Path: utzoo!telecom-request Date: Wed, 24 Apr 1991 04:51:00 -0600 From: "James Borynec" Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom Subject: Decreasing Costs of Transmission Message-ID: Organization: TELECOM Digest Sender: Telecom@eecs.nwu.edu Approved: Telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Submissions-To: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Administrivia-To: telecom-request@eecs.nwu.edu X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 11, Issue 303, Message 13 of 13 Lines: 37 After looking at some of the developing transmission technologies (notably fiber optics) I have reached some conclusions that I would like to share with the net. I would also appreciate any feedback. 1) The costs of long distance transmission of information is going WAY DOWN. This is because of the incredible bandwith of fiber. You can easily fit one million phone calls onto one 32 strand fiber cable. I suspect that the number of phone calls in New York City at any one time would fit on this cable! 2) The real costs of transmission is really in the multiplexing technology. Getting information on and off these fiber highways is the cost bottleneck. Fortunately, we can build bigger, faster, and CHEAPER multiplexers with the new silicon (and other) technologies. Thus these costs are going down quickly too! Because these costs are going down so very much they will quickly be dwarfed (or indeed may already be dwarfed) by other costs such as local access, accounting of calls, etc. Therefore, for all practical purposes a LOCAL phone calls costs as much as a LONG DISTANCE phone call. Clearly the pricing structures do not reflect these costs (Yet!). My question is - What is AT&T, MCI, Sprint, etc going to do when they can no longer reasonably charge more than a local call? Won't this change the industry substantially? Will North America move to a wide area extended flat rate billing zone? How about this - you pay Sprint $10/month to call anywhere in the USA to talk for as long as you want. Jim Borynec jboryne%agt@cs.ualberta.ca james@cs.ualberta.ca 500 Capitor Sqr, 10065 Jasper Ave, Edmonton Alberta, T5J 3B1