Re: Verizon Policy Statement on Net Neutrality

[Stephen Satchell <list () satchell net>]

On 02/27/2015 11:57 AM, Mel Beckman wrote:
> It is NOT the ISP's responsibility to provide you with X Mbps if that
> was advertised as "UP TO x Mbps" (which is exactly how every
> broadband provider advertises its service -- check your contract).
> We're not talking about the Internet's capacity here. We're talking
> about the physical limits of an ISPs own uplink connection to the
> Internet. That costs much more than the income from the number of
> users it takes to saturate the uplink.

If you want guarantees, you make sure your contract specifies those
guarantees in the Service Level Agreement section.

*  Errored seconds
*  Minimum upstream bandwidth
*  Minimum downstream bandwidth

The larger the bandwidth and fewer errored seconds, the higher the cost.

With my "business-grade" cable service (Charter), I have *no* such
guarantees.  It's all "best effort".  Indeed, with the SOHO/home grade
equipment, you can't measure errored seconds at all -- if it's there, I
haven't found it yet.

Now, I run a mail server that serves my building, so my need is for more
downstream capacity than upstream (I don't send a huge amount of mail).
 Unlike an ISP, I don't have people from the outside using POP or IMAP,
so my mail server's outbound traffic is minimal.  As for bulk data
transfer, Dropbox works well enough with the asymmetric circuit.

Even though there is no SLA, my service is better than the typical
residential Internet provisioning.  And I pay for that improvement,
about 4x.