[governance] Not Network Neutrality: Bandwidth pricing is the

[Carlos Afonso]

We are of course talking about final users (consumers, especially home 
consumers) who in general cannot dream of paying $6,000 per year to be 
fully connected at T1 speeds. We are talking about the victims of 
arbitrary measures by operators of ADSL and similar services.

In Brazil we are mobilizing consumers' associations and consumer rights' 
institutes to provide responses to these abuses. Consumer laws in Brazil 
are good, but are worth nothing without mobilization. IDEC 
(http://www.idec.org.br/english.asp), a leading, independent consumer 
rights institute here, for example, is working with Rits and CGI.br (we 
are providing them with technical support) to run independent tests of 
such violations by ADSL providers. Preliminary findings just corroborate 
what I have already said regarding arbitrary tampering with traffic.

Regarding actual speeds, other tests show that in general the link to 
the "tier one" servers (the servers providing content by the ADSL 
operator) are at or very near contract speeds. Content tampering and 
speed limiting is done in the link to the outer tier. Naturally...

frt rgds

--c.a.

John Levine wrote:
>> I agree. I am willing to pay but I'd like to know what I get for my 
>> money. It is about time that ISPs are required to deliver a specified 
>> minimum bandwidth instead of getting away with vague "up to" 
>> circumscriptions that leaves customers without any rights.
> 
> I have a connection that is reliably 1.544Mb each way.  It costs me
> about $500/mo.  Similar connections at similar prices are widely
> available in North America, and I'd be surprised if you couldn't find
> comparable service (perhaps E1 2Mb rather than T1 1.5Mb) in Europe at
> similar high prices.
> 
> Guaranteed bandwidth is expensive to provide, and in most cases not
> very useful to end users.  When you say you're willing to pay, how
> much?  Twice what you pay now?  Ten times?
> 
> R's,
> John
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