[230] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: Usage Charges
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Alan Batie)
Wed Feb 27 22:31:07 1991
From: batie@aahz.hf.intel.com (Alan Batie)
To: com-priv@psi.com
Date: Wed, 27 Feb 91 18:44:49 PST
In-Reply-To: <9102280015.AA22812@world.std.com>; from "Barry Shein" at Feb 27, 91 7:15 pm
In a previous message, Barry Shein said:
> If I offered you two choices for buying a 56Kb line, either $1000/mo
> or $0.035/Kpacket, which would you take?
>
> Well, I'll save you the calculation, at 100% utilization, 24 hrs/day,
> 7 days/week $0.035/Kpkt @56Kb comes to about $1000.00*.
As a large business (e.g. Intel), where the variability of the bill might
not be an issue, the per-packet charges my be acceptable.
As a small-time operator (e.g. my public access system), on a limited
budget (of which there will be a large number if we assume the
Interstate Highway metaphor used in a recent message), I could envision
a typical volume of say $100-200/month, and then, for example, I join a
mailing list with unexpected volume, or some mail gets stuck in a loop
somewhere and I get flooded with mega copies of some large message.
That type of scenario is one of the reasons I don't connect to UUNET,
even just for mail: I don't have fine-grain control over the volume,
and thus can't effectively manage the costs. I'm willing to pay a
higher flat rate (within reason) to be able to budget it.
--
Alan Batie \ Someday I would like to stand
\ on the moon, look through a
batie@aahz.hf.intel.com /\ quarter of a million miles of
uunet!intelhf!aahz!batie / \ space, and say, "There certainly
+1 503-696-4101 / \ is a beautiful Earth out tonight".
