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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: State Super-DMCA Too True
On Sat, 29 Mar 2003, Tony Rall wrote: > No, it is not theft of service. It doesn't cost an ISP more for me to > have 20 machines than it does if I have just 1. Nor does it cost them if > I use NAT. > > What might cost them more is if I use more bandwidth or use additional IP > addresses (for which there may be an associated expense). But a user with > one machine can potentially use as much or more bandwidth than a user with > 20. There simply isn't a decent correlation between number of machines > and amount of service consumed. Even so, an ISP doesn't have a legitimate > complaint against users that are simply consuming the bandwidth that the > ISP advertised as being part of their service. So if I own an "all you can eat" restaurant you would say that I should allow you and your whole family to eat for the price of one person as long as only one of your was in the restaurant at any one time? Of course you'll say your family of vegetarian dieters eats less food than some truck driver I had in last week so thats okay. The ISP is able to charge the low price for "flat rate" Internet because it knows there is only one computer in the house and it's (99% of the time) doing normal web browsing and email type stuff for only a limited amount of time each day (p2p has screwed up the economics a bit). If you price your product on the assumption that the average customer only uses 5% of their bandwidth then it doesn't take many customers using 50% or 100% of it to really spoil your economics. Banning NAT and servers is a simple way to filter out most of the "power users" without scaring the "mom and pop" customers with bandwidth and download quotas. -- Simon Lyall. | Newsmaster | Work: [email protected] Senior Network/System Admin | Postmaster | Home: [email protected] Ihug Ltd, Auckland, NZ | Asst Doorman | Web: http://www.darkmere.gen.nz
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