Points on your Internet driver's license (was RE: Even you can be

Sun Jun 13 00:48:02 UTC 2004

>To compare this with the electricity company, the average home with a 200A
>service is equivalent to NATed and firewalled internet bandwidth. As your
>electricity demands grow (for whatever reason) the electricity company
>upgrades your service, to 3 phase, 600V, whatever. Same with internet
>bandwidth, get a public ip, get a static ip, get ports opened, run
>servers. Just as the upgraded electricity service requires more knowledge
>and equipment so does the upgraded internet bandwidth.

The biggest problem with this is that, so long as the lines support it, 
your electric company will send you as few or as many amps as you need, 
when you need it. They also make sure they don't send you 1200 amps on a 
#14 wire, which would probably cause a significant portion of your wiring 
to smoke, if not burn.

With internet access, how easy is it to suddenly turn off NAT, stop 
redirecting all SMTP access to your anti-everything spam free SMTP server, 
remove the firewalls blocking outbound IPSec packets and inbound SSH? How 
quickly can it be done? How much should be charged for it?

The better analogy is what happens when you leave your oven on for 8 days 
straight? Assuming your house doesn't burn down, should you have to pay the 
electric bill for those 8 days? Hell yeah. It's impossible to separate what 
was "legit" energy use and what was from the oven, and it's not their fault 
you didn't turn it off anyway. And in the worst case, if your house burns 
down, it's STILL not their fault!

Commodity internet access is a one-size-fits-all game plan. At most, 
there's a second size, residential or business. But any user of either plan 
can be compared to any other user of the same plan, and the provider will 
treat them the same. It's too difficult, and doesn't pay, to try and treat 
them differently. The extra $10 a month isn't going to justify the $20 
spent making the changes or talking to the person on the phone.

Rob Nelson
ronelson at vt.edu