Fair Use Policy

Thu Aug 23 02:58:34 UTC 2012

On Aug 22, 2012, at 21:25, William Herrin wrote:

> Works for the electric company, the gas company, the water company,
> etc. Metering I mean, not a use cap. The notion of a cap is pretty
> broken.

The difference is that gas, water, and electricity are all resources that have actual costs relevant to consumer and SMB-level users.  A fiber-optic line costs the same to operate regardless of if it is carrying no data or entirely maxed out.  Higher-capacity optics at each end of course cost money, but they're fixed cost items which are deployed once and don't often need replacement during their useful life (especially given the growth rate of network traffic).  Longer runs obviously need repeaters capable of handling the data rates in use, but the same applies.

As far as I can tell, the actual cost of the bits being transferred is so minuscule as to be practically irrelevant for anyone who's not at the scale to be dealing directly with Tier 1 carriers.  Capacity costs money, but once it's there utilization is nothing.
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Sean Harlow
sean at seanharlow.info