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?

Comments

Charter Communications in Medford, OR

[steveargonman]

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.

Re:Charter Communications in Medford, OR

[Bonker]

Cox Communications in Amarillo TX, which is owned by Cox, but is its own provider, uses a similar tier. I've always thought it was *very* fair in comparison to other cable plans and DSL rates, with the exception that you have to buy regular cable service before you can use a cablemodem connection. (Can you say 'Tying'?)

Currently, you get 1024 kilobit/s down and 128 kilobit/s up at the lowest rate, around $35/month. 15 kilobyte per second can be used for a P2P connection or personal website, but it sucks.

It's more than enough, however, to download from Usenet or large files off the web in reasonable amounts of time.

More and more bandwidth costs more and more per month until you're paying about $300/month for about T1 speeds. I would suggest that most cable operators could probably get this scheme to work. People who are interested in using a lot of bandwidth end up paying for the tier they fit in, while those who are only interested in email and web pay just slightly more than they would for a dial-up account.

Re:Charter Communications in Medford, OR

[Afrosheen]

(Can you say 'Tying'?)

And DSL is different how? If you don't have an active telephone line through your local telco you can't get DSL either. It just comes with the territory.

Re:Charter Communications in Medford, OR

[unitron]

"If you don't have an active telephone line through your local telco you can't get DSL either."

Is there a technical reason why you can't get DSL over a "dry loop"?

Of course it's fair ...

[konichiwa]

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.

Re:Of course it's fair ...

[dbrutus]

Indirect competition is what's going to kill the price hikes and quite soon. Big business has a lot of clout over T-1 pricing and past a certain point, it's just cheaper to get your own business quality line with SLA.

Lets see, a burstable T-1 costs $700 a month at my location (worldcom, lowest tier, a clean T-1 that isn't metered at all costs $900) with which I can share this with 20 of my closest neighbors @ $50/month for an income of $1000/month which pays for my time, the aironet hubs and the rest of the equipment to keep the 802.11b cloud humming and relatively secure. Compare that to the $50/month DSL charges and the T-1 price is the same, you get much higher local connection speeds for the LAN and best of all, you actually get a service level agreement so if your line drops for 8 or 12 hours, they have to pay you. Nobody offers SLAs for cablemodem or DSL internet access.

Any suburban subdivision with at least one technogeek in residence is better off getting T-1 than DSL or cablemodem.

Re:Of course it's fair ...

[Nakarti]

I think I've said this before, but with Slow Dialup in southwestern Wisconsin(only thing available at my home, but not half a mile away, except for satellite) and my typical(constant) average of 2KB/sec, I go to 4 gigabytes down/month. If I were to push it to constant downloading, that could go as high as 12. Now if they hold the meter to their own newsgroups equally, that means if 1GB=$2, I would pay $48 a month, for dialup! in addition to whatever 'connect' fee they put for just having me connected. I've seen metered DSL providers(in an area similar only due to Ameritech) push as high as $61/GB(.06/MB) over a 2GB limit, with $60 access. On that I, as a dialup user, would have to pay as little as $121 and as much as $670!! A month! For dialup! If dialup were metered for bandwidth, which(bandwidth) is apparently cheap in comparison. Though I'm sure their rates would have dropped, if they did it soon enough to not go out of business.
If I pay $60/month for access, as it is, I expect to get my $60 worth: a cap of 38GB/month. Given that I pay $1 to be able to get 0.633GB Anything more($) is price-fixing based on a small demand for big bandwidth; a rate higher than dialup.

Re:Of course it's fair ...

[dbrutus]

First of all, you lose about a third of your bandwidth due to dialup overhead using 1 channel of a T-1 is faster than dialup because the error correction is out of band. Second of all a T-1 has 24 channels so even if they had similar overhead (remember they down't) the T-1 would still offer more bandwidth. Third, the number of times that everybody is going to be going out on the net flat out simultaneously is rather low. Most ISPs oversubscribe by a factor of at least 4-1, many go as high as 8-1 I'm thinking of going no higher than 2-1 since I'm not looking to make this my full time job and just want to provide very good service with low overhead, making my real money on consulting.

Re:Of course it's fair ...

[unitron]

"Any suburban subdivision with at least one technogeek in residence is better off getting T-1 than DSL or cablemodem."

Assuming that the controlling local municipality will let you dig up the right of way to bury cables out to everyones' house, which assumes that the local phone and cable TV company aren't in good with the local politicians.

Re:Of course it's fair ...

[dbrutus]

It's a Wireless ISP (WISP). Running a T-1 to the house is MCI/Worldcom's problem (and they no doubt have *excellent* relations with the PUC in every state). Beyond that it's a bunch of antennas on the roof that don't impact much more than a TV setup.

Even if an unlicensed spectrum antenna were zonable outside the house, it just drives the cost up by making you go directional inside the attic. The type of nit picking municipalities that would bother with this crap also have a lot of rich professionals who could bear the extra cost.

Not pricing themselves out of the market

[Jobe_br]

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?!?

Re:Not pricing themselves out of the market

[withak53]

Not true.
Broadband isn't a need for most people (at least in the home consumer market), it's a luxury. Every person has a limit to what they want to pay for broadband for a month and when it's hit they'll go back to dialup.

Re:Not pricing themselves out of the market

[jimngo]

You can't compare broadband data to landline voice or wireless voice. The landline voice system has been around since 1877 and has paid for itself many times over. The wireless network isn't as costly because a single tower can hook up hundreds of subscribers whose bandwidth requirements are pretty limited. For high bandwidth data, new, costly equipment must be installed all the way through the network, right into your home. And for that, you currently aren't paying much more than service in the other two networks. Think about it.

Re:Not pricing themselves out of the market

[Java Pimp]

Sorta true... For the most part I agree. It would probably take a hell of a lot for my (and your) demand for broadband to diminish. I hate to say it but, if they decided to charge me more, I'd probably pay. Wouldn't be too happy about it but it would take a helluva lot to get me to go back to dial-up.

