On Apr 9, 2007, at 11:18 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > On Mon, 9 Apr 2007, Jeffrey Goldberg wrote:
>> What I struggle with is that we have a situation where the >> protocols are in place, the tools are in place, and the root of >> the system is in place. It is in everybody's narrow individual >> interest to do the right thing, yet so many people (many of whom >> really should know better) simply do the wrong thing. > I agree that ISPs with flat rates would benefit by hosting their > own ntp servers. But who is going to tell them ? Certainly not the > big carriers that provide internet connectivity to those ISPs > because the big carriers do not sell bandwidth to the ISPs on a > flat rate basis. So like in many cases, incompetence should be > encouraged by the big carriers ( the top of the pyramid ) because > they sell more bandwidth this way. > > Of course, in the end, when we waste, its always the end consumer > that ipays. When wasting, money is simply transferred from the > consumer pocket to people on top of the pyramid, this is why those > people are usually pretty rich ;-) > > Nothing is free, when a packet goes through the net, it costs money > and somebody makes profit. Louis, This isn't the place to debate your apparent general view that most waste and inefficiency can be explained by the profit motive. But let's look at the specific case in hand. The situation (as both of us describe it) would have the ISPs be able to reduce costs. (Whether they pass those cost savings on to the customer to increase market competitiveness or keep it as additional profit margins makes no different for this case, either way the ISPs benefit from providing NTP service to their customers). It may be true that the big carriers want ISPs to behave wastefully, but that still wouldn't explain their behavior. First of all, my ISP is a big carrier (Verizon). So nobody with any influence on my connectivity has an interest in me (flat rate payer) wasting resources. Second of all, a smaller ISP doesn't need to depend on its provider to learn about or implement NTP service. Believe me, I had no encouragement from Verizon to use NTP properly, but still I do so. Your claim would only make sense if the big carriers really were in a position to effectively withhold information about NTP from their customers (the ISPs). So I am inclined to go with others' suggested answers to the puzzle. That ISPs figure that the cost of addition connections upstream from not providing NTP services for their customers is less than the cost (maintenance, support) of providing NTP services. If that is the case, then it becomes harder to persuade the ISPs to "do the right thing". But if it is just incompetence, then we have an easier task, since persuading them to do the right thing coincides with persuading them to do something that improves their profits. -j -- Jeffrey Goldberg http://www.goldmark.org/jeff/ _______________________________________________ timekeepers mailing list [email protected] https://fortytwo.ch/mailman/cgi-bin/listinfo/timekeepers
