Hi. I agree with your comments re customers. (residential customers, in particular) At risk of being flamed, what I'd propose is that regulators should put effort into understanding whether the basic service is broken. If it's not broken then perhaps it is reasonable to allow provider-prioritized traffic. (i.e., if the provider offers a good SLA for basic traffic and lives up to it even in the presence of prioritized traffic) On the other hand, if the provider doesn't guarantee a quality basic service then their request to "prioritize" is in bad-faith; they will effectively be de-prioritizing the basic service. Cheers, -Benson -----Original Message----- From: Marshall Eubanks [mailto:tme@multicasttech.com] Sent: Wednesday, 14 December, 2005 09:36 To: Schliesser, Benson Cc: Per Heldal; NANOG Subject: Re: Two Tiered Internet Hello; My experience is that customers won't put a lot of effort into understanding nuances of what they are being offered, that they will always complain to the people they are paying money to, and that if you think that a good use of your bandwidth with your customers (a business's most precious commodity) is to explain to them why it's a good thing that your service is broken, you're crazy. On Dec 14, 2005, at 10:18 AM, Schliesser, Benson wrote:

Marshall Eubanks wrote:

...

If these don't work, people will complain. Just imagine for a second that cable providers started a service that meant that every channel not owned by, say, Disney, had a bad picture and sound. Would this be good for the cable companies ? Would their customers be happy ?

So, the basic issue isn't relative priority. It's the absolute quality of the common-denominator/lower-priority service (i.e., the baseline).

If the provider enforces a solid SLA for non-enhanced Internet, then who would be upset if they also provide an enhanced option? Of course, I don't currently have an SLA for my personal cable-modem or DSL services...

A friend of mine who is also on Cox (and on this list) called up and complained enough to get an SLA from them. I wish I had one. I test a lot of streaming here at home, and I notice when Cox has one of their very frequent 15 second outages. Or their also frequent 5 minute periods of 80-90% packet loss. When Verizon puts their FTTH out here to Clifton, I think I'll get that too and try and multi-home (through tunnels, as I'm certainly not paying either for BGP). Hmm, maybe there's a product there... Regards Marshall

Cheers, -Benson