[Cialug] Mediacom fscking with web access?

[Jonathan C. Bailey]

I think that sums up their thought process... I can see the DNS redirects, but I don't see how it could *ever* be a good idea to mess with 404s ("I went to see billy bob's Myspace page and I got a damn Mediacom screen! Myspace is broken! asdhioqwerhio132e@!3!1!!!!").

-Jon

----- Original Message -----
From: "Josh More" <morej at alliancetechnologies.net>
To: cialug at cialug.org, tdwalton at gmail.com
Sent: Tuesday, September 8, 2009 12:20:34 PM GMT -06:00 US/Canada Central
Subject: Re: [Cialug] Mediacom fscking with web access?

I think that the vast majority of Medicom's customers don't care at all.
 I don't think that there is any backlash worth considering.

If Mediacom works the way we all expect, they keep a few people.  Let's
be generous and say 10.  Assuming that they get $50/month that's $6000 /
year that they get to keep.

If Mediacom does redirection in a way that is more user friendly, they
reduce call volume.  Assuming an average call worker gets $30k/year,
which gives a total employee cost (benefits, training, etc) of
$60k/year.  So, they only need to save that one person, one tenth of
their time to make up for the few people that would be lost due to
change.

Then, when you add on the possibility that a change could not only save
them call volume but also bring in ad revenue, as well as the liklihood
that the people that would move due to being upset won't actually move
because Mediacom is the only game in town, backlash is utterly
irrelevant.

It's more likely that they turned the "feature" off because it
interfered with an internal process, some business client or somehow
otherwise didn't work the way that they expected.  Remember, Mediacom
isn't in the Internet game because they love the freedom of information
and RFCs.  They're in it because they have a lock on people via cable
and want to make more money.  They target people who want a relatively
reliable service for a relatively low price.  They make their money by
charging a monthly fee and incuring as little monthly cost as possible,
which means supporting a handful of applications and operating systems
in "normal" use only.  Anyone on this mailing list is already outside of
Mediacom's target market.  Everyone else likely won't notice a change.

(As an aside, this is also why net neutrality is a dead issue.  There
just aren't enough people around that care about freedom to outweigh the
volume of people that just care about "good enough" and can therefore
sustain a business model around an incomplete Internet.)






-Josh More, RHCE, CISSP, NCLP, GIAC 
 morej at alliancetechnologies.net 
 515-245-7701

>>> Todd Walton  09/08/09 12:00 PM >>>

If Mediacom is redirecting 404s, then perhaps they figure on backlash,
and want to use it to get people to say "maybe DNS error redirects
aren't so bad".

--
Todd
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