Barry Shein wrote:
One possible positive effect (for the consumer) of "per-bit" pricing is the opportunity to buy larger pipes but only pay for what you use.
Right now flat-rate pricing mostly assumes you're going to, within some statistical model, actually use the bandwidth you get, or certainly that someone buying a DS3 is going to use a lot more bandwidth, on average, than someone with a DS1. [Rest of post deleted for brevity]
I wonder if the northeast is more expensive than elsewhere, but from my recent shopping for T1's for myself and my clients, I find the cost of the service over a T1 isn't the budget buster. For one location, all T1 circuits (before buying IP service, just the telco charge) is $613 a month. To another location, the circuits are $900 to $1500 a month. Adding $500 to $1000 on top of that for full-rate service, vs. adding $200-$500 on top of that for "burstable" service just doesn't generate much excitement. Until the base telco circuit prices are lowered dramatically, the pricing of packet service over them, while not "noise," is certainly less interesting. Now, if the whole circuit, T1 and IP packet service, were all priced on the basis of traffic, that'd be interesting. An underutilized T1 would incur some small base charge, plus traffic/usage increments beyond that. That'd be quite attractive, though I doubt the phone companies would think so. Dan -- ----------------------------------------------------------------- Daniel Senie dts@senie.com Amaranth Networks Inc. http://www.amaranthnetworks.com