There is a fundamental problem with the way that Internet services are sold.
At present I have two companies that would like to sell me 'higher speed' Internet service but I have absolutely no way to evaluate their claims. In particular I have no way to know if changing provider or paying my current provider more would make my existing applications run any faster or better. What I do know is that my Vonage service was fine when I first subscribed but is now unusable. I have no way to know if changing provider would change that. If I could be sure that one of the carriers did not have a vested interest in sabotaging my VOIP service from competing providers, that would be reason enough to switch. One would like to sell me higher speed but will not raise their 250Gb monthly bandwidth cap even if I pay more for the service. I am quite willing to pay for higher bandwidth Internet. But at the moment I have no idea what the value proposition that is being presented to me in those offers. And if I don't know I am pretty sure that Mrs B. Muggins has not got a clue. So in my view the problem here is that when I pay for an X Mb/sec connection at the moment I have no real way of knowing whether that is really X Mb/sec all the time or X/n Mb/sec when I am using a service that competes with my carrier. There are two ways that this can get sorted. The first is that the carriers can work out a way to address the issue and explain to the customer what they are really offering. The second is regulation. I really don't see why a regulation need amount to anything more than the fairness in pricing rules that have been applied to other industries who have proved to be unable to get it together on their own. If I pay for X Mb/sec thats what I should get. _______________________________________________ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
