[22075] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: More Sidgemore on per-bit pricing
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jay R. Ashworth)
Sun Dec 6 01:43:04 1998
Date: Sun, 6 Dec 1998 01:12:20 -0500
From: "Jay R. Ashworth" <jra@scfn.thpl.lib.fl.us>
To: nanog@merit.edu
In-Reply-To: <199812052035.AA10253@world.std.com>; from Barry Shein <bzs@world.std.com> on Sat, Dec 05, 1998 at 03:35:19PM -0500
On Sat, Dec 05, 1998 at 03:35:19PM -0500, Barry Shein wrote:
> In my experience it rests on largely a moralistic view rather than an
> economic model. For example, the underlying presumption is that it's
> somehow "wrong" to charge for the cost of billing (why?), and worse
> yet to charge cost+profit on just the billing activity (why?) Yet in
> essence every business which bills customers sells billing services at
> a profit or they're not in business very long, if you want to look at
> it like that.
Not at all, Barry. My assertion rests on two things:
1) Routers are too damned busy as it is; too busy, we're told, to run
the filters that would keep much of the crap off the net. It's
unlikely the money made by packing more customers into a given
amount of uplink would outweigh the costs of gathering and
processing the information at that fine a granularity.
2) The telcos currently control the local loop, and are pricing
that on a flat rate basis, mostly, frame and ATM
notwithstanding (there's _still_ a flat cost, somewhere).
I don't at all object to "usage-sensitive" pricing, burstable T's and
the like; I'm looking at one right now. It's this "slap a byto-meter
on it" mentality that demonstrated, I feel, a fundamental
misunderstanding of the net. But then, I expect that from telco suits.
Cheers,
-- jra
--
Jay R. Ashworth jra@baylink.com
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