrow or on the weekend. This would greatly reduce peak bandwidth in the evening hours, thereby reducing the need to upgrade links, routers, etc. for the ISP's.