Comments on: Why Mark Cuban's only half right about tiered broadband

There's no argument that the Internet is getting clogged up by massive dumps of video--and that's only going to get worse. But there are better ideas than a pay-as-you go approach.

[Mergatroid Mania]

What a moron Mark Cuban is. Classic "because I'm rich, I know what's best".
The problem is not p2p downloading as the idiot seems to think, the problem is that the service providers are not putting enough of their profits back into upgrading their service. Simple as that. Everyone and his dog knows that demands on bandwidth are increasing, but the service providers seem to think that the status quo will do fine.
You PAY for the bandwidth, but when you actually USE what your paying for, service providers complain and idiots like Mark Cuban have to stick their two cents in.
If the service providers cannot provide what they advertise, maybe it's time they either actually upgraded their infrastructure or changed their ads to reflect the reality that if you use what we sell you to the full extent available, we will cripple your service. Then lets see how many people buy it. The first companies who get off their duffs and get their infrastructure upgraded enough to handle the required bandwidth will get all the customers. Imagine an ad "We won't cripple your service like those other companies, and we're just as fast or faster Guaranteed"
Maybe Mark Cuban should stick to basketball, and leave subjects requiring intelligence to those best suited to it.

[nachurboy]

You want to know why it's the cable companies complaining about bandwidth problems? It's because unlike DSL, all their users have to share the connection to their hub, and unlike DSL, cable companies only want to put new repeaters when they have to. They don't like to spend money on infrastructure. Why bother, when they've got market monopolies? So their solution is to get people OFF their networks, rather than upgrade to support more users. The problem with stats like "10% of users use 90% of the bandwidth" is that no one can validate those claims. I love that DirecTV commercial because it seems so appropriate for this discussion:

"Whip up some numbers that make it look like we have, like, I don't know, a thousand HD channels."

"90% of all statistics can be made to say anything....50% of the time."

So true!

[nachurboy]

Forgot the link to the DirecTV anti-cable commercials. http://www.directv.com/DTVAPP/global/contentPageNR.jsp?assetId=P4550066
"I learned this in business school. When I read about business school, in a book. We can't improve our service, but we can improve the price. We can make it higher." "You know what? That's not a bad idea." "We'll get the people with disposable income and they can dispose of it to us!" Hmm. Tiered pricing anyone?

[ilya_87]

Why is it that with every utility other than broadband internet, people are so understanding of the need to for tiered pricing? No one questions the merits of charging per trip on a toll road. No one questions the merits of charging per kilo litre of water, or of charging per kilowatt hour of energy, or per gallon of gasoline. If gasoline had the same pricing scheme as the internet, would anyone out there be happy with 5% of users using 50% of the precious oil?

Here in Australia, we've had metred downloads for over 10 years. We have historically had very poor investment in broadband infrastructure because of our formerly government owned telco, and the only way the smaller providers could compete was by metering downloads. The downloads limits were tiny originally, but have been doubling approximately every year. And when the download limit is reached, you can choose to either have your speed throttled to something much slower, or you can pay per megabyte. Acceptance of this is what has allowed Australia to have the fastest growth in broadband penetration in the OECD for 2007.

For the broadband infrastructure to hold up in America, there needs to be a massive investment from the providers. To do that, they need to raise prices. But why should someone that just checks their email once a day, looks at some youtube videos, and goes on msn + facebook face the same price increases as their neighbour the bandwidth hog so that he can get 6 linux distributions a day? Doesn't sound fair to me. Also sounds like all the complaining is coming directly from the bandwidth hogs.

[Imalittleteapot]

I'm sorry if you're not using your connection to it's full potential. If you have a problem with your ISP could you please take it up with them. I'm sure they have a phone number somewhere in your billing paper work. I don't remember promising anyone I wouldn't download Linux 6 times a day so they could have a better Internet experience. Guess what? Nobody paid me anything either. They did give money to the ISPs though, and the ISPs did promise to give an awesome Internet experience. Maybe they should have a little talk with them if their connection isn't what they thought it would be. Did it ever occur to you that perhaps the ISPs simply lied and promised to deliver a product that they could in fact not deliver? I would be willing to pay more then the other users if I did in fact download Linux 6 times a day. I usually just use the web. However, none of the ISPs in my area have bandwidth caps. They all tell me I have unlimited. So what's wrong if I use unlimited? It isn't my fault their business model is unsustainable and retarded. I hope you realize what's really going on here. The ISPs are in the business of data and file transfer, and now they're telling us they don't want to transfer our data anymore. They still want our money of course, but they just don't want anybody sending anything over the pipe. That's what is really going on. Like I said, if I got a huge chunk of data to transfer I don't mind paying a huge chunk of money to do it, but until recently the ISPs kept saying they didn't want the extra money. It isn't my fault they didn't invest.

[paulopmx]

The solution, so that people wouldn't complain is probably not to charge more, but to charge less to people who are willing to use less bandwidth or consume less datay.

This will give the impression that you are giving a discount, and you will reach a broader audience who have a lower budget.

[DrewHew]

Chuck, I wish more of you guys in the media would pay attention - Barack Obama has repeatedly stressed that an important facet of his plan to improve national infrastructure, would include improvement of the Internet backbone as well. He has also emphasised more broadband access to more people consistently.