On Tue, Aug 26, 2003 at 12:52:06PM -0400, Brian Lloyd wrote: > Jay R. Ashworth wrote: > >>Do you know of a all you can eat plan for 1xRTT? ... > > > > The quote I've been offered (purportedly from a carrier exec) is "we won't > > make *that* mistake again". > > > > IOW: "we don't care if we ever get any real market penetration, and we > > haven't learned the "flat-rate sells and measured-rate doesn't" lesson the > > *6* other times we've been beaten with the cluestick." > > I know from whence he/she comes. As a past operator of a dial-up ISP > I can remember just how annoyed it was when we switched to unlimited > flat-rate. There were always a couple of folks who just tied up lines > continuously. It was ever so much easier when I had tiered service. > I even went so far as to tell one guy to go to my competitors. Let him > suck up their resources.
I believe you think I *dislike* flat-rate pricing. Nope; I won't *buy* anything else; let me tell you about my $800 skytel bull sometime... > Usage based pricing has the advantage that it incents the subscriber > to conserve resources. When the usage goes up and I need to expand the > facilities, the cash flow is there to support it. Fine, but in a packet-switched environment, this is a much less steep hill to climb than it is when counting modem lines... > And when properly applied, most users save money doing usage-based > pricing rather than flat-rate pricing. At one point we offered people the > opportunity to switch to usage-based pricing and showed them how their > bills for the last three months would have gone down if they switched. > In spite of all sense, they stayed with flat-rate pricing. <sigh> > I guess it does make billing simpler. That's not the only reason it's popular, though... Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth [EMAIL PROTECTED] Member of the Technical Staff Baylink RFC 2100 The Suncoast Freenet The Things I Think Tampa Bay, Florida http://baylink.pitas.com +1 727 647 1274 OS X: Because making Unix user-friendly was easier than debugging Windows -- Simon Slavin, on a.f.c -- general wireless list, a bawug thing <http://www.bawug.org/> [un]subscribe: http://lists.bawug.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless
