Re: please help FreeNet by becoming a node

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From: Dave Emery (die@die.com)
Date: Mon Mar 06 2000 - 20:46:24 PST

On Sat, Mar 04, 2000 at 02:40:27PM -0800, David Honig wrote:

>
> But, geez, let people use their pipe any way they want, within the limits
> of what they paid for. Maybe that's the problem.
> The marketeers won't let the engineers point out that
> certain values are peak, that everyone can't flush the toilet
> at the same time.
>
> Apologies for continuing this tangent,

        At the risk of wandering even further off topic, I think an
important driving force in many of the cable modem (and especially xDSL
where technical restrictions on upstream bandwidth are much less of an
issue) marketing plans and resultant restrictive contracts is protection
of much higher priced (and profit) business oriented leased line and
frame relay based Internet services. Certainly this has been true if
it no longer is.

        T1 lines and the like go for many times the monthly rate of
either cable modem or consumer xDSL - and the cost of providing them is
much more comparable to the other technologies than the rates are. And
one can be quite sure that if consumer priced high bandwidth
connections could be legally used for business servers, many businesses
would gladly pay 1/4 or 1/5 the monthly charges and do so.

        If I may be a radical reactionary, I might point out that a lot
of these pricing and service limiting issues would go away if consumers
were billed by the megabyte transferred rather than being given a flat
rate pipe with enormous capacity that they are expected to use but a
tiny fraction of. ISPs pay by the megabyte for upstream connectivity
now, perhaps it is time to recognize that one cannot give ones customers
fatter and fatter pipes with no restrictions on how much they can use
them without something in place to limit the traffic.

        Sorry for being more off topic... 

-- 
	Dave Emery N1PRE,  die@die.com  DIE Consulting, Weston, Mass. 
PGP fingerprint = 2047/4D7B08D1 DE 6E E1 CC 1F 1D 96 E2  5D 27 BD B0 24 88 C3 18

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