If someone calls up for help with a
configuration problem, that may be six month's of
profits from that customer eaten up in the cost of
answering the call.
That is because the current Internet pricing has been
screwed-up from the start. LD settlements between
telcos are fully applicable to ISPs but have never
been instituted. Internet has been subsidised for
years by the local access but now as wireline declines
everybody starts feeling the pain. Usage based billing
and inter-ISP settlements start showing up lately and
they fit well for the Internet. Otherwise transit
providers as well as heavy users rip all the benefits.
Peter Sherbin
--- John C Klensin <john-ietf(_at_)jck(_dot_)com> wrote:
--On Thursday, March 30, 2006 19:30 +1200 Andrew
McGregor
<andrew(_at_)indranet(_dot_)co(_dot_)nz> wrote:
Your ISP charges you 9 times as much for IPv4
addresses as
they do for bandwidth? I'd recommend switching
ISPs. All
the ones I've seen charge a
small premium for additional IP space, but it's
never more
than about a 50% premium.
Not if you don't live in the US. There are no
options here
that are at all cheap. Usually you get a flat
"we don't do
that". And they don't do v6 either.
If it makes you feel better (it probably won't), in
much of the
US, the story from the ISPs goes like this:
* We don't do that on our residential service, if
you
want _any_ IPv4 addresses assigned to you, you need
to
buy the commercial service.
* The commercial service costs around ten times as
much
as the residential one for similar bandwidth _less_
service (often no free email, free web hosting,
"user
protection" software tools, etc.)
* If you want more than one address on the
commercial
service, you will pay some small incremental charge
for
it. But the real incremental charge starts at
address
number 1 and is tied up with the "type of service"
shift.
However, we need to keep something else in mind,
which
Iljitsch's note hints at. If I'm an ISP trying to
sell a
low-end service to low-end customers at a low (but
still
profitable) price, I need to cut customer support
costs to the
absolute minimum. If someone calls up for help with
a
configuration problem, that may be six month's of
profits from
that customer eaten up in the cost of answering the
call. To
that sort of ISP, NATs, and ISP-supplied routers
that support
NATs, have a _huge_ advantage, which is that all
supported
customer LANs are identical -- same design, same
exact internal
addresses, etc. That is very important from a
support
standpoint -- length of calls, skill levels
required, ability to
construct clear FAQs and avoid calls entirely, and
so on.
For the community, there are elements of "you get
what you pay
for" in this. And, for the ISPs, unless we figure
out ways to
provide the same level of support convenience with
public
addresses, we will certainly see NATs with IPv6 as
well as IPv4.
john
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