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Preventing Broadband Price-Gouging?
Wrighter the Pessimist asks: "I've been seeing a lot of stories recently about cable modem companies raising rates and baby bells winning monopolies on broadband. It seems that indeed cable companies are already raising rates, or will be in the near future. Shouldn't broadband be getting cheaper, with improvements in technology? Or has demand already surpassed the capability? Or, have the monopolies just decided to give themselves a raise? What can we as consumers do to prevent prices from going sky high?" The first article mentions the need for higher pricing for users who tend to use more than their fair share of the bandwidth. The second article is about AT&T raising its rates, which is not news to many Slashdot readers, I'm sure. I would think that in situations like this, that a tiered pricing approach might be better than applying a flat rate. Think you are going to be a high bandwidth user? Pay a fair price to your upstream. Web and e-mail only? Pay less. So do you think the current trend in broadband pricing is fair, or are broadband providers pricing themselves out of the market?
I use Charter. They just introduced a new tier. They have for $37.99 or so, you can get 768Kbps/128Kbps or for $50 or so, you can get 1.5MB/400Kbps. I think $50 or so is fair for now, but it sure seems like every couple months the price goes up..
.. and they could get away with it here because DSL sucks, and the least expensive DSL here from a 'local' provider (not counting Qwest w/ MSN) is around $75+ and that's not even 1MB down.
or are broadband providers pricing themselves out of the market?
I've never had broadband and I wont until it becomes really, really cheap or the profit I gain from the connection is more than the cost.
My dial up gives me the most valuable item very efficiently - that is my email. Other things work o.k. too. I don't really need anything else at the moment. I would think the situation is the same for many others.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
Broadband users have been riding the wave of cheap access for a long time, and its just about time that we got what was coming to us.
It's the same thing that happened with the rash of free webhosting services -- the companies finally realized that their businesses were flawed -- free webhosting just doesn't exist.
And broadband companies are having quite the same epiphany: bandwidth is not free! I am surprised that everyone isn't paying per GB downloaded and/or uploaded yet. Personally I think we should be happy that we got cheap (unmetered) broadband bandwidth for so long.
Never argue with an idiot, he'll just lower you to his level and beat you with experience.
Don't like it? Too expensive? Don't buy it.
See, that's the thing ... they aren't pricing themselves out of the market because the DEMAND for broadband won't diminish without an alternative and these monopolies that are springing up (or mergers, if you will) are making it so that there aren't many alternatives ... at least not widely available. I'm not sure why broadband isn't treated like phone access, long distance service, etc. The competition in that sector seems to be healthy and provides for relatively fair pricing, same with mobile phone service. If a few large providers are going to be allowed to exist, broadband should become a public utility and be regulated as such. Right?!?
This is supposed to be commodity pricing where rates go down as they pay of the investments in laying the fiber. Also what is the deal with the dial-up accounts going up in price? This is just terrible.
About three months ago I got a call from Shaw, my cable modem company. They called to tell me that they were dropping the price of internet service from can$50 to can$40, retroactive as of three months before that, because of "increasing popularity of internet cable usage without corresponding television cable" (price for the combo was can$70 - and has remained at that, I believe).
So I'd say that all you Americans are just living in the wrong country - we're fine up here in the Great White North.
Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon
augment your senses: http://sensebridge.net/
Being a Comcast customer (previously @Home), I've noticed that there were times when I found hard bandwidth limits while trying to pull in data. In particular, I was hitting a 15kb/sec limit with an FTP action. It seems to me, that perhaps some providers, (maybe by locales/regions) may already be limiting our throughput, and just not making it terribly public.
Granted, 15kb/sec is better than our old dialup, but when you're trying to move a large chunk of data, 15kb/sec is noticably slow, when you can test the line speed up to 1 Mbs.
Awk! Pieces of eight. Pieces of eight. Pieces of seven... ERROR: General Protection Fault. [Paroty Error.]
For New Yorkers, anyway, maybe a little competition from Con Ed will bring prices down.
And they said it couldn't be done!
In the UK, Blue Yonder, are dropping their prices like a virgin on 'prom night'.
My monthly charge has gone down to £30, from £33.
The cost of installation has dropped, with 'recommend a friend' incentives for people to, er... recommend their friends.
They have also been advertising ALOT recently.
Not sure what it is like for NTL customers, though.
This isnt all good news, though. It is more down to the fact that broadband isnt taking off as quickly as it should, and they are desperate for new customers. Both Blue Yonder AND NTL have got massive debts numbering in the billions, and there is much talk of a merger.
I have had my cable connection for over 6 months now, with no real complaints. I hope that this doesnt change when/if they DO decide to merge. I just couldnt hack going back to 56K...
I put my books on Amazon, Smashwords, Demonoid, ISOHunt and Pirate Bay. Search for 'Michael Cargill'
Is it just me, or does the rather archaic looking word "gotten" make American English the ugliest written language ever?
What about charging like any other utility does (gas, phone, electric, water, etc...) and have a pay-per-unit of bandwidth scheme.
I wonder how that would work out...
Try the way how the phone system in Germany now works: The former monopoly provider, Deutsche Telekom, is forced to rent even end-user lines to competitors at discount (mainly self-cost) prices, since competitors cannot build up their own cable nets in time to become a real threat. The other providers can then offer services at low rates to the public.
(It does not work perfectly, but it's worth a try. And I assume even in the US, often one or two network companies control the actual cables of a geographical region...)
but John Ashcroft has brought J. Edgar Hoover back from the dead to wear girls panties and investagate nerds and geeks. The FIBs are after you. and me. and anyone.
But it's not.
Even if you ignore the technical aspects of monitoring bandwidth usage and tying it to individual accounts you then run into the business cost overhead increase of changing your billing method.
Which is easier and/or cheaper? Flat-rate billing all of your customers regardless of bandwidth usage or doing it as they suggest and charging the bandwidth pigs extra?
As the overhead goes up that cost gets passed along to the customers as well.
Demand really has surpassed capacity. Think about it, a cable modem or DSL has as much or more downstream bandwidth than a T1 costing ten times as much. They can only get away with flat-rate pricing if they can amortize it across every cable modem that shares the high-speed line they bought. MP3 programs have made bandwidth use skyrocket, to the point where too many users are downloading at the highest speed they can get 24 hours a day. The broadband companies have 3 choices here: Cap speed per user, raise the price to reduce demand, or allow the performance to decrease unreasonably when the system is over capacity. None of those options are terribly good, but option 2 is the one that will keep the company afloat.
If you want to help solve the problem yourself, stop sucking down MP3z and ISOz all the time.
Sprint Broadband Direct, who don't accept new customers, recently raised my rate by five bucks a month.
It would have been ten, but I refused the Earthlink account.
--Blair
They are certainly keeping broadband from the real market that's out there. Joe Consumer will never shell out 49 bucks for mere access as long as he can have AOL for 15 bucks and never know the difference. Some of us have no choice, and will pay any price to keep their DSL/Cable lines, no matter how bad the pricing, service, connection.
I personally would rather not have a tiered scheme, as I like having a flat rate every month regardless of usage.
Cliff's commentary on Wrighter's question dwells on the fairness of tiered pricing. However, this is a completely separate question from how to prevent monopolies in Internet access, or how to live with those monopolies. For instance, under a tiered plan, a competitive ISP will probably offer "extra" bandwidth at an affordable rate, while a monopoly will call its customers "hogs" and slap them with "overusage penalties." As soon as customers and providers get into arguing the "fair" price, the battle is lost already, because the market is no longer at work. A monopoly will lose money even at rates that would price it out of a competitive market, because the monopoly's response to losing money is to push for rate increases rather than increased efficiency.
Personally, I think the price gouging is ridiculous. The cable modem service in my area sucks as it is, and is the only thing available besides very slow dialup. And they havent even accepted new customers for almost a year now, because they were transitioning or some such. IMO they need to be more like Canada and give me some decent broadband rates...always turns me green with envy when a Canadian friend in IRC brags about his cable modem which costs him less than my dialup...
On the other hand, in a more pragmatic viewpoint, I can understand the bandwidth costs. The state universities share an OC3 backbone network, and my college, which accounts for 20% of the population accounts for 70% of the bandwidth usage. And I imagine from what I've read here that its a similar ratio for cable modem users...a small portion of us get nailed. I can understand paying higher for higher usage...but I refuse to pay higher to my local company, which uses DHCP and will not allow servers to be run in any way...whats the use of having high traffic availability if I cant even run my webpage off my apache server? Or my mailing lists?
I'd be willing to pay more (not excessive, i'm not rich, but more) than the people who use broadband for just email and surfing. But better yet, since those people use next to no bandwidth, why not drop their rates a little too? Make people get what they pay for...and reduce the bandwidth squandered so the little old rich lady down the street can check her email faster while I'm bleeding myself just to be able to browse 3 webpages at once while sharing my remote desktops at the office, etc...
http://thechubbyferret.net - Ferret pictures and informative links.
2 points:
1) Broadband has been underpriced for some time now. Alot of Ma and Pa's in the world didn't see a need for it beyond dialup. This is now not an issue.
Cable co's are raising rates to make more money and in probably quite a few cases, make money.
2) With the recent ruling against the Telecommunications Act of 1996 (that of *course* wasn't lobbied heavily by the cable co's) most 3rd party dsl providers will soon find themselves in trouble.
Cable co's can now raise prices a little as their main competitor is probably going to face stiffer costs if they can even continue offering service.
Don't tell me that the ruling and the price raises are coincidence...
Until there's real competition in large enough geographical regions (as well as sufficient profits to allow price competion), we're probably going to get higher prices for broadband shoved down our throats.
I live in Ashburn, Virginia about a mile from UUNET and three miles from AOL and we really have very few options for broadband. Given the number of geeks and techies in the area, there's a significant market that isn't being served.
There's not a whole lot of profit to be made wiring an area and having to compete with other companies given the current economic conditions (especially if Verizon doesn't have to share their copper anymore). Until there is, the incumbent broadband providers are pretty much free to charge whatever they feel like.
Our cable company is offering Internet access at a reasonable price (if you consider a single DHCP and a lot of restrictions on what you can do reasonable). There is virtually no DSL available other than IDSL (and that's about $129/month for 5 IPs at 128k). We may soon get 802.11 access in the area, but that's only a pipedream at this point.
Until we're able to get some REAL competition into the area (and I suspect that this is the case in many other areas), things will only get worse for the consumer.
Don't anthropomorphize computers, they don't like it.
Practices!
I am moving to a location where ATT is not serving (thankfully getting out before the price increase).
I am getting SBC DSL. They are equally worse! I have to listen to their endless warnings to me about
1) Owning my own DSL modem (It may not work!)
2) Connecting my wireless router (We don't support it, we can't give you a PPPoE password directly, you have to install our software blah blah)
Its unbelievable how they try to make you buy their own equipment in stock!
If cable companies have no customers they'll reduce rates or give up. Or maybe this is time for more companies to spring up as providers. Competition is awesome
OK, I'm not being 100% truthful. In a free market system, prices are tied to demand. The higher the demand, the higher the price. However, I didn't mention the one way out of this because it would involve sacrifice, which seems to be a foreign concept to most of Slashdot's readership. That's right, kids, you'd have to boycott broadband and live with 56k until enough people dropped the services that the providers would be forced to lower rates to attract people back.
There really isn't any other way to deal with "gouging", except to pass more laws and create more government bureaucracy in an ill-concieved attempt to implement price controls. This is obviously a bad idea, so basically it boils down to "if you don't like it, don't buy it."
"I don't know that atheists should be considered citizens, nor should they be considered patriots." - George Bush
Isn't the point of having broadband access, so that one can transfer more and larger files faster?
Sure web browsing speeds up some, and you can pull spam from your pop account faster, but they are already capping the thoroughput and charging twice as much if not more then dialup.
If they want to make it a lot cheaper (dialup prices) for people just using their connection for email, then fine. But raising prices on an already expensive service is dumb.
The same can be applied to cell phones. Not everyone gets/needs 2 gajillion whenever minutes (thank you Jamie Lee Curtis). You buy whats right for you.
of course as I've been noticing recently, the reliability of this service would be more appreciated than any increase in speed. When its 3 in the morning and my ping to a server within my own state is over 200, my blood pressure rises.
I'd like to quote this message I received from AT&T Customer Care regarding higher upload speeds on AT&T Broadband. I was concerned about the 128K upload cap.
Take a look at this:
Hello! Welcome to the Online Customer Support Center for AT&T Broadband service. A message from a customer care specialist should appear in the chat window shortly. Your session ID # is 2142439.
In-Kevin Roberts has joined this session!
In-Kevin Roberts says, Hello and thank you for contacting AT&T Broadband. My
name is Kevin & I'll be glad to assist you today. I see you have a question regarding higher upload speed . Can you please give me a little more detail ?
