On 11/2/2005 3:41 AM, Tom DeReggi created: [...] > Sounds like a good plan. You can do that at gigabit speeds, because > people that know they need to buy gigabit speeds understand the > business. Residential End users on the other hand do not.
I actually do it at tens-of-megabits-speed for (mostly) small businesses. There is definitely a steeper customer education curve for residential consumers, but if they can't grasp the concept of bits through the network, then they are doomed to believe most marketing hype thrown at them. Imagine consumers who were unable to differentiate between different grades of meat at the supermarket... oh yeah, I guess most can't without the USDA. We definitely need a better system, but I believe that the system involves fact-based, consistent metrics instead of marketing-department-chosen metrics. [...] > Great point. These low price points that follow assumptions, are fueled > by large marketers like ILECs and Cable companies. And all ISPs get > squeezed into this position. It is extremely difficult to compete in the short run with a competitor dumping product into the market. Monopolists are experts at this type of behavior because they have money that they can burn to put potential competitors out of business and extract their previous losses from the consumers during their period as a monopoly. It's the responsibility of government to ensure that this doesn't happen. Unfortunately, the current regulators are either unqualified to apply the existing law to these circumstances or unwilling for other reasons. [...] > If you sell by features and > consumers understand all that, you'll always loose he business because > someone else always has better features. They don't need to evaluate > what they are buying, they just need good guarantees to protect them. > So if their perception of perceived value is not there they can go > elsewhere. Thus bringing up the need for competition. Competition is all about selling features that consumers can understand better than the others. If you can't provide an efficient product for the consumer then your business should either change what it sells or go out of business. Would you rather that marketing budgets determined who stays in business? Government? I don't think that consumers benefit from either of the latter models. I would much prefer winning the customer's business with a superior product. [...] > Agreed. but hard to inforce accuracy of published data. I think that this is the battle worth fighting. It ensures that consumers receive the most accurate information so that they can make an informed decision about the services that they are purchasing. Allowing marketing to determine consumer perceptions only makes money for the marketers and the company with the most effective marketing campaigns. Providing a level playing field with accurate, comparable information allows the competitor with the best services to prevail. [...] > The problem is that if I charged for usage I'd be out of business, > because nobody uses their service very much. > Instead I charge for QOS, I can deliver it since the network is so > underused. You don't necessarily need to charge based on usage. You can charge based on whatever you like. My point was that if you provide an 'unlimited' service you should be able to deliver an unlimited service. In the end you have to charge based on usage (or substantially raise your prices) if your customers' usage patterns change. If I understood you correctly, you were advocating finding someone else to charge for usage when the usage patterns change. This doesn't make sense to me for two primary reasons: 1) Why would 'others' (not your direct customer) pay you unless you had a monopoly on the consumer[1]? 2) Your customers are demanding the additional bandwidth so why shouldn't they pay for it? [...] [I snipped the stuff about discounts because I don't think that charging content providers is a feasible endeavor unless you have unusually loyal customers demanding a high volume of (valuable to the content-network) information] [...] Tom, you're a pleasure to have a discussion with. Thanks for your insights. - Tony [1] Or you colluded with the other duopolist. -- This was essentially AOL's (and CompuServe/Prodigy/etc) model before the Internet was part of their service offering. After the Internet became popular, they realized that their ability to control the relationship between the content provider and the consumer was limited because the consumer often had other (cheaper, faster, simpler) choices for accessing the content provider. To try to retain customers, they provided a connection to some of the same (paying) content providers through the Internet without being directly compensated for it. On the other hand, there is a market for certain large content providers to pay eyeball networks (directly and indirectly) for access. A few companies have even created businesses based on brokering that relationship (Akami, MirrorImage, Switch and Data, Equinix, etc.) -- WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
