Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!PSI.COM!schoff
From: schoff@PSI.COM ("Martin Lee Schoffstall")
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: Re: Dial up access to Internet facilities
Message-ID: <9005270423.AA19852@psi.com>
Date: 27 May 90 04:23:12 GMT
References: <1990May25.163528.14300@ameristar>
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 64

Rick,

Someday I hope to meet you.....  5 years of private and public email
and our paths haven't crossed yet, just swords....    :-)

 	The plight of many small technical businesses is that we just cannot 
 	justify spending $30K+ for access into the Internet for the occasional 
 	FTP/smtp transfer.  Were access fees brought inline with the level of 
 	service offered, eg $2K-5K/yr for dialup SLIP is reasonable, surely PSI
 	and other regionals would see their business pick up substantially.  

Aside for PSI/PSINet not being a regional, (think about th N word), I think most
of us have recognized an entry level market. There must be half a dozen
providers who have something that looks like ~$10K with dedicated facilities.
One of the issues on the dialup front is that a major cost is hidden, the
message units that all businesses have to pay.  In many LATA's a 4wire
unconditioned analog circuit costs $100/mo, the cross over point where
the message units are more expensive is probably not too many of the
3 hour periods described below.

Somehow dialup Internet access and SMTP don't go hand and hand in my mind,
my estimate is that your going to have keep a connection open for about 3 hours
every day to have some probablity of synchronizing with all the SMTP
agents pushing mail out of their queues for the site.  Realistically you'll
be running uucp/tcp to a site like UUPSI who is MX'ing for your domain.

 	Note that it isn't small business alone that has a problem with
 	the high connection costs to the Internet.  Ameristar sells IP/TCP
 	network products and every once in a while I ask some of our larger 
 	customers ($20M & up) why they are not on the Internet.  The answer is 
 	usually that the perceived value of the connection is not in line with 
 	the yearly access fee.  In such cases, a low cost dialup SLIP service 
 	would go a long way in giving people a chance to experiment with 
 	Internet access to evaluate its usefullness to their organization.  
 	Dialup SLIP is also a safe way for the regionals to toy with their 
 	price/volume curve without having to add infastructure (ie additional 
 	or higher capacity links) at the outset of the experiment.  

At least you could talk them into getting a good quality UUCP connection
so they can do email.  I'm frightened by the lack of participation of
many vertical industries in communicating with their customers, suppliers,
except through phones. (Have you ever entered voice mail grid lock, where
neither party ever gets through due to synchronization problems, and
the use of voice mail systems as filtering devices.  Someday the only
time you'll ever get an answer is by dialing 1-900.lovenow).

 	One other suggestion I have is that the regionals ought to survey 
 	potential customers about the sort of connectivity and services they 
 	would purchase as a function of cost.  Good starting sample data sets 
 	might be the lists of technical companies that local business 
 	organizations or government maintains, or even UUCP maps.

This has been done, but your sampling focus is a good suggestion.

 	Please do make an announcement of any new services PSI introduces.  I 
 	for one would like to hear what PSI is doing to moderate access fees 
 	without having to ping your sales organization every few months.  

Maybe Kent England will radio you in reports from "The Front", rumored
to have been named "Operation Fortress Beantown", BarHarborAirlines has
guaranteed that they can airlift as many cisco's as they will need to
sustain the battle.  :-)

Marty