Re: Why do some ISP's have bandwidth quotas?
Now, ISP economics pretty much require that some amount of overcommit will happen. However, if you have a 12GB quota, that works out to around 36 kilobits/sec average. Assuming the ISP is selling 10Mbps connections (and bearing in mind that ADSL2 can certainly go more than that), what that's saying is that the average user can use 1/278th of their connection. I would imagine that the overcommit rate is much higher than that.
I don't think that things should be measured like this. Throughput != bandwidth.
No, but it gives some rational way to look at it, as long as we all realize what we're talking about. The other ways I've seen it discussed mostly involve a lot of handwaving.
Technically the user can use the connection to it's maximum theoretical speed as much as they like, however, if an ISP has a quota set at 12G/month, it just means that the cost is passed along to them when they exceed it.
And that seems like a bit of the handwaving. Where is it costing the ISP more when the user exceeds 12G/month? Think very carefully about that before you answer. If it was arranged that every customer of the ISP in question were to go to 100% utilization downloading 12G on the first of the month at 12:01AM, it seems clear to me that you could really screw up 95th.
Note: I'm assuming the quota is monthly, as it seems to be for most AU ISP's I've looked at, for example:
Yes most are monthly based on GB.
capacity is being stifled by ISP's that are stuck back in speeds (and policies) appropriate for the year 2000.
Imagine a case (even in the largest of ISP's), where there are no quotas, and everyone has a 10Mbps connection.
I'm imagining it. I've already stated that it's a problem.
I don't think there is an ISP in existence that has the infrastructure capacity to carry all of their clients using all of the connections simultaneously at full speed for long extended periods.
I'll go so far as to say that there's no real ISP in existence that could support it for any period.
As bandwidth and throughput increases, so does the strain on the networks that are upstream from the client.
Obviously.
Unless someone pays for the continuously growing data transfers, then your 6Mbps ADSL connection is fantastic, until you transit across the ISP's network who can't afford to upgrade the infrastructure because clients think they are being ripped off for paying 'extra'.
Now, at your $34/month for your resi ADSL connection, the clients call the ISP and complain about slow speeds, but when you advise that they have downloaded 90GB of movies last month and they must pay for it, they wont. Everyone wants it cheaper and cheaper, but yet expect things to work 100% of the time, and at 100% at maximum advertised capacity. My favorites are the clients who call the helpdesk and state "I'm trying to run a business here" (on their residential ADSL connection).
90GB/mo is still a relatively small amount of bandwidth. That works out to around a quarter of a megabit on average. This is nowhere near the "100%" situation you're discussing. And it's also a lot higher than the 12GB/mo quota under discussion.
What are we missing out on because ISP's are more interested in keeping bandwidth use low?
I don't think anyone wants to keep bandwidth use low, it's just in order to continue to allow bandwidth consumption to grow, someone needs to pay for it.
How about the ISP? Surely their costs are going down. Certainly I know that our wholesale bandwidth costs have dropped orders of magnitude in the last ~decade or so. Equipment does occasionally need to be replaced. I've got a nice pair of Ascend GRF400's out in the garage that cost $65K- $80K each when originally purchased. They'd be lucky to pull any number of dollars these days. It's a planned expense. As for physical plant, I'd imagine that a large amount of that is also a planned expense, and is being paid down (or already paid off), so arguing that this is somewhere that a lot of extra expense will exist is probably silly too.
What fantastic new technologies haven't been developed because they were deemed impractical given the state of the Internet?
Backbone connections worth $34/month, and infrastructure gear that upgrades itself at no cost.
Hint: that money you're collecting from your customers isn't all profit. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net "We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.
On Fri, Oct 05, 2007, Joe Greco wrote:
Technically the user can use the connection to it's maximum theoretical speed as much as they like, however, if an ISP has a quota set at 12G/month, it just means that the cost is passed along to them when they exceed it.
And that seems like a bit of the handwaving. Where is it costing the ISP more when the user exceeds 12G/month?
No, its that they've run the numbers and found the users above 12G/month are using a significant fraction of their network capacity for whatever values of signficant and fraction you define. Adrian
On Fri, Oct 05, 2007, Joe Greco wrote:
Technically the user can use the connection to it's maximum theoretical speed as much as they like, however, if an ISP has a quota set at 12G/month, it just means that the cost is passed along to them when they exceed it.
