You may well be right about this and cynically speaking, I'd tend to agree these stories are trial balloons. How much I attribute to planned efforts and strategically placed stories and how much I attribute to general incompetence I don't know. The end effect, from a consumer's point of view, will be the same.
Having worked in a couple of large corporations, it wouldn't surprise me if the network managers, the top management, and the marketing team are not all on the same page when it comes to capacity planning. It also wouldn't surprise me if this is calculated either or some combination of the two. The one upside we have is that metered usage was the norm in the very early internet days (remember CompuServe per minute pricing?). Customers hated it and eventually every major ISP at the time abandoned it. -- -Rob de Santos -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Friday, December 11, 2009 10:11 AM To: [email protected]; Internet radio discussion Subject: Re: [Internetradio] AT&T considers incentives to curb heavy data usage | Signal Strength - CNET News Since I watch this stuff really closely for my job--and deal with some of these jokers--it does lead one to behold some of this with a skeptical eye. The industry clearly is angling for a major change in how service is delivered and how it's priced. It's initial, tentative moves to go to a metering approach have been summarily slapped down by the "net neutrality" community and the FCC has been slow to accept the industry's overall view of things thus far. But there's too much money to be made (too many sheep to be fleeced?) for them to abandon this effort. Look for more "random" stories strategically placed like this one. I think one needs to remember that it's the industry itself that decides the capacity of its network(s). While they would characterize this as a "fairness" issue (a la "why should e-mail users have to subsidize game players?") and/or a supply/demand issue, the industry has considerable sway over the creation of demand and the availability of supply. My preliminary take is that I would feel much more comfortable about things if we regulators would dismantle the vertical integration already too rampant and growing within the industry. Right now, there's a movement growing to repurpose universal service funds toward subsidizing private network deployment, improvement and expansion. Change that word "private" to "public" and I'd be all for that. But I'm skeptical (there's that word again) that any of us will gain commensurately with the public (ratepayer/taxpayer) investment taken/given. Forgive me if I'm cynical but it won't be too long before "all you can eat" plans will be either eliminated or priced in such a way as to make them wholly unattractive. Metering may initially seem like the fairest way to go, but then you have to consider that if the industry controls supply, how fair can the resulting pricing be? And,if on top of that, we (the public, taxpayer, ratepayer) get to underwrite their networks as well... what a bonanza! (For them, of course, while we get raped at both ends.) jaf _______________________________________________ Internetradio mailing list [email protected] http://montreal.kotalampi.com/mailman/listinfo/internetradio To unsubscribe: Send an E-mail to [email protected]?subject=unsubscribe, or visit the URL shown above.