You say, Is there a service plan which provides me with greater upload speeds
than 128k?
In-Kevin Roberts says, Yes, AT&T broadband is coming up with higher upload speed.
You say, when will this be available?
In-Kevin Roberts says, This will happen anytime between May 2002 to December 2002.
You say, what is the pricing?
In-Kevin Roberts says, The pricing will be the same.
You say, what will be the new speed?
In-Kevin Roberts says, The new speed will be 256kbps.
So, to appease cable modem customers, AT&T is rolling out more bandwidth on the upstream side. If you'd like to confirm this, log in to AT&T member services and join a chat room of theirs -- that is what this transcript is from.
I hope this helps those of you who are concerned about higher prices. I, for one, am a very satisfied AT&T cable modem customer.
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Maybe you're lucky with Shaw, but with Sympatico there are bandwidth caps and tiered pricing. Rogers has already said that they're going to follow suit.
I know I'm probably going to stop downloading isos. I was definitely over 5G last month, and at $8/G over, I can't afford it.
And why can I say that so authoritatively?
Because here, in Edmonton, it costs me $40.00 a month for a cable modem. That's Canadian money. And I get 8MBit down, and 768k up. DSL costs about the same, and gets you 1Mbit up and down. If you like, you can pay more for more bandwidth.
I have no transfer quotas, just guidelines. No running porn sites, I can't affect the backbone, don't download to the maximum capacity of the modem 24/7...things like that.
Cable and Phone companies have TONNES of money. They can afford to make basically nothing on the service (which they are) and try and get you for the little extras (more web space, email addresses, etc.) Plain and simple: you're being ripped off.
I'm just worried that now that it seems to be a worldwide trend, the providers in this country will decide to try to bend everyone over.
AT&T Broad(hah!)band's rate increase for those who own their own modems is a bit of a rape.
Yeah, we've been on for a year, but when I bought it it was still over $150 (could have saved a few bucks at places that had it out of stock, but then I wouldn't have had it, would I?). At least there's a six-month grace period, I'll probably just barely come out ahead.
However, AT&T had one other scam going: When @Home folded, they reset my account to leased modem. With my better half paying the bills, we didn't notice for 8 months, what with auto-billing on the credit card. They're fighting us on refunding for the months prior to 2002.
As it is, we only get 128 upstream, and I think 768 down -- at best. The neighborhood is getting crowded.
I'd take DSL in an instant, but I'm 5 miles from the CO -- the best SBC Ameritech offers is IDSL at $80 a month for 128/128.
The cost of high-bandwidth leased lines (T3, T1, OC3, etc) for business purposes is dropping. As the dot-bombs have fallen out the pod bay doors, there are more salesmen for fewer big-byte customers.
Home access prices have to go up to make up the difference in revenues - baby needs fresh minks, and the yacht would look better with new paint.
Note how broadband-only providers are not raising the rates as fast as AT&T and compadres. Yet.
The price will rise to whatever the market will bear...
While at first look the suggestion of tiered pricing seems great, in truth it would be as bad as the current system. Given time, companies will charge a higher and higher price for the higher tiered level of service. As everyone knows, bandwidth requirements are quickly rising for all games and oter forms of online entertainment. I doubt that companies are going to raise the tiers bandwidth allotments to stay with the trend. Therefore, in the near future people would be forces to pay for the higher tiers for the same level of entertainment the enjoy today.
I hope that made sense.
really. You are an ass.
.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
"the need for higher pricing for users who tend to use more than their fair share of the bandwidth"?
Are we referring to the uncapping of cable-modems or just someone using all they can? I don't know what your American companies call 'fair share' but up here in Canada that means if I pay for a 512Kb connection and my monthly limit is 3GB upstream, if that's all I am using, that's all I pay for (at a reasonable $35 CAD/mo.(about $22.75 USD/mo.)). Most of our providers don't even care if you have a home network and use NAT! Check here if you don't believe me.
Maybe Canadian companies just don't understand the concept of gouging like those good 'ol American ones. We always were a little slow.
"You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake."...Tyler Durden
they need to understand (cable companies) that I pay $45.00 a month for my cable modem. And now they want to have me use it less? I've never heard of such things. If I pay my bill I have a right to use my modem as much as I want, when I want.
They are making it seem like the old days when you had like 15 hours a month.
What they need to do is sign less users up or get more equipment. Obviously when they designed their system they had an idea of how many users would use it and how much they would need to charge to make a profit. Now they are greedy and want to put more people on the network then they intended but realize they need to restrict users then.
They just need to spend the money and set up more networks.
"Allez Cusine!"
Corporations almost unilaterally (sp?) have similar shareholders, or are owned outright by the same group of shareholders or another corporation. (think AOL/TIME/SATAN, Viacom/Blockbuster/Demons). They don't care if you have a good connection or not. EVEN if you pay them for the service! The fact that in most if not almost ALL metropolitan and ESPECIALLY rural areas they have a monopoly on the service means they care even less. Who's going to replace them? 56k. Even crappy overpriced broadband is better than 56k, though not from an ethical/financial standpoint, certainly from a technological/convenience standpoint.
The only ways to lower broadband prices altogether are:
roll your own.
(this is being done in some cities (see roll your own dsl, guerilla networks, etc.)
steal it till prices come down.
(this is being done alot from college and corporate networks, and personally I think it's justified by the prices we consumers already pay both colleges and corporations).
Install a large government infrastructure as is being done in cananda.
(not likely to happen since at least in the US, if not all of europe/asia also, the government is OWNED by corporations (think cheney/enron, etc. etc. ad nauseum ad hysterical rage).
so really I don't see the broadband situation improving for at least another 10 years. When monopolies own the technology, they abuse it and limit it's ability as long as they can, and with governments being owned by those monopolies, that is forever, or until millions die in a revolution. The best example I can think of to outline this scenario is microsoft, though there is far too much cowardice to have a revolution about it in this country any time soon.
and to think we had our revolution against brittain over 2% taxes!!! what the hell happened to us? anyone read any late roman history?
rhy
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
Its hard enough to pay for DSL when you don't have a job, let alone how hard it will be when Bellsouth decides to raise its rates a few hundred percent because we have no other choice BUT Bellsouth for DSL. I've seen gas stations do the same thing. In a town where there's only one gas station, notice that the prices there are always near a dime higher than other places? Same difference, except for you can't easily get other providers to give you service. This is why all the DSL providers tell you that they won't know if you can have service until you're actually moved in an situated in a new house or apartment.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
I understand the need for a rate for people who never use the Internet for more than surfing and email. A bandwidth pricing option for them would be extremely useful. But for people like me, a tiering system (and I'm talking about a system much like cell phone plans - where you pay for X and get raped over excess ) based only on how much you expect to use per month would be horrible. My use fluctuates so dramatically from month to month that in the event of having a huge bandwidth month, I would never be able to be prepared for how large my bill might be (assuming I'm on a tight budget). If this becomes the case, the ISPs need to have some sort of system in place so that you can monitor your bandwidth consumption in the same way that you can monitor the amount of cell phone minutes you have remaining for the month. The flat rate plan keeps me from having to worry about one more thing every single day of the month. (I'm Jack's ulcer...)
This sounds like an opportunity for neighbors to join together with wireless networks. Split the expensive bandwidth costs between them...
The Bell's not having to share their copper may also increase commercial wireless opportunities. I work for a minicipal electric utility that has access to many street light poles for wireless access points, along with provisions (empty underground conduit) for future data comm. Might be a business for some utilities to get into...
I suggest TV is a better analogy for broadband than electricity. Can you imagine your cable bill varying based on how much your TV was on? This idea does not really work since much of the time the TV is on you are watching commercials. If you got charged by the minute for watching TV you would not stand for the cable company selling you commercial TV. The internet now is alot like commercial TV. When I read the news on cnn.com or wherever I expend bandwidth on commercial "flash" banners and popups. I don't mind with broadband; it doesn't really slow things down and at some level moving shapes and flashing colors make me happy. But I would want a 'text only' web if it was a metered service.
Water, gas, electricity, and long distance telephone are all pay per usage, I think bandwidth belongs in this category.
The two "unlimited flat-fee" services are local telephone, and television. Neither of these can be abused (hogged) the same way that bandwidth and the other aforementioned utilities can be.
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
I'd like to see them go to a system where you pay for what you actually use like they do for long distance phone service, water, power, etc. Big users would be forced to pay their fair share, small users would get cheaper rates. If you go on vacation for a month, you aren't using it so you don't pay anything except a small monthly service fee.
In fact, I've been saying for years they should do the same for cable TV. Some (actually most) channels I NEVER watch, yet I currently pay for them anyway. Let market forces decide if we really need 6 home shopping channels, 3 religious channels, 5 spanish channels, etc.
My cable bill would be much, MUCH smaller, since I seldom watch TV anyway.
Of course the downside is, there may not be enough subscribers to support some of my favorite channels and they'd go under.
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In Canada, the average price for CABLE modem access is(based on VIDEOTRON)
26.07$US taxes included.
or 22.81$US without taxes.
What you get at this price is
6 gigs download limit
4 gigs upload limit
320 k / sec down
15 k
capitalism works.... greed is good.... sell my babies to make stem cells for jesse helms.... kill all the democrats... capitalism works... kill all the democrats.... greed is good.... sell my babies.... capitalism is good....
I have been debating recently whether I should get cable or stick with dialup. Then I read the recent article about AT&T Broadband hiking prices. It sure made my choice easy. Seems that at least in my case, the "invisible hand" appears to be working just fine.
NO CARRIER
Very Simple: 1) Less competition, higher prices (duh) 2) Companies were charging below cost to get market share. (see: Dot-com boom, venture capital) 3) Those companies are now out of business, or are raising their prices to stay in business (see: dot-com bust, burn rate) 4) goto 1 The phone companies of course have other sources of revenue, so they can still try to price the IELC's out of the game (see: Microsoft, monopoly, anti-trust). Jeff
In sweden there is an cable modem ISP called comhem ab.
... it's the same thing...
Now they are starting to offer a faster service for [more] money... (1Mbit down/200kbit up)
I've used their old service for some year now and I've never got the promised network speed (512kbit/128kbit).
How can they expect me to buy their new service when I will (most unlikely) not get that they promise.
Capitalism? or just monopoly?.... ohh right
but maybe broadband providers *need* a raise.
Recall that the days of the dot-com explosion were also marked by a dramatic expansion of the number of ISP's. Quite a few of the dot-bombs were from the ranks of those ISP startups. Excite@Home comes to mind. At one time in my town of about 50,000, there were at least 8 local ISP's, each trying to undercut the others in price in order to gain market share. Now there are only 3 local ISP's of any consequence offering broadband operating here. Actually, there are a couple more, but they just resell SBC's pipes.
My prices may be a little out of date, but this is what I can get locally:
ISDN: SBC, $150/mo
DSL: SBC, $69/mo + equip
Cable: Cox, $49/mo + equip (maybe more)
802.11a: Chickasaw, $79/mo
Maybe Cox will put the scare into the others in my area... or maybe Cox will raise their price in my area.
Anyway. I'm not sure the pricing and profitability have been worked out completely enough to be certain exactly what broadband is worth. I don't buy the idea that there isn't enough capacity, in the backbone sense. There may be capacity problems at individual ISP's, however.
All things in moderation.
Yes, demand is higher than supply. The problem is also that most broadband markets does not consist of several providers competing for customers. The customers are glad to have a fat pipe, almost regardless of price. Very few have a choice, and where there is a choice it's between DSL or Cable, it's never between to different Cable carriers or DSL carriers.
.5 MBps. It's not electricity where there is an acutal added cost in producing more.
The cost of producing bandwith is fixed, it is not three times as expensive to give someone 1.5 MBps than
But still, since at this stage the users are paying for the building of the networks, tiered or even metered price is a good way to split the costs somewhat fairly. Yet again, who pays for the highways, airports, seaports etc etc. Taxpayers. Why isn't Internet, the infrastructure of the 21st century to a greater extent paid for by our taxes ?
The local monopolies will maximize their short term gains, not do what's best in the long run for the consumers.
Oh, I can't help quoting you because everything that you said rings true
I don't mean to come off as an asshole, or uncaring, but If I pay for 640k/s, I should be able to use 640k/s, meaning a total of:
640k/s * 60s/min * 60min/hr * 24hr/day * 30.5day/month = 1.686528 * 10^9 k/month.
Let me put it this way. By putting a limit on my uplink and downlink, I have essentially bought an amount of bandwidth per month (as detailed above). It makes no sense to charge me for using too much because I cannot physically use more than my allotted amount unless their system breaks, in which case it is not my fault. The telecoms are already charging me for how much bandwidth I use, so the idea of me using too much is silly. If they want to change to a different method of billing then they should take off my speed cap, because the speed cap defines the amount of bandwidth I am allowed to use per month/pay period.
