Re: [Sheflug] E-Petition for Unusual ADSL Business Practices

[Lesley Binks <lesley.binks@xxxxxxxxx>]

Richard Ibbotson wrote:
> David
> 
>> <off topic>
>>
>> Personally, I'm in favour of capping and restrictions (ducks
>> incoming muck and bullets), especially on what are designated
>> 'domestic' lines. I'm a fairly low user at home. 
> 
> There are domestic users like yourself who aren't all that bothered.  
> There's also thousands of people like me who have to have 1 to 8 
> M-bit on a domestic line to do any work or stay alive due to various 
> personal circumstances.  An ideal for me would be 50 to 100 Gb of 
> download capacity each month but I can get by on 20Gb.  There's a lot 
> of people like me who need this.   Daily working practices are moving 
> away from the office to the home.  The dark dungeon at Attercliffe is 
> beginning to disappear.


I have an old low-speed ADSL 512/256 account which is unlimited but low
speed.  I suspect I could significantly increase my download speed by a
factor of 8 to 14) and double my upload speed if I chose to move.

I am however ambivalent about capped bandwidth usage.  On the one hand I
would probably get by with quite a light bandwidth usage and it might be
attractive if I could be sure I wasn't contending with online game
players but I don't see any ISP guaranteeing that with anything but
their most expensive options.

To be honest I could probably get by on 20GB a month but I think capping
throttles VOIP.  Not that I use it at the moment but I can easily
envisage situations where VOIP would be very useful for a home worker.

> 
> I think that ISPs go on about peer to peer use of the internet and 
> point to that as being something to do with excessive use.  Quite a 
> few Microsoft based computers work this way.  It's not just the 
> minority Linux community in the UK.  The whole point of ADSL is that 
> you can do what you like with it (as long as you don't blow up parts 
> of our cities with it).  It was never designed to be capped or 
> blocked in some way which is what the UK ISPs are doing to it.
I used BitTorrent on an XP box to download SuSE recently.  I was so
disappointed in it that I haven't used it since.  I am not hugely
impressed by peer-to-peer networks.  They seem to take an awful long
time to get anything down.  wget works fine for me.
> 
> In the UK if you are involved in a business activity which might be 
> something to do with consumer law or retail law then you have to 
> explain yourself before you sell anything to anyone.  This means that 
> suddenly changing something isn't going to help you to win friends 
> and influence people.  Specially if your ISP suddenly kicks you out 
> for complaining about their lack of service and OTELO sit there and 
> do nothing.  Which they do.
The ombudsmen can be particularly useless at dealing with specific
problems.  The electricity one wasn't too bad when I had problems with
NPower but I did involve my MP and people I knew in the power
distribution game which gave me a bit of weight.

Otelo can ask the ISP, or whatever it is, to stop doing what they are
doing but there's not much power to throw a spanner in the works if they
are not heeded.  Simple cost-benefit analysis shows that it's probably
worth the ISP dishing out rubbish because no-one is going to complain or
hurt them while they continue to do it.  Plus you have to wait about
three months to allow the company to correct matters - which is
ridiculous in my opinion because it means three months of a
multi-million pound company screwing up an individual's life or a small
company's life before anything actually starts to get done.

I don't know enough about ADSL technology to be able to say that we
shouldn't have to pay bandwidth charges but the bandwidth charging model
has been around in server-land for quite a while.  Surely there are
physical limitations that mean, if someone is playing an online game and
others are streaming down video, then the physical line capacity is
going to get soaked?  If that is going to create degradation,
interruption or denial of service to other consumers then how are ISP's
to get round that without charging for bandwidth?

Furthermore, given  ADSL goes through a local BT exchange, there's
nothing to stop another ISP providing an unlimited service that soaks
into the lines we're all carried on anyway?

Regards

Lesley




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