On Sat, Oct 26, 2002 at 11:30:45AM -0500, Robert Seeberger wrote: > LOL......I never thought I'd see Eric take the side of > authoritarianism. Right now we have an extreme bandwidth glut with > about a third of all fiber sitting in the ground "unlit".
LOL.....I never thought I'd see someone make so many mistakes in a couple sentences. First of all a free market does not equal "authoritarianism", it is the invisible hand which is almost the opposite and usually quite superior to government control. Second, you don't know me as well as you think, one symptom of which is that you can't even spell my name correctly. Third, the price of providing service to the home is only partially correlated with unlit fiber, since the "last mile" is almost all copper pairs or coax cable, as well as the expenses of maintaining switches and routers and/or renting space in a telecom central office. Finally, what a silly thing for you to say regardless of the above, since if there is really a glut of bandwidth, then charging free market prices based on bandwidth used is the best thing that can happen for the consumer since it will result in lower prices. > Any bandwidth shortage is entirely manufactured and is a symptom of > "Debeers" type cartelism. LOL.....there you go again making entirely ridiculous claims without having a shred of credible evidence or even having done some numbers yourself. Perhaps you failed to notice that the backbone providers for DSL and cable-modems have been losing money and going bankrupt left and right? Do the names of companies like Flashcom, Zyan, FastPoint, Rhythms, Northpoint, or Covad mean anything to you? http://news.com.com/2100-1033-271697.html?tag=rn http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/article.php/3_861601 http://www.broadbandweek.com/news/010806/010806_telecom_rhy.htm http://www.internetnews.com/isp-news/article.php/8_532831 http://www.internetnews.com/isp-news/article.php/8_863941 Do you know how much a T1 line (1.544Mb/s) costs? The best price I've seen recently is about $500/month. Most ISP's charge about $50/month for service. Even if they had no overhead and didn't make a profit, the best they can do is 10 people per T1 at that price. On average, each person can only get 154Kb/s of bandwidth, only about 4 times what a conventional modem can get. That is not what people expect from a broadband connection, they expect 10 to 100 times better than a conventional modem. So something has to give. What happens now is that many people aren't saturating their connection 24/7. If only 1 person is using the T1 at a time, they can get 1.5Mb/s. But if the marginal cost of bandwidth is free, then more people will use it more often (the "bandwidth hogs" the article talks about, but I think the problem is not that people are using bandwidth, just that they expect to use it and not pay a fair price) and you approach the point of people saturating their connection 24/7 (peer-to-peer programs often do this). In other words, there is a limited resource that needs to be divided up in some way. Price set by supply and demand and the free-market is the most efficient way to do this, as has been proven time and again. You might argue that the natural monopoly of last-mile ISP's over phone or cable lines makes the free-market less than efficient. But this argument is not as strong as it is for services like electricity or gas, because there are a number of broadband alternatives: telephone line, cable lines, some recent housing developments running fiber to the home, satellite, and wireless can all compete for the "last-mile" providers. And for this argument to work, you have to show that the monopolists are making a killing at the consumers expense, but quite the contrary, they've been going bankrupt. It costs a lot of money to build the networks to the home that provide the bandwidth and reliability that people expect. -- "Erik Reuter" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.erikreuter.net/ _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
