farhad believes AT&T should ignore its customers (they want fixed price data access)

presumably this is because farahd has been inconvienced at some point by not getting all the data which HE wants, on the spot - raising prices or throwing barriers in the way of OTHER users will make Farhad happy, if they back off on their "excessive" data use

farhad also believes in "net neutrality" - which is the internet version of fixed price data access.

which is it, farahad? you can't take opposing viewpoints in different mediums.

and what business every succeeded by deliberately giving their customers something they DIDNT want? (google "general motors" if you need a reminder)

You don't understand what net neutrality is. Neutrality is ensuring that people have access to everything on the Internet; violating neutrality would involve blocking certain content (or favoring content: ie, saying you can visit only BN.com, not Amazon.com, because we, your ISP, have an advertising relationship with one of them).

Charging customers more for better service is NOT a violation of network neutrality. If it were, your cable company wouldn't be able to sell you tiers: 1 MB line, 5 MB line, etc.

Lots of businesses charge different prices for different levels of services. If you think about it for one second, even you might come up with some. What I'm proposing is not radical.

Partially true, but net neutrality also speaks of bandwidth shaping by content which is relevant to discussion.

Yes but when it comes to Internet access, that idea is actually stupid. Internet access has always been about unlimited access (at whatever speed you have paid for). Speed can be sold in tiers but access should never be.

That is just a slippery slope we should not go on. A good example is Time Warner's silly caps on bandwidth earlier this summer.

$55 for only 40 GB?

Are you serious?

Watching 10 DVD-quality streaming movies goes over that limit. Why should any consumer support such prices when I can get unlimited Internet for only $30 right now as we speak.

Besides, the telecoms and cable companies have proved over and over again that they are making huge profit margins and little investment in their actual network. Not surprising as there is little actual competition in the bandwidth market. This is why cable and telecoms often double your speeds for free or cut the monthly bills by a good amount whenever a competitor moves into their previously monopolized service areas.

That is the absolute worst case of what non-net neutrality world would entail. What the telecoms have been trying to push, and what google is completely against is not blockage, but tiered access. Such that the packets from a company such as microsoft.com would be given higher priority than the packets to another company, say youtube.com (this of course would depend on your carrier and what those end sites payed to the intermediate carriers). Those packets to youtube would still get to where they needed to go, but with higher latency, and thus lower overall throughput. There is this great fear that that would make smaller sites unable to compete, however if this were to become the case, it would create a market for "network co-ops", eg sites could easily pool together to get their packets in the highest priority tier.

Actually Farhad's economics are quite accurate. He is very correct when comparing it to gridlock on roads. The market price for bandwith is artifically low because it's an a la carte situation. It encourages massive use and no matter how much you add to the system in only encourages more use, and a vicous cycle ensues. Tiered pricing would segment the market and make it more attractive to more users. Would Starbucks survive if you could only by 1 litre of coffee every time? Of course not, but people expect it of moble internet usage.

Tiered pricing would allow the invisible hand of the market place to opperate properly and ensure that supply (bandwith) is balanced to demand (users) based on the price each user is willing to pay. Cry all you want but demanding a la carte pricing is only selfish belly aching.

And if you were on the internet 15 or 20 years ago, you would know it was most definalty priced by usage.

Your last point sunk your argument... We would not have what we know as the Internet today if tiered pricing (in terms of band width utilization vs speed) was still the norm... Grandma wouldn't touch it...

All this tiered-cap pricing talk is just...excuses for the providers to charge more.

Show me an example of a case in which an ISP has introduced tiered-cap pricing and it has actually worked out to be more or less revenue-neutral while putting money back into the pockets of light users.

You show me this, and it'll be the first case I've seen.