Slashdot Mirror
Cable Companies Reject Tiered Pricing Model
The Lynxpro submits this Investor's Business Daily article carried on Yahoo!, writing "It details how the Cable Companies are resisting a pricing this competition with DSL providers by resisting tiered pricing models. The article highlights how Time Warner Cable and Comcast are both bringing access speeds back to 3Mbps without any price increases. What the article fails to mention is that is the very speed rate @Home offered before going into bankruptcy. The cable companies formerly partnered with @Home reduced access speeds when they resumed their own services in the wake of the @Home implosion." I wonder if (low-speed) Internet access will ever be just another basic-cable feature.
Cable modems can go 10Mb/sec upstream and downstream. The capping is artificial, but does reflect real concerns about bandwidth management on a large shared network - obviously they can't give everyone 10Mb up and down.
Typically, though a T1 is more reliable than HFC.
A few months back, I found a deal with Earthlink's cable service that was about $10 cheaper/mo than Time Warner. Plus you get a much cleaner ISP- better Usenet servers, webmail, dialup access, etc. Funny thing is, the bill still comes from Time Warner with a "Earthlink" line item! Anyway, I've never had much problem with the speed, and haven't got kicked for badwidth over-use (yet).
At least in the Madison, WI area. They bought @home's infastructure here, and I had the 768k service until this week, when they knocked me up to 2MB service at no extra charge.. Bandwidth testers show that I'm getting pretty close to that. yippeee!!
THE MAGIC WORDS ARE SQUEAMISH OSSIFRAGE
My girlfriend moved into a house recently and after having dsl for years decided to go with cable modem because of SBC moving over to PPPOE from DHCP. She signed up for the 756Kbs/down "silver" package, which was quite a b it less than the almost 1.5Mbs/sec she was getting with dsl, but lo and behold we get a letter from Charter the other day saying they were upgrading everybody to 2Mbs/sec until next March without a price increase. After having lot sof problems with billing and customer service with Charter, we were pleasently surprised(even if it isn't permanent).
"What the article fails to mention is that is the very speed rate @Home offered before going into bankruptcy. "
That was years ago. Bandwidth has gotten a hell of a lot cheaper, dirt cheap. In fact, pumping photons around the Internet has never been cheaper. Pesos on the dollar to what it used to be.
DSL is kicking cable's butt, and this is what cable had to do to be competitive. No big surprise here.
$30/mo for 128/128
$40/mo for 1.5/128
$50/mo for 3/256
(assuming you have cable TV) 1 IP, 5 or so email addresses, regular residential crap...
or... (what I pay for)
$80/mo for 3/256, 8 real IPs, 1 static IP, no transfer cap, better (business level) tech support
Cox HSD
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
If you look for those answers on Broadband Reports
channel rates
c ab lecomm_wpaper.pdf
channel BW 16 QAM 64 QAM 256 QAM
6 MHz (US) 20.9 31.3 41.7
7 MHz 24.3 36.5 48.7
8 MHz (Europe) 27.8 41.7 55.6
user data rates
channel BW 16 QAM 64 QAM 256 QAM
6 MHz 19.2 28.8 38.5
7 MHz 22.4 33.7 44.9
8 MHz 25.6 38.5 51.3
Threshold C/N (dB, 10-8 BER)
QAM
16 18.8
64 25.5
256 31.7
Motorola CyberSURFR cable modem: 30 Mb/s (shared) downstream in the 65 to 750 MHz band, 768 kb/s (shared), 680 kb/s effective upstream in the 6 to 42 MHz band
http://www.mot.com/MIMS/Multimedia/whitepapers/
Depends on your location. Out in Phoenix, Cox does make available high-speed internet without cable TV.
No. @Home failed because it was an incredibly poorly run operation that invested almost a BILLION dollars in Blue Mountain Greeting Cards and didn't get squat for it. @Home had continual upper-management turnovers, suffered internecine warfare on a near-Biblical scale and failed because they squandered their resources. Had @Home had decent management they'd still be around today and we wouldn't be dealing with Comcast, and I'd probably still have my 4 Mb/sec. symmetric connection.
