NEWS: Free Wi-Fi still a goer in San Fran'

Time Warner is trying that out right now, in Beaumont, Texas:

Steve

Reply to
Steve Fenwick
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I don't know - are you done posting silliness yet?

After you, I'm sure.

Reply to
Mark McIntyre

How would anyone get that in an exchange with you? Oh, I see the smiley now.

Reply to
John Higdon

Geez, John, it's Navas. Why do you bother?

Steve

Reply to
Steve Fenwick

I couldn't have put it better. How long did we suffer with the likes of CompuServe, et al...services which went absolutely nowhere if compared to the Internet? If you have to think for one second about the cost of searching or getting a piece of information, then the premiere feature of the Internet is defeated.

The pricing structure of telephony has even reached a point where people don't give a second thought to making a transcontinental call. Would we now make people hesitate to simply check their email because they are nearing their "cap"?

The Internet could be killed very easily by putting a usage-sensitive tall gate on it.

Reply to
John Higdon

At least you can turn off flash. It may impair your ability to use some sites though.

Steve

Reply to
Steve Pope

about the cost of

I fully agreement with your sentiments here, but I'd suggest there's a bit more to the situation. Your transatlantic call ties up a few kHz of bandwidth, between your and exactly one recipient. Its real cost, however you want to assess it, is indeed very nearly "too small to measure, or bill for".

But if you were able to hook something electronic and automated to that same port and have it start exchanging GHz bandwidth signals with very large numbers of external recipients, the real costs would at some point become not just significant but eventually unsupportable.

Ultimately there has to be a way of paying for the Internet, and somehow this will have to have some connection to amount of use. Obviously there are destructive and constructive ways to do this, efficient and inefficient ways, fair and unfair ways, and so on. The problem is to find ways that will be reasonably fair, acceptably efficient, and adequately constructive for all parties involved in Internet operation and in Internet use.

Leaving Disney, Comcast, and AT&T in charge of finding such a solution is, of course, not likely to produce any very acceptable result.

Reply to
AES

ISP are mixing up network criminals with people who are working from home or serving their own content. How's this for a solution that may address the problem more accurately:

- A dynamic IP address is capped at 40GB a month.

- A static IP address is $15/month extra and has no bandwidth cap.

This gives legitimate power users exactly what they need, it matches revenue to use, and it keeps pirates from hiding behind a dynamic address. Of course the ISPs might have to invest a few more pennies to make it work. Today's last-mile providers are quite complacent with a frustrated customer base that has nowhere else to go.

Reply to
Kevin McMurtrie

But turning it off makes most sites more usable, even with a broadband link.

Jerry

Reply to
Jerry Peters

I've never used the browser on a cell phone owned by anyone for that reason. Using Cingular, now AT&T as an example, I once checked out a phone at one of their stores. The browser did not allow you to pick a home page - it had to be the company's home page - and if you did not get an "all you can eat" plan, they'd charge you a penny a kilobyte (it isn't clear if this includes TCP/IP headers, but my guess is that it does). The home page seemed to be about 10 kilobytes in size, so it would cost you $.10 to just get started. Worse, if you clicked on a link and then went back, it would reload the page for another 10 cents. What you got was no where near 10 K of text, and there was no way of displaying the HTML source. I had a vaguely unsettling feeling that there was some funny going on, like padding the text with a lot of comments to drive up the cost. The charges were high enough that they'd have to be making obscene profits, so I'd suspect the worse. The suspicion of rip-off profit margins is based on the assumption that they have to make a profit on voice or at least break even, so you can estimate a "fair" price for data based on bitrate and charges for voice calls.

Reply to
Bill Z.

... which is one reason I don't have flash on my system - too many web sites abuse it.

Reply to
Bill Z.

I use Firefox with Flashblock and Noscript. To see the flash junk, assuming I want to, I have to allow scripts, then click on the flash video. Makes browsing most Flash infested sites much more pleasurable.

I've only found a few sites which use Flash for navigation which I actually want to look at. Mostly if the site requires Flash, I just contiue searching for one that doesn't.

Jerry

Reply to
Jerry Peters

Except the sites that are unusable, or severely compromised, by turning it off. I find it frightening that B2B sites are starting to require FLASH, or have compromised service. This is not a TV network website, where FLASH might be expected, but places selling OEM electronic components. The FLASH is just there because Marketing got out of control.

Steve

Reply to
Steve Fenwick

Thanks for the info on Flashblock!

Reply to
Roy

What the Internet was built for, and what it does today and can do tomarrow are very different things. I'd hope the latter two would not be limited by the former one.

The first home Internet connections were like that. I remember years ago when AOL made its big start. The usage was metered and you'd have one eye on the clock, one on what you were doing. Several of my first accounts were like that. You'd get so many "hours" of use, and beyond that, you'd pay through the nose for each minute/hour/unit over time. Flat-rate was when Internet took off. Before that, people used to get pissed at stuff like a 6-line signature because their usage was metered. This was more by connection time and you are talking more about data size, but the idea is the same: some ticker running out on you. Let's move forward, not backwards.

Reply to
jayjwa

On Mon, 07 Jul 2008 06:09:50 -0400, jayjwa wrote in :

That makes no sense. The market only works when price signals are related to actual cost, and flat rate pricing is clearly broken.

The problem in the past (and with current cellular pricing) is the "pay through the nose" if you go over some threshold, which is intended to coerce you into a bigger package than you really need.

The simple and proper solution is smoothly graduated pricing:

  • Use X bytes, pay Y dollars.
  • Use 2X bytes, pay no more than 2Y dollars, probably less, NOT more. Then there can be no real objection to metered pricing, which is how we pay for most goods and services.

Or do you think there should be a flat monthly rate for gasoline, no matter how much you drive? That might be great for a minority of heavy drivers, but grossly unfair to light drivers.

Flat rate pricing simply makes no sense.

Reply to
John Navas

One could make a strong case that the Internet use is more like television viewing than gasoline burning. At any rate, this is yet another argument in which neither side seems to recognize any value to the opposing argument. Why are people like that? Wouldn't it make much more sense to try to combine the best of each view?

jeff

Reply to
Jeff

Unfortunately, metered pricing is broken too. How would you charge for email, for example? Should the user pay per byte to receive spam? Should the sender pay and if so, how do you bill the sender? If someone whose computer is hijacked ends up with an astronomical bill one month, the likely result will be a customer who decides that the Internet isn't worth it.

The other problem is that you can't determine how much data you are getting in advance - try to do that with a web page whose server is using chunked encoding. If you can't determine the price before buying it, a market-based approach simply doesn't work.

Bill

Reply to
Bill Z.

I like the European cell phone model. The caller pays the for the call.

Reply to
Roy

I suspect the reason our cell phone companies don't like it is that forcing people to pay for incoming calls makes the service seem cheaper to the person making the call, which increases the companies' revenue stream.

Reply to
Bill Z.

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