Re: My comments to the press about RFC 2474

[Phillip Hallam-Baker <[e-mail]>]

There is a fundamental problem with the way that Internet services are sold.

At present I have two companies that would like to sell me 'higher
speed' Internet service but I have absolutely no way to evaluate their
claims. In particular I have no way to know if changing provider or
paying my current provider more would make my existing applications
run any faster or better.

What I do know is that my Vonage service was fine when I first
subscribed but is now unusable. I have no way to know if changing
provider would change that. If I could be sure that one of the
carriers did not have a vested interest in sabotaging my VOIP service
from competing providers, that would be reason enough to switch.

One would like to sell me higher speed but will not raise their 250Gb
monthly bandwidth cap even if I pay more for the service.


I am quite willing to pay for higher bandwidth Internet. But at the
moment I have no idea what the value proposition that is being
presented to me in those offers. And if I don't know I am pretty sure
that Mrs B. Muggins has not got a clue.


So in my view the problem here is that when I pay for an X Mb/sec
connection at the moment I have no real way of knowing whether that is
really X Mb/sec all the time or X/n Mb/sec when I am using a service
that competes with my carrier.

There are two ways that this can get sorted. The first is that the
carriers can work out a way to address the issue and explain to the
customer what they are really offering. The second is regulation.

I really don't see why a regulation need amount to anything more than
the fairness in pricing rules that have been applied to other
industries who have proved to be unable to get it together on their
own. If I pay for X Mb/sec thats what I should get.