However, if it's more than what I could get for DSL, I'll switch. There is some broadband competition even though there may not be competing cable companies servicing the same area.

On the other hand, my parents won't get broadband simply because they won't use what they pay for. Some people won't need much motivation to switch back to dial-up. Right now broadband is just becoming available to most people so demand is high. Prices will jump because of it. Once the novelty wears off and people realize how much they actually use for what they are paying, some will jump ship.

Give the market some time, it will eventually level itself out. The greedy companies will fold. Grandma will go back to dialup. And the prices will become somewhat reasonable. :-)

You are correct about lack of competition because of the monopolies. If there was decent competition in the market, the prices would level out to an even more reasonable amount.

Re:Not pricing themselves out of the market

[RickHunter]

As a note, we have VERY affordable broadband in most of Canada for not much more than the cost of a cable hookup. So the equipment cost argument is mostly bunk.

Also note that the landline voice system was around since 1877 and is as widespread as it is due to government regulation. I seem to recall that AT&T was granted its monopoly by the government in exchange for limitations on pricing and behavior and such. Though I could, of course, be wrong.

Re:Not pricing themselves out of the market

[T-Ranger]

AT there was never government protection for Bell.. Im also a Canuck, but I do know a bit of the telco history.. Bell acheived a monopoly through mergers in the early early years, and buyouts later on. A communications network is a natural monopoly and once Bell acheaved it it wasent that hard to maintain.

Now, government regulators were at that point faced with a problem: competition is good, but yet natural monopolies are better. All over north america (significantly, crossing national borders and policies) more or less of the same thing happened: Government set up watch dogs to keep prirces low, and consistant from rural to urban areas. In a lot of areas the telcos diddnt want, because they couldnt afford to at there regulated consistant-accross-the-board prices run copper out to rural areas. So governments more or less paid the initial cost of the network install out to stickville provided the telcos would operate it and the bill to the customer in stickville would be the same as in metropolis. Government is happy because now all there peons have telephones and the telcos are happy because now they have more customers for free. Im sure that some of these deals involved long term leases to the telcos for the network, and this might look at government setting up a monopoly, but had they not the network would never have been built in the first place. Not quite so simple and neferiaous as you make it out to be.

The traditional telco are now facing major problems because of this. Consiter Maratime Telephone and Telegraph (now MTT, even more accuratly a part of Aliant..) here in Halifax, Nova Scotia for example. Halifax has the cheepest last mile high speed internet anywhere in the world, save for Canbera Au. We have a dense urban enviroment, both MTT (the traditional telco) and the cable companies offer high speed internet, and the cable companies (Eastlink) also offer telco services as well.

Since the cable companies only offer telco (and HS internet (and for that matter, cable)) in the urban areas there average per-drop pots costs are significantly lower then the average per-drop pots connection of MTT for their provence wide network. Eastlink telco is less then MTT. 'Bundles' of cable, telco and internet are only slightly more then just telco and internet from MTT.

The urban lines pay for the rural lines for MTT. For eastlink the urban lines have a lower sticker cost, and they dont offer rural service at all.

Competition has been forced on MTT. They are obligated to interconnect there telco network with that of competetors. However, regulation has not dissipeared. They are also obligated to maintain service - and cost - to everyone, everywhere in Nova Scotia. They are lobbying hard to introduce a split urban/rural rate for telco service. Eneviatably it will happen.

I guess Im ranting on here, but the moral of the story is that we were all better off with a well regulated monopoly.

Re:Not pricing themselves out of the market

[zenyu]

AT there was never government protection for Bell.. Im also a Canuck, but I do know a bit of the telco history.. Bell acheived a monopoly through mergers in the early early years, and buyouts later on. A communications network is a natural monopoly and once Bell acheaved it it wasent that hard to maintain.

Not quite true. AT&T had almost all of the telephones in large cities and in the North East corridor. But there were still many competitors but they weren't connected to AT&T because they knew they couldn't compete if you could call people on their network from AT&T phones, since they were local and with AT&T you could call your aunt in NY, but not your mom down the street. But this was an annoyance for congressmen who needed to get a phone on each network to be able to reach everyone. So they passed a law that required everyone to connect to AT&T or sell your network to them, everyone but GTE sold out and a few tiny networks in marginal markets. GTE was also formed through mergers, but concentrated on rural areas that AT&T didn't want because the have much lower margins. They had about 70% of the market after gorvernment intervention, and 70% in 1984.

Once they had the government protecting them they got things like 'universal service' where any of their potential competitors in profitable areas like cities would be required by law to subsidise them, ostensibly to provide low cost service in non-profitable areas. The bells inherited this protection and still gets first bids on the universal service slush fund (of which they use about a 1/4 to actually subsidise low profit lines).

I guess Im ranting on here, but the moral of the story is that we were all better off with a well regulated monopoly.
Maybe where you are, my phone bill has only fallen over the last 10 years.

Canada is fine

[EricBoyd]

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

Re:Canada is fine

[Vrallis]

I got the chance last year to visit Calgary and Banff. Besides the amazing scenery, I was impressed by the local telecommunications initiatives. At the time I was there, the big talk was the provincial government sponsoring rolling out DSL to the entire province. I'm from Texas, so I have some idea as to the benefits of this, as that province is about as spartan as Texas. A lot of small towns with great expanses of empty land in between---a real problem for people wanting broadband.

Nice move, guys!

Get it through the power lines

[Scaba]

For New Yorkers, anyway, maybe a little competition from Con Ed will bring prices down.

And they said it couldn't be done!

Said it before...

[Nidhogg]

1. I would think that in situations like this, that a tiered pricing approach might be better than applying a flat rate.

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.

Re:Said it before...

[Arandir]

You're right. Let's charge all long distance telephone users a flat rate.

