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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: The Great Exchange
On Thu, May 28, 1998 at 03:19:26AM +0000, Michael Shields wrote: > Until I can make a one-hour call from DC to Moscow for the same price, > or even a similar price, as a one-hour call to New York, it's not > equitable that I can ftp for the same price. Which resource is it that you are pre-empting, Michael, when you FTP that file? Circuit switching (TASI notwithstanding) and packet switching have different scarcity, and therefore pricing, models. > Could be. I think the economic basis is there; I just don't know if > it's strong enough to overcome customers' love of flat-rate. I think that it is not, and I don't think it's worth it to a whole bunch of people to buy three times as much router CPU to do the work. > Probably it will never make market sense to have distance-sensitive > traffic pricing for "low-speed" users, where the cost of providing the > service is mostly the cost of tech support, billing, dialin or xDSL > aggregation, &c., and bandwidth is a small proportion of the cost. With current trends, will the actual bandwidth _ever_ be more than a small fraction of the cost? Except _maybe_ on trans-oceanic lines... and bet on that situation to get better, not worse, as well. Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth [email protected] Member of the Technical Staff Unsolicited Commercial Emailers Sued The Suncoast Freenet "Two words: Darth Doogie." -- Jason Colby, Tampa Bay, Florida on alt.fan.heinlein +1 813 790 7592 Managing Editor, Top Of The Key sports e-zine ------------ http://www.totk.com
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