[691] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: Cost Of TCP/IP Dialup Connections
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Kent W. England)
Wed May 15 09:57:21 1991
From: "Kent W. England" <kwe2@BBN.COM>
To: Will@cup.portal.com
Cc: com-priv@psi.com
In-Reply-To: <9105132058.1.119@cup.portal.com>
Date: Wed, 15 May 91 09:54:16 EDT
>My intuition tells me that the number of [TCP/IP Dialup] users is not linear
>with the monthly service price. I suspect that somewhere around
>$40 per month the number of users would explode almost exponentially
>and that the total revenue generated would greatly exceed what it
>is with the $200/month charge. Anyone care to agree/disagree with
>this assertion?
>
>Thanks,
>Will Estes Internet: Will@cup.portal.com
"TCP/IP" service is a lot of capability. Any given user may not wish to
avail him/herself of all the capability that is implicit in the term
"TCP/IP dial-up", but a service provider must be prepared to support any
and all uses of TCP/IP anywhere in the Internet and deal with any and
all problems with all protocol stacks in the path, even if all the
subscriber really wants is nntp/smtp to and from some single server
where he has an account. This is expensive in practice, if not in
theory or intuition.
Perhaps you could get the sort of price you would like to pay if you
could instead get "dial-up NNTP/SMTP" [ie, no TCP/IP support] for access
to some machine where you have a user account. Is this more what you
want? If not, I suggest that the cost of TCP/IP service will continue
to be "high" in your estimation. In that case, you need to pool
resources with other users for access to this sort of service. We know
these pools of users as "site LANs". :-) Most people don't find these
LANs expensive because they don't see all the costs of LAN support.
--Kent
