[ NNSquad ] Please!!! stop silly debate about paying for rate versus paying for volume

["David P. Reed" <dpreed@reed.com>]

Users of the network actually care about neither rate nor volume.   
Operators, of course, have *some* costs that loosely track each of those.

But pricing in economics is not about component costs.  If it were, 
automobiles would cost a few hundred dollars, and all the "value added" 
of marketing, ... would be of zero value.

Let's come back to the users' interest.   Most users are interested in 
*response time* to various demands they place on the system, at various 
times.  Most users are not terribly interested in the "total delivered 
volume of bits" over a month.

Response time is not a single unitary measure - there are different 
response times:

    - response to a click on a website,
    - response to fetch a video download (on my Apple TV, this is 
important, because I download the whole video so that there is *no 
chance* that while I'm watching, there will be glitches).
    - response till a collection of photos are uploaded from my camera 
to a photo-sharing site,
    - response between a pause while speaking and the other person 
knows he/she can speak in a VoIP call,
    ...

Now each of these is facilitated by a *high peak rate*, which is why I 
pay for a so-called 20 Mb/sec cable service (from RCN, if you care).

On the other hand, it's also important to me that I can download a *lot* 
of movies and software distributions each month.  So I also care about 
total available usage.

However, I don't want that total to be smoothly metered over a month by 
some kind of "constant bit rate" connection.   Users don't want a 
constant bit-rate, never have, and never will.  They want a 2-parameter 
service, with an *infinite* instantaneous bitrate, and a reasonably 
large average-over-the-month bitrate.

And they also know that their usage per month will vary tremendously, 
because sometimes there are big software update releases, and sometimes 
there are not.

So, PLEASE, PLEASE, guys: it isn't either-or.   The "good" that users 
want is not a constant speed, nor is it a total use.  It's a 
*mixture*.   And the market needs to get smart about that.