There are repeating patterns in the histories of communication technologies, including ordinary mail, the telegraph, the telephone, and the Internet. In particular, the typical story for each service is that quality rises, prices decrease, and usage increases to produce increased total revenues. At the same time, prices become simpler. The historical analogies of this paper suggest that the Internet will evolve in a similar way, towards simplicity. The schemes that aim to provide differentiated service levels and sophisticated pricing schemes are unlikely to be widely adopted.

Date Published: 25 July 2001
PDF: 7 pages
Proc. SPIE 4526, Scalability and Traffic Control in IP Networks, (25 July 2001);

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 4526:
Scalability and Traffic Control in IP Networks
Sonia Fahmy; Kihong Park, Editor(s)