From: Mark Newton (no email)
Date: Fri Jan 18 2008 - 16:18:06 EST
On 19/01/2008, at 6:41 AM, Michael Holstein wrote:
> My guess is the market will work this out. As soon as it's
> implemented, you'll see AT&T commercials in that town slamming cable
> and saying how DSL is "really unlimited".
Meanwhile, on TWC where downloading the entire Internet over bittorrent
every month is expensive, the disproportionately high users will have
migrated to other ISPs.
That'll have some pretty obvious and inevitable effects:
* TWC's cost of operations will drop because they won't have to
provision bandwidth and infrastructure for people downloading
billions of terabytes per month (slight exaggeration :-)
* TWC's perceived performance will increase in some neighborhoods
because their coax local loops won't be congested anymore. That'll
make their customers happy.
* TWC's competitors who still offer "all you can eat" broadband
will find themselves attracting the customers who can't afford to
use TWC anymore, i.e., the heavy users who cost zillions of dollars
to support. That'll push their cost base sky-high, even as they
send out triumphant press releases bragging about their fantastic
growth rates (customer headcount: Growing! Transit requirements:
Growing! Revenues: Growing, a little bit)
* Because TWC's competitors won't be able to afford infrastructure
upgrades to match the usage habits of their newfound customers,
over time they'll become congested and start turning down the
screws on their DPI boxes and/or putting their prices up. All
their newfound customers will say, "You've changed, man," as they
dis 'em in the marketplace. TWC's competitors' customers will be
sad.
* Over time, TWC's competitors will decide that the path of least
resistance is to switch to usage based pricing just like TWC has.
For these reasons, I'm pretty sure that it only takes one player with
significant market share in any given economy to switch to usage based
pricing to eventually force all the others to eventually switch to
usage based pricing as well.
In .au, where this is commonplace (and has been since the mid '90s),
we occasionally get naive providers starting up who offer "unlimited
Internet". They invariably instantly attract all the heavy P2P
users, their performance goes down the toilet, and they run out of
money in about six months. Then a new "unlimited Internet" company
springs up, lather, rinse, repeat. The P2P users don't care, they
treat each new ISP as a thing to be used to feed their habit. As
long as they can leave each carcass behind after they've sucked it
dry they're happy enough.
The more sensible end of town pays about $80 per month for about
40 Gbytes of quota, give or take, depending on the ISP. After that
they get shaped to 64 kbps unless they want to pay more for more
quota. Bytecounts are retrieved via SNMP (for business customers)
or Radius (for DSL, dial, ISDN, etc).
When transit is costing $250 per megabit per month, there aren't
many other options.
- mark
-- Mark Newton Email: (W) Network Engineer Email: (H) Internode Systems Pty Ltd Desk: +61-8-82282999 "Network Man" - Anagram of "Mark Newton" Mobile: +61-416-202-223
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