NNSquad - Network Neutrality Squad
[ NNSquad ] Re: What do users want
Much like spiderman's "with great power comes great responsibility" saying,
there is a similar one that fits this situation. That is, "those with a
clue should rule." I honestly didn't even read your whole missive, because
it starts out with a false premise, which is that clueless end-users KNOW
what is good for them, what is fair, and that actual democracy works. It is
why the US is a representative government, and most other "modern" countries
are parliamentary in nature. This is the concept of leadership. Those in
the know must lead the populous and educate them, not blindly accept what
Joe User thinks he needs and is fair.
We KNOW that certain things that are being done now by ISP's do not match up
with what the near future user requirements are, and that certain practices
are not fair. The ISP's will argue the opposite, but their arguments will
fall on deaf ears if directed at the clueful. The clueless are the real
target. ISP's will spew their propaganda trying to convince end-users that
they don't really need 300G of bandwidth per month, and that it is fair to
block certain traffic because a percentage of people use it for illegal
means. We must show the users what the ISP's are doing, try and make them
clueful, and let the representative process take its course.
There was a recent article that showed that the very young do not
necessarily even believe in "intellectual property." When they are the
ruling class much, if not all, of the cry about "stealing" and "piracy" will
cease. Radio Head released their latest album on an end-user decide how
much to pay for it model. They said that they made more money off of that
than they have made from all electronic distribution royalties they have
ever received, combined. All of the major networks are releasing their
shows on-line very soon after they are initially aired, either with or
without commercials depending on the network. In the last month I've
watched every episode of CSI NY, CSI Miami, CIS, Bones, House, Kind of the
Hill, and Heroes. I didn't like anything on abc.com.
The (Internet) world is changing. The two main factors above, lessening of
"imaginary properly" rights and the willing distribution of material by the
authors, will mean a sea-change for what types of traffic is shared on the
Internet. The ISP's goal is to keep control and shape the future by telling
end-users what is fair, by minimizing the amount of traffic and hence the
amount of $$$'s they need to spend to keep their customers. We have to
convince the end-users that the bar should be held (much) higher. You only
advance by setting the bar higher, not lower.
Fred Reimer, CISSP, CCNP, CQS-VPN, CQS-ISS
Senior Network Engineer
Coleman Technologies, Inc.
-----Original Message-----
From: nnsquad-bounces+freimer=ctiusa.com@nnsquad.org
[mailto:nnsquad-bounces+freimer=ctiusa.com@nnsquad.org] On Behalf Of Barry
Gold
Sent: Thursday, December 27, 2007 1:00 PM
To: nnsquad@nnsquad.org
Subject: [ NNSquad ] Re: What do users want
We've had a lot of discussion here that makes assumptions about what
users want. Among other things:
. "All you can eat" internet access
. Ease of use
. Low prices
. No surprises
. Unlimited usage, including running servers.
Let's look at this a little more closely. We say users want X and Y and
Z; the problem being that I doubt any of us here is a "typical" user.
We're the most knowledgeable 1%. Most people here are (I'd guess)
capable of downloading, installing, _and configuring_ a measurement
tool, especially if somebody else tells us what configuration parameters
to set.
That's not going to be true of the average user. I swear to you that I
know somebody who is convinced that if he does anything besides look at
net sites, his computer will burn up or melt down. He's even afraid to
download and keep, say, a PDF or WMV file. After he had a stroke that
left him with one side paralyzed, I configured his computer to have
sticky keys so he could use it one-handed. And I'm not even familiar
with Macs - I had to use the help to figure out how to do it.(*)
Now I'm not saying he's typical either, but he's probably around the
10th or even 25th percentile of random net users out there.
So to a large extent Brett is right. _Most_ of his customers aren't
going to care about P2P. All they're going to do is surf, shop, maybe
read Wikipedia. And a lot of porn. You better believe people care
about porn. That was the killer app that made the net the success that
it is. Surprised the heck out of me, but then I'm an old fogy who
suffers Moore's Law shock every couple of years. [That's when you look
up and see that fast computers are being measured in _Tera_flops, when
you can remember when the fastest supercomputers were reaching toward a
couple of Megaflops. Or your wife asks you to guess how much an
external 250GB drive costs, and you guess too high by a factor of 4.]
(*) I also made the mistake of trying to back up his computer onto mine.
