Two Tiered Internet

Wed Dec 14 16:40:58 UTC 2005

Hi.

I agree with your comments re customers. (residential customers, in
particular)

At risk of being flamed, what I'd propose is that regulators should put
effort into understanding whether the basic service is broken. If it's
not broken then perhaps it is reasonable to allow provider-prioritized
traffic. (i.e., if the provider offers a good SLA for basic traffic and
lives up to it even in the presence of prioritized traffic) On the other
hand, if the provider doesn't guarantee a quality basic service then
their request to "prioritize" is in bad-faith; they will effectively be
de-prioritizing the basic service.

Cheers,
-Benson

-----Original Message-----
From: Marshall Eubanks [mailto:tme at multicasttech.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, 14 December, 2005 09:36
To: Schliesser, Benson
Cc: Per Heldal; NANOG
Subject: Re: Two Tiered Internet

Hello;

My experience is that customers won't put a lot of effort into  
understanding nuances of what they are
being offered, that they will always complain to the people they are  
paying money to, and that if you think that a good use of your  
bandwidth with your customers (a business's most precious commodity)  
is to explain to them why it's a good thing that your service is  
broken, you're crazy.

On Dec 14, 2005, at 10:18 AM, Schliesser, Benson wrote:

>
> Marshall Eubanks wrote:
>
>> If these don't work, people will complain. Just imagine for a second
>> that cable providers started a service that meant that every channel
>> not owned by, say, Disney, had a bad picture and sound. Would this
>> be good  for the  cable companies ? Would their customers be happy ?
>
> So, the basic issue isn't relative priority. It's the absolute quality
> of the common-denominator/lower-priority service (i.e., the baseline).
>
> If the provider enforces a solid SLA for non-enhanced Internet,  
> then who
> would be upset if they also provide an enhanced option? Of course, I
> don't currently have an SLA for my personal cable-modem or DSL
> services...
>

A friend of mine who is also on Cox (and on this list) called up and  
complained enough to
get an SLA from them. I wish I had one.

I test a lot of streaming here at home, and I notice when Cox has one  
of their very frequent
15 second outages. Or their also frequent 5 minute periods of 80-90%  
packet loss. When
Verizon puts their FTTH out here to Clifton, I think I'll get that  
too and try and multi-home
(through tunnels, as I'm certainly not paying either for BGP).

Hmm, maybe there's a product there...

Regards
Marshall

> Cheers,
> -Benson