[ih] Secret precedence schemes back then

[Jack Haverty]

On Wed, 2009-01-28 at 14:16 -0800, Mike Padlipsky wrote:
> 'a few hundred 
> meagbytes' certainly seems to me to be a modest demand to make on an
> isp 
> this century 

You can get any capacity you want -- as long as you want to pay the
monthly fee.  Well, almost - it tops out at 1250MB/day for the "Business
service".   The 21st century version of SneakerNet is sending 4GB+ flash
drives; with 3 day postal service you get the same throughput -
1250MB/day, at a total cost of less than $0.20/day.   Sad.

I have the "home" (lowest) level of service, which allows 200MB per day
(sorry, used to be 150, they increased it I guess).

See
http://www.hughes.com/HUGHES/rooms/displaypages/layoutinitial?pageid=fairaccess
if you're curious.

I'm actually comparatively well off with 200MB/day and 800 kb/sec
download at the cost of a few hundred up front for the equipment and
$60/month.  Many people here are on dialup, and the phone lines are bad
enough that you get 24 kb/sec on a good (i.e., dry) day.  If your house
is in the trees, satellite doesn't work.

So, this ISP uses cost as the means for dealing with different types of
traffic.  You can send anything you like, but some kinds of traffic will
cost you more.  The "precedence" is set by the user, making the decision
of what kind of stuff to send.  Send too much and *all* your traffic
gets steerage-class service for the next 24 hours.

Wildblue's policy is interesting.  They have a similar threshold scheme,
but implemented using a rolling 30 day window.  When you exceed the cap,
you're throttled down until that 30-day window sum drops below the
threshold.  So, if you (or your brand new computer) downloads enough
stuff to exceed the threshold today, your service might be throttled for
*a month* - until that big download number falls out of the rolling
window.

>From a user's perspective, it's mandatory to find every piece of
software on all your computers or Internet-connected devices that has
any "automatic update" feature and disable it.  Also turn off any
automatic multimedia features, which seem to be increasingly popular on
web sites these days.  Not always easy.

Imagine in The Old Days -- if you FTPed a large enough file, the
Internet would shut your host off for the next 24 hours, sending Source
Quench packets of course.  It would have been fascinating to implement
that in the core gateways and watch the fur fly (from a distance...)  We
never thought of it.  It wouldn't have been all that difficult after we
got the gateways all talking to a NOC.

Hmmm, Dave probably tried it in the Fuzzies...more secrets perhaps.

It will be interesting to see what the new (US) administration's "rural
broadband" thrust does to make this situation better.  I'll volunteer as
a beta tester!

/Jack