In article <1994Feb18.154619.96 at immunbio.mpg.de>,
Christoph Gartmann <GARTMANN at IMMUNBIO.MPG.DE> wrote:
>Just to support Reinhard: it is obvious that the network costs will increase
>in the near future (it's already the case here in Germany). While in the past
>all the links have been paid by governments (like satellite links, gateways,
>ip-service providers, ...) the public funding is reduced signifantly so that
>the network services become more and more commercial. At the end you will
>have to pay for the bytes you transmit, the longer the distance, the more
>you will pay.
I think that this is far from obvious. Clearly,
communications costs have come down dramatically and that trend should
continue for some time in the future. At the moment, there appears to
be a substantial oversupply of fiber - at least in the US. The
oversupply exists because it is as cheap to lay fiber as copper, and
the bandwidth of the fiber is at least 3 orders of magnitude higher.
However, a 100X increase in capacity does not mean that people will
make 100X as many phone calls, so there is a lot of fiber bandwidth
available for networking at bargain basement prices. (Whether your
local phone company chooses to offer such prices is another matter.)
In addition, I suspect that the cost of setting up a network
connection (and billing for it) are much higher than actually carrying
the call, so it is not clear that costs will be distance (or even
time) dependent.
What governs networking costs in Germany I cannot say, but I
doubt that it is the real cost of carrying high bandwith calls longer
distances.
Bill Pearson
