[IP] ALSO MUST READ NYTimes.com: Charging by the Byte to Curb Internet Traffic "People seem to be missing the point."

[David Farber <dave@farber.net>]

________________________________________
From: Andrew W. Donoho [awd@DDG.com]
Sent: Wednesday, June 18, 2008 2:44 PM
To: David Farber
Subject: Re: [IP] Re:  ALSO MUST READ  NYTimes.com: Charging by the Byte to Curb Internet Traffic "People seem to be missing the point."

For IP:

On Jun 15, 2008, at 14:09, Bob Frankston wrote:

> Cellular phones are a good example of creating scarcity – why do
> they have to go through the constrictions of towards? Apple was able
> to support 10,000 MAC (Mac MACs?) at WWDC at Moscone using 802.11
> without creating billable events.




What happens at WWDC is a very different scenario than what happens in
a "last mile" consumer situation. For example, Apple is charging each
attendee about $1,200-1,300 to attend. With 5,400 paid attendees,
that's real money (approximately $7M). At the conference, Apple ran a
NOC with what appeared to be 2 shifts of 3 network engineers. The
iPhones, notorious sources of excessive DHCP allocation requests, were
segregated to their own network. Local downloads of large files (a 1.3
GB SDK) were restricted to a wireline (100baseT) network. In other
words, this network that dynamically supported 10,000 some odd devices
was very carefully engineered. (It also was set up and torn down very
quickly.)

Hence, while the $7M covered many costs in addition to the network and
WWDC is also probably subsidized by Apple, a significant billable
event did occur. The situation is not comparable.

Andrew

____________________________________
Andrew W. Donoho
awd@DDG.com, PGP Key ID: 0x81D0F250
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responsibility."
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