Guru
join:2005-12-01
Canada
| Uh???
"Any model that allows the consumer to have more control and more choice makes sense to us,"
WOW...
Excuses people cum up with to make money...
Very impressed.  |
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asdfdfdf
@xtraport.net
 from:
calvoiper 
| I don't think all these ideas should be treated the same.
Paying by the type of application is vile. This is nothing more than an attempt to rename the BS they were threatening to do a few months ago with google, vonage, etc. Lack of application neutrality would also lead to all manner of abuse as they seek to protect their own application revenue.
Paying by amount of transfer isn't inherently a problem provided that it is structured in a reasonable way. The devil is in the details. If it is an optional service that actually empowers the user to control their costs by controlling their use, that could be a beneficial thing. If it is a scam intended to keep the costs of the light user high while soaking heavier users with exorbitant fees, that is a different matter. It isn't likely, however, that there would be real pay per use. One of the plans discussed in the article is $27 for 1 gig transfer and $1.80 for additional. This is absurd. Firstly it isn't pay as you go. It is a flat fee for an absurdly low use. This doesn't empower the customer. It gouges the low user, gives them no real control over their own costs, and gets worse from there. It is a hybrid which gives the company the benefits of both flat fees and pay per use, while depriving the customer of the advantages of both and forcing upon them the disadvantages of both.
A pay per use model would be $5 a month plus $1-2 per gig transfer, which is the type of model electric utilities use. They are true pay per use. Those who use very little would be paying $10 or less, those who consume a great deal would be paying hundreds.
Having said all this there is no evidence that the present model can't fund service levels. There is no NEED for new business models, the incumbents are just taking advantage of collapsing competition and deregulation to demand additional revenue. |
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calvoiper
join:2003-03-31
Belvedere Tiburon, CA
| I agree with you generally.
I would point out that attempts to gouge certain classes of users are less likely to succeed as long as the charges are passed along directly--someone else will come along and solicit the gouged customer class. (An immediate thought is the customer using only 1 gig or less per month--they will probably abandon traditional broadband for any of the coming wide-deployment wireless applications, muni funded or not.)
If, instead, the ISPs dump extra charges on the content providers, we'll never have the ability to seek out cheaper ISPs, just as Unix/Linux users didn't have the ability to seek out cheap PCs when Microsoft was forcing the PC manufacturers to pay for Windows "per machine manufactured" rather than "per Windows copy installed."
calvoiper
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VoIP--the death knell of remaining voice monopolies! |
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