[1276] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: impact of settlements on provision of free services
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Martin Schoffstall)
Thu Aug 29 22:05:56 1991
In-Reply-To: <CMM.0.88.683514315.lixia@parc.xerox.com>
Date: Thu, 29 Aug 91 20:52:53 -0400
To: lixia@parc.xerox.com
Cc: "Stan Hanks bcm" <stan@karazm.math.uh.edu>, com-priv@uu.psi.com,
From: "Martin Schoffstall" <schoff@mail.psi.net>
Reply-To: schoff@psi.com
>- We've been doing email+ftp+telnet for couple of decades.
> In a near future, I believe a lot of new applications will enter the
> net, such as real time voice and video. Currently many people are
> working on traffic control algorithms for providing different
> quality of service (QOS). 0.5 sec delay is NOT noticable for email
> traffic, but is intolerable for real time voice.
So what is tolerable for RTV?
However well before we see real time, we're going to see large size attachments
to "mail" which will include voice, and image, obviously documents are
here today, and mail relays like UUPSI/UUNET are having lots of fun with
NEXT and MAC machines with 1Mbyte+ messages being the norm for an
increasingly larger customer base.
>
>I'm not sure about this money-spending fear. Every phone call costs
>money, but that does NOT seem to prevent people from making many calls
>everyday.
>Every time you turn on a light, you spend money for that, but does
>that make anyone stay in dark?
Spending money is not the problem, it is knowing how much you have to
spend in the future - this is called budgeting. Let's work with your
examples a bit.
The phone - people fight very strongly through various public utility
commissions to keep their unmeasured flat rate local service. Why do
they like this? Because they can budget for it.
Power - many municipalities for their street light and other needs
contract for flat rate unmetered service. When I lived in Cambridge, MA
the power company offered a flat monthly fee for power which was their
estimate of my needs for the year flattening out valleys and peaks of
the seasons. I found that lots of my neighbors went for this. Why? So
they could budget for it.
Marty
