> The vast bulk of users have no idea how many bytes they
> consume each month or the bytes generated by different
> applications. The schemes being advocated in this discussion
> require that the end users be Layer 3 engineers.

"Actually, it sounds a lot like the Electric7 tariffs found in the UK for
electricity. These are typically used by low income people who have less
education than the average population. And yet they can understand the
concept of saving money by using more electricity at night.

I really think that a two-tiered QOS system such as the scavenger
suggestion is workable if the applications can do the marking. Has
anyone done any testing to see if DSCP bits are able to travel unscathed
through the public Internet?

--Michael Dillon

P.S. it would be nice to see QoS be recognized as a mechanism for
providing a degraded quality of service instead of all the "first class"
marketing puffery."

It is not question of whether you approve of the marketing puffery or not. By the way, telecom is an industry that has used tiered pricing schemes extensively, both in the 'voice era' and in the early dialup industry. In the early 90s there were dial up pricing plans that rewarded customers for limiting their activity to the evening and weekends. MCI, one of the early long distance voice entrants, had all sorts of discounts, including weekend and evening promotions.

Interestingly enough, although those schemes are clearly attractive from an efficiency standpoint, the entire industry have shifted towards flat rate pricing for both voice and data. To dismiss that move as purely driven by marketing strikes me as misguided. That have to be real costs involved for such a system to fall apart.