RE: Greed, stupidity, arrogance, and small genitalia.... (a c orporate study on the bells)

[Josh Daymont <jdaymont () secureworks net>]

It isn't that simple here in the southeastern US.  BellSouth controls nearly
all the DSL lines in its territory, especially here in Georgia.  This
includes anything that is purchased from a so-called third party provider.
The third party basically do the network management/ip assignments and
manage the links to the backbone but Bellsouth runs everything related to
the home office link by law.  The alternative is to get a cablemodem, but if
they were to follow suite then the only option left would be a leased line,
which is too expensive for most SOHO users.  I can't speak for other areas
of the US; but here dealing with Bellsouth on DSL issues (I used a third
party provider called speedfactory) is a nightmare.  My DSL card constantly
has technical trouble for no apparent reason and the only thing my provider
can do is call bellsouth and ask them to look into it.  As you can imagine
turnaround times are measured in weeks.

Pay for less than best effort?  I hate to say it but I often feel like I'm
paying for "no effort" from my ISP's network provider.

So to address your statement about not caring about alienating their
residential customer base:  why would they start caring now?  This has been
the strategy they've successfully pursued for over a decade now.

-----Original Message-----
From: Fergie [mailto:fergdawg () netzero net]
Sent: Tuesday, January 17, 2006 2:14 PM
To: toddtowles () brookshires com
Cc: funsec () linuxbox org
Subject: RE: [funsec] Greed, stupidity, arrogance, and small
genitalia.... (a c orporate study on the bells)


Who the hell is going to pay for 'less-than-best-effort' service
from an ISP? That's ludicrous. ;-)

I say that, if this were come to pass, people should simply vote
with their dollars -- and take their business to someone with a
better business srategy -- an ISP that won't treat their traffic
as 'non-premium'.

Clearly, these guys have no qualms about alienating their
existing residential customer base.

In any event, there are a lot of reasons why this whole scheme
may not take off anyways. ;-)

$.02,

- ferg


-- "Todd Towles" <toddtowles () brookshires com> wrote:
 

> Bear this in mind:
>
> There is no such thing as 'Better than Best Effort' in the Internet.
> In other words, in order to give some traffic 'preferrential'
> treatment, someone's traffic has to be 'penalized'.
>
> I mean, you're bound by the laws of physics -- you can't make 
> light travel any faster across a piece of fiber than it 
> already does, given DWDM, etc.
>
> So who's traffic gets penalized? The people who don't pay them?
> That's basically extortion in my book (and for what it's 
> worth, I wrote one on QoS). :-)

Agreed, but this seems to be a clear attempt to pull on <insert targer
here>'s customer base, clear and simple. They are moving from a default
of all "equal" to a default of "slower" in a general sense, so now you
must pay to get back to "equal"...seems like a backhanded way of
building brand loyal customers...instead of doing it the old fashision
way - having a good services. But I didn't write a book on QOS or
anything for that matter...so those are my 2 cents (given that 2 US
cents isn't even worth that much in metal) lol

-Todd

--
"Fergie", a.k.a. Paul Ferguson
 Engineering Architecture for the Internet
 fergdawg () netzero net or fergdawg () sbcglobal net
 ferg's tech blog: http://fergdawg.blogspot.com/


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