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

[Richard Bennett <richard@bennett.com>]

I agree with David on these points, and just about dropped my jaw over 
the previous suggestion from Vint that bit-rate limits are something we 
should advocate for the Internet. Packet networks are designed for 
sharing, and that works best in the scenario David describes: extremely 
high instantaneous peak rate, and some reasonable quota over longer 
periods of time. Quotas are important because they prevent periods of 
high demand from lasting too long, so they address an issue that peak 
rate limiting doesn't address. Low limits on instantaneous rates are 
circuit switching logic, and we've been past that ever since Louis 
Pouzin invented CYCLADES, if not longer.   

David P. Reed wrote:
> 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.

--
Richard Bennett
Research Fellow
Information Technology and Innovation Foundation
Washington, DC