Maurice, you erudite obsessed wacko you. <g> Again with this instantaneous pricing by marginal demand!!
If all the air time were being bought by multinational commodity purchasing agents, your scheme would work beautifully. Unfortunately for the purity of your pricing scheme, the average even executive phone user is not an Archer Daniel Midlands commodities buying agent.
Is a corp. gonna give all of its G* users carte blanche to go ahead and incur minute costs even if the minute rate bumps up to $10 for a while? $30? If not, is the exec. gonna be happy about having to monitor it every time, with real downside (non-reimbursement) if he goofs, and little upside if the rate goes low? Maybe he chooses a regular cell phone instead whenever at all possible avoid the hassle/risk?
But if the economic principals are applied significantly less "perfectly", the result would make a lot more sense to me. It makes sense to offer "come on" trial use offers, if initial demand is low in some markets. It makes sense to offer off peak rates. It may make sense in big developed cell markets such as the USA to price service out of the local cell service providers area (but within the areas of roaming agreement coverage) at a satcom rate that will lure away that customer from roaming on a rival cell phone network (i.e. less than $1 a minute), but then switch to the full satcom rate when out of all cell coverage (perhaps a GPS sensing algorithm could handle this workably well).
And even off peak area rates. If G* is initially little utilized in Africa, e.g., give Africa an extended period introductory rate.
Trouble with all this is that I imagine that early adopters will be willing to pay higher prices. The speed of adoption will have more to do with good marketing, the demonstration effect of seeing business associates and friends make use of it, etc. This I think is a key point.
But with respect to rates that can change by huge amounts minute by minute, there is also the problem that there will be a real backlash by people against perceived "price gouging" if rates go up by 50-100% from year two to three, while Gstrf is not facing higher costs but rather higher profits from increased utilization.
The idea of introductory come on deals is familiar, and well accepted. But the idea of prices which could be massively raised from time to time, in a manner the customer will perceive as arbitrary or motivated by naked American greed, is problematic.
Please don't argue the economic theory to me. I understand it perfectly. There is also the matter of human psychology.
And I imagine most of the rest of the world would be less tolerant of hyperchangeable pricing (at least when it has an upward price movement component) than the relatively hyper capitalistic US of A.
Regards, Doug |
