smooth surfing Was: ...NAT users

[Jonathan Hutchins]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Patrick Miller" <pert at ygbd.tas-kc.com>

>  I still would personaly love to get a service that
> uses metering. It pays for the necessary infastructure, and allows me to
> burst.

But the infrastructure is what you pay for - amortization of the wiring,
switches, and routers, plus whatever the provider pays for his uplink.

There is virtually no difference in the cost of operating a dead line vs.
one that is running at maximum capacity.  Perhaps a little more electricity,
and perhaps that's a detectable expense if you have a few million
connections running, but I doubt it.

On an oversold network - whether it's Cable, DSL, or T1, it's true that
someone consistently running at capacity is pushing the expenses up by
reducing the available capacity.  It seems to me though that if I buy a
1500/384 connection, I ought to be able to simultaneously push 384k and pull
1500k if I want to.  There's nothing about traffic use in the user
agreements, other than to loosely ban "servers" on the grounds that their
uplink load would strain the network.

Supposedly "the industry" is trying to push broadband, but policies that
attempt to limit it's use are counterproductive.  If they're overbooking
their capacity to the point that it might as well be a dial-up connection
anyway, where's the advantage?

So I really don't think that there's any logic to doing metered billing.
And while long distance billing used to be metered, a majority of people
today are on some sort of flat-rate plan, even if there is a charge for
exceeding the packaged time.  Local service has mostly always been
flat-rate.

In the '80's, phone companies worrying about capacity problems because
people were using their phone lines for dial-up connections to BBSs, and
were staying on-line for hours at a time - longer, according to Bell, than
telephone conversations typically lasted.  They tried to impose either
metered use or higher rates for private data connections.  Southwestern Bell
tried to declare hobby BBSs "commercial", and require that they pay
commercial rates.  I was part of a group of BBS Operators that successfully
fought that move.  Other attempts to address the capacity problem by
penalizing users failed as well, as people could see that it was the same
thing as overbooking an airplane, then charging extra to the people who
actually showed up for the flight.

And that's really what metered use comes down to - you pay for the line,
which covers the cost of installing and maintaining it and the related
equipment.  To charge you more for actually using the line doesn't make
sense.

Banning certain types of use with the excuse that they impact the network is
pretty silly - streaming pr0n off the newsgroup server sucks more bandwidth
than a VPN connection, and NetMeeting with video is likely to load a link
heavier than a home LAN using NAT.

But this whole paranoia was based on two assumptions:  That the ISP can
detect NAT, and that one actually is doing so.  Neither have been reliably
shown to be true.