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from the would-you-like-YouTube^WNetflix^WFacebook^WAmazon-with-that? dept.
Michael Hiltzik at the Los Angeles Times writes about Portugal's Internet which shows us a world without net neutrality, and it's ugly. Basically, tiered services get in there through a loophole for zero-rating.
After paying a fee for basic service, subscribers can add any of five further options for about $6 per month, allowing an additional 10GB data allotment for the apps within the options: a "messaging" tier, which covers such services as instant messaging, Apple FaceTime, and Skype; "social," with liberal access to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, and so on; "video" (youTube, Netflix, etc.); "email and cloud" (Gmail, Apple's iCloud); or "music" (Spotify, Pandora).
Portugal isn't the only country allowing tiering of internet services. In Britain, the internet service provider Vodaphone charges about $33 a month for basic service but offers several "passes" allowing unlimited video or music streaming, social media usage, or chat, at additional tariffs of up to $9.30 per month. [Ed's Note: This is not entirely accurate - Vodaphone's ISP home broadband offering (17Mbps) is £24/month unlimited usage, the additional figures quoted are for faster fiber connections (38 and 76 Mbps) where available. How you use your connection is irrelevant. This is the same for many European ISPs. Smart phone costs are entirely separate.]
Although both countries are part of the European Union, which has an explicit commitment to network neutrality, these arrangements are allowed under provisions giving national regulators some flexibility. These regulators can open loopholes permitting "zero-rating," through which ISPs can exclude certain services from data caps. That's what the Portuguese and British ISPs essentially are doing.
If the vote on the 14th of December repeals Net Neutrality then consumer options will be greatly reduced while increasing greatly in prices as we can see from Portugal's example.
(Score: 2) by jdccdevel on Tuesday November 28 2017, @08:22PM (2 children)
I mostly agree with your points, but you seem fairly oblivious to the realities of ISP finance. There's a lot of misconceptions about why bandwidth costs what it does.
You can't just waive a magic wand and have bandwidth at your house. Building an ISP is a MASSIVE infrastructure investment. Keeping up with the last mile improvements required to deliver any sort of decent service is an insane treadmill, and people just don't understand why.
Last mile infrastructure investment is expensive. Really, mind bogglingly expensive, with relatively small return, and long amortization (more than 10 years), That assumes the ISP owns the physical plant. If not, they have to pay some sort of rent, and they're at the mercy of whoever does own the plant (Usually a incumbent competitor ISP!). That assumes there isn't any wireless in the mix, which implies issues of spectrum crowding, signal quality, and licensing that are out of the ISPs control.
The backbone infrastructure is the low-hanging fruit here. If there's a backbone capacity issue, that's the easy one to justify fixing, since it's relatively inexpensive (per customer). The problem is the last mile, which is hugely expensive on a per-customer basis.
The implication that ISPs are sitting on piles of cash and are holding back from easy capacity upgrades is, in most cases, a fallacy. Anywhere where there is more than one ISP available, they're going to be working hard to get more data to you faster.
These issues exist regardless of what sort of market you're in. Simply saying "an upstart ISP could do better" in a free market is ridiculous, the infrastructure costs are HUGE, and the per customer returns are relatively tiny.
You're right that more competition makes for better and faster services, but the real culprit for the headaches here is customer density. There's a reason why areas with extreme population density (Areas in Europe and Asia) have internet that's so much better, and that's because their per-customer infrastructure costs are so much lower.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by meustrus on Tuesday November 28 2017, @10:28PM
I understand perfectly well that ISP infrastructure is massively expensive. It's the main argument for why internet should be considered a public utility like electricity, because the rollout costs create a similar market problem.
Last-mile infrastructure isn't going to be affected by net neutrality, though. If it made sense to throttle certain traffic at that level, you would see more consumer-oriented products to do just that, because it would only impact the one customer. The argument here is about overloaded backbone infrastructure.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 29 2017, @12:09AM
Established, monopolistic ISPs are sitting on piles of cash, though. Their profit margins at this point are insane. Not so for new players, of course. And they also receive massive amounts of taxpayer subsidies, which they usually receive, waste, and then don't suffer any consequences for doing so. Force the ISPs to rent out their infrastructure so we can see some actual competition.