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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.
its all very well offering 3mbps but what happens if i take that 24hrs a day 7days a week ?
thats why @home failed because they never thought people would actually use the resources they had sold them
That's a pretty good idea.
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!
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
The speed was never 3 mbps; it was 1.5 at best.
These days, of course, while the advertised speed is still 1.5, I'm lucky to get 800 kbps. Repeated phone calls to Rogers have resulted in absolutely no action, and I'm considering switching to DSL.
Not everyone wants speed, but does want easy-to-read bills (no need to have a phone line + separate ISP account, have both for potentially far less), and cheap internet access. always-on is nice, too, and doesn't require high-speed access to appreciate.
As long as it's all low latency, I'd be happy with a slower cable modem (for less money). The latency is the main thing I'm concerned with.
Not fun.
Bush: He's Liberal in all the wrong ways.
Right when cable came to my neighborhood about 4 year ago, there wasn't an upstream cap (or a tv cable block, either:). No one else on my node had @home, so it was the de-facto way to send & receive files between my roommates computers (why we just didn't use the local network is beyond me).
Later on when I worked for @Home/AT&T Broadband, I almost got my access shut off because I'd uploaded 3 gigs of mp3s to my girlfriend's iMac. But since I worked there, they let it slide.
I think the fastest connection we ever observed installing those modems was 8mbps.
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.
Actually, the rate for downstream is more in the general area of 54Mbps per television channel sacrificed for internettraffic. Unfortunately the upstream is more limited; the cable networks were designed to broadcast, and even when they did conceive interactivity, the amount of bandwidth (in terms of Mhz ranges) set aside for the return-channel was rather limited; and there's obviously a limit to how many times you can 'split up' a neighborhood in 'subnets' that have a separate head-end each.
The whole 'cable is shared bandwidth' is somewhat of a thing of the past given that pretty much every one is using (euro)DOCSIS these days, which actually does TDMA - but the availability of upstream bandwidth can still be a bottleneck.
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
So, at most 15 channels plus broadband should run what $25-30? They can have the other 70 channels.
:o(
Home shopping channels pay for the privilage of piping their crap into your homes.
Don't get them, and the cost will rise - at least its easier not to watch than ads WHICH HAVE THE DAMN VOLUME TURNED UP. Even the BBC do that now
Beep beep.
As the subject says, depends on the node your on. I'm also on rogers, and before they slashed everyone back to 1.5Mbps I used to get at "best" 2710kbps, now the best I've pulled is 1305kbps this is on non-docsis, normally I'll pull around 800-1100kbps. I'm on a TCM200 actually, but they are starting to do a test run on the non-docsis modems bringing them back up the to the 3000kbps range, in short periods in different area's. The best I've seen since their "testing" has begun is 1900kbps.
I won't say rogers doesn't have it problems, it stinks to high hell it's only taken me 3 weeks to actually get a damn truck rolling and to get someon to come out and look at my connection...with any luck someone might be here in the next couple of days.
Om, nomnomnom...
Not in my area. Cable has almost total coverage and most folks in my county get 3mbps cable and do not have dsl avilable to them. 384k up seems to be the norm also, which isn't too bad. DSL is a total disappointment in the DC area. No coverage and when there is, it's balls expensive for less than I get with cable. And not even necessarily better upstream.
Oh wait, I "need" a new cablemodem and $45/month for each computer in my house. Thanks Cablevision.
For all their big-company evilness, this is why I love Time Warner at the moment...Friendly to multiple systems behind a router(they offered to help set up a home network when I signed up, even), they haven't batted an eye after i've downloaded 12+ gig of files over the last couple weeks, almost zero downtime, and now this.
Better would be to focus on the slowdown of American broadband. When it was first rolled out there were no caps whatsoever and it was generally allowed to run at the speed that the equipment could handle. So the average DSL user ran over 3mbit in some cases if they had good lines. Uncapped both directions.
Then came the abusers and greed of the communications companies and today you see the extreme chokehold on the broadband today. SBC's base package for DSL is 384/128k dn/up compared to Verizon's 768k-1.544M/128k and the cable companies provide service comparable to Verizon.
New trends are starting to take hold in some areas with Verizon Wireless rolling out EvDO 3G which can run upwards of 2.3M and Verizon Landline (Seperate companies) is testing 2M+ speeds in certain (Lucky) markets with future plans to turn up the dial on broadband.
While those trends are nice to see you still have many who still have dialup due to cost and some worse off areas still cannot get a better connection than 26600kbps!
