Courtesy of today’s New York Times, here’s another benefit of the dedicated network link: a cleaner, greener world. As Steve Lohr at The Times writes:

As travel costs rise and airlines cut service, companies large and small are rethinking the face-to-face meeting — and business travel as well. At the same time, the technology has matured to the point where it is often practical, affordable and more productive to move digital bits instead of bodies. [emphasis ours]

To give just one example, Accenture used videoconferencing to avoid 360 airline trips (240 of them international) in May alone.

From a technical perspective, the dedicated links mean seamless video communication without interruption from spam, DoS attacks or other problems from the online Dark Side. An added benefit: Customers of these services are financing the build-out of tomorrow’s networks.

In short, this is precisely the kind of “win-win” development we should expect from a marketplace that’s left free to innovate. Hopefully our friends on the other side would agree.