The Internet is Missing
Bob Frankston comes back again and again to the end to end principle:
"But you should ask why the cost of your telephone service has not had the same price/performance improvements you've seen in computers and in the rest of the Internet where a factor of a thousand or a million is not uncommon. Even more to the point, a telephone connection is a small audio stream compared with even a cable modem that has 10 to 100 times the capacity yet is priced about the same. And the cable modem is available 24 hours a day and you only use the phone part of the time. What's so special about a phone call that you need to pay a separate fee for that one application?"
He has a knack of bringing first principles to bear that makes his analysis very penetrating. Nevertheless, while he paints a convincing picture of where we ought to go, I have no sense from the article of how we're going to get there.
5:50:30 PM 
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