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Yeah 17 hours is the conservative number.

However I do run Remem upgrade http://www.istop.com/~sadolph/remem_home.html
which uses up some of the power.

With my 4 D-Cell power "pillow" in the backpack I supposedly can get 200 hours... I've never had to replace the batteries in that though.

-- John.

And they raised the price from 25$CDN.

Speed? 700Kb/s most of time... OKb/s from time to time...

When I get out of here, i'll probably try http://www.istop.com/

IStop.

I suppose it's somewhat inappropriate to post "classified ads" or the like in a Slashdot thread, although maybe by doing so I'll help get /. to innovate in that field ;)

I've started working on a model that I'm quite confident will both be profitable and allow for easy and effective user- and project owner-funded development of open source software. I have the skills and most of the capital (it takes very little w.r.t. basic operations), but in order to speed up the to-market time and develop a better service, I'm looking for one or a few people with LAMP experience who have a strong desire to work on this sort of project.

If you're interested, e-mail me at daniel@istop.com, I'll give further details and we can discuss your participation.

I choose to use a small ISP. They have their own problems, but this kind of behaviour isn't one of them. I can almost do what the hell I like with my connection and it's only their peer connections and BGP issues that ever screw me up. I have a choice of other ISPs too who also don't behave like this. Thank goodness for competition!

>You may only be using 128kb/s for an hour a day, but if like many schools and school systems, you connect to the district's central network, which then connects the school to the internet, calculate the amount of aggregate bandwidth that 20 students from YOUR school would use; then multiply that by the number of schools in your district....

12.8 x 60 x 60 x 20 = 921.6 MB x 30 days = 27.648 GB

Cost = $10 CDN * 2.7648 = $27.648 CDN (what a surprise! ;-) ) or about $20 US for 20 students.

If his school is anything like mine was, they'll charge far more than $8 a year for computer fees. ;-)

The benefit is here: Q: Can I run my own servers?
A: Yes, unlike HSE and Rogers, you're free to run servers. We do not block any ports or IP protocols. We may temporarily block or redirect ports for network performance or security reasons. We STRONGLY advise against running servers on Windows unless you consider yourself an expert on Windows security.

Basically, power users have to make a decision. They can stick with the "unlimited" providers, but they'll be restricted from running servers, ports may be blocked, and NAT may or may not be allowed. Or, they can pay for the bandwidth they use. If an ISP is charging by the gig, why wouldn't they encourage servers? They're making money from it!

There is no concept of too much "broadband" (I hate term, it doesn't mean highspeed) with the ISP that I chose. They have a fair quota (I don't even know what is as I've never come close to exceeding it), and they're very clear about the excess charges (CAD$2/GB).

Too much bandwidth to them means you're swamping their network and affecting other customers. Even on a 3.5Mms/800Kbs DSL that's rather hard - it takes being DoSed or colocated to cause them problems. If you do affect customeres, they'll pull the plug on you until they can contact you or temporarily filter the culprit ports, or both.

I gotta say I'm very happy with the situation. There's no ambiguity and I think it's a fair deal (did I mention the paltry sum I pay each month service - it's fantastic).

Aha. Another I-Stop customer on /.

>Why is that my only option?

It isn't. You can take option #2 and wait for someone else to do it. There's always two ways to solve a problem. You can spend money, or you can spend time.

>I'm not interested in "starting my own", I just want quality broadband when I need it. I'd sooner subscribe to a T1 business line than start my own ISP.

Then you'll need to wait for someone to fill that void. That's how business/life works as a buyer. Unless you want government to step in and provide broadband. At that point business service will look REALLY cheap...

>Riiiight... Only requires capital, technical skills, employees, leased lines (where you pay the bills whether you have customers this month or not) and a high level of self-loathing and masochistic tendencies.

Well, if you're needing it for technical services, then sure, you should have the technical skills. But you don't need anything else. Just deal with it wholesale, and re-sell it "as is". Sell it cheap, offer no support, and let that be known.

You'd be surprised at how many people will buy internet like that. I pretty much did. I didn't need to pay the extra that a somewhat more reliable, well supported service provider wants. I got what I needed.

>I'm going to go build my own automobile because I'm tired of paying advertising fees to automobile companies who are trying to out-do each other in how much they can spend during the super-bowl to make the nation aware that "Ford" is better than "Chevy" and that "Saturn", as a company, does indeed exist.

