[Deleted]
What I really think we need here are some "truth-in-advertising"
laws which are applied to oversubscription rates. That'd solve the
problem really quick.
How about we regulat the Internet like the Electric Utility and charge per
byte transferred? 
That would shut down Peer To Peer traffic rather quickly, and it would
ensure that everyone pays a fair amount for what they use.
I'm only half serious here.. However, I do agree that truth in advertising
is a good thing.
On a different tact, where I -THINK- the market will eventually end up is
w/ different classes of BroadBand service, whereby QOS and priority will
be given to those that wish to pay for it. The $14.95 services will be a
best-effort, and the $59.95 services will have priority.
We've there already. When I had my home-office DSL package from XO it was
much more expensive than consumer DSL from pacbell, for example, but gave
me the ability to run local servers, non-blocking network ranges, etc.
Meanwhille, cable contracts are pretty much written such that the service
is only supposed to be used for ~web browsing and other basic tasks, and
if you want reliability or better bandwidth then call the business service
number. I don't see this much in the local provider market though.
You know, that's already happening
Korea Telecom recently decided to scrap its flat rate high speed [1]
broadband offering and move to a traffic based charging plan - must be
because most korean broadband gets used for online gaming, which is as
high bandwidth use an app as you can get ... and they're hit by the
same situation, which does start to bite when a few users start maxing
out their pipes, and really begins to hurt when "few" suddenly becomes
"most"
srs
[1] (and I mean really high speed, compared to what gets sold as DSL
stateside, and way, way over the $75 a month, 3 gig transfer capped
512K dsl line I use in India)
My guess would be that PtP is a much bigger bandwidth hog than gaming, especially for the people who have high upstream capacity (10meg+).
Seeing IX traffic exchange between local 10meg full duplex providers and ADSL providers is kind of fun, with traffic ratios of 1:5 or worse not being uncommon.
Actually, gaming usually isn't a high bandwidth app, it's merely sensitive to latency. The flows are longer, and I'd imagine with Korea's gaming addiction, highly numerous, but really only large when taken in volume. Now, downloading large patches or entire games.. that's another story, of course.
This is one of the problems things like BitTorrent is designed to tackle. A time-lapse flow matrix demonstrating the effects of BitTorrent on egress traffic would be an interesting project.
- billn
Korea Telecom recently decided to scrap its flat rate high speed [1]
broadband offering and move to a traffic based charging plan - must be
because most korean broadband gets used for online gaming, which is as
high bandwidth use an app as you can get ... and they're hit by the same
situation, which does start to bite when a few users start maxing out
their pipes, and really begins to hurt when "few" suddenly becomes
"most"
My guess would be that PtP is a much bigger bandwidth hog than gaming,
especially for the people who have high upstream capacity (10meg+).
the seven biggest isps in japan recently cooperated on a really
good paper measuring a lot about broadband use in japan. it is
in the most recent ccr, v35n1 jan 05. sorry, siteseer seems not
to have it yet.
randy
that would be:
"The impact of residential broadband traffic on Japanese ISP backbones"
Authors
Kensuke Fukuda NTT/WIDE
Kenjiro Cho IIJ/WIDE
Hiroshi Esaki U. Tokyo/WIDE
http://portal.acm.org/ft_gateway.cfm?id=1052820&type=pdf
if the ACM link doesn't work, try:
http://www.iijlab.net/~kjc/papers/srccs-rbb-traffic-2up.pdf
Tiered service is fine, but, charge per octet transferred will not work for
me until I can have control over which octets are transferred. As long
as I can't block spammers and abusers from adding to my bill without
blocking services I want (email, web usage, the ability to host some
small websites, etc.), and as long as search engines and such can generate
traffic on my network without me having any recourse to bill them for
it to recoup my costs, I think metered service is not a great idea,
at least at the small-pipe (<10mbps) end of the scale.
Owen