On Tue, Aug 26, 2003 at 02:01:45PM -0400, Brian Lloyd wrote: > Jay R. Ashworth wrote: > > Fine, but the amount you make on the increased user base *more* than pays for > > the build out -- *if* you set the flat rate in the right place. > > So you are advocating that I overcharge most of the people and > undercharge a few big users in order to optimize my profit? Yes, I know > that is what people want but it doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
Frankly, it doesn't make a lot of sense to me, either -- but if that's what they want, why *not* give it to them. > The networking world is an anomaly. Everywhere else we have > usage-based pricing (except in a few mediocre restaurants where they > offer all-you-can-eat prices). The grocery store doesn't charge you > a flat rate. The water company doesn't charge you a flat rate. The > electric company doesn't charge flat-rate. No, but you can *see* what you're utilizing there; that's not usually true on the Net -- at least, not on the pay per *byte* level we're talking about. > The first company to charge flat-rate for internet access was Netcom. > Bob Rieger did it for a very simple reason: he didn't have a way to > charge for usage. He was using then-new Livingston Portmasters and a > couple of us had just talked Steve Willens into writing RADIUS. Bob > had centralized authentication but not usage based billing so he did > something really simple: flat-rate pricing. Wow, did that ever go over > well with the consumers. At the time (1991) I had just started my ISP E > of Sacramento. (I was working for BARRNet also and Bob was getting his > connectivity from BARRNet.) I'll bet. And I'm not trying to say that I have a lot of back-end experience on the point. 15 years of listening in on the telecom and datacom groups is just that -- listening in... and the one time I *was* a chief for a small ISP, we were already flat rate. But I don't know that any of these things apply directly to packet-switched wireless Internet acccess -- which is the very specific item we're talking about here, and follows different rules than many other types of thing -- stricter in some places, looser in others. Analogizing is hard... 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