Shouldn't broadband be getting cheaper, with improvements in technology?
Not when they're losing money.
They made massive investments in infrastructure, and they're not getting the takeup they projected. To make things worse, a tiny percentage of people leech all the bandwidth.
In a word, they're losing money, so of course they're going to charge more, especially for the small percentage who leeches the network.
It has an incredible amount of depth on every known DSL provider in the country. And it's by USERS!
I think that it is a given that the only reason rates are going up or tiered pricing is being introduced is because of heavy users, right?
These heavy users are donwloading pr0n, mp3s, WaReZ and movies right?
IANAL, but a logical step is that the cable companies are making money off of illegal activity.
Therefore, once this stuff gets instituted the RIAA, MPAA and that dumb software group can come in a sue the providers. right?
If not, why?
Bye. Bye.
"Oh, you hate your job? There's a support group for that, it's called everyone, they meet at the bar."
I work for a telecom equipment manufacturer. Over nearly the past decade, the regional bells (RBOCs) and competitive local exchange carriers (CLECs) were stumbling over themselves trying to build out broadband networks, and they went deeply into debt to do so. Broadband equipment isn't cheap. Believe, I know! The current pricing scheme was based upon the internet-bubble business plan of "market share at any price." We all know how well that worked. The RBOCs and the very few remaining CLECs are bleeding very badly with broadband, so this was inevitable as competition decreased due to carriers going out of business. So, this is the future. The faster we get used to it, the faster the RBOCs will resume building out the network and the better off we will all be.
You may not have noticed, but telco's are going out of business left, right and centre (British English, not a spelling mistake!). This is because they undercharged for the bandwidth in the first place. Rather than proces going (further artifically down) they are now approaching levels when a reasonable profit can be made. Live with the fact you have been a freeloader for too long...
Web and e-mail only? Pay less.
Web and e-mail only? Get Dialup!
The reason I pay for broadband is because I want lots of speed and bandwidth. Why should my price be increased because I am using what I signed up for in the first place?
From a definition of broadband from E2:
"In the US the predominant telephonic carrier system is SONET, which is very similar to SDH but uses different frame sizes, hence the usual definition of broadband is determined by the size of a DS1 frame, which is 1.544 Mbits/s."
Broadband should give me 1.5 Mbps, and that is what it is capped at anyway, so I don't see how people are using too much bandwidth by getting what they should be. Infact, this might have some sort of legal precedent as false advertising, but thats a stretch. Anyway, paying more because you use your connection the way it was intended is rediculous.
Moderation Totals: Flamebait=2, Troll=1, Redundant=1, Insightful=6, Overrated=1, Underrated=1, Total=12. (not mine)
For the average user, whose computer is powered off most of the time or uses their (one) machine 2 hours a day or less, cable/DSL is an excellent value and is priced fairly.
It is more than fair for a user like myself with 7 machines in a network, my own domain complete with DNS server, and other hosts. I am a high bandwidth user. My machines are on 24x7 and I use them throughout the day and even more in the evenings and weekends.
However, I make ABSOLUTELY NO MONEY WHATSOEVER by having a broadband Internet connection. Because of this, I do not believe that a pricing structure that assumes I am a business and therefore using my bandwidth to generate revenue is fair at all.
I pay $45 per month for 1.5 Mbit/sec down and 384 kbiit/sec up. This is barely adequate for my use. Especially the upstream. I would be willing to pay $100 to $200 per month for 5 mbit/sec up and 5 mbit sec (10 mbit/sec total). I think that would be quite fair. I would even be willing to limit high-bandwidth usage to weekends and off-peak hours. Of course, this is an ideal...
I would be willing to pay $100 per month for good solid 1 mbit/sec up and 2 to 10 mbit/sec down. The problem is that there is no deal. The cable company has one-size-fits-all and won't deal with individuals.. or in this case an entire legion of what I like to call "power geeks."
PowerGeeks are folks like myself who are NOT running a business, but who typically have home LANs and higher-than-average bandwidth usage. Also, if the other people in this group are anything like me, we are WILLING to pay more to go faster, but not a lot more.
There is just nothing in between the one-size-fits-all 2 or so mbit/sec down and 256 or so kbit/sec up and a T1 which is just not a practical cost for a hobbiest. This market segment could, in my opinion, be "milked" a lot better. I have about $200 per month to spend and my cable company is getting 1/4 of that from me. If they could offer something a bit faster, they could get considerably more of my money. I have called and asked. I have spoken to the VP of my local ISP, and while he is sympathetic, there just isn't anything in the works.
What do you folks think? Am I being anywhere near realistic? I am talking throuhgput of about 4 GByte per week upstream and sometimes as much as twice that downstream. I'd like to go faster, and I'm willing to pay some more for it.
Vortran out
Knowledge is like ignorance.. too much can be just as bad as not enough.
Sounds good but in my area noone will be paying less. We currently have 1.1Mbit DSL for $40 CDN/ month, now we have a choice of:
same speed with a brand new 3GB max for $45/month
slightly faster with 10GB max for $60/month
And the price hikes for cable are on their way..
Just have it so at the end of the month if you did 1gig of traffic you get charged the 'lite' plan, 5gigs == 'heavy' plan.
Or limit certain accounts to certain ports. Maybe have a browse account which only has access to ports for chat, email and web (80, 110, whatever msn uses etc...)
Marshall
Maybe the government should regulate broadband companies....or if you wanna go REALLY left, maybe they should nationalize em!
Furthermore, you could put the base rate and the per megabyte rate in the hands of the State Utilities Commission, and those rates couldn't be altered without massive voter protest.
This is probably a short term thing though- if the price goes too high, competition becomes higher- sure lots of people THINK they live in a monopoly, but if the price goes too high then technologies like WiFi become more competitive. If you go far enough across WiFi you can always get to cheaper bandwidth eventually. And there's always satellite if you're prepared to wait; or Modems if you're REALLY prepared to wait ;-)
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"..I always wondered how Canada could possibly have much lower rates than the US.
I know how much it costs to put in DSLAMS. I know what the monthly equipment space rentals are at Central Offices. I know what it generally costs to maintain the network infrastructure to support a DSL userbase. And, let me tell you, for $40/month, people like us aren't making huge profits (mind you, we do make money now, but not in the bucketfulls that people here seem to be implying).
Even considering being an ILEC vs a CLEC here in the USA, about the only way I can see the big Canadian DSL providers being able to provide such cheap service is through subsidizing them, either from their other (e.g. voice) businesses, or from the government (e.g. tax credits, direct payments, "access fee" taxes, etc).
Don't get me wrong - that's a perfectly valid way to deliver cheap broadband. The USA did it with Voice service. However, I'm not sure that's the best thing in the long run for Data. In the end, I expect that Voice and Data regulations here in the USA will converge (since there really is no sane reason for keeping them apart anymore). I'd rather see a bit less regulation than tying the whole data network up with the mess of voice regulations. (which isn't the same thing as the ILEC's want - they want voice and data to be UNregulated. Not a good thing either, so long as they control the physical last-mile).
Anyhow, the current price see-saws in the USA are an inevitable adjustment while the companies get the economics right; let's be honest: most broadband companies didn't do a good job judging network usage and layout. They're trying to make new decisions based on the past 4 years of experience, and they'll make more mistakes; but I'm guessing that it will be a better take this time around.
And, also, with all the outcry over raised rates, I don't see anyone mentioning that Several Broadbrand providers DROPPED rates (I'm biased, 'cause I work for Covad, and we dropped ours, but we're not the only ones). It's not ALL bad news.
In the long-run, I expect that broadband will remain unmetered (because, let me tell you, the metric captures are a pain-in-the-ass), but you'll see finer-grained pipe structures: for instance, you may have a 400kbps service for $30, 800kbps service for $40, 1.5Mbps for $60, and 5Mbps for $100, rather than a single 1.5Mbps service for $50. It's a far easier way to segragate the "hogs" from everyone else, and gets them to pay more for the service they use, but not unfairly limit them.
Bottom line here: don't like the service or support you're getting? Vote with your feet and dollars - use something else. There is ALWAYS something else these days, even if it's not what you expected.
-erik
There are always four sides to every story: your side, their side, the truth, and what really happened.
And I still watch TV on my 13" B&W with the rabbit ears antennae. Why would any one want more? It's not like "the price is right" is better in color.
Ok, now wake up.... ;-)
No really, as long as people want to communicate with each other they will have nearly unlimited business.
Also, as long as they have right of way, there can be no REAL competition.
I have a feeling that another monopoly breakup is the only thing that could help at this point....
As for now, I'll just sit back, keeping paying my $170+ monthly qwest bill, and wait for dog to eat dog...then maybe Master (DOJ) will punish....it's inevitable. (sorry, link is PPT)
"Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them."
It will no longer be feasible for many small web sites to say up unless they make money. The result will be fewer informational sites, fewer ideas online, more big coorperations online, and finally less freedom. We need to stop this.
It's only been around for a couple of years now, dude. The way to lower costs is presumably to increase the size of the network: as the number of users of a given provider grow, the cost per user drops and the provider may then lower prices to further that effect. This has not happened, since most people are perfectly content with AOL service. If they all switched maybe the cost of broadband would decrease to the same level as your typical dial-up account, but that would be a chicken-egg problem.
The new FCC ruling is identical to the Tauzin-Dingell bill a few months back, which was shot down. It affects DSL service only. Regional phone companies have always had to open their lines up to competitors at cost -- since the natural monopoly condition only affects the physical lines, not the phone service itself -- including DSL and ISDN lines. The idea was that DSL service providers should be able to compete with Cable service on equal grounds, without that requirement. Congress didn't buy it, but the FCC did.
I am not sure how low they are looking at capping the bandwidth before $$$ comes into issue- I heard between 5 and 10gb/month.
Just for general reference- with 9 computers hooked up, a sane number of mp3 downloads, and a few programs and movies downloaded, in the past 23 days (according to my router) I have passed about 6 to 7 gb of traffic in, and about 1.5 gb out traffic.
What is everyone else here using. I am not running a server of any type to the public- so don't tell me that your FTP server is pushing 50gb/month, that's not the type of thing I am looking to see here.
BTW, i am on Time Warner Cable's Road Runner service.
Tibbon
tibbon.com
For the pessimists:
Short-range communications, such as LAN technologies, roughly follow Moore's law. We have gone from 10Base2/5/T to 100Base-T(X) to 1000Base-T/FX and so on. Wireless went from 11Mbps to 54Mbps, and Linksys is working on wireless with burst modes to 70Mbps. Prices on existing technologies keep dropping, and new technologies take the place of those that fell out. Common sense.
Long range communications do not. If it did, our bandwidth would be improving every month, and/or cost of service would go down every month. Actually, once you have your connection via cable or dsl, your bandwidth is most likely going to lower, due to extra users hopping on the network in your area, and prices will rise due to higher costs to maintain a larger network and regular old inflation. This is the opposite of Moore's Law.
I think this is what has me, and many others, a little disappointed, and possibly even angry at telephone and cable companies.
For the optimists:
This is the way I look at it: if I wanted to make a direct connection between two computers that were in the same room at, say, 15Kbps, it would cost me about ten bucks for a null-modem serial cable and maybe a few fractions of a cent per month for electricity in that little cable. If I wanted to do the same thing to a location across the city _without_ the help of a third party, it would cost me a few thousand dollars to set up (for wireless, I'd need a couple towers, for standard cat5, I'd need a ton of cable, a bunch of repeaters, and a whole lot of time and effort into installation and maintenance), and a few hundred a month to maintain. Now imagine if I wanted to connect to a computer in, say, Austin, TX, from my location here in Grand Rapids, MI. The costs would be insane (like I said, no third parties, so if I wanted satellite, I'd have to launch my own, if I wanted wireless, I'd need a tower every few miles for repeating the signal, and so on).
My local ISP is providing me this service at much greater speeds (as much as 250KB/s from some web sites) to websites possibly around the world. What are they charging me? Around $45 a month.
The speed of time is one second per second.
Okay, I am totally against tiered pricing as a customer, and here's why. I understand that there is a large percentage of users taking up a large majority of the bandwidth, but there are also a lot of users who do comparatively nothing with all of their bandwidth. The money supposedly being lost on the high bandwidth users should be made up in the low bandwidth users.
In particular, I can point to Time Warner, of whom I am a customer, due to the recent report that they would be instituting bandwidth caps. Do I really believe that AOL, the biggest ISP in the world by far (and part of the AOL/Time Warner megacorp) is hard up for cash?? And even if that's the case, turn first to cutting internal costs, don't make customers take care of the bloat themselves.
Competition is heating up, customers are at stake here, not like it was 2 years or even 1 year ago...
