re: Cox Charging for Data Useage in home

Yep, all they're doing is trying to recoup former TV subscribers. I say that, and I used to work for the evil Comcast. If all goes the way I think it will in the next couple of years, the cable giants' days are numbered.

at&t and, believe it or not, Dish Network will be sitting pretty. We shall see if Charlie Ergen at Dish makes the right moves. I know at&t will.

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Capacity has to do with data rate, not total data transferred. The cost to Cox for large amounts of data transferred are negligible, whereas the costs to Cox to stably deliver data rates without congestion are high.

This is different than steaks, or electricity, or water, because the costs of providing those goods/services are dependent on total steaks consumed, total liters consumed, or total kilowatt hours consumed, not the rate at which they are consumed.

Cox is selling you a data rate, which makes complete sense--and then they are capping you at the total amount consumed, which makes no sense.

To give you an example of how arbitrary that is, I am a Cox Business Internet subscriber (so this cap issue doesn't apply to me), and business internet subscribers are given unlimited data consumption. If the amount of data consumed actually cost them real dollar values, how could they afford to give businesses, who are obviously high consumers of bandwidth, a free pass for unlimited amounts of it?

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I was coming here to ask this very question as I'm simply an end user in this regard and have no first hand knowledge of this.

From a user standpoint, it SOUNDS logical that if you use more of something you should pay for it. Water, electricity, data, etc... But...is that actually how it works with data? I tend to think it doesn't, and based on your post that intuition seems accurate.

Date rate...sure. Data amount...not so much.

So if this is true and it literally does not cost any more in real dollars to stream 1TB of data versus 2TB of data per month, where in the flying frick to ISP's get off charging you as if it does? I'm not suggesting they can;t charge you for me, but why suggest it's to recoup the cost of the transferred data if that's not true at all?

FTR I'm a Cox customer and got the same e-mail. As for right now I've never come close to the cap, but that's irrelevant to the discussion as it's more of a principle thing here for me.

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You did far more than that. You made a case for data caps being necessary.

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You read the National Enquirer far too often!

I stated facts. If those facts make it obvious that data caps are necessary to enable everyone equal access to bandwidth that they paid for, then so be it.

Why would I pay for bandwidth so you can hog most of the data capacity?

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I stated facts. If those facts make it obvious that data caps are necessary to enable everyone equal access to bandwidth that they paid for, then so be it.

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Let's review these "facts" that you stated.

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You are delusional. Do you think they spend millions of dollars getting internet to your neighborhood and then only supply 50% of the capacity?

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The bulk of the cost is running lines, and after that it is relatively cheap and quick for Cox to add capacity to a neighborhood. But they won't do it until their customers start to saturate a node, that's just basic business. So yeah, they only "supply" the bandwidth that is necessary, which may be anywhere from 0-100% of the capacity of the infrastructure.

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If 10% of customers use 80% of the bandwidth then not much bandwidth is left for everyone else.

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You seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding about bandwidth. Bandwidth is a momentary measure of data throughput. It is not something that can be "used up" leaving less for everyone else. At any given time, probably less than 3% of customers on average are actively using the internet. Just basic math tells us this: if we take 500GB as an average monthly usage, and 50Mbit as the average speed... 50Mbit is about 6MB/s, so we can download 500GB in about 80,000 seconds, or around 22 hours. So the average user only uses his connection for 22 out of the 720 hours in a month, or 3% of the time.

Now, if our usage was all random and spread out, then Cox could oversell their services by 30X. But, of course, there are peak use times where more people are online, so they probably only oversell their capacity by 10X or so. That means at the peak times, it's probably a VERY common occurrence for 10% of users to use 80% of the available momentary capacity. But there is STILL enough free for the others to get their expected speeds if they need it. Usually.

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The overage charge is to dissuade people from hogging the system.

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This "fact" is complete and total bullshite.

First, everyone's billing cycle is different, so overage charges do NOTHING AT ALL to reduce use at peak times, which is the only thing that matters if we're talking about "hogging the system". If it was really about dissuading people from hogging the system, they would bill more at peak times (like electricity) rather than put in overage charges.

The simple fact is pretty much the ONLY users going over 1TB are those who have cut the cord and stream most of their content, and the overage charges are to recoup lost revenue from these customers.




If Cox doesn't have the infrastructure to supply ALL of their customers with the speeds that they sold to them, there are only 2 legit solutions:

1. STOP SELLING CAPACITY THAT YOU DO NOT HAVE AVAILABLE TO SELL. Does this really need to be stated? How many industries can sell that which they don't have available? Not many.

