[arin-discuss] ipv6 technology supplier phone bank?

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

Tony Hain wrote:
> Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
>> Paul Vixie wrote:
>>>> Date: Thu, 24 Sep 2009 09:56:15 -0400
>>>> From: alex phillips <highspeedlink at gmail.com>
>>> (alex gave me permission to answer this private e-mail publically.)
>>>
>>>> I must have missed the start of this thread but one of the issues we
>> have
>>>> seen in movement towards IPv6 was not only support but moreover the
>> lack
>>>> of profitable reasons to move to it.
>>> agreed.
>> I disagree with this.  The ISP business is filled with things that
>> providers -have- to do but are not profitable, in fact, completely
>> the opposite.
>>
>> Take e-mail, for example.  Back in 1995 you could actually charge and
>> get money from end-users for e-mail boxes.  Then hotmail came out with
>> it's freebie boxes and customers started demanding that you include
>> e-mail boxes at no extra charge with their service, as well as
>> demanding
>> you include a webmail interface.
>>
>> Then hotmail/google/etc came out with spam filtering that actually
>> worked and now customers not only demand free mailboxes with their
>> dialup/dsl/cable/whatever service, they want them spamfiltered as well
>> as with a webinterface.
>>
>> The history of offering Internet service for money has long been one
>> of hack, hack, hack at the bottom line - there's always someone around
>> the corner ready to undercut you with some new scam.  In fact the only
>> thing that stops it is when the guy around the corner outsmarts
>> himself,
>> for example when Juno/Netzero were offering free dialup
>> accounts and discovered that they were being bled dry by customers who
>> never paid them a dime, never were enticed to upgrade, and ran
>> popup blocker software that blocked all the adverts that were paying
>> for the service.  I have to admit I laughed until milk came out my
>> nose when I saw that one come down.
>>
>> Well I don't know about other ISPs but I can speak for my own and we
>> spend a bundle on mailserver hardware that runs lickity-split to keep
>> up with the demands of the latest spamblock software - but we don't get
>> jack from our customers for it.  We do it because if we didn't we
>> wouldn't have no customers.
>>
>> IPv6 is just the latest thing that ISPs are going to have to do that
>> is going to cost more money, and deliver nothing in exchange. 
> 
> This is the short-sighted view of people that can't see past next quarter.
> Unfortunately most people are in this space, and will run right up to the
> end of the free pool before they acknowledge that they need a plan for the
> following quarter. People that insist on having an extremely short term ROI
> will never understand the concept of avoiding a boxed canyon. 
> 

I've yet to see ROI on our spam filtering and we've been doing it for
something like 8 years, now?  I forget exactly.  ROI must really suck
on that. ;-)

It does give me some small pleasure to think of the millions of spams
that I've sent to the great bit bucket in the sky over that time, though.

Ted


> Tony
> 
> 
>> Internet
>> service has changed over the last 15 years from being a specialty
>> industry that you could charge a nice fat margin on, to a commodity
>> industry that your margins are razor-thin on, and you only survive
>> through volume.  A lot of people, like Alex, and like myself as well,
>> clearly remember the old days and what it used to be like, and while
>> it's fun to sit around electronically swapping stories about the
>> good old days when we could get $20 a month for a 28.8 kilobit
>> dialup connection, and run a modem bank on a T1 in your garage
>> that generated sales of $100K a year for essentially having a
>> huge amount of fun playing with networking toys, the sooner that we
>> all grow up and recognize that those days are gone, and that our
>> industry is all grown up now, the sooner we can get off our collective
>> butts, stop whining that some new regulations are going to cost us
>> money, and get the IPv6 deployment finished and behind us!
>>
>> Anyone who wants to bitch and moan about the cost of IPv6 can go
>> take a trip and talk to the operators of your typical coal-fired
>> electrical power plant about how their going to meet the new carbon cap
>> regulations while still supplying power at the regulated rate that the
>> local PUC's have set for them.  Every other business in every other
>> industry has to deal with expenses that they never asked for that
>> the community lays on them, now grow up and take it like a man!
>> (that's meant figuratively, ladies :-)
>>
>>
>> Ted
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