Internet Metering - Back to the good old bad days?

During peak times, 5% of Internet users are hogging 50% of the bandwidth?

How to reply if you're a service provider? Metering? Open access? Tiered plans?

Mark Cuban already cast his vote and kicked of a thunderstorm: Why Tiered Broadband is a Wonderful Thing and ASIVS.

'Leave and take your bit torrent client with you.'

While cable giants like Comcats and Time Warner and telecoms like AT&T are figuring out how to add valves to their pipelines to reign in some of their hard-core users, industry mags like Mediapost's Blogs have long been engaging in the debate.

Now the New York Times is weighing in with a clarifying survey from Brian Stelter.
His article from June 15 compares the potential of 'Internet metering' to the industry's clumsy business models from the early days:

'The Time Warner plan has the potential to bring Internet use full circle, back to the days when pay-as-you-go pricing held back the Web’s popularity. In the early days of dial-up access, America Online and other providers offered tiered pricing, in part because audio and video were barely viable online. Consumers feared going over their allotted time and bristled at the idea that access to cyberspace was billed by the hour.'

Stelter compares some of the plans in discussion and the perspective is grim: Bandwidth allotments appear to favor the very casual Internet user simply sending e-mail and reading the news.

Streaming an hour of video on Hulu, which shows programs like “Saturday Night Live,” “Family Guy” and “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart,” consumes about 200 megabytes, or one-fifth of a gigabyte. A higher-quality hour of the same content bought through Apple’s iTunes store can use about 500 megabytes, or half a gigabyte.

A high-definition episode of “Survivor” on CBS.com can use up to a gigabyte, and a DVD-quality movie through Netflix’s new online service can eat up about five gigabytes. One Netflix download alone, in fact, could bring a user to the limit on the cheapest plan in Time Warner’s trial in Beaumont.   

What this could mean to our fledgling rich media loving industry is pretty obvious:

“We hate it,” said a senior executive at a major media company, who requested anonymity because his company, like all broadcasters, must play nice with the same cable operators that are imposing the limits. Now that some television shows are viewed millions of times online, the executive said, any impediment would hurt the advertising model for online video streaming.

Comments

[RoxanneMorrison33]

I guess that to get the mortgage loans from banks you must have a good reason. Nevertheless, one time I've got a short term loan, just because I was willing to buy a car.

[Kolb Learning]

I was under the impression that most ISPs had caps on the amount of bandwidth you're allowed to use. Last I had heard Comcast allows 250 GB of usage per month. I assume there are different deals available for businesses, and so far I haven't heard any major complaints.

[cissp]

Internet metering is a service model in which an Internet service provider (ISP) tracks bandwidth use and charges high traffic customers accordingly. Typically, a customer will select a service package with a flat rate up to a specified limit and will then pay additional fees beyond that limit, probably per gigabyte of data downloaded.

Internet metering is one approach to the problem of ever-increasing demand for a finite supply of bandwidth. Another approach to the problem is traffic shaping, also known as bandwidth throttling, in which the service provider deliberately slows the connection for some users or applications.

Service providers claim that charging per unit for heavier Internet users will make service fairer for everyone. The argument is that "casual Internet users" should cissp not have to pay as much as those who engage in bandwidth-heavy activities. Heavy Internet users are typically those who engage in P2P file-sharing, online gaming and watching video from IPTV websites like Hulu.com, YouTube or Joost. ISPs have often targeted BitTorrent users in particular. According to Time Warner Cable, the top five percent of users (in terms of demand) consume 50% of their entire network capacity.