Palaces, barricades, threats, meet promises
should read
"On the other hand, Napster/KaZaA/Gnutella phr33ks would be paying about $220 a month for 10GB of downloads"
Anyway, the point is that you could play with the rates to get them to be where they should be, and then people can decide for themselves whether they want to pay for all those MP3s.
About what they are ACTUALLY PROVIDING for your $50-$100 per month.
rather than say 'heres a 1.5Mbit/s connection with a 3GB cap', they should say that 3GB over 30 days is really a ~70kbps connection with a 1.5Mbit/s burst speed (which you will be charged extra for using, assuming constant usage of your 70kbps bandwidth)
Personally, i am not averse to paying for pipe. But if i pay for the pipe, then i expect to be able to use the pipe i was sold for the purpose it was sold to me without being branded a 'problem user', a 'criminal' or a 'bandwidth hog'
Why don't the cable comanies just be honest about it and sell me a 70kbps pipe for $50/month, a 150 kbps pipe for $100 a month and a 1.5Mbps pipe for $1000/month?
Maybe because it doesn't sound like a very good deal at all?
In reality, the cable/ADSL companies are simply trying to limit aggregate bandwith usage to exactly what they used to have when the majority of their customers were on dialup.
Its quite likely you would be much better off with 2 channel-bonded 56k dialups if you are a heavy bandwidth user, while it is the light users who want small amounts of high-speed net access that benefit most from 'broadband'
And then they wonder why there is so much dark fiber laying around because of 'lack of demand'
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
Wasn't TimeWarner/AOL supposed to drop their Road Runner Service upon merging or be considered a Monopoly???
I am posting this using RR right now, and my check is going to Time Warner... so i guess that didn't happen
What did happen to that? Aren't they a monopoly now?
Tibbon
tibbon.com
1) I would love to see the comcast/att merger stopped.
2) All area monopolies are to be stopped after 10 (or x) years.
This would allow for comcast to compete in ATT's area and visa/versa after the system is paid for.
3) echo/dish should be allowed their merger, with the stipulation that if they are serving an area that has < 2 high speed connection, then they are limited to their lowest price. e.g. if serving a town with dsl and cable, then echo is free to charge what ever. But if in the country, than any echo sales anywhere apply to all these areas. So if they charge 25 special in San Diego, then the CO plains gets it as well.
Thank god for my independently-owned-and-operated cable outfit. They charge a whole lot for regular cable TV, but damn, 1536 kbps down and 256kbps up isn't bad for $35/month.
I will now redundantly add my name to the end of my post. You know, in case you forgot me or something.
I use Charter. They just introduced a new tier. They have for $37.99 or so, you can get 768Kbps/128Kbps or for $50 or so, you can get 1.5MB/400Kbps. I think $50 or so is fair for now, but it sure seems like every couple months the price goes up
Fair prices for what you get there indeed, i would say.
Wouldn't expect it to last however. I'm in southern California and on Adelphia, rumor has it that Charter is the expected winner of the Adelphia fire-sale here in Los Angeles, so i decided to check their pricing plans in the So Cal area... what costs you 50 a month is gonna cost me 113.95.
Here's the prices listed for SoCal Charter Pipeline (from their website):
***
Service plans (select one)
768Kb Down / 128Kb Up Bronze Package: $39.95 Charter Pipeline High Speed Internet Access, no contract. This price does not include the promotional $4.95 modem lease or the $10.00 cable access fee for non-cable television subscribers.
256Kb Down / 64Kb Up Value Package: $29.95 Charter Pipeline High Speed Internet Access, no contract. This price does not include the promotional $4.95 modem lease or the $10.00 cable access fee for non-cable television subscribers.
1Mb Down / 256Kb Up Silver Package: $60.00 Charter Pipeline High Speed Internet Access, no contract. This price does not include the promotional $4.95 modem lease or the $10.00 cable access fee for non-cable television subscribers.
1.5Mb Down / 384Kb up Gold Package: $99.00 Charter Pipeline High Speed Internet Access, no contract. This price does not include the promotional $4.95 modem lease or the $10.00 cable access fee for non-cable television subscribers.
The problem here is that the major bandwidth providers (namely AT&T, SBC, Quest, and a few others) are purposely keeping supply low. There are many new technologies and there is more than enough fiber to make tons of more bandwidth available, but then prices will plummet. If they can gradually release new bandwidth as demand increases, they can keep charging the same rates without extra cost. They are colluding to keep prices artificially high and there is a huge barrier to entry which prevents upstrats from setting the situation straight through natual means.
They have resisted commoditizing bandwidth (which is what caused the Enron collapse, by the way) which has helped preserve their monopoly on continental bandwidth supply.
This is only the first example of price gouging. They keep people used to the idea by claiming that people are using more than their "fair share". That's BS. I pay for a cable modem which has X amount of bandwidth. I use X amount of bandwidth, why should I be charged more just because some guy doesn't use his money wisely?
There is no "fair"ness here. They just want to keep upping and upping the price while not increasing bandwidth. Eventually, there will be a large consumer backlash as other technologies arise or as people can no longer afford the rediculous rates, but the telco companies don't care. They will have made their millions and then they will increase capacity to make everyone happy again, and the process will continue. This is the same pattern the telcos have followed since the 60's. First with intra-state LD, then with interstate LD, then with international, now with cell phones and internet.
That the incumbent carrier, as they add new capacity, turns over the older and sub-optimal lines to the competitive carrier.
So yeah, you're getting cheap service. However, you're getting it through older, noisier lines.
At least that's SOP for Ameritech out here. And this info comes straight from my uncle the line-technicians.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
You guys are nucking futs! Price gouging? What price gouging?
Ten years ago I was paying $19.99 a month for 2400 baud access. Five years ago I was paying 25$ a month for 28.8K access. This year I am paying $49 for 1.5Mbps access. That's an awesome deal. It's like moving from a studio apartment to a ten bedroom mansion for only twice the rent.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Gee, I thought paying for what you get and getting what you pay for were good rules.
The problem is that the rate $/MB is set to high.
Of course, you have more than one variable in the equation here. It's not just how many bits your getting, but also how fast you're getting them. So it'd end up like : $ = $/MB * $/(MB/S) * MB. That way, providers would have an incentive to increase both capacity and speed.
I'd pay $30/month for 3GB of data at 768Kb/s. Of course, I have no idea what my current usage pattern is like, I could be in for a nasty surprise.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
As far as stabilizing, and eventually reducing, prices goes, imho the best long-term approach is a dose of [oxymoron]intelligent legislation[/oxymoron] to foster competition from the tier-one providers on down, and, just as important, to officially define ISPs as common carriers whose responsibility for and control over the net connection ends at your doorstep. Your telephone company no longer dictates the number and type of devices connected to your line; if your ISP treated you the same way, we'd see an explosion of innovation in home automation, etc. in short order. This innovation would spur demand, which would temporarily drive up prices, but at the same time would spur investment and competition to meet that demand, driving down prices in the long run. DDB
Life is like surrealism: if you have to have it explained to you, you can't afford it.
Those of you that say we've had it good for too long, or think "bandwidth abusers" should pay their fair share don't know the realities of the situation.
Wholesale bandwidth prices have plummeted! There was a tremendous overbuilding of bandwidth infrastructure over the last few years. One result of the dot com crash was a tremendous GLUT of bandwidth.
By now, we should have higher speed, less byte limits and cheaper rates. Of course, since the monopolies are booting out all competition, they're lowering the speed, raising byte limits and raising overall rates.
While all the time, their costs of doing business have dropped dramatically.
Bandwidth is cheaper than ever and getting cheaper by the day. But independent carrier are being forced out of the DSL and Cable markets. The Telcom's are reinforcing their monopolies and charging monopoly prices. Expect things to get a lot worse.
I'm with Sympatico too, and I was pissed when I saw their email talking about the 5 gig limits.
Has anyone been able to negotiate with Sympatico, say, give me 8 gigs down and 2 gigs up? Or perhaps give me 10 gigs down for $50/month?
Apparently the other DSL providers are using 5 gig limits too.
A flat rate is nice for right now, if they charged you by how much bandwidth you take up I would be back to...shudder...dial-up in 1-2 days depending on how long it would take to cancel it. I am a gamer, download lots of files/patches/music/etc. and would hate to have to pay for the bandwidth I go through. I get about 1.3MB/S on my cable line (Time Warner of Southern Maine) and pay $44.99 a month, and not to mention having only 3 other people with cable on the same connection to the station, please keep this dangerous idea away from cable companies, but if the prices go up...I guess I will have to settle.
Long distance was more expensive in the past because of the limitations of past technology. There has been a huge increase in the last decade in the capacity of long distance voice networks that brought a corresponding drop in prices, independent of whether there was a monopoly and competition.
Besides, it's hardly fair to compare phone service to consumer-class broadband data connections. Phone service is an essential, you didn't really have a second or third choice for instantaneous communication at the time that Ma Bell was broken up. In contrast, you can downgrade your internet connection at any time and still connect to the internet if you find that you don't want to pay for broadband. You're still connected to the internet and getting the same service, you just can't pirate movies as fast as you could before.
"I don't know that atheists should be considered citizens, nor should they be considered patriots." - George Bush
Here in England Ive been using NTL cable for the last couple of months,its got 512kb download and 128k upload. This costs me £25 a month! in my area i can get 60kbps download speeds! quite impressive i think! The upload speed isnt a problem as im not running a dedicated server or web server,the only problem is that NTL is in heavy debt (as some1 already pointed out) but compared to using 56k in my area (The BT network here is about as old as the telephone itself) its great!
The cost of producing bandwith is fixed, it is not three times as expensive to give someone 1.5 MBps than .5 MBps. It's not electricity where there is an acutal added cost in producing more.
Not true. As long as the broadband provider's backbone is running saturated, more bandwidth costs more money.
The backbone (or upstream pipe, for a smaller ISP) costs $x per month, and can move y bytes of data per month. Allowing a customer to move data across the pipe costs $(x/y) per byte.
Assuming your usage goes up with your bandwidth, giving you 1.5 MBps does cost three times more than giving you 0.5 MBps.
The fairest system is to charge by the amount of data transferred, as another poster suggested. This directly passes on the real cost of providing the link for *your* usage patterns.
[And before you suggest running a backbone wide enough to be unsaturated - that costs _more_ per byte of data transferred, assuming cost per unit pipe capacity to the provider remains the same.]
Hopefully they're raising prices so they can improve their services and bring broadband to more people. I would be very happy to pay quite a bit just to have broadband at all. We live on a farm in the midwest and honestly can't get over 26 kbps dialup connection. Most of the day we get a whopping 21.6. Try downloading a song or even email attachments at .5-2k at a time and see how much you'd be willing to pay for your service. We have to pay $19 for the crap we get. I'd pay $50 a month or perhaps a little more for the lowest DSL or cable speed connection.
Of course this is all just wishful thinking. I'm sure the companies don't have any intention of improving or increasing services. Most of them are on their way to bankruptcy anyway.
Most people would die sooner than think; in fact, they do.
I used to work for SBC Internet. I feel for you. To this day, I refuse to use their DSL service. Corporate was using it (at the time - mid 2000) as a "Loss Leader." You wanted to make them lose money serving you? Make one call to tech support that required a live person. After about 15 minutes on the phone, you'd cost the ISP all the profit it made from your account for the month.
We won't go into the 8000 users hanging off a single router that was served by a pair of OC3's. That was 8000 users each expecting 1.53k/sec downloads. You do the math.
Cable modems were/are at least as bad. While I was on a cable modem system (a municipal system, who contracted out their cable modem service) The entire city - with about 1000 users - was served by 6 T1 lines. The only reason the service didn't suck all the time was because I was one of the few users who actually used their allocated bandwidth. That may be an extreme example, but it's not that different for the larger providers.
They ALL over-subscribe their services, and they still manage to lose money on them. Broadband (actually a misnomer in most cases) isn't cheap to provide. They have to raise prices to pay for the increased pipe the users are finally getting around to using. The monopolization doesn't help any, but simple economics is behind this one at least as much as their desire to see some black ink.
Never attribute to malice what can as easily be the result of incompetence...
"higher pricing for users who tend to use more than their fair share of the bandwidth"? I pay for 384kbps, I use no more than that because I can't. That's my fair share of the bandwidth. If I use less, I'm not using the bandwidth, but I am still paying for the right to do so.
