[10814] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
re: How Long to a Multimedia Internet?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Larry Walker)
Thu Mar 10 17:06:34 1994
Date: Thu, 10 Mar 94 09:57:50 CST
To: com-priv@psi.com
From: walkerl@iscmed.med.ge.com (Larry Walker)
jim@Tadpole.COM (Jim Thompson) replied:
>> <me>
>> I think the answer hinges on local-loop monopoly pricing: Mosaic won't be a
>> standard internet interface until most people can do a PPP dial-in to their
>> nearest ISP at rates more like $0.01/min than the current $0.10-0.15/min
>> that they are currently faced with in most locales...
>
>Assuming 30 days/month, this is $432.00/month. You can get
>(full-time!) service for about 1/2 that *today*. There are a
>lot of service providers out there at the $0.02/minute mark
>for dial-up.
After I sent this, I realized I short-circuited a couple of assumptions
that I should have spelled out. First, a multi-media Internet requires an
IP-flavored connection, which generally means PPP/SLIP. I don't know if the
$0.02/min "for dial-up" means a terminal session or a PPP session, but I
consider the latter a necessity.
Second, one must make the phone call from one's home/office to the ISP's
POP. For most people in the country, this is NOT a free local call: it's
either an outright toll call, or it requires at least message-units.
Technically, this isn't really a direct "local-loop monopoly" problem, I
guess.
One could solve the problem by setting up a POP in one's own town, and
leasing a line back to the nearest ISP, in effect becoming a local POP for
them (I'm assuming you'd have to sell local dial-in access to defray the
cost of the leased line...) In this scenario, the limiting factor isn't the
local loop so much as the tariff for leased lines.
But in any scenario, it's the existing "monopoly" on telco circuits, and
the associated tariff structure that makes for a two-tiered Internet Access
market: real affordable for those that live within a local call from an
existing ISP, and radically more expensive for the rest of us...
>
>Not that Mosaic over 14.4k is much fun...
I admit to not having used Mosaic over a modem, but while it's perhaps not
much fun (meaning slow), but just the same, it seems a far sight better
than teaching my mother how to log in to a Unix terminal session and drive
ftp and telnet sessions to get to something...
>Jim
larry
