Re: [Asrg] Re: Tragedy of the Commons

On Thu, 20 Mar 2003 05:31:59 CST, Scott A Crosby said:

> Thus, I've still thought that the mantra of 'stealing my bandwidth' is
> an argument I cannot understand, because of how weak it is. I have no
> idea who made it, or why they focussed on the absolute cheapest
There's two corner cases that you need to consider here:

1) Your note arrived at my laptop over a last-hop link over a 44K modem link
(poor copper out to my place).  If your note had been a 200K spam-gram,
it would have delayed the arrival of something legitimate that I was *waiting*
for by some number of seconds.  Also note that bandwidth used by inbound
mail is bandwidth I can't use to check www.weather.com (which is a bit
important, due to heavy rain this part of Virginia has a flash flood watch
in place).

If I have to upgrade mu last-hop link to ADLS or cablemodem, that will be
a hit of some $50/month.  It's one thing to decide spending $50/mo because
you'd like to websurf faster.  It's another thing to find out that you no
longer have that $50/mo to spend on other things because you can't cope with
spam anymore.

2) Dark fiber is cheap.  Bandwidth is cheap.  However, we recently kicked
our campus backbone to gig-E and our main off-campus pipe to OC12.  If we
need to upgrade the off-campus to 2xOC12 or OC48, that is going to *COST*
a pretty chunk of change, as we'd need to upgrade routers, and NetworkVirginia
would have to upgrade routers, etc etc....

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