On Fri, 11 Nov 2005, Christopher L. Morrow wrote:
oops ;) my point wasn't that bandwidth wasn't necessary over X speed, it was that the main motivator for consumer purchase was no long bandwidth but price alone.
In 1997, Vint Cerf was advocating the necessity of usage based pricing when he was still with MCI. http://www.cookreport.com/05.10.shtml Although MCI has not yet made a formal announcement via a press release, Cerf explained that "we are plainly discussing this with you, Gordon, and your readers." The MCI move is the outcome of what Cerf describes as a crunch between the Internet's flat rate pricing model and usage patterns where both the amount of use and disparity between use by applications has increased dramatically. Will consumers prefer to pay higher flat rate charges for everything, or prefer different pricing models when they access applications which require dramatically different service levels to include the cost as part of an application specific fee?