|
North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: An Attempt at Economically Rational Pricing: Time Warner Trial
On Jan 19, 2008, at 3:25 PM, Rod Beck wrote: If service is metered, it doesn't imply 25 cents a minute. It would probably be based on bytes transferred and would probably be less expensive for the bulk of users than the current flat rate pricing. If the cable companies are telling the truth, roughly 5% of their customers generate 50% of the traffic. That implies that the bulk of users are effectively subsidising the five percent of heavy users. Dear Rod; This does not match my experience of the world. Raise the price for the 5%, sure. Lower prices for the rest, probably not. What I would really expect to result from this are very complicated bills full of obscure fees that effectively raise almost everyone's monthly charge to well above what they advertise on TV. This is, after all, the common pattern on phone service, and I would expect "plans" where you get so much bandwidth but if you exceed your limit you are suddenly paying some exorbitant rate per GB. Soon to come would be TV commercials talking about weekend Gigabytes and daytime Gigabytes and how you can carry your unused Gigabytes over from one month to the next. Regards Marshall Usage-based pricing would give the cable companies and telephony incumbents an incentive to upgrade infrastructure and actually compete for the heavy users. The heavy users would be the most profitable customers. New technologies would be welcomed instead of discouraged.
|