But at this point, we are a long way from the important parts of the argument. My real point is that there isn't anything at all wrong with a service provider charging people for going past a bandwidth limit, as long as the company is straightforward about those limits and doesn't jerk people around.
We try to do just that; we make customers sign a contract which clearly states what we are providing, and then we hold them to it.
Nowhere in the constitution do I find the right to unlimited bandwidth for $50/month.
Jesus, how many times do I have to hear that? "Well, they shouldn't have advertised it..."
WHEN did ANYONE advertise "unlimited throughput"? I have NEVER seen a company sign people up for broadband without some policy somewhere (that was publicly available) that gave them the right to enforce bandwidth limitations. A lot of people here are making a lot of noise about this, but so far every story seems to include "well, my ISP's terms of service say they can change the terms at any time..."
Look, companies that sell stuff want to make a profit doing it. Now that p2p and a few other things have exploaded, it is impossible to allow unlimited throughput and still make money without charging outrageous fees. So get used to it.
If a company really did lie to everyone, and doesn't have a policy that allows them to punish overusers, shame on them. In fact, why don't you sue them? But the fact is, this hypothetical situation is so rare that I haven't even found a slashdot thread matching it.
So put up or shut up...anyone have a story where they got billed, or cut off, without a provision in the TOS that would allow for that?
Your gas station analogy is only relevant if there is ONE gas company in town.
Huh? We aren't the only ISP in town. They aren't the only gas station in town. They might even be one of those gas stations that aren't owned by an oil company...the ones that are can safely take losses, funded by their parents who are amazingly profitable. A lot like LEC-owned ISP's.
I think ringmasta's interpretation here is tremendously meritous. So...uh...there.
Oh, yeah...p.s. That last paragraph made no sense, so I didn't address it.
So, basically, you're saying that ISPs either need to misrepresent their packages, or fund them from other business? Aren't both those alternatives on dodgy legal, or at least moral, ground?
Well, yeah, almost.
I'm saying there are basically 3 alternatives:
1)misrepresent your packages
2)fund them from other business
3)do what we do
#3, what we do, is making all your customers sign a contract that says exactly what they will be charged for, which includes bandwidth fees if they do any serious transfer. It pays the bills, and lets almost everybody off with no problems, because they don't use more than a gig a month.
That's what we do; it allows us to scrape by. We look forward to the day when this all shakes out, and the big guys quit taking massive losses...we'll do great then. We've got efficiency and quality on our side.
But I definitely agree with you; the other two options are unethical as all hell. I do not condone the actions of many providers. Especially those that are LECs or cable companies.
Oh, man...no, the effect on charitable giving is very small, though it exists.
A lot of people made a lot of noise in the '80's over how charitable giving went up. It was true...maybe 5%. Of course, government programs that helped the people that charities helped were cut by tremendously more....
The federal government has always had the resources and ability to do lots better than our loose organization of charities. Charities can't make rural electrification a reality. Or clean air/water. And the rich don't give even a fraction of what would be enough to justify them receiving tax breaks. Think they spend the difference in their taxes on charity? No...........not at all.
And it's not just charitable donations...its the marginal rate to begin with. From 1950 until the early '80's our top marginal tax rate was 79%. After Reagan's voodoo, it was $39. Interestingly, the top fifth (by income) of the population and the bottom fifth both came within 5% of doubling their wealth during the '50-'80 years. But in '82-'92 the top fifth doubled their wealth, and the bottom fifth lost about a third of its.
For the curious, the 2nd-to-top fifth was the only other gaining segment; the others all lost, though not as dramatically as the bottom one.
This is not a coincidence.
Don't vote Republican, folks...
(By the way, go ahead with the offtopic mods. I'm willing to spend a *lot* of karma this way)
a step ahead of you, friend. Already talked to them; unfortunately, in this area they can't do any better. They did have a good price, but to tell the awful truth $500/mbps is better than we *should* get, because this DS3 is running through a few more towns to a few more ISPs, who are effectively sharing the cost of the line, since we all need fracs.
HA! Bullshit! That moderation was PURE partisanship, and THIS AGGRESSION WILL NOT STAND, MAN!!!!
