On Fri, 14 May 2004, Steve Gibbard wrote:
In this case, it's not clear to me where the benefit is. A lot of the cost of residential connections is in support, and in the cost of the physical connection, whether it's used or not. From the ISP's perspective, even if the average customer's use were to drop considerably, it probably wouldn't lead to a huge reduction in their costs, so they wouldn't be able to lower the base price of an unused circuit much below what it already is. While it might be nice to be able to get more than they're currently getting from customers who are heavy users, the heavy users would be unlikely to pay more, given that they could get service for the same flat rate from the ISP's competitors.
This could be interesting for niche markets I imagine. Many smaller ISPs are locked into a reseller relationship with a handful of DSL wholesalers (Covad, and perhaps the local ILEC) and they can't get in with their local cable companies. You're given a product and specs and that's that. It seems the DSL folks finally realized that cable is now much faster, and it actually works well when engineered correctly. So now SBC is offering "up to" 6Mb/s down, and Covad has apparently let loose a 6.0/768 product with Speakeasy, which I assume means that will be available to less favored resellers. I would think it would be a nice option for niche players to offer both traditional "all you can eat pricing" as well as a metered service that includes X GB of transfer. The idea here is that you let the pigs pay full price so they can P2P their brains out, but those that know they don't *need* 6.0/768 24/7, but would sure *like* it when pulling down the occasional ISO or MS patches. I know I would jump on a service that gave me a "fat pipe" that had limited transfer; it's sad to log in to your DSL modem and see that the line is capable of 8Mb/s down and you're being throttled to 1.5MB/s. P2P traffic aside, a faster connection doesn't necessarily mean that you'll transfer more data, it just means you'll get the data you want faster. Unless of course you augment your web browsing skills with a speed reading clas... Charles
-Steve
On Fri, 14 May 2004, Jonathan M. Slivko wrote:
Also, you could also take the approach of wiring a whole building for Internet connectivity through that model, like Intellispace does.
-- Jonathan
Daniel Senie wrote:
At 05:22 PM 5/14/2004, you wrote:
Hello Fellow NANOG'ers,
I was just thinking about this - tell me if it sounds reasonable? The company that I work for developed a piece of technology which, through rate-limit statements, allow customers to buy/sell bandwidth "on demand". Now, I was thinking: "Why can't we take this technology that we've tested successfully in a colo environment and adapt it a little bit for personal/buisness-class ISP's to allow them to bill for the bandwidth that a customer uses, and only that with the exception of a base monthly fee (to cover the DSL/T1 loop, e-mail services, support, etc.) of a few dollars.
The access line (T-1, etc.) loop charge is substantially larger than the bandwidth charge. Get the phone companies to price the lines better, and it might make sense.
Personally, I would like to see a senario where everyone just pays for what they use - it would be a much better system for allowing people who don't neccessarily need to get on the Internet at high-speed, get on high-speed which will not only increase revenue for the ISP's, but also for the customer who can now use DSL/T1 access in a much more effective way.
Questions? Comments? Suggestions?
-- Jonathan
-- Jonathan M. Slivko Network Operations Center Invisible Hand Networks, Inc. help@invisiblehand.net 1-866-MERKATO (USA) 1-812-355-5908 (Intl) <http://www.invisiblehand.net>
-- Jonathan M. Slivko Network Operations Center Invisible Hand Networks, Inc. help@invisiblehand.net 1-866-MERKATO (USA) 1-812-355-5908 (Intl) <http://www.invisiblehand.net>
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Steve Gibbard scg@gibbard.org +1 415 717-7842 (cell) http://www.gibbard.org/~scg +1 510 528-1035 (home)