On Sat, 3 Jul 2004, Richard A Steenbergen wrote: > SIX's costs would be completely covered by charging each > member with a GigE port $1k/mo. Yes, but the SIX's costs are also completely covered _without_ charging anybody $1K/month. Go back and think about the purpose of an exchange: it's an economic optimization over transit. It's the value-add that lets someone who buys transit sell a service that's of greater value yet lesser cost than what they buy. Now, what's an exchange that costs more money? Less effective. So charging more money is just a way to make an exchange less effective, not more effective. Some people who don't bother to run the numbers think that reliability is a justification for charging money at an exchange. I'd encourage them to run the numbers. An exchange which costs twice as much money needs to be twice as reliable to be equally effective. Ask yourself how many exchanges there are that drop more than half the bits on the floor, before you think of charging twice as much money. In other words, if it's not broke, don't fix it. > I would bet that there is more than enough business available to > cover the costs of intelligent spending. While I won't categorically dub that an oxymoron, I'd say that the possibility of their being "intelligent spending" at an exchange is, um, extremely rare. Military intelligence. Jumbo shrimp. Microsoft Works. > You could probably still give away FastE ports for free Any economist, and most practical thinkers generally, will tell you that creating artificial inequities isn't terribly wise. Likewise, incenting bad behaviors like using too-small ports isn't terribly wise. In an exchange, if you want to avoid congestion, and have to charge money for some reason, you probably want to charge the same amount per port, regardless of port speed. But you're a lot better off just solving whatever problem is costing money in the first place. -Bill