MFS WorldCom/WilTel/LDDS

Thu Aug 29 18:29:21 UTC 1996

Hong Chen writes:
> I think that metered pricing will come sometime, if not 
> in the near future.

I seriously doubt it. We live in a market driven world. The market
doesn't want it. People would rather pay a higher fixed price.

> There are various technologies and applications being
> introduced which allow a dial up user to nail up a 
> port for many many hours (such as PointCast, and many
> new business plans I have seen).

So? In the long run ALL users will have dedicated lines (cable modems,
ADSL, something) and their machines will be exchanging bits with other
machines all day and all night. Its what the net is for. You are
blaming people for using it as it was designed.

Raw bandwidth is inherently cheap. Undersea lines are even fairly
cheap, except nasty government price fixing keeps them
expensive. Switching equipment is expensive right now but Moore's Law
takes care of that over the years. In the long run (ten years)
everyone in developed countries will be on the net at all times. No
one is going to want metered service -- it will be too much bother --
and so long as the customers pay enough on average to cover use there
is no problem.

We could introduce metering now for the short run, but I'd say its
smarter for people to let the ISPs charging $15 a month to just go out
of business, and let the ones charging a reasonable market rate to
survive. If the customers demand low usage plans or the like people
will start providing it.

In short, let the market do its thing.

Perry