North American Network Operators Group
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Re: An Attempt at Economically Rational Pricing: Time Warner Trial

  • From: Mark Radabaugh
  • Date: Fri Jan 18 15:47:22 2008

Mikael Abrahamsson wrote:

I'm also looking forward to the pricing, all the per-byte plans I have seen so far makes the ISP look extremely greedy by overpricing, as opposed to "we want to charge fairly for use" that is what they say in their press statements.

I see it more as an experiment driven by the P2P issues and the net neutrality arguments. If we have to throw away the established flat rate / oversubscription models due to P2P upload then something has to give - either per byte pricing arrives, traffic shaping becomes more common, upstream rates are reduced, or the entire last mile is replaced.

P2P is not going to go away and it's hiding itself more every day. Rate limiting hurts all the customers while per byte pricing hurts only a few users. It took 20 years to build the existing last mile. I don't see it being replaced en mass.

I'm going out on a limb here but per-byte is going to be the answer in the end - and marketing is going to have some work ahead of them in selling it. Now it becomes a game of chicken to see who blinks first.

Mark