🚀 go-pugleaf

"Brent P" <tetraethyllead@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:7TiH8.67783$L76.105112@rwcrnsc53...
> In article <acghr1$n7g$3@dns3.cae.ca>, Richard wrote:
>
> It has little to do with wether it's commerical or non-commerical. It's
> about the amount of bandwidth being used. If a neigbor started running a
> free porn site or something sucking all the bandwidth out of the cable
> modem system in the area I would expect that he get booted off. I should
> have crawling speeds so he can set up a high bandwidth server?

No, bandwidth is _not_ the issue. We've already been over this. If you
provide unlimited DSL access on a line capable of 1.2 Mbps downloads, and do
not specify any quotas ahead of time, then implicitly you're setting the
quota in the range of 300 GB/month. Approximately the amount you'd get if
you left your system d/ling at top speed all month long.

By talking about cable, you're comparing apples and oranges. The difference
is in the technology.

With cable there's a certain amount of bandwidth allocated to a given area.
If twenty people in the area all have cable modems and all decide to send 12
rolls of vacation pictures scanned as 6-meg BMP images to Grandma so she can
see how cute little Bobby looked on the beach in Florida, of course it's
gonna be slow! That's why Videotron has always (in theory) had a transfer
cap, a ban on servers and an absurd price on excessive bandwidth usage, they
want to discourage that sort of behaviour.

DSL is different technology. If the same twenty people in the same area all
have DSL, what they do doesn't directly affect their neighbours, it affects
their provider. If the provider can't cope with its customers making use of
the service provided (ie. _unlimited_ internet access) then the provider
either should have already forseen this problem and implemented bandwidth
caps long ago, or if they weren't that smart, they really should go ahead
and fork out the dough to buy/lease the equipment/bandwidth required to
provide the services they promised in the first place.

It's already been said numerous times that the percentage of people out here
whining and bitching about this price increase and bandwidth cap (ie those
affected by them) is very small. Well great! If they're that small in
number, it really shouldn't be that huge a deal to go ahead and upgrade the
system so that 1 or 2% of the customers can happily go about transferring
however much data their connections will let them push through.

For what it's worth, I'm _not_ with Sympatico. My ISP explicitly states that
you _are_ allowed to run servers on a residential connection. Although I
don't run my own porn site, my interpretation of "yes, you can run a server
on a residential account" would be that so long as this hypothetical porn
site was non-profit, or perhaps if I donated the profits to some charitable
organisation, I'd be welcome to run it for as long as I pleased.

> And even in the case of DSL, upstream of you there is still going to be a
> point where bandwidth is being shared. A huge bandwidth need should be
> moved to something better suited for it than slowing down the neighbors.

My DSL usage doesn't slow down my neighbours. Cable, on the other hand does.

> I know your arguement is that new equipment be added to support said
> usage. But, if there are not enough low-bandwidth users to subsidize
> the high-bandwidth users something is going to have to be done.

But there are enough low bandwidth users. Bell themselves justify their
actions by saying that the average user uses something like 1.5 GB. When my
ISP did the same thing at the beginning of this year, they found the average
customer used 1 GB, and even at that they set the limit 4x higher than Bell,
charge less than half of Bell's price per extra GB, and only charge
two-thirds of what Bell does for the base monthly service.

> If efforts to attract more casual users fail, the only option is to take
> step to discourage high amounts of bandwidth consumption to achieve a
> proper balance or raise prices for everyone. Raising prices for everyone
> will further discourage the causual users from signing up. What option
> is left? To limit bandwidth consumption or charge the high-bandwidth users
> more.

Bell already charges 150% of what other DSL ISP's in the area charge. The
servces they provide and customer service are grossly inferior. There are
only two reasons that Sympatico has a customer base at all:

(1) Lots of people will just buy from the first company to put a cool
commercial on TV, instead of actually look around to see what other options
is available.

(2) Force of habit. They're jsut too lazy to switch.

> They left a loophole, people abused it, now they closed it with a
> slamming door and big assed padlock.  I would just never think of
> running something that needed that much bandwidth on a home service.

Well that's where you and lots of other people differ.

> Thats how the no servers of anykind policies on the DSL and cable modem
> services in chicago came to be I suppose. Be nice to be able to run
> a small server that would run at trickle and not be noticed by anyone
> by usage alone without the fear of being booted if caught.

So if I'm reading into this correctly, since Chicago ISPs have already
screwed you over, you have next to no sympathy for the people up here
getting screwed over by one of the bigger ISPs right now?

Richard