Pay-As-You-Use High-Speed Internet?

Sat May 15 02:11:33 UTC 2004

Previously, Valdis.Kletnieks at vt.edu (Valdis.Kletnieks at vt.edu) wrote:
> On Fri, 14 May 2004 17:22:03 EDT, "Jonathan M. Slivko" <jslivko at invisiblehand.net>  said:
> 
> > Personally, I would like to see a senario where everyone just pays for 
> > what they use - it would be a much better system for allowing people who 
> 
> Who pays for a DDoS attack, or getting flooded by bounces from a spammer's
> joe-job or A/V companies warning spam when somebody else's box spoofs my
> e-mail address?

A former employer of mine does something similar to this with a
metro-ethernet product they provide.  Customers are dropped a
FastEthernet port and pay a monthly fee based on their byte count.  All
of these customers are served off of a wireless point-to-point
microwave network that supported, at most, 150Mbits/sec.  This isn't
generally a problem as the peak traffic on the ring was normally no more
than 20 or 30 Mbits, and much more likely to be about 6Mbits otherwise.

So, who pays when a new Microsoft SQL server worm comes out, and many of
those ports start pumping out 100Mbits of traffic on a Saturday morning?  

Also, how many people do you have to call in around the country to start
physically unplugging customer ports to enable your operations staff to
access devices and construct access lists?

I'm not personally fond of business models where capacity planning
requires the use of a crystal ball, or a rabbit, a hat, and a wooden
stick.

-doug