[57164] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: State Super-DMCA Too True
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Tony Rall)
Sun Mar 30 15:58:08 2003
In-Reply-To: <3E870842.9020506@brightok.net>
To: nanog@merit.edu
From: Tony Rall <trall@almaden.ibm.com>
Date: Sun, 30 Mar 2003 13:57:31 -0700
Errors-To: owner-nanog-outgoing@merit.edu
On Sunday, 2003-03-30 at 09:07 CST, Jack Bates <jbates@brightok.net>
wrote:
> Please see Saphire worm. Then tell me that an ISP doesn't oversell
> services. The fact is, the entire Internet is oversold. If everyone did
> their full capacity, it would crash. DSL is also based on this
> assumption.
It's fine to oversell your capacity, as long as you inform your customers
that that is what you're doing. And it's ok to put bandwidth limits on
usage (or tiered pricing), as long as you're up front with your customers
about it (don't advertise a 2 Mb/s connection for $50 and then, in the
fine print, say that the customer can't average more than 50 kb/s).
It's not fine (although an ISP can do it if they choose) and it is
somewhat stupid to try to control what you care about (bandwidth) by
limiting something that is not necessarily related to that resource (NAT,
certain apps, etc.).
In summary, charge appropriately for what costs you money. NAT does not
cost you anything. Charge for bandwidth, helpdesk calls (not due to ISP
problems), whatever really is a direct expense to the provider. Again,
tell the customer plainly about these limitations (before they commit to
them).
Tony Rall
