[asterisk-users] OT: What do you guys think of this?

[Ira]

At 12:44 PM 12/2/2008, you wrote:
>At 04:03 12/2/2008, Benny Amorsen wrote:
>  >Doug <Doug at NaTel.net> writes:
>  >
>  >> "Net Neutrality" is great in principle.  But ISP's need to
>  >> somehow control those few percentage of users who suck down
>  >> a huge majority of the bandwidth.  It's dollars and cents.
>  >
>  >Yes, just like the airlines need to somehow control those users who
>  >keep showing up to the flight they booked, every single time! It's
>  >impossible to do overbooking with customers like that, so we need to
>  >find ways of punishing them.
>
>What happens if everyone who owns a car drives
>it at the same time?  Owns a telephone and
>uses it at the same time?

As far as I remember the very first service to offer flat rate was 
BIX. They very carefully figured out what it would cost to insure a 
fair profit, and it was a big hit till a few people figured out that 
they could use private chats as a network pipe and stay on 24/7 using 
some mysterious protocol. In the end, that was some of what killed 
the service and there was nothing to be done about it.

For most of us, well for me anyway, I like the fat pipe I have for 
the 1% of the time I use it and I expect that as a residential user 
Time Warner sell me that pipe expecting me to use it about that much, 
maybe a bit more if I had teenage kids. I'm sure in the fine print it 
says I can't host a web server though I'd guess they'd not complain 
if it didn't get much traffic. I've considered a T1 so I'd be 
guaranteed the throughput so my phones would always work, but that 
costs 10 times as much and has less promised speed than my cable modem.

So personally I consider that if I was to try and use my current 
internet connection to host a torrent site and it tried to use 100% 
of the promised capacity all the time that I'd get cut off.  The same 
as most of the "unlimited" phone service says in fine print "up to 
2000 minutes/month" or some such limit.

If I could get the same plan for my internet as I get for my phones, 
a few dollars a month plus a bit per minute(megabyte), I'd be all 
over it, but even better, then the provider wouldn't have to care as 
they'd be making a fair profit no matter what the user did.

Ira