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Originally Posted by towny
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.
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All anlogies have thier limits and can be pushed too far. However the point is in my analogy terms is that the 'size of your car' realtes to the 'size of your connection' (which tier of service you are on - 150k,600k or 1Mbs). I only introduced the idea of different size cars (to match the different sized 'connection') because I felt that was where ian would go next. It was probably a mistake to do so. The point is though that 'Mr Warez Monkey' can not be the equivalent of a 40 ton truck in terms of my analogy, because NTL do not offer 40Mbs connections. Simple as that really.
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Originally Posted by towny
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.
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Like I say all anlogies have their limits. Their real use is to highlight certain points to help in understanding / conceptualising an idea that is trying to be conveyed. However if the person 'listening' does not want to understand then they are bad, because they can allways be attacked because no analogy is a 100% representation. It does not try to be, just to highlight the point.
Maybe a better way to have tried to explain my point would have been to have suggested that a 500kbs user is half as affected by congestion than a 1mbs user, because they can only do half as much to start with.
[snip] *
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Originally Posted by towny
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.
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I understand you are happy at 'these peoples' illegal activites, but illegal activites should be dealt with by the _law_. You don't stop shop lifting by charging an 'entrance fee' to shopping centres. You stop it by arresting people.
There are already ISP's that charge on usage. To make all ISp's charge on useage would be a mamoth undermining of the potential of the Internet to be useful to people (doing _legal_ things). This is because the incremental cost of _provision_ of the service (IE that cost to NTL that goes up when it is used more is _tiny_ in relation to the fixed cost _of provision_ )
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Originally Posted by towny
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.
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Now you have serious misread and misunderstood me here.
Its not that the cost to the customer is fixed, it's that the cost of _provision_ of the service (ie the cost to NTL to provided it) is almost entirely fixed (which is why the vast majority of net connection around the worls are fixed price, btw.)
This was exactly the argument we used when arguing for flat rate dial up and eventualy Oftel agreed and mandated a wholesale flat rate dial product on BT and flat rate dail up access in the UK was born. If anything the incremental costs on dial up were higher and less prone to halving every 12months (as the incremntal cost of provsion of BB halves) yet still the argument was won and sustainable unmetered dial up was a boon to internet access in the UK
(as an aside soon after it was mandated on BT, the cablecos also introduced it, as unlike anyone else they could have done at any time previously but did not. Remarkable situation with BT driving the competition vs companies that were designed to drive competition with BT)
If you read back my posts Towny I think you will have to agree that I have always been clear that it was 'cost of provision' and not 'cost to customer' that I was tlaking about ? An appolgy is optional
* I was just going to ignore this because it has been covered time and again. Try the link to the anticap site I provided.