On Sep 2, 2010, at 8:45 PM, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote: > There is a fundamental problem with the way that Internet services are sold. > > At present I have two companies that would like to sell me 'higher > speed' Internet service but I have absolutely no way to evaluate their > claims. In particular I have no way to know if changing provider or > paying my current provider more would make my existing applications > run any faster or better. > > What I do know is that my Vonage service was fine when I first > subscribed but is now unusable. I have no way to know if changing > provider would change that. If I could be sure that one of the > carriers did not have a vested interest in sabotaging my VOIP service > from competing providers, that would be reason enough to switch. > > One would like to sell me higher speed but will not raise their 250Gb > monthly bandwidth cap even if I pay more for the service. > > > I am quite willing to pay for higher bandwidth Internet. But at the > moment I have no idea what the value proposition that is being > presented to me in those offers. And if I don't know I am pretty sure > that Mrs B. Muggins has not got a clue. > > > So in my view the problem here is that when I pay for an X Mb/sec > connection at the moment I have no real way of knowing whether that is > really X Mb/sec all the time or X/n Mb/sec when I am using a service > that competes with my carrier.
This sounds like there is potential for crowd sourcing here. For example, I can tell you nothing about Vonage, but a fair amount about Cox Cable Internet. What you want to know is known, just not (yet) in a way you can easily access. Would a Yelp type model be appropriate ? Regards Marshall > > There are two ways that this can get sorted. The first is that the > carriers can work out a way to address the issue and explain to the > customer what they are really offering. The second is regulation. > > I really don't see why a regulation need amount to anything more than > the fairness in pricing rules that have been applied to other > industries who have proved to be unable to get it together on their > own. If I pay for X Mb/sec thats what I should get. > _______________________________________________ > Ietf mailing list > Ietf@ietf.org > https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf > _______________________________________________ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