Sig free since 2/6/2002
The statistics vary, but all agree that a very small number of heavy users account for a very large percentage of traffic. Charging these few users more would not be a ton of overhead, since you'd still be charging most people a flat rate.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Some of you have talked about capitalism, but obviously have not idea what it is about. When areas give a monopoly to a utility provider, they are asking for their own trouble. All monopolies should be limited in size, number, and/or length of time. Personally, my belief is that the monopoly should be from a special block concentrator to the home. The concentrator should be capable of supporting > 50 connections, and then should run fiber to the house. Charge x amount / month for that connection and then allow the end user to pick who will provide what to that particular end-user. Since the price is lowered for running cables (block level), you encourage many companies to compete where their is dissatifaction or too high prices. Way out west (here in colorado) is doing just that.
The towns/cities/counties/states/country who grant total monopolies are fools. True capitalism works. You just have to allow it to do so. Monopolies never do (try being secure on a MS box, yeah right).
C'mon guys, remember what cable deregulation was supposed to do to cable prices? Cable prices were supposed to go down.
I don't know about any other slashdotters, but my cable bill has NEVER gone down. It only goes up.
Some people will say that increased competition from satellite TV drove the cable industry to upgrade to digital cable....I say baloney. I still can't get digital cable, and i'll only get it when cablevision decides they want to give it to me.
Why would broadband providers structure internet connectivity any differently? The only way the United States will get widely available broadband at reasonable prices is if the US government makes it a priority. The gov't must aid in the build out and then REGULATE the industry.
We've already tried the unregulated approach and wall street bent over and took the results. All we've got now is spotty broadband coverage and high prices....don't even get me started on wireless internet!
-ted
I live in San Mateo (zip 94401) and I have RCN (http://www.rcn.com)
/sbin/ipconfig parameters! I was impressed. I had dealt with too many tech morons who would say 'sir we dont support Linux, or broadband will not work with Linux' :-)
- cable tv
- broadband
- phone line
for about $80/month. No contracts!
All services are _great_. Trust me I know. I have been with AT&T and other DSL providers. By far RCN is far better. I only had to contact their customer service a couple of times at start and they were very knowledgeble. The average service rep knew about
Their upstream cap is around 700kbps (that cool compared to the 128kbps by AT&T and all other DSL providers). I get about 700-1500 kpbs downstream. I just use SSH but even if I ran a small FTP/webserver they are not that anal. I have LimeWire running and people have been downloading stuff off me @ crazy speeds (e.g 100 kBps, yes with a capital B). I don't share any illegal crap, just typical opensource programs and some copylefted MP3s.
If you are in the same area, please consider these guys.
Try looking at commercial quality, clear-channel T1. $1800-3500/month.
And you think that cablemodem and DSL service is EXPENSIVE?
It's barely more than the cost of a second phone line and a decent dialup ISP! And you have the ability to pull down data at rates rivalling T1 throughput. For what? 1/30th to 1/60th the price?
As they said, less than 1% of the user base is accounting for over 30% of total traffic.
Now I'm not suggesting they go per-megabyte or anything. Far from it.
But if they divided the service into 3-4 pricing tiers, it might go a long way towards, if not relieving the bandwidth consumption issues, at least getting it on a basis where they're not losing money hand over fist. AND, it should allow them to have more accurate data on hand for future capacity planning.
And I don't mind paying a premium for premium service levels.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Upgrade the system so they can sell more lines at the current price/performance. This has nothing to do with a lack of capacity. After a huge buildup in infrastructure followed by the dot-com collapse, there is a huge glut of available bandwidth. Prices are going up because the industry has consolidated into a few major players (read monopolies) who can now gouge you because there is no other choice. So if you want to help solve the problem yourself, call your congressman and push for regulation of the broadband industry similar to that of the telco industry.
They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty nor security
Nobody's making a dime in home broadband subscriptions. Your provider has been selling it to you at a loss because of their own competitive pricing.
Originally cable internet was pricey. They were losing money, but waiting for subscribers to reach critical mass to make a profit. It didn't happen. All the geeks in town were already online and nobody else knew what the hell the internet was. Solution - lower prices to attract subscribers. They had a monopoly with cable anyways, so what the hell. Then DSL came along. Suddenly there were many players involved, spreading the subscriber pool thin and pricing even thinner.
Why do you think a measly T1 will cost you $1000 a month when cable internet is comparable in speed? Cause THAT'S paying for the equipment you're using and THAT'S paying for service guarantees.
In this downtime, these companies need every cent they can get, so they are raising their prices a bit. Also, smaller fish are going under and their subscribers are consolidating to the bigger players. These bigger players are losing cash as well, but suddenly need more equipment to handle the growing subscriber base.
:wq
They'll charge more and more as the years go on. It is assumed that because you have a computer, and apparently had an extra $1,000 or so to spend, then you won't mind spending whatever it takes to get "broadband". If you're like me, you fixed up an old computer, and are able to get on the internet for very little bread. This is almost too difficult to do now that Walmart is selling good machines without an OS. So I have dialup, and "broadband" is something that I'll probably never have, since I have several old machines, most not able to handle a cable modem. Almost all run Linux and Windows, and all surf the internet. Why should the providers give away their services to cheapskates anyway? If you have to ask how much, then you can't afford it.
Since when is raising the rates $7 per month classified as "price gouging?" Charging $14.95 for a CD that costs $0.03 to manufacture is surely price gouging. Raising broadband from $45 per month to $52 per month is not.
It's a bunch of whiny geeks.
--sam
--sam
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
AT&T just like other companies during the boom of the 90's laid so much fiber that they now find that maybe only 5% of it is actually being used. They now have these sunk costs that they are trying to cover by charging up absurd rates for high speed access. Unfortunately the Government is foolish and is allowing them to charge us exorbitant rates by granting monopolies to these companies.
The Telco Act was supposed to crack open the markets and allow competition. Of course, ask Covad and Rhythms about how much the Baby Bells opened up their networks. The incumbents basically gambled that the Telco Act wouldn't be enforced, or if it were, that any punitive measures would be insignificant compared to the revenue they would lose by letting a competitor lease bandwidth at cost. They won that gamble: the administration (W) has no desire to enforce laws against businesses, as FCC Chair Michael Powell so eloquently put it not long ago. So Congress, rather than putting teeth in the telco act, decided to offer more "incentives" -- i.e. loosen up the silk handcuffs a bit.
Short answer: nothing short of a new Telco Act and an administration with the desire to enforce it will prevent the Bells and Cable cos. from gouging the consumer/SOHO whenever they feel like appeasing their shareholders. Which is all the time. If you try to do an end run (create public utility districts, for example), they'll sue to stop them: they can afford to hire lawyers to keep out competitors, or at least stall them until they get legislative approval of their de facto monopoly status.
just a report from seattle... millenium cablespeed is switching it's customers from static ip's to dynamic. To retain a static ip costs 40 dollars more a month. The claim that static ips cost more to admin (i'm sure they do), but those customers who are being switched certainly won't see a price drop.
I'm getting tired of reading about this twice per day. It's a simple business tactic. Sell a new product at below cost, get everyone on board, and then raise rates. They reel you in, show you that their product is 1000000 times better than dialup, and then raise costs. It's business, and it seems to be working. How many people here would ever go back to dialup now that you've experienced broadband? A very small percentage. You can bitch all you want, but it's going to keep going up until they reach the point where they will start loosing money if they raise rates further.
For every person who has complained that their broadband rates have gone up - how many of you have cancelled your broadband? That's about all you can do to show your objection, and you'd be crying if you had to dig out the ole' analog modem.
I don't see why this always comes as a surprise. No matter how much you oversell your bandwidth, you can't make money charging $35/month for a 1 meg pipe.
1) I have a few social skills, but there are times when I prefer to not use them.
2) I am not on good terms with many of my neighbors.
3) What about my neighbors who are happy paying Charter $40 a month? Why should they pay me $60?
4) What about my neighbors who don't have any computers at all - geez, in 802.11 range, I think my market is about, one jerkwad plus myself.
5) Yeah, like I want to dick around trying to shoehorn an 802.11 card into everybody's busted ass old PII 133 running Windows 95, find a driver and make sure there's no interrupt conflicts.
6) Yeah, like I want to take phone calls at 2am because granny's email client wont connect, or Joe Bob can't download his pr0n. The T1 goes down and guess what, I'M responsible for the outage. Fuck that.
I suspect the solution is to move to Japan or Canada where the market forces that have drivin US Broadband services to $50/month apparently don't exist for some strange reason. . .
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
for much the same reasons that railroads are not profitable. The investment required to lay down wiring for access makes it prohibitive... thus they have to charge what consumers feel is a ridiculous sum in order to make a profit. wireless will do much to alleviate this, especially if they can get a few hubs to cover a large area
If 76 Trombones really led the big parade, why did they have anyone else in it?
What is the deal?
Currently Australia's broadband situtation is getting very scary. Soon both companies will be running a 3Gb cap (3000mb!) on downloads. Meanwhile this service will still cost at least $80AUS/month ($40US). Basically it has gotten to the stage where with an unlimited dialup account you could download more data in a month.
Put simpily things are getting worse!
What other technology has gone like this?
Personally I don't know what to believe but surely this isn't the way of the future?
I really don't know how Australia expects to be taken seriously in the IT world when its broadband services are going backwards.
We certainly wouldn't be taken seriously if we ditched the asphalt and went back to gravel roads.
One problem seems to be our focus on Cable TV and not Cable Internet in political circles. The issue of broadband internet need more public representation.
This is why we had dot-bombs, and why so many companies have failed in trying to utilize the internet for profit. Cable has an infrastructure that is unchanging and can meet any demand the public makes of it. Sure, some people might get premium cable, but thats easy to determine, and can be counted easily. Other customers aren't hurt if you leave your TV on all night, but if you leave your connection on, somebody gets screwed out of bandwidth. Advertisements are not effective on computers. How many times have you WILLINGLY clicked on an ad? I think for me, its about five or six times, and I certainly didn't buy anything. Internet is not TV, folks; we have a lot easier time avoiding nuisances and working around the boring stuff we don't want to read. When something fills up the whole screen, and your only option is to miss your favorite website, then maybe ads will work. Right now, nobody reads the ads, because 1, they're small, 2, they're inobtrusive, 3, they're not catchy/interesting. I don't like internet ads. For a good TV commercial, I'll wait a second before I take my bathroom break. For a flash ad or a pop-up, I won't even take the time to move my mouse. I'll download a pop-up ad killer so I never have to deal with it. The solution to the problem is to alter the internet so it is fundamentally shifted towards either the TV or the electricity paradigm. These business models work, and internet startups were foolish to think they could work around them.
Then how come when I run a 10/100 Mbps Ethernet network around my house, it seems so gosh darned cheap?
"The system we have isn't pure capitalism" don't you understand?
These companies aren't just in the business of selling broadband access. They're also in the business of selling cable TV.
In my own case, getting 1.5/128 from Charter was only affordable because I got a good package deal on cable TV, too. Raise the broadband rates and give me a ridiculous download cap like 3-5 gigs a month and I'll just go back to dial-up - more significatly to them, I'll also get rid of the cable access and get another satellite dish. They may be losing money from me as a broadband subscriber, but they're making money from me as a cable TV subscriber. Eliminate one, they eliminate both - cable broadband is the only reason I have cable TV.
As CEO of CLIT i asked that you succum to our power. dont slip into the darkside of trolling that is the anonymous coward
Sorry to be so blunt, but has noone here ever taken a high school economics class? YOU the consumer are always in complete control of the price of any product. If you think that broadband is too expensive, don't buy it. Demand starts dropping, as does the price. Why would anyone (except those who never took high school economics, I suppose) not realize this? Economic freedeom is a great thing.
Flat rate bandwidth pricing makes about as much sense as flat rate electricity pricing.
The best way to accelerate a windows box is at 9.8 meters per second square.
Over here in Australia, the number 2 (of 2) cable ISP had a highly sensible system in place to ensure their bandwidth was being used fairly by the users. It was simply -
All users may download 10 times the daily average user download, calculated over a 14 day period.
This system worked great because it was dynamic system and would continue to grow with Internet usage patterns determined by the users themselves.
Unfortunately the greed factor kicked in, and realising they did not have to be so virtuous in a duopoly market, Optus recently implemented a 3GB monthly cap (after which the speed is throttled to 28.8). Nonetheless, I think the 10x system would be a very sensible plan for ISPs everywhere.
so if everyone who currently subscribes to broadband internet took t ; ne month</a>'s worth of connectivity and purchased a wireless access point, we could have a peer-to-peer Internet that is truly distributed. for another $100 you could buy a sweet antenna for it in case your neighbors are too far away. i'm sure there's also ways to boost the power, as with that linksys router with a software programmable power setting.
The cost of producing bandwith is fixed, it is not three times as expensive to give someone 1.5 MBps than .5 MBps. It's not electricity where there is an acutal added cost in producing more.