Clearly, whomever thought this as offtopic could not see that it was clearly a direct response to the parent as well as a serious consideration on any story dealing with a government program and its budgetary considerations.
Fact is, politics is ALWAYS on-topic. It always matters, especially when the post connects to the story in question.
Yeah, that doesn't surprise me a bit. Without giving away too much (my employer might frown on this flame war;-) our city is within a couple hours of a metro area, and the standard price for ADSL there is around $40; the LEC charges somewhere in the $20-$25 neighborhood for the same thing ours charges $37.50.
I'm sure the population density helps lower costs. On the other hand, I'm about 99% sure that the ISP our LEC owns is running at a loss...which suggests those line fees are, um, profitable...doesn't really seem fair...
There's a major difference in the cost of operation depending on where you live. No question. And it continues through to aggregate bandwidth; when I start talking about $500/mbps, most folks here think I'm a damn liar. But I'm not...just live in the sticks.
Oh, and as for how we're supposed to compete with the LEC....well, that's the big question, no? We're actually turning a profit (barely), and we do it by charging people for what they use, keeping less than 12hrs of downtime annually, keeping our bandwidth from topping out more than a couple times monthly, charging folks for what they use, offering kickass support (Win9x+, Mac7+, *bsd, linux), and charging people for what they use. Oh, and charging people for what they use.
When you get down to it, this makes us the expensive but reliable ISP. This also means that our business is evolving...we're moving from the era of $19.99 dialup everywhere to the era of LEC broadband vs. full-service, business-centric ISP's. We lose a ton of dialup customers each month; can't keep up with Earthlink's $9.95 package, or the loss-takers in the cable market...our goal is to get enough new business lines (a couple SDSL's, and around 10 ADSL's) to break even with the dialups we plan to lose.
So far, we're making it. But it's going to be tough for the foreseable future.
(in other words, sorry to the bandwidth hogs; can't really afford the charity right now...)
No. LEC. Local Exchange Carrier. It's in the FCC tariffs and all.
The ADSL rates from the only CLEC that will do business with other ISP's (there's a moderately-sized ISP in town that became a CLEC [read: paid.25mil] just so they could get raw copper and avoid these ridiculous tariffs by getting their own DSLAM) are slightly higher. But their SDSL rates are better, and their reliability is much, much, much better. So we use them for our "high-end" accounts.
And yes, we pay $1700/month for a local DS3 on top of those fees to carry the circuits to us from the telco.
No, while reform is nice, we could use a lot more cash in a lot more of our systems. Not that I disagree that money shouldn't be taken from *this* program...it needs it too.
Unfortunately, in this country it has become quite fashionable to trumpet the tax cuts you are giving to everyone, while giving them to the ultra-hyperbolic-rich, and swinging an axe at every program you can find, often cloaking it as a block grant or a reform/reorganization.
First, of course, just as the other person who replied to you pointed out, your numbers for bandwidth are not far from mine, which only proves my point. Remember that we only see $17.49 on a residential ADSL circuit; the LEC gets $37.50 of the $54.99 we're charging. So...minus support and network costs, that doesn't pay for "about 15 CD's, or 11 hours of video conferencing, or about 50 hours of Voice over IP." Sorry, but it just doesn't.
But then, you go and accuse me of personal moral failings, of being a liar and a thief, without a shred of a clue of what you are talking about. You say "It was OK for you to go out and buy a T1 and a DSLAM and start charging customers $60 a month for DSL until they started ringing your phones off the hook about crappy service." Except that every single part of that statement is wrong. We have no DSLAM; ISP's that aren't LEC's or CLEC's typically get their DSL customers on a virtual interface of a router, via some aggregate circuit from the LEC. So, we pay $1,700/month to the LEC for a local loop DS3 to carry all our customers in, and then pay them $37.50/line/month for the line provisioning and the DSLAMs and whatnot. Oh, and *then* we pay for the bandwidth to get to the world, at the aforementioned $500/mbps. And since we're getting technical, I should mention that that price is just for adding bandwidth; there is a price just for the circuit regardless of the bandwidth we put on it, and I don't know just what it is right now.
(and before you get down on the LEC, remember that DSLAMs and running a bunch of ATM circuits all over town to feed them is not cheap either. I don't know what gives everyone the idea that they can just bury as much fiber anywhere they want for nothing, but it just ain't so. That said...they do make a decent profit on us.)
