begin quoting Wade Curry as of Sat, Jan 19, 2008 at 08:25:17PM -0800: [snip] > > This has always rubbed me the wrong way. I don't mind that someone should > pay more to get more... It's more that what generally goes into > "business service" is just plain network access. Pay more and get > what they should've given you in the first place.
What about discounts for less service? That's really the problem... Sure, unrestricted network access would be nice, but some folks don't need or want that. They really only want to run a web-browser and a mail client (better yet, webmail!), and perhaps play WoW with their buddies. They barely understand the concept of running a public Internet server after five minutes of explanation, and (rightly) opt out of having such a capability in exchange for a much-reduced fee. Give 'em full access, and then offer 'em a reduced functionality connection for a discount, and they'll opt for the reduced functionality in a heartbeat. I just can't bring myself to conclude that they're in the wrong over this. Nor can I justify getting annoyed at the ISPs for offering such an option to them as well. This leaves me in the unenviable position of having something I don't care for and cannot object to. > SLAs should be > an added cost, of course. It shouldn't cost more for them to > unblock ports and provide a reliable connection, though. For most > of us, that's all that we need. When I was shopping for broadband, it wasn't "Net Access" I shopped for, it was "relatively unrestricted broadband with static ips". That's the baseline functionality I considered acceptable, and I got a lot of flack for it as well. I didn't get the cheapest "Internet access", but I got a reasonable price for the minimum required service. It was much higher than the "minimum cost" if I'd just relax my requirements, but that seemed a silly tradeoff. Last year, AT&T representatives came around and tried to sell me on their New! Fiberoptic! DSL! ... but they couldn't tell me if I'd get static ip addresses with little to no restrictions; and from what I've read since, they've teamed up with Yahoo and I *have* to run a browser or MSWindows machine. I won't do that, so no AT&T dirt-cheap internet access for me. -- Today I'm annoyed at Apple The iApps support is crapple. Stewart Stremler -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
