Often, I have seen overly simplistic perspectives on the levels of service that should be demanded of internet service providers. I’d like to start a discussion on a higher plane. Comments will appear below.
There appear to be a number of people who belive that their internet access should function more like a private line as contrasted with a shared resource. Let’s be clear – $45 per month does not pay for an internet access service that delivers 10 Mbps continuously for all 24 hours in a day.
On the other hand, it seems to me that internet service providers need to be clear in letting consumers know what kind of performance criteria are being used to engineer the customers’ networks.
In the old phone company days, most people simply assumed that the dial tone was always available. But the reality was that the voice network was also a shared resource; not everyone could make a call at the same time. We had various engineering standards that were monitored.
For example, during the busiest 3 months of the year, during the busiest hour of the day, 98.5% of callers were expected to receive dial tone within 3 seconds. Local and long distance circuits were engineered to a certain level of availability.
Are there similar criteria that can be developed for internet access services?
Wasn’t this the justification for economic and technical ITMPs? Or are you talking more about managing the retail customer’s expectations?
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a few random thoughts:
It is interesting that in the wireless space people seem to take it a little more for granted that service quality is going to be variable.
In the telecom days, we used to also always pay higher per-minute fees during peak period (price discrimination is one way to smooth out the demand peaks)
I think your point about service providers being clear is very important. People get upset when the service doesn’t do what they thought it said on the tin.
I can’t help but think that with usage based billing these problems would magically go away. If I was paying incrementally for each GB that suddenly the ISPs would have every incentive to feed me as many GB as I can consume at any time.
That unlimited plans put the incentives of the ISP at odds with those of the user. That we would all be better off if we paid per GB for all bandwidth… provided that the pricing per GB was “reasonable” and had a tendency to decline in price or double in volume over time (like it should) roughly on par with moore’s law. [In addition to average effective speeds, we as a country should be benchmarking ourselves effective price per GB as a metric to judge if we are doing a good job of creating a leading regulatory and competitive environment.]
However, that in practice, ISPs could just as well like to use UBB to raise overall pricing and/or as a lever to squeeze out wholesale providers whom they quite resent.
However, in practice that “congestion” can be used as smokescreen for ISPs to protect their cable, voice, broadcasting businesses, forestalling the obvious threat that a fast/open/neutral internet will eventually cannibalize all of those cash-cow services.
I am sometimes amazed that the current providers would want to keep investing in network capacity at all.