Re: How's this for fun?

[John Payne <john () sackheads org>]

On Oct 27, 2005, at 3:10 PM, Larry Seltzer wrote:

> > > One support call to whitelist against blocking means from at that  
> > > point
> onwards one more call and you're costing them money rather than  
> making them
> money.
>
> Obviously that could be true for a while, but you do continue to  
> pay them
> money and they will make up the difference before too long. You  
> make it
> sound like that one call is an ongoing obligation.

If the ISP churns through customers such that the expected lifetime  
of the account is on the order of a couple of years (I'm going from  
memory here), then the point is that you *don't* continue to pay  
them!  ISP customer churn is higher than you might imagine for a  
number of reasons, the most obvious being incoming spam load too  
high: kill the account and move elsewhere.


> And the cost issue could be greatly mitigated with an online  
> configuration
> switch, secured with e-mail confirmations and stuff like that.  
> (Obviously
> you have to protect against a zombie operator setting the switch.)

Yes... but then you have to figure out what's most cost effective for  
the company at a whole.  Remember that in the main, ISPs dealing with  
consumers have a TINY margin (if any at all - I suspect the cable  
operators are heavily subsidising the Internet access in return for  
being able to get TV, phone, etc $$$ out of their users)
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