[governance] Not Network Neutrality: Bandwidth pricing is the

[John Levine]

>> 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?

> I wouldn't mind a range of bandwidth but the bottom of it should be
> defined.

I think it is defined, it's basically zero.  You get the maximum
divided by however many people are sharing your connection, which
varies by time of day, network topology in your neighborhood, what's
on TV, whatever.

> Business related contracts is an entirely different matter.

There's no contract for my service, it's a regular item off the
telco's price list.  But since it's two-way with no multiplexing
between me and the router and a relatively uncongested backbone link,
it's not cheap.  For $50/mo I could get cable service from Time Warner
with average typical download speeds much faster than 1.5Mb with lower
worst case.

But this begs the question.  How much more would you pay to know that
your minimum is 100k bits or whatever?  My impression is that most
residential users wouldn't pay extra for guaranteed bandwidth so
there's no incentive to provide it.

R's,
John




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