At 17:45 20/08/96 -0800, jim bell wrote:

The fact is, LD phone is a business that, like it or not, is going to shrink drastically _in_terms_of_dollars_, simply because the cost of that service will likewise, go down. That's life.

Perhaps the answer to this interesting debate between Vipul and Jim lies in looking at what happened to computers as they became cheaper. There was a time when someone at IBM predicted that the needs of the entire world would be met by about 50 computers or so, but now that computers are almost free (as Jim argues bandwidth has become), we have almost that many in a single household (counting all the video games, watches, car and appliance electronics). People found new ways to use computers, so they used far more of them. So much so, that the computer industry overall did not shrink, but grew. There was a time when you bought "time" on a computer, as you do in long-distance telephony. Changing over to computer purchase didn't kill the industry. So if you were sold a size of bandwidth pipe instead of how many hours you actually use it, and eliminated the cost of accounting for time usage, I think we'd all be happier -- except maybe the IBMs of telecom. Arun Mehta Phone +91-11-6841172, 6849103 amehta@cpsr.org http://www.cerfnet.com/~amehta/ finger amehta@cerfnet.com for public key