Re: DO IT!!!! (plus report on Utah)

["Fred R. Goldstein" <fgoldstein@bbn.com>]

  At 01:23 AM 5/28/96 -0400, AerieGroup@aol.com wrote:
  
  > His attorney (me) then took the stand to explain that , yes, that it was the
  >end of the electronic world as we know it unless they lowered ISDN rates.
  
  Y'know, I wonder if that soft of hyperbole can backfire?
  
  In the Bell Atlantic case, it's quite obvious that they're interested
  in discouraging widespread residential use.  That's very bad.  They are
  interested in keeping it a boutique service.  Hey, I passed a Land Rover
  dealership yesterday and I'm sure their customers appreciate the unhurried
  look of the showroom.  But a lot more people drive Toyotas and Fords.
  
  Oddly enough, BA's ISDN tariffs may prove to be self-fulfilling.  Set the
  price high enough and demand falls, causing unit prices to rise.  I have
  some suspicions about ISDN "cost studies".  They are always sensitive to
  the overall deployment level.  Price it right and it is deployed widely and
  the unit price is cheap, but it wouldn't surprise me if the *marginal
  fixed unit cost* of *residential* ISDN in BA territory were, in fact, 
  much higher than the DE commission thinks.  Why?  Because Resi ISDN is
  NOT usually deployed in the big Centrex COs.  Put a thousand Centrex ISDN
  lines in a CO and the unit cost is bubkis.  Put two Resi or POTS ISDN lines in
  another CO (one that has no big ISDN users or especially Centrex) and you
  still spend the hundreds of thousands of dollars in *marginal* ISDN costs to 
  upgrade the CO.  Does the cost accounting take into account the difference
  between a service deployed "wide and shallow" (POTS)  versus one deployed
  "narrow and deep" (Centrex)?
  
  This would be moot if ISDN demand could be raised to German levels, say,
  5% of POTS.  But BA and most other Bells aim, it seems, to keep it to
  around .05% or maybe .005% of POTS, not counting Centrex.
  
  None of this, of course, affects the Traffic-sensitive cost of ISDN one
  sou.  Discriminatory (vs. POTS) usage charges are never justifiable.
  
  > Found a charming example of a software engineer in Utah who has to use
  >residential FRAME RELAY to telecommute to Silicon Valley.  
  
  In the US West case, that's exactly the idea.  They are obsessed with FR,
  so they intentionally price it to be more attractive than ISDN.  Even as
  a residential service.   In practice, a *full time* connection (i.e., a
  server) is a questionable choice for ISDN, so a 200-hour cap isn't such a
  big deal, especially when FR is available. They just set their overall rate
  levels too high -- the $63 service would be much nicer at $40 or so.
  ___
  Fred R. Goldstein      fgoldstein@bbn.com  
  BBN Corp.              Cambridge MA  USA    +1 617 873 3850