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To: w molloy who wrote (3934)	12/4/1999 12:59:00 PM
From: Bux	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 13582

In San Diego plans vary from 30c to 47c/minute. In the US, both parties pay for the call???? Is this true? In the Seattle area Airtouch offers 500 any-time minutes for 49.95/mo. and this includes a handset subsidy, all digital value added services, dual-mode so analog is priced the same as digital, and no long-distance charges for calls made in the U.S. That's less than $.10/min. and only the wireless party pays. Other carriers offer competitive plans. Bux

To: w molloy who wrote (3934)	12/4/1999 7:05:00 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Respond to of 13582

W, what matters is the long run marginal cost of producing another bit and whether that'll sell at a good price above that cost. If the production cost is way below the value to the user, then It's a winner! The price per minute being charged now is irrelevant to the situation which will exist in two years when HDR is a reality. So comparing price per minute now [which is only 10c per minute and rapidly falling - eat all you like for the Cricket plan] with an equivalent data charge is not the way to value networks in 2001. Capacity is being increased rapidly as various engineering trickery is created. Competition in infrastructure and devices is frenetic. Prices will fall for infrastructure as they did for handsets. Electronic gizzards are easily cloned and inherently cost near zero. As service providers start to figure out that the best way to make money is charge heaps at peak times and generate consumption at slow time, they'll get those rats nose to tail in the pipe. When it's really busy, the service providers will put a little cat sign on the device so rats will know that they will be bitten $1 or something if they enter the pipe then! So they'll wait until the cat goes away. When the cat's away, the rats will play. That's Marketing 101 in the WWeb. George Gilder has been to rat training school. He says that cheap supply [no cat] creates demand [rats jumping down the drain]. Sure, some slow service providers will not bother with data. They'll sit on their dwindling molehill of money while WWeb Marketing 101 graduates will be providing what customers want = cheap, high quality voice, with cheap, high quality WWeb. Those ignorant about rats will make a molehill out of their money mountain. Mqurice PS: I still prefer the freeway analogy because there is a destination, with various routes to take, humans are a better model for WWeb use than rats are, there will be WWeb in cars, people will be able to queue their data like you queue cars on the on-ramps and wait for the toll charge to drop enough for them to hit the on-ramp. Stuff like that. With the rat/cat analogy, the cat could have little dollar signs in It's eyes, saying $1, $2, $5, or whatever the market will bear. Whatever it takes to stop rats piling down the drain and blocking it.