Tim Lee

The Broadband Buffet

Felix Salmon links approvingly to my op-ed yesterday, but he takes exception to my claim that using your neighbor’s bandwidth as a permanent Internet connection is borderline theft of service:

Well, is it theft of service or isn’t it? And who’s being stolen from here, Lee or the ISP? Would Lee slap on that password because he feels a debt of gratitude to his ISP for its service, and hopes that maybe the price will come down if his “unscrupulous neighbor” pays a monthly charge as well?

The answer is that you’re stealing from the ISP. Think of an all-you-can-eat buffet: they charge you $7 for all the food you can eat because they make reasonable assumptions about how much the typical person eats. Some particularly large people eat mor than $7 worth of food, but the average customer eats less than $7 worth of food, and so the buffet is able to make money.

If you take your table scraps home to your dog, the buffet probably doesn’t care. The amount of food involved is trivial, and you wouldn’t have brought the dog in anyway. But if you shovel a bunch of food into a tupperware container to share with your friends, that’s not kosher because you’re breaking the terms of the “all you can eat” agreement.

By the same token, the broadband provider provides you with an “all you can download” service for you and the members of your household. The viability of this arrangement depends on people not “cheating” by sharing the service with neighboring households. Sharing your wireless connection is analogous to sneaking food out of the all-you-can-eat buffet. Sure you could have consumed all of that bandwidth yourself, but the fact is that you wouldn’t have. The flat-rate pricing model only works because most customers pay for their own connections.

March 17, 2006 | Comments |

Viewing 6 Comments

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    All analogies have problems. But the all-you-can-eat-buffet has a big one: the buffet doesn't meter/restrict your throat/stomach bandwidth.

    When I pay for a broadband internet connection, I'm paying for X kbits of bandwidth. Nowhere in my contract does the ISP explain that this bandwidth is only to be available in bursts only, and that my average bandwidth should really be Y kbits/s (where Y < X). If they did, okay, fine; they are really selling me Y kbits of bandwidth, and some truth-in-advertising laws should kick in.

    As long as the ISP is selling me a connection with a specified transfer rate, they shouldn't care what bits I fill that transfer rate with. Whether they be bits that I initiated by reading techliberation, bits that my wife initiated by watching videos at youtube, or bits that my neighbor is using to download a security patch, it shouldn't matter. As long as I'm only consuming my alloted bandwidth, the ISP shouldn't know or care what the bits mean, where they came from, or why they are there.

    The buffet analogy would work perfectly, if, instead of paying $7 for the buffet, you paid a monthly fee of $X for Z ounces of food per minute. Under such a contract, it wouldn't matter if I ate the food myself, regurgitated it in the bathroom, took it home to the dog, or carried it out and resold it on the sidewalk.

    Perhaps the real problem is that the ISPs advertise their services as a data transfer rate, instead of as what they really intend (which you seem to imply as something far less than the advertised data transfer rate). That dishonesty is not my problem. It's the ISPs.
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    joey5: No home user saturates their broadband pipe 24/7. Indeed, most broadband terms of service explicitly say that the ISP has the right to take action against users who consumer excessive bandwidth. Some broadband ISPs also explicitly prohibit sharing bandwidth outside the customer's household.

    Now, I don't think you necessarily have to follow the letter of the fine print in every service agreement. I think the important thing is to honor the spirit of the agreement, which is that they're selling you an Internet connection for the personal use of your own household. Multiple households sharing one Internet connection clearl violates that spirit.
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    Burying terms in the fine print of service contracts that are contradictory to product labeling and advertising is a deceptive business practice. As long as the ISPs persist in this practice, I'll persist in picking the terms out of the contradiction that I find most favorable to my own situation.

    I imagine that this will all resolve itself eventually, with metered access or tiered service agreements. This is how telephones work, right? And telephone networks are probably our closest analogy.

    There's also a technical aspect here: if I hide all my data by tunneling it through https, there is no way that an ISP will be able to determine if the requests/responses originated with me or with my neighbor. The data is indistinguishable.

    Why is that important? If the ISP is to take action against bandwidth "thieves" (as you'd call them), they must necessarily punish the honest as well. My penchant for, say, downloading lots of songs from iTunes will be indistinguishable from me sharing my connection with a few dozen neighbors who just do average surfing. What can the ISP do in this case? Punish anyone who uses "excessive bandwidth."

    And there is where the whole argument falls apart: my bandwidth is already capped by the modem I lease from the ISP and the routers that it connects to. I can't get more than X kbits. And I *pay for* X kbits. So the ISP can only punish me for using what I paid for.

    Again, truth in advertising would fix this -- ISPs could advertise that you are really only getting the equivalent of a 56K dialup modem (on average) if thats what they expect their customers to use, instead of touting their service as 6Mbit, etc.
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    hello! http://www.dirare.com/Sweden/ online directory. SMART Yellow Pages, About DIRare, Search in Business Category. From online directory .
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    That is expensive compared to what overseas users pay for the same amount of Bandwidth . 56k or 256k. Prices should be alot cheaper.
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