UCT_Slash
join:2001-09-14
Marietta, NY
| Re: Who do I send the bill to........ said by ikarus1  :
said by apollo80 :
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Similar objections could have been made when dial-up ISPs charged by the minute, but that did not stop them.
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Don't see too many dial up ISP's nowadays still charging by the minute. Most are a flat fee.
They learned their lesson. Broadband p;roviders will potentially learn the same lesson if they do bill by the byte.
Did you EVER see ISP's charging by the byte? DUH!, NO! You never saw ISP's charging by the byte. Had ISP's had the comptence in the beginning (most are only now LEARNING how to do this) that is what you would have seen from the beginning.
AS AN ISP, a long term ISP... My thinking was ALWAYS that charging by the minute of connection time, or the byte of data was the MOST fair type of billing. When I set up my first personal ISP, I set up billing in that manner. If someone only connected to me for ten minutes of an evening, why should I bill them the same amount as the idiot with a redialer? It worked, actually it worked so well that my nearest competitor cracked my system and modified my billing software, not once but twice... While he had ALL his customers paying $23.95 per month for dialup, some of mine paid about $7.00 per month, others paid as much as $20.00 per month. BUT, EVERYONE PAID FOR THE SYSTEM RESOURCES THEY USED... It was fair.
Well, whatever... I was ahead of my time. This *ABSOLUTELY WILL* eventually come to everyone because of market pressures. If I (as an ISP) want market share, and I want to extract from my existing system maximum profit, I am going to set up such a system. Why? Well because the other guy is going to do it if I don't, and if I do it first, he will do it after I do so he can stay in business.
Honestly there are people who should be sold DLS at $5.00 per month, and there are others who should have to pay $50.00 per month for dialup.
It isn't so much how fast your connection is as it is how much you use when you are online... For the first two years my current employer was in business, he had one dialup user who used AS MUCH BANDWIDTH as ALL THE OTHER USERS ON HIS SYSTEM COMBINED... That situation remained until he broke 400 users... She was online 24x7 and she was streaming audio 24x7...
So... unless you know whereof you speak... learn something and come back. I don't bother wasting my time with the clueless, especially in hurricanes.
-m-
For starters why the hell are you referencing dial-up users? They don't download a fraction of what dsl/cable users do so this hardly effects them. And who's going to subscribe to your "hypothetical charge-by-bandwidth ISP" if/when an alternative flat rate ISP exists in the area? Clearly not people who plan on using their connection for downloading media in any way... which make up the majority. Try pushing this bs on consumers used to paying $35-40/m for unlimited broadband.
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