It's a popular concept that competition will resolve NN concerns. A couple of weeks back I taped Barbara Van Schewick expounding on her theme that blocking, discrimination, and/or access charges, ARE acceptable if at the users - rather than provider's - discretion. http://www.isoc-ny.org/p2/?p=1459 Afterwards, I asked her about the effect of competition. She remarked that, according to her research, countries with competition, such as the Euro unbundling regimes like the UK, actually had a much higher likelihood of such network management practices that the duopolist USA as the providers were under greater pressure to optimize the economic value of every bit put through. <http://www.isoc-ny.org/p2/?p=1459>Plusnet's transparency would seem to be indicative of a trend toward Van Schewick style solutions, where user's have a bandwidth dashboard where they can opt to throttle application-by-application, plus possibly receive targeted ads, to get a cheaper connection. j On Tue, Nov 30, 2010 at 3:13 AM, Michael Painter <tvhawaii@shaka.com> wrote:
Ben Butler wrote:
Same hymn sheet, if they pay enough the cost averaging model works again and we don't have to worry about latency critical or transfer volume. The problem is that they wont pay for it.
I became interested in these guys: http://www.plus.net/?home=hometop in 2008 because they were one of the first to use DPI (and admit it) to enforce their TOS. Every time I check their site (~every 8-10months), they seem to have won another award. Is 'Net Neutrality', the FCC, or something else preventing a model like this from having success in the U.S.? Or does it exixt and I just haven't heard about it?
--Michael
-----Original Message----- From: wherrin@gmail.com [mailto:wherrin@gmail.com] On Behalf Of William Herrin Sent: 30 November 2010 04:17 To: Ben Butler Cc: NANOG list Subject: Re: Level 3 Communications Issues Statement Concerning Comcast'sActions
On Mon, Nov 29, 2010 at 10:51 PM, Ben Butler <ben.butler@c2internet.net> wrote:
Then consumer broadband came along, the subs went down, the headline speeds went up, service delivery becomes impossible in the face of the marketing BS ---- and here we are.
Hi Ben,
So you're saying: treat it like electrical service. I have a 200 amp electrical service at my house. But I don't pay for a 200 amp service, I pay for kilowatt-hours of usage.
There are several problems transplanting that billing model to Internet service. The first you've already noticed - marketing activity has rendered it unsalable. But that's not the only problem.
Another problem is that the price of electricity has been very stable for a very long time, as has the general character of devices which consume it. Consumers have a gut understanding of the cost of leaving the light on. But what is a byte? How much to load that web page? Watch that movie? And doesn't Moore's Law mean that 18 months from now it should cost half as much? If I can't tell whether or not I'm being ripped off, I'm probably being ripped off.
A third problem is the whole regulated monopoly thing. The electric company had to be slapped down hard by the government to make its billing process fair. Anything we can do to avoid that fate is money in the bank, even if it means allowing the occasional customer to get more than he paid for.
So if we can't bill you by usage, and at a consumer level we can't, then we have to find another way. Statistics and prayer isn't working out as well as we'd hoped so we're looking at double-billing schemes. Bad plan!
Regards, Bill Herrin
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