On Thu, 4 Oct 2007, Hex Star wrote:
Why is it that the US has ISP's with either no quotas or obscenely high ones while countries like Australia have ISP's with ~12gb quotas? Is there some kind of added cost running a non US ISP?
Depending upon the country you're in, that is a possibility. Some countries have either state-run or monopolistic telcos, so there is little or no competition to force prices down over time.
Even in the US, there is a huge variability in the price of telco services from one part of the country to another.
Taking a slightly different approach to the question, it's obvious that overcommit continues to be a problem for ISP's, both in the States and abroad. It'd be interesting to know what the average utilization of an unlimited US broadband customer was, compared to the average utilization of an unlimited AU broadband customer. It would be interesting, then, to look at where the quotas lie on the curve in both the US and AU. Regardless, I believe that there is a certain amount of shortsightedness on the part of service providers who are looking at bandwidth management as the cure to their bandwidth ills. It seems clear that the Internet will remain central to our communications needs for many years, and that delivery of content such as video will continue to increase. End users do not care to know that they have a "quota" or that their quota can be filled by a relatively modest amount of content. Remember that a 1Mbps connection can download ~330GB/mo, so the aforementioned 12GB is nearly *line noise* on a multimegabit DSL or cable line. Continued reliance on broadband users using tiny percentages of their broadband connection certainly makes the ISP business model easier, but in the long term, isn't going to work out well for the Internet's continuing evolution. And before anyone accuses me of sounding overly critical towards the AU ISP's, let me point out that we've dropped the ball in a major way here in the United States, as well. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net "We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.