Flast model users (was: Re: Lessons from the AU model)

[Michal Krsek]

Dear Mark,

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Mark Newton" <newton@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Do you think Australian ISPs haven't tried to offer US-style
> flat-rate services?  Of course they have.  And they get destroyed
> in the marketplace.
>
> Here's the thing that metering gives you:  it stratifies the
> marketplace.  It gives you two classes of customer.
>
> One class is customers who know they can live painlessly within
> the boundaries of whatever quotas you're offering.  They don't
> complain, they just pay their flat monthly bill every month
> and get on with their lives.
>
> The other class is customers who do so much P2P that the
> imposition of quotas is a painful and unwelcome experience.
> They whinge and bitch loudly about how awful their ISP is,
> and migrate en-masse towards whichever ISPs are providing
> "unlimited" services.  The only people who truly care about
> "unlimited" are the ones who know they can't live within any
> limits.
>
> That means "unlimited" ISPs almost exclusively attract the
> most voracious, least profitable, noisiest, most difficult
> to support, loudest complaining customers.  And the metered
> ISPs cater for normal folks who aren't like that.

I can't agree with your definition of users. In community that has been also 
in a bit isolated (czech republic), there has been monopoly for cables/lines 
to Western europe till end of the 2K. Then after deliberalisation (and later 
sale of state owned ILEC) many new players entered the market and prices 
felt down. So it seems like Australia is somewhere in our trace.

In meantime, some companies tried to start metered services. Some failed, 
some survived. But no one from surviving based his metering on payments on 
gigabytes. Most of them are working to soft limits and aggregation. Just 
because there is a problem that user cannot understand what is he consuming. 
You can meter water or minutes consumed on telephone. But if you are tuning 
up your favorite newschannel over Internet, do you know how many MB you are 
transferring each minute?

Other problem is unsolicited traffic. Most of "plain users" have their PCs 
not well secured. And worms and botnets can create same traffic as P2P. Same 
situation for application that are making money over your business (i.e. 
Joost or Skype).

You can argue that people cannot understand eletricity consumption and they 
are paying for usage, but - someone has to fire a coal or broke uranium 
atoms to develop elettricity. Are ISPs developping Mbytes or are they paying 
to Yahoo!, Google or other ICP?

For me, raising this discussion from ISP community will lead to discussion 
on net neutrality from other (unwanted) side. May AT&T pay to Yahoo! or 
Google for data that they are selling to their customers?

               Regards
                   Michal

P.S: To not be completelly off-topic. For last two weeks I've been visiting 
New Zealand (nomadic access). And last few days I'm in Australia. Let me 
tell you that it is unblievable that these two countries are on the same 
submarine cable systems. NZ looks from nomadic perspective as US or NL, but 
I've been more lucky to get connectivity in Beijing that in Melbourne 
neighborhood :-(