[12228] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
effect of metered vs. flat rate (was Internet v. Minitel)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (David M. Piscitello)
Tue May 10 13:50:53 1994
Date: Tue, 10 May 94 10:04:00 EDT
From: "David M. Piscitello" <corecom@tigger.jvnc.net>
Reply-To: dave@corecom.com
To: com-priv@psi.com
A clip from Russ Nelson's reply to the original message and
recent policy changes from my internet provider cause me
to stir the pot anew...
>Internet access will be cheap, fast and widespread once we have ISDN
>tariffed for a zero per-minute charge. Billing will be easy and
>secure once MIT-PGP 2.5 is used. Clarity will be provided by for-pay
>services. :)
The cost of my SLIP account, formerly $99/month, unlimited usage, will
DOUBLE shortly for unlimited usage (yes, double). Metered service
will drop to a "modest" $49/month, with $4.95 per metered hour of
service. This model affects some users (probably not me, so don't
interpret this as whining) in several ways, including
- graphical interfaces, retrieval of audio and graphical information
becomes problematic (read $$$$)
- newsgroups and noisy mailing lists (ahem...) become a financial
liability
which sort of reduces the view of internet services to something you
get from Minitel (welcome to the past). I'm not sure what Russ'
concern about billing is (which provider), but given the current
state of affairs, there is no reason to conclude that flat rate local
services = flat rate internet services (I'll leave the issue of PGP
and security alone for the moment...). There's also good reason to
believe that metered SLIP connectivity is a precursor to metered
info retrieval services. I'm more than a bit concerned that cheap Internet
access is may turn out to be an oxymoron.
David M. Piscitello
Core Competence, Inc.
1620 Tuckerstown Road
Dresher, PA 19025 USA
dave@corecom.com
1.215.830.0692
