On 01:40 PM 1/31/2002 -0500, Greg Pendergrass wrote:

It doesn't make sense that an ISP should complain that customers use 100% of what they pay for. So if 1% of your customers use %50+ of your bandwidth, your 1% is getting their money's worth. If you don't want the customer to use it, don't sell it to them.

The problem is that ISPs are not configuring products that meet customer needs. What the average broadband customer WANTS is: o The highest transmission rate possible, both for uploading and downloading o A reasonable "consumption" of the above bandwidth per month, perhaps 1 GB aggregate (both directions) o For a reasonable "home user" monthly rate o With the ability to buy additional consumption at a moderate increase if their needs are higher than the typical "home user" o The ability to use NAT to have more than one home machine on the connection, so that they can share the connection among all the residents of their home But the home user broadband accounts ISPs sell are: o Accounts with tiered bandwidth pricing o No consumption cap so they limit speed instead (meeting the ISPs needs, but not the customer's needs) o Unreasonable NAT policies o Expensive upgrade paths Until ISPs start making broadband services which match end users needs these problems will continue. You can't address this with TOS policies, you have to have products that MEET your customer's needs! Web hosting providers have figured out how to make products that meet their customers needs by metering and charging for excessive bandwidth consumption, (or shutting off the site's access if it consumed the limit for the day, or the month) without throttling the site's "speed". This isn't rocket science, you just need to apply the same pricing schemes and bandwidth management systems to broadband. Instead of cutting the broadband customer off when they have used their bandwidth consumption, rate limit the connection to 14.4 so that they can still access their email and see your message telling them that they've over-consumed their bandwidth and exhausted their allotment. They can either accept the rate limited circuit until the beginning of the next cycle, or they can opt to pay extra to have a higher bandwidth consumption allotment. The only reason that broadband providers don't do this already is that there are artificial barriers to true competition. When those barriers are removed and any given broadband customer can select from dozens or hundreds of options (as is the case with website hosting), these options WILL be available and customers will opt for services that have them. jc