[rescue] misc old Sun resources

[Tim H.]

On Mon, 22 Jul 2002 10:30:27 -0700 (PDT)
James Lockwood <james at foonly.com> wrote:

> That's not bandwidth, that's speed.  Without a SLA you have no
> bandwidth assurances.
> 
> Given that one 1.5M user can potentially move about 390GB of data over
> the course of the month, I don't see how flat rate access plans can
> succeed for much longer.  Even at 5% usage it's likely a losing
> proposition for the ISP.
> 
> The figure I'm familiar with is that the top 1% of high speed users
> consume 30% of the bandwidth.  I suspect that this is conservative.
> 
> -James

Actually that problem has always existed, even on POTS dial-up.  I am
still waiting for my ISP to notice that I am up 24/7, but it isn't real
likely, since every time I call when there is an issue I have to tell
them what is happening because they can't figure it out.  In fact, when
I signed up they were not specifying supported OS, but I knew they'd
freak out if I mentioned Linux, so I told them I was using a Mac,
figuring if they had directions for a mac I could figure out what their
stupid windows dialer software was doing.

It took 2 days to manage to connect to the one guy who knew how to hook
up a Mac, and he had never done it, he just had a MSWord doc with
standard Mac PPP instructions.  I accidently got it to work, and
realized that all that was going on was their dialer software
upper-cased the username and their dial up servers are username case
sensitive.  I tried to tell them this, but a couple months later the web
site specified windows only, not even Mac support.

But anyway, they can't be making money on a 24/7 connection at $10 a
month.  I'd love to see an ISP actually meter bandwidth at a fair price,
what I see happening on consumer deals is a ridiculously low cap, after
which there is an exhorbitant price.  I'd like to see the caps go away,
and just have a fair price from the start.

Tim