Re: ABC News on internet telephony

[David Sternlight <david@sternlight.com>]

At 5:58 AM -0700 7/19/96, Deranged Mutant wrote:
>ISPs have functioned better using flat monthly rates, and the biggies are like
>AT&T are going in the same direction for internet access.  I don't
>see this as being 'counter-intuitive' at all.

I said counter-intuitive to the way we stereotype them. We stereotype the
phone companies as greedily pursuing metered rates and distance-sensitive
ones at that. Every so often we see a horror story that they're about to
charge per packet, or put in a modem tax, or some such. History supports
such fears.

> The costs to the
>ISPs and telcos aren't really based on where you call or how long you
>are on anymore.

I don't have the data to know if that's generally true, but I'll take your
word for it for the moment. Can you post or e-mail me something definitive?

>
>Big questions are how the main hubs for the internet are maintained
>(esp. when some of the big telcos maintain them... a conflict of
>interest, perhaps).  Will fees become too much that smaller ISPs are
>put out of business, or that we'll start seeing ISPs merge?  (Remember
>when there were mainly local cable companies?)

Count on it. But I speculate the demise of smaller ISP's will come at least
in part in another way--the capital base of the big telcos means that they
can offer more reliable service, fewer busy signals, better customer
service, and more rapid introduction of advanced technologies AT SCALE as
they grow. But isn't that the way markets are supposed to work?

David

>
>On 18 Jul 96 at 11:03, David Sternlight wrote:
>
>[..]
>> This is the rankest speculation on my part, but could some of the bigger,
>> smarter phone company cum internet providers have done some serious
>> analysis and concluded that we're moving away from distance-based rates for
>> voice calls. Might they even have examined where we'll be in the next ten
>> years (with ADSL, etc.) and decided that the network technology and simple
>> market economics makes fixed charges per "line" more profitable to them
>> than metered usage? Maybe this is wishful thinking on my part, but some of
>> the bigger actors are starting to behave in a surprisingly
>> counter-intuitive (based on the way we stereotype them) fashion on this
>> topic.
>
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