But bandwidth isn't a scarce resource in the same way electricity is. There's very little incremental cost to delivering each extra bit, so it doesn't really matter if bandwidth usage is wasteful. All that matters is there's enough peak capacity, and nearly everybody contributes equally to peak usage. The incentive to minimize waste is the fact that performance will suffer otherwise.

I feel like you ignored the brunt of my argument and demonstration for my statements, and instead are just arguing with a soundbite from my comment. I will try again, maybe more explicitly: bandwidth is actually very much like electricity because both have a peak capacity, a noticeable cost of equipment maintenance, but very little incremental cost; you don't experience a blackout or a brownout because you ran out of coal: maybe that will happen in the distant future, but today the problem will be that the immediate amount of power needed by the users exceeded the maximum capacity of either the plant burning coal (which likely has lots of coal in reach that it can't burn fast enough) or at best the rate at which you can remove it from a mine to get it to the plant.

Now, if you could somehow cheaply lay cable and setup cell towers constantly and everywhere, and if they didn't degrade or get obsoleted by new standards, sure: maybe you could keep building out infrastructure and accumulate capacity to handle increasing usage forever. But finding places to put cell towers is hard, laying new cable is destructive, and the reality is that you have to maintain and upgrade your infrastructure constantly. The peak load that can be supported is thereby a key cost, and there should be incentives for everyone to keep that cost low.

As for your "peak usage is contributed to by everyone equally" assertion, I just don't understand why this is not clear: if the Superbowl being streamed is the highest usage load, then if you are watching the Superbowl (or doing something else equally bandwidth intensive at that exact moment) you contributed to the max total peak usage for the month in a way that someone who wasn't using the Internet that day did not. I just don't see how you can argue against that: it seems self-evident :(. Some people are simply going to be using more bandwidth than other people during the peaks (and some services are going to encourage people to use lots of bandwidth, especially simultaneously, while others do not.)

To put this another way, you are saying that my grandmother sending a few emails every month is contributing to peak usage as much as someone who streamed the Superbowl... or that someone who only uses Netflix at 3am (or whatever the most non-peak time happens to be) is also contributing to peak usage as much as someone who streamed the Superbowl... at some point this argument becomes gratuitously preposterous. If everyone were my grandmother then the world would need fundamentally less networking infrastructure to keep up with demand: she should not have to bear the cost of people who insist on streaming the Superbowl live over the Internet.

And again, with the concept of "wasteful", this should also be really obvious: let's say the there are two ways to steam the Superbowl--two codecs that could be used to compress the stream--and one uses half as much bandwidth as the other. This one decision affects peak usage more than any other decision: someone somewhere has to bear the price of this decision, and to make the wrong choice is "wasteful". If someone insists on using the worse codec (or in a network neutral "bill the users" model, chooses to use services that employ the worse codec), they should somehow be forced to bear the infrastructure buildout and upkeep cost of that decision.

Maybe you could work this out with some math: can you demonstrate how all these different kinds of users are contributing equally to the peak load? You seem to believe that this should be as obvious to me as I think this should be to you. Whether you measure a ratio of the peak or the probability of increasing the peak or even metrics that are purposely flawed in an attempt to force equality, like "whether the user was using any bandwidth at all during the peak", any and all analyses show that the person watching the Superbowl streaming in this example are contributing to the peak much more than my grandmother is, much more than someone watching Netflix in the middle of the night is, and even more than someone using a "less wasteful" codec to perform the same activity is... please show me what metric you are using where these people ally work out to "contribute equally".

Unfortunately with all the projects I'm working on, my previous comment was stated poorly and I don't have the time and energy to craft a satisfactory response.

Fundamentally, I believe that any current problems with bandwidth are entirely manufactured by the last mile ISPs, and that further ISP consolidation will give them greater leeway to fabricate more crises in the future.

I also believe that a premature focus on morally loaded concepts like "fair shares" of capital expenses is a manipulative tactic used by ISPs to divide the public, turn innovators into the enemy, and cripple technology's progress.

