On 2003.04.01 08:10 Scott Harney wrote: > > I personally have always thought restricting ports is > a foolish and worthless exercise. I've argued this fairly high up. > The primary concern for cable operators is limited available upstream > bandwidth spectrum. (simple explanation: cable was designed to send > information out originally. not bring it back in) > > Far better to set some monthly bandwidth usage guidelines and let > subscribers see where they stand. (ie view MRTG graphs) > > Profit on the broadband side is definitely minimal. Only folks with > a long established footholds in large markets are in the black on their > broadband. Cable ops subsidize the broadband side with profits from the > traditional TV business. And the rate of adoption has generally not > been as high as some might have predicted. >
Keep pushing Scott, but don't get yourself canned over it! I'll be the "hosting" division is losing even more money than the cable itself. It should be obvious that most people are not going to be bandwidth hogs and those that are will manage to do it anyway. It would be so much better to encourage commercial start ups and charge people that are actually making money than it is to charge up front. Someone also needs to be hit with a clue stick so that they understand that normal people want to share pictures and other low bandwidth stuff. The real hogs are the folks passing around other people's music and movies. I've watched cable modem go from fixed IP, no caps service to something that resembles dial up. It really sucks and I'm sure that it costs money to make it suck so hard. To years ago, I thought cable was wonderful and well worth the cost of two expensive dial up services. How much did it cost to put in DHCP? As it is, it's hard for me to recommend cable to "normal" people. Sure, it's fast and all, but I've done all the usual "residential" stuff on a modem without a problem. No, you don't need to have more than one phone line and multiple dial up accounts. An $9/month dial up and NAT are all you need to browser around and do the email thing. It's a little slow, but it gets there. Sure, it sucks when the phone is busy, but "normal people" are not online all that much. About the only thing you can do with cable that you can't do with a modem is download 30MB files. "Normal" people don't do that anyway.
