Get Ready for Volume-based Pricing for the Interwebs

Singapore – ISP’s to customers – “You are evil”

The article attempts to equate using the Internet with consuming more than one’s fair share of water. This is emotional manipulation of the worst kind. Clearly the ISP’s are getting ready to try and introduce volume-based pricing in Singapore, and they are using all their press contacts to smooth the way. The article even trots out the argument that it isn’t price fixing and collusion if all the ISP’s coincidentally introduce volume pricing.

Except data isn’t water, and there is no shortage of bandwidth. The world still hasn’t consumed most of the fibre capacity that was installed during the dot com boom, and new technology continues to increase the capacity of the fibre optic pipes.

The whole comparison to water usage is a deliberate attempt to mislead.

The ISP’s in Singapore have been selling ever greater bandwidth packages to consumers, confident in their belief that nobody can actually use that much capacity. At the same time, they have also under-provisioned the bandwidth required to connect all those subscribers to the rest of the world, which explains the incredibly slow performance one suffers with on a daily basis when accessing any site outside Singapore.

With organizations like the BBC discontinuing short wave transmissions in favour of Internet broadcasts, the popularity of video sharing sites like YouTube, and the wide-spread use of gaming, the Internet has matured into a rich media network.

Actually that is what it is supposed to be, but in Singapore we only get a frustrating hint of what is possible because of the lack of international bandwidth provided by the ISP’s.

The problem is not “bandwidth hogs”, it is the lack of capacity installed by the ISP’s. I can’t watch YouTube, listen to the radio, or download files without interruptions and dropouts. When I measure the local loop capacity, there is indeed 8Mb/sec of capacity. But that rapidly disintegrates into a high-latency, high packet loss mess as all the subscribers who are already paying for service find themselves dumped into congested and under-specified international gateways.

Fuck the ISPs!

Related posts:

1. From the World Financial Meltdown playlist
2. A widget ready theme
3. Interesting quote
4. “A Typical Conversation with My Mom”
5. Such Skepticism