Slashdot Mirror
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?
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.
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.