And that seems like a bit of the handwaving. Where is it costing the ISP more when the user exceeds 12G/month?
No, its that they've run the numbers and found the users above 12G/month are using a significant fraction of their network capacity for whatever values of signficant and fraction you define.
Of course, that's obvious. The point here is that if your business is so fragile that you can only deliver each broadband customer a dialup modem's worth of bandwidth, something's wrong with your business. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net "We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.
Joe Greco wrote:
Technically the user can use the connection to it's maximum theoretical speed as much as they like, however, if an ISP has a quota set at 12G/month, it just means that the cost is passed along to them when they exceed it.
And that seems like a bit of the handwaving. Where is it costing the ISP more when the user exceeds 12G/month?
Think very carefully about that before you answer. If it was arranged that every customer of the ISP in question were to go to 100% utilization downloading 12G on the first of the month at 12:01AM, it seems clear to me that you could really screw up 95th.
First, the total transfer vs. 95%ile issue. I would imagine that's just a matter of keeping it simple. John Q. Broadbanduser can understand the concept of total transfer. But try explaining 95%ile to him. Or for that matter, try explaining it to the average billing wonk at your average residential ISP. As far as the 12GB cap goes, I guess it would depend on the particular economics of the ISP in question. 12GB for a small ISP in a bandwidth-starved country isn't as insignificant as you make it sound. But lets look at your more realistic second whatif:
90GB/mo is still a relatively small amount of bandwidth. That works out to around a quarter of a megabit on average. This is nowhere near the "100%" situation you're discussing. And it's also a lot higher than the 12GB/mo quota under discussion.
As you say, 90GB is roughly .25Mbps on average. Of course, like you pointed out, the users actual bandwidth patterns are most likely not a straight line. 95%ile on that 90GB could be considerably higher. But let's take a conservative estimate and say that user uses .5Mbps 95%ile. And lets say this is a relatively large ISP paying $12/Mb. That user then costs that ISP $6/month in bandwidth. (I know, that's somewhat faulty logic, but how else is the ISP going to establish a cost basis?) If that user is only paying say $19.99/month for their connection, that leaves only $13.99 a month to pay for all the infrastructure to support that user, along with personnel, etc all while still trying to turn a profit. In those terms, it seems like a pretty reasonable level of service for the price. If that same user were to go direct to a carrier, they couldn't get .5Mbps for anywhere near that cost, even ignoring the cost of the last-mile local loop. And for that same price they're also probably getting email services with spam and virus filtering, 24-hr. phone support, probably a bit of web hosting space, and possibly even a "backup" dial-up connection. Andrew
On Fri, Oct 05, 2007 at 01:12:35PM -0400, andrew2@one.net wrote:
As you say, 90GB is roughly .25Mbps on average. Of course, like you pointed out, the users actual bandwidth patterns are most likely not a straight line. 95%ile on that 90GB could be considerably higher. But let's take a conservative estimate and say that user uses .5Mbps 95%ile. And lets say this is a relatively large ISP paying $12/Mb. That user then costs that ISP $6/month in bandwidth. (I know, that's somewhat faulty logic, but how else is the ISP going to establish a cost basis?) If that user is only paying say $19.99/month for their connection, that leaves only $13.99 a month to pay for all the infrastructure to support that user, along with personnel, etc all while still trying to turn a profit.