Re:Said it before...

[bmajik]

Actually there is merit in his claim.

It's often said that it costs the phone company more to bill people for add-on features and what not than the money they make back from them.

I feel somewhat qualified to speak on this matter. You see, i redesigned and rewrote the billing system of a national ISP that used two carrier networks for dialup traffic and which was the first ISP to offer rebranding to buisinesses (you dont think Target has a datacenter handling Target Internet Services that you can get on a CD at the checkout stand, do you ?)

Now, i wasn't getting paid much, but even so, i basically spent 1 summer fulltime on billing system redesign and feature additions. We processed CDR information from two major carriers. One used SNMP traps on all their Ascend terminal servers to see who was connected. They had a state table that generated call initiate and call terminate events. They sent us this data nightly. The call time was recorded with 6 second accuracy.

Sometimes their state table would get corrupted. Sometimes we'd see conflicting events in the CDR

The other carrier had an entirely different CDR format, that was generated in an entirely different way. (carrier A used RADIUS proxies to auth to our servers, carrier B used TACACS and gave us a portal to their TACACS database)

Now, a given "customer" could have multiple "accounts", and each account could login to either carriers termservers. Additionally, each type of account had different rate plans, limits, promotions, and what not.

We also had the foolish concept of "prime time" and "non prime time". The prime-time hours were different to us based on our carrier. The hours we exposed to customers had to be the same regardless of which number they called. They also had to be correct for that users time zone. We didn't know that users time zone.

What the customer wanted was a Bill that was a charge for usage of the previous billperiod, and a pre-billing for service for the upcoming usage period.

Given that i've just described two of the sources of input for dialup / isdn accounts, i hope you begin to see the fucking ridiculous complexity of writing a billing system that has rate schedules, addons, and so forth.

The system was originally written by a contract programmer for a hefty sum of money. Later on i re-wrote it and expanded it to meet the demands of the aggressive sales/branding/marketing/bozo-in-a-suit staff.

The system required a few spendy machines to run in an acceptable amount of time (even after my rewrites caused a 1500% speedup). It required spendy database licenses.

So if i went back there now and played with the data some, i could probably do a calculation that told us how much additional revenue was coming in for rate schedule and add-on option accounts, versus flat accounts, per month. It is left to the reader to figure out how many man hours at hourly rate x are consumed to maintain and improve the system to support additional rate plans (even if you amortize all the work done to begin with to make any of it possible)

Keep in mind that when you're dealing with money, and bills.. and you're a business.. you have to be able to fully reconcile your books. Rounding errors ? No thanks. Getting customer bills wrong is the sort of thing that gets people in a lot of trouble. A lot.

Demand

[Have Blue]

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.

Re:Demand

[sconeu]

Stop downloading the MP3z, primarily (ISOz are bad, too, but that practice doesn't seem to have caught on *quite* as much .. yet).

So, when I downloaded my ISOs of Mandrake 8.2, I'm doing something illegal?

Re:Demand

[budgenator]

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.

Actualy according to our teleco guy, he said ISP's usualy plan for one b channel (honest 56K)for every 30 normal users or 10 bussiness users. Surfing the web when this stuff started had a low duty cycle, typicaly you would read for 3 or 4 times the time you downloaded. Local cacheing and proxy servers helped immensly.

Now there is so much more bandwidth being used, everything from animated gif's to flash on otherwise plain site hurt as much as MP3's and ISO's because everybody get them. Actualy there is a lot of software now that just assumes an internet connection to be there available for it. Now there are alot of machine that'll never really let an internet connection just set idle.

I still think these guys have a lot of un-lit fiber and unused lambda's on lit fiber's to go around, they just need more paying users or capital to justify the equipment to light it up. kind of a chicken or the egg thing.

Re:Demand

[srvivn21]

Option 2 is not the only option that will keep a company afloat. I happen to work for a company that is offering broadband under an "option 1" scheme, and let me tell you, demand is high, and margin is very healthy.

There are complainers that bemone the fact that they have a b/w limit, but they are more than welcome to order a leased line.

Re:Demand

[Obiwan Kenobi]

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.

Or how about option 4: Cap speeds and charge more for those who want more. It keeps the company afloat and lets those who want more pay for it.

Re:Demand

[stripes]

Linux is the first and last thing I've seen come as an iso

FreeBSD, NetBSD, basically any OS that wants to be a bootable CD is going to come as an ISO...

Sprint BBD hiked rates

[blair1q]

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

Two sides to my opinion...

[pogle]

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...

A suprise? hardly.

[Telastyn]

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...

Re:They have never gotten into my market

[Jobe_br]

Without a doubt you're correct. For the average Joe, works at the office 9-5, leaves work at work and has a life, dial-up should be fine for most purposes and a little patience will got a long way with the larger downloads :).

I started needing broadband w/ Linux ... its constantly being updated and I was constantly downloading new software or system updates or new ISOs, trying out different distros, whatever.

Then, I started working from home and needing to have a speedy connection to my Rackspace servers. Now, I VPN to various locations and broadband is essential to my livelihood. Essential enough that when searching for a house to move into, "location, location, location" became "location, location, broadband" ...

Things probably won't improve soon

[eyegor]

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.

Well, the answer is quite obvious

[Anomolous Cow Herd]

Consumers can't really do squat about price gouging. Sorry to disappoint you.

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."

Re:Well, the answer is quite obvious

[Anomolous Cow Herd]

Instead of begging people to invest money in somone's education or begging programmers to fix bugs in open source programs, why don't you invest money yourself? If you think you can run the business better than the old pros at the cables and phone companies, go to your local bank and consider your loan options.

Perhaps you will soon find out that these "monopolies" are operating on some really thin margins.

Re:Well, the answer is quite obvious

[jafac]

How in hell are they operating on really thin margins?? This is only a US problem. Broadband in Japan and Canada is much cheaper - how can they do it? Smarter accountants?

