Quote:
|
Originally Posted by erol
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_ )
|
It is not as tiny as you may at first think. The more that the service is used the more there is need to balance UBRs. Because it takes so few users, particularly 1Mb p2p users who are thrashing their connections, to saturate the upstream channel of a card, it is so easy for all the users on that card to experience problems. What happens then? Many calls to Customer Services and Technical Support complaining of the degraded service. Each and every one of these calls costs NTL to answer them. This has a knock on effect of increasing the queues on the phone for these departments with increased frustration for both the customers and the agents answering the calls. Increased frustration amongst agents leads to the frustration being spread to subsequent callers to those agents and the likelyhood of increased absenteeism amongst the agents. All these items increase the costs of NTL. Frustrated customers with problems are more prone to say "that's it, Ive had enough" and so the churn rate increases and they lose customers that may be spending quite a lot on all the NTL services but leave them all because of their perception of the service levels of the company.
A last analogy for you :
I was on the M1 the other day and was involved in a massive traffic jam. The eventual cause I found to be a very large lorry spanning two lanes with a police escort and travelling very slow. That one lorry was solely responsible for the congestion.