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How Much Does Your Broadband Cost?
Anders Höckersten asks: "Recently, the Vice President of Sweden's largest ISP Telia declared that broadband is far too cheap in this country, compared to what it costs internationally. Meanwhile, surveys have shown that people aren't prepared to pay more than what they are currently paying. My question is simple: How much do you pay for your broadband, and what upload and download speeds do you get? As a reference, getting 1024 kbps (that's kilobits) download and 200 kbps upload from Telia currently costs 295 SEK (around $30)."
...on a dedicated pair 12.6 kft from the C/O, from Internet America in the Dallas, Texas area.
You could've hired me.
1.2Mbit down, 128Kbit up.
$40/month for the service, + $10/month cablemodem rental.
Charter Pipeline, South Lake Tahoe, California.
Paranoid
Bwaahahahahaa.
I'm paying $150/month for 768k/768k
I also was given the opportunity to buy blocks for IP addresses at 5 IP's for $50 (one-time fee)
I can also upgrade my service to 1.5mbit/1.5mbit for an extra $50/month (total of $200/month)
These is a slight discount if you engage in a 1yr or 2 yr contract with them also.
New customers only get 1.5/128 at the price I'm paying, so I guess they've effectively hiked the price. Existing customers are grandfathered in.
I know that I'm just playing into the trap of this question by responding, but don't you think that knowing the general/national/global pricing of a product will help you make a better decision? This is the kind of info that providers of services, be it cell phone, broadband, or cable television, would like to keep on the down low. They are hoping that what you don't know, you won't bitch about. Think about it before you blast someone again. Besides, there are much more geeky topics than this. Save the bait for those. :)
The / in
Appears to me that they've realized that they can charge more to increase profits. What they want to know is at what price point (as price is increased) will the revenues lost to unhappy customers outweigh the increased revenues from remaining customers?
So Telia figures that Swedish customers are getting a great deal. Too good of a deal, because customers elsewhere in the world pay more. Doesn't this tell you that we in other countries are getting soaked, that it really DOESN'T cost them $44.95USD to provide me with broadbad; that they could be charging $30USD and still make a profit?
That's $44.95USD for 1024kd/256ku for AT&T Broadband cable I'm paying.
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
Sorry dude - that was Shatner in a Saturday Night Live sketch about Star Trek conventions. Well, you were clever enough to add profanity. Glad you could grace Slashdot with your presence.
The dumber people think you are, the more surprised they are when you kill them.
Of course, it's much more than I pay for. Hey, the DOCSIS 1.0 standard is weak.
Gosh I like living in college.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
$80 + $2 a month. Sierra Vista, AZ. theriver.com.
I've got Speakeasy DSL which runs about $100/month for 768 down, 384 up. It may have come down a bit (my better half handles the bills), and I might be able to shave off a few more bucks if I trimmed unnecessary services (like the shell account), but it's still more than the local telco (PacHell), which is cool by me because Speakeasy is really customer focused. They happily set up reverse DNS for my (static) IPs, they have no problem with me running servers, they give advance notice of outages, and much more. I believe that level of service is worth paying for. Most people I know don't. They're happier saving $10 month.
I think the head of Sweden's telco is probably right - that does sound cheap and people will not voluntarily pay more, but guess what: if those rates are raised $10, people will still pay - they'll just complain about it. Remember when AOL raised rates from like $19.95 to $21.95? It made headline news in the states. I remember everyone grumbling about it. But a month later everyone forgot and AOL continued to grow exponentially after that time (I'm sure they've leveled off since though). One thing I'd be curious about is how are they able to keep rates so low in Sweden? Was part/all of the network government sponsored? Does the unique low price of broadband give Sweden a competive edge to attract high-tech companies to set up shop there over other countries? I don't think the existing customers will be much of a factor in any price increases, but I think they should keep bigger issues like these in mind.
