I'll start off that I do not know the internals of the business model behind how much ISP's make money and how, I can only speculate.
I agree with you about the Israeli customer and yet, at the same time, different government regulations (handled by Bezeq) have been limiting us from receiving different packages from the ISP. Now that large upload packages are finally coming out, you can see already how the "heavy" users will start going for those packages (including myself which I consider a medium user as far as how much usage I do- about 3-5GB/month), they will happily pay double the competitive amount for the regular packages to receive the gain from 128 to 512kbit's and IMHO it will greatly help the whole market in general. I disagree that we are one of the cheaper prices on the market of Internet compared to what we get- I don't think in the USA anyone would pay the 150NIS (say 35$ including infra+ISP) for 1.5Mbut/96Kbit ADSL line but would happily pay 50$ for say 2Mbit/1Mbit (I am not completely up to date as you can see but you should still get the point). Bottom line, users have been pressing the market down because the difference between the packages is so low when dealing with such a limited uplink that it has been driving the flag product of 1.5Mbit to low prices. These new packages with higher uploads which are clearly aimed at the heavy users and/or gamers will dramatically help I believe. Correct me if I'm wrong.. Cheers, -David -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Ariel Biener Sent: Monday, September 26, 2005 10:11 AM To: Yedidyah Bar-David Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; El-al, Netta; Linux-IL Subject: Re: Actcom without a dailer costs more On Monday 26 September 2005 10:26, Yedidyah Bar-David wrote: > > connected 24x7 and effectively do have a static IP, the only price I see > is the cost of administration, not of the address itself. So I guess it > should be low (or zero) and one-time. Am I far from the truth? The price involves money payed to RIPE for the IP blocks needed in order to be able to provide so many clients with permanent IPs. Actually, in management overhead, it has some advantages, at least security wise, since hunting down an abusive client becomes very straight forward, without any need to search radius logs for accounting START/STOP. However, if you come to divide how much money is payed for an IP in a /16 block, which all the big ISPs use (each has a few), you'll probably find that it amounts next to nothing compared to what they charge customers for. However the Internet in Israel is cheap compared to the large world outside, and the Israeli are a tough crowd to serve, as they want everything, while they are not willing to pay anything. So, using the pretense that a permanent IP belongs to a VIP class of service (business or whatever) is a economical model that allows the ISPs to charge a price that can actually allow them to earn something from the private sector. Just to sum up, in general I think Israelis are shitty customers, in all respects, and while the "no one will fuck me over" slogan was good at first, and taught a lesson to people trying to break our backs, later on, like everything else here, it got twisted and taken too far away, to a place where we pirate everything (software, music, films), and are unable to pay a price for a service. The ISPs cut throat competition for the basic ADSL/Cable packages, and the ridiculous price they charge for them is just a testimony of how powerful the Israeli customer has become. But, will driving the ISPs into bankruptcy, or worse, keeping their income so low that they cannot advance and offer any new services and improvements, will that serve us as customers in the end ? I believe a good deal is based on the fact that after provider and customer shaked hands, both are content with the result. That is not the reality today. --Ariel -- Ariel Biener e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] PGP: http://www.tau.ac.il/~ariel/pgp.html ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