And then, the most important part; the customers don't ring our phones off the hook about crappy service, because our service is always fast BECAUSE WE BILL PEOPLE FOR OVERUSAGE!!!! Seriously, you get closer to your rated speed on our service than anything else in the area, and it's all because of this. The cable companies don't meter anything here, but every day they have a bandwidth crunch. Sucks to be their customer...unless all you care about is leaching movies.
That's the point here that you and others like you don't get. If you want these services to be low-priced, we can't let 1% of the users take most of the bandwidth. This is *not* a high-margin business, all the rape-and-pillage-the-users talk in here notwithstanding. Seriously, ISP's are not making outrageous profit. It just is not happening. We make very little money on our ADSL business, and if 5 guys like you want to freeload on our pipe, we will be losing money. Simple as that. So our alternative is raising prices. Screw that, why should everyone else subsidize your illegal dvix collection? Or your perfectly legal VoIP conversations or video conferencing?
Of course not. We expect the user that just pops on for email to pay a fairly reasonable rate, and the guy who wants to download movies all day and video conference to pay a hell of a lot more. After all, he's using a hell of a lot more, right?
The truth is, granny is still subsidizing you...she still pays us much more per GB. Just not as bad as she does at the next ISP, that doesn't have/enforce a limit. Sorry that you want to screw other customers and are pissed of that we want to be sort of fair, but, well, that's life.
Oh, and about that self-righteous flatulation at the end there. Yeah right. You aren't the reason we're in business. You didn't help do a damn thing. We don't need you or anybody else that just wants to sit around and bitch about not getting a handout from corporatism's externalities.
So shut up about it already. You don't have any right to free bandwidth. Your kind will stick around, moving continually to the dumbest and slowest (costs are costs), providers, until all the providers have finally moved to a reasonable system, instead of a model pulled from Golden Corral.
Hey. Dick. Don't tell *me* what *my* costs are, ok?
If you want, tell me what *your* costs are. Where are you? California? Just outside Denver? I'm betting you aren't where *I* am.
Because I'm not lying. We have a fractional DS3. We are able to add bandwidth to it at the rate of $500 per 1mbps, measured at the 95th percentile.
And the 5% number was just pulled out of the air. But we aren't going to try and do stupid things with the numbers like you do above. Yes, we measure utilization! What kind of idiots do you take us for? We are a small company that makes its name on service and quality, so we try to keep our bandwidth at a level where it only tops out a couple times a month. It's hard to do that. But we do, and our customers can almost always realize their stated throughput.
We also keep track of the maximum number of concurrent dialup connections each day. And we haven't had a busy signal for YEARS. Except for the day the LEC cut a fiber outside town and no one could make inter-office phone calls...but they couldn't call tech support either, so we got by just fine;-)
According to the math we did, which I have wholly forgotten, if our users averaged more than about 3GB/month, we were going to lose substantially.
Of course, I've expounded above about how we are a tiny ISP in a really tough market. And, since our "normal" user uses less than 200MB/month, this average isn't that hard to meet. On the other hand, when we did the math, we did it because we *were* losing money on ADSL. Hence the 10GB limit we now have in our contracts.
By the way, since a few have mentioned it, we NEVER put these "we can change the contract whenever without telling you" clauses in there. Let me be as clear as I can, I think some of these practices are outrageous...but I also think users should recognize that they are not paying enough to use a half-ds1 worth of bandwidth.
No...our contract is fine, and better than anyone else is offering us.
Our bandwidth also costs us about a third of what it did 5 years ago. But, since we are in a relatively sparsely-populated area in the midwest, bandwidth does cost a *lot* more here than it does in big metro areas, or on the east or west coast.
And that's not the only thing that makes this market such a bitch for us...our LEC charges us $37.50/month for line provisioning on each 768/128 circuit. So...after we charge $54.99/month (yeah, go ahead and gasp at the outrageous expense) we get a whopping $17.49/month. Of this, we liberally figure we make an average of $1 profit.
Maybe this market is making ISP's rich someplace, but it sure as hell ain't here.
Not that I expect facts or logic to sway you, but...
