That is not how import tariffs work!

It seems Trump has started charging tariffs on small packages now, and as US does not have capacity to handle collecting the tariffs, so is expecting tariffs collected at source!

That really is not how it works. But...

It sounds like Royal Mail are going to do a pre-paid tariff option (I am amazed they are bothering). Sadly this probably means I'll end up creating a load of Tindie carriage rates to US for each tariff amount, as I don't think Tindie do a shipping rate that includes a percentage of goods price (maybe they will - I have asked them).

Just to be 100% clear to anyone in the USA who is confused, this means YOU ARE STILL PAYING THE TARIFF, it just becomes part of the shipping cost to the USA.

I feel sorry for RM trying to keep up with the changes, and we all feel sorry for people living in the USA.

https://www.royalmail.com/usapersonalupdates

Moving on...

The review of A&A tariffs is going well.

We have list of changes we can make that are not controversial or a big issue to do, and some are not dependant on something else. Sadly some are, and that means a delay in announcing them. I expect to have this all sorted by end of next month.

We have increased the standard non terabyte Home::1/SoHo::1 tariffs by 50GB (somehow I got sweet and sour sauce on my keyboard whilst typing that)... This is a change we have been planning for some time.

Even that hit a slight snag - previously we had 150GB, 250GB, and 350GB, now moved to 200GB, 300GB, and 400GB. But, unknown to many people we had a couple of "secret" tariffs, including one at 200GB, which was priced between 150GB and 250GB. And a customer on that asked what was happening...

Fortunately it is all sorted out now, but basically he stays on 200GB at a lower price, the old 150GB rate, so good news. But he was asking now for 250GB? The answer is simple - if usage justifies 250GB, then that would be the cost of the previous 250GB tariff and we are happy to do that for him but give him an extra 50GB making 300GB for that price now. Either he needs 50GB a month more or not. If so, he actually gets 100GB more for what he expected to pay for 50GB more, or not, and he gets the same 200GB for less money. Simples. A couple of interim low level "secret" tariffs have now gone, as that makes it a lot simpler for everyone.

I only mention it to try and explain how even the simplest of changes can be more complex than you realise.

However, the good news is some changes, partly inspired by the blog feedback, for which I have set up a page to track them...

http://aa.net.uk/news-2017-tariffs.html

As you can see, one change is for top-up not to expire. We have coded the change and all looks well to do a final live test on someone on lunar billing in two days. If it as expected we update the web site and officially launch that change...

The other one you will see, which I have not started on yet, is allowing tariff increases to be applied immediately, mid-month, for a pro-rata charge. This will provide an alternative to top-ups, increasing tariff right away when you realise you have higher usage. The logic is simple, pay an extra amount for remainder of the month and get an extra quota for the remainder of the month. You can still do it "on next bill" as now if you prefer.

I hope both of these are welcome changes, and we have a long list of other ideas we are working on. My plan is to roll these out as soon as we can and update that web page with details (as well as the main web site, obviously).

Thanks again for all the feedback.

P.S. Full moon happened, and code on live system did not work as expected (top up vanished), so back to testing. Looks like may be some other place in the "system" that zaps it. Humph. P.P.S. working now, so next step is updating web site.

Don't be a dick

I am still getting grief for this on irc now. So I really want to put it to bed.

• No, I am not saying that having bought 1TB you should not use it.
• No, I am not saying that having music or netflix on in the background is a problem.
• No, I am not saying that you find it easier to re-download all the patches to a game when you install a new computer rather than having made your own backup, is not on.
• No, I am not saying we want to know what you are doing with the internet or why you are using it. We explicitly don't care, that is the point about privacy.
• No, I am not saying that leaving big downloads you need to do to the last day just in case, is an issue.
• No, I am not saying you must not download a linux torrent even!
• [P.S] No, I am not even saying we see a peak in usage at the end of the month, that is not the issue here!

I hope that is clear.

Our acceptable use policy has had this forever, it is not something new: "Please also note that the service is a shared service. In fact the whole internet is a shared service. The internet is commercially viable becease links are shared. You are expected to make responsible use of the service in light of the fact that it is shared with other users and your actions affect others" [sic]

That can be reduced pretty much to "Don't be a dick".

All of this started with one person that seemed to be saying he would deliberately download stuff, and not even save it or watch it, just to make sure he uses up all of his 1TB allowance each month.

