On Mon, Nov 29, 2004 at 02:33:19PM -0700, Hyrum Wright wrote: > >For most everyone on this list, ``customer-unfriendly'' translates to > >``more expensive for me.'' The rest of the customer base subsidizes > >the heavier users, like ourselves. Why should we expect others to pay > >for our bandwidth? > > > >Maybe if we actually paid by the byte, the telecom companies would not > >be trying to find ways to reign in costs incurred by the heavier users > >by locking down ports and other such nonsense. > ... > Bandwidth is a slightly different beast. Because it is > time-dependent, if not used, it disappears.
I am willing to bet that, at the aggregated macro-economic level, bandwidth and water do not look much different from the supply side, in that marginal increase in maximum bytes/sec capacity correlates with marginal increase in cost for the supplier. As the bandwidth cap gets hit, the carrier has to dump money into raising the cap. In any case, I think that ISP's will one day follow the model that the cell phone companies currently employ. Give a quota for every month, and bandwidth used during peak periods applies to that quota (with ``unlimited bytes'' at 2:00am, for example, to give incentive for people to grab their ISO's from a cron job so they don't stress the network). Then charge for every megabyte used over that quota. Usage of available resources will become more constant (i.e., the maximum bytes/sec will go down), and hence more efficient, and hence... cheaper (for the average user, at least)! If you find that you hit your quota too often, then buy the higher-quota package. Somehow, I envision something like that mitigating a lot of the spyware/spam/etc. issues that currently plague home PC's and (subsequently) the network. When double-clicking that attachment can lead to real $$ on your next Internet bill, people will start behaving more responsibly. As if by magic, spambots will be taken off-line and general computer security will increase as computers become harder to compromise. Mark my words. :-) Mike .___________________________________________________________________. Copyright is nothing more than a temporary loan from the public domain.
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