In the Australian ISP's case (which is what started this) it's rather worse. The local telco monopoly bills between $30 and $50 per month for access to the copper tail. So there's essentially no such thing as a $19.99/month connection here (except for short-lived "flash-in-the-pan" loss-leaders, and we all know how they turn out) So to run the numbers: A customer who averages .25Mbit/sec on a tail acquired from the incumbent requires -- Port/line rental from the telco ~ $50 IP transit ~ $ 6 (your number) Transpacific backhaul ~ $50 (I'm not making this up) So we're over a hundred bucks already, and haven't yet factored in the overheads for infrastructure, personnel, profit, etc. And those numbers are before sales tax too, so add at least 10% to all of them before arriving at a retail price. Due to the presence of a quota, our customers don't tend to average .25 Mbit/sec over the course of a month (we prefer to send the ones that do to our competitors :-). If someone buys access to, say, 30 Gbytes of downloads per month, a few significant things happen: - The customer has a clear understanding of what they've paid for, which doesn't encompass "unlimited access to the Internet." That tends to moderate their usage; - Because they know they're buying something finite, they tend to pick a package that suits their expected usage, so customers who intend to use more end up paying more money; - The customer creates their own backpressure against hitting their quota: Once they've gone past it they're usually rate-limited to 64kbps, which is not a nice experience, so by and large they build in a "safety margin" and rarely use more than 75% of the quota. About 5% of our customers blow their quota in any given month; - The ones who do hit their quota and don't like 64kbps shaping get to pay us more money to have their quota expanded for the rest of the month, thereby financing the capacity upgrades that their cumulative load can/will require; - The entire Australian marketplace is conditioned to expect that kind of behaviour from ISPs, and doesn't consider it to be unusual. If you guys in North America tried to run like this, you'd be destroyed in the marketplace because you've created a customer base that expects to be able to download the entire Internet and burn it to DVD every month. :-) So you end up looking at options like DPI and QoS controls at your CMTS head-end to moderate usage, because you can't keep adding infinite amounts of bandwidth to support unconstrained end-users when they're only paying you $20 per month. (note that our truth-in-advertising regulator doesn't allow us to get away with saying "Unlimited" unless there really are no limits -- no quotas, no traffic shaping, no traffic management, no QoS controls. Unlimited means unlimited by the dictionary definition, not by some weasel definition that the industry has invented to suit its own purposes) - There is no net neutrality debate to speak of in .au because everyone is _already_ paying their way. Like I said a few messages ago, as much as your marketplace derides caps and quotas, I'm pretty sure that most of you would prefer to do business with my constraints than with yours. - mark -- Mark Newton Email: newton@internode.com.au (W) Network Engineer Email: newton@atdot.dotat.org (H) Internode Systems Pty Ltd Desk: +61-8-82282999 "Network Man" - Anagram of "Mark Newton" Mobile: +61-416-202-223
In the Australian ISP's case (which is what started this) it's rather worse.
The local telco monopoly bills between $30 and $50 per month for access to the copper tail.
So there's essentially no such thing as a $19.99/month connection here (except for short-lived "flash-in-the-pan" loss-leaders, and we all know how they turn out)
So to run the numbers: A customer who averages .25Mbit/sec on a tail acquired from the incumbent requires --
Port/line rental from the telco ~ $50 IP transit ~ $ 6 (your number) Transpacific backhaul ~ $50 (I'm not making this up)
These look like great places for some improvement.
Like I said a few messages ago, as much as your marketplace derides caps and quotas, I'm pretty sure that most of you would prefer to do business with my constraints than with yours.
That's nice from *your* point of view, as an ISP, but from the end-user's point of view, it discourages the development and deployment of the next killer app, which is the point that I've been making. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net "We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.
On Sat, Oct 06, 2007 at 10:16:16AM -0500, Joe Greco wrote:
So to run the numbers: A customer who averages .25Mbit/sec on a tail acquired from the incumbent requires --
Port/line rental from the telco ~ $50 IP transit ~ $ 6 (your number) Transpacific backhaul ~ $50 (I'm not making this up)
These look like great places for some improvement.
Of course. Transpacific backhaul may drop in price once the AJC/Southern Cross duopoly is broken. Perhaps 2009, we'll have to see. Port/line rental? Ha. We have an incumbent telco who owns 100% of the copper local loop, who is so aggressive about protecting their monopoly that they've actually sued the Federal Government to obtain relief from the requirement to offer wholesale access to the local loop to their competitors. The competition regulator has recently imposed an order on them to drop their price of access to the raw copper; The incumbent's response has been to initiate a national political debate during the present federal election campaign campaign over the merits of a nation-wide Fiber-To-The-Node network which, just coincidentally, requires the exclusion of competition to make the numbers in the business case add up. So I wouldn't be holding my breath about that one.
Like I said a few messages ago, as much as your marketplace derides caps and quotas, I'm pretty sure that most of you would prefer to do business with my constraints than with yours.
That's nice from *your* point of view, as an ISP, but from the end-user's point of view, it discourages the development and deployment of the next killer app, which is the point that I've been making.
