On Mon, 26 Aug 1996, Sean Donelan wrote:
Depending how you account for interconnect costs, a provider selling $2700/month T1 packet-switched connections with a 23:1 bandwidth overbooking ratio generates the same revenue as analog voice circuits at 10cents/minute - 4cents/minute interconnect fees.
You mean gross revenue don't you? Also, that price seems steep for 23:1 ratio. Wouldn't that be closer to the price for 10:1? The other factor here is costs. The cost of billing 10 cent a minute phone calls is HUGE compared to billing a bunch of monthly flat rate T1's.
Well, there was a few rounding errors long the way, but 67Kbps is darn close to a DS0 at 6cents/minute. Bad news for the Internet telephony folks, there still ain't no such thing as a free lunch.
Don't forget that Internet telephony uses compression. I don't know if they use 4:1 compression but I do know that companies like Gandalf can put 4 voice lines through a DS0 and still leave 19200 bps for data.
If I'm paying for voice telephone level quality, am I getting it?
You pay for what you get. If you don't like the quality, go somewhere else. Interestingly, the advent of Internet phone allows consumers a choice in quality that they didn't have before.
Internet Network Operators (to relate this slightly to NANOG) need to look at diversifying their Internet connections between providers.
Does this mean that Sprint should be buying transit form MCI and ANS instead of just using their own lines? ;-) Michael Dillon - ISP & Internet Consulting Memra Software Inc. - Fax: +1-604-546-3049 http://www.memra.com - E-mail: michael@memra.com