No subject

Ken Poulton [poulton at labs.agilent.com] a Palo Alto CA fiber 
activist, responds to my query in SMART Letter #52 about whether 
1 Gbyte per month is a reasonable throughput budget:

  "My e-mail record on my at-work system says: 
   0.04 GBytes/month last year in personally-handled mail 
   0.02 GBytes/month in unique weather data messages 
   (sent hourly to Bay Area windsurfers) 
   1.50 GBytes/month when you count the 400 weather 
   subscribers

  "My home Unix system (used as a remote work terminal): 
   1.9 GBytes/month

  "So even these rather heavy corner-case uses are only a 
   few GBytes per month.  Most users would be hard-
   pressed to get to a GByte/month until they turned on 
   streaming video or Internet radio stations. Those 
   could get your usage up to around 10-20 GByte/month at 
   24 hours/day.

  "In the Palo Alto Fiber to the Home Trial, we 
   considered a service that would be limited to 1 
   GByte/month.  I continue to believe this is a 
   perfectly reasonable way to operate, but I can tell 
   you from experience that it's a hard sell to consumers 
   when you're offering a 100 Mbit/s pipe that can (in 
   principle) use up your month's quota in 80 seconds. 

  "For starters, we settled on an unlimited service that 
   is 100 Mbit/s to the hub, but uses a shared 10 Mbit/s 
   connection to the Internet.  Locally-served services, 
   such as video-on-demand, can make good use of the 
   local 100 Mbit/s, but Internet access (where the BW 
   gets expensive) will be limited. We have not turned on 
   the system yet, so we can't tell how it will work out 
   yet. 

  "The problem is non-trivial: $100/month only pays for a 
   *continuous* usage of about 100 kbit/s.  You can get a 
   *lot* of benefit from peak rates of 100 Mbit/s, but 
   you have to deal with the people who will suck you dry 
   with a server farm if you let them. 

  "A pay-per-GByte system (like 1 GByte free, $100/GByte 
   thereafter) will never ding most people, and charge 
   big users appropriately. But it makes consumers 
   (justifiably) nervous. What if you get a $1300 bill 
   when your son leaves on the Internet radio 24 hours a 
   day for a month? Simply cutting people off doesn't 
   work either.

  "What I think is needed is to allow consumers to choose 
   full speed access up to 1 GB/month, and then throttled 
   BW after that. Your connection may get slow, but 
   doesn't die.  And you don't get a huge bill by 
   surprise.  I suspect this will need special support in 
   the routers or some kind of special billing box. 
   Anyone care to support this in their routers?"
-- 
Henning Schulzrinne   http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~hgs