My electric utility came to the house on Wednesday and installed my new smart meter. Earlier this year, we installed the Peaksaver thermostat.
The idea behind the smart electric meter is to enable the utility to charge differential prices based on the time-of-day or day-of-week when we consume power.
The Peaksaver thermostat not only enables some very cool programming and remote internet access, but also permits the utility to kill the air conditioner for a brief period (hopefully not noticeable) during the hottest, most power intensive days of the summer.
I wonder if the concepts behind these capabilities might find application by a creative ISP.
For example, internet services don’t really have a monthly capacity constraint; monthly download caps are a convenient measure of total consumption for proportionate allocation of resources, but the pipes are really provisioned for peak load. For real-time applications, like voice calls and streaming content, ISPs need to make sure there is sufficient capacity to handle everyone’s aggregate requirements. Less sensitive applications can be delayed slightly without any impact.
Outside of the peak, it doesn’t matter as much if an individual user is consuming a little or a lot; the network capacity is sitting available.
It seems to me that an ISP might want to create a service offering that provides user incentives to shift loads out of the peak – for example, offering software utilities to make sure those routine software updates are scheduled to downloaded during slower network loads, and perhaps exempting such behaviour from contributing to the download caps.
What about another product that permits interruptible service? Rather than degrade all bandwidth intensive traffic, would some consumers be interested in a service that cuts certain bandwidth intensive applications at peak times – like killing the air conditioner on peak electrical days.
Of course, these kinds of network based developments require network operators to have the flexibility to deploy and use technologies like DPI interfacing to various billing and management systems – and to advise customers on what is going on.
Would such services help preserve flat rate internet for some users, while providing effective economic internet traffic management?
I really like the idea of Time-Of-Use pricing. I've suggested it before elsewhere. I think it could be a powerful, non-discriminatory, NN-compliant economic ITMP. The idea of a PeakSaver-style application installed on the user's computers (with permission from the user, of course) could be quite interesting if done correctly.
Exempting certain traffic from monthly caps or other economic measures, however, could easily be considered discriminatory.