That is what I call "being a dick" and is simply something that does not work in society, especially with a shared resource, whether metered or "unlimited*" or whatever. Yes, one person doing it is just selfish and not a problem, but more people doing it and we have problems. Don't do that for internet, or water, or gas, or electricity, or roads, or even a buffet lunch. Be a part of society and play nice please, that is all I was asking.

I am sorry if that came across badly in some way, I hope it makes sense now.

Thanks for the comments

Thank you all for your feedback - the tariff post is the most commented I have had, I think. So to save you reading all of the comments, here is a summary. It has been very interesting.

Tariff changes

Firstly I can announce we have today changed the sub terabyte Home::1 and SoHo::1 quotas, increasing by 50GB/month for the same price. I have also added to September's quota for existing customers.

However, there are a number of good ideas that have been put forward, and we expect to announce some more interesting changes in October. Some suggestions we can't do, but some we can. The feedback has been useful.

Waste

There has been some very interesting discussion on the matter of playing fair and waste in the tariff post and my subsequent post on water metering. This was all sparked off by someone that apparently felt he should deliberately download any renaming unused quota at the end of the month even if he had no need to - because he has paid for it. This was a surprise to me, and people seem a little divided on this point, which is interesting in itself - thank you.

Regardless of pricing, allowances, metered to unmetered, etc, the fact remains that the Internet is a shared resource, and much like gas, electric, and water, things really only work if people make reasonable use of that shared resource. In practice many services create a financial incentive not to waste the resource and for some there are legal requirements not to (e.g. water).

With all of these things your own usage impacts others. On that basis alone it is morally wrong to "waste" the resource. The impact is different for different things - in effect water is unlimited (in UK anyway) as it simply recycles in the weather (simple view, I know) but the infrastructure has limits and so do reservoirs. The Internet is a bit like that - there are an unlimited number of bits but the infrastructure is not able to meet the maximum demand everyone could make. It would be impractical and uneconomical to make such a system. So wasting bandwidth has an impact - either causing immediate slow down of other people's service because of congestion, or causing infrastructure to be upgraded increasing costs directly or indirectly for services.

This is not just about ISPs, and pipes - looks at someone like Netflix. They charge a fee, so more customers means more money to pay for more infrastructure - good. But they too have a model of expected usage and if every existing customer started streaming 4k on four TVs at once, 24 hours a day then they would not have the capacity. They would have much higher costs per customer to meet that demand and so would probably have to charge more.

One person makes no difference

One of the issues with a moral problem like this is that a single person not playing fair does not cause a problem. There is capacity to handle one person being selfish and deliberately wasting resources.

The issue is when lots of individuals think like that, that "one person makes no difference". Then it all starts to fall apart. It is a bit like littering - one empty can thrown out of a car window is not a big issue, but everyone doing it makes it a big issue.

This is why we have to self impose some restrictions in some cases for good moral reasons as part of a society. I know it is easy to be selfish, and I can be as well sometimes.

But I paid for 1TB!

This is where it gets more interesting, and where I have seen some interesting comments from people.

Yes, I agree, and fully understand that, if I pay for X then I should get X. Someone suggested ordering 1000l of bottled water from Tesco and expecting to get them even if I just use them to wash the car because they are sat there...

The problem is that I never saw the 1TB allowance as "selling 1TB". Sorry. I understand that is how people see it. But when we set that limit we were thinking: "what is the most a typical, or even heavy, user would use, let's set a limit well above that so people can buy a fixed price service that they don't have to worry about hitting a limit".

The reason for a limit is that there are a tiny number of people that, if unlimited, would do the 25TB a month they can on a fast FTTC line, and we basically want to discourage those people - they are not the sort of customers we are after.

Just to be clear, we do expect heavy users, and we know that we are the highest per user peak bandwidth on one of the major back-haul carriers - we know we have heavy users and that in itself is not the problem. We also know overall usage is increasing as more people stream TV. But, there is heavy and there is silly at a hundred times that level!

Usage does change over time, and the fact we are seeing a few people hitting 1TB makes me think we may want to make it higher, e.g 2TB, or 5TB, or something. We will be discussing this as part of our tariff review.

However, I am now in a slight dilemma in that people may then think "I have paid for 5TB, I will damn well find a way to use or rather than not get what I paid for".

I need a way to explain that the high limit we set is not a target. I do not want to go down the "unlimited*" route where 5TB is a "fair usage" limit - I want to be more up front than that.

So, we will think of ways to tackle this as part of our tariff review.

Thank you all for your comments.