Re: Industry standard bandwidth guarantee?

[Joe Greco <jgreco () ns sol net>]

> Consider a better analogy from the provider side:  A customer bakes a 
> nice beautiful fruit cake for their Aunt Eddie in wilds of 
> Saskatchewan.   The cake is 10 kg - but they want to make sure it gets 
> to Eddie properly, so they wrap it in foil, then bubble wrap, then put 
> it in a box.  They have this 10kg cake and 1kg of packaging to get it to 
> up north.  They then go to the ISP store to get it delivered - and are 
> surprised, that to get it there, they have to pay to ship 11kg.  But the 
> cake is only 10kg!  If they pay to ship 11kg for a 10kg cake, obviously 
> the ISP is trying to screw them. The ISP should deliver the 10kg cake at 
> the 10kg rate and eat the cost of the rest - no matter how many kg the 
> packaging is or how much space they actually have on the delivery truck.
>
> And then the customer goes to the Internet to decry the nerve of the ISP 
> for not explaining the concept of "packaging" up front and in big 
> letters.  "Why they should tell you - to ship 10kg, buy 11kg up front!  
> Or better yet, they shouldn't calculate the box when weighing for 
> shipping! I should pay for the contents and the wrapping, no matter how 
> much it is, shouldn't even be considered! It's plain robbery.  Harrumph".

Perhaps that's because in the case of shipping, it is usual and 
customary to expect an item to be packaged carefully and that the 
packaging is counted as part of the shipped package.

> From the provider side (bearing in mind I've been in that business
for a few decades), usually what the customer wants is to understand
what they're purchasing, and if you as a provider tell them that
they're buying a 100Mbps circuit, they kinda expect that they can
shovel 100Mbps down that circuit.  No amount of "but you should
expect that there's packaging and you should just /knoooooow/ (whine
added for emphasis) that means only 80Mbps usable" is really going
to change that.

That's why I designed an analogy that is much more representative of
reality than yours.

... JG
-- 
Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net
"We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I
won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN)
With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.