Comments on: Do Neutral Wireless Networks Require an End to the Flat-rate Plan?

By: Rich

Rich — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 14:57:55 +0000

Tom seems to have the solution when he says "the answer is mettering in the same way the DSL/cable operators have done it. keep everything unlimited and sell tiers of speed."

By: Alz

Alz — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 14:47:32 +0000

Tom, when you talk about tiers and different options, you are describing the market. One of the many reasons to fight Net Neutrality is to preserve the benefits of choice that only a market can provide.

If people don't like certain pricing models, then entrepreneur will figure out better ways.

As soon as the government is involved, it will be harder for competition to develop simply because of the uncertainty of government.

I'm surprised Gigaom is so anti-competition here.

By: tom

tom — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 13:13:54 +0000

i really believe the answer is mettering in the same way the DSL/cable operators have done it. keep everything unlimited and sell tiers of speed. the basic tier may have to be really slow compared to todays standard. but i think that may be OK. i know large families who share Cricket mobile broadband connections that are only providing about 400kbps and are happy. how about selling unlimited 0.5mbps connections @ $15/month but letting consumers bundle as many 'connection as they desire. so while $15 gets you 0.5mbs $150/month would get you 5 mbps. most consumers would go for the cheapest option keeping the network uncontested and the power users who believe they need the speed could pay for it.

and if the operator really want to sell by the KB let them do that as well which would actually makes a lot of sense for certain application that do not need lots of constant bandwidth. but please give us a slow but unlimited option.

By: Ray

Ray — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 04:38:17 +0000

So someone had to right a paper to explain that there will never be enough OTA bandwidth to satisfy demand.

OK, I get it.

What we're left is trying to come up with a market structure that follows a rational supply and demand curve, a structure that would naturally throttle demand as the supply of unused bandwidth approaches zero.

Flat-rate pricing can never do this since it's based on the assumption that bandwidth is infinite. Carriers throttle arbitrarily whether or not it's required. Worse of all, customers are charged whether or not they use the resource. The result is supply and demand have no relationship with each other and no inherit corrective tendencies.

Like it or not, metering is a possible solution. By charging by the byte, users would finally be aware of how much of the resource they're using. Overall the price of a byte would be set at a level necessary to protect the network. Set too high and demand and profits go down, too low and network reliability suffers.

Whatever shape broadband pricing takes in the future, it must balance supply and demand.

By: tom

tom — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 03:05:43 +0000

i believe that there is a reality in play here which is consumers are completely unwilling to subscribe to a service with such an unpredictable cost as metered broadband would be that it simply would not work.

By: Alz

Alz — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 00:46:12 +0000

Keep the government out. Imagine if the government regulated PC's. We'd all be running something like Windows ME and the people trying to run better OS's would be taxed and ridiculed by the Politically Correct people.