First off, I'm interested to know whether Cox makes a profit on it's cable Internet business. Most of the cable companies don't. Actually, that's one of our pet peaves as a tiny ISP; those guys run losses so heavy we can't make money in this business or we look outrageously expensive.
Second, where in your grumbling did you get around to supporting your eventual conclusion that "it's not high-speed"?
Thirdly, quit playing with your units.
And finally, don't get so bent out of shape about the fact that you "can't even use it like it was a modem." Because a month @56kbps is 18GB of transfer. Yes, I can transfer that much in a month, but only if a)I try really hard, b)I leave kazaa on with my whole hdd shared and no bandwidth limiting, or c)I post my IP address and root password on alt.2600.whatever.
Now, it may not sound like a lot to you...but when you have a couple thousand customers and a business to run, it's not a small matter. Our average ADSL customer uses less than 200MB of transfer each month.
We have a contractual limitation of 10GB/month. That's just over 32kbps averaged across the month.
Now...for the record, I do not condone Cox changing its terms of service without informing its customers. We make them *sign* the limits. Why? Because we plan on enforcing them.
Yeah, no kidding. And it's also quite sufficient to paint this ISP as damned reasonable. I mean, hell, if you want to offer everyone in the world a public download of a popular software program.....pay for the bandwidth.
I can guarantee this ISP has lost hundreds of dollars on this guy.
It would really, really surprise me if this was accurate.
Case in point: the (very, very small) ISP I work at. We are a tiny shop, and we don't go in for a long contract and a bunch of legalease. Matter of fact, I write most of the contracts myself. The ADSL one is just over a page long, in 12pt type.
But...even we have a paragraph in the contract that says:
"the speed that distinguishes any given ADSL circuit is its theoretical maximum speed. It is customary that the quoted speed for ADSL is expressed in terms of potential PEAK transfer rates. These rates do not represent either an allowed sustained rate or a guarantee of performance between the customer and any given Internet site at a particular instant."
Any ISP that doesn't have something like that in its policy somewhere is dumber than a rock. Because you can't make this service even break even without oversubscribing your bandwidth.
Oh, and by the way, yes, we have a limit on allowed transfer. It's 10GB, and it's in the contract that all our ADSL customers must sign.
Ok...no problem. We won't oversell our ADSL bandwidth at all.
Now...about your bill. That 768/128 line is going to cost, oh...$300/month.
Oh, yes...and I really do work for a small ISP, and our cost for our outbound bandwidth really is $500/mbps.
Not overselling bandwidth would be the stupidest thing any ISP ever did. It would make it absolutely impossible to profit. This thing only works because at any given moment only 5% of our customers are downloading.
Thanks for bringing that issue up; I've been wondering about that for a while. Doesn't a company who wants to file an IP claim have to "mitigate the damage?" In other words, don't they have to show that they did something about the violations as soon as they knew and could do something? Seems to me that a company that patented the cdrw routines in '95 would have had to cry foul against easy cd creator v 1.0, wouldn't they?
Otherwise, sounds like they have the same problem AT&T had vs. BSD...
"Hasn't this black and green box endured enough ports?"
No, no, not at all. Why should it? It's a popular current computer archetecture! There are millions of them...and they're really cheap. They are a great thing for people to hack on and port YourMommaOS on for fun. The xbox, being so widespread, really ought to have everything available to it that a normal PC has.
While that may be an important question for the article overall, it was not particularly important to this subthread.
The point here is that the great^x-grandparent was silly, trying to apply a concept, scsi-emu, to a system where it doesn't really exist, Windows. I'll bet Windows doesn't end up using a "scsi emulator" at all, really...more likely it just hands off the hardware to certain programs that ask for it, and the programs either do something like cdrecord+scsi-emu or cdrecord+the ide driver from 2.6.
But anyway, here we are discussing the technical minutia and probabilities of people solving a problem in certain ways, and you come in and say "the important thing is you don't have to care"...what a dick.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah...ok, I'll agree with all that.
But at this point, we are a long way from the important parts of the argument. My real point is that there isn't anything at all wrong with a service provider charging people for going past a bandwidth limit, as long as the company is straightforward about those limits and doesn't jerk people around.
We try to do just that; we make customers sign a contract which clearly states what we are providing, and then we hold them to it.
