[Sosfbay-discuss] The End of the Internet?

[Wes Rolley]

Just to exerpt the conclusions from what Cameron said, he speaks the 
truty.  I might add that one of the costs that I pay as an internet user 
is to have my  cable company handle all of the email that I receive.  
Most of it is SPAM.  Some of the rest is malicious.  The SPAMMERS exist 
because email is free.  If everyone had to pay a micro-charge for their 
email, it would not be much of an additional cost.  I send at the most 
20 a day.  But, for many spammers, who sends million, the costs would 
start to excede their hope of revenue and that will reduce the number of 
routers needed, the amount of switching.  I, for one, would welcome a 
scheme by which some sort of micro charge is costed into email.

As a telecom consultant I know  wrote, "If you dig a trench the most 
expensive thing you can put into it is dirt."

>
>What's gonna end, and it *should*, is the bandwidth
>is free party.  It turns out the economics of
>long haul and edge bandwidth are really weird.
>It costs about the same to lay a hundred optical
>fibers from San Jose to Los Angeles as it costs
>to lay one, and most of the existing fiber was laid
>by Enron-type bubble companies which then collapsed.
>So the fiber between cities is at 2% capacity
>and depreciating.
>
>But that doesn't mean bandwidth is free.  We're just
>not paying for it right now.  (Routers and the staff
>to manage them and the fortresses they live in
>turn out to be the big cost.)  The telcos are locked
>in a price war with the cable TV companies,
>charging less than cost for residential broadband
>and the network behind it.  They're looking for a
>way to end that price war.  You're gonna have to
>pay something approaching the cost for movie downloads
>and podcasts and voice over IP.  Good.  It won't be
>True Cost Pricing, but it will be more real than the
>free bandwidth fantasy we're living in now.
>
>Meanwhile, the really essential functions,
>email and the text part of the Web, consume tiny
>bandwidth, that can be supported by volunteers if need be.
>Should the telcos take away the fat pipes,
>independent skinny pipes will remain.
>Should the DNS become discriminatory, the
>alternative DNSes are ready to roll.  I'm more
>worried about spam and malware and voluntary, stylish
>stupidity chasing people away from email and the Web
>than about any telco conspiracy.
>

-- 
"Anytime you have an opportunity to make things better and you don't, then you are wasting your time on this Earth" Roberto Clemente

Wes Rolley
http://www.refpub.com/
Tel: 408.778.3024