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Rogers Cable Plans Fees to Curb Bandwith Hogs
jeremyd writes: "Major Canadian broadband provider plans to charge heavy users higher monthly access fees as high as $80 per month. Read the article here from the Globe and Mail. If only the world would protest. What's the point of high speed broadband access if you can't use it to full potential without having to start selling organs to pay the bills?"
Isn't that like 10$ US?
I'm one of those users. I'm sick of AT&T limiting my upstream to 128kbs, upping my rates by $5 every 6 months, and cutting my d/l speed in half when @Home went under.
So, to "protest" I'm gonna take all the pipe I can get. I have a "wget -m local-kernel-mirror" going in the background at all times.
Yeah, I might be seen as a prick, but AT&T has the cash to not be such assholes when it comes to their rates and bandwidth policies. Screw-em.
Method of processing duck feet
I'd pay $80 if the connection was fast both ways and I was allowed to run small home web sites.
:)
How about $800? Or More? Look at wholesale T1 pipes to any major ISP worth connecting to - e.g. UUNET. ~$800/month for 1.5 Mbps.
Maybe if these companies are hurting for money so much they could take some of the cash they are wasting on cheesy commercials and put it towards reducing the cost of bandwidth.
Now there's a great idea: Let's not advertise! And you want your service provider to last more than a few months? Actually, if you're just slamming the cheesy ones, I'd have to agree with you there.
For years, US West used to run these ads that used a formula like this: "You're dumb. We're smart. Look, a dog doing tricks! Buy our service." If you've seen the ads, you'll know what I'm talking about. Amazing that people would buy stuff from a company that tells them they're idiots.
Sure this stuff costs a lot to install but there is a crap load of fiber already installed
Someone's got to put an end to this misnomer. There may be a lot of city pair fiber (e.g. from Cleveland to Chicago) unlit or underutilized out there, but the magic comes in putting it together. Everything from equipment to terminate the pipes, facilities to house the equipment, people to implement and maintain it all, and the stuff to put secret ingredient IP on top of it all cost bucks.
Don't forget either that what most customers want isn't a fiber pipe between Cleveland and Chicago. They want "Internet" - meaning expensive pipes terminating to a major player's network - UUNET, Sprint, etc.
Add it all up, throw in the backoffice, customer support, bad debt from deadbeats that don't pay, and you're paying probably at or less than actual cost right now.
Don't forget the people cost too - Cox in our area is dying daily deaths on their cable Internet ever since they migrated off of @Home. Their gateway router in town reboots hourly, and at least once a day we see the entire metro network crater for about an hour. A major part of the problem (besides having the suits in Atlanta make the equipment purchase decisions) is that they pay their router geeks crap - the top guys make about $42K/year. But hey, once they get up to the CCNP, they discover they can be hired for $15K or more a year anywhere else in town. So Cox ensures regular turnover and technically limited staff (hey, who says you can't static route the entire metro network?). So is unreliable service worth that low price?
while at the same time leaving a lot of their capacity left untouched.
Hmm... providers offering service right now at or below cost, and you want them to overproduce as well? Look at the ag world for how well that works.
Another solution is to offer proxy servers and make them part of the default install.
A decent suggestion, but web surfing isn't the majority of the problem. Peer to peer apps, streaming audio (which I tend to abuse), etc. kill your bandwidth models.
I'm greatly surprised more ISP's don't offer something like a regional BBS-like interface that lets users chat and trade files with others locally.
Did I forget to list attorney fees above? Yes, I sure did. Filesharing offered by the ISP is a nice way to meet the friendly folks from the software police who will explain to you how many millions of dollars you will be donating to their policing efforts. Almost as much fun as a visit from the Rainbow Coalition...
Either way please get rid of those crappy commercials. I'd pay an extra $5/month just to be able not to see those.
Don't like them? Shop with your feet. I've got a personal aversion to the whole dot-com mystery meat advertising ploys, like AT&T's new Mlife campaign. It's like putting frosting on a cow pattie.
Better yet, try my investing model: short the stock of dot-com marketing hypsters. I did well on Lucent and a few other made up name companies who used those fuzzy zero-substance marketing campaigns. The only thing better than knowing a company is a loser is making money when you're right.
*scoove*