Nowhere in the constitution do I find the right to unlimited bandwidth for $50/month.
Jesus, how many times do I have to hear that? "Well, they shouldn't have advertised it..."
WHEN did ANYONE advertise "unlimited throughput"? I have NEVER seen a company sign people up for broadband without some policy somewhere (that was publicly available) that gave them the right to enforce bandwidth limitations. A lot of people here are making a lot of noise about this, but so far every story seems to include "well, my ISP's terms of service say they can change the terms at any time..."
Look, companies that sell stuff want to make a profit doing it. Now that p2p and a few other things have exploaded, it is impossible to allow unlimited throughput and still make money without charging outrageous fees. So get used to it.
If a company really did lie to everyone, and doesn't have a policy that allows them to punish overusers, shame on them. In fact, why don't you sue them? But the fact is, this hypothetical situation is so rare that I haven't even found a slashdot thread matching it.
So put up or shut up...anyone have a story where they got billed, or cut off, without a provision in the TOS that would allow for that?
Your gas station analogy is only relevant if there is ONE gas company in town.
Huh? We aren't the only ISP in town. They aren't the only gas station in town. They might even be one of those gas stations that aren't owned by an oil company...the ones that are can safely take losses, funded by their parents who are amazingly profitable. A lot like LEC-owned ISP's.
I think ringmasta's interpretation here is tremendously meritous. So...uh...there.
Oh, yeah...p.s. That last paragraph made no sense, so I didn't address it.
So, basically, you're saying that ISPs either need to misrepresent their packages, or fund them from other business? Aren't both those alternatives on dodgy legal, or at least moral, ground?
Well, yeah, almost.
I'm saying there are basically 3 alternatives:
1)misrepresent your packages
2)fund them from other business
3)do what we do
#3, what we do, is making all your customers sign a contract that says exactly what they will be charged for, which includes bandwidth fees if they do any serious transfer. It pays the bills, and lets almost everybody off with no problems, because they don't use more than a gig a month.
That's what we do; it allows us to scrape by. We look forward to the day when this all shakes out, and the big guys quit taking massive losses...we'll do great then. We've got efficiency and quality on our side.
But I definitely agree with you; the other two options are unethical as all hell. I do not condone the actions of many providers. Especially those that are LECs or cable companies.
Oh, man...no, the effect on charitable giving is very small, though it exists.
A lot of people made a lot of noise in the '80's over how charitable giving went up. It was true...maybe 5%. Of course, government programs that helped the people that charities helped were cut by tremendously more....
The federal government has always had the resources and ability to do lots better than our loose organization of charities. Charities can't make rural electrification a reality. Or clean air/water. And the rich don't give even a fraction of what would be enough to justify them receiving tax breaks. Think they spend the difference in their taxes on charity? No...........not at all.
And it's not just charitable donations...its the marginal rate to begin with. From 1950 until the early '80's our top marginal tax rate was 79%. After Reagan's voodoo, it was $39. Interestingly, the top fifth (by income) of the population and the bottom fifth both came within 5% of doubling their wealth during the '50-'80 years. But in '82-'92 the top fifth doubled their wealth, and the bottom fifth lost about a third of its.
For the curious, the 2nd-to-top fifth was the only other gaining segment; the others all lost, though not as dramatically as the bottom one.
This is not a coincidence.
Don't vote Republican, folks...
(By the way, go ahead with the offtopic mods. I'm willing to spend a *lot* of karma this way)
a step ahead of you, friend. Already talked to them; unfortunately, in this area they can't do any better. They did have a good price, but to tell the awful truth $500/mbps is better than we *should* get, because this DS3 is running through a few more towns to a few more ISPs, who are effectively sharing the cost of the line, since we all need fracs.
Sucks, don't it?
HA! Bullshit! That moderation was PURE partisanship, and THIS AGGRESSION WILL NOT STAND, MAN!!!!
Clearly, whomever thought this as offtopic could not see that it was clearly a direct response to the parent as well as a serious consideration on any story dealing with a government program and its budgetary considerations.
Fact is, politics is ALWAYS on-topic. It always matters, especially when the post connects to the story in question.
