> Is there any cost that an ISP company has related to the amount of data transferred?
Not sure if at a noticeable level, but I keep wondering: aren't there costs that are directly proportional to the amount of data transferred? Flipping bits costs energy, both at the level of fundamental physics and (more importantly) at the level of engineering - all the electric and optical signals aren't free, and packet processing isn't either. E.g. I'd expect my power bill to be larger if my Raspberry Pi saturated the network by streaming /dev/urandom than it would be if it was sitting idle.
But aside that, I think that beyond the "we can charge you for data because you can", the per-data-transferred costs come from the overprovisioning ISPs do. The fraction of the advertised to actually supported bandwidth per user they can get away with is dependent on average amount of traffic users generate.
But aside that, I think that beyond the "we can charge you for data because you can", the per-data-transferred costs come from the overprovisioning ISPs do. The fraction of the advertised to actually supported bandwidth per user they can get away with is dependent on average amount of traffic users generate.
How do data caps help with that though? People are still going to use most of their internet during peek hours, because...well, those are the times people use the internet the most, by definition.
It's like trying to combat rush hour traffic problems by limiting the number of times people can use a highway. People are still going to use it during rush hour, they just are going to avoid using the highway during non-rush hour periods, which accomplishes nothing.
They help demand management because if they're set low enough, people can't use the highway 5 times a day, they have to limit their usage to just once a day, or maybe a few times a week.
In Australia the bandwidth caps used to be specifically set up with a different peak and off-peak cap to help with this even more.
In the UK most ISPs will instead perform traffic shaping where they will slow down your connection during peak times after a certain small amount of data transfer. This still seems to be disliked by consumers just the same.
Yes. Everyone still needs to go to work at the same time so the resources are still going to be used at the same time. It's charging extra for standard expected usage that the ISPs have known exists for years. If this were really an issue there wouldn't be so much dark fiber in the US hooked into copper cable local loops.
If we had a competitive market in either place, it would be interesting to see what consumers choose. I think I would prefer the traffic shaped example, since the current tiering situation appears to have _both_ limits in the fine print with Comcast.
If there weren't municipal companies with better service, faster speeds, no caps, all for cheaper, then I might agree. But these companies are greedy, and they keep crying wolf while increasing their profits.
WRT. home example, what if it's a router? I'd very much expect the router to use less power idling than when handling 1gbps - especially that routers tend to look into packets, which is computation, which uses power. Also, if the router does does mode change (e.g. Ethernet on one side, fiber on the other), I'd expect more power usage still when busy.
Not sure if at a noticeable level, but I keep wondering: aren't there costs that are directly proportional to the amount of data transferred? Flipping bits costs energy, both at the level of fundamental physics and (more importantly) at the level of engineering - all the electric and optical signals aren't free, and packet processing isn't either. E.g. I'd expect my power bill to be larger if my Raspberry Pi saturated the network by streaming /dev/urandom than it would be if it was sitting idle.
But aside that, I think that beyond the "we can charge you for data because you can", the per-data-transferred costs come from the overprovisioning ISPs do. The fraction of the advertised to actually supported bandwidth per user they can get away with is dependent on average amount of traffic users generate.