Re: webserver on a cable modem connection

[Bill Crawford <bill syseng netcom net uk>]

On Mon, 31 Dec 2001, Rob Wolfe wrote:

> When did "fair" ever enter into the conversation?
> If you agree to pay me some $$ to provide a service and I say ok as long as
> you do follow my list of things to do and don't (aka the terms and
> conditions) then doesn't it follow that you cannot decide on your own that
> it is no longer fair and stop following the terms of the contract.

 I wasn't suggesting that's it's "OK" to change the terms.  However it
is an unfortunate fact of life that anyone who didn't accept the terms
in the first place, would a) not have a connection and b) be viewed as
a Homer Simpson-esqe loudmouthed malcontent (like me).  Market forces
ultimately serve the providers more than the customers in many cases.
The main reason for that is the lack of concerted action by customers
(which is unlikely to occur due to various social pressures).

 I was saying that I don't think those contract terms are particularly
reasonable since most providers AFAIK already have a fairly low cap on
upstream traffic by design (mostly due to the nature of ADSL/cable) so
artificially restricting what you can do with the bandwidth was rather
senseless to my naïve little mind at the time I responded.

 Having thought about it a little more, it's obviously a heavy-handed
way to reduce upstream bandwidth consumption, but I still can't see
much point unless it really is costing the provider more to handle the
traffic in that direction (are there really such asymmetric contracts
these days?)

> Call me hopelessly old-fashioned but I like to know that when I sign a
> contract with one of my clients they cannot decide half way through a
> project that it only seems fair to them that I should still deliver my
> services but I should also start providing free lunch for all of the
> members of the project team who do not want to make their own (a service
> that I do provide, for a "small" fee).

 We're not talking about free lunch ... we're talking about (to borrow
your example) someone looking over the terms of your contract and then
wondering why they're not allowed to use the kitchen to make their own
lunch.  Sure, once they've signed the contract, you may have them over
a barrel, but that's another story.

> If someone signs a contract that says they are not to run a webserver,
> mailserver, etc... then that means they *are not* paying for a
> service  that allows them to do so. There is almost always an alternative
> type of account available from  ISP's geared to "business" clients that
> allows you to do all this stuff and more.

 There are many examples, some mentioned in this thread, of people who
want to run a web server for extremely small volumes of traffic, share
access to their machine with friends, whatever.

 Now the truth is that often there will be more traffic generated from
the alternative solutions (using a "free" webspace provider, whatever)
than from keeping much of the traffic local to the DSL/cable provider,
which would be the case where a few friends are using the server.  For
example, I want to make a 10MiB file available to a friend.  I can put
it on an external web site, which results in 10MiB of upstream traffic
followed by 10MiB of downstream traffic to the friend.  Or I could try
to mail it to the friend, which also results in 10MiB of traffic, plus
use of the mail server resources of the provider.  If the friend isn't
local to the same provider, the arithmetic *is* slightly different but
the total amount of traffic is no lower than if the friend can connect
directly to my box and download the data using FTP or HTTP.

> If you really want to be frightened by the price of telecom service, check
> out what it costs to get a dedicated T1 line. I cannot seriously believe
> that anyone wants to use that kind of guaranteed bandwidth pricing model
> for home systems.

 No, but that's just it ... why not just rely on contention ratios to
keep the overall cost sane?  Even for business connections, there have
often been differentially priced options with varying degrees of
contention ...

 I can see why they do it, and I understand your point ... ultimately
though the business/personal distinction doesn't really cut it.  Most
businesses are just as much cheapskates as personal users.  Trust me,
I've worked for a couple of ISPs, albeit not in the same country.

> Rob Wolfe

-- 
Bill Crawford, Unix Systems Developer, GTS Netcom
work: bill ops netcom net uk, home: billc netcomuk co uk
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