@james Butler
No-one's mummy promised anything. Instead, this company people pay money to for a service promised this, in exchange for the payment. The company promised a service, The customer promised to pay in return. That is what we adults call 'a contract'.
Now, 'oops' the company has oversold and can not hold up it's side of the contract, or is complaining about people holding it to the contract, and utilising what has been sold. They want to break the contract. If you can't hold up your end of the deal, say you don't have enough money to go around all your bills, will the ISP take a small payment instead for they month, because your funds are oversubscribed. Of course not. You pay your bill, or you're cut off, and they will enforce that bill strictly.
I don't live outside my means. If I don't have enough of my commodity (money) to go around, I don't promise it in a contract. If a company doesn't have enough bandwidth to adequately deal with the customers it has, it should't be making it worse by signing up new ones. That is the basis of this discussion.
ISPs oversold capacity to try and make things more affordable. The more they oversold, the cheaper their prices and the greater their profits. Yes you can have a leased line for $400/month, or a stupidly high contention rate line for $5/month; there has to be a balancing act. The ISPs like comcast, arguing for these bandwidth measures, are those that have failed to create a balance. Perhaps plans should be sold not by speed alone, but by an average speed rated as total throughput per month. 100Gb a month download limit? Sell it as a 0.4Mbit down connection. People can use their connection then flat out all month, and not breach the 100Gb/month limit that is the ISP's network capacity limit. Sell on capacity, not peak speed.
The only problem with this sort of FAIR package naming, is that the ISP's with the poor infrastructure (you know the ones we're meant to be sorry for, for all the naughty people using what they were sold) won't have very good plans - low rates and high prices - and still their businesses will suffer.
In technology, you have to invest, the complaining ISPs are not, not where it counts. They'd rather spend $250,000 on network managing tools to give them 2 years of service on the same pipes, than $20M to give them 10, and better customer satisfaction. However, as Mr Bennett said on his blog, "ISPs upgrade their networks as users and markets require. If they spend too much money on upgrades, they get hammered by the stock market; they spend too little, they get hammered by their competitors." The problem is, most ISPs have very few competitors. If you don't like your Comcast connection, is there another cable ISP you can go to? no. Me, I only have one option for broadband, Bellsouth/AT+T. There are no competitors. I can get satellite internet, or dialup, but they're not like-products. They can spend as little as they want on infrastructure, as he says, and I'm F*cked. Oh, and remind me just how good the judgements of the morons on Wall Street are, please? Remind me who put us into a economic meltdown. thats right, the people the ISPs are trying to keep happy (rather than their customers).
Biting the hand that feeds IT
