Rowland, Alan D" <alan_r1@corp.earthlink.net> said:
I've seen a lot of good responses since this post but none that points out
the obvious, most broadband providers offer 'residential' and 'business'
products. The former at ~$50/month for a 'single connection,'the latter for
~$120/month including most of the services at issue in this thread. You get
what you pay for.
Yes this is true. However, you have some Broadband ISPs (RR, Speakeasy)
that will offer additonal ips for an extra fee without having to pay for
business access.
Many broadband ISPs also do not offer business access to residential areas.
Everytime I've asked one, they couldn't give me a good reason why.
Some day case law will catch up to this new media enough that when a
'residential' service customer seeks remedy for $X,000 in 'lost business'
the defense will be that if they want a 'business' connection, then that is
what they should have signed up for/been paying for.
Exactally. However, that's why you have a "Service Level Agreement." Can't
really win a lawsuit that easily without on, one either side.
I don't know if many broadband providers offer a SLA for business
connections as well, unless its something more economical to provide a SLA
for, such as a T-1.
I do know when I signed up for a business cable modem once, it said in fine
print on the contract "You will not hold RoadRunner responsible for down
time due to network issues, etc." I'm pretty sure most broadband providers
stick a clause like that into the contract.
When 1% of your users are sucking down %50+ of your bandwidth you may need
to discuss AUPs with that 1%. Don't expect your shareholders to cut you any
slack on this issue.
How could 1% of your users suck down %50+ of bandwidth in such a scenario?
Even though they are running NAT, they only have one address, one MAC
address from the cable modem, and one system doing the rate limiting off of
that ip/mac address.
When someone's running NAT, the bandwidth is distributed between the users
behind the NAT device.
If someone's assigned 512K, they can only use up to 512K, be it one
computer, or several behind a NAT device.
--conradr