[9345] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: Cost vs benefit of internet services
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Dick St.Peters)
Wed Dec 29 20:54:03 1993
Date: Wed, 29 Dec 93 20:46:09 EST
From: stpeters@spare-parts.crd.ge.com (Dick St.Peters)
To: karl@mcs.com
Cc: com-priv@psi.com
Reply-To: <stpeters@dawn.crd.ge.com>
> Uh, excuse me for being stupid today, but if I'm a big national carrier
> and have to pay $10k for each regional/small reseller/whatever that
> I sign up and provide routing to, how can I do that and not pass it on?
C'mon Karl, you're supposed to be a capitalist who understands the
concept of making a little less profit on each customer in exchange
for having more customers. I'd expect you also understand the concept
of investing in market growth - offering discounts to new customers
while they develop.
If you're the big national carrier who doesn't want to do this, well
then maybe someone else will. Actually, though, I had more envisioned
you as the kind of guy who would throw a line to the CIX, join up as a
national carrier, and keep everybody else from getting too fat and
complacent - including, I might add, keeping the total CIX revenue in
bounds compared to actual CIX needs, instead of being open-ended.
I'm not begrudging the CIX it's reasonable revenue; I just don't like
to see the cost distributed without regard to use and turning into a
barrier against startup of small operations - intentional or otherwise.
> The last collapsed backbone that I built had over a half-million bucks
> in CISCO gear in residence at the central site alone. That backbone
> served only 56kbps tail circuits. (It did serve 12 states and something
> like 300 actual sites however. :-)
I fail to see any relevance here to the problems faced by small startup
providers.
--
Dick St.Peters
GE Corporate R&D, Schenectady, NY stpeters@dawn.crd.ge.com
