More Sidgemore on per-bit pricing

Sun Dec 6 02:14:37 UTC 1998

On Sat, Dec 05, 1998 at 06:07:35PM -0500, Barry Shein wrote:
> 
> On December 5, 1998 at 14:28 karl at denninger.net (Karl Denninger) wrote:
>  > Absent BOTH of those on a worldwide basis and I could never justify
>  > recommending to anyone that they accept such a pricing system.
> 
> Of course you could, if the per-unit cost were the same, pro-rata, as
> paying for the whole thing. So if the choice was between paying
> $48K/mo for a DS3 vs $2K/mo for each DS1-equivalent the worst case is
> $48K/mo anyhow so may as well take your chances with crooks.

Except that if I don't need a DS-3 often then the possibility of being
billed for it when I wasn't the requestor is a hell of a liability.

> Particularly if, as I
> predict, it becomes a major way to sell a lot of very high bandwidth
> lines (155mb+) to customers who otherwise wouldn't consider so much
> bandwidth if they had to pay for all of it all the time.

Again, it depends on the risk factors.

> You're right that something has to be done, but I don't particularly
> accept that the situation is so untenable. On a service like this a
> credit for a bad week with a crook doesn't really drive the provider
> under either, particularly if they make some effort to prevent it
> (e.g. prosecuting abusers, detecting and blocking abuse quickly, etc.)
> 
> I'd guess that one model which might work well is whitelisting: I want
> on-demand bandwidth up to, say, 155Mb/s to this short list of sites
> (VPN-ish), but only T1 to everyone else to prevent abuse.

Possibly, yes.

--
-- 
Karl Denninger (karl at denninger.net) http://www.mcs.net/~karl
I ain't even *authorized* to speak for anyone other than myself, so give
up now on trying to associate my words with any particular organization.