Dump Broadband, Dig Out Your Modem!

wilstephens writes: "Found this article on CNet about the latest trend of people dumping broadband in favour of their modems. Cheaper, and more reliable service, apparently! 'Katy Ling, a software consultant who had her home wired for high-speed Internet access last year, did what many technology analysts said would never happen: She bailed out of broadband...'"

Comments

Broadband situation is generally deplorable

[Ars-Fartsica]

Most people still can't get cable modem or DSL.

Those who can face unreliable service, high prices, and shamefully bad customer service and support.

And its getting worse. Most of the start-ups that may have created competition in this market have gone under, leaving the cable and telephone monopolies in charge.

I don't know if the solution is more or less regulation and/or public involvement, but in the current atmosphere, things are going to suck for a very long time.

This article is crap

[pod]

I read this article yesterday, and it was so painful. The very premise is bogus. You're paying about 2-3 times as much for a cable/dsl line as for dialup. While such a price may be a little hard to justify for people already on a very tight budget, chances are you can spare the dollar a day required to keep your line.

And the value in 'broadband' is not the speed really. We've heard many times now, it's the instant availability stupid. People hate to have to wait (through busy signals potentially) to get online witha modem to check their mail. They like to have ICQ/AIM running all the time to see when their friends are online and to chat. It's all about convinience.

Besides, the article is full of contradictions, for example take this bit:

[ISPs] are looking for high-speed subscriptions' profit margins to bolster their bottom line...

and later:

...operating margins excluding sales and marketing expenses for cable modem subscribers are as low as 5 percent, and they say DSL is break-even at best.

So which one is it? I work for an ISP that does DSL, and let me tell you, there are no margins on DSL. It can easily take a 2-3 years to start making money on a DSL client. Hosting (and dialup to a certain extent) and bandwidth reselling is where the margins are.

And as a later paragraph puts it, high-speed subscribers would "rather sell their grandmothers" than go back to a pokey dial-up connection. It'll be hard for anyone to convert back to a dialup connection.

Missing the point of broadband apparently...

[Arethan]

I used to work in the Cable Modem industry, back when it was "New Technology(tm)". The biggest selling point that I noticed for the tech savvy was the speed. (Obviously.) However, the tech savvy market is smaller than you think. So the real highest selling point was the cost vs benefit. For example:

_Dialup Model_
56k ISP: $20+/mo
2nd Phone line: $20+/mo
waiting 10 minutes/MB: pain in the ass

_Cable Modem Model_
Modem Rental: $10/mo or less
Connection Fees: $30-$40/mo
waiting 30 seconds/MB: less pain in the ass

The point is, for the same price, or even $10 more, people could have the same non-voice-line-interrupting service, and even get some extra speed out of the deal. People that had the more expensive ISPs (AOL comes to mind) were even more prone to make the switch, since they would actually be saving money by switching. (We provided @Home at the time, which provided content so people used to AOL wouldn't feel too out of place.)

Amen

[Christopher Bibbs]

If I was out of work I'd cut the cable, cable modem, Netflix membership, sell my motorcycles, and anything else to keep food on the table (and keep the table). The article states the painfully obvious. Broadband comes out of discresionary spending and when you need to save money, dropping down to regular dial-up is a viable option to many people.

So long as I have disposable income, however, the extra $20/month to have a cable modem as opposed to a traditional dial-up is worth more, than say, my weekly trip to the arcade.

A better (real) story would be about people who aren't worried about their jobs or the economy dropping broadband because they see no value in it.

I am among the luddites!

[peteshaw]

Yeah, I dropped my dsl line back in October. My carrier got bought out by RealConnect and at the end of my one year contract I was notified that my 49.95 128K IDSL line would be *slightly* going up to $169.95!

What really annoyed me was the letter itself. Okay, I can understand if costs go up. But (a) there was no apology in the letter and (b)I was given 7 days to make up my mind on continuing the contract.

So I call up RealConnect and mildly explain my position, which is that you are trying to gouge me with an insanely high price. They in turn blamed Network Access Solutions for ratcheting up the residential rates to match business class. NAS is the only provider to the local switch, so after some research, I figured I was pretty much hosed.

Needless to say I do my big downloads from work and at home I say, "Welcome to NetZero!"

Postscript: After one month plus at 28.8K (my phone lines are &@#'d up buts thats another story) I don't knotice it that much. When I'm online my phone calls are forwarded to my cell, and I can't download ISO's, MP3's, or mulimedia, but who cares? I can easily do without that junk. Email, ebay, online shopping, messaging, you can do 90% of your stuff with a dog slow connection.

Re:Going back

[GreyPoopon]

That's the problem with the cable modems, it's a shared line. So you'll notice different times of the day will be faster than others.

I'm not going to dispute your statements, but I wanted to point out that there's much more to speed considerations than the whole "shared line" concept of cable modem. Let me spell it out a bit. Both DSL and Cable employ shared sections of their network. Both can suffer when oversubscribed. The primary difference is that correcting the problem on DSL is easier and cheaper. It involves duplicating the portions of equipment (usually located at the CO) that are overloaded. Cable, on the other hand, requires a trip 'cross country to correct the problem, and could ulimately lead to the need to bury additional cable to meet demands. Cable is divided into different "nodes," which constitute the shared portion of the connection. When cable slows down, it could be (among other things) that the node is overloaded (difficult to fix), or that the pipe between the node and the cable company is not fat enough (easier to fix).

Despite all of this, my experience has been that the single biggest bottleneck for every internet service I have had is the throughput between the provider and the internet itself. Either their pipe to the internet was a "garden hose," or the section of the internet they connected to wasn't exactly running at a spanking pace. Case in point: I used to have double channel ISDN. This is in some ways similar to DSL. Even though I had a capacity of 128 Kbps, I found that I rarely jumped over 64 Kbps unless I was hitting servers at the ISP (who happened to be the phone company). Because of some changes in price structure, I decided to go with another ISP. Under their configuration, I could only achieve 56Kbps on each channel (for a total of 112Kbps), but I found that my connection was usually running at between 90 and 110Kbps. The difference? The new ISP made sure their connection to the internet was adequate for their subscriber base.

Some suggestions:

• See where the bottleneck is first. Try hitting servers located at your ISP. If your throughput to them is good, you can be sure that your shared connection has nothing to do with your problems.
• See if you can find somebody else, preferably in a new neighborhood who has the same provider but is on a different little-used node. If they're speed is good, then you know the problem is in your shared cable. Seek DSL. :)