[1266] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: impact of settlements on provision of free services
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Stan Hanks (bcm))
Thu Aug 29 11:56:24 1991
Date: Thu, 29 Aug 91 10:57:31 CDT
From: "Stan Hanks (bcm)" <stan@karazm.math.uh.edu>
To: craig@sics.se, stan@karazm.math.uh.edu
Cc: com-priv@uu.psi.com
Craig,
Having seen the dial-up argument from a few people now, I'd like
to point out that this only works for low speed applications, like
mail and the odd FTP or so. People in corporateland *usually*
understand that you need at least 56kb to do anything they would
consider useful for commercial applications (aside from the aforementioned
mail and occassional FTP) and that T1 may not even be enough if they're
linking multiple sites for the purpose of doing routine business --
take concurrent engineering as an example if you will.
For these folks, a T1 usage-based service will let them experiment with
the technology enough to understand how many full T1 or better connections
they need. The main argument inside corporate America against stuff like
the Internet is something like "well, you have to pay for all this capacity
you can't use anyway". And you still have to remember that they haven't
yet figured out how much they're going to use it anyway, right?
I'm not disagreeing with the difficulty or expense of providing such a
service -- after all, I had to figure it out for MFS. I'm not disagreeing
with the notion that once you know what you're doing, flat-rate service
is clearly the way to go. I'm just saying that there is a large market
on the commercial side for usage-based high speed service. Ask me if I
was wrong after the MFS stuff has been up for a half year or so.
Stan
