[ NNSquad ] Re: Simple questions

George,

you have either misunderstood or completely distorted what I was trying to say. I actually think fractional access makes sense - it's sharing of a broadband channel. I think that's fine. You pay a fraction of the cost and get high burst rates. The only time your "fractional share" becomes a potential issue is if the shared channel becomes congested. At that point, you should be shaped in a way that is pro-rated according your putative share of the channel. what I am against is the broadband access provider making decisions that interfere with the subscriber's freedom to go anywhere he or she likes on the net and run any applications desired. If the system becomes congested (regardless of cause), the then-current users should experience traffic shaping commensurate with the fraction of the access channel they have subscribed for. Essentially, your share of the channel is a function of the "tier" you subscribe to and the utilization of the channel by you and others who share it. There is a question about oversubscription (a common practice in residential networks). If the oversubscription is significant and if the channel is regularly congested then you may not experience the kind of burst freedom that you value in your note below. Your traffic will always be shaped as a result. You would be well-advised to institute some kind of measurement practice to figure out, in that case, just what kind of service you are getting (peak and average bit rates).

When I was at MCI, we charged customers based on the 95th percentile traffic rate they sent or received. That is, we ignored the 5 percent peaks and charged at the 95th percentile rate.

Users could subscribe to various tiers of traffic level depending on their anticipated 95th percentile requirements.

On Aug 30, 2009, at 11:40 PM, George Ou wrote:

There is nothing “silly” about comparing fractional ownership of an airplane to fractional ownership to a piece of copper or fiber. In each case, fractional ownership means fractional cost and that means little guys like me aren’t priced out of the market. What is so wrong with a collocation offering 3% ownership of a 100 Mbps circuit at $25 (other $25 for electricity and rack space) which is 2.3% of the cost of having 100% ownership of a 100 Mbps circuit? Having a service that can burst to 100 Mbps on demand that includes 3 Mbps average for $25/month (I have the option to buy more anytime) is absolutely wonderful to me. If we outlaw fractional ownership of Internet connection circuits, which is something Vint seems to be suggesting but refuses to clarify, then I’m either stuck with paying $1100 or the ISP will simply cap my bandwidth to 3 Mbps with zero usage caps. That effectively cuts my average performance down to probably well under 1 Mbps even though I’m paying for 3 Mbps simple because I cannot guarantee that my web visitors will produce a consistent 3 Mbps demand. So the type of regulatory restrictions that Vint Cerf is apparently lobbying for is harming small businesses, which would severely curtail the competition for Google because they’re one of the few companies that have the kind of scale that can justify purchasing full ownership circuits. So the only thing that’s silly and malicious is someone who would have government step in and take away my flexibility and freedom.