Generalizing: We're living in an environment where European service providers use DPI boxes to shape just about everyone to about 40 Gbytes per month, and where US service providers have enough congestion in their reticulation networks that the phrase "unlimited access" carries ironic overtones, and where Australian and New Zealand service providers give uncongested access at unconstrained ADSL2+ rates for as much capacity as an end user is prepared to pay for, and Asian ISPs where in-country is cheap but international is slow and expensive (but nobody cares because they don't speak English and don't need international content anyway), and most of the rest of the world is so expensive that hardly anyone uses it anyway. If there's another killer app on the way, there are enough global constraints on its development that I reckon Australian ISPs' business cases probably aren't the be-all and end-all of its developmental merits. Five years ago the typical .au quota was 3Gbytes per month. Now it's more like 30 - 50 Gbytes per month. If there's a killer app there'll no doubt be commercial pressure on ISPs to bump it again. But until said app comes along? Well, it isn't an ISPs job to subsidize the R&D overheads of application developers, is it? The point here is that you guys in the US have a particular market dynamic that's shaped your perspective of what "reasonable" is. It's completely delusional of you to insist that the rest of the world follow the same definition of "reaosnable", *ESPECIALLY* when the rest of the world is subsidizing your domestic Internet by paying for all the international transit. - mark -- Mark Newton Email: newton@internode.com.au (W) Network Engineer Email: newton@atdot.dotat.org (H) Internode Systems Pty Ltd Desk: +61-8-82282999 "Network Man" - Anagram of "Mark Newton" Mobile: +61-416-202-223
On Sun, 7 Oct 2007, Mark Newton wrote:
We're living in an environment where European service providers use DPI boxes to shape just about everyone to about 40 Gbytes per month,
This doesn't fit with my picture of european broadband at all. Most markets are developing into flat rate ones without per-minute or per-traffic charges, and residential broadband is closing in on 50-70% market penetration all across the continent, with the northern part being a bit ahead of the southern part. Competition is so fierce that a lot of ISPs are electing to get out of certain markets due to uncertainty of future profits even with quite slim organisations and tight budgets on technology without ATM etc (IP dslams). France for instance, it's hard to make any money unless you sell triple play and try to make total profits on the combined services, just selling one doesn't work. It's not uncommon for low-bandwidth (.25-.5 megabit/s) residential access to be in the USD15/month range and 24 meg costing USD30-50 per month including tax. This is without any monthly quota at all, ie flatrate. 5-10% of swedish households have the possiblity to purchase 100/10 over CAT5 for USD50 a month including 25% sales tax, without any quota, and they can actually use the speeds. Some even have 100/100. Recipe for this is to have competitive markets with copper being deregulated and resold at a decent price. Bitstream with incumbant providing access just doesn't work, new services such as multicast IPTV doesn't work over bitstream. In a lot of continental europe ISPs can purchase wholesale internet in the gigabit range for USD6-15/meg/month depending on country and if it includes national traffic or not. Having a competitive market with a lot of players makes all the difference. -- Mikael Abrahamsson email: swmike@swm.pp.se
5-10% of swedish households have the possiblity to purchase 100/10 over CAT5 for USD50 a month including 25% sales tax, without any quota, and they can actually use the speeds. Some even have 100/100.
from japan that seems pretty normal, except for it being available for such a small proportion of the population. north america is a ridiculous back-water with insanely high prices for negligible bandwidth. in hawai`i i pay $70/mo for just layer two of 768k. tokyo is significantly less money for usable 100m/100m. randy
The competition regulator has recently imposed an order on them to drop their price of access to the raw copper; The incumbent's response has been to initiate a national political debate during the present federal election campaign campaign over the merits of a nation-wide Fiber-To-The-Node network which, just coincidentally, requires the exclusion of competition to make the numbers in the business case add up.
Sounds much like the sort of shenanigans that happened here in the US. Problem is, by many accounts, we already paid for a carrier neutral fiber network and the telcos took the money and ran. The reality is that if you allow them to make up the numbers for the business case, it always appears to be bad business.
So I wouldn't be holding my breath about that one.
Yet it's fairly obvious that there is a solution. Just not necessarily the one that the carrier prefers.
Like I said a few messages ago, as much as your marketplace derides caps and quotas, I'm pretty sure that most of you would prefer to do business with my constraints than with yours.
That's nice from *your* point of view, as an ISP, but from the end-user's point of view, it discourages the development and deployment of the next killer app, which is the point that I've been making.
