From the end users' perspective, we've got pretty much the same story. They're unlikely to save more than a few dollars if they don't use the connection at all, and they'll have to pay more if they do. What's in it for them? If the end user is already paying the $30-50/month you suggest
For an idea to catch on, it often helps for there to be a clear benefit to doing things the new way rather than the old way (or at least, it needs some good marketing...). In this case, it's not clear to me where the benefit is. A lot of the cost of residential connections is in support, and in the cost of the physical connection, whether it's used or not. From the ISP's perspective, even if the average customer's use were to drop considerably, it probably wouldn't lead to a huge reduction in their costs, so they wouldn't be able to lower the base price of an unused circuit much below what it already is. While it might be nice to be able to get more than they're currently getting from customers who are heavy users, the heavy users would be unlikely to pay more, given that they could get service for the same flat rate from the ISP's competitors. that they would pay for the loop, then they're currently getting the bandwidth for free. Why would they want to start paying more? The situation for users of much bigger connections, where we're talking bills of thousands or tens of thousands of dollars per month, instead of $30-50, is quite different. Metro ethernet and OC-whatever connections generally are billed at 95th percentile utilization, which is a form of pay as you use. -Steve On Fri, 14 May 2004, Jonathan M. Slivko wrote:
Also, you could also take the approach of wiring a whole building for Internet connectivity through that model, like Intellispace does.
-- Jonathan
Daniel Senie wrote:
At 05:22 PM 5/14/2004, you wrote:
Hello Fellow NANOG'ers,
I was just thinking about this - tell me if it sounds reasonable? The company that I work for developed a piece of technology which, through rate-limit statements, allow customers to buy/sell bandwidth "on demand". Now, I was thinking: "Why can't we take this technology that we've tested successfully in a colo environment and adapt it a little bit for personal/buisness-class ISP's to allow them to bill for the bandwidth that a customer uses, and only that with the exception of a base monthly fee (to cover the DSL/T1 loop, e-mail services, support, etc.) of a few dollars.
The access line (T-1, etc.) loop charge is substantially larger than the bandwidth charge. Get the phone companies to price the lines better, and it might make sense.
Personally, I would like to see a senario where everyone just pays for what they use - it would be a much better system for allowing people who don't neccessarily need to get on the Internet at high-speed, get on high-speed which will not only increase revenue for the ISP's, but also for the customer who can now use DSL/T1 access in a much more effective way.
Questions? Comments? Suggestions?
-- Jonathan
-- Jonathan M. Slivko Network Operations Center Invisible Hand Networks, Inc. help@invisiblehand.net 1-866-MERKATO (USA) 1-812-355-5908 (Intl) <http://www.invisiblehand.net>
-- Jonathan M. Slivko Network Operations Center Invisible Hand Networks, Inc. help@invisiblehand.net 1-866-MERKATO (USA) 1-812-355-5908 (Intl) <http://www.invisiblehand.net>
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Steve Gibbard scg@gibbard.org +1 415 717-7842 (cell) http://www.gibbard.org/~scg +1 510 528-1035 (home)