[ILUG] Free software for .pando files?

[Thomas Bridge]

On 03/09/07, paul at clubi.ie <paul at clubi.ie> wrote:

> b) The ISPs further do not differentiate on cost of bandwidth. So a
>     set of customers who use near-100% of their link bandwidth to talk
>     to each other, but only a trivial amount of an ISPs expensive
>     transit bandwidth, are penalised the same as customers who use
>     100% of their bandwidth to share data with hosts /external/ to the
>     ISP.

Because the cost of accurately billing the difference far outweighs
the costs of just not bothering.

> 2. that it's pretty unlikely that the crack-smoking telcos are going
>     to give up building towers of crap with L2TP/MPLS/etc.. and start
>     offering native IP network access[1]

Um - they are offering "native" IP network access.   The fact they may
be using L2TP and MPLS is irrelevant - they (or usually
$INCUMBENT_TELCO) are simply choosing to use those technologys to
connect the ISPs customers to the ISPs data centre.    Remember, when
DSL was first introduced into Ireland, it was ATM from the customer
site to the data centre - all that the introduction of L2TP did was
make it cheaper for the Telco to supply connections to the ISP (one of
the direct results of the introduction of L2TP was that Eircom started
treating the country as one, instead of under the ATM based solution
where Eircom charged different prices depending on what part of the
country the customer was in).

> Then if some set of ISPs started to differentiate bandwidth costs
> (same AS cheaper than external, e.g.), so that customers had an
> incentive to shape their traffic accordingly, those ISPs might
> eventually see an advantage (happier customers and better margins).

There's very little margin in supplying consumer DSL in any case.
The driver is typically to keep prices down - that's what the main
factor in the consumer market is.

T.

-- 
Thomas Bridge
CCIE  #14108