Telecom, of course, is short for telecommunications. Telecom products fall into two main categories: commercial and consumer. For now we will concentrate on the consumer telecom market.
The telecom market, including the consumer telecom market, can fairly be described as "complicated." The pubwan movement is committed to a NeutralityPrinciple, so we will avoid controversial questions like whether it's the most complicated industry in existence, or whether it's complicated by design. That it's complicated is hopefully uncontroversial enough to merit a discussion here.
One of the complexities facing the consumer of telecom product is the presence of "dilemmas":
the residential (individual?) and business (institutional?) environments.)
- bundled or unbundled (this is not really a di-lemma but a multilemma because each bundle contains its own product inventory).
- buy or lease the actual tangible product, i.e. the phone
After the process of deconstructing (actual) bundles comes the process of constructing (virtual) market baskets. First, there we construct the set of "atomized" market baskets. Fortunately (for this purpose if no other) this is constrained by income so it is FINITE. It is also constrained by pricing policies, so it is also NONLINEAR. This is the part of the exercise that demonstrates entropy by demonstrating that information is ridiculously easy to destroy and ridiculously hard when it comes to "putting Humpty together again." Then, we determine the nondominated subset of this set of atomized market baskets.
Let's assume for the sake of argument that we have established a list of available and affordable bundles of telecom product. Remember that the parameters listed below refer to properties of bundles, not of their constituents.
(This is a fancy term for "monthly subscription rate." We tabulate it by the second instead of by the month, because the second is the SI unit of time, and the month isn't even plainly and unambiguously defined.)
- percent of time spendable online (dimensionless) (max) In theory, having "unlimited" internet connect time means the ISP doesn't mind if you log in and never log out, or 100% of the time online is OK. In practice, there's some kind of contractual fine print that says the ISP doesn't hold the user to a maximum number of hours, but also that there is some kind of "no free parking" clause. This, of course, is especially explicit when the ISP is a subsidiary of the phone company :) "30 hours a month" means we divide 30 by the number of hours in a month (on average, 730.45) and use this percentage (0.041=4.1%) as the value of this parameter.
- percent of time spendable on phone (also dimless) (max)
- total number of email addresses (maxlo) Notice that so far I have suggested signa (minimize or maximize) but not priority (high or low). This is because I hypothesize (for admittedly intuitive reasons) that signum (desirable vs. undesirable qualities) is fairly "objective" while priority is very "subjective." I figure just about anyone would maximize their number of email addresses (because two units of any good is better than one) but with low priority. The main reason I make this assumption is because the number of possible "well-formed" email addresses is humungous, compared to, say, the number of possible well-formed phone numbers.
- total number of phone numbers (max)
- total number of mobile phones (max)
- total number of pagers (max)
- minimum number of pager characters (max)
- average number of pager characters (max)
- espn3 included (maxlo)
- static IP included (maxhi) See SamIzdat. Some people prefer the stick over the automatic.
- late payment fee (min) Minimize this with high priority if you consider yourself a "bad credit risk," or to make a statement against in loco parentis. I call this "de facto interest." Legally, it isn't interest, but its IRR as a cash flow can be in triple or even quadruple percentages! Caveat emptor!
- works with Linux (max)
- works with nonproprietary network interface (maxhi)