Roland Dobbins wrote:
I recently purchased a Slingbox Pro
It's a neat toy indeed, I would almost run out to get one too was it not for the cash deficiency. I assume you got your X-mas presents early ? :) [..]
What I'm wondering is, do broadband SPs believe that this kind of system will become common enough to make a signficant difference in traffic paterns, and if so, how do they believe it will affect their access infrastructures in terms of capacity...
The fun part is that some ISP's 'restrain' people to use P2P and other big traffic hogs, but they (at least some :) do provide huge NNTP servers providing large local caches of truly illegal content and most of them also seem to advertise with "download movies and music, now faster and faster than all the other competition". ISP's should not be classifying nor filtering any of the data that one is transmitting, especially as when they will do that people will simply start using port 80 or 443 SSL'd for everything to avoid those crap filters. I wonder when the usage of IPSEC will become more dominant as that will also nicely equal out any form of discrimination (can't call it anything else) there. Filtering default ports like 25 outbound and some other silly virus-prone things like 137-139/445 etc is okay, BUT provide a way to disable this easily. A certain Dutch ISP allows doing this using a webinterface, which is a perfect method and saves on support calls. That said ISP's should simply have a package saying "50GiB/month costs XX euros, 100GiB/month costs double" etc. As that covers what their transits are charging them, nothing more, nothing less. The money then is to be made from selling a large package to a stupid user who doesn't use the traffic, or as that above mentioned ISP once said in the hallways "we have a few folks doing 400Gb/month, but it's only a few and if we factor in the people doing almost nothing it equals out very well". Please note my careful putting of 'usual' and 'most' and 'some' all over the place, it might seem annoying, but that avoids all those nice responses with "but we don't do that" kind of arguments; there are fortunately a number of ISP's who simply can't care less what you do as long as you pay the bills, and that is what they are supposed to be doing. Greets, Jeroen