As other posters have explained, the vast majority of the expense of an ISP is not in delivering the next gigabyte of data, but in establishing the physical connection. Once the cable is laid, new technology can be added to the endpoints (like DOCSIS 3) for a fraction of the original cost. Grandma's web browsing cost just as much to lay the cable as everyone else's Netflix, and Grandma already has the option to buy a cheaper connection if she wants.

> There is something unique in character to that Superbowl experience that is making it fundamentally more expensive to the world than other possible uses of bandwidth, and that needs to be modeled as a cost to someone.

If this was actually a problem there is a much better way to model it than metering: Sell different speeds at different times of the day. Instead of selling a connection which is allegedly 100Mbps all day and all night, sell a connection which is 1Mbps during peak hours and 100Mbps off peak. Then sell a more expensive connection which is 10Mbps during peak hours and 100Mbps off peak, etc.

This is a much better mapping to costs than metering because it takes into account the persistence of capacity expansions. With metered billing, the people who only tune in on Superbowl Sunday aren't actually paying as much as their usage is requiring capacity to be expanded. Peak usage that day is higher than peak usage any other day so more capacity was needed just for the day, but once built it sticks. Just paying the “normal” metered pricing that day would let them off the hook for their contribution. But increasing the price to the accurate level, putting the whole capacity expansion cost onto that one day, could create such high prices that customers would revolt, and would probably make live streaming of popular events uneconomical. The better solution is to make the correct people pay (namely those who buy the plan with sufficient peak hours performance to play the stream), but pay by subscribing to a plan that spreads the cost out over the whole year and in exchange provides superior peak usage performance all year to those paying for the capacity expansion that allows it.

> The reason we don't have horribly wasteful electronic devices is partly because they would cause electricity bills to go up for the people using them. If you had a washer/dryer that used a thousand times more electricity than other appliances you owned, or you had a holographic television that used a thousand times more electricity than a lightbulb does, you would start to limit how often you washed clothes and watched holovision, and this would be a good thing: it would lead to market incentives to create similar devices that used less electricity.

The incentive exists without metering. If you had a version of Netflix that used a thousand times more bandwidth than the existing one, you would need a connection which is a thousand times faster in order to use it. You can even get such a connection: Just pay AT&T or Level 3 to dig up the street in front of your house and install 10 or 100Gbps fiber just for you. They'll do it for the right price, but that price is prohibitive for pretty much everyone. Which is why Netflix doesn't even offer to stream uncompressed 4K 3D video at ~10Gbps per stream.

You're also making the assumption that the price of metering would be high enough to have a significant deterrent effect on usage. But accurately priced metering probably wouldn't. The significant majority of an ISP's expenses are not strongly correlated with the amount of data transmitted. They're paying accounting, customer service, marketing, linemen to repair weather damage, property tax, electricity, etc. Even a significant proportion of expansion-related costs are uncorrelated with future consumption, because by the time you break ground to do any expansion whatsoever, the digging becomes a sunk cost and the cost to install 2X or even 10X as much fiber into the open hole is extremely modest. Expanding capacity by 500% can cost in the same ballpark as expanding capacity by 50%.

The marginal cost of increased usage that could be deterred by accurately priced metering, i.e. the cost to the provider of usage increasing by say 55% instead of 65% over the same period, is so small that trying to measure it isn't even worth doing. It may even be zero – upgrading links from 1Gbps to 10Gbps gives you ten times as much capacity regardless of how much you actually needed.

The concept of trying to conserve bandwidth is the application of false analogies. It's not like electricity; there is no generation cost. Bandwidth is use it or lose it. If you're paying for a high speed plan and then not using it, that isn't the fault of someone paying for a high speed plan who is using it. A single user using more than average costs nothing because it isn't enough to require an overall capacity upgrade; only the average user increasing average usage does, and if that happens to a sufficient degree then all it means is the average user will have to pay a higher rate. People who don't use as much and don't want to pay as much can buy slower connections – but if it turns out that the actual cost of increased usage is a sufficiently small proportion of the cost of providing internet service that slower connections cost almost as much as faster connections, that's hardly the fault of people who send more bits.

