more on Who's a Bandwidth Bandit? - The Checkout

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Brett Glass <brett () lariat net>
Date: October 4, 2006 12:01:06 PM EDT
To: dave () farber net, ip () v2 listbox com
Subject: Re: [IP] Who's a Bandwidth Bandit? - The Checkout

Dave, for IP if you will.

As an ISP myself, I can confirm that Verizon does have a point: Most  
excessive use of bandwidth is caused by worms, viruses, "zombies,"  
illegal downloading, and P2P (which not only uses an unusually large  
amount of bandwidth but also tries to take over the ISP's network on  
behalf of the purveyor of the P2P software). However, they are wrong  
if they presume that this is always the reason a customer uses lots  
of bandwidth. It's a convenient presumption to make, though, if you  
want to "fire" customers who take you up on an "all you can eat"  
offer and then proceed to eat more than you intended to serve them.

The real problem is that many consumers are unwilling to pay for the  
network capacity they use.

There's no way for an ISP to make money on a $27.99 per month  
connection if the customer is using the equivalent of a T1 line  
(which costs more than 10 times as much as that, even wholesale).  
Yet, when the customer IS using the connection, he or she expects Web  
pages -- even those which are bloated with unnecessary, bandwidth  
hogging graphics and ads -- to come up in a flash. He or she wants to  
see video instantly and do instant uploads and downloads.... Instant  
gratification. We also have several customers who are addicted to  
social networking sites such as MySpace, which constantly refresh  
graphics-laden pages and hog huge amounts of bandwidth. Perhaps the  
worst is ESPN, which wastes huge amounts of bandwidth with constant  
page reloads. Consumers do not complain to these sites about this  
(though they should), because they don't realize that just sitting on  
a page can hog most or all of their bandwidth.

In any case, when consumers expect to get your product at retail for  
less than it costs wholesale, no business model will work except one  
that involves predatory pricing or cross-subsidization. (This is why  
the telcos and cable companies are so into "triple play" and  
"quadruple play" deals which produce monthly bills of $100 or more  
per customer. They can hide the true cost of the Internet component  
of the package, or cut corners on the other services in the bundle.)  
But our ISP -- being a pure play ISP -- doesn't have the option of  
playing those games.

What we do, instead, is something that seems to be contrary to the  
very nature of the large corporations with which we compete: We're  
open and honest. We specify a cap on sustained bandwidth that kicks  
in within a minute. The user's connection can go to much higher  
speeds in short bursts (good for Web pages), but after a minute it  
normalizes to the throughput we specify.

The result is that folks who browse the Web tend to really, really  
like our service. So do people who do a reasonable amount of  
downloading. And most folks understand that we cannot provide them  
with infinite throughput. But some do occasionally call to complain  
that the service is "slow."

Some of these people are rabid P2Pers, but not all are. We recently  
hooked up an office full of surveyors who trooped back from the field  
and tried to upload hundreds of megabytes of results -- ALL AT THE  
SAME TIME. They would not go on to other work, or quit for the day,  
until the upload was complete. Since they insisted upon working this  
way instead of staggering their uploads or allowing them to run  
whilst they went off and did other things, they had no choice but to  
buy more bandwidth. Which was only fair; we had to buy that bandwidth  
at wholesale and shouldn't be expected to provide services below our  
cost.

In any event, when we receive a complaint about speed, we check to  
see if there's an obvious bandwidth hog on the connection (e.g. a  
browser sitting on ESPN and using up all of their allocated  
bandwidth). We then tell the user to run any of the third party speed  
tests available on the Net (we don't want just to refer them to our  
own, because they might think we have our thumb on the scale). Unless  
there's something wrong with the connection, the number comes up just  
where we said it would; in other words, we're delivering the exact  
amount of sustained bandwidth that we specified in LARGE PRINT when  
they signed up. If they don't want to pay more for more capacity...  
well, we hate to lose a customer, but we would rather have such a  
user hog a competitor's network than ours.

We do have an anti-abuse policy, but will only cut off a user in  
response to DEMONSTRATED abuse, illegal activity, or an  
uncontrollable "zombie" or "bot".

--Brett Glass, LARIAT.NET



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