[oclug] rogers EUA

[Matt Rose]

On 20 Mar 2002, Andrew J. Hutton wrote:

> On Wed, 2002-03-20 at 07:15, Brad Barnett wrote:
>
> > Imagine living in a society where 30% of the people were always breaking
> > the law, but were never punished.  Most of these people NEED to break the
> > law to live as well!  Imagine living in that same society, and with one
> > simple slip up, you were thrown in jail for life.
>
> What do you mean imagine?
>
> > This is the state of ISP access in Canada currently.  It needs to be
> > rectified and regulated more strongly than the phone service was.
>
> No, phone providers had assured monopolies in exchange for submitting to
> regulation.  ISP have no such assurances and should not be regulated in
> the same manner.
>
> You the consumer have a choice.  If you want to allow an abusive company
> to purchase your cooperation by subsidizing your net access, you're
> welcome to.  Or you can go with another non-abusive company and pay
> substantially more for your service but not sell out your ideals to do
> it.  The problem is, most people have ideals that can be bought easily
> enough.  If 50% of the Rogers or Sympatico customers went elsewhere,
> then those infrastructure providers would see that cooperating with 3rd
> party service providers could be profitable, as it is you all
> (Canadians) flock to them in droves, why would they ever change?

	I hate to say it, but I agree with Andrew in this case.  There are
plenty of local services that do exactly the same thing as Rogers.
Believe it or not, every major ISP in the area offers high-speed services,
many that don't have the restrictive clauses that Rogers does.  I've had
a server co-located at IStop for a while now, as well as paying Rogers for
connectivity to my house.  Rogers has it's reasons for not allowing you to
run a server (for example: your personal site that is on your rogers
connection gets slashdotted, and your entire neighborhood loses it's
connectivity), and if you don't like Rogers terms, than don't use Rogers.

	I often get the feeling on this list that a lot of people want to
have their cake and eat it to.  They want unlimited bandwidth, unlimited
access, and unlimited transfers, but they don't want to pay market rates
for it.  If you're paying $50/mo for the same service that businesses are
paying upwards of $200 for, you have to think that there's going to be
some restrictions.

	I've often thought of starting a co-operative Internet Access
Provider here in Ottawa, to the point of having a cost breakdown and a
"business plan" (though for a co-op, it's kind of a misnomer), but I
always get the sense that people wouldn't be willing to share the cost of
access equally.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Matt Rose     mattrose at folkwolf.net    Visit my blog!  http://folkwolf.net
He's a benighted skateboarding dog-catcher on a search for his missing
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Random Crime Fighters by http://www.rain-street.org/fightcrime.htm



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