Why do some ISP's have bandwidth quotas?

Thu Oct 4 17:50:40 UTC 2007

On Oct 4, 2007, at 1:29 PM, Justin M. Streiner wrote:

>
> On Thu, 4 Oct 2007, Hex Star wrote:
>
>> Why is it that the US has ISP's with either no quotas or obscenely  
>> high ones
>> while countries like Australia have ISP's with ~12gb quotas? Is  
>> there some
>> kind of added cost running a non US ISP?
>
> Depending upon the country you're in, that is a possibility.  Some  
> countries have either state-run or monopolistic telcos, so there is  
> little or no competition to force prices down over time.
>
> Even in the US, there is a huge variability in the price of telco  
> services from one part of the country to another.
>
> jms

Hint: whenever/wherever service providers are able to secure the  
majority of their essential inputs on a predictable fixed cost basis  
(e.g., circuits rather than variable IP transit), they tend to extend  
the same pricing model to their customers. However, in some cases  
there is a major lag separating the timing of the change in the  
provider-level cost model and the change in customer-facing pricing.  
Absent competition, the lag may be infinite. In other cases, there  
may be more variable costs associated with service delivery than is  
immediately obvious.

Southern Cross was completed in late 2000, and not long after (couple  
of years) incumbent operators in AUNZ had done a pretty good job of  
leveraging the new infrastructure to effect just the sort of variable- 
to-fixed cost conversion described above. Marginal improvements in  
customer pricing are just starting to happen in the last year or so...

TV 