Re:Well, the answer is quite obvious

[Anomolous Cow Herd]

Because people perhaps have less money to spend and are thus willing to pay a lower maximum fee for broadband? Did you consider exchange rates? There is a nearly infinite number of variables when you are comparing the prices of services as complex as broadband internet access across national boundaries. It's a subject that is best suited for doctoral dissertations and I would be way out of my depth there.

Re:Well, the answer is quite obvious

[Lumpy]

wait a damned minute...

first off... $50.00 a month for broadband is insanely cheap... your 56K access isnt much, if any cheaper. because you have to include the cost of the phone line in the 56K dial-up access. you dont have to for broadband..

$35.00-$40.00 for a regular phone line (WITHOUT LONG DISTANCE CHARGES) $9.95-19.95 for internet access.

it's the same price, or pretty damned close to it. Sorry, but they should be charging $100.00 a month for broadband, it's worth it. if you dont agree go and buy your own bandwidth at $1000.00 a month for a T1...

the ONLY people bitching about broadband prices are the clueless masses.

basically, you dont like the price? DONT BUY IT. Me? even if they raise ther price to $100.00 a month I'll buy it.. as I know how much I am saving every month by having it.

Re:Well, the answer is quite obvious

[TheSync]

Broadband in Japan and Canada is much cheaper - how can they do it?

Unbundling has not played a major part in Canadian broadband. BCE (Bell Canada and others) are a near monopoly on the telco side, but got into DSL early because of competition from cable companies. Cable modems came out in Canada in 1996. During 2000, service problems with cable modems then lead to a growth in DSL access in Canada. There are about 2.6 million broadband users in Canada at end-of-year 2001.

Meanwhile, ISPs have accused Bell Canada of anti-competitive DSL pricing. I can believe this, because Verizon played a similar game versus the CLECs (and I got cheap DSL...)

But recently "Industry Minister Allan Rock Bell Canada shot an arrow at the heart of the Internet, levying a $3-5 toll on a streaming movie and a $2.50 surcharge on a regular radio listener. They raised their basic rates 13 percent, and tacked on a surcharge of $7.90 (Canadian) a gig after 5 gigabyte."

In addition, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) charges 4.5% of Canadian telco revenues for a fund to subsidize service in high-cost areas (i.e. rural ones).

Check out the Canadian Broadband Task Force that wants to spend over CA$4 billion on broadband.

Other countries have it easier because of population concentration. Korea has 15% of its population (7.5 million people) connected to broadband. This is because 70% of Koreans live in 7 largest cities, and 40% of urban apartments are served by DSL. I know average local loop lengths are smaller in Europe due to its smaller area and higher urbanization, and I believe Japan has the same situation as well.

The Korean government has also financed a 22,000 km intercity backbone, is distributing satellite receivers in rural areas, and provides low-interest loans to providers.

AT&T is raising upstream bandwidth!!

[SlashChick]

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.

Re:Repeat after me

[NanoGator]

"Don't like it? Too expensive? Don't buy it. "

Would that be your attitude if your phone company did that? I doubt it since life in America virtually requires you to have a phone. (Which is why phone rates are so heavily controlled...)

The problem is that the internet is becoming a requirement in a lot of households. A lot of us have jobs that require us to have an active connection to the net. If the ISP's get too greedy, what do we do?

My situation, in particular, is a little more unique. I don't have a phone line, just a cell phone. If I got a phone line, it'd be almost strictly for getting on the net with. It'd cost between $20 and $30 a month for me to get the phone line, and another $10-$20 for internet service. I pay $55 for cable modem right now. If my cable modem gets too expensive, it won't suddenly get much cheaper for me to get 1/25th of service.

I could find myself in a spot of trouble if AT&T gets too greedy. Capitalism may work, but not without seriously screwing me in the process.

It's clear prices can go down.

[Dixie_Flatline]

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.

Re:It's clear prices can go down.

[mcdade]

If it wasn't so damn cold in Edmonton I would move there for the bandwidth! Down here in Windsor I'm pretty much stuck with either Bell Sympatico or Cogeco cable.

Bell charges 39.99/month, which has just been increased to $44.99/month with 5gig up and a 5gig down limit after that you pay per gig. I get 1mb downstream services and only 128kb upstream.

Cogeco charges about $49.99 ($10 less if you are a cable tv subscriber)I believe you get about 10mb shared connection and 256 upstream. They haven't said anything about limits but i'm going to guess they will follow suit. There are some smaller providers too but they don't really have the bandwidth to give that great of service.

Rob Peter, Pay Pal

[Ashurbanipal]

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...

Here's the deal.

[crhylove]

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

But I want my DSL.

[Renraku]

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.

Wireless Co-ops

[chipperdog]

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...

no cable for me

[myc]

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.

Lack of competition

[jspayne]

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

Local monopolies

[bigmouth_strikes]

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.

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.

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.

Re:Local monopolies

[srvivn21]

Let me get this straight. You are buying internet access? Where the hell do you keep it? In the garage next to your car?

Try again.

If you and I both consign a company to supply me a service (say electricity), and I use 3x as much electricity as you, should I pay more?

The car in your example is equivalent to your computer. If you use that three times as much, you don't pay anymore.

Re:Local monopolies

[sysadmn]

Have Americans been completely brain-washed into believing they should pay more to use the most of a service? If you buy a car, and I buy a car, yet you drive it 3x as much, should you pay more (aside from gas prices)?

To be pedantic, in the US a substantial part of highway construction and maintenance costs comes from taxes on gasoline. So those who use more, pay more. I believe, but wouldn't swear, that trucks also pay additional taxes, on the theory that being heavier, they use the highways harder. They don't necessarily pay the right proportion, but they do pay more per mile of use.

in the land of dsl...

[global_diffusion]

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.

Re:in the land of dsl...

