More Sidgemore on per-bit pricing

Fri Dec 4 17:42:55 UTC 1998

Sidgemore talks again: 

http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,29533,00.html?st.ne.fd.gif.a

I'm sure this subject has been discussed at length here, but I still fail
to see any benefit for per-piece pricing other than to the seller's
revenue stream. I think it's always interesting that discussions of
per-piece pricing always fail to mention the fundamental issue: provide a
disincentive to the consumer to use the service.

There is already per-piece pricing:  1.544Mbps of traffic costs $500 to
$2000+/mo, depending upon how much the provider is counting on you to not
use the service. However, in this case the burden is placed on the ISP to
balance closing the sale with making money off of how much the customer
actually uses the service. 

The thing I most distrust about people who talk about per-piece pricing is
that in spite of the fact that it should end up costing lower-use
customers less, for some reason it always ends up costing everyone more. 
Look at UUNet's pricing now (for 256K ASU, or something like that), versus
the flat-rate price available from equivalent NSP's. Is that where things
are going? 

Pete. 