Re: More Sidgemore on per-bit pricing

[Tim Salo]

> Date: Sat, 5 Dec 1998 11:26:45 -0500
> From: "Jay R. Ashworth" <jra@scfn.thpl.lib.fl.us>
> To: "'nanog@merit.edu'" <nanog@merit.edu>
> Subject: Re: More Sidgemore on per-bit pricing
> 	[...]
> Well, we'll see.  The problem is suits who don't understand that
> billing by the byte, rather than by the router port, usually has higher
> costs than it does revenue enhancement.  If I assert that I'm trying to
> reduce customer's billings, then, as a CEO of a publicly held company,
> I'd better have something up my sleeve that will actually enhance
> revenue, or I'll be out of a job, real quick.

I suspect that "it's too hard and/or expensive to bill by byte (or
kilo-byte or mega-byte)" may become one of the great myths of the 
Internet.

It should be noted that phone companies, particularly LECs, are probably
better than anybody at billing in very fine usage-basee increments.
"Suites" often understand costs and pricing very well.  Suites often 
also understand competitive advantage.  I wonder if John Sidgemore is
thinking that offering fine-grained usage-based billing is something that
he can do well (if he leverages the billing skills of other parts of
WorldComm) and that his competitors won't be able to replicate, (e.g.,
the thousands of ISPs who seem to think that sending out one fixed-rate
bill a month is a sizable burden).

Beyond suspecting that fine-grained usage-based billing in the Internet 
will be introduced by those that can do it well, I haven't a clue what
the long term future is...

-tjs