Pascal Bruno wrote: > True, a friend of mine experienced that. His vonage service was > suspended for excessive use. Even he had an "unlimited" plan.
The problem is that in VoIP, selling anything "unlimited" while the VoIP structural picture continues to be very highly PSTN-centric (which it will continue to be for quite some time yet) is a losing proposition. But it is a requirement of marketing to do so, as long as your competitors are doing it--or, at least, claiming to do it, it doesn't really matter which. So, maybe Bret is right; if there were a strict and comprehensive regulatory ban on claiming anything is "unlimited," ever, that might go some way toward solving that problem. Personally, I don't think there's a problem here. It's enough for 90%+ of customers 90%+ of time since they never hit the threshold, much as with ISPs. Any kind of business that deals in high volumes of variable transactions has to make trade-offs that lead to a Pareto-optimal[1] outcome. You'll never please everyone, yet competition necessarily pares things down to a lowest common denominator in the discursive space of marketing. Nobody is five-9s[2], nobody's SLA is worth a crap, and nobody's "more bars in more places" or "always on" has any empirical validity from an engineering perspective. Every system of social and productive relations creates crosses to bear. The interplay of "marketing" with competition is one of the better-known crosses of capitalism we have to hoist up the hill. -- Alex [1] Otherwise known by names such as "the 80/20 rule." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle [2] Except, perhaps, the ILECs, who have had a few decades to work on this in technology stacks we now consider "legacy," and also face a tremendous regulatory mandate to provide that level of availability. -- Alex Balashov - Principal Evariste Systems Web : http://www.evaristesys.com/ Tel : (+1) (678) 954-0670 Direct : (+1) (678) 954-0671 Mobile : (+1) (678) 237-1775 _______________________________________________ --Bandwidth and Colocation Provided by http://www.api-digital.com-- AstriCon 2009 - October 13 - 15 Phoenix, Arizona Register Now: http://www.astricon.net asterisk-biz mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-biz