Generalizing:
We're living in an environment where European service providers use DPI boxes to shape just about everyone to about 40 Gbytes per month,
HUH? What in the world are you talking about? I see stats of numerous European customers where they're pulling TERABYTES per month on a resi connection, some more terabytes than you can count on a hand, from a wide variety of providers. Now, if you're extending "European" to include Israel and Egypt, or possibly eastern Europe, I guess maybe it could be happening SOMEWHERE, but not as a general rule.... Otherwise, the only major EU thing I can think of is: Virgin in the UK, having introduced their "fair use" policy, which seems to be intertwined with what appears to be an unpublicized problem with US-facing capacity where they're pegging it during peak times, and appear to have "solved" this with shaping during peak hours, but this only affects peak hours. Actual reality may be different, I'm talking about observed data, posted policy, and extrapolation.
and where US service providers have enough congestion in their reticulation networks that the phrase "unlimited access" carries ironic
There are a few Canadian providers which seem to have some congestion from the US into Canada during peak times. There are some problems with one very specific US cable provider and backbone capacity that I'm aware of. There are probably lesser problems with a whole bunch of networks, providers and backbone, where they run their network at a capacity percentage that might lead to some discomfort. There are reports of Road Runner implementing some sort of fair use policy as well. However, from what I can tell, it is statistically extremely unusual to find a US broadband customer on a sufficient circuit who cannot get a constant 1Mbps of download capacity, and that's been improving fairly steadily.
overtones, and where Australian and New Zealand service providers give uncongested access at unconstrained ADSL2+ rates for as much capacity as an end user is prepared to pay for,
The ideal situation, from a service provider's viewpoint.
and Asian ISPs where in-country is cheap but international is slow and expensive (but nobody cares because they don't speak English and don't need international content anyway), and most of the rest of the world is so expensive that hardly anyone uses it anyway.
If there's another killer app on the way, there are enough global constraints on its development that I reckon Australian ISPs' business cases probably aren't the be-all and end-all of its developmental merits.
No, it'll be developed in Europe, most likely, where >20Mbit access is pretty common, and growing. The problem, from my point of view, is that I'd rather see new killer apps being designed here in the US, and driven by customer demand here in the US.
Five years ago the typical .au quota was 3Gbytes per month. Now it's more like 30 - 50 Gbytes per month. If there's a killer app there'll no doubt be commercial pressure on ISPs to bump it again. But until said app comes along? Well, it isn't an ISPs job to subsidize the R&D overheads of application developers, is it?
No, but then again, that's not the problem I'm pointing at, is it (and it isn't even a real problem, regardless, unless maybe you're some kid writing the next Napster, but I'm willing to pretend even that doesn't happen). The real problem is the ability of users to adopt new killer apps. This eventually breaks down to issues of "how long is it reasonable for users to fund that shiny telco network at $50/line/month" and things like that, because rather than solving the problems, it appears that AU ISP's are simply passing on costs, minimizing the services offered in order to keep service prices as low as possible, and then sitting around justifying it. At a certain point, the deployment cost of your telco network is covered, and it is no longer reasonable to be paying $50/line/month for mere access to the copper.
The point here is that you guys in the US have a particular market dynamic that's shaped your perspective of what "reasonable" is.
Actually, we're more of a content network, delivering content globally, and we deal with regional issues around the globe. I probably have a pretty good idea about a wide variety of strategies. Your view appears to be somewhat more provincial, defending a status quo that doesn't honestly make sense. My perspective of what "reasonable" is certainly isn't shaped by the US market, which is quite nearly as broken as the major communications companies have been able to get away with.
It's completely delusional of you to insist that the rest of the world follow the same definition of "reaosnable",
Interestingly enough, you're now putting words in my mouth, because there is no way in hell that I would suggest that AU follow the US model. I would not wish that on anybody. I might suggest that AU follow the model proposed back in the mid '90's - which would be a good idea, in fact.
*ESPECIALLY* when the rest of the world is subsidizing your domestic Internet by paying for all the international transit.
Interesting thing about how the market works, isn't it. It seems that there's substantially more value to be had in AU connecting to the US than there is the other way around, and costs are shifted accordingly. It isn't fair, but it's the way it works. Historically, AU has always had connectivity issues. There was a time when a machine I ran was burning up a measurable fraction of the total connectivity to AU sending USENET to you guys (anybody remember in the early '90's, when AARNet only had 1-2Mbps to the US? Remember the alt.binaries.pictures.erotica fiasco?) ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net "We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.