Yeah, that doesn't surprise me a bit. Without giving away too much (my employer might frown on this flame war ;-) our city is within a couple hours of a metro area, and the standard price for ADSL there is around $40; the LEC charges somewhere in the $20-$25 neighborhood for the same thing ours charges $37.50.
I'm sure the population density helps lower costs. On the other hand, I'm about 99% sure that the ISP our LEC owns is running at a loss...which suggests those line fees are, um, profitable...doesn't really seem fair...
There's a major difference in the cost of operation depending on where you live. No question. And it continues through to aggregate bandwidth; when I start talking about $500/mbps, most folks here think I'm a damn liar. But I'm not...just live in the sticks.
Oh, and as for how we're supposed to compete with the LEC....well, that's the big question, no? We're actually turning a profit (barely), and we do it by charging people for what they use, keeping less than 12hrs of downtime annually, keeping our bandwidth from topping out more than a couple times monthly, charging folks for what they use, offering kickass support (Win9x+, Mac7+, *bsd, linux), and charging people for what they use. Oh, and charging people for what they use.
When you get down to it, this makes us the expensive but reliable ISP. This also means that our business is evolving...we're moving from the era of $19.99 dialup everywhere to the era of LEC broadband vs. full-service, business-centric ISP's. We lose a ton of dialup customers each month; can't keep up with Earthlink's $9.95 package, or the loss-takers in the cable market...our goal is to get enough new business lines (a couple SDSL's, and around 10 ADSL's) to break even with the dialups we plan to lose.
So far, we're making it. But it's going to be tough for the foreseable future.
(in other words, sorry to the bandwidth hogs; can't really afford the charity right now...)
No. LEC. Local Exchange Carrier. It's in the FCC tariffs and all.
.25mil] just so they could get raw copper and avoid these ridiculous tariffs by getting their own DSLAM) are slightly higher. But their SDSL rates are better, and their reliability is much, much, much better. So we use them for our "high-end" accounts.
The ADSL rates from the only CLEC that will do business with other ISP's (there's a moderately-sized ISP in town that became a CLEC [read: paid
And yes, we pay $1700/month for a local DS3 on top of those fees to carry the circuits to us from the telco.
I'm not kidding...we really aren't raping people!
No, while reform is nice, we could use a lot more cash in a lot more of our systems. Not that I disagree that money shouldn't be taken from *this* program...it needs it too.
Unfortunately, in this country it has become quite fashionable to trumpet the tax cuts you are giving to everyone, while giving them to the ultra-hyperbolic-rich, and swinging an axe at every program you can find, often cloaking it as a block grant or a reform/reorganization.
Don't vote Republican folks...
This is hilariously ridiculous.
First, of course, just as the other person who replied to you pointed out, your numbers for bandwidth are not far from mine, which only proves my point. Remember that we only see $17.49 on a residential ADSL circuit; the LEC gets $37.50 of the $54.99 we're charging. So...minus support and network costs, that doesn't pay for "about 15 CD's, or 11 hours of video conferencing, or about 50 hours of Voice over IP." Sorry, but it just doesn't.
But then, you go and accuse me of personal moral failings, of being a liar and a thief, without a shred of a clue of what you are talking about. You say "It was OK for you to go out and buy a T1 and a DSLAM and start charging customers $60 a month for DSL until they started ringing your phones off the hook about crappy service." Except that every single part of that statement is wrong. We have no DSLAM; ISP's that aren't LEC's or CLEC's typically get their DSL customers on a virtual interface of a router, via some aggregate circuit from the LEC. So, we pay $1,700/month to the LEC for a local loop DS3 to carry all our customers in, and then pay them $37.50/line/month for the line provisioning and the DSLAMs and whatnot. Oh, and *then* we pay for the bandwidth to get to the world, at the aforementioned $500/mbps. And since we're getting technical, I should mention that that price is just for adding bandwidth; there is a price just for the circuit regardless of the bandwidth we put on it, and I don't know just what it is right now.
(and before you get down on the LEC, remember that DSLAMs and running a bunch of ATM circuits all over town to feed them is not cheap either. I don't know what gives everyone the idea that they can just bury as much fiber anywhere they want for nothing, but it just ain't so. That said...they do make a decent profit on us.)
