At 3:54 PM 3/27/96 -0500, Mark M. wrote:

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On Tue, 26 Mar 1996, E. ALLEN SMITH wrote:

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It occurs to me that it would be good if people sent in some non-governmental/hierarchial solutions to this problem, such as ones using digital cash as "postage" for prioritized mail.

I read an article on various Internet pricing schemes a while ago and one of the ideas was a pretty clever solution. Internet services would be classified according to their bandwidth requirement and need for interactivity. The cost per byte of e-mail might be very cheap whereas the cost per byte for videoconferencing might be more. There's no real way to rip off this scheme, because if you try to send an e-mail and classify it as "high priority" it is more expensive.

The phone companies have dealt with this kind of problem for years. For example, there are issues of phase jitter and bit error rate that they deal with all the time. If anything, they don't quite understand the email type communication of, "Oh, anytime in the next 10 minutes, and tell me if it doesn't get thru and I'll send it again." In ATM, these characteristics are bundled into what is called Quality of Service. That, along with bandwidth, make a reasonable basis for charging. Email is a bit like flying standby, while video is more like the Concorde. IMHO, the only long-term solution to the problem of bandwidth allocation involves markets. Markets feed cost information back to the users and give the providers incentive to improve service. Regards - Bill ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Bill Frantz | The CDA means | Periwinkle -- Computer Consulting (408)356-8506 | lost jobs and | 16345 Englewood Ave. frantz@netcom.com | dead teenagers | Los Gatos, CA 95032, USA