[11012] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: flat-rate=cross subsidy (was: FCC strikes the internet)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Barney Wolff)
Fri Mar 18 02:35:57 1994
Date: Thu, 17 Mar 94 22:08 EST
From: Barney Wolff <barney@databus.com>
To: com-priv@psi.com
>Date: Tue, 15 Mar 1994 11:41:04 PST
>From: Lixia Zhang <lixia@parc.xerox.com>
>agreement on all this free choice and no mandate etc.
>One minor detail though: to leave people a free choice, we have to
>have an accounting system built into the infrastructure (so I'm not
>sure about the saving in billing cost)
I'd be astonished if providers didn't already have mechanisms in place
to tell how much use each customer makes of the service (*). The big savings
in non-usage pricing (or at least non-call-detail pricing) is that you
don't ever have to argue with a customer over whether the bill is right.
It's the customer support department that costs all the money, that and
generating reams of paper.
But, of course, usage-based does not have to mean call-detail, or linear
pricing, or unit pricing. It just means that, at some granularity, as
the customer's usage goes up, so does the bill.
(*) Maybe not in detail, but sampled or approximate.
Barney Wolff <barney@databus.com>