I ended up with directories with names that aren't legal under
Windoze, so I can't even delete the junk. One of these days I'll hook
up a mac to my desktop again and delete that huge tree.
So, what do _I_ think the average user wants? Basically the first four
things above. But interpreted a little differently than we think of it.
"All you can eat"? Not exactly. What they want is "no surprises". If
they buy net access for $40/month, then they expect to pay $40/month
(plus a few odd $ for taxes). Not to find an extra $30 tacked onto
their bill because they watched a few episodes of their favorite shows
on CBS's website. So "all you can eat" really means "all that _most_
users _will_ eat". It doesn't matter to them if you get cut off after
300 GB/month(+), because they'll never hit that limit. (That represents
using the full 1.5MB/sec "burst rate", continuously for 2 hours a day,
every day of the month.) Brett, or any other ISP, needs to provision
his system for his average customer's usage, plus a little extra to
allow for inevitable growth. If he gets one or two customers who want a
lot more than that, he can throttle them down and/or suggest that they
buy a higher tier of service with more bandwidth and/or a higher usage
limit.
(+) substitute whatever limit realistically represents your user's
expected usage.
They also want "ease of use." That translates as "I don't want to mess
with it, I just want it to work." Most users are intimidated by
Outlook's or Thunderbird's setup screen. They don't want to have to
mess with it, and that's a large part of why ISPs need support staff --
to tell Joe LUser how to get his email working again after Outlook lost
his settings. And I've noticed that most ISPs don't even bother to
support any browser except IE, any mail client except Outlook/Outlook
Express (plus whatever is most common on the Macintosh this year). Why?
Because Firefox and Opera and Konquerer and the other browsers out
there account for maybe 2% of customers -- combined. So it's not worth
the money to write scripts for the support drones to follow for those
other programs.
P2P? Most users are way too unsophisticated to configure a P2P server,
or any other kind of server. It's no wonder Brett can (mostly) get away
with telling his users they aren't allowed to run a server. Yeah, sure,
I can just see the average non-programmer user configuring Tomcat. Not
gonna happen.
That said, Brett really does have an "attitude problem". To a large
extent he thinks of his exceptional users as enemies, using terms like
"stealing". What he really needs to do is think of them as potential
_extra_ revenue, that just need to be educated. "Hey, want to run your
own servers? No problem, we'll even help you set it up, only $X setup
and $Y/month."
Finally, they (we) want "low prices". "Low price" of course means
different things to different people. One of the big jobs of any ISP is
to figure out what combination of service level, provisioning, support,
and bandwidth will draw the highest profit. Not necessarily the maximum
number of users -- lowering your prices will always get at least a few
more users. But the highest value of
#-users * per-month-fee - (cost-of-bandwidth + cost-of-support-staff
+ cost-of-cables/transmitters/whatever-else-your-network-is-built-out-of).
All those costs change almost daily, and the expectations of your users
change all the time too, plus your competitor(s) (cable if you're a DSL
provider, DSL if you're a cable provider, wireless like Brett) are
contstantly adjusting _their_ prices, which affects how many customers
you can retain at a given price point.
I'm glad I'm not running an ISP.
Btw, one of the things I mentioned above -- user expectations -- that is
subject to change without notice (or damn little notice). You never
know when the next "killer app" _will_ require running servers (and
provide a system that configures them without you having to think about
it). And any ISP that has decided hard line "no servers" is going to
have to rethink things in a big hurry -- or be replaced by somebody who
_is_ flexible.
Lastly, No surprises: If I _do_ happen to use more bandwidth than the
typical user, I don't want a big surcharge on my bill. And I don't want
my internet access cut off, as Rogers was threatening to do in their big
contretemps. "Graceful degradation" is called for -- just slow the
usage hogs down to a level you can afford to support. But, again, this
should be based on how much they use, not on which ports they connect to.
[ As others have noted, a major problem is unwritten limits and
unspecified
rules that are invoked via the broad, general wording ("interfering with
other customers", etc.) in ISP Terms of Service agreements. That sort
of enforcement philosophy might have worked in the old Soviet Union, but
is inappropriate today, even if specifying the limits explicitly can
make
things easier for abusers. Fair is fair.
Secondly ... porn? Porn? Porn on the Internet as a major desired
application? C'mon, "Normal people don't sit at home and look
at porn on the Internet":
http://youtube.com/watch?v=YRgNOyCnbqg (mature audiences only).
-- Lauren Weinstein
NNSquad Moderator ]
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