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Originally Posted by erol
Again in analogy terms you could argue that big cars cause more congestion than small ones - and you would be right, but in turn small cars are more able to nip in and out than big cars (or use bikes if you prefer) and thus the effect of the congestion on them is proportionately less that someone in the big car.
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This analogy falls flat in two ways that I can see.
First, have you ever been on a motorway in very heavy traffic with lorries filling two of the three lanes? Mr Warez Monkey is like a 40 ton truck complete with extra trailer, and there are so many of them on the road, that even if I'm in a Smart car I have limited room to manoeuvre around them.
Second, smaller cars are by no means guaranteed to be able to make best use of small gaps in the traffic. Small cars generally have small engines. It's the Jaguars and BMWs that have the power to exploit gaps in the traffic flow. And so at this point the analogy breaks down all together.
A contended service relies on the 20 or so people to whom the same chunk of bandwidth has been sold,
not all trying to use it at once. It would be reasonable to say that, in any 24 hour period, my fair usage of the system would therefore amount to 1/20th of the time ... 72 minutes of download, if used in one constant block. This is a very rough sketch of the principle, but hopefully you get the idea. I accept this, because I accept the economics of it. If I want truly limitless service unipeded by other users, I would have to pay a lot more for it.
Now, I
don't want a capped or metered service, but I don't want high petrol prices either. I just have to accept that fuel duty is the weapon of choice in a fight to reduce traffic on our congested roads. Similarly, if there is no effective way to beat the warez monkeys, then it is not unreasonable to discuss pricing them out of their
illegal activities. This does not have to mean 'all pints are £50' as was suggested earlier; perhaps a pricing scale that only gets punitive with very excessive use.
Yes, the cost of using the service is the same regardless of how heavily you use it, but to make this the basis of a campaign to retain flat-rate broadband internet at all costs completely fails to take aaccount of basic world economics. It just aint like that.