On Thu, 2008-08-14 at 15:27 -0400, Richard Siddall wrote: > This problem is not limited to VoIP, of course. It was (and is) > standard practice among dial-up ISPs. Yahoo! is now offering "unlimited > web hosting" with limits. If it isn't already a problem among broadband > providers, it will be as the oversubscription levels they need to > maintain their pricing becomes unmaintainable as more people watch more > video over the internet. Broadband providers are certainly making > noises about applying usage caps. >
I agree that its not limited to voip, although in the particular instance that started this it was someone talking about voip. In europe its very common to have broadband have "unlimited" as part of the advertising and a "fair use" clause in the contract saying that unlimited means "with limits". One provider I saw used unlimited to advertise a multimegabit link with a 2GB monthly transfer limit. My math showed that you could hit that limit in less than a day at the advertised speed. > The real question is how you fight it. I suspect most customers would > take a plan claiming to be unlimited against one that had generous > limits they would never reach in practice. I bet most customers would, especially since figuring out if they would ever meet the limits would take math and its been my experience that is a sure way to get people to ignore something outright. This is the very reason so many advertise as unlimited. If you offered someone a plan similar to vonage but told them that they had 90,000 minutes per month, my guess is that many would retort "but vonage is unlimited!" not even bothering to do the math that 90k minutes on 2 channels exceeds every months total number of minutes (31 days would be 89,280 minutes). I suggested "truth in advertising" laws be applied or amended so they could apply a few years ago when I first started talking about this. *Technically* they are being truthful, they put a little * next to unlimited and then define what that means elsewhere, in the fine print, so its all legal but its not honest in my opinion. -- Trixter http://www.0xdecafbad.com Bret McDanel Belfast +44 28 9099 6461 US +1 516 687 5200 http://www.trxtel.com the phone company that pays you! _______________________________________________ --Bandwidth and Colocation Provided by http://www.api-digital.com-- AstriCon 2008 - September 22 - 25 Phoenix, Arizona Register Now: http://www.astricon.net asterisk-biz mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-biz
