Re^2: FCC doing it again...

[Chet Murthy]

earlw at Apple.COM (Earl Wallace) writes:

>In article <246 at cfa.HARVARD.EDU> wyatt at cfa.HARVARD.EDU (Bill Wyatt) writes:
>>...
>>I don't want extra charges either, but in addition to the above 
>>consideration, modem calls are not the same simply because they
>>usually last much longer than a voice call. Somewhere I read an
>>estimate that if only 20% of household had modems in regular use,
>>the phone system would be hoplessly bogged down.
>>...

>Why do we have to pay more bucks to operate our modems over the phone
>lines than a voice user?  If companies charged $$ based on how much of
>a service you used, the Post Office should charge MORE for bulk mail
>rather than less :-)

Read the article more carefully.  And think.  The Post Office charges less
for bulk mail because it's not much more costly to do the routing of
a large package than it is for a small package.  The major cost is the
human one - handling.  So it makes sense to charge less per lb. for bulk
than for letters.

For phone calls, though, the cost of setup and teardown is small, and is
easily dwarfed by the cost of maintaining the connection and data transfer.
So it makes sense to charge more for time spent.  You might say that in
that case, they should charge per-call.  But voice calls, as pointed
out, are shorter than modem calls, hence the modem calls incur more
load on the network.

All in all, it makes sense.  The system _does_ get more load from modems,
so why not charge them more?  However, the _reason_ the system gets more
load from modems is because it's designed for voice.  I should think
that a well-designed ISDN system wouldn't have these problems.  So
perhaps what we should all be pushing for is a kind of ISDN for
homeowners?





	--chet--
	murthy at cs.cornell.edu