At 12:12 PM 08/24/1998 -0700, Owen DeLong wrote:
... To some extent that's true. However, as a counter-point, consider such sites as sunsite, wustl, smc.vnet.net, etc. I doubt those sites would continue to exist in a solely bandwidth sensitive pay-as-you-go world. I think they count on flat rate connectivity to be able to continue to exist. I don't think the elimination of those sites (and many others like them) would benefit the net. Do you?
I'm not certain that they represent a true public service, as opposed to simply interesting content. Interesting content can probably pay its own way, even at retail prices. For example, the incremental cost to send 10MB of data is only about 50 cents using normal retail rates [1]. Are you saying that whatever you're downloading isn't worth paying that? (or watching the appropriate number of web ads, as I currently do to download palm pilot apps, pc freeware, and today's weather gif?)
/John
[1] Retail T1 transit from major backbone, fully utilized, $2400 monthly, presuming cost recovery over 4 peak hours of 20 business days = $30 per peak hour; each hour good for about 600 MB -> 5 cents / MB )
Although I wouldn't mind paying for it, I think that the sites that are doing much of that wouldn't find it worth the effort to collect the money from all the users that are downloading. At that point, they'd simply fold up shop and go away. That's my concern. Owen