$quoted_author = "Joe Greco" ;
The real problem is the ability of users to adopt new killer apps. This eventually breaks down to issues of "how long is it reasonable for users to fund that shiny telco network at $50/line/month" and things like that, because rather than solving the problems, it appears that AU ISP's are simply passing on costs, minimizing the services offered in order to keep service prices as low as possible, and then sitting around justifying it.
if only it was so easy. AU's infrastructure has a long been a quagmire of political fumbling and organised chaos. as mark keeps trying to point out the current state has nothing to do with the wants of the ISP industry. they all wish it was different too...
At a certain point, the deployment cost of your telco network is covered, and it is no longer reasonable to be paying $50/line/month for mere access to the copper.
nice rhetoric. can you come and convince our politicians of that? cheers marty -- You need only two tools, WD-40 and duct tape. If it doesn't move and it should, use the WD-40. If it moves and shouldn't, use the tape.
On Mon, Oct 08, 2007, Martin Barry wrote:
At a certain point, the deployment cost of your telco network is covered, and it is no longer reasonable to be paying $50/line/month for mere access to the copper.
nice rhetoric. can you come and convince our politicians of that?
I think you meant "why wouldn't business love that?" and "who is going to fund my next infrastructure upgrade?" Adrian
Joe Greco wrote:
Technically the user can use the connection to it's maximum theoretical speed as much as they like, however, if an ISP has a quota set at 12G/month, it just means that the cost is passed along to them when they exceed it.
And that seems like a bit of the handwaving. Where is it costing the ISP more when the user exceeds 12G/month?
Think very carefully about that before you answer. If it was arranged that every customer of the ISP in question were to go to 100% utilization downloading 12G on the first of the month at 12:01AM, it seems clear to me that you could really screw up 95th.
First, the total transfer vs. 95%ile issue. I would imagine that's just a matter of keeping it simple. John Q. Broadbanduser can understand the concept of total transfer. But try explaining 95%ile to him. Or for that matter, try explaining it to the average billing wonk at your average residential ISP. As far as the 12GB cap goes, I guess it would depend on the particular economics of the ISP in question. 12GB for a small ISP in a bandwidth-starved country isn't as insignificant as you make it sound. But lets look at your more realistic second whatif:
Wasn't actually my whatif.
90GB/mo is still a relatively small amount of bandwidth. That works out to around a quarter of a megabit on average. This is nowhere near the "100%" situation you're discussing. And it's also a lot higher than the 12GB/mo quota under discussion.
As you say, 90GB is roughly .25Mbps on average. Of course, like you pointed out, the users actual bandwidth patterns are most likely not a straight line. 95%ile on that 90GB could be considerably higher. But let's take a conservative estimate and say that user uses .5Mbps 95%ile. And lets say this is a relatively large ISP paying $12/Mb. That user then costs that ISP $6/month in bandwidth. (I know, that's somewhat faulty logic, but how else is the ISP going to establish a cost basis?)
That *is* faulty logic, of course. It doesn't make much sense in the typical ISP scenario of multiple bursty customers. It's tricky to compute what the actual cost is, however. One of the major factors that's really at the heart of this is that a lot of customers currently DO NOT use much bandwidth, a model which fits well to "12G/mo" quota plans. It's easy to forget that this means that a lot of users may in fact only use "500MB/mo". As a result, the actual cost of bandwidth to the ISP for the entire userbase doesn't end up being $6/user.
If that user is only paying say $19.99/month for their connection, that leaves only $13.99 a month to pay for all the infrastructure to support that user, along with personnel, etc all while still trying to turn a profit. In those terms, it seems like a pretty reasonable level of service for the price. If that same user were to go direct to a carrier, they couldn't get .5Mbps for anywhere near that cost, even ignoring the cost of the last-mile local loop. And for that same price they're also probably getting email services with spam and virus filtering, 24-hr. phone support, probably a bit of web hosting space, and possibly even a "backup" dial-up connection.
That makes it sound really nice and all, but the point I was trying to make here was that these sorts of limits stifle other sorts of innovation. My point was that cranking up the bandwidth management only *appears* to solve a problem that will eventually become more severe - there are going to be ever-more-bandwidth-intensive applications. That brings us back to that question of how much bandwidth should we be able to deliver to users, so the $6/user is certainly relevant in that light. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net "We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.
participants (8)
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Adrian Chadd -
andrew2＠one.net -
James Spenceley -
Joe Greco -
Mark Newton -
Martin Barry -
Mikael Abrahamsson -
Randy Bush