Re: Pay-As-You-Use High-Speed Internet?

[Kurt Erik Lindqvist <kurtis () kurtis pp se>]

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On 2004-05-14, at 23.34, Valdis.Kletnieks () vt edu wrote:

> On Fri, 14 May 2004 17:22:03 EDT, "Jonathan M. Slivko" 
> <jslivko () invisiblehand net>  said:
>
> > Personally, I would like to see a senario where everyone just pays for
> > what they use - it would be a much better system for allowing people 
> > who
>
> > Questions? Comments? Suggestions?
>
> Who pays for a DDoS attack, or getting flooded by bounces from a 
> spammer's
> joe-job or A/V companies warning spam when somebody else's box spoofs 
> my
> e-mail address?
>
> If they have a website, who pays how much if it's slashdotted?  
> (Serious
> question there - I may have budgeted for only several hundred or a 
> thousand
> hits a day, and if 200K hits costs too much, I may be in trouble...)
>
> How do you handle disputes?  Who has the burden of proof?
>
> Those are all questions I'd be asking as a potential customer..
>
> And the biggie for you is: How do you handle these issues on a low 
> margin? ;)

Back in the days, before DDOS and massive spamming, I worked for an ISP 
where we used this. Actually we used a much more elaborate scheme with 
different tariffs based on source / destination. It actually worked 
well enough to get quite a good uptake. Especially for users that had a 
lot of national / local traffic (which was cheaper to produce and 
cheaper for the user). Worth noting is that we where transit free.

I used to think this was the billing model of the future, however I 
changed my mind. Not because of any of the reasons you state, but 
because of this just being another version of bandwidth payment. For 
the problem with all similar technologies, QoS, dial-on-demand lambdas 
etc is that the original builder/producer of the service needs to 
depreciate/pay even when you don't use the service, which is either 
reflected in the price or in the SLAs. Neither of which seems as a very 
good business model.

- - kurtis -

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