Re: trying to reconcile two threads

[Tony Hansen <tony at att.com>]

I wish it were per-residence pricing. Here, if you want a 2nd (3rd, 4th,
...) IP address, the cable ISP expects you to connect a 2nd (3rd, 4th,
...) cable modem to the cable line. And they then charge additional fees
for each such additional connection.

	Tony Hansen
	tony at att.com

Keith Moore wrote:
> 
> > IP Addresses cannot at once be scarce enough to charge for and
> > non-scarce enough that scarcity is a non-issue.
> 
> IPv4 scarcity is an issue, at least for customers.  Whether it's
> an issue for large ISPs is a different question.
> 
> The cable ISP isn't really charging per-IP addresses; rather it's
> charging per-residence.  The motiviation is not the scarcity of IP
> addresses, but the scarcity of available dollars per customer -
> in other words, they have an assumption that the amount of income they
> can get from residental Internet service is more-or-less a constant
> times the number of residental customers served.
> 
> So they use flat-rate, per-residence pricing to attract the largest
> number of residential customers.  But they get annoyed when the
> service is shared over multiple residences.  They'd get just as
> annoyed if the mechanism were IPv6 instead of NAT.
> 
> Keith