William B. Norton wrote: First - As for whether the US Transit market is healthy or unhealthy...

Hmm. For this one topic I think I have the best explanation in the world (tm): it's unhealthy if you bite the dust, it's healthy if one of your competitors bites the dust :-)

It certainly appears that the majors can't make money in this transit market, and they would probably say that the bottom feeders are greasing the skids to financial ruin for this industry.

Indeed, and see above. That being said, historically (and valid only for that long) dominant players in a given industry are the ones that survived the slide with greased skids.

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Michel Py wrote: Someone mentioned that this was comparing apples to oranges. Indeed it is, <stuff deleted>

I would disagree that these are apples and oranges comparisons - these are real prices (normalized to USD) for transit that someone in the country would pay to access the big 'I' Internet.

I misread Patrick and withdraw my statement. In the context you meant it, these are apples to apples. What Patrick meant though (which remains extremely valid) (2nd disclaimer, forgive my poor English) is that comparing what it takes to build and/or sell transit in different countries is comparing apples to oranges. However, what you wrote as being the cost of connecting to the big "I" is totally valid (that's where I was trying to get to with my P2P comparison) and has indeed to be understood WRT to Joe's comments:

Joe Abley wrote: http://www.economist.com/markets/Bigmac/Index.cfm I suppose a more direct analogy to the Big Mac Index would be to take some usefully-accurate measure of transit costs in each country, and use that to weight a comparison between other related commodities (cell phone calls? televisions? computers?)

Please accept my entry for the Big Mac Index: One Mbps worth of residential traffic, link always-on, unlimited, un-metered, in an urban area within 12,000ft of the CO. Valid between 500 Kbps and 3 Mbps, pro-rated to 1Mbps. Please fill-in the blanks, convert your local currency to US$ and send it to me privately, I will post summary results to the ML. Then we can compare to the cost of transit as Bill posted yesterday and have a better grasp at the relevance of the BMI. +-------+----------+---+----+-----+-------+-------+ |Country| State / |ISP|Link|Speed|Monthly|Monthly| | | Province | |type|Mbps | cost | /Mbps | +-------+----------+---+----+-----+-------+-------+ | USA |California|SBC|DSL | 2.5 | US$37 | US$15 | +-------+----------+---+----+-----+-------+-------+ | .. | .... | | | | | | +-------+----------+---+----+-----+-------+-------+ ^ | Big Mac Index

Eric Kuhnke wrote: You can peg a 100Mb/s FTTH line (which costs about $65 USD/month on a 1 year contract) from Chunghwa Telecom in Taipei 24/7, as long as the majority of your traffic stays on the island of Taiwan...

This is not connecting to the big "I" because there are strings attached to it; it's just like an ISP saying "traffic to a web site we also host is free". Joe Consumer does not give a rip to this concept: when he surfs the net it does not matter where the site is. Michel.