USENIX Board Studies UUCP

[Brad Templeton]

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