From: John C Klensin <john-ietf(_at_)jck(_dot_)com>
...
(1) As others have pointed out, the knowledge/skill level of a
typical ISP seems to be on a rapid downslope with no end in
sight. ...
...
* The difference between those "business rates" and
whatever you are paying are mostly determined by a "what
they can get away with" mentality -- we know what the
marginal operational costs are. If those prices stay
high, it is either because there is no alternate
provider, or because there is (illegal) price-fixing
going on, or because no one sees a business opportunity
by operating a business service at a lower margin.
The second segment seems to ignore the implications of the first segment.
The marginal cost difference between "business" and "residental" is
zilch only if you have the same people running things and interacting
with customers. Front line tech-support droids that are dumber than
the Windows boxes of residential customer cost a lot less than humans.
If your front line support people know have a clue about the LSRR IP
option, then either your rates are higher than $30/month or you have
customers like us who do most of our own support (and cost our employers
or ourselves a lot more than $30/month for that support).
Many
of us can remember when the solution to "no viable
Internet dialup service" was "go form a consortium with
a few friends"...
There are some surviving ISPs that were started and still run that way
least in geographical areas I know about. Their prices seem to be
higher than the organizations in that race to maximum stupidity.
It is not a coincidence that they have very few internal spam problems.
They are never blacklisted, not even by the second tier spam blacklists,
even when they rent straight modem dial-up ports. (Third tier DNS
blacklists are kooky 32-bit random number generators.)
perhaps it is time to do something
similar with DSL.
I know people who have done that sort of thing with DSL and 802.11.
However, I fear that idea is generally killed for now by the fact
that IP bandwidth pricing is set by those outfits racing for ultimate
stupidity. They see IP bandwidth as a loss-leader.
Or maybe we would rather whine than
do something, perhaps because what we have been fed is "good
enough".
Until people like the individual complaining here that his cable-modem
is listed as a dynamic address are willing to pay for the costs of
real IP service, including the costs of doing more against your spamming
customers than asking blacklists to list your own addresses, there's
not much hope.
We could accept the fact that people who are not willing pay more than
$10-30/month are not interested in the Internet and stop listen to
their whining. Detroit laughs as people who expect to get Mercedes
for Chevrolet prices. Why can't we laugh at people who expect to get
real IP service for $10-30/month, or least stop taking their demands
literally?
If cable-modem IP is good enough for you, then you're not interested
in multihoming or even running your own VoIP system. You might be
happy to have your phones connected to the email and web browser
demark/appliance maintained by your telco/cableco, but you're not really
interested in the Internet. You lack the interest to be allowed to
run your own servers for anything.
Vernon Schryver vjs(_at_)rhyolite(_dot_)com