[elflord]

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).

You haven't bought that amount of sustained bandwidth. I don't know about you, but I'd prefer to have the burst transfer rate that is comparable to a T1, while paying a cost that reflects my average transfer rate, which is what it is. Just look at the numbers, and tell me -- is broadband closer in price to a dialup, or to a commercial grade T1 connection ?

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.

Would you prefer they capped your speed at 14.4k ? Because that's what they'd need to do to sell you service at dialup prices.

Re:in the land of dsl...

[enigma48]

Just for the record, there are major problems with this overly simplistic model:

1) Everyone is charged regardless of usage. We might not agree with Delta overbooking planes, but it either reduces ticket prices or delta makes more money. (being a public company they publish their better profits and new cheaper local competition comes in since profit opportunities are better)

2) Costs increase *dramatically* for the company for each customer. 640k is near half a T1, so for every second customer that comes in, each new customer pays for all costs associated with that "almost half T1".

You've purchased the service, but I've never seen a document saying you've purchased 10^9 k/month at 640k/s. If they don't document where you get cut off then you're right, you're perfectly able to "rip the company off" and we've been doing that for years.

Now after some of the companies of mostly fluff are gone, the survivors are trying to get out of the red ink and into the black. The myth that content will save the day and you need to sign up millions of customers to be profitable is gone and companies are looking to be stable.

Look at it this way:

*If they overcharge, they lose a major part of the market - someone else will service these customers.
*If they make HUGE profits even with $10/month, other companies have an incentive to get some of this pie and charge $9. Then $8, 7....
*If they don't make enough profit and stay that way, they cut corners and eventually die. Some of the old customers move to larger companies, which likely benefit from economies of scale.

If they are "gouging" successfully, they will benefit in the short term only. Since price increases are small and companies are still going under, I highly doubt major profit is being made.

Letting everyone (ab)use their high speed by downloading every second only hurts us.

If you like 640k/s all the time, buy the fractional T1. If you don't value your 640k/s THAT much, look for a cheaper option. Like what you have now.

Re:Repeat after me

[quantaman]

You seem to have been missing the boat on the whole M$ antitrust thing. If you have a monopoly in a sectors do you know what you get? It's sure not Capitalism, the laws might be the same but it's a whole new ball game because there is no competition. When corporations get too powerful (a point where our present system is starting to approach) it's them, not the governments, pulling the strings. What if you need the broadband but the cable provider and the telco are in bed together and charging through the roof. Competition can't get in because of the monopoly so the prices and service stay at that horrid level and you still have to buy it. Unfortunatly market forces arn't quite powerful enough to keep the big boys in line anymore and they're starting to make their own rules. I don't trust governments but I'd trust a corporation with the same power a whole lot less, at least in the end the leaders of the government are directly accountable to you and not dependent on how well they are able to force you to buy their product.

Re:Fair Share?

[Renraku]

Why should they care? ISP's in the US for the most part anyway, frown on using home networks or NATs. They will promptly tell you to subscribe to their small business service (read: pay 2x the normal price) or remove your network. In one case, it makes sense. Tech support doesn't want to have to help people set up their networks, and truthfully, companies can't afford the time/effort to train techies in setting up networks. Only basic problems. The small portion that can tech support networks is sent to the commercial-class tech support. I do know, however, that since they limit the speed, the bandwidth used should be ignored. Since my DSL line is limited to 1.5MBps, I should be able to use it 100% of the time and only have to pay my base rate. If they don't like it, they can upgrade their backbones, or drop DSL. Why should we have to pay for their bad decisions?

Broadband is cheap--too cheap

[jimngo]

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.

Er, you were undercharged before...

[inetuid]

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...

What the hell is the point then?

[emkman]

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.

Re:What the hell is the point then?

[elflord]

Web and e-mail only? Get Dialup!

A lot of people who are primarily using web and email might want the convenience of a connection that's fast, and up 24/7. It certainly makes downloading much more convenient.

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?

The problem is that "lots of speed and bandwidth" means different things to different people. Basically, if the other users are subsidising you and the company are running on thin margins, then your prices should indeed be increased.

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.

"Should " this, "should" that. You can "should" all you like, but it's not going to alter the fact that you are not going to get a T1 for the price of a dialup. If you want or need that much bandwidth, pay for it. The problem here is that you want a T1 connection, but you don't want to pay for it.

Here's some news for you -- broadband as in cable modem or DSL is NOT the same as a T1 connection. It gives you a good burst transfer rate at a low price, but in terms of sustained throughput, it doesn't give you a whole lot. The nice thing about broadband is that it makes it possible for ISPs to offer very high transfer rates at a cost comparable to a dialup. The problem is that sustained throughput is expensive (because it is reflected in the ISPs costs), and you have to pay for that. You can bitch about it all you like, but it's not going to alter the fact that what you're asking for costs more money than you're willing to spend.

Re:What the hell is the point then?

[elflord]

I do not feel however that I am asking for more than I am paying for. 50$ / month should entitle me to 1.5 mbps.

On what grounds do you make this claim ? Why "should" you be "entitled" to a certain amount of bandwidth -- is bandwidth an inalienable right all of a sudden ? Any moral argument about being "entitled" to bandwidth is nonsensical. A more interesting question is whether or not it is feasiable to provide sustained downstream throughput comparable to a T1 for approximately the cost for a dialup. How do you suppose your ISP can provide you with this dedicated bandwidth ?

The difference between residential broadband (cable dsl) and commerical broadband (t1) is the upstream.

No, that is a difference. if that were the only difference, sDSL, with high upstream and downstream burst transfer, would cost as much as a T1. Clearly, it doesn't, and it is not the only difference. Think about it for a moment. Do you suppose that the ISPs costs drop by an enormous factor simply by virtue of the fact that the bandwidth is downstream only ?

If someone else doesn't need as much speed, let them pay less, dont make me pay more.

