SlashDot: "Comcast Gunning for NAT Users"

Fri Feb 1 01:18:31 UTC 2002

On Thu, Jan 31, 2002, Nathan J. Mehl wrote:
> 
> In the immortal words of Steven J. Sobol (sjsobol at JustThe.net):
> > 
> > So you think that dialup users should be allowed to stay online 24/7 for
> > $20/month on an account advertised as unlimited?
> 
> The Federal Trade Commission (and possibly your local district
> attorney) will certainly think so, unless your service contracts
> contain a novel redefinition of the word "unlimited."
> 
> (This is, I suspect, why most of them do just that.)

We have the same problem out here in Australia with ISPs selling
"unlimited" accounts, but they really aren't unlimited in the
truest sense of the word.

The cutest idea I ever saw (and I'm not sure how well this'd
scale on a cable network, but ..) was adaptive bandwidth
limiting. One ISP tried bandwidth limiting each dialup customer
based on how much bandwidth they had used over a calendar month.
If you fell inside that top 1% which used 50% of the network
resources, you soon ended up getting a trickle of traffic.
Local traffic (for example, gaming, or local IX traffic)
wasn't affected by this pipe.

Personally, I think that would be wonderful for Residential
Cable/DSL services - there's only going to be a (relatively)
small number of your userbase that will ever be affected by
the bandwidth limiting, and you're still providing "unlimited"
connectivity to whatever you deem as "local" ..

Adrian

-- 
Adrian Chadd			"The first rule of optimisation:
<adrian at creative.net.au>	  Don't do it, and at least don't
				    do it yet." -- Stefan Axelsson