🚀 go-pugleaf

Calvin Ostrum wrote:

>
> You seem to be drawing some deep essential distinction
> between what is part of a "service" and what is part of
> the "service agreement".

>  The "service" is apparently
> locked in stone forever, whereas the "agreement" can
> be tinkered with a little bit as long as it doesn't
> offend your sense of entitlement to the service
> as it is currently described.  How is this distinction
> clearly to be drawn?  Is there a legal basis for it?
> The agreement says that it can be changed at any time.
> Where does that rule out changing some aspects of the
> nature of the service that is provided?

The service agreement does provide for changes in its terms, but "the
service" is "unlimited access to the Internet".

> | about the amount of bandwidth. If you went over your time by
> downloading or uploading
> | a lot, you paid for the time.  I pay a lot more for "unlimited
> access" with Sympatico
> | High Speed edition than I was paying before.
>
> In those days, at those download speeds, with the network structure
> that existed, there was no real danger of congestion, most likely.
> Do you know that to be the case now as well?  How do you know this?
> Where is your technical data on this matter?  Various internet
> economists, as I have pointed out in the reply to Baptista that
> he ignored, argue that pricing is a good way to relieve a
> serious problem of congestion.
>
> When I had an "unlimited" account with netcom in 1995, by the
> way, it truly was limited.  I was not allowed to log in at
> certain hours, because it was determined that I was a "heavy
> user".  Here, the congestion problem was their modem pool for
> dial up accounts.  When they could not tell under what conditions
> I could be sure to be allowed to use the system, I left them
> and went to interlog.  The guy who founded interlog and
> at that time ran it, Matt Harrop, was adamant that interlog
> would not provide "unlimited" accounts, so that people
> could more rationally plan their internet access.
>
> A similar thing is happening now, it seems, with
> high speed access.

Don't you think that Bell should have known that it would happen. If
people have accounts for 50, 100, 500 hours per month, they will try to
use the time they paid for. As I mentioned before, my Sympatico HSE is
almost twice as much as my old unlimited dialup connection.  Sure I use it
more.I make use of the high speed connection for some of the stuff I
transfer back and forth, and I use a lot of time. I paid for that time.  I
am sure that Sympatico expected me to use it. I don't doubt that they did
some market research to estimate how much extra time and bandwidth their
HSE would be using.  Since the time I upgrade to Sympatico HSE, they have
continued to market the service.  Does it not seem ironic that they are
complaining about their system being overloaded but that they continue to
expand the service?

Give your head a shake. They offered a service that caused a lot of people
to abandon the competition's dialup services. Having reduced the number of
competitors in the field, they now want to cut back on the service and
increase the number of users of the system that they claim that we users
have overloaded.

> | That is the way it was marketed. Be hooked up all the time and have
> unlimited access.
>
> Yes, it was marketed that way, and it was that way.  Now
> they are planning to change it.

I beg your pardon, but they are still advertising unlimited access, and it
would seem obvious that they are doing that in order to expand the number
of users of their service. This is the same service that they claim is
being slowed down by excessive use.  Yet, they continue to try to attract
more users to their supposedly overloaded system.  The other possibility
is that it is adequate for the number of users they have now, but that
they are planning on converting hundreds of thousands of people over to
their system.  With each of them paying the higher rates, it's all gravy
for them.

> The destruction here might be averted by raising the
> cost on everyone.  But this, as I said, is not fair,
> (even if it works, which it may not, since the light users
> which subsidize the heavy users may be driven away).
> One should be able to get a limited plan where one gets
> less access for a lower price.  You claimed one could, and
> I pointed out this was not the case.  If one wants
> high-speed access, there is only the one choice.

I believe I said that dialup services offered different packages. There
are plans with varying numbers of monthly hours and there are plans that
deal with blocks of time. As far as I know, Sympatico offers only the
unlimited access plan, the one that now is call unlimited but which has
limits on its use.


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