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Google Fiber now allows servers for non-commercial use

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Re: Google Fiber now allows servers for non-commercial use

#31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised to hear that. I've never had a problem with an ISP blocking SMTP.

Inbound on port 25? I know my ISP does

Come to think of it, I've never looked at inbound stuff. You'd think outbound would be where all the spam problems come from, though.

Re: Google Fiber now allows servers for non-commercial use

#32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because not all internet is equal. Most ISP's give home users a significant discount on their service, in exchange for agreeing to certain assumptions about their use. This is done because most home users could never afford internet, if they had to pay for full price. For example, in this area, a dedicated 20x20mb connection to the internet costs about $500USD per month (Metro Ethernet). You can do almost anything yo…

Sounds like false advertising to me...

Imagine if cars were sold this way:

"Unlimited high-speed Italian sports-car, leases starting at only $250/mo! By the way, we're also giving keys to your neighbors, and if you drive the car too often we're going to deactivate your copy of the keys"

Re: Google Fiber now allows servers for non-commercial use

#33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inbound on port 25? I know my ISP does

Come to think of it, I've never looked at inbound stuff. You'd think outbound would be where all the spam problems come from, though.

If you block 25 outbound, people's mail clients (Outlook, Thunderbird, etc) could not deliver mail to servers that don't run SSL or TLS (465, 587)

Re: Google Fiber now allows servers for non-commercial use

#34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Come to think of it, I've never looked at inbound stuff. You'd think outbound would be where all the spam problems come from, though.

If you block 25 outbound, people's mail clients (Outlook, Thunderbird, etc) could not deliver mail to servers that don't run SSL or TLS (465, 587)

Lots of ISPs does this. They require you to relay via their SMTP-server.

Re: Google Fiber now allows servers for non-commercial use

#35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because not all internet is equal. Most ISP's give home users a significant discount on their service, in exchange for agreeing to certain assumptions about their use. This is done because most home users could never afford internet, if they had to pay for full price. For example, in this area, a dedicated 20x20mb connection to the internet costs about $500USD per month (Metro Ethernet). You can do almost anything yo…

Sounds like false advertising to me...

I'm not sure what would be preferable. They could sell you metered bandwidth; but everyone always complains about metered bandwidth, and no one wants to accidentally have their 14 year old nephew who comes to visit for a week blow out your caps and cost you tons of money because they left Bittorrent seeding a bunch of popular movies.

They could just sell you lower bitrates. But then everyone would suffer, as they wouldn't get the short bursts of quick bandwidth they need to browse the web or download files.

Or they could do what they're doing, which is sell under separate residential and business plans. The residential plans are sold under the assumption that you'll be using them for ordinary personal use by you and your family, and that you're not going to build a data center in your basement and start reselling bandwidth to people colocating servers in your basement.

"Business" and "residential" have fairly well established meanings. There are already plenty of zoning laws that make business vs. residential, or residential vs. commercial vs. industrial distinctions. Selling a residential plan that includes in its terms of service "you may not use this for commercial purposes" is not unreasonable.

Now, I do object to residential plans that unilaterally block ports without recourse, or disallow any running of "servers", as there are lots of valid reasons why someone would run a server for personal, as opposed to commercial, purposes. But I can't find a good way to allow everyone to share a larger pool of bandwidth at a lower price for home use, without allowing some people to take advantage of it for profit, without making the business/residential distinction.

And sure, there will always be grey areas. What if you work remotely? What about personal uses that are abusive? These are things that need to be dealt with on a case by case basis, or spelled out clearly in the ToS. You can't really include the entire complexity of the ToS in a single ad, so I'm not sure you can claim false advertising just because there are a few terms in the ToS which weren't unambiguously stated in any "advertising" about the service.

Re: Google Fiber now allows servers for non-commercial use

#36
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like false advertising to me...

Let's just imagine for a moment what "truthful advertising" would look like. Probably something like "1 Mbps for $50/month"; when ISPs are already offering 15 Mbps for $50 today there's no way to get there from here.

