Date: Wed, 20 Mar 1996 11:32:16 -0600 (CST) From: Joe Greco <jgreco@brasil.moneng.mei.com> To: witr@rwwa.com (Robert Withrow) Cc: hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: hackers-digest V1 #986 Message-ID: <199603201732.LAA29744@brasil.moneng.mei.com> In-Reply-To: <199603201329.IAA13281@spooky.rwwa.com> from "Robert Withrow" at Mar 20, 96 08:29:25 am
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> > Of course, getting the ISP to let you bring dry wire and your modems > > into their facility is another matter. You probably will have as much > > luck getting them to let you use one of those 20mile/10Mbit spread spectrum > > transmitters that make the connections over the air. > > That is the real problem. Their bread and butter is 9600 baud > internal fax-modem Pee Cee users, and they seem to have very > little interest in affordable bandwidth of the kind I want to > have. Probably has something to do with the fact that that same bandwidth that you want to be "affordable" costs THEM an arm and a leg :-) Your typical small ISP works on the basis of bringing an expensive T1 into their office (long distance), probably for around $4000/month, and breaking it up into dozens of circuits (let's say 40 $100/month dedicated 28.8K connections). That's an overcommit situation, but it works as long as not all of the connections are yabbering away at full speed simultaneously. It even works in the case where a percentage of them ARE yabbering away at full speed 24/7, but not all of them, because you would be swamping your network connection. Your typical big ISP does the same thing by bringing in a T3 and splitting it up into fifty T1's. Now how do you price a connection with the potential ability to singlehandedly swamp your own network link? You could put instantaneous bandwidth limits on it... say, 'well you can't go faster than 128kb/s' - but people won't like that because they WANT the speed. You could put average bandwidth limits on it... say 'well, you can't exceed 100MB of traffic per hour', but people won't really like that either. You could bill them $2000/month. There goes "low cost". It's not a matter of bread and butter. It's a matter of "bandwidth is expensive". An ISP will happily sell you any circuit you can imagine, as long as the price allows the ISP to buy the resources to continue providing a reasonable level of service to all their customers. ... Joe ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Joe Greco - Systems Administrator jgreco@ns.sol.net Solaria Public Access UNIX - Milwaukee, WI 414/546-7968
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