On Mon, Jan 4, 2010 at 14:34, Patrick Leary <[email protected]> wrote:
> Things like Netflix do pose an interesting challenge to ISPs and I'm not > sure how best it gets addressed. Too bad users don't accept metered use > of their broadband like they do their cell phone use. Sprint, at least, offers an "unlimited everything" plan. Does exactly what it sounds like - unlimited voice, data, roaming (except internationally). Cell phone usage is easier to meter, at least for voice, because we all know more-or-less how long "one minute" is in terms of talking. We all have a decent sense of how time works, at least well enough that billing by the minute is fairly intuitive to consumers. Bandwidth is a much more fuzzy thing. I couldn't tell you how much bandwidth it takes to stream a seven-minute YouTube clip, and I work in this field; a typical non-IT home user will be even more lost. If you want to sell by the bit, you also need to do a really good job of educating users so they know what they'll get, and you have to keep these things up-to-date. For instance, ten years ago, I used "one minute of MP3 audio is about 1MB," and at the time that was accurate. Today, most folks encode their audio at higher bit rates, and many people buy from the iTunes Store; it's probably closer to 2MB per minutes now, based on an informal sample of my music library. And this doesn't even account for things like online radio stations, streaming video (both YouTube-grade and Netflix-grade), online gaming (what's the rate of bits-per-bullet?) and any of a few hundred other things. (Anyone who suggests Web sites need interstitial labels - "this Web site may take up to 4MB of bandwidth to load, do you wish to continue" - gets socked in the jaw.) David Smith MVN.net -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WISPA Wireless List: [email protected] Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
