Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!iuvax!cica!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!MITRE.MITRE.ORG!mcgurrin
From: mcgurrin@MITRE.MITRE.ORG
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple
Subject: Re: 1-900 BBS
Message-ID: <8908111935.AA11607@mitre.arpa>
Date: 11 Aug 89 19:35:27 GMT
References: <8908111748.AA01506@trout.nosc.mil>
Organization: The MITRE Corp., Washington, D.C.
Lines: 12

Sorry, but I think it would be a bust.  The kicker is the $0.30 per minute
collection fee from the phone company.  In order to break even you have
to recover that, in addition to the flat monthly fee and the startup cost.
Unless you want to lose money on every call, and make it up on volume :-),
you need to charge more than $0.30 per minute, or $18.00 per hour.  It's
hard to think of what you would offer that would compete with services
like GENIE or Compuserve, or the Telenet-type inexpensive access to remote
BBS's.  This isn't to say that there wouldn't be some novelty application 
that a creative person could come up with.  You'd need something that would
appeal to folks with modems, and that was better or as good sent as data as
a voice 900 call.  Who'd have thought listening to anonymous confessions
would rake in the dough?  This concept has just spread to the D.C. area.