Could this Kill On line Gaming?

[Evermore]

Usage based billing


/discuss

[Lyion]

Usage based billing

/discuss

Not at all. Onling gaming uses very little bandwidth. This will mostly crush P2p stuff, and hurt pirates who download 10s of gigs every month.

[Zanchief]

Usage based billing

/discuss

Not at all. Onling gaming uses very little bandwidth. This will mostly crush P2p stuff, and hurt pirates who download 10s of gigs every month.

You might have to pay to watch The Golden Compass 2.

[Yamori]

I don't think it would affect MMOs all that much. For the most part the network aspect of MMOs is mostly just data instructions to be interpreted by the client end... All the graphics and sounds and animations are on the hard drive already.

From a political perspective I think this is the ideal solution of bandwidth overuse. It averts the whole net neutrality issues of de-facto censorship via bandwidth allocation to sites.

[Harrison]

It isn't going to do squat.

[KaiineTN]

Well, the internet is going to become more and more video intensive. Youtube and such is just the beginning. Sure, this might slow down massive torrent users, but people who watch a lot of streaming content probably end up using a lot of bandwidth as well, and they aren't really doing anything wrong and shouldn't need to pay more for that, should they?

Shouldn't bandwidth become cheaper anyways? How does it work? You'd think with how cheap disk space has gotten that other technologies would follow. What would allow bandwidth to be cheaper?

[Harrison]

Once internet access becomes free this will all be a moot point.

We aren't far from this at all.

[Lyion]

Well, the internet is going to become more and more video intensive. Youtube and such is just the beginning. Sure, this might slow down massive torrent users, but people who watch a lot of streaming content probably end up using a lot of bandwidth as well, and they aren't really doing anything wrong and shouldn't need to pay more for that, should they?

No they do not.

Streaming content that is used by a large amount of users, and the youtube servers can by and large be cache'ed reducing the throughput needed.

Downloading multi-gig new pirated movies and games via P2P sites cannot. The people capping their bandwidth 24x7 via P2P should be charged a premium, if the provider desires.

[10sun]

Once internet access becomes free this will all be a moot point.

We aren't far from this at all.

I don't see people ready & willing to give away cable that they have spent billions to lay.

Return on the investment is a long time coming for a lot of it.

[Yamori]

Shouldn't bandwidth become cheaper anyways? How does it work? You'd think with how cheap disk space has gotten that other technologies would follow. What would allow bandwidth to be cheaper?

My un-informed impression is that installing new technologies on the cable company side is filled with red tape and legal issues that make it very difficult.

Isn't there some law that says that cable companies have to share their lines with any competitors that want to use it? I'd guess that would make no one want to put the money up for it.

[Yamori]

Once internet access becomes free this will all be a moot point.

We aren't far from this at all.

I don't see people ready & willing to give away cable that they have spent billions to lay.

Return on the investment is a long time coming for a lot of it.

I think he might be referring to massive wireless WANs or whatever those are called, where the city provides free wireless access within a certain-mile radius of the signal's broadcast point. There's some talk of that being in the future.

[10sun]

Once internet access becomes free this will all be a moot point.

We aren't far from this at all.

I don't see people ready & willing to give away cable that they have spent billions to lay.

Return on the investment is a long time coming for a lot of it.

I think he might be referring to massive wireless WANs or whatever those are called, where the city provides free wireless access within a certain-mile radius of the signal's broadcast point. There's some talk of that being in the future.

Yeah, except the entire earth isn't one big city. Get to the edge of a continent & you run into another issue, oceans. They suck & they are big & wet & stuff.

-Adam

[Lueyen]

Shouldn't bandwidth become cheaper anyways? How does it work? You'd think with how cheap disk space has gotten that other technologies would follow. What would allow bandwidth to be cheaper?

My un-informed impression is that installing new technologies on the cable company side is filled with red tape and legal issues that make it very difficult.

Isn't there some law that says that cable companies have to share their lines with any competitors that want to use it? I'd guess that would make no one want to put the money up for it.

A coworker who has a sister working for a phone company was telling me about this, basically yea they had to allow competitors to use their copper runs, however the laws were pre-fiber, and the smaller companies were losing their free ride as the major ones started running fiber, and consequently not maintaining their copper lines as well.

It does cost money to run lines and maintain them... the cost might be relatively negligible for the most part which is why we've seen for the most part internet access billing based on speed rather then usage for your average home user. I don't really care for where this sort of thing could lead, but I also understand it. Frankly what it does boil down to is that everyone paying for internet service who isn't using massive bandwidth is in essence supporting the few that do. Time Warner would be smart to do some sort of tiered structure that would actually lower the bill for the majority of customers, but I suspect it will be designed around maintaining current billing rates for most and going after the heavy users. In this Time Warner is looking out for it's self and not it's customer base.

[Harrison]

It would make sense if they had a tiered service as you said.

That doesn't make them more money, however. So what we will see is a massive war in the next 10 years. I don't foresee "a winner is you" in my future, and I doubt most of us nerds are too happy about that.

[Tikker]

Shouldn't bandwidth become cheaper anyways? How does it work? You'd think with how cheap disk space has gotten that other technologies would follow. What would allow bandwidth to be cheaper?

well, this is almost exactly my job, so let me tell you how it actually works

when you hear complaints about bandwidth usage and costs, it has 99% nothing to do with the local carrier

the big bandwidth costs are all the interconnections between companies

for instance, if I want to watch Araby's nightly webcam porn show, those packets have to cross multiple carriers to get from her house, to my house.

so if ISP_A wants to be able to talk to ISP_B, they have to set up some sort of peering arrangement. this can either be a single pipe between the 2, or it can involve ISP_C where A and B already have transit agreements

ISP_A has a pipe to B that costs $50/MB, and a pipe to C which costs $35/MB

so when you have guys downloading a ton of stuff, and you KNOW that even 50% of it is pirated, it makes the decision to throttle, charge overages, or whatever pretty easy


if it's all just local traffic (never leaves your own network) that's a complete non issue
it's the fact that ISP_A is paying more money for Pirate_01 every time he steals a movie/game

[Zanchief]

It's funny how righteous these dirtbag companies get when it starts to affect their profit margin.

I downloaded the 4 hour version of Das Boot with pride last night.

[recks]

I hope it doesn't happen ><

I used to work for an ISP back home in New Zealand where there is no cable, all they have is DSL which is completely monopolized by a company called Telecom which owns ALL the lines. Other ISP's exist by leasing out the lines from telecom, in short our company made more money from dial up customers than DSL ones. On top of that due to the badly placed and short numbered DSL exchanges most people were lucky to get above a 2mb connection.

The plans were had were something like

1gb per month for $29.95 ( yes ONE FUCKING GB, if you went over you were charged like $0.25 per MB)
5gb per month for $39.95
and above, with the max allowed being like 40gb for $100 odd bucks

If you went over on any plan then your speed was capped to 56k for the remainder of the month, except of course the $29.95 plan where the company would rape you with charges for going a few MB over

[Ndaara]

I used to play EQ with someone in Nova Scotia. Regularly, we wouldn't see her the last day or few days of a month. It was because she'd run out of bandwidth and not be able to log in! That seemed really unfair to me ><

[Tikker]

was that in the Dial-up days?

could be that they had a package for x# hours and weren't willing to go over that

ps, who was it?

[Ndaara]

Could have been dialup days, you might be right. I thought I remembered her saying it was Bandwidth related, because at the time, I didn't know what bandwidth was, but that easily could have been someone else. My memory's notoriously selective. Character was Narrin, et al. She had bunches of alts, so we had lots in common =)

[Tikker]

not even vaguely familiar name, heh