Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lts!amanda From: amanda@lts.UUCP (Amanda Walker) Newsgroups: comp.dcom.modems Subject: Re: FYI -- PC-P Price "Increase" Message-ID: <869@lts.UUCP> Date: 2 Jan 89 17:20:06 GMT References: <261@lakesys.UUCP> <7342@chinet.chi.il.us> <574@atanasoff.cs.iastate.edu> Reply-To: amanda@lts.UUCP (Amanda Walker) Organization: InterCon Systems Corporation, Reston, VA Lines: 57 jwright@atanasoff.cs.iastate.edu (Jim Wright) writes: ... I'm glad I don't own stock in this company. I wonder if they will even exist 12 months from now. The bad feelings from this can't help but spill over to their other ventures. Well, although I can appreciate your feelings, it's not very likely. GTE Telenet is one of the more successful and established telecommunications companies, after all, and they could probably drop PC Pursuit altogether without any particular trouble. As I understood things, PC Pursuit was a clever way to get a little additional revenue from BBS users during time when the existing commercial network was not being fully utilized. From this point of view, the new charges make sense. If you are using it to log in to BBS's across the country, it's still the way to go. If you're using in a commercial fashion (such as long-haul Usenet links), you get to pay for it. Seems pretty fair to me. There ain't no such thing as a free lunch. The issue of whether or not GTE should have done better market research in the beginning so that they would have realized that people would use it for things like Usenet and Fidonet is a separate issue, I think. Sometimes we forget how unknown these things really are in "the real world." It's only in the last couple of years that simple hobbyist BBS's have started to really be visible. The idea of something with the size and success of Usenet would surprise a great number of people, I think. I doubt the idea of PC Pursuit was started by an engineer, but by an upper-level manager or executive, probably someone who never heard of Usenet, and who now has to cope with mis-reading the potential market for the service :-). At least they are trying to minimize the impact on the people they see as their primary users. This does point out, though, that there is certainly a market for cheap, on-demand, long-haul data services. Usenet feeds and mail relays do tend to fall between the cracks in the classical divisions in the telecom market: it's more than casual use, but it's not commercial up-all-the-time use either. Ideally, something in between normal phone service and a leased line would be great--something on the order of, "I want a 9600 baud dialout channel, but only 2 hours a day." I do know that various of the BOCs are experimenting with switched 56K baud service, which would be ideal. Unfortunately, I think that even when this available, it's only within a given local dialing area, and I don't know anything about the fee structure. In a way, this whole situation reminds me of the flap over the FCC tariffs a while back. Nobody in a position to make decisions seems to appreciate that the demand for personal data services has kept pace with the commercial demand. Sigh. Just a few thoughts, -- Amanda Walker ...!uunet!lts!amanda / lts!amanda@uunet.uu.net InterCon, 11732 Bowman Green Drive, Reston, VA 22090 -- Calm down; it's only ones and zeros...