Interestingly people have pointed out monopolies. There is basically 1 telepone company in South Korea. Korean Telecom and a handfull of offshots after other companies were allowed to spring up but I'd say 90% of that country is serviced by KT and TMK there is only one cable company there. So it's questionable if more competition really is the answer (Korea may regulate, the us de-regulates)
I'm not sure what goes on in Japan but I would suspect nearly the same situation there also but you'll have to understand both countries until very recently had complete conglomerates (Sp?) of many things from electronics to communications systems. Now there is free market competition but not in the manner of how the US Govt mandated AT&T split up those companies were just forced to allow competition to "try" to work their way into a established system. Which probably will work becuase the exec's of those companies realize given choice people will pick the better company that provides them value.
The ultimate thing we have to complain about is that after ATTBI took over we went from 4-5Mbits (8Mbits peak) to 1Mbit (1.5Mbit peak), for only $7/mo MORE. Thats right, ATTBI REDUCED our service while charging us MORE. Since Comcast took over for ATTBI, they've upped our download cap a bit, trying to be the "good guy"... But it still stands that we're getting less and paying more than what we signed up for.
Existing digital cable boxes already have a built-in RF modem to support the program guide and pay-per-view ordering. It probably wouldn't cost much to add an external Ethernet interface for connecting to the user's computer.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
I don't think this is quite right. I was an @home customer, and my rate was always 1.5 down, 128k up. Since I've been moved over to comcast, I'm now getting 256k up, and soon to get 3 down. I'm not complaining until they start forcing me to pay for cable tv.
Cable modems generally have different selections of modulations and frequencies
that enable many datarates higher than 10Mbps downstream.
For instance, my Linksys BEFCMU10 has the following specs:
- Upstream datarate: 320Kbps (QPSK) to 10Mbps (16QAM)
- Downstream datarate: 30Mbps (64QAM) to 43Mbps (256QAM)
So the problem isn't the modem, but whatever the head end is using, and environmental factors.Show me on the doll where his noodly appendage touched you.
Not really. If you consider the fact that @Home gave me that speed to start with and between ATT and Comcast they've raised my rates twice. Once because I own my cable modem instead of renting theirs, and the second time because I don't want cable TV.
I'll view this as positive when my rates go down. Don't be fooled. Most people don't use the full bandwidth available to them. This is just a marketing ploy to make you think you're getting more. Did you consider that cable is a shared network? If eveyone on your node is downloading the latest RedHat iso's do you really think you're going to see anything close to that 3MB/sec?
The only positive thing about this is the hope that the telco's will get scared and upgrade their DSL equipment so I can actually be their customer.
"The avalanch has already started, it is too late for the pebbles to vote." -Kosh
What do you mean? I'd kill to have 384/128 access for an additional $10 a month on my phone or cable bill. I'm sure plenty of other people would too. All I want is a persistent connection that I can share with people in the house that will let me send/rec email and small files quickly on occasion, and maintain a small personal web page. As long as I don't have to wait for it to dial in (this includes PPPoE garbage too), and it's pretty much always there, I'm in.
funny munging
Man, if speakeasy made something like that easy to do, I'd switch in a heartbeat. Not even easy, just some help dealing with the telco. Cox here isn't bad for speed, but I'm getting sick of not even being able to do basic tasks like send email (outgoing 25 blocked) or ftp (incomming 21 and 80 blocked) into my home computer. As it is, I ditched my POTS line 5 years ago, and I'm never going back.
Here's what I think: Cable is getting their asses handed to them by DSL, and they need more marketing to "differentiate" them from DSL (ie, we're faster!!). Then they can (technically correctly) claim this, and win converts.
I tell ya, I'm about *this* much away from dropping my Comcast connection, since
I live in (or around) St. Louis, MO, USA. My area is blessed with the presence of Charter Communications. They are a cable company that does offer tier based pricing.
Service plans (select one)
384 K $29.99/month
2 M $39.99/month
There's actually a 3rd tier in the middle they don't tell you about on their website. I'm not certain what the specifics are on it. But the tiers are listed as; Bronze (Maximum-crap), Silver (Marginal-crap), and Gold (Minimal-crap).
Here's what they don't tell you: All upstreams, on all tiers are capped at 150 kilo-bit per second. Regardless of the tier you're paying for, you cannot buy more upstream. This has annoyed me for years. Oh how I long for the days of @home. I am curious why the upstreams are capped as they are. I don't understand why the upstreams are limited as they are. I think that it might be to curb child pornographers and data pir8s, but those activities are illegal. It's not up to my cable provider to thwart such activity.
It makes me wonder what they're doing with all that extra bandwidth. Their mail servers likely take in significantly more than they put out. Their web servers likely don't consume a relativly large amount of bandwidth. They must have a massive surplus of upstream that they're paying for anyway.