On 8/22/12, Bacon Zombie <baconzombie@gmail.com> wrote:
I how you are talking about 3G or there is a typo. An ISP with a 5GB cap that is charging the end user more then 5$ total {including line rental} a month should not be allow to operate.
I don't believe $5 even covers an ISP's typical cost of having a line, let alone getting data through it, maintaining, supporting it, and providing upstream networking. Last I checked you can't even buy dial-up services from national ISPs for that low a price, before the per-Hour usage charges, and those require simpler less-costly infrastructure to maintain for the ISP. With residential broadband, if there is not a heavy degree of oversubscription, the ISP will either go broke, or the cost of residential service will be so high that the average person would not buy it. "I want my line speed 24x7" is a technical argument, it is a numbers game, and the average subscriber does not make that argument, or at least, rather, the average res. subscriber is not willing to bear the actual cost required to actually pay what it would cost their ISP to satisfy that for every user trying to utilize so much. Why should the end users who transfer less than 1GB a month, with only basic web surfing, have to suffer periods of less-than-excellent network performance or pay increasing costs to subsidize the purchase of additional capacity for users at the same service level expecting to use 100GB a month? There is a certain degree of fairness there. Even if the metric is wrong -- the idea of metering bytes transferred is broken, because it does not positively reinforce the good behavior. It's like trying to reduce congestion during rush hour on the freeway by imposing a "40 miles of travel per day" limit on each vehicle owner. That gives no benefit for those effected by the limit to adjust what time of day they travel those 40 miles, however. A "X=10 gigabyte per 4 hours" rolling average limit would make more sense. Where "X" is varied, based on the actual congestion of the network between other users of the same service level.
And if your infrastructure and handle 25% at a minimum maxing out their connect them don't advertise " unlimited " since you can't provide it and it is false advertising.
There's no such thing as unlimited, period. Even if the provider wanted to, there will be some physical limits. I agree the use of the word is confusing... when they say unlimited what they are often indicating is "You are not limited by the provider in the number of hours a day you can be connected to the service".
The world would be a better place if ISPs that either throttled, cut off or added on extra charges to the end users bill were fined to hell for false advertising and repeat offenders were named and shamed on a public website. [snip]
There might be no residential ISPs left -- -JH