If you are willing to go to automatic payments they will waive the HD Access Fee for two years, which should match the requirements for free HD on DISH. You just have to call them and ask for it.
$0.80 for packaging/manufaturing seems way high. In the late 90's working for an ISP, we had CD's made to distribute to our customers. It was a small lot of 1000 and the cost per CD including packaging was $1.10 with $500 to produce the glass master and proofs for labeling and package printing. I'm sure they can get down a lot lower than we were able to.
Actually, AT&T owns basically nothing of the underlying tech, they would be a target. What you are thinking of is Bell Labs, spun off to Lucent, which is not Avaya. Now THEY have patent teeth.
Remeber the AT&T you know today is actually little more than a purchased corporate identity used for name recognition. Not to belittle the formitability of SBC (now AT&T).
I've been skimming that section and as someone who worked for an ISP for 10 year, we had that exact system in place, as a matter of fact Avaya now owns it's inventor, Livingston Technologies. It's called RADIUS. ISP's had the exact same problems and the exact same response. BTW, it was always released as OSS by Livingston. Even if the rest of the patent is not obvious and valid, that portion talking about using a database for billing, scalability, account control, fraud protection (multiple simultaneous connects, and unauthorized usage), etc. ISP's have done for a very, very long time, and is entirely obvious, and commonly used. As an interesting fact the VoIP solutions I have looked at can use RADIUS for just this purpose, aside from some appliance setups.
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If you are willing to go to automatic payments they will waive the HD Access Fee for two years, which should match the requirements for free HD on DISH. You just have to call them and ask for it.
My wedding video was severely decayed due to a bad tape, 5 years after my wedding. No worries there.
$0.80 for packaging/manufaturing seems way high. In the late 90's working for an ISP, we had CD's made to distribute to our customers. It was a small lot of 1000 and the cost per CD including packaging was $1.10 with $500 to produce the glass master and proofs for labeling and package printing. I'm sure they can get down a lot lower than we were able to.
Actually, AT&T owns basically nothing of the underlying tech, they would be a target. What you are thinking of is Bell Labs, spun off to Lucent, which is not Avaya. Now THEY have patent teeth.
Remeber the AT&T you know today is actually little more than a purchased corporate identity used for name recognition. Not to belittle the formitability of SBC (now AT&T).
I've been skimming that section and as someone who worked for an ISP for 10 year, we had that exact system in place, as a matter of fact Avaya now owns it's inventor, Livingston Technologies. It's called RADIUS. ISP's had the exact same problems and the exact same response. BTW, it was always released as OSS by Livingston. Even if the rest of the patent is not obvious and valid, that portion talking about using a database for billing, scalability, account control, fraud protection (multiple simultaneous connects, and unauthorized usage), etc. ISP's have done for a very, very long time, and is entirely obvious, and commonly used. As an interesting fact the VoIP solutions I have looked at can use RADIUS for just this purpose, aside from some appliance setups.