-"Zow"
I think it's a completely absurd to compare how much users in one country pay for broadband as opposed to another. Lets look at what some of the major costs are involved in providing broadband access in the US:
1. Pipelines of fiber across the country so that users throughout the majority of the country can have access
2. The cost of piggy-backing off of someone else's infrastructure for the last mile (DSL service providers having to make deals with local phone companies)
3. TAXES! It's a utility, it gets taxed.
4. All of the routers and switching stations for all those thousands of miles of fiber.
Now, lets compare the country of Sweden to the US. It's smaller requiring less mileage and switching/routing infrastructure, it's got different taxes (i'm guessing), and I'm sure there are other factors at work that would affect their cost comparred to the US.
Now, this isn't even taking into account the fact that maybe Sweden doesn't even have a national landline phone network to piggy-back off of.
And what about supply and demand? Do those two things have NOTHING to do with the cost that a company can charge? If the above stated price is what users in that country are willing to pay for broadband, then Telia can either raise the price and see what % of their user base leaves, or they can try to optimize or increase profits some other way.
What an absurd statement.
With NTL - the service is fairly stable, I've had a few days downtime since it was installed, that was about, um, 6 months ago.
:), but the service is pretty basic; support is practically non existant (NTL are in way too much debt to pay monkeys to sit at helldesks :)
Speeds are good, it's actually 600kbps down in some areas (mine included
There are no up/download limits, and their news setup is excellent. Aside from a transparent HTTP proxy which goes pear shaped every so often, there are no blocks to, for instance, port 25 in/outgoing.
So that's £25 (~$35) for the CM, plus £15 (~$21) for the phone/TV.
For about $69 with 5 static ips and the ability to have as many netblocks as I want attached to the dsl. My roommate owns three class C and they can be attached to the dsl for free. The dsl modem does NAT or 1to1 NAT or routed and its pretty nice dsl as long as its up.
This is with atg ( http://www.callatg.com ) but to get anything done, or to have any support you are out of luck.
"Not my manner of thinking but the manner of thinking of others has been the source of my unhappiness." - M
They're both about Can$40 a month. I have no idea about up/down speeds. Maybe between 100 kilobytes/s and 300 KB/s for a fast site. As far as I know the cable is symmetric. I upload tens of megs of digital photos plenty fast enough for me, anyway.
6MBit down, 768k up.
Between Shaw nodes, that goes up. I should be able to saturate my link to 10MBit down, and get a bit better than 1MBit up.
That's $40CDN a month. If I also have cable TV (I don't, right now...) they give me a multi-use discount, so I pay $30 a month.
Well, cable modem is $30 a month for what appears to be 6 megabits down, 1.5 megabits up. DSL is $65 a month for the ISP (this includes static IP, secondary DNS (I host primary), and 8 additional IPs (for a total of 9). The line itself is an additional $30 a month or something. Still *less* than I was paying for a dedicated 56k dialup with the same services attached to it (through the same company.) I consider both to be worth it for the services provided (cable: insanely fast bandwidth, DSL: everything else.)
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
I had a RoadRunner cable modem for $40/month. My company picked up the bill for it so now it is registered as a business cable modem. They pay $80/month for exactly the same setup.
To get a static IP I would have to pay a $99 install fee (they change me to a Cisco box) and an extra $50/month.
But, I'm very happy with it. 2Mb/sec down, 384Kb/sec up and I get every bit of it.
I pay ~50 USD a month for 2 mbit down, 1.5 mbit up, but time warner has their network capped at 200k, so thats about all I get. Where I work, we used to pay 340 a month for 768k SDSL w/ 64 ip addys.
Check out DSLReports.com for a lot of ISPs and reviews thereof in multiple countries (US, Canada, UK, and one other afaik).
Also, I use Shaw, as does another slashdot user. I get what s/he gets.
Also, a friend of mine in Washington state gets wireless internet for free. Not legally, but...
--Dan
Note: I can do this _legally_ because I attend the school I'm doing it to.
