On 10/4/07, Hex Star <hexstar@gmail.com> 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?
One early US cable modem company started propagating the "Don't Let Customers Run Anything Resembling a Server" meme to many other ISPs, primarily cable but also DSL. One early Australian cable company started propagating the "Don't Let Customers Download More than X MB/month" meme, and while it hasn't been picked up as widely, there are a number of ISPs that have adopted it. At one time Australia did have a relatively small amount of Internet bandwidth and a large non-data-clueful dominant carrier, which had only gradually been bullied into accepting that there were data customers who wanted an E1 line because they wanted the whole 2Mbps for one medium-sized data channel as opposed to 30 channels of boringly slow 64kbps (perceived by the carrier to be blazingly fast...) So they charged their users a lot to download data from outside; I forget if they were the ones who had a cheaper rate for data downloaded from inside Australia or not. But outside the Land of Oz, it used to be that European PTTs also charged excessive amounts of money for connections around their countries or across borders. That's changed radically with liberalization. And of course Japan and Korea charge minimal amounts for huge home broadband bandwidth - Korea has about triple the population of Australia, in much smaller land area, and while it's not quite as far from Silicon Valley as Australia is, and of course it's much closer to Tokyo, it's still got to cost a bit to run the cables there. -- ---- Thanks; Bill Note that this isn't my regular email account - It's still experimental so far. And Google probably logs and indexes everything you send it.