On Thu, Jul 11, 2002 at 08:00:45PM -0700, JC Dill wrote:
The problem with asymmetric pricing is that the cost of passing the packets is equally born by both ends. Take 2 networks that peer, one with mostly content, one with mostly eyeballs. The content providers pay a higher price *per MB* for bandwidth to their provider than the end user does, but both networks have equal costs in transiting the packets from the server to the end user.
This might be true per Mbps of capacity, but is simply not true per average user's MB/month. The typical cable/dsl subscriber still only uses about 5-10 Kbps, averaged over a month. If lots of people start watching video streams for much of the day, current cable/dsl rates will not survive. -- Barney Wolff I never met a computer I didn't like.