RE: Regional differences in P2P

Steinar Haug wrote:
Telenor, the largest Norwegian service provider, capped their
ADSL customers at a ridiculously low 1 Gbyte/month for a
while. Presumably they lost sufficient business to other
(uncapped) providers that they noticed - the cap has now been
removed.

Ridiculous is the word here. Download two service packs and you're done
for the month? I can understand this happening in Brazil or India, where
caps are a tool to attract enough customers so they bring revenue that
in turn will be re-injected in much needed backbone upgrades, but in
Norway or the US it does not make a lot of sense to me.

Michel Py wrote:
I agree, but see above: a 40GB/mo cap is not something that
I care about. Granted, I'm not a hardcore file swapper but
40GB/mo are more

Mikael Abrahamsson wrote:
I don't know of any capped service over here, nobody dares
take the first step. The largest 10meg provider here launched
a new 100 meg full duplex service for their approx 200.000
household reach at USD$110 a month with a 300G cap (their 10
meg service for $45 a month is uncapped) and there has been
a fair amount of users complaining about 300G not being nearly
enough. When you start swapping DVDRs it just isn't.

There is a need for capping 10 and 100 meg residential though; if you
want to run your 100 Mb/s pipe full all the time it represents 26TB per
month in each direction; you can't give 2/3rds of an OC-3 to a customer
for $110/mo. A 300GB/mo cap means that the customer is using their line
an average of 1.15%, which brings the interesting question of what a
reasonable speed/cap ration should be.

  1.5 Mb/s = 389 GB/mo
10 Mb/s = 2.6 TB/mo
100 Mb/s = 26 TB/mo

Speed/cap ratios:
  1.5 Mb/s capped at 1 GB/mo = 0.25% ridiculous IMHO
10 Mb/s capped at 40 GB/mo = 1.54%
100 Mb/s capped at 300 GB/mo = 1.15%

Thoughts, anyone?

Michel.

Personal reflection?

I believe 90% of all households will manage well on 35gig per month, ie
100kilobit/s on average.

Those who need more should be charged let's say $40-50 per month per
megabit used, at least during peak hours. For ease of calculation, $5 per
another 35gigs per month (token system, user has to actively do
something). Add optional free download during 1am and 7am (or whenever
your lows are), and only half counted bw used between 7am and 1pm and you
should probably be able to even out the usage and get less costly backbone
upgrades because of peak usage.

If user doesn't pay, limit speed to 256k or so. If you feel you have an
uneven traffic ratio, feel free to only charge/cap in the direction that
is most favorable to you.

Now, to get user acceptance and a sound technical implementation for all
this, that's another matter ...

Michel Py wrote:

Thoughts, anyone?

If the cap is based on financial requirements, it usually makes sense to set the cap around 90 to 95 percentile mark of your user base. This makes it fairly network dependent. Even on residential-heavy networks the p2p user population is a smallish fraction subscriber-wise but a fairly significant one bandwidth-wise. (to have some numbers I would say >60% and <10%)

Pete