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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: More Sidgemore on per-bit pricing
On Sat, Dec 05, 1998 at 03:35:19PM -0500, Barry Shein wrote: > In my experience it rests on largely a moralistic view rather than an > economic model. For example, the underlying presumption is that it's > somehow "wrong" to charge for the cost of billing (why?), and worse > yet to charge cost+profit on just the billing activity (why?) Yet in > essence every business which bills customers sells billing services at > a profit or they're not in business very long, if you want to look at > it like that. Not at all, Barry. My assertion rests on two things: 1) Routers are too damned busy as it is; too busy, we're told, to run the filters that would keep much of the crap off the net. It's unlikely the money made by packing more customers into a given amount of uplink would outweigh the costs of gathering and processing the information at that fine a granularity. 2) The telcos currently control the local loop, and are pricing that on a flat rate basis, mostly, frame and ATM notwithstanding (there's _still_ a flat cost, somewhere). I don't at all object to "usage-sensitive" pricing, burstable T's and the like; I'm looking at one right now. It's this "slap a byto-meter on it" mentality that demonstrated, I feel, a fundamental misunderstanding of the net. But then, I expect that from telco suits. Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth [email protected] Member of the Technical Staff Buy copies of The New Hackers Dictionary. The Suncoast Freenet Give them to all your friends. Tampa Bay, Florida http://www.ccil.org/jargon/ +1 813 790 7592
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