 justbitsMore fiber than ATT can handlePremium
join:2003-01-08
Chicago, IL
 ·AT&T Midwest
·AT&T Yahoo
1 edit | Cars As to be expected, the analogy is conveniently crafted to serve an agenda. Let's consider a different one: ISPs don't provide cars, they provide highways. ISPs don't sell the vehicle that drives on the highway, they charge a per-month toll for using their highways.
Feel free to create your own analogy and equate it to current practices you observe.
ISPs provide the highways, set the toll prices, and set usage limits. It's ok if you drive the speed limit, but only as long as you don't do it for more than 2 hours every day.
ISPs provide side streets, national highways and the vehicles.
ISPs provide side streets, state highways and vehicles. Other national ISPs provide federal interconnects between state highways. Vehicles are irrelevant since everybody that enters the "tollway" is towed at the maximum rate that the tollway moves from each point to point. The only part that matters is the bottleneck... the slowest part of the system is the side streets for the majority of people; it's the "last mile" technology and the artificial speed limits placed upon the "vehicle" (cable, DSL and fiber) that can make a Ferrari perform like a Pinto. In many cases, as the last mile speed limits are increased, the state highways, which have not been upgraded as quickly as demand, are not able to keep up with capacity (demand) during peak hours of the day, so traffic congestion occurs. .....
blah blah blah... the point is that analogies are useful to get a less knowledgeable person to agree with commonly known ideas when the reality is that Internet service providers have no direct analogy to another daily used existing form of business (except maybe the shipping business or maybe to a public utility.) |