And then, the most important part; the customers don't ring our phones off the hook about crappy service, because our service is always fast BECAUSE WE BILL PEOPLE FOR OVERUSAGE!!!! Seriously, you get closer to your rated speed on our service than anything else in the area, and it's all because of this. The cable companies don't meter anything here, but every day they have a bandwidth crunch. Sucks to be their customer...unless all you care about is leaching movies.
That's the point here that you and others like you don't get. If you want these services to be low-priced, we can't let 1% of the users take most of the bandwidth. This is *not* a high-margin business, all the rape-and-pillage-the-users talk in here notwithstanding. Seriously, ISP's are not making outrageous profit. It just is not happening. We make very little money on our ADSL business, and if 5 guys like you want to freeload on our pipe, we will be losing money. Simple as that. So our alternative is raising prices. Screw that, why should everyone else subsidize your illegal dvix collection? Or your perfectly legal VoIP conversations or video conferencing?
Of course not. We expect the user that just pops on for email to pay a fairly reasonable rate, and the guy who wants to download movies all day and video conference to pay a hell of a lot more. After all, he's using a hell of a lot more, right?
The truth is, granny is still subsidizing you...she still pays us much more per GB. Just not as bad as she does at the next ISP, that doesn't have/enforce a limit. Sorry that you want to screw other customers and are pissed of that we want to be sort of fair, but, well, that's life.
Oh, and about that self-righteous flatulation at the end there. Yeah right. You aren't the reason we're in business. You didn't help do a damn thing. We don't need you or anybody else that just wants to sit around and bitch about not getting a handout from corporatism's externalities.
So shut up about it already. You don't have any right to free bandwidth. Your kind will stick around, moving continually to the dumbest and slowest (costs are costs), providers, until all the providers have finally moved to a reasonable system, instead of a model pulled from Golden Corral.
Hey. Dick. Don't tell *me* what *my* costs are, ok?
;-)
If you want, tell me what *your* costs are. Where are you? California? Just outside Denver? I'm betting you aren't where *I* am.
Because I'm not lying. We have a fractional DS3. We are able to add bandwidth to it at the rate of $500 per 1mbps, measured at the 95th percentile.
And the 5% number was just pulled out of the air. But we aren't going to try and do stupid things with the numbers like you do above. Yes, we measure utilization! What kind of idiots do you take us for? We are a small company that makes its name on service and quality, so we try to keep our bandwidth at a level where it only tops out a couple times a month. It's hard to do that. But we do, and our customers can almost always realize their stated throughput.
We also keep track of the maximum number of concurrent dialup connections each day. And we haven't had a busy signal for YEARS. Except for the day the LEC cut a fiber outside town and no one could make inter-office phone calls...but they couldn't call tech support either, so we got by just fine
Anyway, point is, quit being a jackass.
According to the math we did, which I have wholly forgotten, if our users averaged more than about 3GB/month, we were going to lose substantially.
Of course, I've expounded above about how we are a tiny ISP in a really tough market. And, since our "normal" user uses less than 200MB/month, this average isn't that hard to meet. On the other hand, when we did the math, we did it because we *were* losing money on ADSL. Hence the 10GB limit we now have in our contracts.
By the way, since a few have mentioned it, we NEVER put these "we can change the contract whenever without telling you" clauses in there. Let me be as clear as I can, I think some of these practices are outrageous...but I also think users should recognize that they are not paying enough to use a half-ds1 worth of bandwidth.
No...our contract is fine, and better than anyone else is offering us.
Our bandwidth also costs us about a third of what it did 5 years ago. But, since we are in a relatively sparsely-populated area in the midwest, bandwidth does cost a *lot* more here than it does in big metro areas, or on the east or west coast.
And that's not the only thing that makes this market such a bitch for us...our LEC charges us $37.50/month for line provisioning on each 768/128 circuit. So...after we charge $54.99/month (yeah, go ahead and gasp at the outrageous expense) we get a whopping $17.49/month. Of this, we liberally figure we make an average of $1 profit.
Maybe this market is making ISP's rich someplace, but it sure as hell ain't here.
Not that I expect facts or logic to sway you, but...
First off, I'm interested to know whether Cox makes a profit on it's cable Internet business. Most of the cable companies don't. Actually, that's one of our pet peaves as a tiny ISP; those guys run losses so heavy we can't make money in this business or we look outrageously expensive.
