Well, if you ever want to download DVD's or (HD DVD's in the future) in anything approaching realtime or less then we need some way to make 10-100Mbit pipes into homes economical. Current high bandwidth pricing ($100K/month or so for OC3 Internet connectivity) is just ridicuolous and in no way related to the value that is created for the customer (you can argue that point since some people are paying...) Computers have gotten faster by a factor of x over the last n years yet bandwidth costs have hardly changed in the last 10 years. This is despite the fact that the capacity of fiber already in the ground keeps increasing by leaps and bounds. Somehow this problems needs to be solved. If some sort of usage based pricing doesn't do it then we'll have to wait for super high speed, auto configuring wirelss networking in each PC. Everybody has a 100Mbit connection to all PC's within "earshot". The higher the local computer density, the higher the available bandwidth (with some upper limit of course based on how much frequency space gets allocated to this). Problem solved, phone companies roll over and dies. Dirk On Sat, Dec 05, 1998 at 04:06:30PM -0800, Michael P. Lyle wrote:
One notable thing about per-bit pricing, as well, is that once one provider really rolls it out and pushes it at a low cost, it's bound to become a surety. Suddenly the provider with per-bit billing will be able to steal all of the low-usage customers, while leaving the expensive near-saturation customers at other providers... effectively raising their cost per DS1...
As to the merits of per-bit pricing.. I could certainly see myself purchasing a lot more bandwidth if I could use it on demand, even with the possibility of someone deciding to smurf me. And think of other positive effects-- there will be real economic forces urging customers of providers not to be smurf relays, etc.
Mike
-- Michael P. Lyle Senior Security Architecture Analyst Exodus Communications, Inc. icee@phoenix.lyle.org <- PLAY mlyle@exodus.net <- WORK