Comment by doctorless | Hacker News Reader

Comment by doctorless | Hacker News Reader

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Both are also independently contentious battles, too. We can’t treat bits agnostically; otherwise we have to accept DDoS attacks and do nothing to route around them/block bad nodes. We can treat opinions agnostically, until said opinions/speech start to infringe on the freedom of others. But we’ve always had a struggle in drawing that line. Likewise, what constitutes a bad node, ultimately? From the perspective of an ISP, that opinion ranges from the aforementioned DDoS, to Netflix for consuming the majority of their bandwidth. What about end users? Their opinions can differ too. A heavy torrent user can weigh down a local hub. Should an ISP just let them? The internet is far more a finite resource than some people are willing to accept.

I'd be totally fine if we were charged like datacenters. e.g.: pay for a minimum of 10mbps, but burstable to 100mbps, and if you average over 10mbps/mo, pay some fee. It's typically different, but it ends up being a few TB/mo of traffic at the most absolute 'base' plan.

Then you can pay more for "unmetered" 10mbps, 100mbps, 1000mbps, 10000mbps, etc...

There's also plans for "minimum + burst" e.g.: 20mbps->200mbps, 50mbps->300mbps, 100mbps->1000mbps, so on and so forth.

I think this is a perfectly acceptable method of billing and I really wish we could just use this. As, in effect, if you pay for the '100mbps->1000mbps,' this translates too... you get 1000mbps at all times you use the internet, but you get 100mbps/mo worth of bandwidth.

That translates to ~8.75TB/mo of bandwidth or,

  ((100*24*30)/1024)/8

(someone please correct me if I'm very wrong here. I worked at a webhost several years ago and this was basically our pricing model.)

I agree with what you say, except "opinions/speech start to infringe on the freedom of others"

Speech can't infringe on someone else's freedom.

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