On Thu, Jul 11, 2002 at 08:00:45PM -0700, JC Dill wrote: > > The problem with asymmetric pricing is that the cost of passing the packets > is equally born by both ends. Take 2 networks that peer, one with mostly > content, one with mostly eyeballs. The content providers pay a higher > price *per MB* for bandwidth to their provider than the end user does, but > both networks have equal costs in transiting the packets from the server to > the end user.
This might be true per Mbps of capacity, but is simply not true per average user's MB/month. The typical cable/dsl subscriber still only uses about 5-10 Kbps, averaged over a month. If lots of people start watching video streams for much of the day, current cable/dsl rates will not survive. -- Barney Wolff I never met a computer I didn't like.