Here, check out this link. It gives some good background on the failure of @Home.
At Home
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
How difficult is it to simply give me the products I want to pay for? Give me 1) Broadband internet access 2) the History channel 3) the Learning channel 4) Discovery 5) CNN's 6)CSPAN 7)FoodTV 8) Speedvision 9) ESPN and perhaps a few others. The rest is just noise that I don't want to pay for and never watch.
So, at most 15 channels plus broadband should run what $25-30? They can have the other 70 channels.
Something that you may not be aware of is that many channels are part of package deals with cable companies. If you want CNN, you have to carry TBS. If you want ESPN, you have to carry ESPN2, ABC's family channel thingy, etc.
Also, the prices charged for individual channels, such as ESPN, are quite high per cable subscriber. You aren't just paying for access to cable -- you are paying for the content as well even if you are just getting basic (since this usually is more than just local channels and shopping channels). Other than the local channels (which must be carried) and the shopping channels (which pay your cable company to be on their system), each channel has a cost to the system that carries it. Not surprisingly, ESPN and CNN are among the most-expensive cable channels because everyone wants them. Throw in the package deals and the cost of the cable plant, and the "basic" cable cost soon gets fairly high.
Your cable bill can be viewed as several separate and discrete components: cost recovery for the cable plant, overhead (ads, customer services, truck rolls, etc.), profit margin, content costs, and premium content costs (which are recovered by higher charges for premium packages). Municipalities also get money from the deals that they cut from the cable companies to provide service in your area (franchise feess/taxes).
If you want internet access or better basic cable options, a good idea is to mobilize people significantly in advance of the time that a franchise agreement for your municipality is about to expire. Let your local elected officials know what you think is important and organize a group of people so it's not just one person nagging. More often than you might suspect, the local board in charge of such things will consider your input.
The local chamber of commerce is a good place to start rallying the troops as well -- many local chambers are in favor of the idea of expanding broadband access, as it helps businesses as well as consumers. They might be willing to agitate with you or at least at the same time as you. If a local board sees people coming out of the woodwork on an issue, they are less likely to rubber stamp whatever is dumped into their laps by the cable company.
Someone with a better knowledge of the cable industry can fill in the details on component costs better than I can, but this is my general understanding of how things work with cable price policies.
GF.
Lots of petrified grits
Maybe once PC's become as easy to use as a TV will that work. Maybe.
Maybe not. Had a customer support meeting today to review what our broadband operation is dealing with. The top ten?
- I lost my password (pppoe logins). Need reset
- I can't type my password right
- My Internet doesn't work (something unplugged, someone goofed up IP settings, etc)
- Virus/Trojan/Worm infections
- Pop-Up annoyances and requests to tell the Internet to stop sending them to the user
- Home network disasters
- Microsoft Word, Excel, etc. application help (yes, apparently your broadband provider is supposed to provide this help for free. Why do they call? "Who else would I call? I don't know anyone else who knows Word!")
Broadband without support? Good luck. We specify what support is and isn't provided, and we still get "SEP" (somebody elses problem) issues more than any issue related to a customer's broadband service.