Wrong. Bandwidth is a variable cost over time. Let's say I'm an ISP with DSL customers. (Okay, so I'm nuts.) If I am maxxing out the oc-XXs on my regional aggregates and my backbone because of warez puppies, I have to lease more lines from the telco. That's not free. There are both setup fees and recurring fixed costs for each circuit. Not only do I have to buy more lines, I have to get more cards for the Junipers and Ciscos, run BGP to the extra interfaces (causing even greater overhead), and I may have to get additional routers as well. If I start saturating my private peers, then I have to renegotiate peering arrangements with them, which can also be a pain in the ass all by itself.
This can and does mean the difference between reasonable profit and big loss, for most companies.
By the way, don't assume that a bigger pipe is always going to be priced by the telco less than or equal to the equivalent bandwidth across smaller pipes. In many areas, there are special rate plans in effect, with max amounts the telcos are able to charge for one or two types of circuits, like frame relay or 0-mile T-1s, etc. The telco makes up what it thinks it is missing in revenue by raising the rates on higher bandwidth circuits.
Get off my launchpad!
Whoah.. I think my transfer speed has gone up! I upload images to my webserver from time to time, usually at 15 KB a second. Today it was 30! I was surprised! Well it was a small file, so I tried a bigger one. I got 30 again!
Question: Does anybody have a fairly reliable way for me to test my upload just to make sure I didnt just get lucky?
"Derp de derp."
The stock market ran the prices for these big companies up to the moon. Then they bought each other out with billions and billions of dollars worth of phoney-baloney debt and stock. The cable rates are just what it takes to pay off the banks and shareholders. Imagine if $10k of your new $35k SUV went just to pay off all the crazy things Ford or GMC bought.. maybe it does..
We are slaves to the maga corps and like slaves we really have no choice. I have seen this country change over the last 35 years and what has happen isn't pretty to the avg joe. We are sheep and we know what happens to them.
i've got sbc dsl and we just recently hooked up a pc and mac to an etherfast cable/dsl router (linksys). it works great, and was quite easy.
Today I have 1.1Mbs symetric with 4 static IPs and no server restrictions for $199.95/month and honestly I feel that *fair*. I've never measured it acurately, but I'd guess I use about 10-12 Gigs d/l and 2-5 Gigs u/l a month ... that probably isn't nearly as high as someone swapping mp3s 24/7 but I'm not exactly a light user either -- for me the TOS stuff for servers and the static IPs were the important stuff, otherwise I still look at it that I've got near T1 performance for 25% of the price.
I'm not surprised the guys at $58 went out of business ... I honestly can't figure out how they covered costs much less made money ... at $200 a month I think my providor makes a few bucks and I have decent service.
Sure there are parts of the whole system that need improvement, but there ain't no free lunch, nor bandwith.
"Pure capitalism." The term is virtually meaningless. That's the part I don't understand, nor do, I think, any of the people who use it. What does "purity" have to do with capitalism? Capitalism is the private ownership of some means of production for profit, end of story. Capitalism may include markets, or there may be for a variety of reason monopolies within it. Ownership itself, the concept and the reality, is a socially constituted and defended institution, enforced by governments. So any capitalism is inherently impure. Nor does capitalism as such require that there be competition - even in a simplistic model of capitalism, if no one chooses to compete (better opportunities elsewhere, lower costs of entry, supply bottleneck, time-to-market problems), there's no competition. As long as the production is privately owned with investment for a return, it's capitalism.
Granted, I can't recommend it because it's bad and wrong, but I haven't had to pay for internet for years. I'm currently bidding on a cable modem from eBay so that I can tap into my cable co's DHCP.
Ingredients
1 market zone with 3 or more $49.95 DSL providers offering 768K down/128K up
50,000 potential customers
10,000 DSL subscribers
1 major cable company ready to offer 1.5 mbps up and down for $39.95/month
Pour the 1 market zone and 10,000 existing DSL subscribers into a, say, 200,000 person city. Then add in the 50,000 potential customers. Stir.
Now add the major cable company into the mix. Just pour it right on top and do not stir.
Let sit until the DSL customers and subscribers alike float right towards the cable company ingredient, seeking the el cheapo $39.95 and 1.5mbps up/down deal.
Stir.
The DSL ingredient will turn green, and then dark red, as the cable modem ingredient neutralizes them into bankruptcy and also makes your mix more sweet and also homogenous.
As the last DSL ingredient is neutralized, take note of how the cable modem ingredient changes color. The cost goes up to $69.95 a month, your upstream is cut to 128Kbps, you are slapped with usage fees for going over 1 kilobyte a month,
and your city is now screwed royally.
Welcome to capitalism.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
I have Adelphia right now. When I started the service last year I was charged $39 a month. Now my bill is $45. And the service and bandwidth both suck. I have complained to them a couple of times about raising their rates. They haven't increased the capacity of the network or improved the speed -- but, they feel justified in raising the rates. I guess they were busy buying condos, golf courses, hockey teams, and forests with my money. I just dread going to Verizon instead because their caps suck!
"I would think that in situations like this, that a tiered pricing approach might be better than applying a flat rate. Think you are going to be a high bandwidth user? Pay a fair price to your upstream. Web and e-mail only? Pay less."
You would think, wouldn't you. The naivety of that statment scares me. Hasn't this person learned anything from the RIAA? Useless patent laws? Business in general!? THEY DON'T GIVE A CRAP ABOUT YOU. YOU ARE CATTLE TO THEM. A SOURCE OF INCOME TO BE MILKED. THEY WILL TREAT YOU LIKE CATTLE UNTIL YOU AND THE HERD BITE THEM HARD ENOUGH TO WHERE THEY HAVE TO CHANGE, and then only enough to just squeak by. It's a rare company who actually treats their customers like they are the reason they're in business.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
since they sort of 0wn it.
But they _can_ seriously inhibit the development of that market, which they've already been doing for maybe 5 years now.....
Exceeding the recommended torque is not recommended.
Curiously, this doesn't seem to be the case here in the province of Quebec, in Canada. The cable modem access base cost is 30$ CDN (about 20$ US). That is if you have bought the modem. This is really cheap for 3Mbits/s. And ADSL is so cheap, some analog modem access provider want to sue Bell Canada for unreasonably low prices. Currently, it costs the consumer 24.95$ CDN per month for ADSL access with Bell Canada, the owner of the copper lines. But Bell allows 3rd parties to offer ADSL access, at a cost of 24.99$ per month. It is therefore impossible for them to be competitive.
I don't want to pay more, but let's be honest, 25-30$ CDN (16-20$ US) is incredibly cheap for broadband access, and I would find it reasonable to see my internet bill raised.
As I learn more and more, I realize I don't know much.
Shouldn't broadband be getting cheaper? Are you kidding? Have you looked at the balance sheets of most of these telecom companies?
They are pretty much all carrying massive debt loads from the initial deployment of the technologies. The investments that they made have not begun to pay off. The unrealistic growth that they had anticipated never materialized.
It's going to take some time for things to even out after the bubble burst. I wouldn't expect any deals on broadband in the near future. If anything, prices will probably go up as companies fold. In the short term there will be less competition as I don't see any investors who will want to invest in the sector anytime soon.
I don't see things getting any cheaper until someone comes up with a much faster technology that is cheaper to deploy. Maybe something wireless? Who knows?
It's a well known fact that DSL is just second rate to cable. The ill-informed DSL guys will tell you how great it is and all, a nice dedicated connection - but they won't tell you it's dedicated to the switch. The point being, you've got all these people pirating mp3s, porn, and software and you still are gonna get shitty service. Let's just hope you live across the street from the telco's switching equipment. The telco's have no reason to maintain their lines either, they have to open it up to other companies which look bad when bell decides to get around to fixing a problem on the lines - they make money by neglecting their equipment.
@home shot itself in the foot by offering crappy DSL service.
Cable on the other hand is not regulated meaning they have don't have to open their systems for shit. They generally provide better service anyway. In a 2001 Newsweek report it stated that the DSL market has shruken nearly a staggering 14% in one year, 9% of that in the last quarter alone. If you own stock in any of the other big DSL companies such as Verizon, Swbell, or @home then you are in for a big surprise. Lets just hope you enough bandwidth to come crying on slashdot when your company leaves your ass hanging in the breeze.
Fact: @home is DEAD.
With all the cable companies NOT paying the $15 to @home a month ..
.. I know ALL how the cable company works with its price rates.
.. no matter what.
.. they figure they wont get mad again .. or .. if they call in to unsubscribe . they can offer them a few free months of HBO to keep them in the game.
.. thats more than if i ordered digital cable WITH premium channels !!
.. i can get a dedicated t1 for like $250 a month .. flat rate on BW.
.. i can run a server . .or .. god forbid . .resell the service.
.. is .. well . .kidding themselves. How do you think these companies got to where they are today ? Price gouging in the 80's on cable TV.
.. they have to put a $175 tap out of the building/neighborhood .. that can handle about 40-50 customers without puking.
.. all the coax is the same cable tv coax that has been there 20 years.
why did my fees go UP this month ?
as a former employee at comcast @ home since inception
They go up every year . no matter what.
Comcast's policy has always been annual increments. And NEVER to go down
after people get mad the first time or two
this month my cable modem was $60.02
in my area
and on that
anyone out there that is kidding themselves that its NOT greed
Why do you think comcast is fortune 500 company #281 ?
Anyone who says they have to build a new infra structure is crazy.
to convert cable TV coax to handle internet
they pay that off in 1 month of service when its 1/2 full
What the price increases are for (at least as far as comcast is concerned) is to pay for the new Telco Server they installed In WhiteMarsh Maryland. to handle telophony service.
6 billion and counting.
--Ne auderis delere orbem rigidum meum, non erravi pernicose!
They don't care how you do it, that's part of what your salary is for.
So in other words, that's how they get away with in effect paying you less than minimum wage, by paying just over the minimum and making the employee pay for a sometimes disproportionate portion of the expenses.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Is there any possiblity of bouncing [an 802.11] radio signal off the building?
You mention that the building's reflective to light. Now you'll need to check two things: 1. the angle of incidence must equal the angle of reflection, and 2. not only light but also the longer 802.11 wavelengths bounce off the building. If both of those work out, get a pair of parabolic dishes and try it!
Will I retire or break 10K?
The problem isn't that they're charging more for it...the problem is that there arent more practical alternatives. The cap at 56k means that something better needed to come along. That's one thing that has yet to be adressed. DSL and Cable internet are one thing, but it's tough for Joe ISP to get on the broadbandwagon, whereas to get on the dialup scene all you need are a fistful of IPs and a T line. Granted i've oversimplified it, but without making it more easily available and making competition a practical thing, everyone's going to get screwed in the end.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
I live in San Mateo (zip 94401) and I have RCN (http://www.rcn.com)
- cable tv
- broadband
- phone line
for about $80/month. No contracts!
Uh.. I thought broadband meant voice, data, AND video. Not just internet you fucktwat.
Most ISPs say they don't support Loonix because the average luser doesnt know shit anyway and the majority of customers have a stroke over entering the smtp mail server information or 'winipcfg'.
I couldn't imagine what it would be like trying to help the average Lanux using Charlie Manson^H^H^HRMS over the phone with setting up say, a static ip.
People like you make me want to piss on myself.
most of the fiber in this country is dark.
At least in the United States, much of the fiber is dark because routers to send data over fiber cost money.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Remember the multiple stories about how Telco's are trying and succeeding in removing the requirement for providing connections to independant DSL providrs?
I am too lazy to link them but any regular Slashdot reader should remember them, there have been like 5 of them so far.
Well it seems to me those things are connected. Less competition means higher prices. It does not mean as telco's would like you to think "more innovation and exciting new services".
Does anybody have a fairly reliable way for me to test my upload just to make sure I didnt just get lucky?
Use Apache (or WinApache) to open a port on your machine. Place some .ogg files in your .../htdocs/ folder. Now, from another machine on a different broadband provider, access your machine and download some .ogg files.
Will I retire or break 10K?
If you think you can run the [broadband] business better than the old pros at the cables and phone companies, go to your local bank and consider your loan options.
And watch the municipal governments deny you the right-of-way to lay cables, making broadband just as much of a government-granted monopoly as a copyright or a patent.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Here is a brief list of some things about broadband pricing and regulation that not everyone may know... i did a paper on regulatory access requirements (not price controls) for a course this past semester. If you want references e-mail me; if you want to argue, reply here.
Some consumer advocates speculate that the language of the FCC's ruling that a Portland, OR utility board could not regulate cable Internet service as telephony (it ruled that it was an information service) could end the implied authority of utility comissions to regulate DSL service.
I say: if it does, it does. Let's see how DSL ends up if/when it's unregulated. Considering the shape of the unregulated cable Internet business, it probably won't be any better or worse... and if it is, Congress can vote to bring the two substitutes under regulation under the same set of guidelines... something that wouldn't be politically feasible if Tauzin-Dingle had passed.
