Posts by Graham

US bandwidth gets new caps

No such thing as a free lunch.

Download caps and/or pay per usage are the way to go. Low usage customers stop subsidising the heavy downloaders and can probably reduce their bills. The heavy downloaders get to stop worrying about bittorrent or iplayer or whatever being traffic shaped. You want to use more, go right ahead, just be sure to pay your share. The price the ISP charges you is much closer to how they are charged. This reduces the need for them to encourage/discourage particular usage patterns because the customers stop fitting into "profitable" and "cost us a fortune" brackets. You get what you pay for. Simple.

And if you want net neutrality you should support this. Net neutrality happens when all bits are treated the same. When are all bits the same? When they cost the same.

UK.gov backs ISPs on charging content providers, throttling P2P

Charging from the wrong end

I fully expect tiered services to kick in some day. Some ISPs already charge per Gb, and some have different rates for different times of day. It's to be expected. But the charges need to be to the user, not the content provider. Let me decide if getting a good quality service to content x/y/z is important to me. If it is, then I'll (have to) pay. Charging the content provider means I have to find an ISP that's in bed with providers x, y AND z. If they are niche providers there might not be such an ISP and now I can't get all the content I want.

This stifles innovation in high-bandwidth services because new players in the market must strike deals with at least all the major ISPs before they stand a chance. That's going to be expensive. So we'll just have to put up with content from the big guys and the little startups just can't get in the game.

Rupert Murdoch must be loving this.

Tiscali pulls plug on 186K

Glad I moved. And a bit @David/Be customer

Used to be an EFH customer. They were brilliant until being bought by 186k, then it really went downhill. Eventually jumped ship when bandwidth was so low the streaming iPlayer never worked. Looks like it was a wise move.

On Be now, and mostly happy with it. Re David and his DNS filtering with Be: are you a static IP customer? They changed their DNS servers recently and didn't tell customers, I was lucky to spot it in the scrolling news text on the account page when I went to open a ticket cos I couldn't get to a site from home that I could access from work. Old DNSs are still there, just not listing all sites, new DNSs seem ok. So I'm only "mostly" happy with Be cos of not telling customers when customer action is required.