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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.
BTW, I LOVE my new 3 mbps RR.
true but that T1 is synchronous - downstream speed = upstream speed , whereas Comcast does 1.8 down, and 256k up. man it'd be sweet if I could run an FTP at 183 KB/s upload speed... I'd be sure to spread the wealth around :) *wink*
I've been using alternative providers in the past 5 years. What is cable like these days in terms of services? Are you allowed to host at all? Do they offer a tier for business users who want to host or is hosting or running anything on any port just plain disallowed?
I guess I'd like to compare apples to apples when comparing to DSL or broadband wireless.
What are outages like? How often? How long do they last? What's the "real" upload speed vs. download speed? How are ping times to common sites as compared to other types of services?
I think we can use a quick discussion of these topics just so we're all on the same page.
I left the cable world because of many/all of these issues. I still see people struggling with them. What's it really like with cable, though? Do I just have a few bad experiences?
"If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
Hrmmm. I really like the idea of basic cable coming with internet access. This sort of thing was what deregulation was supposed to be about. More products for cheaper given the open competition. Rather what has happened ever since cable deregulation has been a steady increase in the price of cable (from $9.00 to almost $50.00). And while the number of channels has increased, I am still getting the same channels I always watched, but my cable company has bundled in lots of shopping channels I don't want and I don't want to pay for. 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.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
As someone who doesn't have or want cable for television, I find it constantly frustrating that internet access is being bundled with it, and can't be had without at least "basic cable"
For the record, our TV hooks up to our DVD player and VCR. Just starting on season 6 of STTNG this week. Hope to get DS9 soon.
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Congratulations, you found a way to complain about the fact that Comcast is increasing bandwidth at no extra cost. Anyone here think that's a little negative? What happened to the headline "Comcast Reverses Reduction in Bandwidth"? I'm not some pro-big-business-fuck-the-hackers economist or anything, but isn't that a "good thing"? Competition leading to better service at the same price?
I think I'll stop here.
The cable operators face a really difficult choice as far as speed and bandwidth is concerned. Remember, high speed access is only one of the products hey sell. They are also making significant income from pay-per-view and premium channels.
With higher speed access, some program originators might decide to cut out the cable operators entirely. For instance, my wife and I subscribe to MLB's Philadelphia Phillies broadcast over the Internet. This year, MLB added video, with surprisingly good quality.
But, with this MLB package, my cable company, as the carrier, gets nothing. If this were a pay-per-view event, they'd be a profit participant. And, who's to say some movie channel or sports channel or any kind of broadcaster or cablecaster might find it more economically viable to cut of the cable middleman and do the same thing?
This is one reason I worry about cable and telcos as the primary high speed gatekeepers. Telcos have their own issues with VOIP.
It will be interesting to see this all play out. Will cable companies see it in their best interest to give us this broad pipe only to watch us cut their throats with it?
Seriously, the poster really wasted my time with a garbage sentence like this. I struggled with it for a good 20 seconds before I gave up.
You've got to be careful about writing sentences clearly in the intro, because it will waste many 1000s of people's time if you don't.
Remeber on /. a while ago, they already started enforcing download limits and wouldn't give a number, just that some comcast(?) guy had DLed too much. Why do I get the feeling they'll be doing that a lot more in the near future?
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Make basic cable come with a username/password and leave support at that. No tech support, no customer service, just a low speed (100k down, 30k up or something) thing for users of whatever cable service. If you want tech/CS/more speed, you'll pay the premium!
The very people who would use that are most in need of support, etc.
Installation, configuration, "how do I". Maybe once PC's become as easy to use as a TV will that work. Maybe.
Bandwidth has gotten a hell of a lot cheaper, dirt cheap. In fact, pumping photons around the Internet has never been cheaper.
Says who? Sprint, UUNET, etc. have all jacked prices. Typical is 10% across the board each year in the past - on top of "old" pricing. Deals for highly discounted wholesale bandwidth are no where as competitive as the peak of dot-com - why? There simply isn't the competition anymore (and not enough people giving it away to make up for a little bit of cost).
DSL is kicking cable's butt, and this is what cable had to do to be competitive.
Actually, cable's doing this but for a different reason. Cable operators have generally failed to implement layer two over layer two/three protocols that allow them to rate shape customers effectively. Yes, they do have controls but overall they're pretty raw compared to mechanisms like PPPoE that is more common in DSL land.
The solution for the cable provides is to solve this by overengineering and using brute force. That's why you'll see 3 Mbps/1 Mbps type profiles, but at 9pm, it takes 25 minutes to download a 5 MByte file or dslreports shows you're running 108kbps down, 72kbps up.
Likewise, you'll find lots of the cable operators in smaller markets abusing their aggregate to the extreme. Yes, it's 3Mbps local, but a single T1 for all to share leaving town.
Just don't forget, bandwidth is no different than crude oil - it's very supply/demand driven, and right now, those who've survived to be here today in telecom just won't sell cheap anymore.
*scoove*
T1 is 1.5 both ways, and its GUARANTEED service..
cable rates goes all over the place since you are sharing with your entire neighborhood, and you don't get diddly of a guarantee.
Its the difference between business class and 'home service'..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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.
@Home folded because they are completely worthless. It is easily within the capability of any cable company to run a cable modem ISP. Once that secret got out, @Home's days were numbered.
@Home was a great idea at first. They had the skills to run an ISP, so they rented themselves out to cable companies. However, the barrier to entry dropped very fast, and all the cable companies realized that they would be more effecient without @Home.
See that "Preview" button?
By what measure? According to this recent article in PCWorld Magazine:
- There are about double the number of cable modem users as DSL users
- Cablers are more satisfied than DSLers with their service
- Cable costs less and is faster
- Cable is installed faster and with fewer problems
I don't know about you, but that looks like a slam-dunk for cable. Don't get me wrong, I have no love for the cable monopolies. But at the moment, theirs is the best broadband deal. (And don't start telling me about running servers. If you want to run a server, do it right and get rack space.)Now. If only the power companies would get off the dime and start their broadband offerings, we could really start heating up the competition...
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
Couldn't have put it better myself, but what the fuck does all that mean?
Well with Google + an acronym dictionary, here goes:
MTTR = Mean Time To Recovery.
ATM = Asynchronous Transfer Mode.
CBR = Can Be reached.
SLA = Service Level Agreement.
I'm interested to find out my score, but obviously an 733t h4xx0r like me has to stay one jump ahead of the feds. Hmmm, let me see...
Okay, if all are correct, Letterman will make a Clinton joke, if not, he will announce that he's wearing women's underwear under his suit.
T&K.
Political language