I had always assumed the advertised speeds were likely (according to an unregulated definition), but not guaranteed. Even if the ISP gave me an SLA (maybe they did?), they couldn't make promises regarding the performance of any external network anyway.

Maybe they should be required to report a sharing ratio in addition to bandwidth and latency within the ISP's own network. Any thoughts on how that would look, or what formula might make sense?

Re: Google Fiber now allows servers for non-commercial use

#37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because not all internet is equal. Most ISP's give home users a significant discount on their service, in exchange for agreeing to certain assumptions about their use. This is done because most home users could never afford internet, if they had to pay for full price. For example, in this area, a dedicated 20x20mb connection to the internet costs about $500USD per month (Metro Ethernet). You can do almost anything yo…

Sounds like false advertising to me...

How does no one understand that what he's saying is that the product regular ISPs market is 'internet w/ fine print (i.e. no servers, etc)', versus uncapped, open 20x20mb line, without fine print?

The point is exactly that everything advertised by Comcast comes with an asterisk and fine print which you must agree to, to use their service (making it not false advertising).

Re: Google Fiber now allows servers for non-commercial use

#38
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's just imagine for a moment what "truthful advertising" would look like. Probably something like "1 Mbps for $50/month"; when ISPs are already offering 15 Mbps for $50 today there's no way to get there from here.

The fact that ISPs have oversold their services and painted themselves into a corner with misleading, if not downright false advertising is entirely their problem. Get a law passed and let them whine about it and then deal with it.

So, what would you prefer? Would you prefer fixed lower bandwidths; everyone gets exactly 1 Mbps all the time, for the same price you're paying now for 50 Mbps? Then you're going to have a ton of bandwidth going unused all the time, while everything will load slower.

Or would you prefer the famously unpopular bandwidth caps and overage charges?

Saying "unlimited bandwidth" but selling it as a residential (ie, non-commercial) plan seems like a fairly reasonable solution to the problem. It gives actual non-commercial residential customers what they want, the ability to have spikes of high bitrate transfers without having to worry about overage charges or being throttled, while actually allowing that pool of bandwidth to be shared reasonably fairly.

The problem is if you divide shared resources like upstream bandwidth (or in the case of hosting, resource like disk or RAM) in precise amounts such that you could support 100% of the capacity you sold at any time, you would be wasting the vast majority of your resources. Most customers can't predict in advance exactly how much they need, and are quite averse to any kind of overage charges.

Now, for some (mostly business) customers and workloads, precise metering works well, and for some completely dedicated bandwidth works well. But for the average residential customer, who has extremely spiky bandwidth demands and is quite averse to overage charges, neither of those work well.

Re: Google Fiber now allows servers for non-commercial use

#39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would expect this to be to allow market segmentation and price discrimination. A business might be willing and able to pay more for internet service than an individual, but less likely so if they could get the same thing for the individual's price.

I'm sure this is coming with Fiber. But for early stage products (technically Fiber only has three "customers" right now-KC, Austin and Provo), one of the best things you can do to encourage uptake is keep your pricing drop-dead simple. I think they are just trying to balance that simplicity with keeping it fair by not allowing commercial servers. A couple businesses taking advantage of a system that wasn't built for…

Google is smart enough to write an equation that says what usage patterns are too much to be fair usage of their network for $70/month. Then they could (in theory) publish it as part of their Terms and Conditions rather than have a "non-commercial" clause. I wonder how that would work in practice...

Re: Google Fiber now allows servers for non-commercial use

#40
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like false advertising to me...

Imagine if cars were sold this way: "Unlimited high-speed Italian sports-car, leases starting at only $250/mo! By the way, we're also giving keys to your neighbors, and if you drive the car too often we're going to deactivate your copy of the keys "

Of course comparing apples to oranges leads to absurdities; not all things have the same attributes as all other things.
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