Lets send these to the list? ----- Forwarded message from Patrick Miller ----- From: Patrick Miller X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.5 PL3] To: bradmiller@dslonramp.com (Bradley Miller) Subject: Re: Comcast/etc....meter it YES I am all for Metered pricing. I always avoided unlimited dialup accounts. I used the 200 hour accounts more than I would ever need, but those that abused paid for the extra lines needed. Give me the fast connection. Let me do with it what I want. Don't say I get x bandwidth and try an find tricky ways to get us to fit in your parameters. I am paying for x bandwidth let me do with it what I want and pay for the extra data. Just don't nickel and dime me for $50/ month I should be getting a size able chunk of gigs 30 sounds good. If I use that many every month I would be using more than I am paying for, but on average if I use more than that I will be abusing the system and pay for it. Less than that and you know you have room to grow. Its the law of averages. For the average user --- on my cell phone I get more minutes than I will use, but I know I have a buffer. Perhaps a good level is 10 gigs.. I haven not seen a chart of average usage for a cable or dsl node. More at end.... Bradley Miller wrote: What about metered pricing though? Every other commodity is priced that way. We buy a gallon of gas, get water based on so many thousand gallons and electriciy is by the kilowatt/hour. Why not bandwidth? Would your download habits change? If the price was right I could see a minimum connect charge (say $15/month) and then a $??/gig transfer fee. Will people yell? Yes -- they are to used to the "give me all I can get" mentality. The Internet "metality" is free, but somewhere along the line someone forgot to mention that the infrastructure has to be paid for somehow. We'd all love a 6 lane highway from KC to St. Louis, but once we realize who's paying for it . . . The new 3G wireless phones are on the brink of coming out -- but how do you price them? Do you think they're honestly going to let someone tie a cell and bandwidth to be "Mr. MP3 Jukebox" for 1/2 the country? -- Bradley Miller > > Personally, I think they should have metered bandwidth with pricepoints for > different levels of data connections. I'm not saying have a > "20gig/$50/month" limit, more like a window for download speeds. If you > have one PC, do you need more than 400K/sec? A tiered pricing structure > would give people the best of both worlds. Yes and no. You should probably pay a little more for a faster connection, but probably not. If they have a faster connection they will enjoy the connection more, and thus reach the limit faster. Someone with a 384 connection who downloads the full pipe all the time is probably causing more problems than someone who bursts upto 4 megs a few times a month but avereges 128k/month. ----- End forwarded message ----- -- JD Runyan "You can't milk a point." David M. Kuehn, Ph.D.