John Linton
........it just costs money for some commercial entity to put all of the infrastructure in place for you to receive the information you select.
I haven't given much/any thought to the ramifications of buying bandwidth in different ways to those available in the past over the almost 7 days we have been away but this topic surfaced yesterday in an obscure column in one of the UK Sunday papers - I can't remember which one as I've grown unused to having several Sunday papers to browse through over breakfast on a Sunday.....I never read the Sydney Sundays papers. Anyway, the column was about the inequities of UK ISPs and their pricing of downloads and was railing against the fact that the internet should be free. I thought only the twelve year olds on the various on line fora made such childish statements but apparently the pseudo journalists in mainstream UK papers do too.
The internet can never be 'free' as long as some sort of infrastructure is required to deliver it to any end user. In Australia this means that some sort of telephone line is required and some sort of switching centre is required as well as some sort of connection to the various sources of data that any customer will wish to access - OK - everyone knows this so why does anyone, including some sort of UK journalist rabbit on about access to the internet being provided 'free'? Because they had trouble writing their column this week and resorted to dashing off some splenetic piffle to assuage the editor's wrath is the only reason I can think of.
Over the last month or so there have been some quite dramatic changes downwards in the pricing of 'international' IP bandwidth where the pricing is now approaching the cost per mbps of the customer connection bandwidth. This in turn means that the cost to an ISP of delivering 1 gbps of data to the end user has fallen to something below 60 cents in peak time and something under 30 cents in off peak time (the description of off peak varies very widely from carrier to carrier.Ignoring the P2P addicts who believe an internet connection is only useful if it allows them to download infinitely large amounts of data each month, and for whom no ISP will ever be able to provide a service at a price they deem reasonable, it appears to me that the time is coming where an ADSL2 service can, and should, be offered on the basis of a single connection charge of, say, $25.00 per month with a few mbps of download included and the a pay for use of something like $1.00 per peak gb downloaded and 50 cents per off peak gb downloaded.
The numbers I am quoting are based on the costs of the two different IP costs that exist now - we are talking with a number of carriers to reduce those numbers in the future which could make peak per gb downloads as low cost as 50 cents and off peak as low cost as 25 cents per gb. Who knows - by mid 2010 the costs could be much lower than that - so - they may get close to 'free' as the juveniles in Australia seem to think is appropriate. For users such as me, who are constantly connected to the internet but whose use over any month seldom, if ever, exceeds 1 gb such a pricing would be ideal. I don't know how many such users there are but well over 60% of Exetel's customers use less than 2 gb per month and, based on BigPond's and other ISP's low end plans that is a pretty common 'theme'.
The major issue we, as an insignificant buyer of IP bandwidth, would like to see is the split of IP pricing into time zones so that off peak bandwidth is priced at a fraction of the cost of peak time band width. The conservative, and greedy, carriers don't like that concept much but I believe some of the 'hungrier' carriers will find a way of offering such a service and I'm hoping that while I'm away such an offer will have been put in place. If that proves to be the case we will have something to 'play with' in October in terms of how it can be packaged to provide the most benefit to Exetel's really valuable customers and how we can negotiate the other elements of the 'deal' that will allow us to use any commercial advantages we may temporarily gain to everyone's best advantage.
It will be an interesting concept to turn new ways of buying into workable and attractive new ways of selling.