June 26, 2006

Tariff Rebate Passthrough – achieving pricing flexibility

I’ve thought more about the one weakness so far in the Tariff Rebate Passthrough plan – pricing flexibility. Contrary to what I implied a few hours ago, I now believe that Tariff Rebate Passthrough (TRP) is fully compatible with the kinds of service pricing flexibility providers and consumers are used to or would want. To see that, let’s consider the basic kinds of telecom service pricing:

 

 

*I haven’t checked those numbers to see if they make sense. They’re just examples.

**Subject to the usual kinds of regulation stemming from the monopoly/oligopoly status of last-mile providers.

 

What kinds of price structure does Tariff Rebate Passthrough not allow for? Mainly, discriminatory connection-based pricing is sharply reduced. E.g., “friends and family” calling plans, “free calls but only to other subscribers to our service,” etc. might be hard to replicate under TRP. But I think TRP leaves plenty of other pricing options for service providers to still make money hand over fist.

Comments

2 Responses to “Tariff Rebate Passthrough – achieving pricing flexibility”

  1. The Monash Report»Blog Archive » Unlocking fiscal from technical architecture on July 3rd, 2006 8:30 am

    […] Martin Geddes of Telepocalypse is kind enough to call Tariff Rebate Passthrough “the first new idea I’ve seen in a long time on the stale network neutrality debate.” He goes on to express concern about the practicality of the idea, but hopefully I addressed that somewhat in subsequent posts. While there certainly are major systems to build, which I acknowledge, I don’t see why it’s worse than what would be needed if the telcos’ preferred bill successfully makes it through Congress. • • • […]

  2. Simple legislative language for Tariff Rebate Passthrough | The Monash Report on November 6th, 2008 12:58 pm

    […] of the best features of Tariff Rebate Passthrough is that, even with pricing flexibility, it can be implemented using simple legislative language. There only have to be three […]

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