One might ask the same about birds. What ARE birds? We just don't know.
hmm, sounds interesting. from a company's standpoint, i can see why a flat rate is beneficial. first, a flat rate gives the company steady, predictable (based on the number of current subscribers) revenue. with erradict revenue, its tough to decide whether to boost marketing, r&d, wages, etc. also, the company makes more off of the flat rate. they have priced their service, so that on average, somewhere (assuming here) around 31% above the average costs of the bandwidth provided. so if you use very little bandwidth then they make a bigger gross profit (revenue minus cost of goods sold). if you use more, then this percentage shrinks. oh, but wait! the companies are now hedging on this situation and are starting to charge more for these 'power users'. with this strategy, the company will never make less than the percent mentioned earlier, whatever it really is. :::cough, cough Mr. Michael Powell, FCC chairman::: competition
now, do i a consumer like this, no. but that's how the company makes their money. the only thing that can change that is
------
[insert funny
Of course you have to pay for their idiocy.
Do you think debt is free? It costs interest, and when communication companies take such large ammounts of unsecured debt during times of high interest, that debt is quite expensive. You can add to that high salaries for executives who obviously screwed up.
So yes we are paying for their idocy, and we shouldnt. Failed bussiness plans should just fail, they shouldnt pass their failures on to their consumers.
Laying cables and building infrastructure is expensive, and the money just isn't there. The cost to maintain it is also high. However, there isn't *REALLY* any money there.
Slashdot is looking at this from a consumer point of view, but the other side of the Internet is the webhosts. Look at all your favorite web sites. The Internet USED to be 100% free, once you paid for your internet access. This isn't the case anymore. Now you have to pay to read news articles at Gamespot, pay to download files from Fileplanet... even Slashdot is implementing a subscription plan. Once a web site gets popular, they can't pay for their bandwidth. Advertising alone doesn't work anymore because users have become desensitized to it.
How can we solve this problem? Obviously this can't continue. Eventually, all web sites will require your money to stay afloat, and nobody will want to pay. Then, the Internet will just stop being used.
The bottom line is, bandwidth is expensive, yet worthless. Most people get nothing from it but entertainment, and companies don't get enough money from consumers to pay for their own bandwidth.
The only thing that will fix this problem is cheaper bandwidth. For that, we just have to wait until the infrastructure is in place. It may take a while, we can't expect it to happen overnight. Prices will go up before they go down, because the broadband industry is sick.
What happened to that glut of bandwidth we kept hearing about a few months back? I distinctly remember several "experts" proclaiming that the world had come into an over-capacity of bandwidth from all the expansion in the late 90's. There was talk-a-plenty of supply outstriping demand and how it was going to be the undoing of broadband providers. Funny how all that evaporated when the economy turned South... or maybe it was after AOL bought Time-Warner.
That might work, however I would never pay for such a thing.
Reason: Most ISP's buy Leased lines (T1/E1) at $XXXX/Month. This is a bandwidth limited line. They pay the $XXXX/Month whether they use the bandwidth or not. There is no reason to sell me a service (768Kb/sec Up and Down) and then limit the amount of data I can receive/transmit at that speed. Companies that implement policies like that are doing so because they have over-sold their bandwidth. They need to find a way to limit the usage of the users so that they can sell to more people and not have insanely slow connection speeds.
Just because I like to drink all the beer out of the bottle before I throw it away, doesn't mean that I should have to pay more for it. If you sell me a connection for a certian speed, you better make sure that I can ALWAYS get that speed from another computer that can send it to me that fast. And don't ever think that I won't use the service that I am paying for to its fullest capabilities.
700kbps ... = ... 70K/s. The 100K/s you might have seen is just a spike.
Here's an explanation for some spikes: Many datalink protocols include compression. For instance, PPP over v.90 includes a form of LZW compression called v.42bis. In addition, some protocols will compress data at the presentation/application level; many HTTP/1.1 servers can gzip content on the fly. All this adds up to more than 10 KB per second down on a v.90 dial-up connection when downloading the text of web pages.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I couldn't imagine what it would be like trying to help the average [GNU/Linux user] over the phone with setting up say, a static ip.
Customer buys a BSD or Linux distribution that gives the user the option of using "wizard" style administration tools.
Cust: I bought your second-tier cable modem service, and I'd like to know how to connect my computer to the Internet. (reading the screen) I need to know my IP address, the IP of the DNS server, and the addresses of the mail and Usenet servers.
Tech: Um... (clickety-clack) Your IP is 123.45.67.89. The DNS servers are 123.98.76.54 and 123.98.54.76. Our mail server is mail.foo.net; the Usenet server is news.foo.net.
How hard was that? If that's too hard, just do what many ISPs do by default anyway: use DHCP to give the user a dynamic but unchanging IP address, and then post e-mail and Usenet hostnames on a web page.
Will I retire or break 10K?
If you're concerned about the AT&T price increase then do what I did and sign up for their annual plan. The net result is that I'll be paying an average of $33/month instead of the current $36 for month-to-month.
A few months ago I was living in the Charter Cable region, where they increased the speed this year from 500Kbps to 750Kbps (fast for living in the middle of nowhere) without a price increase.
I pay $40/month for my 512k connection, and I should be able to use it all without being hassled.
He trusts the government.
The same government that has imprisoned 2 million people for drug possession.
The same government that takes an aggregate of half your income in taxes.
The same government that kills innocent people around the world causing you to pay an extra $10 for that gram of cocaine.
The same government which is supposedly accountable to the people, yet most people don't even know who their local senator or representative.
The same government that funds american business with 150 billion a year, in exchange for a variety of monetary compensation. Of course, the average American donates $1000 a year to that fund of bribery
The same government that has a whole army, the FBI, the DEA, the ATF, the CIA, the IRS, and many other armed government bodies ready to enforce their wishes.
And this whining tool thinks AT&T is evil because they raise there prices $10 a month.
Every country outside of the US imposes these kinds of controls on a vast scale. Go look at the shitty shacks in which people live in the UK, and look how expensive their state controlled internet access is. Go anywhere in Europe and you will see what price controls do, they destroy progress and they prevent innovation.
Fuck, go to Canada. Look at how those schmoes live in abject poverty they call a higher standard of living. A stanard applied to prisons. Ahh well, you got food, shelter! Be happy!
I am so amazed people actually believe corporations are forcing Americans to do anything. Yet, no one can name a single instance where this is true.
to force: to compel by physical, moral, or intellectual (logical conclusion folks) means
No one is forcing you to pay $50 a month so you can download a gig of porn a day. You don't want to pay, fine turn it off.
However, try telling the government you don't want to pay the $200 a year the average american wastes in tax dollars on the highways which fuel suburban sprawl. I take a Schwinn to work. If I told the government that I would go to jail.
Here we are, 200 million people killed by governments in this last century in order to control markets. Thats nearly the entire population of the US, dead. And people think government and their weapons of war, even on the small scale of a police officer forcing you to leave your house so it can be auctioned off, are the answer to ANY problems. And we wonder why history keep on repeating itself.
I want X.
Those evil Y'ers won't give it to you!.
Fuck them! Tell Y to give X to me or they die!!!
Yeah, real brilliant.
note X can equal food, shelter, gold, silver, internet access, you name it.
The government is your enemy.
Note to europeans, berkley graduates, and residents of rent controlled apartments: Fuck you! Live free or die bitch! When the next hitler comes, we won't save your sorry ass!
I don't read or respond to AC posts
Here's the math that the broadband providers did in 1999:
y = mx + b
y = the investment to wire the service area
m = the cost per subscriber
x = the number of subscribers
b = the "overhead" cost - that cost which has to be paid more or less regardless of the number of subscribers.
(Of course, it's much more complicated than that, but this formula makes the point well enough.)
The problem is that everybody thought that "x" would be pretty durn high - certainly more than the 15% we've seen. Remember when everybody was going to be on broadband, and we'd all be giving up our phone service and go to voip?
The bottom line is that the providers overinvested, and some even went bankrupt.
For those of us with broadband, the problem is two-fold:
1. Somebody's gonna end up paying for the infrastructure. Many providers have monster debt loads that need to be serviced.
2. We're so-called "early adopters", and we're pretty hooked on broadband.
In other words, as a group we're not that sensitive to price, so we get to pay the interest on the debt.
Ah, you say - why not lower the price, and attract more customers to share the burden? The pundits say that broadband might take off if the price went to $25 / month, but that's a big "if". There might be other obstacles - such as the fact that the biggest bandwidth hogs are music and videos, and both are in the legal twilight zone.
Besides, dropping the price from $45 to $25 is drastic, while raising the price from $45 to $50 is pretty easy, and will probably have almost no effect on the number of customers.
Seems like an obvious move to me.
How can anyone be surprised that a company who's main source of revenue for 80 years was a monopoly is all the sudden acting against its consumers once again. Wake UP This is how they operate, and have for DECADES. If you disagree, then take your business elsewhere. Get DSL, get Satellite, or, better yet, get your cable guy to hook you up. But quit whining. It might suck, but that's life! (I just love saying that while i'm ranting).
"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste." - Rahm Emanuel
Yeah you're trolling but I'll feed you anyways,
Fuck, go to Canada. Look at how those schmoes live in abject poverty they call a higher standard of living. A stanard applied to prisons. Ahh well, you got food, shelter! Be happy!
Funny you should say that. I live in Canada. Do not think I live in ignorance of government corruption our national government is in fact going through a quite a controversy over diciplinary actions against several well known ministers and our provincial government is far from spotless. Also keep in mind that corruption is present is all organizations the reason we hear about it so much more in politics is because we are much more concerned with them and have better access to information. Governments are bad I corporations are just as bad, if not worse because tey are not accountable to that. Will the next Hitler win an election and then go nuts or will he be a CEO who fulfills his obligations to his stockholders by maximizing profit at any cost, ie. in Nigeria Shell Oil ran a brutal military dictatorship with the goal of more money.
I stole this Sig
Monopolies always say they're charging the lowest price possible and they're costs are all soooo expensive etc.
Then competition comes along and bingo - the price goes down.
Companies charge the maximum they can get away with and they can get away with a lot higher price if you have no alternative supplier.
My cable modem runs at 2.5Mbps (though normally I get about 1.5) downstream, 500Kbps downstream, and the service is fantastic, and I pay something like $44.95 CDN (~$30 US). The system works beautifully up here because we have a large, powerful phone company, and some large, powerful cable companies, and they are tooth and nail fighting each other to get your business : If cable pisses me off, I'll get HSE, and vice versa. Other options have floated around on the fringe (a radio internet system called "LookTV", among others), but the current low prices prohibit their success so far (again: If the prices did rise, then the alternatives would too).
To make matter even more interesting, the phone company sells a satellite TV service to try to take cable customers away from the cable companies, and the cable companies sell digital cable to try to keep customers from the phone companies, hence the broadband cable is another selling point : I have resisted even considering satellite TV merely because I use and enjoy my broadband cable, and along with it comes cable, making it convenient for me to get the whole package.
I guess my point is this: Even with only two true competitors, capitalism works fantastically. I think some parts of the US are screwed because either they are one and the same, or some of the players are colluding with others. Anyways, cheers.
P.S. Recently both the phone and the cable companies have announced tiered services, and in some cases minor price increases, however all have been quite fair and I wouldn't consider it gouging.
There is no question in my mind that large-scale tiered pricing would really pour cold water on all of the internet. Alongside every single click we'd make, we'd find ourselves calculating whether this is a wise use of our allotted bandwidth. ("If I watch that BBC video now, I might not have enough allotted bytes left to catch my favorite streaming radio show from France later tonight." "I could check to see what was posted on usenet, but just downloading the headers for the few groups I monitor is over 200MB. I can't afford that!" "Hey, the demo of a game I'm interested in is available for download, but if I get it, my wife won't be able to use the internet for the rest of the month. Better not!")
Basically, Americans would become second-class internet citizens if tiered pricing is put into effect. Video and voice over IP are going to be technologies that only Europeans and Koreans (and maybe some Canadians) will have the unmetered freedom to explore. I'm not sure what the next big application for the internet will be, but when it comes, you can bet it will use a lot of bandwidth, and you can bet that if US broadband is metered and you pay by the byte, Americans won't be anywhere near first to notice and take advantage of its potential. We will be the pedestrians of the internet.
The majority of people on the internet are already non-US-Americans. There is no way to prevent that. However, the USA is still far ahead in terms of buisinesses that make money from the internet. Inertia does not carry you far in this market. Just look at Netscape, Lycos and countless others who seemed invincible not very long ago. What has kept us ahead is that we have a head start on using the net, and we do a good job educating the next generation. As soon as we fall behind, others will be happy to take over our place.
