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Bad Behavior on the 'Net - Who Pays the Bandwidth Bill?

Posted by Cliff on from the stuff-to-talk-about dept.

rakolam asks: "I am involved with network management in the hosting department of a fairly large ISP. Constantly we have customers who dispute inbound bandwidth spikes and demand service credits on their burstable connections. Events such as the Slammer Virus literally have everyone knocking on their salesperson's door at the end of the billing cycle. My position is that the internet is a public space, and by placing themselves in that space, one has to realize the consequences (and the implications of burstable billing). I'd like Slashdot's perspective on this. Should ISP's ultimately eat the costs of malicious behavior? Is the customer ultimately responsible for the bandwidth they've generated, regardless if it's desired or not? Is this a new frontier for insurance companies?"

9 of 595 comments (clear)

  1. analogous to water/electric company IMHO by rdewald · · Score: 5, Insightful

    What happens to you if someone runs an extension cord from your house or if you spring an unknown water leak? You get a huge bill and you fix the problem. How is this different?

    --
    The best way to do is to be.
    1. Re:analogous to water/electric company IMHO by captain_craptacular · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Bad Analogy. The poster says customers dispute INCOMING bandwidth spikes. So the analogy would be more along the lines of someone sending a huge power surge through your lines un-announced and un-requested, then the power company attempting to charge you for it.

      I lean towards the consumer not having to pay, considering they didn't request the traffic and are therefore not resonsible for it.

      --
      They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty nor security
    2. Re:analogous to water/electric company IMHO by Fishstick · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Yep, I was thinking along the same lines. It's like having a drinking fountain outside your house for public use - you are expecting amybe 10-20 gallons monthly as people stop by and have a quick sip. Then, you get all pissed when your water bill comes and 5,000 gallons show up when the circus comes to town and all the clowns have used your water fountain to fill all their water baloons. :-)

      Do you then go ask for a credit from the utility because of the excessive/unexpected use?

      --

      There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
      Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.

    3. Re:analogous to water/electric company IMHO by DanEsparza · · Score: 5, Insightful
      I completely disagree. Bandwidth is analagous to people using roads (network connections). If roads are heavily used, they must be maintained, or they fall into disrepair. If network connections are heavily used, ISP's need capital to get bigger (or more) connections so that certain service levels can be maintained.

      We don't live in an (entirely) communist world. We don't get to pass out resources indiscriminately. We have a fixed amount of resources, and as with any case of supply and demand, the person holding the supply can (and should) charge for using the resource. In the case of network bandwidth, the resource is not obvious, but it is still tangible: It is network equipment and opportunity costs.

  2. Users just won't pay by drfuchs · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If someone steals my credit card number, the credit card company won't even charge me the $50 that they have the legal right to. I doubt that ISPs will be able to fare any better.

  3. It's in the contract by eagle486 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The customer pays what is in his contract. Make the language very explicit. There is no reason the ISP should eat it.

  4. In other words by djKing · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Should /. pay the bill for the /. effect?

    -Peace

    --
    Free as in "the Truth shall set you..."
  5. Balanced response. by gehrehmee · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Give them a complete or partial rebate, the first time, and have a set of "How can I protect myself?" documentation ready for the user. Email it to them, mail it to them, fax it to them, whatever it takes to get them to read it.

    Inform them that if they ignore those suggestions, and future problems end up costing them money, then they'll have to foot the bill.

    This way, the customer walks away happy and informed, and if they're really willing to be a good net citizen, they won't come back crying.

    If they're not willing to do what's required of them, they'll get stuck paying for it.

    --
    "You know, Hobbes, some days even my lucky rocketship underpants don't help" -- Calvin
  6. Re:Simple policy by sweetooth · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Protecting yourself from an attack, such as code red, doesn't mean it doesn't still eat bandwidth. It's the same with anything. I noticed today that my mail server was a little slugish. I sshd into it checked the logs and saw the same bastard attempting to send spam to the server and tons of rbl lookups were taking place. So I added the various ip's to the firewalls blacklist. So now the mail isn't processed, but whatever program they are using doesn't even bother to check to see if the mail is being accepted, it just keeps spamming. So, I'm still having a fairly large percentage of my bandwidth being eaten because of a very inconsiderate individual. Stopping code red was the same. At one point I was logging thousands of attempts every day. They were not successful, but they still ate the bandwidth.

    I don't know what the solution to the problem is exactly. As it stands now I pay for any bandwidth used regardless of how or why it was used. It would be much better if those charges could be passed along to the person responsible for abusing your bandwidth, but how that could be enforced is beyond me.

    One thing I have to note here is that the person posing the question is talking about INBOUND spikes not outbound. So your points are even less relevant.