You seem to believe that it makes sense to buy a fixed guaranteed speed connection: I am starting from the assumption that no one would ever want that as it is inherently wasteful, and that any ISP that bills like that will be defeated instantly by an ISP that understands the idea of time sharing. As a user, I don't want to buy a connection that is guaranteed to be able to transfer a bunch of bits that lies dormant 99% of the time even when I'm actively browsing. However, when I am transferring something, I want to be able to take advantage of the faster rate. If you work out the math on some of the examples I've given in this thread (the people trying to transfer a minute of video over different time frames), you will see that "total number of bits" is actually a reasonable approximation and a fundamentally more reasonable approximation than buying fixed-size connections. I also have already stated there are more accurate billing models, but they start to look as complex as Amazon Glacier, and they require your browser to purposely rate limit themselves, which is tech we don't have deployed.

To address your comments on the pricing of "peak usage", metering is an approximation of your probability of increasing the peak load. This works better than you would expect (and even better I feel than for electricity) because bandwidth is designed to gracefully degrade: if it takes twice as long for me to download tiny files from the Internet I am unlikely to even notice. If the speed slows down tremendously, then rather than having to increase the price for that bandwidth, we simply decrease everyone's quality of service. This happens automatically and naturally, and while it might make you angry that you feel you were paying for something you weren't, what you were actually paying for was always this "probability distribution of speed assuming characteristic usage patterns under an expected load distribution". If you thought your flat-billed bandwidth was anything different you haven't thought through the economics enough: you would have to be paying much much more than you do under the current model, so anyone who actually billed like that would look so expensive as to be "insane". As people are already effectively paying more during peak load (as they are getting slower service for the same amount of money) that part is already actually fine: the issue is now how to deal with the fact that some people are more likely to increase load due to their usage patterns, and while switching to Amazon Glacier style billing would be "extremely accurate" just billing on total usage is fundamentally more accurate than a flat rate.

As for electricity, I covered this already many times: you are just wrong about the costs. The costs associated with power are dominated by the overhead of the plant, not the costs of generation. If you run a plant "below capacity" you are often better off just shutting it down, as the overhead is so high (you mostly do that in order to have "spinning reserve", so you can obtain more power quickly in the near future). If you are simply unwilling to believe that the cost of coal is largely irrelevant to our power costs, think about the economics of hydroelectric, which provides 16% of the world's power. In fact, electricity is mostly a game of "how many plants do I need to have built to have capacity to satisfy the load requirements", which is exactly the game with bandwidth. You don't have a blackout because someone ran out of coal: you have a blackout because more people are using power than is capable of being generated, we are using power faster than we can burn our copious available coal (which was probably more obvious back in the days when brownouts were more acceptable). If you are capable of generating power and you aren't, in a similar manner to bandwidth you are just "losing it": it isn't like we can store power at these kinds of levels; with some kinds of plants you get to save a little fuel, but again, that is a minor cost and doesn't apply to renewable sources, including hydroelectric.

All that aside, though: I want to point out that you are also not arguing for the current state of affairs. You also think people need to "pay for what we use", you just have a different concept for how that "usage" must be monitored. As it stands, most people only want to pay for "lots and lots of bandwidth at a flat price". They don't appreciate the idea of an incentive and they aren't modeling any costs to the ISP at all. In a way, and I think in a very fundamental way, what you are saying is actually agreeing with the overall point I was defending: the statement upthread that we need to pay for what we use to not run into network neutrality issues. If people who wanted to watch Netflix actually were paying much much more to get that kind of dedicated service than the people who were browsing web pages there would also not be this network neutrality issue. I argue that this would be a wasteful and expensive way to do the billing (as people browsing web pages--who would like their web pages to download quickly but also are downloading so dispersedly that time slicing is super efficient for them--either end up paying too much or having to live with downloading things needlessly slowly, and people who watch Netflix erratically are forced to spend on the same guaranteed bandwidth as someone watching it constantly despite they also being able to timeslice better) but at least your different way if billing is also a way of billing compatible with network neutrality.