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Technology Stocks : The *NEW* Frank Coluccio Technology Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tech101 who wrote (14379)	3/27/2006 3:25:05 AM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 46821

Hi Tech101, re: "Me to, 'vehemently oppose Whitacre teiring as bad for democracy, bad for business, and, in the end, bad for the broadband providers themselves.'" I could not, at this time, say whether I would "vehemently" oppose future changes in pricing rules. As a member of the species, I, too, am naturally averse to any form of unilateral decision process that would result in changing an environment - in this case, the environment being "all you can eat" - that I have an interest in, or that I have accepted in the past and have become fully accustomed to. I think it’s this natural aversion to change, in general, that probably has much to do with how QoS issues are perceived by many on the end-user side of the equation – and in many cases, ISPs, too - although, this aversion should not detract from other arguments that are well founded in economics. I have a sense that at some point pricing models will have to be changed, anyway, regardless of whether QoS is a part of it or not. A model requiring folks to pay into it can't have a lopsided utilization Pareto, and its attendant flagrant inequities like we have now (20% of users/spammers utilize 80% of capacity?) and be expected it to last forever -- especially when overall consumption is taking a hockey stick ride into the heavens. I do have an issue, however, when those who dominate and possess near- full market power decide to charge more based on the perceived value of a packet or stream of content. This would sit in stark contrast with unit pricing based on the costs associated with production, but even here we see the costs of delivering different types of content varying, sometimes justifiably. Meaning, I allow that some linkage exists, in theory at least, between the delivery of certain types of content and how that content is handled by the service provider(s). But the decision to provide special handling and safeguards should be made by the end user ordering it up, and NOT by the provider. One would ordinarily assume that the price paid for broadband access is amortized over the cost of access platforms almost entirely. But that is not the way it works. Such thinking is not consistent with the revenue flows and value exchanges taking place in the Internet’s ecology. But, the model doesn’t appear to be a constant one anymore, or as constant as it was for the first dozen or so years of its commercial existence. It’s continually changing, in fact, along the parameters set by providers’ business models and increasingly by the demands being made by end users’ ever-more-voracious applications. On a purely cause-and-effect basis, one would readily assume that “something’s got to give”. But we have a situation whereby the aforementioned greater demands are being offset by technological improvements that yield greater amounts of production per dollar. The question then becomes: “Is the utilization of Internet capacity and the overall burden to providers being caused by more sophisticated applications outpacing the gains being achieved through innovation and technological improvement? Your thoughts? FAC