[ILUG] Esat Clear "flat rate" costs

[Padraig Brady]

Nick thanks,
loads of good info here..

> > Yep there's an admin trade off here obviously though.
> > Have you any ballpark figures, or anyone in
> > Ireland that does it?
> 
> Most ISP's will do it,  but I've no idea about costs or anything.
> 
> Also, rememeber that most WWW customers will expect more than 
> 64k access
> speeds for their WWW site.  Not all of the world is dialup 
> 56k, and I can
> tell you that there's nothing more tedious than being at the 
> end of a fast
> connection, where the data is crawling though because of a bottleneck
> somewhere else.

That's a very good and obvious point I overlooked.

> As regards administration, unix server administration is 
> pretty much the
> same, regardless of whether the system is in the same room or 
> in the next
> country.

Yep, but I was thinking about HW. (upgrades, specialised external HW access,
etc.)

> > How would this be an admin nightmare. Just use a mail server
> > on the LAN (e.g. VPOP3) to distribute the mail both ways.
> > How would having a leased line help things here?
> 
> Static IP address, 

How does this help?

> no need to bother about the risk of the link being down,

i have to say I've never had problems connecting to IOL
in over 3 years. I can't speak for other ISPs.

> good quality customer service from ISP's, 

Hmm that would be a help OK. I usually get feed up
and figure things out myself.

> faster access (remember that 56k access is never 56k), 

very true.

> cleaner, easier configuration, less maintenance, etc, etc, etc.

how?

Padraig.