If you dislike the situation enough, go ahead. Trust me, there isn't much sympathy from others for a geek without ports.

>Once again, I speak from experience.

Experience of running a site that has gigabytes of traffic daily?

>My web host charges about $9 per month, and I get 150 hits per month. That works out to roughly 6 cents per hit.

That's great, but...

I actually pay $10 CDN per 10 GB. I host my own stuff (like slashdot). So, a hit costs me $0.005 CDN. I expect slashdot, using more bandwidth than myself, gets a better rate.

It is unfortunate that your weservice is so expensive.

To cost slashdot $21,000, you would need to download over 21 TB of data from them. That means, if each hit costs 50 kb, you need to hit slashdot at least (and that's assuming they pay my rate, which is wrong to assume) 4,200,000 times a year. That's 11,507 times a day. Trust me, they'd ban your subnet before you got as far as 300 times a day.

>I only assume that Slashdot uses an equally economic web service.

I certainly hope not!

That was well over a year ago, and I haven't heard anything more about it. Hopefully the result was the SOCAN/BSA did actually piss off.

IStop.com. Their prices are online too. The web page is no frills, they're looking for customers who technical and can support themselves, and they don't offer service in French. The service has been stabalising for some time, especially since mid-last year when they're tried to expand too quickly and got burnt.

IStop.com. Their prices are online too. The web page is no frills, they're looking for customers who technical and can support themselves, and they don't offer service in French. The service has been stabalising for some time, especially since mid-last year when they're tried to expand too quickly and got burnt.

Your prices are way high for Canada:

I pay:

$24 Local line
+$30 1.7/0.4 Mb ADSL
==================
$55 /mo. for phone

Compare that with cable 1.5/0.2 Mb service at $44/mo with TV service, or $54 without.

excess charge of just $6 per GB - 25 times cheaper than the industry standard.

I just have to mention my ISP again: Istop. They offer static IPs for their DSL customers, allow you to run servers and charge CDN $2 per excess GB. And you thought US $6 was cheap. You poor bastards:) I wouldn't give up this for anything.

I don't know about the US, various parts of Europe have undergone are undergoing such transitions. From what I've seen (I'm an ex-pat Briton) or read in The Economist, deregulation seems to come with regulations and industry watchdogs. For deregulation to work, I would guess that the incumbent needs to be forced to share their networks, and also be forced to share them at a reasonable rate. What defines a reasonable rate is subjective, but defined by an unbiased industry watchdog that has powers to punish violations. Personally, I think the last mile infrastructure should be split out and managed by separate companies that aren't allowed to provide services to customers... although that might be too late for Telstra if they're already partly privatised.

Here in Canada, I'm reasonable happy with the way DSL is working. I get good prices and good services from an independent ISP (they cater to "techie" people, and offer little tech support, and no crappy portal web sites and service limitations.) That doesn't mean I don't think the setup is perfect (there's still too much bias to telco's wholly subsidary ISP company), and that I'm not happy that I have to have voice service on the land line from the telco.

I varies from place to place. I am in Ottawa, Canada. I used to have cable in my old place and Rogers (the cable company) overloaded their cable hubs so bad I was having up to *50%* packet loss and attrocious speeds in the afternoon (and it is capped at 2Mb/384k and the IP shifted every now and then). Then I moved (same town) and I got cable again but this time it was fine - no packet loss at all. In the mean time DSL became available in my neighbourhood and I swithched. My ISP sells me a 3Mb/600k DSL with a static IP line for about US $35/mo. Eat your heats out Americans :)

$50 for a static IP? Wow! I must have struck lucky. My ISP charges me CAD$4 (25 cents USD??? ;)) for my static IP address. How do ATTBI justify that price?

Oh, and for the person you were replying to, I also connect via PPPoE. I.e. PPPoE isn't synonymous with a dynamic IP. Yes, it's kind of annoying, but it would triple my costs if I were to get the non-PPPoE based solution (they use their hardware rather than leasing a DSLAM port).

So for the same price, I decided this week to switch to a virtual co-located server at JohnCompanies which is kick-ass fast, and has NO troubles with connectivity. That server is in a controlled environment. I really doubt that any home/small office DSL solution would be economically feasible for the RELIABILITY that you require, if you just need to have one server for web, dns, database and email.

My ISP is istop.com. It's a small company run by Linux geeks.

