🚀 go-pugleaf

In <3CED88B4.4EA8ED5C@sympatico.ca>
   Dave Smith <adavid.smith@sympatico.ca>  wrote:

| > It also seems to allow for changing pretty much whatever
| > they want.  The part you quoted never mentioned any limits
| > on what they could change; rather, it seemed to simply give
| > one example of something they felt they would be most likely
| > to want to change.  Where does it rule out other forms of
| > change?  Is there anything in this agreement that protects
| > the consumer from anything that Sympatico should wish
| > to do?
| 
| I posted the pertinent parts of the agreement, and I believe that
someone else posted
| it in the entirety (or a link to it).  I don't see where it says
they can change
| whatever they want, as you indicate.  It describes "the service" as
unlimited access
| to the Internet, and the agreement provides for changes in the
agreement, but nt to
| change "the service" ... unlimited access.

[Google when quoting folds these excessively long lines. 
It's not my fault. Mine are short enough to double
quote]

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?

| > | Bear in mind that internet access rates have dropped
dramatically
| > | over the last decade as advances in technology came along and
the number of
| > | users grew.
| >
| > I am not so sure about that.  I have seen a number of cut-rate
| > services, but quite a few  basic dialup ones are still around
| > $20 a month or so for "unlimited" access.  People seem to be
| > subscribing to these services.  Perhaps they have turned out
| > to be more trustworthy, or at least seem that way.    $20 a
| > month is similar to what I paid for my first commercial ISP in
| > 1995 (netcom).  In any case, we are talking about a much higher
| > level of technology.  Even when you are charged Sympatico's $8/G
| > for download, that is far cheaper than things used to be (you
| > would be hard pressed to download a G a month in the old days),
| > and of course everything is much much faster too.  So there is
| > "internet access" and there is "internet access".
| 
| For the first few years that I had an internet account, I was buying
blocks of time
| or paying monthly rates with limited hours. I was also connect at
14.4. Rates were
| always time based and you could go as fast as the equipment allowed
without worrying
| 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.

| > | If you are not using the net much, you can buy more limited
plans. Planning to
| > | spend more time on the net, I opted for the unlimited access
offered by
| > | Sympatico. It is still advertising the High Speed Edition as
unlimited access.
| >
| > I don't think so, can I?  If I want high-speed access
| > (high-speed for me is  more a matter of quality of net-use than
| > quantity) I think I am forced to buy Sympatico's DSL (or some
| > other DSL at basically the same rate) or cable.  All of these
| > currently offer the same price for those people who use huge
| > amounts of bandwidth and those people who use only a small
| > amount, which hardly seems fair.
| 
| 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.  But that is a non sequitur; 
you ignored the point of the above, which is 
that when there is a limited amount of a thing, unless
perhaps the heavy users have some kind of special need, 
it makes sense that people pay for how much they use of the 
thing, as opposed to being able to get as much of it as they 
want.  If they can take as much as they want, you have what is 
called the tragedy of the commons, in which the commons is 
destroyed.

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.

Many people are posting here that there is no point getting
high-speed access unless you use far far more than the people
who currently have it, on average, are using.   That it
totally false.  Currently at 56kps I download about .3G
a month.  If I could share the cost of one HSE account
with another person, it would be *totally* worth it for me 
to get faster downloads for just that amount of material.
I spend a lot of time waiting that I would not have to.
The experience would be improved dramatically.   There
is no need to download more than 5G to profit from
high-speed access.

| > The ability to buy "more limited plans" is what Sympatico
| > is planning to introduce.  I will probably get the plan
| > limited to 5G/month for $45.  If you want the 6G/month plan,
| > it will cost you $53.  The 7G/month will cost you $61, etc.
| > You can get whatever one you want, and switch around
| > automatically with no effort.  Sounds not to bad to me.
| > Except that perhaps all of them should be cheaper, and there
| > should be plans even cheaper than the 5G/month plan
| > (but which still offer the same high speed).
| 
| So after dial up connections getting cheaper and cheaper per hour, 
Bell's
| technological devolution seems to require them to increase their
unit charges.

Dial-up connections have probably reached a saturation point, 
economies of scale (modem pricing and the like) have brought them 
down quite low, and also note that there are very few if any
truly unlimited dialup plans around anymore.  If you check the
details of a dialup plan, you will see that their 
definition of "unlimited" is generally based on 
"intermittent usage".  And there are a lot of plans still 
offered which are for a fixed maximum length of connect
time per month.  They have no doubt settled into
this sort of pattern partly because of the distribution
of usage rates and various other cost factors. 

The same thing is happening now with high-speed
access.  We don't know how it is going to end up
at this point.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Calvin Ostrum                                         cbo@interlog.com
----------------------------------------------------------------------
 To say altruism and morality are possible in virtue of something 
 basic to human nature is not to say that men are basically good.  
 Men are basically complicated; how good they are depends on whether 
 certain conceptions and ways of thinking have achieved dominance, a 
 dominance which is precarious in any case.  The manner in which 
 human beings have conducted themselves so far does not encourage 
 optimism about the moral future of the species.   
      -- Thomas Nagel, "The possibility of altruism"
----------------------------------------------------------------------