North American Network Operators Group

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Re: Points on your Internet driver's license (was RE: Even you can be

  • From: Rob Nelson
  • Date: Sat Jun 12 20:52:02 2004


To compare this with the electricity company, the average home with a 200A
service is equivalent to NATed and firewalled internet bandwidth. As your
electricity demands grow (for whatever reason) the electricity company
upgrades your service, to 3 phase, 600V, whatever. Same with internet
bandwidth, get a public ip, get a static ip, get ports opened, run
servers. Just as the upgraded electricity service requires more knowledge
and equipment so does the upgraded internet bandwidth.
The biggest problem with this is that, so long as the lines support it, your electric company will send you as few or as many amps as you need, when you need it. They also make sure they don't send you 1200 amps on a #14 wire, which would probably cause a significant portion of your wiring to smoke, if not burn.

With internet access, how easy is it to suddenly turn off NAT, stop redirecting all SMTP access to your anti-everything spam free SMTP server, remove the firewalls blocking outbound IPSec packets and inbound SSH? How quickly can it be done? How much should be charged for it?

The better analogy is what happens when you leave your oven on for 8 days straight? Assuming your house doesn't burn down, should you have to pay the electric bill for those 8 days? Hell yeah. It's impossible to separate what was "legit" energy use and what was from the oven, and it's not their fault you didn't turn it off anyway. And in the worst case, if your house burns down, it's STILL not their fault!

Commodity internet access is a one-size-fits-all game plan. At most, there's a second size, residential or business. But any user of either plan can be compared to any other user of the same plan, and the provider will treat them the same. It's too difficult, and doesn't pay, to try and treat them differently. The extra $10 a month isn't going to justify the $20 spent making the changes or talking to the person on the phone.

Rob Nelson
[email protected]