Comcast/etc....

[JD Runyan]

On Fri, Jan ,  at 11:38:14AM -0600, Bradley Miller wrote:
> What about metered pricing though?  Every other commodity is priced that
> way.  We buy a gallon of gas, get water based on so many thousand gallons
> and electricity is by the kilowatt/hour.   Why not bandwidth?   Would your
> download habits change?  If the price was right I could see a minimum
> connect charge (say $15/month) and then a $??/gig transfer fee.  Will
> people yell?  Yes -- they are to used to the "give me all I can get"
> mentality.  The Internet "mentality" is free, but somewhere along the line
> someone forgot to mention that the infrastructure has to be paid for
> somehow.   We'd all love a 6 lane highway from KC to St. Louis, but once we
> realize who's paying for it . . . 
> 
I don't totally disagree with your idea, but your commodity analogy is flawed.
Bandwidth is not a consumable like gasoline, electricity, food, etc.  It is 
more like a highway.  When it rush hour, more people are on the highway, thus
traffic moves slower.  During the day, fewer people are on the highway, and thus 
traffic can move at more rapid speed.  The road does not go away, nor does it change
in some way, because it is more heavily used.  Neither does bandwidth go away, it just
offers less speed when their are more users.  When I receive 4MB of data from some 
site on the Internet, I do not consume 4MB of bandwidth that cannot be regained.  I 
only use some portion of the bandwidth for a fixed amount of time, and then 
return it unchanged.  A more accurate analogy would be a car lease.  You lease
a car over a certain time, and you have a mileage limit.  If you go over that limit
you then pay a premium for that overage.  You could look at us leasing the Internet
connection, and they could monitor the transfer volumes, and then charge a premium
for those that go over.  This is the model that a lot of businesses use.  I personally
would not pay for this for my home usage.  Capitalism forces the market.  Services
sold to the masses find a point of value to the customers where the companies make
a profit, and that is where the price lands.  If other companies can do better, 
they will and customers will go to them for the service.  

My main point is that bandwidth is not a consumable resource.  There are maintenance
cost involved in maintaining that bandwidth, but the bandwidth does not go away by
use.
-- 
JD Runyan
		"You can't milk a point."
			David M. Kuehn, Ph.D.