In reply to a post by Ignitionnet:

Yup. They are already being paid for that capacity by their end users, and it's no coincidence that most of those doing it offer their own TV services. Nothing to do with protecting their network capacity at all, they want to compensate for loss of TV revenue to OTT providers.

End users are paying for access via a contended pipe. The greater the amount of traffic the bigger the pipe has to be and the more it will cost. No reason why those who use it much more by streaming should not pay more by paying Netfllix who can then pay the ISP. Why should those who don't use so much subsidise those that do?

Why should those who don't use so much subsidise those that do?

So why shouldn't Microsoft and Apple be paying the ISPs for updates/apps? Why shouldn't bittorrent sites pay ISPs for their transit?

Personally I think the model is better paid for by those requesting the content than those supplying it - if I watch one hour of TV a month on streaming why should I have to pay extra to support those that watch it 8 hours a day? The argument can be had at almost any level and someone will feel they are being hard done by because they are paying for other people's "excessive" usage.

In the end the "fair" model is for each user to be charged for the bandwidth they use - but that is not a model that most consumers like (even relatively low bandwidth users) as it produces uncertainty and people over time gravitated towards unlimited bandwidth.

The likes of microsoft, google and netflix still pay for their bandwidth in some form, they dont get to just dump data on the internet without investment.

They pay for their uplink but they don't pay towards the transits used by the ISPs. It is an ongoing thorny debate around net neutrality and exactly who should pay for bandwidth in a complex infrastructure.

its not that complex.

by the time the traffic reaches someone like comcast, even if the traffic originated from netflix its technically not netflix traffic so e.g. if the traffic goes netflix -> level3 -> comcast, then its level3 traffic not netflix traffic.

providers peer with each other, might be mutual tariff free, might not be.

They only need to pay for their uplink to the backbone of the internet, at that point its job done for them, its how the internet has always worked. Of course we can see other arrangements can be made e.g. isps like sky have netflix caching servers so if a sky customer watches netflix the content may come from within sky's network via a cdn type setup.

I wonder what comcast would think if google started charging them for each youtube video uploaded, or each file uploaded to google drive, maybe microsoft should do the same with onedrive.

Edited by Chrysalis (Tue 13-Feb-18 23:31:30)

I kinda liked the old Plusnet model: unlimited usage during off-peak hours, but a monthly traffic limit otherwise. This had the right incentives for heavy users to schedule big downloads overnight.

Sadly, they got rid of it about five years ago, switching to a "normal" unlimited plan.