On Wed, 27 Feb 2002, Donald Neal wrote:

Asking a serious question which may have some relevance to this list, is anyone in New Zealand doing any research at present which would use high-bandwidth links in either of these ways?

Possibly. Depends on your definition of research. I'd like to tentatively dip my toe into the jetstream pricing model discussion, if I may. (1) My biggest problem with it, personally, is the lack of discrimination between domestic and international traffic. Callplus has a 100Mbit APE link, and a 10Mbit WIX link, as well as some other misc links (direct peering links to major players - CLIX, etc). These cost a tiny, teeny, pathetic fraction of the amount we spend on connectivity to the US tier-1 guys. So much so, in fact, that domestic usage doesn't even really factor into any of my provisioning. Most of the heavy duty moving of data I do, is domestic. And it's really very heavy duty, multiple 700MB files at a time. Jetstream is, therefore, not a option for me. Jet_start_ is fine (pricewise) but has other issues (128K barely qualififes as broadband, IMHO), and that's what I had at my last house - it let me move the data I wanted to move, though usually so slowly that I would typically use Sneakernet for serious throughput. (BTW, My new house is in Swanson. No ADSL. Walker Wireless tell me no coverage. Clear tell me no Tempest. IHUG Ultra would work - I have a perfect view angle on the tower and BCL Waitarua - but has the same charging scheme as Jetstart with no discrimination between domestic and international traffic .. so, sod that. Dialup is my current home link to the world. Dialup through TDM equipment, so 28k8 is usually the best I get.) ...but Jetstream does not charge differently for domestic access as for international. Why? They're just counting octets on the interface for billing, perhaps. But there's no reason why a smarter billing system couldn't differentiate between the two, and charge appropriately. Or, due to the pricing disparity stated earlier, just give domestic access away. Or, on jetstream, sell a full-speed 8Mbits/sec connection to domestic, and 128Kbits/sec rate-limits on international. Or Telecom could sell the link for a sane price, and let the ISP pick charges. One reason why this may not happen is outlined in my next grump: (2) There's no fucking money in it. Download 20GB of data in a month over Jetstart. Pay your bill - result is (a) Your host ISP gets their princely $30, and (b) Telecom gets to hire another Harvard graduate to hold up the money-filled trousers of principal shareholders. Does anyone actually think that delivering 1.5GB of data from the domestic interconnect link of the host ISP, via jetstart, to the customer costs Telecom $30, but delivering the same amount of data via jetstart costs $600 (or whatever the jetstream1500 pricing model is, these days) or more? Of course not! It's insane. ISP's make little/zero/negative money from jetstream users. So there's really little incentive to sell the product. I see a few people have dropped it as an offering, and a few more are talking about doing so. Xtra very likely make the same tiny profit (or loss) on this product as any other ISP, but in their case it _doesn't matter_ because Telecom will happily wear the loss/shitty-margin on that product because it lets them rake in money on the jetstart delivery system itself. Telecom are not there to be good for the country, or help the NZ internet flourish. They are there, and 100% concentrating on, enhancing shareholder value. They're very good at this! Have a look at their profit reports, in the middle of an industry downturn, and general economic slump! But definitely there is a downside to their success, and that downside is that takeup of serioius bandwidth over the existing last-mile infrastructure is very stifled by their pricing models. And no-one else gets a look-in on that infrastucture, ever. JSR (P.S. Anyone on here reading this who can think of a financially viable way for me to get even a moderate amount of flate-rate bandwidth from CBD Auckland or one of the major peering points out to my place on this hills in Swanson, please let me know. :) ) -- John S Russell | Smile Chief Engineer - R&D | Nod Attica/Callplus NZ | Build it. - To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog