William B. Norton wrote:
First - As for whether the US Transit
market is healthy or unhealthy...
Hmm. For this one topic I think I have the best explanation in the world
(tm): it's unhealthy if you bite the dust, it's healthy if one of your
competitors bites the dust 
It certainly appears that the majors can't make money in
this transit market, and they would probably say that the
bottom feeders are greasing the skids to financial ruin
for this industry.
Indeed, and see above. That being said, historically (and valid only for
that long) dominant players in a given industry are the ones that
survived the slide with greased skids.
Michel Py wrote:
Someone mentioned that this was comparing apples to
oranges. Indeed it is, <stuff deleted>
I would disagree that these are apples and oranges
comparisons - these are real prices (normalized to USD)
for transit that someone in the country would pay to
access the big 'I' Internet.
I misread Patrick and withdraw my statement. In the context you meant
it, these are apples to apples. What Patrick meant though (which remains
extremely valid) (2nd disclaimer, forgive my poor English) is that
comparing what it takes to build and/or sell transit in different
countries is comparing apples to oranges. However, what you wrote as
being the cost of connecting to the big "I" is totally valid (that's
where I was trying to get to with my P2P comparison) and has indeed to
be understood WRT to Joe's comments:
Joe Abley wrote:
Our Big Mac index shows how burger prices are changing
I suppose a more direct analogy to the Big Mac Index would be
to take some usefully-accurate measure of transit costs in each
country, and use that to weight a comparison between other
related commodities (cell phone calls? televisions? computers?)
Please accept my entry for the Big Mac Index:
One Mbps worth of residential traffic, link always-on, unlimited,
un-metered, in an urban area within 12,000ft of the CO. Valid between
500 Kbps and 3 Mbps, pro-rated to 1Mbps.
Please fill-in the blanks, convert your local currency to US$ and send
it to me privately, I will post summary results to the ML. Then we can
compare to the cost of transit as Bill posted yesterday and have a
better grasp at the relevance of the BMI.