What you don't realise is that what you are proposing is not economically feasible. Broadband is not a terribly profitable business. Sure, you'd like everything cheap, and like most slashdotters, it seems that you believe you're enetitled to hog resources and not pay for what you use.

There is a hard cap at 1.5 mbps, if I hit it fine, im getting the most out of my service, and I expect to be able to hit the cap when I need to.

Your argument is absurd. The fact that you have a high burst transfer rate does not give the ISP any sort of moral obligation to provide you with an equally high sustained transfer rate. If you want dedicated bandwidth, you can always buy it, but it costs money, which is the root of the problem here-- you basically want the downstream part of a T1 for the cost of DSL.

Insignificant Broadband Market Segment?

[Vortran]

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

Pay Less?

[Webexcess]

Think you are going to be a high bandwidth user? Pay a fair price to your upstream. Web and e-mail only? Pay less.

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..

Long term the price is going down

[WolfWithoutAClause]

Right now the price is going up- lots of telecoms companies are trying to make more money- some of them are in a really bad way in fact. Actually they are rebounding from what was probably in the short term, an unsustainably low price.

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 ;-)

As a CLEC employee...

[trims]

..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

Two sides

[Indras]

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.

tiered pricing

[Kargan]

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...

Broadband comapnies should be more honest

[ikekrull]

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'

Re:Broadband comapnies should be more honest

[Artifex]

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?

Because they are marketing based on max throughput, not on constant rate. If they sold you constant rate 70kbps, and you ended up using only 35kkbps, you'd ask for 1/2 your money back. But within those days, you might have hours of virtual dead time and then spikes as you download the latest isos, or whatever.

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'

It's that kind of thinking (bonding data channels) that got ISDN started. =)

Heres what to expect

[martissimo]

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.

Re:Repeat after me

[Lemmy Caution]

Says who? Very few markets more significant than lemonstands and prostitutes have trivial barriers to entry. Bottlenecks (including access bottlenecks - remember, unless providers actually own a cable-wide swath of land to every house in the country, they are using public land), limited resources, well-capitalized existing players who can afford to starve you out - all these things are part of any real capitalism.

Economics isn't about the little toy-models that you grab from game theory, it's about unthinkably complex open systems - if they can even be called systems - with limited and often incorrect information.

Re:Pay per use is fair

[Wraithlyn]

OK, the telephone was a bad example. In fact, many places (such as parts of Europe, IIRC) DO charge per use for local telephone.

It's still a question of degrees though.. you can't ever use more than that 64Kb "trickle". The only variable is time. With a broadband internet connection, there's a world of difference between Mom and Pop checking email and casual web surfing, and Joe L337 Haxor running a 24/7 Gnutella node, and downloading gigs of porn, isos, mp3s, and divx, know what I mean?

Nucking Futs!

[Arandir]

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.

Re:the old cabling monopoly problem...

[sconeu]

The former monopoly provider, Deutsche Telekom, is forced to rent even end-user lines to competitors at discount (mainly self-cost) prices,

Because the courts just threw out that that part ot the Telecom Reform Act of 96.

Don't be a moron

[Anomolous Cow Herd]

The goal of any publicly-traded company is to maximize profits. Monopolies have just as much reason to be efficient as any other company. Also, monopolies are more efficient than competitive companies because they operate under a single, unified infrastructure (no more overhead incurred from leasing access).

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.

Re:Repeat after me

[srvivn21]

A lot of us have jobs that require us to have an active connection to the net.

So get your job to pay for it. Work pays for my desk, my computer, my lighting, my heat, my phone... All requirments that must be met for most people to work for a company. If your job requires you to have internet access, make them pay for it. Duh.

Re:Not just price gouging, other coercive business

[Bagheera]

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.

Re:Repeat after me

[dbrutus]

Indirect competition is one of the most little understood features of capitalism. Most critics of capitalism just ignore it and that is what makes their critiques so silly. In this case running a WISP (Wireless Internet Service Provider) is likely your solution after the next price hike.

If you have a few social skills and good relations with your neighbors, throw up an 802.11b cloud, get a T-1 line and charge $60 a month for access. Get your customers first and then you'll end up having the same or more practical bandwidth, control over your own future (there's a lot more competition for T-1 lines) and you'll actually make a small profit you can bank in case you suddenly lose a lot of customers.

Not a lot of overhead

[Trepidity]

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.

Re:Yes, master....

[dbrutus]

Actually the only babies getting sold in the US are aborted ones sold for parts, including stem cells. The right wing is much cooler with using your own stem cells which doesn't kill anybody and keeps you off the anti-rejection drugs making stem cell procedures a one-time cost instead of a lifetime expense.

Funny, those leftist pro-choicers want the stem cell variant that puts the maximum amount of money in the pockets of the drug companies. Who would have thought that?

Re:Unpredictable Use

[budgenator]

Holy Cow Batman!, if you could check on your bandwidth consumption on a regular basis, you would have a pretty fair idea if your billed bandwith was even in touch with reality

Re:Utility

[dbrutus]

If business lines are still available flat rate (T1/E1) then it is possible to beat them. Wireless ISPs are the wave of the future because you generally don't need regulatory permission and you just rent your lines like any other business until you can lay your own copper out of your profits.

We've seen the cable pricing model before!

[zerofoo]

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

Re:We've seen the cable pricing model before!

[detritus.]

I think it would be safe to say we won't see any changes under the current administration... It's sad when the government needs to be the regulation referee because greedy companies can't play nicely.

Re:We've seen the cable pricing model before!

[zerofoo]

I agree, competition is a wonderful thing...but that usually implies more than one vendor of a product or service. Most areas of this country can not get broadband, those that can are usually only serviced by one broadband provider.

No competiton there.

As far as channel selection goes....started with around 50 and still have around 50. I don't want any more...there is already too much garbage on TV...I want higher broadcast quality and 5.1 channel audio...maybe even some music channels that aren't programmed by Clear Channel Inc.

