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

  • From: Scott McGrath
  • Date: Tue Jan 22 08:43:51 2008

Consumers have been conditioned through advertising that 'bigger is better' so bigger numbers imply a better service in their minds. Look at the current flat panel TV size madness
there is a formula for calculating the size of a display based on distance to the viewer I live in a older house so based on that I have a relatively small display but going to the stores all they want to push is 42" and up. My needs for net service are modest and would be best served by a 256k link with low latency and jitter so that SSH and NMS applications would run reasonably well over the VPN but I cannot buy this from my telcom/isp instead I was forced to buy the "business" service tier which does nothing (same speed same 'excessive usage cap') for me except not block IPSec and oh by the way costs 2x the $59 dollars the 768/384 by DSL line runs monthly (I am served by a rural telcom so no options here) .

But since most ISP's are telecoms these days all they think of is selling circuits with as little support as possible.

On the last point this would involve actually providing a SERVICE something that US businesses do not do anymore since businesses these days are run by the finance department and providing services requires investing in plant/equipment/people rather than writing a check to a investment fund who 'guarantees 20% ROI (think sub-prime). We in the US have forgotten
Edward Deming's key dictum i.e. 'managing for the bottom line ensures that you will soon NOT HAVE a bottom line'.

The industry will return to profitablity once companies wake up to the fact that profits are dependent on having products and services which people want to buy, rather than the current model where the company wants to push its product/service to the CONSUMER who MUST buy their product rather than offering a competitive product/service to a CUSTOMER who has options on what they spend their hard earned money on. Words have meaning and many companies have fallen into the trap that people will buy anything offered.

Sorry for the rant

[email protected] wrote:
There are symmetric versions for all of those. But ever since the dialup days (e.g. 56Kbps modems had slower reverse direction) consumers have shown a preference for a bigger number on the box, even if it meant giving up bandwidth in the one direction.

For example, how many people want SDSL at 1.5Mbps symmetric versus ADSL at 6Mbps/768Kbps. The advertisment with the bigger number wins the consumer.

Seems to me that Internet SERVICE Providers have all turned
into telecom companies and the only thing that matters now
is providing IP circuits.

If P2P is such a problem for providers who supply IP circuits
over wireless and cable, why don't they try going up a level
and provide Internet SERVICE instead? For instance, every
customer could get a virtual server that they can access via
VNC with some popular P2P packages preinstalled. The P2P software
could recognize when it's talking over "preferred" circuits
such as local virtual servers or over peering connections that
aren't too expensive, and prefer those. If the virtual servers
are implemented on Linux, there is a technology called FUSE
that could be used to greatly increase the capacity of the
disk farm by not storing multiple copies of the same file.

Rather than moaning about the problems of being a telecom
provider, people could apply some creative technology to get
out of the telecom ghetto.

--Michael Dillon