On Thu, Jan 30, 2003 at 11:43:44PM +0100, Torsten Schlabach wrote:
> Dear Miernik,
[.. cut ..]
> Thoughts and opinions on this are welcome! Maybe prices are different in
> other parts of the world? Just it is my experience that even in Africa
> (I am not kidding, I am serious) there is Internet service available
> pretty much at comparable rates to in what some people call the
> "developed" world. So I did not find a lot of value in making huge
> investments to compete in such markets.
What you are saying is at the same time true and false:
It is true that in almost any country there are many services which
supply internet for fees same as these in "developed" world.
It is flase, because you forget two things:
1) These services for these prices are avialable in most countries
_in_a_limited_area_of_that_country_
Often these services are avialable to about 5% of the population
For you, just looking from abroad at the webpages of the internet
providers it may seem to you that the prices are great, and there
is no problem. But when you realy are there in that country, and
you want to subscribe to the service, in 95% of cases you live in
the wrong city, you are on the wrong street, etc.
2) Don't forget that salaries are different in different countries It
may seem to you that 20 EUR is affordable, but over for 80% for the
population, 20 EUR monthy for an internet service is too much to
afford. You can but a DVB card for 30 EUR, and that is a one time
cost. Many people have their telephone lines cut off because they
could not pay that 100 EUR bill...
Making software developement mailing lists avialable for the whole
continent only for a signle one time cost of buing the DVB card would
be a tremendous help for many developers which could read all
discussions they need to develop and use GNU and open source software.
> >> It should not cost more than 100 EUR monthly to multicast that.
>
> I have heared quite different prices for capacity on Astra or Eutelsat.
> More like 10.000 EUR / month or even more.
10.000 EUR / month for 16 kbps? Are you sure?
There are satellite services, like http://www.netsystem.com/ which
sell 300 kbps for 36 EUR monthly. It is technically possible to
multicast through that service to all users in Europe, I'd be able to
write software for that.
Only their licence prohibits that. But that is 300 kbps for 36 EUR. So
if we only wanted to use 5% of that they could allow us to multicast
that. We would use much less of their bandwidth than a single user
downloading MP3s and films all the time (which is allowed in their
rules).
For me it would be technically possible to do it even without them
knowing and noticing it. The only way Netsystem.com staff could know
that we do this, is that they would read about it here for example :)
But when they will do, they would be very angry, and this would not be
a good thing to do to violate the rules of the service - GNU is about
being OK with everyone, obeying rules and being legal.
P.S. You do not have to CC: me, I get mail from the list anyway.
--
Miernik ____________________________________________________
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