Followup: All-I-can-eat
The “All-I-can-eat-mentality” article has triggered (as expected) numerous responses. Some of them provided useful data, links to more information or informative perspectives – many thanks to those readers. A few others were unfortunately following the “I-am-right” line without considering facts. Most of the readers from the Service Provider community decided to stay anonymous (when you read all the comments, it becomes obvious they made a wise decision) or respond off-line.
Whatever your position in this issue, I would like to ask you to keep your comments focused on the topic. Although you were all infinitely more polite than the usual forum/blog crowd and provided some really good arguments, writing angry replies does not help. What’s happening with Internet is (like it or not) our common problem … or you could take the blue pill and continue bashing the other side.
I particularly liked the summary of our discussion posted on Slashdot (where someone included the link to my blog):
Whoa, whoa, whoa, that article seems to be promoting a balanced viewpoint that denies a) that telcos are totally evil and b) that we should all be allowed to have as much bandwidth as we want and not have to pay for it. We'll have none of that nonsense on /.
It’s also painfully obvious that the current handling of ISP service offerings is often dismal. For example:
- Publicly accessible service definitions don’t exist. What most large ISPs offer on their web sites is the X Mbit @ Y $/€/whatever per month. They “forget” to mention that the offered rate is PIR, with expected CIR being only a few percent of PIR.
- When introducing the traffic caps, some providers started with ridiculously low and probably a bit overpriced figures.
- A while ago some people decided to keep P2P traffic (which is the worst bandwidth hog of all) in line by resetting TCP sessions (a link to the recent state of affairs would be highly appreciated).
In the next few weeks, I’ll try to cover a few of the topics raised in the comments, including:
- Why do we have to live with oversubscriptions?
- Why are the Service Providers forced to use traffic management?
- Is it possible to have a fair and consumer-friendly service definition?
- Why will everyone have to invest in deep packet inspection (DPI)?