Project still in progress (waiting for special ordered parts). A $20 home built 802.11b antenna and a major university a mile a way, although a decent investment in equipment, I doubt more than the typical DSL or Cable setup.
1 Lucent Orinoco Silver 802.11b pcmcia card - $75
1 Antenna cable - $22
2 N connectors - $8
1 18" piece of PVC - in the garage
20' of coax - also in garage
Had the misc networking hardware already.
Apartment roof has line of site to an access point about a mile away at school. So taking all this into consideration, my setup equates to a $0 reaccuring cost. If you live in a well populated area you could probably build a similar setup linked to a local business, but that wouldn't be nice, so don't do it. I'd also like to note that when I moved into my apartment, and before I figured all this out, I would have been happy paying for broadband. But there's nothing available here.
My narrowband provider is Charter Communications with Earthlink as the ISP. I pay $24.95 for service and $4.95 for modem rental (with the option to buy my own DOCSIS compliant modem from anybody I want). I get 256 down and 64 up which for me isn't too bad. For $39.95 I can upgrade to 512d/128u and then the last upgrade is like $60/mo for 1.5mb symmetrical. For my $24 I get pretty good ping times playing just about anything and consistant download speeds. Their service has gotten MUCH better than it used to be, they actually answer the phone now when you've got a problem.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
US$45/month ($5 discount if also paying for $30+ cable TV)
2Mbps download cap
384Kbps upload cap
Noticably slower at peak times but still satisfactory (can listen to 128Kbps audio streams, load web pages and download files many times faster than dialup).
Only noticed one case of downtime (couple of hours) in the past 4 months.
Latency is pretty good, I can always find 100ms Quake3 servers.
Service includes USENET news server (including binary groups), 5 email accounts, 5MB web disk space. No virus filtering on mail.
The only port I know is blocked is 25 (you can't receive mail on your own SMTP server). Running servers is not explicitly supported but they're not shut down either. Ditto for NAT boxes (tho' they will sell you additional IPs for $5/month if you want). Port 80 has never been blocked.
IPs are not static but address seems to change only once a year for the same MAC address (if your MAC address changes, your IP changes).
DSL is available in the area with comparable features & rates. I am pretty happy with my service. I don't think I would seriously consider dropping it unless the rate went over $50/month.
I pay 275sek (~$27) for my Telia ADSL 512/768. But then, I haven't had to pay it for 5 months because the service has been terrible, only recently did I get a good working connection after some ~50 calls to Telia...
Problem in Sweden is, if Telia raises the price to $100 a month, if you want DSL, that's basically your only option unless you live in one of the major cities. Skanova (owned by Telia) owns the physical carriers, Telia Internet Services leases them from Skanova at a high cost, Skanova makes a lot of money for their dear mother Telia, Internet Services makes a LOT less, but hey, Telia as a corp makes enough to keep it afloat. Daughter companies exchange money back and forth basically.
However, enter 3rd party ISP, if they want to provide DSL they HAVE to lease carriers from Skanova, unless they want to dig down their own. Skanova eats the profit, smaller ISP makes barely enough to get by, if even that, Telia is happy, consumer is told to bend over, spread, and smile.
Wax-Museum Fire Results In Hundreds Of New Danny DeVito Statues
I've recently got ADSL here in the UK. I've bought it from my old dialup ISP. However, BT provide most of the infrastructure, did the install, and take the lions share of the monthly fee.
I opted for the business service (you can run services, get static IPs, they promise to only oversell the bandwidth by 50%, instead of the 400% on residential etc), which sets me back £100/month ($140/month) for a 512kbps downlink / 256kbps uplink. Every extra 256kbps downwards costs another £20, and you can't start buying more uplink bandwidth until your downlink is at 1Mbit/s.
Initially, I got a static IP thrown in with the deal. I've just gone over to 6 IPs (one for the dsl router, leaving 5 for my boxes), and that was only another £20 / month, but that sort of charge is much higher if you're buying direct from BT
This post will enter the public domain 70 years after my death, unless Disney buys another extension.