Need innovation and quality, not quantity.

That brings up another near monopoly...and not one that government created. Clear Channel Inc. programs most of the radio stations in this country....and most of them are terrible. The radio industry used to be competitive, but thanks to the wonderful capitalist movement called consolidation, we are ending up with 2 or 3 big media companies that control most TV and radio.

Again, not much competiton here, and a lack of innovation. Growth through aquisition instead of innovation is only temporary, unsustainable growth.

Finally, most drug development is done by the private drug companies, not the US government. I'll give you this much, there is competition in the drug business, but not much innovation. How many allergy medications have you seen in the past few years? Tons, all roughly equivalent...none really better than the other.

We need to strike a balance between innovation and competiton. When both are gone, the government needs to step in and give the industries a "kick-start".

-ted

Re:We've seen the cable pricing model before!

[TheSync]

Most areas of this country can not get broadband

Look for Dial-up acceleration using DTV signals.

BTW, what cable deregulation? Most localities (counties, cities) still only allow a single cable provider.

Plus, think local quality service. A friend of mine is going to shortly offer local broadband to his city.

Re:We've seen the cable pricing model before!

[zerofoo]

Most areas only have one cable provider, that's true. Usually it is a regulated monopoly. Typically the local cable company is allowed a monopoly for a contractually limited time. After that time the cable co. has to sweeten the deal with the local governments (better programming, upgraded services and features,...etc) to keep that area or the local gov't gets competing offers from other cable companies.

RCN in San Francisco Bay Area

[linuxlover]

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!

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 /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' :-)

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.

Broadband is expensive?

[Chas]

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.

Re:Repeat after me

[ChenLing]

If you have direct line of sight, a directed 802.11b link can go for miles. There have been several articles on slashdot about that. Another possibility is ordering a dry line (just a copper line) from your work to your home -- security companies like ADT generally use this, so it is available. Set up a pair of routers on each end, and you're in business. There was another slashdot article about that a year ago.

Re:Moderators: Mark parent +1 funny!

[OhYeah!]

Yes, but don't forget context. You're posting on Slashdot. I would be surprised if you're a majority here.

Re:Repeat after me

[NanoGator]

"If so many other ISPs are having trouble staying afloat, how can the first increase in prices be considered "greed"?"

That's a fair question. I don't mind if AT&T says "It'll cost you another $5 to maintain your service". It bugs me when they say "Despite our promises of unlimited bandwidth, we're charging you by the gig now." (Note: They haven't told me that, but there are rumors to that effect...)

It used to be that I'd save $10/mo. if I owned my own cable modem. According to what I've read recently (Note: Haven't personally verified this...) it'll cost $7 a month more to use a non-leased modem.

I damn near bought a cable modem because it'd pay for itself in a year. Now I'd be pissed to find that my 'investment' would end up costing me money. I haven't heard a good explanation as to why they'd charge more.

If this isn't a profitable business model for AT&T or anybody else, TELL ME THAT so I can make fair decisions about what I want to do! What's the point of jumping ship to DSL if they have the same problem?

Price Gouging?

[petrov]

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

Re:Repeat after me

[NanoGator]

I don't have line of sight to where I work, but I can look out my window and see a big reflective building that my office can see also.

Is there any possiblity of bouncing the radio signal off the building?

Re:Repeat after me

[NanoGator]

"Having a job at McDonald's doesn't require you to have a car there are other methods of transportation such as walking or riding your horse."

In other words, McDonald's makes a reasonable assumption that you have a way of getting to work. They don't care how you do it, that's part of what your salary is for.

Re:Repeat after me

[MrResistor]

It's sure not Capitalism

Actually, it is Capitalism. It is not a Free Market, which is, I think, what you meant to say. They are not the same thing, but are often confused, especially by Americans, due to our political leader's tendancy to mash Capitalism, Democracy, and the Free Market together into a single, nebulous ideology.

Why is it still Capitalism? because the goal of Capitalism is to amass Capital, and the best way to do that is by establishing a monopoly.

It's a small point, really. Other than that I completely agree with you.

Re:Repeat after me; fuck that.

[jafac]

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. . .

broadband isn't profitable...

[mqatrombone]

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

One issue that's been missed ...

[pyramid termite]

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.

Re:Metered service

[Nf1nk]

This is a profit driven service so if 85% of your customer base would pay significantly less its a bad system for the provider (lest we forget that it they who are providing the product).
Remeber if it is not profitable to do something a company won't do it for long, so if 15% of their customers are seriously impacting the bottom line, they want to do something that affects only the 15% that are unprofitable. The part of this that bothers me is that it smacks of the bait and switch. If you tell me something is unlimited, don't bitch when I use the crap out of it, So the companies either need to change their advertising or they need to suck it up. Of course they still want it both ways.

As for your cable tv example things just don't work that way, for the Cable company it cost nearly the same to send 120 chanesl as it does to send 50, while at the same time it costs less to send all 120 to you than to give you just the 8 that you want while at the same time giving your spanish speaking neighbor a measly 6 chanels that they can comfortably understand, and the religeous lady across the street some choice as to which thief to send her money to and always giving you the opportunity to watch something you would have never admited to wanting to a salesman (admit it you gotton hooked watching some guy install under floor heating). So what i am saying is that to give you only the TV chanels that you want it would end up costing you much more than you currently pay.

It makes sense

[HydroCarbon10]

Flat rate bandwidth pricing makes about as much sense as flat rate electricity pricing.

Are you nuts?

[Artifex]

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.

Unofficial Confirmation..

[NanoGator]

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?

Re:Unofficial Confirmation..

[NanoGator]

Awesome! It works!

Okay dudes, it's official: In Portland, OR, using AT&T Broadband, I am getting 1.5 meg down and 256 up. *Very happy*

I'll tell you what part.

