George,
you have either misunderstood or completely distorted what I was
trying to say. I actually think fractional access makes sense - it's
sharing of a broadband channel. I think that's fine. You pay a
fraction of the cost and get high burst rates. The only time your
"fractional share" becomes a potential issue is if the shared channel
becomes congested. At that point, you should be shaped in a way that
is pro-rated according your putative share of the channel. what I am
against is the broadband access provider making decisions that
interfere with the subscriber's freedom to go anywhere he or she likes
on the net and run any applications desired. If the system becomes
congested (regardless of cause), the then-current users should
experience traffic shaping commensurate with the fraction of the
access channel they have subscribed for. Essentially, your share of
the channel is a function of the "tier" you subscribe to and the
utilization of the channel by you and others who share it. There is a
question about oversubscription (a common practice in residential
networks). If the oversubscription is significant and if the channel
is regularly congested then you may not experience the kind of burst
freedom that you value in your note below. Your traffic will always be
shaped as a result. You would be well-advised to institute some kind
of measurement practice to figure out, in that case, just what kind of
service you are getting (peak and average bit rates).
When I was at MCI, we charged customers based on the 95th percentile
traffic rate they sent or received. That is, we ignored the 5 percent
peaks and charged at the 95th percentile rate.
Users could subscribe to various tiers of traffic level depending on
their anticipated 95th percentile requirements.
v
On Aug 30, 2009, at 11:40 PM, George Ou wrote:
There is nothing “silly” about comparing fractional ownership of an
airplane to fractional ownership to a piece of copper or fiber. In
each case, fractional ownership means fractional cost and that means
little guys like me aren’t priced out of the market. What is so
wrong with a collocation offering 3% ownership of a 100 Mbps circuit
at $25 (other $25 for electricity and rack space) which is 2.3% of
the cost of having 100% ownership of a 100 Mbps circuit? Having a
service that can burst to 100 Mbps on demand that includes 3 Mbps
average for $25/month (I have the option to buy more anytime) is
absolutely wonderful to me. If we outlaw fractional ownership of
Internet connection circuits, which is something Vint seems to be
suggesting but refuses to clarify, then I’m either stuck with paying
$1100 or the ISP will simply cap my bandwidth to 3 Mbps with zero
usage caps. That effectively cuts my average performance down to
probably well under 1 Mbps even though I’m paying for 3 Mbps simple
because I cannot guarantee that my web visitors will produce a
consistent 3 Mbps demand. So the type of regulatory restrictions
that Vint Cerf is apparently lobbying for is harming small
businesses, which would severely curtail the competition for Google
because they’re one of the few companies that have the kind of scale
that can justify purchasing full ownership circuits. So the only
thing that’s silly and malicious is someone who would have
government step in and take away my flexibility and freedom.
