[opendtv] Re: Broadband 'Zero Rating' Actually Costs Customers More, Study Finds
- From: "Craig Birkmaier" <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> (Redacted sender "brewmastercraig" for DMARC)
- To: opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 25 Feb 2019 09:31:29 -0500
On Feb 24, 2019, at 7:19 PM, Manfredi (US), Albert E
<albert.e.manfredi@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I think you have to be a clueless and gullible consumer, or a devious crook
like the FCC Chairman, to really believe that zero rating saves you money. It
sure doesn't save you money, unless you obediently do exactly as you are
told, by the service provider. And you can be sure that anything the ISP
isn't raking in, because of zero rating, he'll be making up in other ways.
Talk about clueless...
Zero rated bits are PAID FOR by the service that is offered as part of the
bundles each ISP offers customers. Maybe Bert has forgotten about the good old
days of subsidized phones, which we paid for through inflated prices for the
wireless service.
Do zero rated plans save you money?
That is largely dependent on your overall usage of the wireless service, and if
you would use the zero rated service if you had to pay for the bits. If those
bits were added to your monthly usage and pushed you over the cap fo that
service, you probably saved money. But only if you are not paying separately
for the zero rated service.
If the ISP feels obliged to set data caps (which, as the article says, serve
no technically valid purpose), it would be far better to allow the customer
to decide which streaming services he wants zero rated. Such as, each
customer gets up to x streaming services zero rated. The customer chooses,
not the telecom service. That's a neutral service.
As I pointed out yesterday, the article is INCORRECT that there is no
technically valid purpose for data caps, whether the ISP service is fixed or
wireless. We do not have “unlimited plans” for other public utilities like
electricity - most of the country cannot choose the lowest cost provider for
the electricity delivered over the “neutral” last mile electric utility
monopolies.
BITS ARE NOT FREE. When you combine the power consumption of the edge server
“cloud,” and the power used to operate fixed and wireless digital networks, the
power consumed is approaching 5%. Add in the always on devices we use to access
the Internet, and we are approaching 10% of all global energy consumption:
http://science.time.com/2013/08/14/power-drain-the-digital-cloud-is-using-more-energy-than-you-think/
Which uses more electricity: the iPhone in your pocket, or the refrigerator
humming in your kitchen? Hard as it might be to believe, the answer is
probably the iPhone. As you can read in a post on a new report by Mark Mills
— the CEO of the Digital Power Group, a tech- and investment-advisory firm —
a medium-size refrigerator that qualifies for the Environmental Protection
Agency’s Energy Star rating will use about 322 kW-h a year. The average
iPhone, according to Mills’ calculations, uses about 361 kW-h a year once the
wireless connections, data usage and battery charging are tallied up.
And NO Bert, allowing the customer to choose which service to zero rate is not
neutral - if a customer could choose any service to be zero rated, that would
represent a subsidy from the wireless carrier, UNLESS the carrier could charge
every service that is zero rated for the bits used by the subscriber.
What is neutral is the ISP service, which allows subscriber to connect to ANY
edge service, whether subsidized or not, whether free or paid by subscription
or by a use fee. It is up to the consumer to control their usage of bits, and
to pay for excessive use of bits.
The reality is that this is exactly how fixed broadband works - the customer
chooses the services they want, and if they exceed any cap on their plan they
pay for the extra bits. In time this is what will happen with wireless data
plans too, when the capacity of the wireless infrastructure is adequate to
support unlimited video streaming.
Bert might remember the good old days when you could easily exceed wireless
data caps by streaming AUDIO. That is now ancient history, and the need to
zero-rate video bits will disappear in a few years as the 5G infrastructure is
deployed.
That being said, bundling of edge services (content) with ISP services
(broadband) will not disappear when this happens. It is more likely it will
become MORE prevalent. Funny, how many MVPD services have now integrated
Netflix with their Set Top Boxes...
Regards
Craig
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