On Thu, Apr 20, 2006, Hetz Ben Hamo wrote about "Looking for another ISP (a bit
off topic)":
> Hi,
> I just saw the news in
> ynet:http://www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-3241600,00.html - Netvisionhas
> started charging extra for users who downloaded over 5GB a month.
> Naturally, since I'm testing every now and then a new version ofvarious Linux
> distributions, plus some other heavy bandwidth relatedwork, I'm bypassing the
> limit of 5GB within a 3-4 days, and I'm notprepared to play some heavy
> "fines" or their "business" package.
This is a really off-topic, but I think that some type of "pay more if you
use more" indeed makes sense. I'll explain:
ISPs used to market ADSL and cable connection as "fast Internet". I think
this was a wrong view. For many users (think of your parents, grandparents,
neighbors, etc.), the benefit of these connections over the old modem
connection isn't that you can download 3 gigabytes a day, but rather that
you can:
1. Be connected all day, and don't need to "dial" when you want to send
an email, or when you think you *might* have a new email and want to
check.
Moreover, being on the Internet doesn't use up your phone line.
2. Have a moderately fast connection for short bursts, such as Internet
browsing or email fetching. These users don't need 2 MB per second, but
7 KB per second (the old modem speed) was too slow.
In a perfect world, a user that needs a connection like this - an always-on
roughly-modem-speed connection, should need to pay the ISP very little, as
little as a few shekels a month, because they hardly use any resources from
the ISP. Unfortunately, you can't give such users cheap coonections without
differentiating between them and the user that DO use up a lot of expensive
resources, like international and IIX bandwidth.
This doesn't mean, however, that prices need to be absurdly high or dis-
continuous. It doesn't make sense to sell to "typical" users connections
for 50 shekels a month, while charging a user that use slightly more in
some month around 500 shekels as a "business user". But if your bill varied
from 10 shekels a month for very low users, through 50 shekels to average
users, to 100 shekels a months for very heavy users, what's really wrong
with that? How is that any different than what happens in any other utility
like phone, cellphone, electricity, water, and so on?
Of course, if they bill by volume, I hope they have a way to do it reliably
and keep the bill limited. I'd hate to see someone get a 10,000 shekels bill
because someone else tried a DoS attack on him, for example!
--
Nadav Har'El | Thursday, Apr 20 2006, 22 Nisan 5766
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Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |A conclusion is simply the place where
http://nadav.harel.org.il |you got tired of thinking.
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