[ILUG] Slightly OT. The which ISP Question!

[Colm MacCarthaigh]

On Mon, Feb 20, 2006 at 11:05:17AM +0000, Justin Mason wrote:
> This is the reality for me; I don't find capping to be based on a
> realistic picture of how a user *like me* uses the internet.

Capping is mostly based on how much transit bandwidth costs, and
unfortunately bytes cost money. And that's not just the money that goes
to the transit provider either, it's all of the interface cards and
routers and fibre costs in between too. These things are not cheap, they
cost a lot of money.

Despite the prices and caps, most ISPs in Ireland (and Europe) are
making a loss on their residential broadband services. The costs really
are a lot higher than most people think. Dirt-cheap services, in Europe
and the US are generally provided as massive loss-leaders based on some
magical future revenue potential, although at least in the US transit
costs are getting really cheap.

Caps are a direct product of people's insane desire to have flat-rate
pricing. I'll never understand this, it just doesn't make sense. And the
weird thing is, flat-rate pricing made more sense for POTS (which is
mostly circuit switched) - which wasn't.

The costs of broadband vary mostly depending on how much you use it, so
why shouldn't the charging model? I'd love to see the market abandon
caps and just charge by the byte (at a reasonable rate), but people just
don't want to buy the product, and groups like Ireland Offline actively
campaign for flat-rate all over the place. This just makes no sense.

Incidentally most ISPs don't enforce the caps unless you are really
exceeding it by a large ammount, because it's a lot of work for them to
go to the trouble of figuring all of that out.

-- 
Colm MacCárthaigh                        Public Key: colm+pgp at stdlib.net