[11083] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: What is an "Internet reseller"?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Kent W. England)
Mon Mar 21 20:17:08 1994
Date: Sat, 19 Mar 1994 13:14:32 -0800
To: "Erik E. Fair" (Your Friendly Postmaster) <fair@apple.com>,
com-priv@psi.com
From: kwe@cerf.net (Kent W. England)
At 1:13 PM 3/18/94 -0800, "Erik E. Fair" (Your Friendly Postmaster) wrote:
>
>Why do some of you persist in believing that handing out IP addresses
>makes it qualitatively different? Bandwidth is bandwidth.
>
>This whole mess comes about because NSP's will not engineer their
>networks to carry the total aggregate inputs - too expensive. So, they
>guess at an average usage per customer, and then frantically restrict
>anything that violates that assumption, with lots of handwaving.
Eric;
Network service is not just bandwidth for a service provider that has any
kind of idea of quality of service. It may be priced by bandwidth, but
there should be more to the service than access bandwidth for any client
that is doing business on the Internet.
I have had experiences in resale that are bad (the reseller would not
maintain quality of service and expected me to provide support and help
that he was supposed to provide) and good experiences (where the reseller
provides support for a target market that I cannot support as well).
But if everybody agrees that bandwidth is just bandwidth, then providing
Internet service and allowing reselling is a piece of cake, since the
service is bandwidth, not a quality of service measure that reflects
utility. Just plug in -- but don't call me if your throughput from A to Z
isn't useful.
I don't like that kind of service and that isn't what most end-users need.
And I think that folks that receive that sort of service will tire of it
and those that need Internet to do business will migrate to providers that
are more than just bandwidth resellers, since Internet is not just a hobby.
I grew tired of AOL when service degraded last fall. I haven't been back
since, and I don't know whether it's better or not, and I don't care about
Internet Center since I know it will melt down the first week that it does
more than email.
--Kent