[Lemmy Caution]

"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.

Travoltus' Broadband murder/mayhem recipebook

[Travoltus]

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.

No @Home fees . .prices should go DOWN

[RembrandtX]

With all the cable companies NOT paying the $15 to @home a month ..

why did my fees go UP this month ?

as a former employee at comcast @ home since inception .. I know ALL how the cable company works with its price rates.

They go up every year . no matter what.
Comcast's policy has always been annual increments. And NEVER to go down .. no matter what.

after people get mad the first time or two .. 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.

this month my cable modem was $60.02 .. thats more than if i ordered digital cable WITH premium channels !!

in my area .. i can get a dedicated t1 for like $250 a month .. flat rate on BW.

and on that .. i can run a server . .or .. god forbid . .resell the service.

anyone out there that is kidding themselves that its NOT greed .. 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.

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 have to put a $175 tap out of the building/neighborhood .. that can handle about 40-50 customers without puking.

they pay that off in 1 month of service when its 1/2 full .. all the coax is the same cable tv coax that has been there 20 years.

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.

Other relevant slashdot stories

[Edmund Blackadder]

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".

Re:Other relevant slashdot stories

[Edmund Blackadder]

Ok i see those stories were mentioned in the news post.

sorry

Verify your upload speed with WinApache

[yerricde]

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.

Statutory monopoly

[yerricde]

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.

Yes you do

[Edmund Blackadder]

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.

Datalink and pres/app level compression

[yerricde]

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.

Is it that hard to support Linux's net wizard?

[yerricde]

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.

Re:Repeat after me

[rodgerd]

You appear to have "capitalism" and "free markets" conflated.

Capitalism has nothing to do with free markets. It merely has to do with how people generate more capital by owning capital...

Re:Repeat after me: Capitalism=Freedom

[quantaman]

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.

Worse than that!

[Dr. Spork]

The truth is that even though several markets around the world (for example in Australia) have some ISPs that offer tiered pricing, this hasn't been implemented on a huge scale (as it would be if AT&T and Time Warner picked up the scheme).

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.

Re:AT&T is raising upstream bandwidth!! - for

[joe52]

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

Re:Repeat after me

[Rinikusu]

Force?

How about:
go outside. Get offline. Find a new line of work. Whatever. There's more to life than broadband/dial-up. Go make your own money and open up your own ISP and charge whatever the hell you want. If the local providers are "in bed" together and pricefix, then you can bet your sweet ass there will lots of other consumers waiting to get out from the price yoke and come swarming your way.

One of the few times govt SHOULD be involved

[FreeUser]

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.

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 ... 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.

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.

Re:Repeat after me

[TheSync]

I doubt it since life in America virtually requires you to have a phone.

Why is that? I don't really need a landline, I only have it for DSL. I mainly use my cellphone, which has far less regulated rates. While I'd take a big hit on quality of life without my cell, I could get much real communication done by email anyway.

Re:Repeat after me

[quantaman]

The question is interoperability. It's often not a choice to use MS, your customers demand it because their infastructure forces they to deal only with MS products. That is where MS is a bad monopoly, because they won't let you use a competitors product with ease (ie. netscape). We also don't necessarily want them to open up the source code, although if they did contrary to your belief that would be about the best thing that could happen for OS and the industry in general. Knowing what makes windows tick would give competitors the same advantages that MS has now, to make better products which would mean better competition and choice for you. You could add emulators into Linux that would allow you to play those windows games so people could do away with their windows partitions. MS would lose its biggest asset which is the fact that in order to live in an MS world (+95% of the buisness world) you NEED to use MS products because no one else can crack their file formats and APIs. Security is just the concern of SysAdmins who don't always get the last say, your average consumer couldn't give a damm whether their system was secure. Try sending a real presentation in RTF, are you really going to keep your customers if they have to screw around with file formats? What about your highly productive work force and you have the choice of suddenly making fundamental changes to their work environment taking a massive short term (and possibly long term) productivity loss in exchange for saving a few hundred bucks on software? In time Linux might start to make some inroads into the MS market. But in the meantime MS will just continue to gouge consumers and screw the competition (2 practices made possible by the fact they ARE a monopoly) with out legal intervention it is going to be a tough ride for the consumer.

Bandwidth and cable

[gybrwe8]

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.

Re:Repeat after me

[NanoGator]

"Why is that? I don't really need a landline, I only have it for DSL"

Heh, no no I meant a phone in general, not specifically a landline. I don't have a landline either. I'm strictly cell phone and rather happy about that.

I had a case once where I was filling out something and they specifically said 'no cell phone'... but I gave them my cell number anyway and it wasnt a problem. That made me nervous for a mo.

I'll tell you something I didn't expect with getting a cell phone: I don't get solicitation calls. *very happy about that*

Re:T1? Ick try cogent

[dbrutus]

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.

Re:Repeat after me

[dbrutus]

I'm a one man consulting shop so I'm already paying the business overhead. I live in a subdivision filled with doctors and other white collar professionals and a ritzy country club (also without broadband) is right next door. Since my wife (a doctor) gets calls at 2 AM anyway it's not like a late ringing phone is going to be new to the household.

I'm not saying that setting up a WISP is for everybody (clearly it's not) but I am saying that the "awww, I'm gettin screwed by the man" line is overblown and that there are real limits to how badly you can be screwed if you know what you're doing. Once you know the technology and you understand the economics, you are free of the crippling effects of learned helplessness.

Re:Repeat after me; fuck that.

[dbrutus]

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.

Qwest in Denver

[G0SP0DAR]

Do they block Slashdot on their network there?

Re:Repeat after me

[NanoGator]

I wasn't making a general broadband comment. I was responding to the guy who said *I* don't need broadband.

Although in retrospect, he may have intended to say that all ppl don't need broadband, but my response was focused on myself. Sorry if I misinterpreted him.