Broadband might look to some like an entertainment service not too different from cable TV. It's a natural assosiation to make, given that they go across the same wire and the bills go to the same place. However, in terms of economic externalities, there is a world of difference. The country gets no benefit from the broad availability of cable TV (yet we regulate the industry to keep the prices low, which seems as stupid as regulating tobacco producers to keep the prices of cigarettes low). There is a huge economic and educational benefit provided by unrestricted and fast internet access. How many billions of dollars flowed into our treasury as a result of kids basically playing on the internet and inventing something? And how many dollars will be lost when their parents drag them away from the computer in fear that their bill will force them to cancel the family vacation?
Yes, I'm close to saying that it is our patriotic duty to see to it that as many Americans as possible have fast and unlimited access to the internet. We will reap the benefits of this later, and they will outweigh the costs by orders of magnitude. Remember, Canada has understood this for a long time, and even though they have a much more scattered population, far more of them have broadband, and they are paying far less than we are (because of direct government action). I understand the situation is similar in Republic of Korea. Anyway, it doesn't take a genius to see where the next generation of internet billionares will come from.
Like electricity and telephone, broadband must be regulated by the government. Actually, if I had my way, the government would just nationalize all the lines, a la Cuba. I honestly think that forward-looking countries would see internet access as a service they must provide for the entire population, for the same reason that the government provides us with basic education. I know that most readers here don't have socialist leanings to the same degree I do, but you won't be laughing at me when you're old and you find we have "unrestricted-capitalismized" ourselves out of a huge emerging market.
Anybody believing cable MODEM or DSL is broadband is being sold a lie. For those that want to see how to build a real network, check out
http://www.glasgow-ky.com/papers
The RBOCs and the cable company will never deploy real broadband (100Mbs and beyond). They'll tell lies and feign competition in the name of preserving their monopolies.
The only way forward is for municipalities to build their own connectivity networks with carrier neutral colos. Use the power companies and their ROWs and connect each member in your community to the rest of the world at no less than 100Mbs and beyond.
It's past time we all stop paying ridiculous access fees to monopolists.
Humans are not trained elephants and can break free from a copper loop that holds back a giant.
I think this is pretty easy:
Is people willing to pay a lot for broadband?
No, because they think they will always be happy with those dial-up connections
Sell cheap broadband connections, give away 6-months trials, with free dte included. Make people feel it's easy and cheap to have it.
Now ask those impulsive-buyers:
Are you going to pay a lot to keep your broadband, or you want your cheap'o modem back?
I know the answer and, too bad, marketing people knows even better.
I think prices will rise, reaching the right level. After that, probably prices will start to lower
Just sit down, wait and pay the bills
:dikappa
They are standardizing on 256k upstream for residential customers. For myself and other former MediaOne customers this means a decrease in our upstream (albeit not by much since we're just going from 300k to 256) with no change in price.
-joe
I live is London and pay £29/month for a 512/128 ADSL connection and would class my self as "High use" but still only manage to max my connection out maybe a few hours per week (DL'ing ISO, etc)I think, and I hope I am not alone, that if a company makes you sign a contract to say you pay
$xx.xx per month for a 512Kbps or 768 Kbps etc connection then it is acceptable fair use to indeed use the stated bandwidth per sec or per month. In this day and age these very same
companies are selling their connections by hyping high content media such as streaming audio and video. Post sale, how can they expect you not to use it...
There's been a bit of a race to see who can afford to lose the most money in order to drive the competition out of the game. Essentially, companies with deep pockets are trying to make it unprofitable for other companies to enter or stay in the market.
Last man standing owns something worth far more than the money he lost in the five or ten years spent purchasing his monopoly.
Says the RIAA: When you EQ, you're stealing bass!
-Sam
Looks good here in Seattle. I ssh'd into my Mac at home and scp'd a file up to another host. 28K/sec. I bet it would have been faster had I turned off the scp progress meter.
Not bad, in any case. Better than it used to be.
"What can we as consumers do to prevent prices from going sky high?"
-Wireless co-ops running all-free linux on a leased T1
"The first article mentions the need for higher pricing for users who tend to use more than their fair share of the bandwidth."
"Think you are going to be a high bandwidth user? Pay a fair price to your upstream."
-You seem to use this 'fair' word a lot..."I don't think it means what you think it means."
I wasn't sold my high speed access on download ratios...I was sold it with reference to SPEED.
"A bazillion times faster than modem!!" they screamed.
With no reference whatsoever to download limits.
My question is...if my speed's roughly the same,but now i'm capped...OR I have to pay more...what's the point...
I mean,when's the next shoe going to drop?
AT&TBELLROGERS REP:"Sorry sir,you've gone over your limit of..uhh..Linux sites...we'll have to charge you more."
Me:"WTF?!?!"
AT&TBELLROGERS REP:"Well,yes..uhm,you see..certain content has been found to use more resources than average. I'm sure you've heard of the 'slashdot effect'. It's a very big problem...I'm sure you don't want to take any more than your 'fair share'"
Me,Five minutes later on the roof in the rain hooking up a yagi antenna to my wireless router:" Motherf[beep]ing!! Sonofabi[beeep] Piece of [beeepbeeeepbeeeppitybeeeeeeeeeeep]"
So yes we are paying for their idocy, and we shouldnt. Failed bussiness plans should just fail, they shouldnt pass their failures on to their consumers.
... just like many of the 3rd party telco services they would be driven out of business by the owners of the last mile, and your service, to your home, would become more shoddy, and more expensive, as a result. Just like what has been happening with the telcos.
Well, actually they should, as that is what is required for them to stay in business and it is their fudiciary responsiblity to do whatever is legal and ethical to stay in business.
However, the customers should then stop being customers when the prices rise unacceptably, and either the providor will become leaner and lower prices to a more acceptable level (again, to stay in business), or they will go under.
Unfortunately, this all presupposes a free market, which as everyone knows doesn't exist in the telco/broadband market, where monopolies own the last mile of copper and can leverage that to destroy their competitors (as the baby bells have done to many third party DSL providors already).
Imagine if the last mile of highway to your house were privately owned by a monopoly. Do you really think competitors cars, shipping companies, and delivery services would be able to get to your driveway under the same terms as the subsidiaries/strategic partners of the local road monopoly? Hardly
The only reasonable solution to this quandary is for the wire to be treated as we treat our roads and highways: a public works project to which providors and users all have the same access, under the same terms, in a competative environment. The alternative is exactly what we have now: the very worst possible marketplace one can have: that controlled and manipulated by our local monopolies.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Fair?
how do you consider Fair?
I have a contract that says I pay $25 (plus franchise fees and taxes of course)for 128kup
and 1m down speed GUARANTEED. Now the service
is decent, but I wasnt getting what I am paying
for. I reguarly check the actual speed I am
getting up and down, and it has been slow. I did call and they fixed it. I do download whenever I want, whatever I want, as my CONTRACT states.
These things called CONTRACTS are legally binding in Texas. I know not about elsewhere...
And when you pay ahead for the annual plan you lock yourself out of the one tool a consumer has, leaving and taking your money elsewhere.
So when SERVICE gets really bad your going to be paying through the nose for something that may not be working at all.
Disclaimer: I work for a large cable company. However, I spent my last 5 years running startup ISP technical operations, and I was a cable modem customer long before I started with my current company.
Having spent close to the last year working for a large cable company, I have to say that the reality of providing data over the cable system is a little different than the comments that I've seen here today seem to indicate.
First of all, the scarce resource for a cable company is not internet bandwidth. In the local network, my employer currently has 3 OC-3's to the Internet, and is converting those to OC-48's as I type this. Outside bandwidth is certainly cheap these days, and until the glut of dark fiber in the ground works itself out, this probably won't stop anytime soon.
However, the scarce resource for the cable company is the RF spectrum on the coaxial cable plant itself. Essentially, each service/channel resides in its own RF band on the cable plant. For my provider, we have a 6mhz downstream frequency and a 1.6mhz (currently being migrated to 3.2mhz) upstream frequency dedicated for every 4 nodes on our network that share these RF spectrums. Needless to say, this is *THE* bottle neck to providing higher bandwidth to our customers.
Remember also: all of our services are shared within the 850mhz range that is carried by our system.
Currently we have the following services on our system:
Analog cable: 75 channels, each one takes 1 6mhz carrier
Digital cable: 100+ channels, 6 channels per carrier
Cable modems: 1 6 mhz channel
Telephony: 1 6mhz channel
Video on Demand: 32 channels (sorry, I don't know how many carriers it takes, but I suspect a decent amount.
Reverse carriers: 50 mhz total spectrum, all communications to our systems (upstream cable modem, pay-per-view orders, VOD orders, telephony) within these carriers.
So, do the math: what causes our bandwidth headaches? Analog video. These 75 channels account for well over half the total RF spectrum we have.
Can we get rid of it? Not until every one of our users gives up their analog cable boxes and stops complaining that the digital boxes cost 3x as much (3.95 for analog, 8.95 for digital). Also not until our franchise agreements are changed in many cases to allow digital only transmission to customers.
Would we absolutely kill and die to get rid of analog and be able to do more for our customers?
You bet. In a heartbeat. Personally, I'd love to have DS-3 speeds (which is what DOCSIS will currently support) at my house cheap, plus 4 extra phone lines at a price cheaper than the local ILEC can provide. But until we are able to migrate our customers to the latest and greatest, there is nothing we can do.
Incidentally, some of the service problems caused by wide open cable systems (@Home, for one) are based on the fact that the RF spectrum is shared. If you open everyone up, one person can conceivably trash the entire node. Also, I was peripherally involved with an @Home conversion. One of the things we discovered on the routers that @Home maintained for us was the fact that they allowed the end cable modem connect at their maximum speeds, but they rate limited the network between the routers and the Internet drain during prime time to keep each router from overwhelming the DS-3's that they maintained for Internet access. Kinda dirty, letting users *THINK* they had infinite bandwidth, but barely letting more bandwidth through on the backend that a few cable modems.
I would suggest (very politely) that you find out the details of how the cable system works before whacking the cable provider over these issues.
Having been Director of Operations for 3 different dot.bomb ISP's, I thoroughly understand the differences between the two. The way I tell people the difference between a traditional ISP and a cable provider is this: When I was with the ISP's, it was like playing in an orchestra that only played music in C Major. When I moved over to the cable provider, I moved to an orchestra that only played in D Minor. It's still music, but the differences are both amazing and subtle.
20 users on a T1 will be slow. Try this though.
Cogent. 100Mbits for $1000. Much better deal. Now your 20 users will be _VERY_ happy. Only problem is that you will feel silly with 802.11 tied to a 100mbit line.
D'oh. Time to go for someone other than SBC for DSL access. I too am moving to an area that AT&T broadband doesn't serve (this was my first consideration since it was so cheap). So I'm toying with the idea of DSL.
SBC offers 1 dynamic IP address via PPPoE, their standard e-mail and web server quotas for about $50/mo.
Brand X (a highly rated local ISP) DSL service offers 4 static IP addresses, 80mb of whatever space (e-mail, web, ftp, etc), 1gb/mo of web traffic, and shell access for $58/mo. Hmm.
Go check out dslreports.com, there are better options.
P.S. I used PacBell (now SBC I suppose) dialup access previous ($22/mo) to this local ISP ($18/mo - same 80mb of space, shell, etc). PacBell had enough trouble keeping the dialup stuff working (random nameservers going down, authentication problems constantly, occasional upstream problems), I shudder to think how their DSL service is.
- alex
The revolution will be mocked
I don't think he should feel too silly about it. No one person can grab the pipe to himself and make everyone suffer. This way 10 or 12 people would have to be going full-bore before it even starts to become an issue. We have to do a lot of traffic shaping here at work because the dorms have more bandwidth available than the connection.
Besides, knowing the next hop is 100Mbit won't make you feel too silly unless you get REALLY giddy about it.
I can see you've never run a business. Why would I want to run 30%+ higher costs in the vulnerable startup phase when the current offering is superior to the competition?
Something like this would be very nice in an expansion phase (and thanks for the tip) but for a startup? Not in the first year as a wrong guess kills you quicker. Much better to oversubscribe and run cogent as a second provider.
All I can say is that it sucks to be you.
I can't help you out on 1 and 2, 3 just means you have to sign up more customers before it's practical at a lower price point and the SLA is worth a good deal depending on how bad the DSL/cable modem service is. 4 well, if you're in granola-technophobe land you're SOL. 5 just means you're lazy and you haven't figured out that for those cheap bastards, you shoehorn an ethernet card into their PII which will have drivers and you get them an access point. 6 is just laziness again plus poor imagination and planning.
If you're considering changing countries to get broadband, try downtown pittsburgh instead. The city's wiring itself for wireless access for free now and a lot less than $50 later.
Do they block Slashdot on their network there?
Calm down, it's *only* ones and zeroes.