On Jan 20, 2008 12:03 PM, Mark Foster <blakjak@blakjak.net> wrote:

<snip>

For example, on my residential DSL service i've used 4.7G this month. With
1/3 of the month left, I have more than half of my self-selected 10Gig cap
available. (And I grabbed at least two CD ISO's the other day.)

The model works. What remains to be seen is whether it's actually
feasible in a market where truly flat-rate services are hitting the market
at margins where they can barely pay for themselves.

Mark.

All of these discussions ignore the developments taking place in the consumer electronics marketplace. A quick glance at this years consumer electronics show in Vegas shows a HUGE variety of home, mobile and automobile consumer devices using IP services. These devices, AppleTV as an example, will require large bandwidth commitments.

Add this to IP based telephony and you can't just "shut off" a users service after they reach a cap, you would be removing their emergency services access.

Hopefully we won't be seeing "basic" internet services of a couple of gig per month and "channel" offerings of AppleTV, all you can eat as "tier 2 plan", or "other service" as "teir 3 plan".

Alongside this discussion is AT&T's direction of content censorship and its impact on end users.

Our help desks are going to take a huge hit in the future as we start trying to troubleshoot issues where the general rule of "I'll pass any packet I get" becomes "I will pass any packet I am payed for and have dissected for content, and after I have determined that the rest of the stream won't push my end user over his network cap this month".

I have this picture in my mind of Google offering $99 one time cost Wireless routers that autolink with each other and Google's local data center. A few advertisments served up with your endless free networking.....

cheers
Jeff J