SlashDot: "Comcast Gunning for NAT Users"
JC Dill
nanog at vo.cnchost.com
Fri Feb 1 03:52:54 UTC 2002
On 01:40 PM 1/31/2002 -0500, Greg Pendergrass wrote:
>
>It doesn't make sense that an ISP should complain that customers use 100% of
>what they pay for. So if 1% of your customers use %50+ of your bandwidth,
>your 1% is getting their money's worth. If you don't want the customer to
>use it, don't sell it to them.
The problem is that ISPs are not configuring products that meet customer needs.
What the average broadband customer WANTS is:
o The highest transmission rate possible, both for uploading and
downloading
o A reasonable "consumption" of the above bandwidth per month,
perhaps 1 GB aggregate (both directions)
o For a reasonable "home user" monthly rate
o With the ability to buy additional consumption at a moderate increase
if their needs are higher than the typical "home user"
o The ability to use NAT to have more than one home machine on
the connection, so that they can share the connection
among all the residents of their home
But the home user broadband accounts ISPs sell are:
o Accounts with tiered bandwidth pricing
o No consumption cap so they limit speed instead (meeting
the ISPs needs, but not the customer's needs)
o Unreasonable NAT policies
o Expensive upgrade paths
Until ISPs start making broadband services which match end users needs
these problems will continue. You can't address this with TOS policies,
you have to have products that MEET your customer's needs!
Web hosting providers have figured out how to make products that meet their
customers needs by metering and charging for excessive bandwidth
consumption, (or shutting off the site's access if it consumed the limit
for the day, or the month) without throttling the site's "speed". This
isn't rocket science, you just need to apply the same pricing schemes and
bandwidth management systems to broadband. Instead of cutting the
broadband customer off when they have used their bandwidth consumption,
rate limit the connection to 14.4 so that they can still access their email
and see your message telling them that they've over-consumed their
bandwidth and exhausted their allotment. They can either accept the rate
limited circuit until the beginning of the next cycle, or they can opt to
pay extra to have a higher bandwidth consumption allotment.
The only reason that broadband providers don't do this already is that
there are artificial barriers to true competition. When those barriers are
removed and any given broadband customer can select from dozens or hundreds
of options (as is the case with website hosting), these options WILL be
available and customers will opt for services that have them.
jc
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