Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!mailrus!iuvax!watmath!looking!brad From: brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton) Newsgroups: comp.org.usenix Subject: Re: USENIX Board Studies UUCP Message-ID: <62293@looking.on.ca> Date: 16 Dec 89 01:18:08 GMT References: <36700@apple.Apple.COM> <127@dumbcat.UUCP> <36766@apple.Apple.COM> <1989Nov26.001644.3176@utzoo.uucp> <93061@pyramid.pyramid.com> Organization: Looking Glass Software Ltd. Lines: 20 Class: discussion I am not so sure that E-mail by phone is so good an idea, in the end. I feel fairly certain that within just a few years, E-mail will be available for a fixed price -- ie. for $10/month, you get all the E-mail you can type. (To avoid people sending megabyte files around this way, no doubt there will be limits on the total data to any one destination for a given user.) It has to go this way, I think. Unlike phone, video and other things which require almost 0-latency in delivery, E-mail doesn't care if it takes 1 second or even 1000 seconds to reach its destination. There are so many high bandwidth channels being built that we could send all the typed messages of the whole world in their spare bandwidth. And this can't result in anything but fixed-price E-mail, because people *love* fixed price services, and companies love them even more. So E-mail by modem and phone may be dead before long, anyway. -- Brad Templeton, ClariNet Communications Corp. -- Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473