*scoove*
I pay for and get 1.5 down, 1.0 up with Access Cable in Regina, SK. I had nothing but problems with Rogers in the GTA, with weekly downtimes of 20-36 hours, very poor download, and pathetic upload speeds. And this was on a shub with a whole 7 users, much less the 20+ that they later started rolling. If you actually want the bandwidth, you have to get Roger's commercial links, but make sure you check the fine print on the SLA before signing up. The whole point of a commercial link is to get a static IP and to get a usefull SLA that you can give a lawyer to smack them around with when they continue playing games. The other thing to do is run weekly speed tests, and whenever the bandwidth isn't up to snuff, send them the results along with your complaint. Mention that you're archiving the results, and that you intend to pursue legal action if they continue their breach of contract. After three such reports, have your lawyer draft a legal notice of intent. That will cost you a few dollars (unless you have a lawyer for a friend), but it usually wakes them up to the fact that you aren't some newb who's going to go oooh-aaahhh just because they claim it's high speed. You can also try disabling the DNS forward-first that queries their DNS servers first. As the majority of users are running default Win32 boxen, the DNS servers for cable and DSL ISPs tend to be woefully inadequate for the request volume they deal with. My own page load times have dropped by 40% by removing the ISP's DNS servers from the equation. (Yes, I know that's not nice, but if the ISP won't provide capacity, you have to do what you can to get around it.) You should also be aware that once you pass about 256Mbit, you stop seeing a real difference for "normal" surfing. You're spending so much time doing DNS lookups for all the )@%&)@%&)@&% banner advertising on most pages that the actual content transfer is a mere fraction of the time the page takes to load.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
LinuxInDallas is correct. DSL is either Symetric (SDSL or IDSL) or Asymetric (ADSL). A T1 is always Symetric.
Synchronous refers how the communications work, not whether or not the upload and dowload speeds are the same. I'm too tired to get into the difference between Sync and Async connections though.
"You've got an invalid haircut" -Warren Zevon - Life'll Kill Ya
I pay for and get 1.5 down, 1.0 up with Access Cable in Regina, SK. I had nothing but problems with Rogers in the GTA, with weekly downtimes of 20-36 hours, very poor download, and pathetic upload speeds. And this was on a shub with a whole 7 users, much less the 20+ that they later started rolling.
If you actually want the bandwidth, you have to get Roger's commercial links, but make sure you check the fine print on the SLA before signing up. The whole point of a commercial link is to get a static IP and to get a usefull SLA that you can give a lawyer to smack them around with when they continue playing games.
The other thing to do is run weekly speed tests, and whenever the bandwidth isn't up to snuff, send them the results along with your complaint. Mention that you're archiving the results, and that you intend to pursue legal action if they continue their breach of contract.
After three such reports, have your lawyer draft a legal notice of intent. That will cost you a few dollars (unless you have a lawyer for a friend), but it usually wakes them up to the fact that you aren't some newb who's going to go oooh-aaahhh just because they claim it's high speed.
You can also try disabling the DNS forward-first that queries their DNS servers first. As the majority of users are running default Win32 boxen, the DNS servers for cable and DSL ISPs tend to be woefully inadequate for the request volume they deal with. My own page load times have dropped by 40% by removing the ISP's DNS servers from the equation. (Yes, I know that's not nice, but if the ISP won't provide capacity, you have to do what you can to get around it.)
You should also be aware that once you pass about 256Mbit, you stop seeing a real difference for "normal" surfing. You're spending so much time doing DNS lookups for all the )@%&)@%&)@&% banner advertising on most pages that the actual content transfer is a mere fraction of the time the page takes to load.
(Yes, HTML is easy, until you start bouncing back and forth with vB-syntax boards. I'd love to smack the wanker who came up with that perverse syntax!)
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
I'm in a canyon community in Los Angeles, and I have Chartercom as well. They've certainly not made me a happy customer. A while ago they did the Gold 1500/384k ($99+10), Silver768/128 and Bronze 384/64 package. Then they did away with the gold all together about a year ago (or more I don't remember) for new customers.
Anyway, about a week or so ago they got rid of the tiered thing...which sounds like a good thing over all... BUT, the new upgrade was from ANYTHING to 2000/128. So my 1500/384 was 'upgraded' to 2000/128 30% better download 300% worse upload.
I spent 5 days on tech support trying to fix my problem. Mostly they said "well that's just the way it is now". I ended up getting it fixed via their business division...Although its entirely over priced you can get 1500/384k ($99) and 2000/512k ($149 w/contract) from them if you can afford it. It actually might be $10 cheaper because you don't have to pay the $10 'cable access fee'.
I hate charter too, but maybe this will help you give more money to a company you don't like.