If they cover your area, check out http://www.istop.com/. They cater explicitly to technically minded people. They basically allow you to do what you like, and if you exceed the 20GB/month quota, it's only $3/GB extra. 25% of the customers have static IPs, which should give you an indication of the clientele. The owner frequents can.internet.highspeed, where he has polarised people to either love or hate him. The current debate is over his comments that he'd rather people who are going to waste his time calling tech support should go his competitors! They're not taking customers at the moment though as they've been deluged by people switching from Sympatico due to their new and ridiculous bandwidth quotas. They offer the cheapest 3.5Mbs connections around here.

Residential 1.2M/160K is $29.95, plus modem rental, and a static IP will run you $4/month extra. 10Gb local (news, mail and proxy) and 10 Gb outside per month, $3 per GB beyond the limit.

And did I mention those are all Canadian dollar prices; multiply by 0.6 to get the USD equivalent.

And the beer up here is great, too...

It seems to me that ISPs use interception proxies to lower bandwidth costs. Here in Canada (Ontario at least), most of the big ISPs are talking about implementing bandwidth caps (5GB/month with excess charged at C$10/GB). I hope your ISP isn't doing both, as that would seem unnecessary and rather heavy-handed.

My previous ISP, Sympatico, used to have a transparent interception caching proxy. It was quite troublesome and more of a translucent crashing poxy server. I remember being unable to access starwars.com for two weeks once, even though everything else seemed fine. It was particularly annoying for people whose MTU was set too high (they needed 1454 or less) as they would constantly get timeouts on HTTP POST, such as when trying to send email from a web interface like Hotmail or Yahoo. It was also a constant source of problems for people trying to author their own personal web pages as it would cache them and not show their updates.

My current ISP, IStop.com, has an optional proxy. This is great! I normally use it, but if I have problems, I can switch to a direct connection. They run Squid and they also seem to have some sort of advert filter running. I get their logo (cached by my browser) or "This ad zapped" messages in place of at least 80% of web ads, which saves me lots of irritation, and both of us save lots of bandwidth. Incidentally, they also have reasonable bandwidth caps: 10GB non-local + 10GB local (mail, news, proxy, etc) per month, with excess charged at C$3/GB.

After a while, Sympatico reduced HTTP interception to large population centres like Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa. Finally, they stopped doing that too. I guess it was causing too many problems and costing them too much to deal with it. If my ISP were to introduce an interception proxy today, I would leave them immediately. It's just not worth the irritation and problems for the length of time it will take them to fix it or get rid of it. I do live in an area where there is plenty of DSL competition though.

So that would be my advice: switch ISPs immediately. Don't waste anymore time or effort on these guys.

The reason Canadians are so likely to have it is the price! I used to pay CDN$40 (ca. USD$25) for a 1mbs connection. It's so cheap here, if want the internet, you might as well have broadband! For people who have dial-up and a dedicated phone line: it's a no-brainer!

Right now, I'm with IStop.com. If you own your own modem, they offer a 1184/160kbs DSL connection for CDN$30 (ca. USD$19). To put it into perspective, that's less than the price I payed for dial-up when I lived in the US! This company also offers 3mbs/800kbs (CDN$99), and if you have a business line, 6/1mbs (CDN$195).

For myself, I have their 1.2mbs service + ethernet modem rental + static IP, all for ca. CDN$40. I can run any server I like - it's unrestricted access. The HTTP proxy is optional. If I exceed their 20GB monthly limit, I get charged $3/GB for excess (apparently this will be dropping in the future to $2/GB). THE PRICE IS RIGHT!

Check out:

http://www.istop.com/collocation.html

Check-out the rates at:

http://www.istop.com/residential.html

I'm paying $35.95CDN = $22.78US (including modem rental) for 1.2Meg DSL from some other provider (BTW, mine is non MDU unlike the ones above).

Here in Ottawa there are multiple DSL resellers, plus the cable company. IStop has good tech support, let you run servers, and has the best local prices.

Example? I'm in a highrise condo and am paying $29 Canadian (That's just under $20 US) for 1.2M/128k line. For an extra $12 Canadian ($8 US) I could move up to a 3M/800k line with a static IP.

Looking for a great DSL provider? Move to Ottawa and get IStop.

(Biased customer rant ends)

No restrictions on servers, either.

There are a fair number of ADSL vendors here, plus the local cable company. Sure, it's colder and the taxes are higher, but we have more high speed options AND the beer is better!

• IGS
• Esia (formerly Cyberus)
• Istop (Doncaster Consulting)