What help is knowing the price in other countries?
because for some of us which countries we can go live in and keep our telecommuting jobs is important.
personally I'm waiting for Spain to get broadband so I can go live there and keep my well paid UK job (I work from home, I can work from anywhere with a 24/7 link)
free your mind, and your ass will follow!!
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
I'm a slave of the German Telekom and its online-sevice T-Online. They offer T-DSL, 768kbit down - 128 kbit up, and I'm really happy with it. My Connection is always fast ans stable, it works great with Fli4l and it costs just 30 EUR.
Boycot? Blackout? Subscriptions?
I don't care!
In the Worcester, Massachusetts area, I'm paying $30/month for Charter Pipeline. 1M down, 128K up. This is down from $50/month for two reasons:
1) I bought their digital cable service at the same time, which takes $10/mon off the price of Pipeline.
2) I bought the modem, which saves an extra $10/mon. Why wouldn't anyone do this? The price on their Motorola Surfboard is down to $100; you'll make your money back in 10 months.
"Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?"
RoadRunner in Kansas City, I asked what they charge for their most basic internet connection: $19.95. Just the internet, no tv. What started out as a constant 2MB/sec up-down has been turning into 3MB/sec bursts both ways. That's two ISO images in just over an hour.
No port filtering, so I get the usual funny viral entries in my httpd logs.
Reliability has been nonstop, except for the ice storm just this last week in which the lovely tree in my back yard knocked down the 14 kilovolt wire for the neighborhoods around me. The cablemodem came right back up when the electric company repaired everyone's downed poles a week later.
The long term strategy of companies selling broadband to the consumer market is not to sell bits. There's not nearly as much profit potential in selling bits, which is essentially a commodity market, as in selling content and thus be able to sell eyeballs to advertisers.
A content company with control over the pipes into consumers homes means that they can capture all of the profit w/o having to share. Remember when AT&T wanted to charge businesses for all ecommerce transactions that went to their broadband customers? This is what AOL/TW is about and why open access matters.
So broadband operators can take a loss leader on the price of broadband, or sell as close to cost as possible even though there isn't meaningful competition in the broadband market. They need customers so that they can partner with content providers and advertisers. Just wait for interactive TV.
I am paying 45$ CDN (~30$ US), modem included, for 1 Mb/s dl, 40 Kb/s ul. Yes, the upload suck but I don't need it much beside the odd ssh session. My other option was the cable co (Videotron) at a similar price for much greater speed, but the service only allow for 6 Gb download, 2 Gb upload IIRC. Plus Videotron like to block port at random (25 inbound, 80 inbound in the Code Red era). Sympatico are cool about running server (at that speed, there is'nt much point anyway). They only block 25 outbound, so you must relay your mail thru their SMTP server.
Personnally, I am using a Nortel modem but I think (this will have to be confirmed) that those using newer modem (Alcatel) are getting greater speed. I don't complain; the added speed would only be welcome when I download ISO (about 2 hour from a good server).
BTW, this is residential service. Commercial xDSL service is much more expensive (80-200+ CDN$, depending on your SLA).
:wq
Of course, it was COX@Home. It was very fast (in excess of 1mbit/second). Now that they've transitioned to their own internet service, online speed rating programs put me at about 580kbit/second on my downloads. Seems to match what I've been seeing, actually.
Cost? $34.95/month + $10/month cable modem rental. I really need to stop renting that cable modem.
"... To summarize, in canada, if someone gets BB access at more than 40$, that's somewhat illegal... "
You apply to the CRTC with what you want to charge, and they say yes or no. I don't think they've ever said no, by the way.
You need to reapply to change that rate; again a "no" answer is pretty much unheard of, although sometimes they will balk if you can't show the price is reasonable (you need the money for profits, infastructure, etc), so you might have to revise your rate.
There are plenty of services that are more than $40, although you are correct in that most are in the $40 to $45 range.
All prices in Canadian Dollars (x 0.63 = $USD).