As a telco we see a number of these services, based around premium rate dialup access. I have to say that so far none appears to have worked even ones we have done that were advertised as part of the largest TV shows at the time. For most applications, eg sports, porn it can only work if the information is i) unique to this site ii) worth paying for .. point (i) seems to be the biggest issue stopping success thus far. For value add to really work you have to be offering a product/service that cannot be obtained for free anywhere else on the Internet, as most services on offer are just one of a number of competitors doing the same thing then most of the competitors need to go down the value add road if they are to succeed. Steve On Sat, 13 Jul 2002, Tim Thorne wrote:
JC Dill <nanog@vo.cnchost.com> wrote:
My premise is that in the end, content providers want to send lots of packets more than end users want to pay to receive them. Joe is not willing to pay an equally high rate to get the packets that content providers are willing to pay to send them. Thus, settlements.
In the end, I think the cost must be borne by the end user in some way, shape or form. The first Internet boom is over. People providing content realise it isn't cheap and in the current financial climate are no longer willing to throw money away. Bandwidth is getting cheaper but employees are not. I think your ISP subscription will take care of it in the future. They will buy in content or access for their users. Perhaps AOLs model of value added services was a little premature?
-- Tim