NNSquad - Network Neutrality Squad
[ NNSquad ] Re: [IP] Re: a wise word from a long time network person -- Merccurynews report on Stanford hearing
At 10:21 PM 4/22/2008, Edward Almasy wrote: >I don't understand why we should accept the premise that an ISP can't >survive unless they oversell their bandwidth, Because it's true; that's why. Let me give you an example. We had a business customer who wanted higher speeds and to use BitTorrent -- that is, to saturate a high bandwidth link. We wanted to keep them, so we offered them 100%, non-oversold backbone bandwidth at 5% over our cost: $105 per Mbps. Basically zero profit for us. The cable company offered them 8 Mbps down, 1 Mbps up of (obviously pooled) bandwidth at $150. Guess which one they took? And are claiming to us that they are saturating 24x7? This customer decided that it would rather hog an oversold bandwidth pool (which we can't let them do for obvious reasons) than pay for the bandwidth it fully intended to use. Many other customers try to do the same. But we can't sell guaranteed bandwidth below cost. Want to saturate your link? If so, you have to pay for saturating it. Likewise, if we gave residential customers 1 Mbps links and alloweed them to saturate them, we'd need to charge them $100 per month. Guess how many takers we'd get. --Brett Glass