[9253] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: an Internet buying coop?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Stan Barber)
Sun Dec 26 18:16:40 1993
From: sob@tmc.edu (Stan Barber)
Date: Sun, 26 Dec 1993 17:15:48 -0600
In-Reply-To: karl@mcs.com (Karl Denninger)
To: karl@mcs.com (Karl Denninger), bzs@world.std.com (Barry Shein)
Cc: tenney@netcom.com, com-priv@psi.com
There are two popular schools of thought I have often heard on the need
for flat-rate services:
1. Providers sometime argue that only doing flat-rate services is cheaper
since they spend less overhead generating bills of varying rates to their
customers. Everyone pays the same thing, so generating bills is easy. I
don't know if this is still true or not. I can say as a service provider
within the Texas Medical Center, that it is a heck of a lot easier for me
to generate a flat rate bill than charge by the incident, but maybe I
am just not efficient enough to capture the incident charges well. Comments
from the provider folks?
2. Some customers operate on flat annual budgets and it is easier to pay
a flat rate for those customers (and budget for that rate) than to deal
with the risk in the variability. As a customer in that catgory, I can say
that I prefer flat rate right now and until such time as the providers get
SMDR capabilities like the long distance carriers, I probably always will.
It is certainly easier for me to budget for a flat rate and I don't currently
have good mechanisms to caputure the raw data so I can cross check my bill
against the data the provider gives me. Again, it is possible I just
don't have a good system to capture the data to check the bill. Comments from
the customer folks?
Happy Holidays to you all.
--
Stan internet: sob@bcm.tmc.edu Director, Networking
Olan uucp: rutgers!bcm!sob and Systems Support
Barber Opinions expressed are only mine. Baylor College of Medicine
