North American Network Operators Group

Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical

Re: Home media servers, AUPs, and upstream bandwidth utilization.

  • From: Jeroen Massar
  • Date: Sun Dec 24 19:47:48 2006
  • Openpgp: id=333E7C23

Roland Dobbins wrote:
> 
> 
> I recently purchased a Slingbox Pro

It's a neat toy indeed, I would almost run out to get one too was it not
for the cash deficiency. I assume you got your X-mas presents early ? :)

[..]
> What I'm wondering is, do broadband SPs believe that this kind of system
> will become common enough to make a signficant difference in traffic
> paterns, and if so, how do they believe it will affect their access
> infrastructures in terms of capacity...

The fun part is that some ISP's 'restrain' people to use P2P and other
big traffic hogs, but they (at least some :) do provide huge NNTP
servers providing large local caches of truly illegal content and most
of them also seem to advertise with "download movies and music, now
faster and faster than all the other competition".
ISP's should not be classifying nor filtering any of the data that one
is transmitting, especially as when they will do that people will simply
start using port 80 or 443 SSL'd for everything to avoid those crap
filters. I wonder when the usage of IPSEC will become more dominant as
that will also nicely equal out any form of discrimination (can't call
it anything else) there.

Filtering default ports like 25 outbound and some other silly
virus-prone things like 137-139/445 etc is okay, BUT provide a way to
disable this easily. A certain Dutch ISP allows doing this using a
webinterface, which is a perfect method and saves on support calls.


That said ISP's should simply have a package saying "50GiB/month costs
XX euros, 100GiB/month costs double" etc. As that covers what their
transits are charging them, nothing more, nothing less. The money then
is to be made from selling a large package to a stupid user who doesn't
use the traffic, or as that above mentioned ISP once said in the
hallways "we have a few folks doing 400Gb/month, but it's only a few and
if we factor in the people doing almost nothing it equals out very well".


Please note my careful putting of 'usual' and 'most' and 'some' all over
the place, it might seem annoying, but that avoids all those nice
responses with "but we don't do that" kind of arguments; there are
fortunately a number of ISP's who simply can't care less what you do as
long as you pay the bills, and that is what they are supposed to be doing.

Greets,
 Jeroen


Attachment: signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature