Why do some ISP's have bandwidth quotas?

Joe Greco jgreco at ns.sol.net
Tue Oct 9 05:09:43 UTC 2007


> $quoted_author = "Joe Greco" ;
> > 
> > > >That's approximately correct.  The true answer to the thought experiment
> > > >is "address those problems, don't continue to blindly pay those costs and
> > > >complain about how unique your problems are."  Because the problems are
> > > >neither unique nor new - merely ingrained.  People have solved them
> > > >before.
> > > 
> > > "Address those problems" sounds quite a bit like an old Sam Kinnison 
> > > routine, paraphrased as "move to where the broadband is! You live in 
> > > a %*^&* expensive place." Sorry, but your statement comes across as 
> > > arrogant, at least to me.
> > 
> > It's arrogant to fix brokenness?  Because I'm certainly there.  In my
> > experience, if you don't bother to address problems, they're very likely
> > to remain, especially when money is involved on the opposite side.
> 
> it's arrogant to use throwaway lines like "address those problems" when the
> reality is a complex political and corporate stoush over a former government
> entity with a monopoly on the local loop.
> 
> AU should be at a stage where the next generation network (FTTx, for some
> values of x hopefully approaching H) will be built by a new, neutral entity
> owned by a consortium of telcos/ISPs with wholesale charges set on a cost
> recovery basis.  if either political party realises how important this is
> for AUs future and stares down telstra in their game of ACCC chicken, that
> may even become a reality.  

So, in other words, it is arrogant for me to not have a detailed game plan
to deal with another continent's networking political problems, and instead
to summarize it as "address those problems."

Okay, then.

Well, I certainly apologize.  My assumption was that the membership of this
mailing list was:

1) Not stupid,

2) Actually fairly experienced in these sorts of issues, meaning that they
   are capable of filling in the large blanks themselves, and

3) Probably not interested in a detailed game plan for something outside
   of the North American continent anyways, given the "NA" in NANOG.

Certainly the general plan you suggest sounds like a good one.  We kind of
screwed that up here in the US.  Despite having screwed it up, we've still
got cheap broadband.  I'd actually like to see something very much more
like what you suggest for AU here in the US.

But there was more than one problem listed.

The other major factor seems to be transit bandwidth.  I believe I already
mentioned that there are others who are actually working to "address those
problems," so I am guessing that my terse suggestion was actually spot on.
Otherwise they wouldn't be working on a new fiber from Australia to Guam.

The only thing that seems to be particularly new or unique about this
situation is that it was a momentary flash here in the US, when broadband
was first deployed, and providers were terrified of high volume users.
That passed fairly rapidly, and we're now on "unlimited" plans. 

I would, however, caution the folks in AU to carefully examine the path
that things took here in the US - and avoid the mistakes.  We started out
with a plan to have a next generation neutral network, and it looks like
it would have kept the US in the lead of the Internet revolution.  The
first mistake, in my opinion, was not creating a truly neutral entity to
do that network, and instead allowing Ma Bell to create it for us.  But
it's late and I'm guessing most of the interested folks here have already
got a good idea of how it all went wrong.

... JG
-- 
Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net
"We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I
won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN)
With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.



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