"El-al, Netta" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:

> this is what i have to say about actcom: last year i got sick of
> bezeqint's crappy service and their hanging up on me every time i
> uttered the word linux so i switched to actcom. they were a little
> more expensive but offered me a deal for a half a year for fifty
> something shekels for 1.5M.  after a half a year, they started
> charging me about 100 shekels so i called them up and asked them
> what deal they could offer me now.  they said that since my download
> bandwidth usage was over 9G a month that it wasn't worth it for them
> and they couldn't offer me anything better!

This fits my (lack of) experience with them. Some years ago I was
shopping for an ADSL connection and called a few ISPs. I called Actcom
because of their reputation within the community. They asked (via a
written contract) whether I was going to connect one computer or
several. I said it was none of their business. They said that for 2 or
more computers I would have to pay several times more. I asked how
they were going to notice. They admitted they could not, but still
insisted that was their pricing model.

In the end, I called Netvision and asked, among other questions, if
they cared about what I had on my end behind NAT. They said, not in
the least.

Deduction: Actcom are cheap. They buy bandwidth from the networks and
sell it to subscribers, living off the difference. They buy too
little, and overbook (in terms of the nominal bandwidth), counting on
the typical user to use only a small fraction of the nominal
allocation. Then, if a particular user has several computers (hence
several potential simultaneous users) or just downloads a lot, they
are in trouble, and they want to charge extra for this.

Other providers, such as Netvision, buy more BW, probably live on a
thinner margin, but don't oversubscribe so drastically.

-- 
Oleg Goldshmidt | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | http://www.goldshmidt.org

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