Apologies for the mostly-off-topic post. In message <20020225230605.GA17795(a)tapu.f00f.org>, Chris Wedgwood writes:
On Tue, Feb 26, 2002 at 11:57:39AM +1300, Juha Saarinen wrote: JCM was devised as a method of limiting broadband service uptake
Until I see proof of this, I'm going to call BULLSHIT.
FWIW, I'm inclined to agree (that it's bullshit). The JCM (and similar systems which have been in use in New Zealand for a long time) are attempts to limit demand to a level where the supply can be made at a similar cost to what is being paid. So that increases in bandwidth required to supply the demand can be met out of revenue.
I wish people in New Zealand would stop pretending bandwidth is cheap and/or cost almost zero and expecting vast amounts of resource for little cost. It doesn't work that way. Anywhere.
From my point of view bandwidth is very cheap now. Of course this is coming from first connecting to the Internet when we were being charged around $600/MB ($0.60 per kilobyte) for (international) traffic. Now I'm paying, what, about $0.20 per megabyte (less in some instances) for international traffic.
That's about 1/3000th of the cost a bit of 10 years ago (about 13 years ago now IIRC). Sure there's lots of things one could do if someone were handing out bandwidth for free. There's lots of things one could do if someone were handing out money for free too. That doesn't meant it's a good idea to get fixated on them, and blame the people not giving things away for free for "holding you back" or whatever. The Paradise.Net charging model (for want of a better term) where plans include some amount of traffic "for free" (ie, in the base cost) may have some of the effects that people are hoping for in their "fixed price, all you can eat" plans, but without the horrendous downside effects of "all you can eat" plans (on everyone else, the provider, etc). This is particularly true where the plan includes more traffic than most people can sensibly use in the period (eg, the Paradise.Net plans that have 10GB of traffic included in them). (A friend of mine with a 10GB traffic plan has been trying _very_ hard to use it all up in a month, without succeeding.) My plan at home (a mere 1GB of traffic included) is plenty fine for me; I've never ever hit the limit (in the 18 months I've had the connection), and only rarely think about not doing something "because of the traffic charges". (About the only thing I actively avoid doing is downloading ISO images of (free) software releases.) If somehow I could get more than 128kbps upstream I'd be really happy. (2Mbps downstream is very nice; but 512kbps downstream was fine. 512kbps upstream would be really nice. Anyone lurking from TSNZ take note: I'll pay real money (up to about 50% more for the connection) for a better upstream on my cable connection. I don't even care if it's not backed by international bandwidth; I want this extra upstream bandwidth for local (NZ-wide) use.) Ewen - To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog