Exasperated Calculator

Net Neutrality is one of the biggest hot button issues among the nerd illuminati of the Internet right now. The simple question is whether all internet bits are equal, or should ISPs be allowed to privilege some bits (from their customers or people who pay them) over others.

There are some side issues here, but a big part of it is peer to peer. Which brings me to this story from today that online video distributors can save a lot of money by using peer to peer protocols

In the example given, Democracy Now saves $1,000 (of a $1,200 bill) by using BitTorrent. My question is - who ends up paying that $1,000? If we assume (and it’s not a great assumption) that everything is competitive, then that $1,200 represents the cost of pushing that many bits to end users. If it goes down, then it must mean that $1,000 worth of bits are now being pushed by someone else - in this case, the upstream bandwidth from the users.

So who pays?

At first, probably the ISP of the end users. Their bandwidth out gets used up, costing them money.

They’ll pretty quickly pass that on to the end users. Which means they’ll increase prices for everyone.

So what’s DemocracyNow really doing here? They’re pushing the costs of distributing from themselves on to end users. Which, due to the way pricing is set up, will be borne equally by everyone, regardless of how interested they are. In fact, people who have no interest at all in the video probably end up paying for this too.

I’m not arguing against net neutrality - there are other reasons why it’s a good idea. This is probably more an example of how the pricing for internet access is set up wrong - flat rate charges create strange incentives across the Internet, not just for the end users.

But that $1,000 saving? That doesn’t exist. You’re just making other people pay it.

Just got an email from my ISP (the fabulous Internode) to tell me that my upgrade to ADSL2 will be happening sometime next week. Should pretty much quadruple my internet connection speed, which will be very nice indeed.

It seems that lots of people are all aflutter over Google Spreadsheets.

I personally doubt that it’s going to have any impact whatsoever on Excel and Office more generally.

Firstly, most people who use Excel use it fairly peripherally. Word is by far the most used of the programs in the Office suite. Most uses of Excel are going to be pretty peripheral. When these people use Excel they mainly use the ’simple’ functions: sum, average, and so on. Will they use the Google Spreadsheets? Maybe, but I’d guess that as a lot of this is for personal financial information (budgets and the like) they may well be a bit reluctant to put it out on the web.

So who uses Excel the most? To guess (without any data) I’d say that the biggest users would be people who work with company financial data, followed by scientists and social scientists who work with quantitative data. Firstly, a lot of this information is confidential, either commerically or otherwise. They simply won’t be allowed to use something like Google Spreadsheets. Some might ignore that restriction, but most won’t. But more importantly, they use a lot of the higher end functions. Things like pivot tables, lookup functions, the statistical programs and so on (update: well, the lookup functions at least are included). While we’re still waiting to see the full feature set for the Google version, I’ll be very surprised if everything I need for spreadsheets is included.

A couple of other important question marks include spreadsheet linking. Can you link a cell in one file to another cell in a seperate file? This is a very common use for advanced Excel users, and without it Google Spreadsheets will be useless.

One final reason why most advanced users will stay away is other programs. Most data analysis programs (STATA, SAS, etc.) can read excel files. But they won’t read these Google files. While you can download them as .xls to your local drive, while add another step when you already have Excel installed?

So I don’t think anyone at Redmond is very worried today.

Now a Google Wordprocessor could be a whole other story, as there’s a lot more casual use of that program.

staticICE seems to be a useful search engine for Australian computer hardware prices.

(Nothing very new, but most of the ones on the ‘net are US-centric).