🚀 go-pugleaf

Steve Fenwick <nospam@nospam.invalid> writes:

> In article 
> <HisRoyalRadioHigness-70941C.18541818062008@news.announcetech.com>,
>  John Higdon <HisRoyalRadioHigness@kome.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> It's a bit like charging cellphone users for incoming calls. I can't 
> tell who "Private Call" is; I can answer it, and it may be a junk call, 
> or it may be a family member trying to get in touch with me urgently.

I've never used the browser on a cell phone owned by anyone for that
reason. Using Cingular, now AT&T as an example, I once checked out a
phone at one of their stores.  The browser did not allow you to pick a
home page - it had to be the company's home page - and if you did not
get an "all you can eat" plan, they'd charge you a penny a kilobyte
(it isn't clear if this includes TCP/IP headers, but my guess is that
it does).  The home page seemed to be about 10 kilobytes in size, so
it would cost you $.10 to just get started.  Worse, if you clicked on
a link and then went back, it would reload the page for another 10
cents.  What you got was no where near 10 K of text, and there was no
way of displaying the HTML source.  I had a vaguely unsettling feeling
that there was some funny going on, like padding the text with a lot
of comments to drive up the cost.  The charges were high enough that
they'd have to be making obscene profits, so I'd suspect the
worse. The suspicion of rip-off profit margins is based on the
assumption that they have to make a profit on voice or at least break
even, so you can estimate a "fair" price for data based on bitrate and
charges for voice calls.


-- 
My real name backwards: nemuaZ lliB