[geeks] testing

[Bill Bradford]

On Wed, Jun 09, 2004 at 12:32:16AM -0500, Mike Hebel wrote:
> (0) Talking about "unlimeted internet" versus "we capped your downloads".
> Had a couple of friends bit by that.

ARGH. 

As a former employee [0] of an Internet Service Provider, I had to explain
many times that "Unlimited Internet" means "Unlimited Access to the Internet;
we don't control where you can go" and does NOT mean "unlimited bandwidth".
It means "reasonable bandwidth usage".  

If we had people pegging a dialup line (this was '98) and staying connected 
24/7, we'd give them a warning or two, and after that tell them to either 
curtail their usage or change to a dedicated dialup connection (which was 
only $20 or so more than the normal fee).

ISP economics (at least back in the dialup days) are based on the fact that
100% of your customers won't want to dial in and use the system at the same
time.  I didn't know of a single provider that had enough lines for every one
of their customers to connect simultaneously.  Things are different now with
DSL and cable, of course - you just have to have sufficient upstream.

Bill (glad to have been out of the ISP business for four years now..)

[0] '95-'96: IOnet.net (I was their first tech support guy, and was assistant
			sysadmin by the time I left)
[1] '96-'98: Texas.Net (Sr. Systems Engineer)
[2] '98-'99: Jump.Net (part time night job doing tech support, for extra money)
[3] '99-'00: onr.com (OnRamp Access, head systems administrator)

-- 
bill bradford
austin texas