I would say that somewhere in the vicinity of 80-90% of my data access is for work, on a mobile plan that is paid for by my employer. This means that I am more than happy to have my employer fork out extra, say $10 a month more to have priority data access on congested nodes. This deviates from the current service offerings of a large number of ISPs that punish users of bandwidth hungry services, such as bit torrent, without giving anyone the ability to easily raise their connection priority above that of other users. Additionally, there is no reward for being a user that doesn't use services such as these.
Further refining this offering you could even pay a lesser amount, say $5 and have the priority access to only a selected number of sites, say your employers domains, thus covering business access as required. This solution would obviously be harder to implement than blanket priority for a given user.
What are your thoughts on this?
This is very similar to Diffserv. The problem being that you're paying for *comparative* service, i.e. "I want better service than that guy" as opposed to a particular level of service. What happens if everyone in that area is a business user?
ReplyDeleteThat'd be fine, then you understand that the access will collapse back to the current best effort solution. Currently there is no way to differentiate user access at all.
ReplyDeletehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_neutrality
ReplyDeleteYour idea sucks.
Thank you for that very constructive reply.
ReplyDeleteConsider the introduction of 4G networks, this effectively gives the users that can afford to upgrade early a differentiated service. What I am proposing is no different. Are you against new services being introduced?
Additionally, the idea that treating every packet the same is the best way to serve the internet is silly. Real Time communications require differentiated processing from general TCP traffic such as a file transfer in order to function optimally.