Second, where in your grumbling did you get around to supporting your eventual conclusion that "it's not high-speed"?
Thirdly, quit playing with your units.
And finally, don't get so bent out of shape about the fact that you "can't even use it like it was a modem." Because a month @56kbps is 18GB of transfer. Yes, I can transfer that much in a month, but only if a)I try really hard, b)I leave kazaa on with my whole hdd shared and no bandwidth limiting, or c)I post my IP address and root password on alt.2600.whatever.
Now, it may not sound like a lot to you...but when you have a couple thousand customers and a business to run, it's not a small matter. Our average ADSL customer uses less than 200MB of transfer each month.
We have a contractual limitation of 10GB/month. That's just over 32kbps averaged across the month.
Now...for the record, I do not condone Cox changing its terms of service without informing its customers. We make them *sign* the limits. Why? Because we plan on enforcing them.
...another story from the "evil-isp-won't-sell-me-$500-service-for-$50" department.
Yeah, no kidding. And it's also quite sufficient to paint this ISP as damned reasonable. I mean, hell, if you want to offer everyone in the world a public download of a popular software program.....pay for the bandwidth.
I can guarantee this ISP has lost hundreds of dollars on this guy.
You'll note that the letter said he used 100 times more than the median...
Of course, this doesn't surprise me...typically our top 10 ADSL customers use more than the other ~490 combined.
It would really, really surprise me if this was accurate.
Case in point: the (very, very small) ISP I work at. We are a tiny shop, and we don't go in for a long contract and a bunch of legalease. Matter of fact, I write most of the contracts myself. The ADSL one is just over a page long, in 12pt type.
But...even we have a paragraph in the contract that says:
"the speed that distinguishes any given ADSL circuit is its theoretical maximum speed. It is customary that the quoted speed for ADSL is expressed in terms of potential PEAK transfer rates. These rates do not represent either an allowed sustained rate or a guarantee of performance between the customer and any given Internet site at a particular instant."
Any ISP that doesn't have something like that in its policy somewhere is dumber than a rock. Because you can't make this service even break even without oversubscribing your bandwidth.
Oh, and by the way, yes, we have a limit on allowed transfer. It's 10GB, and it's in the contract that all our ADSL customers must sign.
Ok...no problem. We won't oversell our ADSL bandwidth at all.
Now...about your bill. That 768/128 line is going to cost, oh...$300/month.
Oh, yes...and I really do work for a small ISP, and our cost for our outbound bandwidth really is $500/mbps.
Not overselling bandwidth would be the stupidest thing any ISP ever did. It would make it absolutely impossible to profit. This thing only works because at any given moment only 5% of our customers are downloading.
Thanks for bringing that issue up; I've been wondering about that for a while. Doesn't a company who wants to file an IP claim have to "mitigate the damage?" In other words, don't they have to show that they did something about the violations as soon as they knew and could do something? Seems to me that a company that patented the cdrw routines in '95 would have had to cry foul against easy cd creator v 1.0, wouldn't they?
Otherwise, sounds like they have the same problem AT&T had vs. BSD...
"...the idiotic moderation system that promotes groupthink..."
...stupid mod system.
I just have to laugh when I see posts like this modded "+4 insightful."
"Hasn't this black and green box endured enough ports?"
No, no, not at all. Why should it? It's a popular current computer archetecture! There are millions of them...and they're really cheap. They are a great thing for people to hack on and port YourMommaOS on for fun. The xbox, being so widespread, really ought to have everything available to it that a normal PC has.
You Jackasses! The subject of the parent is "I was in prison"!!!!
Jeez.
While that may be an important question for the article overall, it was not particularly important to this subthread.
The point here is that the great^x-grandparent was silly, trying to apply a concept, scsi-emu, to a system where it doesn't really exist, Windows. I'll bet Windows doesn't end up using a "scsi emulator" at all, really...more likely it just hands off the hardware to certain programs that ask for it, and the programs either do something like cdrecord+scsi-emu or cdrecord+the ide driver from 2.6.
But anyway, here we are discussing the technical minutia and probabilities of people solving a problem in certain ways, and you come in and say "the important thing is you don't have to care"...what a dick.