On Sat, Dec 05, 1998 at 06:07:35PM -0500, Barry Shein wrote:
On December 5, 1998 at 14:28 karl@denninger.net (Karl Denninger) wrote:
Absent BOTH of those on a worldwide basis and I could never justify recommending to anyone that they accept such a pricing system.
Of course you could, if the per-unit cost were the same, pro-rata, as paying for the whole thing. So if the choice was between paying $48K/mo for a DS3 vs $2K/mo for each DS1-equivalent the worst case is $48K/mo anyhow so may as well take your chances with crooks.
Except that if I don't need a DS-3 often then the possibility of being billed for it when I wasn't the requestor is a hell of a liability.
Particularly if, as I predict, it becomes a major way to sell a lot of very high bandwidth lines (155mb+) to customers who otherwise wouldn't consider so much bandwidth if they had to pay for all of it all the time.
Again, it depends on the risk factors.
You're right that something has to be done, but I don't particularly accept that the situation is so untenable. On a service like this a credit for a bad week with a crook doesn't really drive the provider under either, particularly if they make some effort to prevent it (e.g. prosecuting abusers, detecting and blocking abuse quickly, etc.)
I'd guess that one model which might work well is whitelisting: I want on-demand bandwidth up to, say, 155Mb/s to this short list of sites (VPN-ish), but only T1 to everyone else to prevent abuse.
Possibly, yes. -- -- Karl Denninger (karl@denninger.net) http://www.mcs.net/~karl I ain't even *authorized* to speak for anyone other than myself, so give up now on trying to associate my words with any particular organization.