[129808] in North American Network Operators' Group
RE: Did Internet Founders Actually Anticipate Paid,
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Justin Horstman)
Mon Sep 20 14:09:51 2010
From: Justin Horstman <justin.horstman@gorillanation.com>
To: 'Owen DeLong' <owen@delong.com>, William Herrin <bill@herrin.us>
Date: Mon, 20 Sep 2010 11:08:43 -0700
In-Reply-To: <47C24175-66AA-47D9-B8AA-2EF21300F911@delong.com>
Cc: NANOG <nanog@nanog.org>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Owen DeLong [mailto:owen@delong.com]
> Sent: Monday, September 20, 2010 10:43 AM
> To: William Herrin
> Cc: NANOG
> Subject: Re: Did Internet Founders Actually Anticipate Paid,
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> On Sep 20, 2010, at 8:59 AM, William Herrin wrote:
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> > On Sat, Sep 18, 2010 at 2:51 PM, Tony Varriale
> <tvarriale@comcast.net> wrote:
> >>> Of course the high level of oversub is an issue....
> >>
> >> We'll disagree then. Oversub makes access affordable.
> >
> > Sure, at 10:1. At 100:1, oversub makes the service perform like crap.
> > With QOS, it still performs like crap. The difference is that the
> > popular stuff is modestly less crappy while all the not-as-popular
> > stuff goes from crappy to non-functional.
> >
> Only if the QoS is tilted in favor of the popular stuff. The concern
> here isn't QoS in favor of the popular stuff... The concern here
> is QoS in favor of one particular brand of service X vs another.
> (e.g. Netflix vs. Hulu).
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> If QoS favors unpopular but more profitable services, it can make
> the user experience for those services significantly less crappy
> than the competing more popular services and actually drive
> shifts in consumer behavior towards the less popular services.
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> Of course, as this succeeds, it becomes self-defeating over the
> long run, but, only if your goal is to provide good service to your
> customers.
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> If your goal is to keep your customers spending $minimal per month
> and stay attached to your service while using QoS payments from
> content providers to drive much larger margins, then, you can
> make a circuit through the content providers watching each
> one's popularity wax and wane as you screw with their QoS
> based on the money you get.
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> This is very bad for the consumer and, IMHO, should not be allowed.
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> > In my career I've encountered many QOS implementations. Only one of
> > them did more good than harm: a college customer of mine had a T3's
> > worth of demand but was only willing to pay for a pair of T1s. In
> > other words, the *customer* intentionally chose to operate with a
> > badly saturated pipe. QOS targetted only at peer to peer brought the
> > rest of the uses back to a more or less tolerable level of
> > performance.
> >
> You are still making the mistake of assuming that the ISP is interested
> primarily in providing good service to their customers. When you move
> this from customer-oriented good service model to profit-oriented
> model built around keeping the pain threshold just barely within
> the consumer's tolerance, it becomes an entirely different game.
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> Owen
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Devil's Advocate here,=20
What would you say to ISP A that provided similar speeds as ISP B, but B to=
ok payments from content providers and then provided the service for free?
Gives you the choice, ISP A, which costs, and ISP B, which is free, and mos=
t people wouldn't know the difference.
~J