2. UPGRADE THE EQUIPMENT AND INFRASTRUCTURE TO SUPPLY THE SERVICES YOUR USERS ARE PAYING FOR.


That's it. Those are the only two ways that an honest actor can solve the problem of limited bandwidth capacity. Data caps solve a different problem entirely. That is, lost revenue due to lack of innovation and poor pricing strategies.

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1. STOP SELLING CAPACITY THAT YOU DO NOT HAVE AVAILABLE TO SELL.

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When you have unlimited data you can not cost out the number of customers times the data amount predicted to get the capacity needed.

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2. UPGRADE THE EQUIPMENT AND INFRASTRUCTURE TO SUPPLY THE SERVICES YOUR USERS ARE PAYING FOR.

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That has already been done with the 1TB data cap.

3.5 million customs times 1TB gives a finite usage number to plan for.

3.5 million customers times unlimited data gives an infinite number of expected data usage.

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That has already been done with the 1TB data cap.

3.5 million customs times 1TB gives a finite usage number to plan for.

3.5 million customers times unlimited data gives an infinite number of expected data usage.

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You obviously completely lack a fundamental understanding of this subject.

I have to hand it to you. You really are single-minded.

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That has already been done with the 1TB data cap.

3.5 million customs times 1TB gives a finite usage number to plan for.

3.5 million customers times unlimited data gives an infinite number of expected data usage.

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CAPACITY IS BITS PER SECOND, NOT TOTAL BITS TRANSFERRED.

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My above figures can be used to calculate expected total bits transferred or to calculate expected bits per second.

Unlimited data allows for longer periods of maximum bits per second.

You can do these calculations on a system level or on a node level.

No company knows ahead of time how many total customers they will have or how those customers will parse out to each node. So capacity adjustments will have to be made as the system matures and they can better predict customer loads.

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bandwidth speeds in the UK drop by 35 percent during the evening ‘rush hour’ when people get home from work.

It’s also worth noting that the high number of users during rush hour can prompt ISP throttling in addition to volume-related slowdown.
When too many users try to log on at the same time, some ISPs throttle connections to give each customer a portion of the bandwidth rather than relying on first-come-first-served.

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Want the fastest Internet speed? Surf at night or in the early morning. During rush hour, expect even the best connections to slow.

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That has already been done with the 1TB data cap

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Ok you are an idiot

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Unlimited data allows for longer periods of maximum bits per second.

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No shite, but this is ONLY a problem if ISPs are overselling.

If we assume for a second that it's OK for ISPs to oversell, managing a network through volume caps still doesn't make sense. A volume cap will not change users' patterns re: time of day usage. Users will still log in at peak times and saturate their connections, causing congestion on oversold nodes. A volume cap does not prevent this, unless somehow you think volume caps will make some users think "Instead of streaming the LSU-Alabama game live, I'm gonna wait and watch it a replay stream in the middle of the night."

As I have already stated in the other thread on this matter, if an ISP wants to oversell and they need to manage congestion, they can easily do so by network prioritization. Users who are constantly saturating their connection would have their traffic deprioritized during times of congestion. This would provide an actual incentive for users to then alter their usage patterns to use bandwidth during non-peak times. This would also only kick in when nodes are actually saturated, instead of an arbitrary number Cox pulled out of its arse that we're supposed to take on faith is real. So why doesn't Cox do this? Well, most of us know but you seem to be single-mindedly ignoring the obvious: because it's not about congestion, it's about limiting users from being able to use streaming services that compete with their cable television business.

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When you have unlimited data you can not cost out the number of customers times the data amount predicted to get the capacity needed.

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Well ISPs don't pay per bit transferred, rather they pay by transfer rate. Which hopefully you can understand by now that it is quite simple to calculate the number of customers, the total transfer rate that you have sold to them, and the total transfer rate necessary to provide them with those transfer rates. A certain amount of overselling is expected and necessary, but if they can't handle the load they have sold, then they shouldn't have sold that service to those customers.

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That has already been done with the 1TB data cap.

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WTfrick are you talking about?

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3.5 million customs times 1TB gives a finite usage number to plan for.

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But, again, data does not cost by the byte transferred. The costs are directly related to the transfer rate.

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3.5 million customers times unlimited data gives an infinite number of expected data usage.

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So, what you're saying is that not only are you clueless about the internet, but you also struggle with statistics?