On 2014-07-22 at 11:58 -0400, Derek Balling wrote: > Or -- IF YOU WANT THAT CHOICE -- (as with electric companies), you pay more > for the more expensive solutions. So if you want the IP packets that are > costing Verizon more money because they're coming from that way overloaded > peering point that requires constant care and feeding, you pay more.
We are paying more. That's why the big ISPs have 99% profit margin on their Internet offerings. There was a time, when I was in the ISP sector, when network equipment was expected to be replaced every two to three years, to handle capacity increases. The fees have continued to be charged on that basis, but in many places the investment has disappeared. Note also that those ISPs who are part of the former Bell monopoly have been receiving tax breaks and rate increases on their POTS lines, to fund the investment in the 45Mbps baseline service which everyone is supposed to have by now. My understanding is that the total amount of money sunk into that, over the past couple of decades, by ratepayers and foregone taxes is over a trillion dollars. > 1.) Metered billing. Yep, you pay by the Megabyte of traffic. Here's your low > rate for "having a pipe of width X" and here's your rate for every "gallon" > of traffic that flows through that pipe. Just like your electric, water, > sewer, gas, etc., etc., bills today. .... OR If it's congestion-based, it might be reasonable. It would lead to market pressure. But there's no market, since 2000/2001 when wireline connectivity providers were declassified. I was at a Dutch ISP and we got to watch in horror as the US ISP market was mostly destroyed, with independent ISPs no longer able to get lines at reasonable prices. It was illuminating to observe how, over the subsequent six years, the network speeds we could offer kept going up (we had to compete in a tight market, but we could apply pressure onto the DSL line providers) while the speeds in the USA did not take long to start stagnating. > 3.) ISPs simply say "screw it" and freeze the investment in architecture in > place and don't put another dime into it. If you think that's unlikely, ask > yourself "when was the last FIOS city rolled out most recently?" Answer: > YEARS AGO because VZN has already done the math and realized that IP traffic > on FIOS scale is a LOSING PROPOSITION for them. If your town doesn't have > Verizon FIOS today, it never will. EVEN IF they've already run the fiber for > it. Because lighting up that fiber means incurring a customer base that they > lose money on. Better to write off the CapEx than to have to write off the > CapEx **and** take monthly OpEx losses on it as well. Actually, I live in Pittsburgh, PA, and FiOS is continuing to roll out here. The explanation I've heard (so no, I do not know this first-hand) is that the city negotiated the contract for the rights-of-way competently, so that not only is there a requirement to reach the whole city, and not only are there penalty clauses, but the penalty clauses are on a _renewing_ basis, not one-time, so for as long as the city doesn't have ~complete coverage, Verizon keep paying fines, hefty enough to actually show up on the bottom line. Apparently, the deadline is the end of this year, and it was last year that Verizon realized they actually had to deliver and suddenly started back up the roll-out. I know that Verizon's sales people were utterly uninterested in acknowledging that there was FiOS passing my house and uninterested in making a sale (which tells you something about the level of market forces actually in play) and this persisted, until the head of the redevelopment corp went and shouted at Verizon on our behalf; the city apparently did not appreciate having the values of property in their redevelopment project being hurt by Verizon being unwilling to update their database. (Yes, I had explicitly asked about FiOS availability when we purchased the house.) -- My employer, Apcera Inc, is hiring sysadmin; primarily San Francisco: http://www.apcera.com/jobs/#operations-engineer (but all the mistakes in this email are made in my personal capacity) _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
