Paul,

Terrific piece. Our company, SJN Sales is rapidly expanding in Asia and we have found, exactly as you suggest, that highly variable speed and bandwidth issues affect our clients in different countries, or even parts of cities quite dramatically.

Video conferencing and collaboration technology is mature and offers great efficiency but low speed and poor network throughput, outages, and frequent connection disruption, are facts of business life in some areas of every Asian country we serve. For our client companies, and our own offices, pricing disparities are lesser issues when compared to service related disruptions.

Businesses in the region will have to work with their national and regional technology providers to strengthen the infrastructure so that the bottom line benefits of video conferencing can become predictable throughout the region.

Once high-speed infrastructure is more reliable, we can move on to the completely random and ridiculous pricing disparities. SJN reviews of issues and complaints from our current regional clients don't focus much on price. That said, once the systems are more stable i feel certain that the technology companie we serve will move on to asking the pricing questions you raise as well.