On Apr 9, 2007, at 2:12 PM, Simon Lyall wrote: > On Mon, 9 Apr 2007, Chuck Swiger wrote: >> At least at one point, ISPs were expected to provide more than just >> bare Internet connectivity-- they were supposed to provide working >> DNS, NTP, SMTP/POP/IMAP, and even NNTP/Usenet feeds. > > You forget homepages, commercial hosting, telehousing, web design, web > proxy and IRC servers.
It's not so much that I forget web hosting, but that my expectations of what an ISP should provide were formed prior to creation of the WWW. > Seriously though most of the above aren't as common because the > cost of > bandwidth has decreased enough [1] that the saving for the end user by > using the ISP's server is nill. The ISP then has to compete against > specialist providers across the country/world who drop the price of > the > service right down (sometimes to nothing) and/or take the best of the > paying customers. > > For NTP there is no possibility of charging but providing local NTP > servers costs the provider in servers, monitoring, software support > and > help desk calls. Doesn't the ISP already charge customers for access? Sure, they aren't going to be able to charge extra for people to use the local NTP server than for using a remote one, any more than an ISP charges it's customers to use their DNS servers-- but providing basic infrastructure is, or ought to be, part of what an ISP does. Also, note that there are email providers like Gmail and Yahoo which offer huge amounts of email storage for free...so providing NTP service is hardly going to represent a major cost center to any large ISP. -- -Chuck _______________________________________________ timekeepers mailing list [email protected] https://fortytwo.ch/mailman/cgi-bin/listinfo/timekeepers
