I just wanted to weigh in here and add that filesharing and p2p is really a main driver of the isp business model today and we're going to have to do something to pull this in and make it equitable for everyone. If you think about this, what we're all doing here is paying for expensive dedicated service - eg: marlon's 10mbps pipe, my 45mbps pipe, or whatever - we're paying carriers and large network operators for truely unlimited service at the subscribed port speeds, and we pay a premium for it. In return, we are (usually) getting a quality that justifies the price (otherwise I'd just buy piles of $14.95/mo dsl circuits!). So what we then do is turn it around is add oversubscription to this model so that we can pay someone $400/mbps/month or whatever and then sell this for effectively $20/mbps/month.
It used to be that the average broadband user would use say %15 or less of their sustained maximum transfer thruput - which means that they used their 1.5mbps or whatever at full rate for only brief periods of time. This allowed oversubscription to work effectively because the chances were often excellent that full rate transfers weren't being done by a signifigant percentage of others at the same time.
But now with the growing demands of p2p/filesharing, this is broken. I routinely have customers now running full blast 24x7 throught the day and night with no letup or break ever and I strongly suspect that most if not all of it is simply wanton copyright violations and wasted downloads of stuff they won't ever even look at anyways. The field service calls I make for support purposes strongly support this notion because I usually get to see the customer pc and of the ones I see, more than %95 are just loaded up to the brim with ripped off songs and movies from limewire,kazaa,edonkey, you name it. The corresponding spyware/junkware infestations and crashing, slowdowns and malfunctions are just desserts of course, and I have never ever seen anyone just using these programs for 'legal purposes'.
But back to the main point here - we certainly want to provide good customer service and an overall good user experience. But the discussion needs to be had concerning the definition of what we're selling people, and it cannot continue to be "an unlimited pipe that spews forth as much data as you want all the time". I have never used the word 'unlimited' in any advertising and have never promised or alluded to that word at any time. In my business at least, I am leaning twords implementing 'content labeling' of the services offered which would work something like the ingredients on the box of corn flakes, and would describe all the features and restrictions of every service I offer. I think that, longer term, we're all going to have to do this (internet service content labeling) because otherwise, filesharing is going to overrun us all. Shared service is not shared if you're hogging it 24x7....
Mike- [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Hi Marlon, Merry Christmas to you and your family! Just a thought, you might want to fire those 9 customers. You could also rate-limit them down to 56K and see how long they stick around. Jeff
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