Stuart Corner
Monday, 21 January 2008 00:06
Opinion and Analysis
Page 2 of 3
One of the main reasons we have much more draconian download quotas in Australia than the US is that much of our traffic comes from overseas at considerable cost whereas most of that in the US originates within it borders and delivering it end users is a much smaller component of total service delivery cost.
When it put its hand up a foundation customer of Pipe Networks' planned PPC-1 submarine cable last week
iiNet said that international bandwidth soaked up 15 percent of its cost of sales and that Pipe's new network would "will provide a significant saving for iiNet in international bandwidth costs."
The cost of Internet data in Australia has been falling steadily. The Internet Industry Assocation reported in its latest quarterly survey that the average data cap per standalone plan of ISPs surveyed was now 8GB per month compared to 6GB per month at the beginning of 2007 and that the average cost of data had fallen from $6.60 per GB to $4.30
This trend is likely to continue, while in the US it is likely to move the other way, media criticism, customer opposition and regulatory scrutiny notwithstanding. But simply imposing download quotas, 'overage' charges and/or bandwidth throttling are fairly blunt instruments in managing demand and charging for both quantity and quality of Internet services.
Networks have be much more highly engineered to delivery real-time services like streaming video and VoIP than simply web browsing and file transfer which have much greater tolerance of latency and packet loss. Another fairly blunt instrument deployed by some ISPs is simply to block or severely restrict peer-to-peer traffic at peak times.
These crude instruments are a reflection of the immaturity of the Internet. Like it or not the market is moving inexorable towards a one where different types of service will be charged at different rates or where services will be charged according to grade of service - for example if you want one that guarantees low latency for VoIP or for real-time video you will pay more. If you are happy to have your peer-to-peer traffic blocked at peak times or throttled back if there is unexpected congestion, you might pay less.
